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At the mere mention of Papa’s name, I let out a low snarl, even as my heart clenched in my chest. It hurt to know that he was dead, but I also was not surprised. Papa was an evil human.
“I’ll be back before you know it,” Axel promised. “Be good, Ghost. And you two…” He made a strange gesture, pointing at his eyes with two fingers and then at them.
And then my mate was gone, out the door.
I went to the window, watching his truck pull away as I’d done hundreds of times before. Unease settled in my belly. Or maybe that was just hunger.
Once the truck was out of sight, I padded away from the window and went to the cooling unit where Axel kept the pizza rolls, ripping open the bag with my teeth and dumping the whole thing in my mouth. Pizza rolls were sweeter than fish, less meaty, but still very good. Plus, they were provided by my mate, which made them taste even better. I grabbed a second bag and prowled over to plop down in front of the television. It was much smaller than the one in Papa’s lab, but it appeared to operate in the same way. Axel had piled tapes next to it that he thought I should watch, and I glanced through them. While I couldn’t read the text printed on them in the human language, I tried to judge their content by the images, none of which interested me.
Mate won’t mind if we watch something else, I thought.
The t’chl appeared in our peripheral vision and I turned to growl at him.
Ziggy raised his hands. “Easy. I just thought I’d offer some assistance.”
“Just pick something and put it in.” Honor sank into Axel’s cushy bean chair. “Not like it matters.”
I growled at him, too. Not that it made much of a difference. No matter how much I growled at them, they weren’t leaving. They seemed content to live in Axel’s house, taking up space, even when my mate clearly didn’t want them there.
“It matters to him,” Ziggy protested and went digging through another pile of…
Axel had called themvideo tapes. They were odd little boxes that went into another box that connected to the television. Somehow, the video tapes contained magic that made pictures appear on the television.
I picked one up that looked interesting. It had a pretty lady on the cover with two men. I held it up to Ziggy with a grunt.
His eyes flared wide and his ears flicked. “Um.”
“No porn,” Honor said firmly.
I clutched the video tape and hissed at him.
His answer was a stubborn grunt as he went fishing around in the basket next to Axel’s squishy chair. He drew out a plastic container full of dried green grass and started packing pinches of it into a paper. “Just put on a cartoon or something, Ziggy.”
“How about this one?” Ziggy held up another video tape with some robots on it.
That one didn’t look too boring. There were lots of bright colors in the background, and a truck like Axel’s. “Yes,” I said and curled up on the couch, drawing my knees to my chest so I didn’t take up too much room.
The tape started with a bunch of small movies that seemed to be designed to get people to purchase items.
“Pizza?” I grabbed a handful of the cold pizza rolls, offering them to Ziggy, who’d sat down on the floor.
He looked at them like he didn’t want them, but accepted them anyway. “Thanks.”
The cartoon, as Honor had called it, was confusing. There were trucks in it, but they were also robots from the stars who helped humans. I liked them at first, but then it became clear they were fighting with other robots from the stars and I started to think about the day the base fell into chaos and the violence that followed.
The tank was cold and encased in iron bars, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t even mind that it was too small for me as long as they didn’t turn on the electricity. Even the darkness wasn’t so bad once I got used to it. It was the isolation that made the tank so intolerable. Day in and day out, I floated in my tank, waiting for the time when Papa would come for me. But he never came.Just the strange men in masks with their shots that made me hurt and feel angrier. The shots made my genitals swell and the need to mate strong. Sometimes, in my frustration, I lashed out, clawing at the tank. One day, I was so angry I shattered it, even though that was supposed to be impossible.
More workers came in to replace it and I attacked them. I didn’t mean to, didn’t want to, but the anger inside me was too much, a beast taking control of me. There was blood and screaming everywhere.
Then Papa came back with someone new. Someone I had never met before and instantly disliked. I swam to the edge of my new tank and looked up at him angrily through the bars, waiting for them to unlock. Except they never did.
Instead, Papa removed his glasses and pinched his face with a finger and thumb, rubbing his eyes as if he hadn’t slept for some time.
“You know what you have to do, Parker,” said the other man.
“Yes, I know, Colonel.”
I cocked my head to the side. What were they talking about?
