Page 27 of Caldar
Sonia really hated this guy. Or gal. It was hard to tell with the distortion.
“If you can find your way to the center of the maze before the hounds—” again, not hounds, but a word the translator didn’t pick up “—then you will move to the next round.”
Howls—presumably belonging to the hounds—rang in the distance.
“Why would I want to play your game?” Honestly, fuck this doctor and their bullshit.
“Because your mate is waiting for you at the center of the maze. He wasn’t cooperative, so I had to sedate him. There was so much blood.”
“Caldar?” Her throat went dry. Who else could the doctor mean?
“Hurry. Find your mate before the hounds.”
CHAPTER9
SONIA
Sonia feltlike she was having that uncanny stress dream where she tried to call 911 but her fingers wouldn’t work right or the numbers on the keypad no longer made sense. Her entire hand was numb, and her arm hung useless at her side. She felt hot and sticky, but also cold.
This is a fever.
It barely bothered her. She kept walking and turning left at every juncture, because she just couldn’t make a choice at the moment. Everything hurt. Everything felt fuzzy.
“What the hell is even happening?” she asked no one in particular.
“How should I know?” she answered.
Great. Now she was conversing with herself.
“I should be on a beach on a planet with three moons, drinking cotton-candy-colored confections, and complaining about, I don’t know, saturated fats.”
She wanted to kick a rock, but there were no rocks or anything that could be used as a weapon in the maze, just the maze itself. The path between the hedges had a squishy, rubberized coating, like a kid’s playground. It was such a pointless, needless detail, like the people who raided her cruise ship and plopped her down into a maze made from poison plants didn’t want her to get a skinned knee.
“Now I have to rescue Caldar, because of course I do. I don’t even know if I want to rescue him.”
Now would be a good time to kick a rock.
Sonia stumbled over her own foot and fell to the ground, catching herself with her bad hand. She hissed in pain, tears rolling down her face. Now her hand throbbed, and that was so much worse than numbness.
“Fuck!” She shouted a string of profanities. Hopefully, the mastermind behind this terrible game, the doctor, or whatever they were calling themselves, was listening.
Cursing helped. Shouting helped more, but now her throat was parched.
“He’s not my mate. I don’t know what he’s been telling you, but you got it all wrong. I don’t even like him. He’s my stalker,” she said. Sure, he had saved her from those muggers, and then saved her from being sucked into the void of space. He had a few good qualities. “Fine, I like him a little. Like, a teeny tiny amount.”
She rubbed her aching arm with her good hand. The throbbing was still there but only when she focused on it.
“Get up,” she told herself.
Getting to her feet was a struggle. She was in pain and poisoned or having an allergic reaction to the deadly hedge plants. This wasn’t her finest moment, but she got back on her feet, because Sonia Newton was a survivor.
She didn’t make it through an alien invasion to die in some knockoff labyrinth filled with the wrong kind of puppet monsters. She was going to get to the center of the maze, find Caldar, and then get the hell off this ship.
Her Goblin King needed her.
CALDAR
Caldar woke on a slab.
