Page 18 of Taken to Kor
“I stabbed him with this dagger I found in the escape pod.” She must mean sword because there are no daggers in the escape pod. “I…I killed him.”
“Good. I’m proud of you.”
She sniffles and it sounds wet and angry. “You are?” Her voice is shaky, but hopeful. It makes me smile.
It breaks my heart.
“Ontte, Deena. I am proud of you.”
There’s shuffling again. More of that popping metal sound. More of her strange swallows. More sniffles. But her breath…it seems to come a little easier and I’ll take it if that’s all I can get for now.
“Deena, who attacked you? One of the human males?” The asteroids are crowding in around my ship and our cannon fire is causing chaos. Huge chunks of asteroids bounce off of our shields, scraping the yeeyar, which is a delicate substance. Each time it sustains damage, I can feel the yeeyar’s ire in my token, needling my brain like a splinter. Tevbarannos asks me if we should keep going at our current speed. He urges me to slow down.
I shake my head. “Keep going.”
“I don’t know what it is,” Deena says. “Please don’t make me look.” More scrambling again, then she heaves out a breath. It sounds like relief.
“Did you get him off of you?”
“Ontte.”
“Good. You need to look at him now. Tell me what he is so I know how to kill him.” How to make him suffer.
“Centare, Rhork,” she bellows. “I can’t look.”
“You can.”
“I’m going to shit myself.”
“Then do it. Just tell me what you see.” There’s a long silence in which I can hear her silent and weighty debate. Then she gasps.
“Did you shit yourself?”
A bolt of laughter is swallowed by one of those painful-sounding Hick-cups. “Centare,” she whispers.
“Good. Now, what do you see, Deena?”
“I…I don’t know. There’s so much blood. But he…he doesn’t have eyes. They have claws, but not like the Voraxians do. No clothes. He…shouldn’t be hard for you to kill. I think it’s just the numbers.” She makes a sound like a controlled scream then inhales a gasping, shuddering breath. “There were so many of them.”
“How did you avoid detection?”
“The light,” she breathes. “The light hurts them.”
A spasm makes my neck contort. I bend it until it cracks. “It’s dark? There’s no light?”
“Centare. Just…just in the cells.”
“Cells?”
“Not cells. They’re…” she says a word in Human that translates totanks.
“Tanks.”
“Ontte. There are humans in tanks. They…the creatures that look like carpets…” She drops her pitch so low I strain to hear it. “Theyeatthem.”
Shock. Disgust. Pain. Rage. Ontte, rage. Emotion consumes me like vitriol, endlessly whispering,you lost her. “That’s what this male wanted to do to you?”
“Probably,” she says, still whispering.
