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“Perhaps, but her spirit is not at rest. You know why that is.” The Seer turns back to me. “You know nothing,” she says. “You are empty. Be careful of what fills you.”
“They will try to take your dream girl from you,” she tells Shah. “Be careful, lest your dreams become nightmares. Hold her close. Do not let her be taken.”
She places the lid on her tea pot.
That seems to be our cue to leave.
“Did that help?” I ask Shah the question as we return to his ship.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Sometimes her words don’t make sense until after the fact.”
“So, like everything in life, then?”
I’m trying not to be skeptical, but even a drone from a Colony could tell that was mostly bullshit. Shah’s looking for answers everywhere. He’s getting desperate as his world slowly implodes.
We return to the dark, quiet ship. It’s a different kind of quiet than on the asteroid. It’s a heavy dark, the closing of a curtain, the end of something that was once alive.
“C’mere,” Shah says, picking me up and tossing me over his shoulder. “I need you.”
* * *
We both need this. We are like animals desperate to burrow out of harm’s way. Instead of hiding in the earth, we’re left with each other. Shah kisses me passionately, his mouth on almost every part of me. His tongue finds my nipples and toys with them, flicking them to a state of militant arousal. I want him as much as he wants me, because when Shah is inside me, literally nothing else matters. He makes life and death become one thing when I am writhing in pleasure.
“You’re mine,” he growls. “You’re mine and I’ll never let you go. No matter what I lose, no matter what it costs. No matter what happens. You know that, don’t you, Dreamy? I’ll always come for you.”
“Mngghh!” I agree. What he is doing is driving me past the point of being verbal. The head of his cock is at the verge of my sex, that hot, hard, throbbing member teasing me with short thrusts that almost enter, but don’t quite fill me until I reach down and grab his ass, pulling my hips up to him. I would never have had the confidence to demand his cock before. I was passive and I was quiet, and I let him dominate me without question. Now my hunger equals his.
At my urging, Shah fills me. He surges forward, impaling me, driving out my thoughts, leaving me writhing on his cock as if that pulsing rod were the nexus of my entire existence. When he fucks me, I am his in a way I have never been anybody’s. I belong to him and to the beast that only exists when our flesh meets.
Shah
I can’t fuck the Seer’s words out of my head. There’s something going on. Something right at the edge of my understanding. Something I so very nearly understand that not actually understanding it feels like physical pain.
Her words have not brought me any peace. They have amplified the feeling of quiet doom I have been nursing since the attack. Something bad is coming. Something that makes Dreamy feel like she is gone even as I hold her in my arms.
I have spent my entire life trying to build an empire to withstand all challenges, but it is crumbling around me. The attack at the space station was not only lethal to the lives of my men and women, it was damaging to my entire enterprise. The word is that I have been compromised, and it could not be more true.
But I still have Dreamy. For now. I still have Dreamy.
11
Shah
The sound a Colony battleship makes while de-cloaking off our starboard bow is precisely nothing. One moment we are alone in deep space, the next we are being dwarfed by a vessel more than twice our size. The only real tell-tale sign are the sudden shadows cast over the empty food hall. This place used to buzz. Now there’s just one vending machine and a lot of chairs stacked on tables, cast into an unexpected twilight.
When things go wrong, they go wrong fast. That is the way of the universe. It used to be me who made things go wrong. Now I seem to be on the receiving end of an almost endless cascade of karma.
“DREAMY!” I call her name. She’s right beside me in the dark, my sweet little shadow. She has been worried about me. I know that because I have caught her reflection when she hasn’t known I could see her, and the adorable, furrowed look on her sweet brow has reminded me I need to stay strong, even if I am in career stasis for the moment. Nothing new can be undertaken until the traitor is unmasked, and yet I cannot imagine anybody left aboard my ship being such a villain.
“I’m here, Shah,” she says softly, slipping her hand into mine.
I take her with me up to the bridge, where Malik once more has command. It seems like a very long time since I sat in that chair and gave orders.
“Colony hyper-battle-cruiser,” he says as I emerge, Dreamy in tow.
“How did they find us?”
He shrugs, as if it doesn’t matter. Nothing much matters anymore.
