Page 58 of Taken to Kor
It must surprise her too, because she doesn’t answer right away and she doesn’t laugh in that creepy villainous cackle, like she ordinarily would. “You sound pleased to see me.”
“Of course. This is the family reunion I always hoped for.” My voice trembles just a little bit in the middle and I can feel her lean her weight further into my back, barrel of whatever blaster-tip more aggressively digging into my flesh. I will my token on, but Mathilda says, “Don’t even think about it. I have a mobile disabler active. It has a wide radius. Not even your shadows will be able to reach out through their tokens.”
Her hand curls around my shoulder like a claw and she starts to rotate my body away from the Eshmiri tent and back onto the main road. She pushes me forward. “As you can see, your pirate friends are a little incapacitated at the moment.”
Shrov.
Herannathon stands at the stall opposite this one with all four of his hands raised. Behind him are two Drakesh warriors, characterized by their long white hair and dusky red skin. They have blasters trained on him. Of course, given that this is Kor, no one seems to care. I have half a mind to laugh until I realize that Tevbarannos,Rhegaran, and Ewanrennaron are in identical positions.
Shrov!
Shrov rhymes with stove. I feel like cooking Mathilda on a stove right about now. She deserves worse. How is she here? How did she find me! And who in the shrov are these Drakesh? Are they working for her? My thoughts jump the tracks that they were on and I suddenly arrive at a few conclusions based on the things that I know now. Because not just my belly has gotten bigger these past however many solars, but my brain has practically exploded with all the new gunk Rhork and my pirates have been feeding it.
This gunk enables me to postulate a few theories. Heh. Postule. Sounds like pustule.
Focus!
How is she here?Exile.It has to be. Kor is where the Voraxians exile all their unwanted creatures. Svera or Miari or somebody back on the colony must have figured out her game and shipped her off to the grey zone where they hoped she’d die even though they didn’t have the tits or the stones to off her themselves. Cowards.
How did she find me?I stand out.Belly aside, I’m damned conspicuous. Even on a planet as diverse as this one, a single human still garners attention. A single human mated to Kor’s overlord? I might as well carry a blinking sign with an arrow pointing down at my head.
Who the shrov are these Drakesh?Hmm….Here, I’m not so sure. They could be more exiles? But what’s strange is that they seem to be following her orders. Are theyworkingfor her? That seems unlikely. Drakesh are known for their hatred of other species. It seems like a stretch that they’d ever work for a non-Drakesh, no matter the payment.
The thoughts turn over and over in my head as she leads me down the main road past the last of the Eshmiri tents. We turn right and head down Pleasure Alley, away from the Cosmos Dome and the Gogo Racetrack, which is good for her. Everyone knows me there.
We don’t go deep into Pleasure Alley, but stop at the third building in. The structure is wedged between two huge pleasure houses — one run by the Oroshi, the other by the Oosa, which means the streets outside are littered with every kind of species and all the genders they contain between them. Tentacles slither and cocks hang so long they nearly touch the ground. Breasts hover like inflatable balloons, some species with six or seven of them. Skin tones glitter in all gemstone shades. It’s a good spot for a hideout. No one would stand out here. Maybe, not even a human.
The Oosa building is bright yellow, covered in lights. The Oroshi building looks like it’s made out of the same material their tentacles are, blue-green and kind of squishy. The building wedged between them is black and brown and green — Breen? Glaown? — and completely run down. Mathilda presses me up against the front door and for a moment, I wonder if she’s going to try to push me through it without opening it at all…
And then she does.
The facade of the building shimmers and makes a popping sound as I’m shoved into it, or rather, into the building behind it. The interior is nothing like the outside. It isn’t glaown at all, but a lavish and decadent green. It was always Mathilda’s favorite color. She’d send her human minions to the far side of the planet to harvest green leaves from the tallest trees just so she could dye her fabrics. At least three warriors died in their attempts. Did she shed a tear? That’s a hardno.
The pale green carpet fibers are long and swish around my ankles, feeling like strands of silk caught in suspended animation. There’s a divan against the far wall, stacks of pillows spread around it. To the right is a dining table built for ten and there’s a staircase leading up to the right of that. Paintings that look like something with tentacles painted them hang lavishly over the divan. Sprawled across it is someone I did not expect.
My hands flinch towards my lightning stick but the male just clicks his tongue against the backs of his teeth. They’re pearly white and match his hair. It’s white. His eyes are black. His skin is red. I haven’t seen this male before in the flesh but make no mistake in thinking that I don’t know who he is.
Pogar. Drakesh. Exile. Rapist. Murderer. Bo’Raku, once, but he hasn’t been that for rotations. Now, all he is is a whispered menace, a haunting shadow…
His reputation has carried even though I wish it hadn’t. When he was exiled from Voraxia, it should have been the last we ever heard of the male whose crimes include mutiny, thievery, rape, kidnapping and murder. He bought the hybrid babies Mathilda sold him. He bought the kit that would have been my hybrid brother or sister. I wonder where she or he is now…Clearly, he didn’t keep them. He probably sold them off and I know better than anyone what kind of fate awaits a human in this grim and greedy galaxy when they don’t have a pirate family to back them up.
Family. And I don’t mean the blood-relation standing just behind me with a blaster pressed to my stomach. And I don’t mean the kind of family Pogar had given that his son, Peixal, was just as foul as he is. What he did to Kiki? There’s a special place in the afterlife for that level of scum.
No, I mean the kind of family who will buy my future kits a poisonous animal to cuddle and who will fight a giant with me because I say he cheated at a game of mok-biz and who will trick me into eating a living insect by claiming that it’s really a sweet and who will show me how to reload a blaster bigger than I am and who will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with me and sing songs I made up about plants and planets and spoons — maybe even not sing them, but shout them — up at Kor’s many moons when the sweet wine is at its sweetest and the lunar is at its deepest.
The kind of family that, some day, I hope to pillage a Voraxian ship with. The kind of family who will help raise all six of my coming kits because they already think of those kits as their family, too.
It’s hard not to feel calm and strangely protected even as I stand between two of the sickest most sinister beings in the galaxy. My voice belies such a calm when I say, “So. You’ve been making friends, gramma.”
She shoves me forward. I stumble, then brush down my dress. I got too big for my gormar pants, so now I just wear this giant grey gormar tarp. Rhork calls it a dress, but I’m too big for dresses. It’s a tarp. But no matter what it is, I feel beautiful in it because Rhork still looks at me like I’m a perfectly formed star.
“I have. It looks like you get that skill from me, Deena.” She eyes my stomach as she comes to stand in front of me. I see the blaster now, for the first time. It’s an old model compared to the one that I use and I almost tease her for it — I would have, had Herannathon been using it — but then I remember that even the old models plug holes into things just fine.
“Actually, I didn’t make friends. I found a family, but I don’t suspect that family is what you brought me all the way to Pleasure Alley to talk about. It hasn’t ever really been your strong suit, now has it,grandmother?”
She gives me a funny look and I struggle looking into her eyes. Every time I do, it makes me think about what she cost me. What she cost the entire colony. So many lives, wasted. So much suffering. So much pain. So much of it mine. But that’s all over now.
The colony is firmly in the control of the Voraxians — the good kind — and Miari and Svera. And I’m a pirate and my man controls the most important trading port in the entire galaxy. And I’m a protective mama bear who won’t let anything hurt the strange multiple-armed hybrids growing in my belly. They’remineand she no longer owns me.
