AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The lights curve around and land somewhere near the shuttle wreckage. There’s a crew down. Why isn’t he running toward them? Why is he hauling me away at a speed I would have usually associated with some kind of vehicle? At full pace, he runs faster than a Gettem drone can fly. He must have discarded his boots to sleep, and when I look down at the flashing darkness, I can see the toe claws on each of his toes working to dig into the soft ground, propelling him through this pitch black forest at at incredible speed.
“What is happening!?” I scream the words, but there is no answer. He tosses me off his shoulder and down onto the moss and leaf covered ground. I squeal at feeling such organic material pressed against me. The feeling only grows as he starts tearing into me like an animal. I don’t know what he intends to do. I am frozen in horror and terror, anticipating the end which I have always seen in his eyes.
He rends the clothing from my body, ripping away the last vestiges of my elite status. I am naked now. Naked, and absolutely terrified.
“Hold still,” he says. “Your implants must come out. They are following your signal.”
Though his words are simple enough, I am not sure what he means. We are both fitted with augmentations. He has hundreds more than I do. If anybody is being tracked, it is him. But why doesn’t he want to be tracked? And why is he doing this to me?”
“I…”
“Put this between your teeth.”
He pushes a piece of tree skin into my mouth. Before I can spit it out, he places his hands on either side if my head. There is a sharp sensation as he curls his fingers inward and his claws dig into my skin.
There is no escaping him, or this pain. He is stripping me of my status and my personhood. I cannot help but cry, hot tears running down my cheeks as he performs a forever life changing surgery on me in the most brutal and beastly of ways.
“Stop emitting water,” he growls.
“I can’t help it.”
“You have so little control over your bodily functions, human.” There is disdain in his tone. “Be still.”
I cannot be still. My body thrashes around out of pure and simple instinct, my feet drumming against the soil, grunts and muffled cries escaping my mouth.
I feel it when he finds it quarry, latching onto the two implanted discs just behind my temples which made me elite. Losing the augs was bad, but I could always have gotten some more of them. They were a fancy kind of clothing. Now he is digging inside my skull to remove the last vestiges of elite status. His claws are inside me. Penetrating me. They’re beneath my skin, finding the little pieces that make me elite and pulling them from my very flesh.
It hurts. A lot. It makes me scream and cry, and he does not care. He persists in the process of removing them until they are free. I see them in his massive hands, two small pieces of slim metallic material no more than half an inch across each.
He flicks my implants from his claws and sends them arcing in shining bloody packages into a stream trickling nearby. I can see a little now as the sun rises over my bloodied, prone body. I can see my blood on his claws. I can see the river which is sweeping my existence away in a peaceful flow.
“Stay still,” he says. “I will mend these edges.”
He presses against the torn edges of my flesh with his fingers. I feel heat surge through me. He has taken me apart, and now he is putting me back together again through the power of his augmentations.
Still he is not done with me. He shows no concern for my pain or my fear as he drags me over to the stream and paws water over my face, washing away blood and mud, the debris of my ordeal. Am I crying? I must be crying. From sleep to shock, I have been absolutely brutalized by this beast of a korabi.
Finally, Rath pauses to let me breathe. I find myself staring into the pooled water beneath as the sun’s rays cast fresh light and new truth over the landscape.
The water reflects Rath above me, the brutal lines of his cruel deep dark purple face so familiar to me. He is looming over me, one of his hands still in the water. I can see my crusted blood still clinging to the tips of his fingers. That is what it means to be in Rath’s possession. It means pain and suffering and fear and…
Who the fuck is that?
A fresh horror emerges as I see the face beneath his. I scream at the top of my lungs and dash both my hands into the water in the attempt to erase the oddity. When the ripples clear, the strangeness remains.
