“Can’t you put her down for a moment?”
I don’t want to put her down. After everything that has happened for the past few years, I feel as though she is anchoring me to myself. The studies done on me were not pleasant. The scientists who had me in their grasp tried to take me apart in hundreds of different ways. I was hurt terribly and repeatedly, but with my pet in my arms I feel something close to normal.
The others have missed me, but they do not want to address the events of my captivity either. We are all skirting the issue, over and over. I suspect they know more than they want to share with me. How could they not? We are all uniquely connected, our consciousness a mesh we all weave.
“No,” I say aloud. “You can speak to me with her here.”
Mara smirks against my chest. She cannot hear Alara, but she is very good at working out what is happening in the absence of information. Humans are talented in that regard. What they lack in sophistication, they make up for with instinct.
* * *
Mara
These aliens seem so above it all, so psychic and ethereal. But I can see what they are. I can see the power in their bodies, the protective scaling, the claws and the teeth. These are predators as surely as any animals are. And Freak already told me they are at war.
The female who keeps circling us like a hungry beast wants Freak. She calls him something else, but I stick with the name he gave me. I like it better anyway.
She settles down nearby, in a chaise chair, and she engages with my owner. It feels natural to think of him that way, though I would not say it out loud. I am still free, still independent in the recesses of my mind.
I don’t know what is passing between the two of them, but I can feel Freak getting more tense the longer their associationcontinues. Whatever they’re magically saying to one another, it’s pissing him off.
I want to help, but I have no way of originally interrupting. So I lift my head from his chest, turn to his neck, and bite the scaled side of it. I can feel the scaled texture of his skin beneath my teeth and tongue. It’s an interesting texture, firm, but warm.
He smirks, and relaxes. I see the sharp teeth emerge from under his upper lip as he smiles. It’s not a threat, though. I think he is pleased.
“You shouldn’t let your pet bite,” the woman says out loud for my benefit.
“You shouldn’t let people tell you what to do,” I respond.
“Easy,” Freak says to me, patting my rear warningly. “Let’s not be disrespectful.”
“Is she trained at all? Or is she going to behave as she likes?” The woman is really pushing things now. She doesn’t have to talk about me at all, but if she really wanted to, she could do it without me knowing. By speaking out loud in a tongue I understand, she’s doing this on purpose.
“I do what I want,” I say. “I’m a human. And I have a mission.”
“Oh,” she says. “A mission?”
“Yes. I am going to get water to save my world.”
“No, you’re not,” she says. “Silly little thing. The world you came from is ordained to suffer from a drought that will eventually claim everything. Dust begets dust, and human habitation rarely leaves an environment better for it. It is just as well Tasin took pity on you. You will be the last of that line.”
She turns to Freak and smiles a little too broadly. “You should really find a good human to mate her. She could produce cute little babies to sell.”
And that’s when I lunge at her.
The notion of letting some strange man have his way with me, make me swell with babies, then sell them. It’s obscene. It’s evil. And for her to suggest it, means she is evil too.
“Hey!” Freak grips me tightly and pulls me back down, this time over his lap rather than on it.
He starts to spank me hard and fast without so much as saying a word at first. Then I start to wail as all the handsome aliens watch me get my ass whipped. It is deeply embarrassing, not to mention painful given how much trouble I have been in lately. It feels as though I am constantly being thrashed in between being praised for my behavior.
“We do not rush at anybody,” he says. “Bad girl. You know better than to do that. What would you have done if you had made contact? Would you have bitten the matriarch? What would have happened then? Do you know what she could do to you? She could eradicate you from the face of existence with a snap of her fingers if she so decided.”
This feels harder than anything he has done to me before. Harder, meaner, more intense, and enough to make tears run down my face.
* * *
Freak
