Chapter 4: Menace
Poppy glares at me like I’ve just committed a crime. “She needs her bag. Why did you take it from her?”
“Shifter took the other two,” I defend.
“Because they’re camp gear, not her stuff,” Shifter mutters.
Poppy scans Sefina’s pack with radiant swirling bars projecting from her eyes. “Females are very protective of their things. They don’t have a lot, but they need supplies we don’t. Sefina is one of the few females here healthy enough to have monthly cycles.”
My core heats and swells with stronger mating urges.Sefina is fertile?
“And medicine? You really don’t want her to have that?” Poppy growls at me. I can’t recall a time she ever growled at anyone.
“She’s not sick that I’ve ever seen,” I admit.
“Because she’s been taking it. And stars in the void, Menace, it’smedicine. Who cares what it’s for? It’s hers. She knows she needs it. That is all that matters.” Poppy hisses and punches me in the shoulder with enough force that it actually kind of hurts.
“Ow.”
“Oh, switch off!” Poppy moves behind me to continue scanning the bag. She’s clearly looking for something and knows something about Sefina that I don’t.
Shifter runs a hand down his face. “Have you really forgotten basic human needs? Is your human assessment programming not running?”
I glower at him. “No. It hasn’t in years.”
“Then you need to visit Rebel.”
“I am not broken,” I sneer.I just wanted to help her.“She has carried too much weight for too long. We cannot afford to have her injured. My probability programming is running without error.”
“And yet she ran off when you refused to give her the bag.” Shifter shakes his head. “Is she really safer now?”
“I didn’t know she would do that.”
Poppy sighs. “For a stealth model, you can be a real misfiring thruster sometimes.”
“And you’re a hunk of ballast out here.”
Shifter nudges my mind like he disapproves.
Poppy gasps. “Ouch.”
A rustling noise down the tunnel Sefina took makes us all look.
Catching the scent of welvir blood, I blow past them and charge through the corridor, following Sefina’s scent. It’s not a choice. My body doesn’t give me one.
I get that I’m everyone’s least favorite Brother and Titan and that I’m messed up in the head, but I still recognize a capable soldier when I see one. We have so few that we have to protect each other.
But it’s instinct as much as it is a necessity to search her out.
When I get to the tunnel, Sefina straightens from above a dead welvir. Blood drips from a knife she carries in the strap across her voluptuous chest. It doesn’t fizzle or burn like it’s impervious to the acidic mutant blood. And there’s an odd sheen to her eyes in the darkness, something I’ve only seen a few times in animals like myself.
She continues on, leaving me standing over the dead animal. “We can’t keep closing the tunnels. I think they’re feeling the vibrations and following them.”
“They’ll follow the blood scent, otherwise,” I reply.
“Takes longer to travel.” Sefina stares coldly at me. “And we can’t escape that completely anyway between our injured and the meat on your back undermypack. At least, we can stop sending out a damned beacon. If Solcrue are watching seismic activity, they’ll see the explosions.”
“Commander Savage has spread out Titans to ensure causing such tunnel collapses all over will make it look like we’re scattered.”
