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Like all of my fellow humans, I’d been taken from Earth against my will. But all but Genevieve had been like me too, in that barring the expectation of being sold into slavery or cut into pieces for alien funsies, it had started to feel like as much adventure as terror by the time Kaelum had taken us onto his ship.
I was on an alien world! The plants wanted to eat us, the meat was from giant creatures that look like a cross between a yak and a giraffe, and they lived at the top of an enormous cliff overlooking the biggest, bluest waterfall I’d ever seen. Sure, I had been worried that I would touch the water and then find out that oops, it was corrosive or something, but I also had a tour guide in Kaelum, to tell me that it wasn’t.
It was cool when I allowed myself to think of it that way and stopped seeing myself as scared little kidnapped Lucas the weak human. Which was, incidentally, still how most of the aliens saw me.
Screw that.
I was done being scared Lucas. This was a goddamn adventure. I was gonna eat alien food and drink alien booze and maybe play a little hide the alien sausage.
Assuming it was actually sausage sized, and not too scarily proportional.
I’d only caught a glimpse down at the river, had felt it against my back, but Kaelum hadn’t pushed for a chance for me to get overly familiar with his appendage.
On that thought, we came around the corner into a big antechamber only to find the last guy in the world I wanted to see.
Fucking Crux.
He was sneering down his nose at... the king. That seemed a little suicidal, but okay. As we approached, my implant kicked in and his deep rumble started to sound like English. “If Vorian is to have his pick, then I require all the humans to give samples. They were chosen for their genetic diversity, and all of them need to be in the lab—”
“And Kaelum quite fairly chose one as a reward for coming to your aid when you failed to protect yourself,” his father answered stonily.
It was the first time I’d ever heard his father say something that could, in the right light and maybe with a drink or two, be heard as complimentary to Kaelum.
Crux made a growling sound in his chest that was most definitely not intended as a throat-clearing. Was he threatening the king? The guy was bigger than him, and had at least four distinct tattoos to Crux’s one.
“No,” I said aloud. Everyone turned to look at me, including the king, Kaelum, Crux, the two guards at the door, and even Kaelum’s mother, sitting on a chair as far as she could get from Crux and looking anywhere but him.
Her rapist.
Fuck me.
I shook off my momentary horror, and turned to look at Crux. “There are laws on Thorzan about this. You’re not allowed to take, you have to ask. And while we’re at it, we should have a discussion about kidnapping people, because I talked to everyone, and none of us were given a choice on whether to come.”
“You wished to leave—”
“Wanting to go somewhere else and agreeing to go with you are different things. Maybe we would have said yes if you asked us, but the fact is that you didn’t. Not one of us.”
Kaelum’s mother gasped, and when I turned to look at her, wincing a little, her hand was over her mouth, eyes wide, as she stared at me.
“They didn’t... hurt us, exactly,” I promised her. “But I’ve been told we were supposed to have a choice.” Turning back to Crux, I widened my stance and stared at him, as if I’d have half a chance in a fight with anyone, let alone an eight-foot alien. But I’d been watching the Thorzi, and maybe I wasn’t an anthropologist, but I was a historian. I knew about how societies worked. I thought I had a decent handle on how theirs was structured. “Maybe you didn’t break the rules explicitly, but you skirted around them like you thought they shouldn’t apply to you. And you manhandled Ree on the ship, which is definitely against the law. I think you don’t care about the rules, and you’re pushing to see just how much you can get away with.”
I met his eye head on, forcing him to be the first to look away, which he did when he glanced at the king. The king, who was looking at me with new interest. Or maybe the first hint of interest ever.
He gave me the tiniest of nods, then looked behind me to Kaelum. “The two of you are free to go. Crux and I should have a discussion about who Ree is, and why he was breaking the law in regard to our human guests.” He turned a sharp look on the other alien. “Because that is what they are supposed to be. Guests. Not prisoners.”
For the first time since my body went weightless back on Earth—hell, since way before that—I felt like I had at least the tiniest bit of power. I was not inconsequential, I was notweak, and I was in charge of my own goddamn destiny.
CHAPTER20
KAELUM
Before that moment, my father had not liked Lucas.
Perhaps that wasn’t fair.
My father had not liked the idea of my fondness for any human as a bed partner, much less anything more. Better that I set my sights on true-born Thorzi. Or, if not that, at least a hybrid. He wanted to sustain or improve our line’s strength, and did not see any human as a viable path for that.
We had had humans on Thorzi longer than I had been alive. They could not become warriors, sent to trek out into the wilderness on their own. They were not capable of activating the marks on a true-born Thorzi warrior.
