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I raised my tail, winding it around my front and bringing the black tip up to cover my eyes. The gesture was sign of immense respect I gave only to the likes of the Lavrikala now.
So bright I was afraid. But then, suddenly, there had been a hand reaching for me through all that white. And though it had been inhuman and strange, I knew that I was supposed to reach out and take it. But I’d woken up before I could do so, and I’d been struck by a bizarre and unshakable sense of loss. I couldn’t stay in bed anymore after that, couldn’t even stay in my basement apartment. I had to outrun this feeling. The feeling of grief.
“You have all been specially selected to serve your planet on a confidential mission. This mission is one of the first of its kind, and its secrecy is of the utmost importance. Thus, you were selected and taken before any information could be leaked.”
You have all been selected for your areas of expertise – chemistry, biology, anthropology, botany, linguistics.”
“Unbeknownst to the public, Earth has a large space program, much more advanced than what you see on TV with rockets and moon-landings. We have been searching for energy and materials to sustain life on Earth, and have been also searching for planets to eventually host human colonies.”
“See? We don’t want to and you can’t make us. You may have been able to toss us into vans and get us here, but there’s no fucking way you’re getting us off this planet.”
“I’m afraid, Katerina,” the Colonel said, his voice like ice, “that that ship has already sailed.”
This mission is so top secret that they literally had to kidnap us and drug us to get us here, you think they’re going to just let us waltz back into our lives afterwards? And what about the fact that we’re all women, huh? And the fact that we’re all young or students and definitely not the kind of experts you’d want on a mission like this? Why aren’t they sending the crème de la crème, top notch scientists and shit, to deal with this?”
And, so help me God, if that didn’t light the hottest fucking fire under my ass.
“Love getting ready to greet some territorial aliens without knowing any bloody verbs or adjectives or the way to say ‘friendly humans, please don’t eat us,’”
Gahn Fallo’s men. A hunting party, by the looks of things. They were felling zeelk left and right, and scooping up women as they moved through the carnage. I watched the scene unfold, bringing my irkdu to a stop, wondering if I should approach them.
I watched as the last running woman was yanked onto an irkdu and the remaining zeelk fell. It wasn’t ideal that they were grabbing hold of all the new female creatures, but it was better than those frail small females getting devoured by zeelk.
Never had I known, in all my war-filled life, a poison quite this sweet. So sweet I’d gladly let it kill me. Over and over again.
And now his tongue – a tongue forked into three freaking parts, was working steadily away at my neck.
