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Sometimes a thing was simply broken, and there was no fixing it.
“Damned pink weakling,” Crux hissed, throwing a data drive down on the table in front of him, where it crunched against one of the Zathki-provided tubes in which he grew us damned pink weaklings. “He dares take one of my humans, as though it is a spoil of war.”
His humans, he called them all.
What would King Xyren think of that, I wondered? Or of the fact that in private, Crux still referred to the queen as “my Rochelle.”
Not because he cared for my mother, you must understand. But because, like the human Lucas, taken by Prince Kaelum after the Zathki attack, Rochelle had been taken from him.
He considered my mother as he did one of his Zathki toys, or a set of clothes. A fine thing he owned and wanted to show off.
Sometimes, like me.
Not that he thought me a fine thing, but he did sometimes like to show me off. His own weak human hybrid, stronger than those other weak human hybrids. The first. The best. The strongest.
He’d made sure of that in my eighth cycle, when he’d taken me up to the temple for the first time, shoving me into the light of the sacred star, Lyr, and watching to see if it would kill me. I’d screamed and pounded against the door as it had burned my soft pink skin, begging him, begging Father, please let me in. Help me. Save me.
It had been the last time I had asked for help.
No one helped the likes of me. Unwanted by my mother, and little more than another experiment to Crux, I had learned to save myself. Had gone again and again to the temple of my own will after the first time didn’t kill me.
At first, Crux had encouraged it, and some small part of me had thought to gain... if not his love, then at least his favor.
After my fourth star mark to his single one, he had started looking on me with suspicion. Expecting that I would betray him, no doubt—as he expected of everyone. I didn’t care to imagine what he thought now that I had seven.
Even he didn’t know what the last two did.
No one had ever asked.
A chime sounded at the door to the facility. The crew bringing the remaining humans in, no doubt. That was good. Perhaps seeing the humans yet in his possession would calm his anger.
Because whatever the king and his court thought, Crux did own the humans. He would rule their lives with an iron fist, keeping them in the facility and lording his might over them, because unlike the last time humans had been brought to Thorzan, the first minister of the council was now Vipha.
And Vipha had given Crux all the power over the humans he brought back, and all the oversight. Vipha, more than anyone else on Thorzan, was Crux’s creature.
So unfortunately for the new humans, Crux owned them.
Just as he owned me.
I wondered if perhaps he would take one of them up to the temple, to see if the sacred light of Lyr would mark them. If he would stand by, watching dispassionately, taking notes on a data drive as they screamed and begged for mercy, and—since humans truly were physically soft and breakable—died.
He would, I decided, if he found himself curious about it. Best to keep him busy and distracted, then.
“The humans are here for your inspection,” I told him as he continued to hiss and mutter his anger at the prince.
The prince was little more than a spoiled child, but as it happened, so was Crux. At least Kaelum had braved the light of Lyr three times, and not smugly rested after his first, when it had given him power over others.
The power to read minds.
He turned, eyes laser-focused, narrowed on me. “Are you amused by this?”
I lifted a single brow, keeping my face entirely blank. “Of course not. Why would I be amused?”
He gave another hiss of frustration and turned to march down the hall of private cells toward the antechamber where the crew had brought the humans.
Crux didn’t like asking people how they were feeling. He liked using his mark and knowing it. But since the fourth mark given me by the sacred light of Lyr, Crux could no longer see my thoughts.
Perhaps when I was seven, I would have been devastated by the fact that my own father would never again trust me. Now, I was little other than grateful that he couldn’t see the disgust I felt for him.
