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CALIGHER
???
Caligher woke slowly, unable to move his limbs. Cold, blaring light blinded him from every side. Gravity seemed to pull the blood out of his body, leaving him weak.
He jerked against that immense sense of heaviness.
A bare white cell locked into place around him. Square. Utterly, disturbingly, square. He was strapped to the wall.
No.
An ugly face appeared beyond the window. The creature had strangely mottled flesh—an unappealing reddish color with a sickly undertone. Caligher could see his individual pores. Even the blood vessels beneath his eyeballs were visible. The sight of it turned Caligher’s stomach.
“Good evening, Mister alien…God, you are a stunning creature.”
The human’s eyes roamed over Caligher in an avid study, making his skin crawl away from that spectral touch.
He hated that he knew his language.English.
The human had an unsettling way of speaking. He had a habit of smoothing every word over with a layer of something… slippery and menacingly polite. The kinder the word, the darker the meaning. He gestured his hand until Caligher peered down to find that hundreds of tubes had been driven under his carapace.
He struggled on reflex, watching in horror as chips of exoskeleton peeled loose. Revulsion twisted his stomach until scalding vomit flowed up his throat.
He couldn’t—he couldn’tdothis again. He wouldn’t survive it a second time. He wasn’t convinced he’d survived the first. He wasn’t convinced he’descaped. A dream of life after captivity teased at his thoughts—fleeting, vaporous.
Now was real.
Thiscellwas real.
Beyond the window, the human captain had assembled a crowd of similarly ugly creatures. Blood darkened their thin skin unevenly. Some were covered with pockmarks, scabs, or uneven patches of sharp fur. Caligher couldsmelltheir cloying breaths and odors, even through the observation window. A few of them were decaying from the inside—walking creatures of death. The blank white walls only exaggerated every repulsive detail.
He tried to will himself to pass out and die right there but the pain and terror kept him solidly locked in his body.
Meanwhile, raw indifference exuded from the humans watching him with eyes that looked too much like his own. That was what disturbed Caligher the most—that they looked like Ternetzis. Uglier, but shaped like people.
“Ghrvle.” The captain addressed someone. The translation was gibberish to Caligher’s ears. “Let us start.”
Machines beeped behind him on the wall and panic seized him in a chokehold. He would fight this time. He pounded in search of machinery but cuffs cut into his limbs.
His body was drained of its spark. Without it, every part of him felt drained, drugged, andwrong. He felt the agony with every nerve. The ones going through his exoskeleton and lodged in his bones. The nerves on his raw skin underneath. Even the nerves in his mind—
He couldn’t move. He was a prisoner inside his body and hecould not move.
The human said another name. Another command.
Acid poured into Caligher’s veins, wrenching him out of his sane mind, digging him open from the inside out. It burned everything with icy pinpricks and made his eyes bulge and water. A raw scream tore his throat. The humans observed, indifferent.
“Very good,” the lead human praised. “Perfect… perfect… Now… Miss Lucca, would you please start the next phase?”
No.
No.
Caligher began clawing, reduced to mindless animal instinct. A shadow crossed the other side of the window.
“Yessir.” The familiar placid voice pained him. The shadow assumed the skin-crawling shape of a human as it operated the controls beyond the door.
“Lucca,” he croaked. She had to see it was him. She would never do this to him. Not her. Never her.
