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Sure enough, it gave a familiar little buzz and then lowered.
Success!
I pulled the blanket tight around my shoulders, wrapping part of it around my head, and even burying my fingers as deep in the material as I could. After all, Jax had been trying to protect us from the cold that was outside.
And it was freakingcold, and this time, I’d only brought one blanket.
I shivered hard, looking around as much as I could, with an improvised blanket hood and a big scratch across my glasses. Fortunately, it only took me a moment to locate Jax, so I pulled the blanket back in tight and narrowed in on him, marching over and scowling.
“Seriously? Are you just going to keep abandoning me while you work? I’m not a wilting violet, Jax. I can help. I can—”
But the man standing in front of me wasn’t Jax at all.
He was about the same height as Jax—aka taller than me, but shorter than the immense blue Thorzi I’d been around in the lab—but he lacked Jax’s muscular bulk. He was also a paler sort of blue than the other Thorzi, his skin almost blending into the glacial ice that surrounded us, and his hair was as white as Jax’s was black.
“Oh I’m... I’m sorry, I thought you were my friend.” I backed up a step, biting my lip and ducking my head in embarrassment. How had someone even gotten here? After failing to find Jax’s rodents the day before, I’d been rather convinced that the planet was entirely uninhabitable.
This guy was actually covered with clothes, and I couldn’t help but wonder if this was what a non-warrior Thorzi looked like. Not small, to be sure, but less enormous and ripped, and more... dad-bod style, and padded with layers of shirt and coat and some kind of scarf thing that went around his neck, over his head, and tucked into the coat. It looked seriously warm, and I was jealous.
“You... are not Thorzi,” he told me, like it might be a surprise, and I should know about it.
I turned and looked behind me, as though maybe he was talking to that other human trapped on the ice planet, but then I shook it off and turned back to him. “Yeah, no, I’m human. I’m... I mean, you know about Crux and the, um”—I coughed, trying to clear my throat of shame, which worked about as well as you might think—“breeding thing. Experiments. Lab? Future of the Thorzi people and all that?”
He cocked his head, ice-blue eyes narrowing in thought, like maybe he did know what I was talking about, but also, like I was confusing. And who could blame him? I was confused. And maybe if he lived out here on an ice planet all by himself, he didn’t know about Crux and hybrids and breeding tubes and weird little zappy gadgets that drained your gametes with none of the fun of an actual orgasm.
I, for one, thought he was better off without that knowledge. Learning how to donate sperm without even getting to orgasm had not been the high point of my life.
“Sorry, I’m Wes.” I made an abortive motion with my hand, but independently of me, it decided it wasn’t going to poke out of the blanket. Sensible hand. “I’d shake hands, but it’s freezing out here.”
“I am Marex. How did you come to crash here?” he asked, motioning to the ship, which, fair enough.
I looked back at it, the ramp barely touching the ground and the whole ship tilted at an odd angle, leaning hard against one side of the cavern we were in. I couldn’t tell, in the low light, whether it was because the ground was uneven, or because the ship was damaged.
I glanced back at Marex, the alien I didn’t know, concern blooming in my mind. The prince had been a good man, and so was Jax, but quite a few Thorzi had worked for Crux without question, so that goodness wasn’t universal. This guy could be a friend of Crux, or something even worse.
Or he could just be a harmless hermit, living alone on a big ball of ice, interested in how a stranger had ended up in his territory.
How could I tell which he was?
“You, um, you know Crux?”
His lip curled in a sneer that he covered quickly, but that was enough for me.
“He kidnapped my people from Earth to use us in his, you know”—my cheeks flamed hot even in the freezing air—“breeding program. And Prince Kaelum and his men helped us escape, but Jax and I were the, um, the distraction. And we distracted them.”
“And Crux fired upon you, believing you to be escaping kidnap victims and his own prince? He let you crash here, and left you to die?” His shock and disgust read clearly, even through the foreign language and the interpreter implant.
“Um, yeah. That’s pretty much the size of it,” I agreed, shivering and pulling the blanket tight around me. His brows knit in something that looked like confusion, but I really didn’t want to stand around in the freezing atmosphere explaining things. “Look, not to be especially un-warriory, but could we go back into the ship? Jax got the life support working, so it’s not as freaking cold in there.”
His eyes went wide, and then his whole face filled with something I’d only seen from Jax and Kaelum before, among the Thorzi: sympathy. “Of course. Is that all you have to keep warm?” He reached into a pocket and pulled out what looked like a cell phone, breathing on the shiny side before another man who looked just like him appeared on the screen. He made that weird cat sound Jax made sometimes before the other guy could speak, and immediately started talking. “No, I do not have answers. But something strange is happening. Crux is kidnapping the aliens instead of taking them with permission, and”—he broke off and looked at me, concern creasing his brow. He looked so much more human than the Thorzi warriors I’d met that it was disconcerting. “I require someone to bring a portable heater, and food, and other supplies to care for a crash victim.”
“There are two of us,” I pointed out.
On the other end of the line, the alien snorted. “Yes, we know of the warrior. He is attempting to scavenge materials from sector eight.”
Scavenge? What the hell? Jax wasn’t really a scavenging kind of guy. And if they were aware of him, why hadn’t they just approached him? And they didn’t seem to be hermits at all—I could see people moving around behind the fellow on the screen of Marex’s phone. All that same shade of light blue as Marex, with silvery white hair. How many people lived on this icy hell-planet, and for goodness’ sake,why?
CHAPTER14
