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Serenity was being carried away by a man.
Whatever the man had in mind for her, she was pretty sure it was nothing nice. Her blood ran hot and cold with panic, her fine hairs stood on end, and her heart pounded machine-gun fast behind her sternum. She flailed and kicked her legs, but it did no good.
Where was this guy taking her?
It didn’t take long for Serenity to find out the answer to that question.
The natural stone walls of the canyon were honeycombed with hundreds of branching caves. It was a veritable labyrinth of stone arteries within which an unwary explorer could quickly become lost. Some of these passageways even connected to a vast network of subterranean tunnels, which the ukkur used to move undetected between encampments hidden at various locations around the planet. It was the ukkur’s knowledge of the planet’s underworld that gave them an advantage against their enemies, the more numerous and better equipped nith.
It was into one of those cave tunnels that Serenity now found herself being carried kicking and screaming. Or at least she was attempting to scream, but the hand over her mouth was still muffling her cries.
One might have thought the caves would be even darker than the canyon, but this was not so. The walls and ceiling of the passages were spotted with bioluminescent lichens that exuded a soft, blue-green light. Serenity had learned all about this alien flora when she had been led through similar underground passages after being rescued from the nith slaughterhouse.
But this time, Serenity was not being rescued.
She was being captured.
And by the dim blue-green glow, she could now see that she had not just one captor to worry about, but three. Three frightening human men covered in prison tattoos and dressed in primitive loincloths.
Once they were deep inside the tunnel, the men stopped running. The one who was carrying Serenity set her down, but he kept his hand squeezed tightly on her mouth.
She felt cracked lips brush her earlobe and smelled foul, rotten breath as the man whispered to her.
“I’m gonna take my hand off yer mouth now,” the man rasped. “You best not scream nor try to run off, else we’ll hurt you bad. Understand?”
Serenity did not nod or make any sound, and a moment stretched out where the only sound was the click of water dripping inside the cave. Irritated by her silence, the man shook her and hissed more insistently.
“Understand?” His voice echoed in the enclosed space.
This time, Serenity whimpered and nodded. She was not agreeing to anything, and she fully intended to get out of this situation any way she could. But for now, she just wanted that grubby hand off her face.
“Good,” the man grunted.
His gnarled fingers slid away from Serenity’s mouth. He shoved her, and she stumbled for a couple of steps before catching her balance. She turned and glanced fearfully at the trio of men who had her surrounded.
All three of the men had shaved heads. The one who had carried her had a big, flabby brawler’s body and a creepy soul patch under his chapped lower lip. The second man was wiry with a thin mustache, and the third had a set of scraggly mutton-chop sideburns. Between the three of them, they almost had a complete beard.
Soul Patch’s beady eyes narrowed as he focused on her tattooed shoulder, and a crooked grin split his face.
“Well, well, well, would ya look at that? We caught ourselves a piggy.”
“A piggy? She looks kinda skinny to me.”
“Look at her tat, dipshit. She’s a cop.”
“Oh fuck. Now I’mreallygonna enjoy this.”
“What are you going to do to me?” Serenity asked, trying her best to hide the quaver of fear in her voice.
Soul Patch just sneered at her.
“Shut up, bitch pig. I’ll do the asking. And I want to know what you were doing out past curfew all by yerself.”
It was a bullshit question of course. These men were breaking curfew just as much as she was. But Serenity didn’t dare say that out loud.
Her impulse was to run for it, but the three men had her surrounded. Should she scream? They had taken her deep enough into the tunnels that Serenity doubted whether anyone would be able to hear her back at camp.
“She was bein’ a nosy little piggy,” Mutton Chops slurred in a demented voice. “She was listenin’ to them ukkurs gettin’ it on.”
