Page 50 of Bred

I’m yelling at a man I don’t know for abandoning me, and though I can’t bring forth any memories of him, I am genuinely upset. My emotions are in a turmoil, and I feel betrayed, even though I can’t remember enough to know if that is a reasonable reaction or not.

His voice sounds as rough and emotion-filled as my own. “We orbited your planet for a year. Your condition did not change. We did not abandon you, Lyra. I didn’t want to leave you at all, but the crew had their lives to go on with. We could not all stay sentry. Come here. Please...”

The last word makes it a request rather than an order. There is a rough, cracking quality to his voice that I can tell is unnatural to him. It touches something inside me, but I don’t know how to respond. Fighting with him is easy. This is hard.

He opens his arms and for a moment, I hesitate. He is a stranger. He cannot offer me anything besides answers, and yet every part of me seems to want him—every part besides my mind, which remains a frustrating blank.

“Lyra...”

I dive into his arms and find myself pulled against a hard armored shell. It’s uncomfortable, and not very intimate, but it is somehow still the best hug in the universe.

“I cannot tell you how much I missed you, or how much you were mourned,” he murmurs in my ear, absolutely dwarfing me with his height.

“You really missed me?”

“I missed you like oxygen.”

That’s so fucking sweet. I let him pull me tighter and I cuddle into him as best I can.

“I still have no fucking idea who you are,” I murmur into his ear. “But I missed you too.”

“You won’t ever miss me again,” he promises. “I’m going to keep you by my side and if you see a sentient anomaly, you are going to stay well away from it.”

“Sounds like a good idea.”

“It does. If only you thought that the first time around,” he says, squeezing me tighter. “Come. You have some people to see.”

* * *

This ship is full ofthe strangest configurations of humanoid shapes and types I’ve ever laid eyes on. It’s almost as if someone took a bunch of body parts and just threw them into a mold and whatever came out is...

“What’s your name?”

“Talon,” the captain says, drawing me through the ship by my hand. The aliens do seem pleased to see me, a lot more happy than the humans were, that much is absolutely certain.

“Hello! Hi. How are you? Hello. Hi. Hello,” I say, smiling and waving at what are probably the faces of various entities. “Man, I’m really popular here.”

“You almost lost your life to save ours,” Talon tells me. “You are, without a doubt, the only reason any of us are alive.”

“Wow, that was pretty cool of me.”

“It was,” he says.

“I guess I’m kind of a hero then.”

“You are,” he agrees.

“So I guess I’m going to be like, the captain now.”

“And that, little human, is where you go too far,” he chuckles. “You are my mate. You are not the captain, and I can promise you that you never will be.”

“But I saved the ship, so it should be mine.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“I feel like it should be.”

“How you feel isn’t relevant.”

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