The DC who spoke on the speakers has made an appearance in person. He is heading up the group. I know his name. Alred. I know because that is what the technicians called him when he gave orders for me to be tortured.
“Last I saw you, you were in a containment chamber with lines coming out of every part of your body, screaming with pain,” Leader Alred says.
I decide to kill him.
He does not get a chance to wield a weapon against me. Neither do the other two. We step through space, glitchingout of the world they believe is real, entering our home realm for a moment, and then re-emerging in their faces. To their frightened gazes, we seem to disappear and reappear while ripping into them.
I kill my torturer with my bare hands. My claws lengthen, my fangs extend. The illusion of the almost human maw breaks as my mouth becomes more like a bloody snout containing jaws flashing with multiple rows of razor-sharp teeth. It is all over in a matter of seconds. Their bodies are no match for ours. Scales and muscle and guns seem as though they will offer resistance, but they do not. Before we evolved psychic powers, we were a viciously predatory species.
“Well,” Drak says, wiping some blood and visceral tissue from his face. “That was… dramatic.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
The DC had forgotten we are still descended from ferocious primates, much like humans are. The first time they took me, they hadn’t forgotten that. They drugged me. They made it so I could not resist. My capture was carefully orchestrated. It was organized with respect.
Today, they thought holding us at gunpoint would be enough.
They could not have been more wrong.
* * *
Mara
The fuck did I just see?
I knew something was wrong when I heard voices. I sneaked out, looked through the room. I saw the copper lizard people wearing their long black coats, holding guns that looked like they’d be capable of ending all of us.
And then I saw Freak and his men do the most feral, vicious thing I have ever seen in all my life. They tore them apart, breaking bone, consuming flesh, rending the internal organs of those who came to attack them. There are bits of scale and bone and coat all over the bridge. They’re going to be cleaning up forever.
Someone grabs me by the collar from behind, wrapping a hand around my mouth at the same time. Fear spikes inside me. I try to call out for Freak, but it feels like a big heavy fuzz has descended into my mind. I’ve been rendered helpless in every sense.
“We’ll be going, I think,” he says.
In a flash, I am gone. Well, the ship is gone. I am still here. But I am looking at a much darker set of structures and I know in my gut this is not a good thing. Flashes of awful memory still zap through my mind. I have to assume that I am going to be hurt in return for what was done to these aliens’ leaders.
“Please don’t hurt me. I didn’t eat your friends.”
The lizard lets out a laugh. “Of course you didn’t. You’re not capable of that, or anything for that matter. You’re a hostage.”
“Oh. Are you going to hurt me?”
“Yet to be decided,” he says. “If you give me fewer reasons to, that might help. Or it might not.”
He half-laughs as he speaks, enjoying the control he has over me. Life and death are as one to me right now. I am as dead as I am alive, as alive as I am dead. For a second time, I have been kidnapped by something so much more powerful than me. This time there is no generosity of spirit, or kindness, or even the basic urge to save me. I am looking into the vertically slitted eyes of an animal that sees me as nothing more than convenient prey.
“Did we get her?”
“Of course we did. Am I not a rogue?”
“You are,” the voice outside the door says. It is coming closer, traveling with its origin point. I cannot see this one yet. It blocks out the light as it comes toward me.
“I want to see the human the Psyon is obsessed with.”
“Just a human. Fairly standard,” the rogue who caught me says, giving me a quick up and down with his eyes. He sees nothing special about me, because I am nothing more than meat to him. I can feel his disregard like a cold wall pressed briefly against every part of me.
“She can’t be standard. He’s a Master Psyon. Let me see her.”
The creature steps into the light. He is impressive. Another lizard alien. Looks like a leader. He is particularly large and very… gleamy. His scales shine, the edges all gilt with gold. They are very pretty. I don’t think he is trying to be pretty. I think he is trying to be terrible.
