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CHAPTERONE
RAINA
When you’ve been livingin a cage for weeks, creating a bit of chaos is nothing more than a reminder that you’re still alive.
One of the aliens keeping me captive has gotten a little too comfortable playing with his victims. He’s used to those that would hide in the corner and make themselves small. I saw him across the darkened hall before, sticking his cattle prod through the bars for fun.
He’s an octopus monster with gray jelly skin and wet, slithery appendages. This kind of alien doesn’t look as strong as the ones that raided our colony and stole us away. There are no bones in him, and I’d love to know what it would take to kill his kind. The other aliens, the ones that looked like lizard-people, were difficult to kill. I only managed to get one of them by hopping on his back and strangling him. They weren’t pleased about it, and perhaps that’s why we ended up here in a new place.
Frankie, Kaye, and I were brought here two days ago.
We’re fresh meat, recently shuttled from another slaving ship to this one. We haven’t seen any other humans since the day we were captured. One day, we were at the town market when a bomb went off, and the next day we woke up from a long, drug-induced nap in a stasis pod.
“Raina . . .” I hear a warning whisper from Frankie. She is inside the cell to my right. “Don’t—”
Frankie knows me well. We became friends on the first day of colony training. She knows that I’m probably going to do something reckless.
“Come closer and let me look at you. I’ve never seen a human before.” The creepy guard speaks to me slowly, as if I’m stupid.
I put on a smile and step up to the bars.
“I’m curious whether you’re a hardy species,” he muses, twisting his electrified staff in hand. It works like a cattle prod, but it’s shaped like a Q-tip. “If you last long, maybe I will buy one for myself.”
“Go ahead,” I say.
He hesitates. “Excuse me?”
“Go ahead. Come on inside. See how long I can last. I’m kind of curious myself.” I wrap my fingers around the bars. They, too, are electrified, and they give me a dull shock. It’s a harsher version of rubbing your socks on the rug and touching something metal.
The guard snorts. “Strange, stupid creature . . .”
Amused, he slips inside my cell. He knows I can’t run for it. Our ankles have been chained to the back wall so that the farthest we can go is to the bars.
“The market value of humans is high now because you are a novelty. But it will quickly drop if you turn out to be a weak creature.”
He wastes no time before he stabs me with the tip of his weapon. It jabs me in the stomach, delivering a powerful shock ten times worse than the bars of my prison. Pain blazes through me, but I grit my teeth and grab the shaft of the cattle prod. He’s too distracted by his sick enjoyment to suspect anything until I’ve landed my foot on his squishy tentacle arm.
He shrieks as I slam all my weight down on his slimy, twisty limb.
It squishes like a bug, oozing everywhere as he squeals in pain.
“You walked into the wrong cage,” I tell him as I wrestle the sparking staff from his floundering tentacle. Once his grip loosens, I have the leverage I need to yank and twist until I am the one shocking him with it.
His screams of pain sound squeaky as I give him a taste of his own medicine. Other alien prisoners shuffle toward their bars to watch.
The ruckus finally raises the attention of two other guards at the end of the prison hallway.
They hustle over to investigate and then gather outside my cell to watch their comrade sizzle at the end of his own weapon.
“Go in there and get him,” one of them says. “This nasty little female is vicious.”
“You do it,” the other snaps. “She could have a disease. What if she bites me?”
The first one makes a wet smacking noise of derision.
“If he didn’t torture them so often, he wouldn’t be in this situation,” the first points out.
I step on his neck and press down experimentally. Wait, maybe these things do have bones . . . I feel resistance, like a spinal cord lies deep inside. Will he die if I crush this part of him?
