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“Came to rescue my idiot captain. Ex-captain,” I correct myself quickly.
He nods, his big horn making an intimidating arc through the air. “The one who crashed out by the bar.”
“Yes. I guess. So everybody knows about us?”
“Not a lot of aliens tolerated to be on this planet,” he says. “Even fewer of them end up the alpha’s resident fuck-mate.”
He’s speaking crudely, but I’m used to crude. If you let yourself be distracted by someone’s rudeness and brutish speech, you can miss a lot. This guy is clearly intelligent, and powerful. I get the impression he could break out of this jail just as easily as I can if he wanted to.
“There’s going to be a shift change in the guard,” he says. “In about three minutes. You’re going to want to be behind that door over there. Once they open it and come through, you’ll be able to slip through.”
“Thank you. What can I do for you?”
I know he’s not helping me for no reason. This information is going to come with a price tag, and I want to know what it is.
He reaches into a pocket in his pants, and hands me a thick piece of card.
“When you get out there, drop this note in the red box opposite the jail. That’s all you need to do.”
“Is it like a post box or something?”
He smiles, and I see sharp teeth, a couple of them broken, but all in all still a devastatingly frightening sight. There’s something about this character I have only encountered a few times in my life. He has the demeanor of a truly dangerous being.
“Or something,” he says. “Best not to ask too many questions. Let’s just do this little favor for each other, and call it there, eh?”
He speaks differently than the other saurians do. Avel and Thorn and the others I’ve met so far have a particular kind of dialect which I understand easily. It’s basically a broad, round, easy to understand way of speaking, which means their saurian anatomy makes the words gruffer and deeper and more gravelly than they sound out of my mouth. This guy, though, he has a harder accent, clipped and rough. Put together with his appearance, I’m going to guess that this is the kind of accent that saurians from the wrong side of whatever passes for tracks have.
I’m curious about him and about the rest of society. I wasn’t, up until this moment. I’m realizing that this is a socially complex world, and I’m already part of it, whether I like it or not.
“What’s your name?”
“Best you don’t know that,” he says. “Best you don’t ask any questions.”
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll read the note, then?”
“You wouldn’t make heads or tails of it, I reckon,” he chuckles. “Look at it if you like. Can’t say I care. Just get it in the box, alright?”
I nod.
I’m not sure what I’ll do once I escape. Try to make contact with the ship, I guess. Or more to the point, hope they’ve been tracking me and are ready to get me. It’s a helpless feeling, being stuck on this planet of massive predators. I’m used to being on the wrong side of the law, so I shouldn’t give a damn what Avel thinks — but I do. He’s gotten under my skin somehow. He’s fucked with my head.
“Guard’s coming. Better get moving.”
The nameless prisoner prompts me into action. I move at his suggestion, slipping down the hall to stand behind the hinged side of the door. The prisoner’s intel was accurate. I can already hear the heavy boots of a jail guard moving toward the door. I wonder if there was a camera on my cell. I wonder if Avel is keeping an eye on me from afar. They’ve got to have some kind of monitoring, right?
“Hey! Prisoner guy!” I hiss-whisper down the hall.
“Yes?”
“Do they have cameras here?”
“No.”
The second the answer returns to me, the door swings open, damn near catching me in the face. I am so much shorter and smaller than all the creatures this facility was designed for, and that means that I can be taken out by a carelessly opened door if I am not paying attention.
There’s a moment of opportunity in which the guard steps through the door, and the door is not quite closed yet. I slip around the door and out into the other hall, which leads to the guard area and the reception and then the door that leads to the outside.
I do not fuck around with sneaking. I bolt like the wind, slamming into the exit door as quickly as I can. I need the momentum to overcome the inertia of the large portal. I feel the weight of it against me, pressing back before giving way and swinging open. Bursting out onto the night street, I make a dash for the red box across the road, pushing the paper inside it, and fulfilling my end of the deal.
