AllFreeNovel
Share Us
A spaceship.
Holy Hannah, I was on a spaceship.
The super tattooed guy glanced over at me, his brows drawn together to form a little line between them. “Are you well? Your heart rate has increased.”
“I’m—fine. How did you know that?”
He didn’t answer, just gave me a little shrug and kept walking.
The shower was very cool, if deeply unsatisfying, and afterward, he gave me a beige dress, my clothes nowhere to be seen. Thank goodness I hadn’t given him my glasses.
I raised a brow at him, picking at the shapeless dress with two fingers and curling up my nose.
Unless I was mistaken, he had to cover a smile. “Your clothes will be returned when they, too, have been cleansed. We do not wish to introduce unnecessary dangerous microbes to our environment.”
I didn’t know any more science than a person could learn from a lifetime of sci-fi watching and gaming and reading, but it sounded legit to me, so I nodded. “You can’t have my glasses, though.”
“You wore them into the shower,” he pointed out. “And they are not made of cloth, to hide microbes inside them. They did not need as thorough a cleansing.” Then he glanced around, like maybe he expected someone to jump out and call bullshit, so I thought maybe, you know, he was bullshitting me.
“You’re seriously going to give my clothes back?”
“If the answer were no, would you prefer to be naked?”
Damn. I shrugged and pulled the dress over my head. “You make a fair point, I guess.” The dress was pretty comfortable, other than the whole letting my dangly bits, you know, dangle.
Underwear: best invention ever.
“Is anyone going to explain to me what the heck is going on?” I asked as he led me down a maze of metal hallways like a rat looking for a piece of cheese. Or, um, I guess like a rat leading someone to—okay, you know what? Bad metaphor.
He didn’t answer, just led me to another door, and when it opened, he motioned me in. When I turned to look at him, waiting for an answer, the door slid closed between us.
Well hell.
I turned back to find a room half-full of other people. A few were still wearing tan dresses like the one I was in, but most were in real clothes, so I kept my fingers crossed for the eventual return of my stuff.
I tried to put on a smile, probably failed completely, and took a deep breath. “Hi. I’m Wes. So I guess we’re all going to be prisoners together.”
CHAPTER2
JAX
Eighteen humans.
They were far from the first that we’d had on Thorzan, but somehow, they had changed everything when we had saved them from the Zathki attack on Crux’s ship at the edge of our territory.
Now, we had to save them again.
In a handful of days, the humans had turned our society upside down. And now, on Thorzan, I was sneaking across the landing pad above the jungle, trying my hand at piracy for the first time since Kaelum and I had stolen a ship to try and convince Xyren the Imperator, his father and our king, of our skill and might.
Earlier that day, Prince Kaelum had called me to his chambers. There, I had met the human Ree, sheathed in a bright red dress but with dark rings around her eyes from exhaustion.
She claimed that Crux had imprisoned the humans, that after Kaelum had refused to return his Lucas to the lab, he had locked them up in small cells, refused to let them out. No one thought that Crux was kind, but there were laws about the treatment of humans. That he broke them now meant risking Xyren’s vengeance.
But before we could take the case before the king, we had to get the humans to safety. And, according to Lucas, we had to return them to Earth. They had been frightened and mistreated, and one had even been taken from her mate. It was our duty to set things right.
Kaelum had a ship of his own, a war vessel that was small and sleek and good in combat. But for a journey across galaxies to return these humans to Earth, we would need something larger, a ship equipped for long travel.
That was my job.
