Page 31 of Bound to the Alien King
Iwas the one who’d fallen in love with Nera.Ihad been the one she’d allowed close to her heart, the one who’d gotten to know her, who she trusted inside her.Me.I was the version of Maxx she loved.
I’d be damned if I had to throw all that away.
“Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight…” the robotic voice continued.
My hands moving frantically over the console, I hit a yellow switch.The floor beneath us seemed to shift and then dropped away completely so that we were floating.
“Anti-gravity on,” the robot announced.
“How is shutting off the gravity supposed to help us?”Miekil shouted as he somersaulted through the air.
When I only growled in answer, he launched into more nonsense words and phrases and numbers to guess the passcode.
But then I saw how shutting off the gravity could help us.Maybe.I was floating toward a hatch in the ceiling.Probably sealed to ensure zero gravity, but that seal wouldn’t have a chance against my sword.
IfI had enough time.
Growling with the effort, I swam my arms through the air to speed my progress upward.Of course my head crashed against the hatch since I had no control of my direction.With one elbow and leg braced against the ceiling, I smashed the hilt of my sword against the hatch.
It buckled underneath my continuous blows until finally the seal broke.
“Fifteen…fourteen… Anti-gravity off.”
The sensation of weightlessness ended with a great whoosh, and Miekil crash-landed back onto the floor of the ship, groaning.Almost immediately, he launched into more guesses.
“Quantum quirkiness one two three.Zap zap pew pew sixty-nine,” he shouted.
I, on the other hand, swung like a pendulum from the hatch’s handle.With a jerk of my whole body, the handle twisted, and the hatch popped open and upward.
“Miekil, stop your ridiculous guesses and get out after me,” I shouted down while I hauled myself up.
Once I was out, I knelt and reached my hand down into the ship to help Miekil.He leaped the five feet or so to catch it and then clambered up and out.
“Five…” The robotic voice floated up after him.“Four…”
As one, we turned and jumped off the cloaked ship into the forest below.Too late, I realized that behind the ship was a steep drop-off.We plummeted down, down, through the trees and branches, a deluge of snaps and cracks in our wake.
The huge explosion above rocked the air and scattered fiery debris everywhere.We hit the ground hard, our shoes skidding out beneath us in the loose dirt so we landed on our asses.
We lay there while the smaller debris sailed down on top of us, catching our breaths and staring up at the fire pluming smoke on top of the cliffside.The larger debris had caught in the branches, and tendrils of fire streaked across the bark.
We would have a forest fire in seconds if I didn’t do something, and the idea struck me as ludicrous.So much so that I burst into laughter, the sound reaching me through an echo chamber.
Miekil laughed too.“You should…see your face…right now.”
I had no idea what he meant by that, and it made me laugh even harder.
The trees seemed to shift places, and the smoky sky contorted like a funhouse mirror.What was happening here?
“We have to…figure this out.”I hauled myself into a sitting position, unable to keep from laughing, my muscles feeling weak.
Still snickering, Miekil pulled himself to his feet, stumbling on what should have been flat ground but crested like the sea.“I don’t feel so good.What…is happening?”
My stomach pitching, I used a nearby tree to help me stand.It was then I noticed that my hands were invisible, completely see-through.Panic rang through me, but it was distant, carried away by the shifting, rolling landscape.
“We have to find my hands,” I replied, trying to keep my balance on the wobbly terrain.“We have to find…”
Something, but I had a feeling we were headed in the wrong direction to find whatever it was.Why wasn’t my brain working?Had we been drugged?
