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“She was hit, wasn’t she.”
“Indirectly, but yes.”
“Can’t solve everything with explosives, Equs.”
I don’t want to hear his opinion on the method of dispersing the terrorist bastards who caused this whole thing to happen. I want him to save the woman I have begun to love.
I stay silent, and he gets to work.
“She has a lot of wounds. None of them are deep enough to present a current risk to her health, but if infection sets in, we could be in real trouble. Also, I can’t tell if she was tagged by any of the Eponite arrows or now. She needs to be moved somewhere we have supplies. Somewhere we’re not going to be ambushed.”
“We are a long way from the city.”
“She needs to be transported. That’s not going to change. I can use some herbal concoctions to try to stave off any kind of bacterial incursions, but this is not good.”
“What about her bones? Her skull?”
“Bones intact, but I’m fairly certain that there’s been a concussion. She could have some minor brain damage, or she could bleed. Again, we need to go back to the city. As quickly as possible.”
I look down, considering that I had little to no choice. What I ended up doing to her was better than letting the Eponites have their way with her. They are particularly brutal when they find something they think I care about. Better to be unconscious and die in my care than be tortured to within an inch of her life by those who hate everything over five foot high.
There are so many I could blame for this. I could blame the watch for not giving an early enough warning. I could blame the archers for letting her be caught in the blasts. Inevitably, however, I have to blame myself. I am king, and this happened to her in my care. That is the only blame that matters.
Eight
Blaire
“You’re awake.”
I am awake, but I wish I wasn’t. I am in so much fucking pain. My head is pounding, and I feel as though one side of my body has been scraped nearly fucking raw. Memory escapes me for the moment. I can’t recall what the hell happened to get me in this state. I can barely remember who I am, let alone how I got here.
An alien face looms above me, and I freak the fuck out. What the fuck is that? Big dark eyes and better hair than any hair model ever. It suddenly occurs to me amid all this empty-headed madness that those hair models are probably wearing wigs. It’s all fake, in one way or another.
“It’s okay. You’re safe.”
“No! I’m not!” I reply very stridently because I know for sure that if I am anything, it is not safe.
“Do you remember who I am?”
“You’re an asshole.”
“I’m going to need you to be more specific.”
“You’re the king of assholes,” I grunt. “And my head is killing me.”
“Stay still. You are being treated, but you must rest.”
“What are they? Those things that attacked us?”’
“Do you want a history lesson now?” He asks the question with the gentle human inflection which makes me not entirely hate him.
“I want to know why I’ve been wounded and left for dead,” I growl. “I want to know what the fuck happened.”
Memory is coming back to me now. Equs. That’s his fucking name. And there was a battle, and…
“They are Eponites. But what they really are, are feral middle managers. When humans first arrived here, they split into two groups. The survivors, and the middle managers.”
“You’re fucking with me.” I think I must be concussed. Or maybe he is. Because this sounds like insane babbling.
“I wish I was. The middle managers have gotten shorter over time because it was more efficient and helped to cut costs.”
“You are absolutely fucking with me.”
“I am not. They took on the most fearsome colors and they appointed a diverse board of directors, and they decided that cannibalism was eco-friendly.”
“Oh fuck off.”
His words are ringing true though. The queen was truly ferocious, and though she mentioned burning me, I suppose burning isn’t that far from cooking if you think about it.
“This… what. I thought they were the good guys. Or good girls.”
“No such thing anywhere in the universe, just a series of perspectives which makes one bad and good in turn.”
“That’s not true. I can be good. I am good.”
“You’re a horse thief.”
“Well, I mean that was…”
“A matter of perspective. Good and bad. We’re all the same. Mixed up together.”
“You’re just trying to excuse exploding me with arrows.”
“I never excuse myself. I know what I am. I know what I do. I don’t pretend to be good when I am doing evil. Some mistake me for being entirely evil for that reason.”
“Uh-huh.”
My head is fucking sore. I think I might have some kind of concussion, or maybe brain damage.
