“I’m sorry, pet,” he says. “I know this is awful for you, but I beg you. Hold on. I am coming for you. Even if you do not believe me. I am going to take care of you…”
His little speech is cut short because I throw the live fish in my hands directly at him. It is a dream, after all. Of course there is a fish. There is also an assignment I have forgotten to do, and all my teeth have fallen out.
The fish hits Freak, and turns into little furry hamsters. Those hamsters start running in wheels embedded in the walls. I watch all of this happen with the impassive hostility that can only come in a dream.
My father is suddenly in the room. “Hello, Mara,” he says. His face in the dream isn’t his face in the real world. In the real world, he looks like an older, weathered, male version of me. In the dream world, he looks like ancient human heartthrob, Liam Neeson.
“Hello? What do you want?”
“I want you to know that I’m in the…”
“In the what?”
He opens his mouth again, but nothing comes out. I try to get closer to him. Maybe he’s whispering. Maybe if I can just understand what he is trying to say to me, I’ll be able to work it all out. Maybe I can find him…
“Wake up, human!”
A harsh lizard voice cuts through my dream, and in an instant Freak and my father are gone. I am opening my eyes to a captivity that feels worse than anything that has come before it, and I am feeling my soul sink into my gut in a sick kind of way.
My body throbs where the cane made contact, reminding me of the agony of being caught out by creatures who have no fondness or kindness in them.
The lizard guard steps into the brig and throws my suit at me. “Put this back on,” he says. “Your bare flesh is making the guards feel ill.”
They’d prefer I was scaly and knobby like them, I suppose. If I was, their cane would not have been so brutal.
I am taken before the Lizard King again. My guess is that he is bored and wishes to torment me again. Or this is another interrogation to try to get some angle on Freak. These creatures have a cold intellect that is capable of far darker machinations than I would ever tolerate.
“Are you ready to apologize?”
“What do I need to apologize for? Trying to escape? I wasn’t trying to hurt you, I just want to be somewhere else in the universe. Anywhere else. I need to find my father.”
“You sabotaged our ship. You could have killed us all, you filthy little rodent,” one of the others says.
“I’m not a rodent. I’m a human!”
“Same thing,” they insist. “Same common ancestor.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I argue.
“You don’t think anything of value,” they riposte.
“You said you are looking for your father?” The Lizard King tilts his head. “Should I know him? Is he a monarch?”
“Of a kind. They used to call him the Scrap King,” I say.
The Lizard King throws back his head and laughs in a hearty fashion. “The Scrap King?”
“Yes. His real name was Alan.”
“Alan the Scrap King. You wish me to find this man for you? Would you assist us if I did?”
“He’s missing,” I say. “So yes, you’d have to find him first, but I don’t know how to help you any more than I have, which is not at all. I don’t know anything about the Psyons.”
“I see, so you wish to find him to ensure that he is well and to tell him that you are the captive of one monster and the pet of another?”
“Sure, if that will all fit on the postcard,” I quip.
He laughs again, a rough sound.
