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A short, hysterical laugh bubbled up from a woman in a bright red dress. It grew, until it was the only sound in the room. Until her companions laughed nervously alongside her.
“Safe? How the fuck are wesafe?”
There was a man by her side, slight and blond—the only one still wearing transportation garb. He swallowed hard, shrinking under the attention even as his arm wound around hers. A bruise blossomed on his temple.
“You keep your life if you come with me now. If you stay here, you will die.” I scowled as the woman’s laugh bubbled up again, her eyes welling with shining tears. “I offer you safety.”
But none of the humans moved. The ship creaked. I felt the rumble through the floor under my feet and feared it would crack before we had the chance to escape.
We could grab them, take them, but not all together if they fought us, with only Jax and Lethen and Vorian at my side. We might only save half.
But then, one stood.
He was not especially tall. He did not have muscles like a Thorzi, and his eyes were a shade of gray that looked like stone, not water and starlight.
There was hair on his chin, but sparsely, in a soft golden shade that was only a little darker than his skin.
He took the hand of another woman with pink, swollen eyes and a round face, and he stepped toward me.
“We don’t want to die,” he said. His voice barely cracked.
I reached out to him, my hand falling on his warm, round shoulder. “I give you my oath that I will not let that happen.”
CHAPTER5
LUCAS
Apparently, it was against the law for giant muscular alien guys to wear shirts. They all wandered around in leather pants and heavy boots that clanged with a metallic noise against the floor as they walked, looking like rock gods in blue body paint.
Well, except these new guys. Oh don’t get me wrong, they still didn’t wear shirts and looked like they belonged on magazine covers, but the four that had come to the door after gravity reasserted itself were... oddly human looking. Their skin was sun-bronzed instead of blue. They had the same muscles-on-muscles-on-muscles of the blue guys, but they were very human in coloring.
Well, kinda.
There was a bluish tinge to their skin around the joints, like maybe they’d once been painted blue and failed to wash it all off in the hard-to-reach spots. And when I looked at one of them, he met my eye with the same terrifying all iris-and-pupil eyes of the aliens. I’d had to swallow down a frisson of terror and remind myself that alien didn’t mean bad. That was just my lizard hindbrain at work, trying to keep me from being eaten.
And frankly, if these guys wanted to eat us, we were pretty screwed.
When the one who called himself Kaelum looked me in the eye and promised our safety, god help me, I believed him. Maybe his idea of safety and mine were entirely different, but I, for one, didn’t want to die in this hell.
I held Genevieve close to my side as she cringed away from them, and nodded to Kaelum. “Where do we go?”
He didn’t turn and lead the way, but motioned to two of his men, saying something fast in an unfamiliar language, waving toward us. They both nodded and stepped back against two walls.
Kaelum turned back to me. “Eighteen?” When I nodded, he turned and said one word to one of the men, who inclined his head sharply. Then he held his hand out toward the door. “Come with me.”
And he walked beside me down one plain metal hall, then another.
The temperature of the ship was dropping fast, and I shivered, Genevieve shaking against me and huddling for warmth.
Kaelum gave us another sharp look. “Will you survive?”
“We’ll be okay. But it’s really cold.”
He nodded, and picked up the pace. “Life support systems are broken. But we will reach my ship soon.”
Sure enough, he led me around the next turn, and there in the wall was a door that looked like it belonged on a boat, with sort of rounded edges and a wide rim, split down the middle like it was actually two doors pressed together tightly. He motioned us through, and when I stepped over the threshold, past a blast of pressurized air, the temperature increased at least twenty degrees.
I almost collapsed in relief. The other ship had only been getting cold for a few minutes, but it had been so fast...
