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The second I wake up, I know I’m caught.
My suit is gone. Instead, I am dressed in what I can best describe as a kind of tunic slip dress. Something that feels like it was made very quickly to cover me when I was stripped. I bet they took that suit off me as soon as they could. It’s what I would do if I was trying to capture me.
I’m in a small room with nothing besides a bed, though there are marks on the floor that suggest the space was furnished recently. It looks like things were taken out. Maybe to stop an occupant from getting herself into trouble. I get out of bed and go and try the door. It’s locked, but it was worth having a look at. This doesn’t feel like a prison. This feels like the worst room in a very fancy house, which means I can probably escape it given enough time.
First, I get my bearings by going to look out the window. Even this is a potential escape portal, come to think of it. For the moment, I just look at the city outside. Like a lot of primitive cities, it is constructed from stone. I don’t think this place was poured and cast the way a lot of old human cities used to be made, though. I think it was carved deep into the earth, like a massive open-air burrow, or a mine, I suppose. A river flows into it from one side, in a cascade that should be flooding the city completely, and yet doesn’t because it all goes pouring into a series of rivers that wind their way down to a very big sort of plug hole in the center that has to be a health and safety issue in the most serious of ways.
The lake at the bottom of the city seems organic, however. There is a very impossibly, incredibly large skeletal ribcage quite visible from my vantage point. It belongs to a creature that must have been the size of… it’s almost impossible to even fathom the size. Probably the size of a whole city block or more.
Above us, there are huge cliffs. I can see saurians taking off from them, and windows and doors and whatnot, so I guess they live up there, miles above the lowest point of the city. There are impressive places all over the settled universe, but I’ve never been in one like this, where high technology and ancient relics stand side by side. Everything here is wild, as well as being deeply developed. I can’t wait to get out of the room I’m being held in and explore it.
No sooner do I have that thought than the door opens behind me and Thorn appears. He has changed clothing and is wearing black scaled leggings and boots with a matching vest. There’s something fancy about it, though I don’t know that it is formal attire. If I had to describe it, I’d call it ass-kicking clothing. I can guess whose ass he intends to kick.
“Come with me,” he says, crooking a finger at me in that authoritarian, I-intend-to-be-obeyed way that he has.
I indulge him, mostly because it gets me out of the room and gives me a chance to see some of the house outside it. My first impression is that it is fancy and large. Everything here seems large to me. Everything was made for massive saurians to lumber about in. But even with that scale difference taken into account, this place seems huge.
We don’t walk far. We only go to the very next room in a hall full of rooms. Nothing here is overstated or ornate, but there’s a quality to the materials and the craftsmanship used to form them into a house shape that tells me this is an expensive sort of place.
In the very next room, there is a table and two chairs. On the table is my suit, and next to my suit is every single bit of the contents of it, all laid out in neat rows.
“You are charged with thirty-two counts of property destruction, two counts of theft, and one of illegal importation of a destructive species,” Thorn says to me. The formality of him reading my charges is somewhat offset by the fact he also decides to pick me up under the arms to sit me on the chair he clearly intends to interrogate me in.
“What are these?” He points to the contents of my suit. “I want a full description of each and every one of them.”
Answering his question would not be difficult. I know each of those things. This is like seeing all my old friends displayed before me. I miss them with a nearly physical ache.
I sit back in the chair, lounging in the seat. It’s all too big for me, but I pride myself on being able to make myself comfortable anywhere.
He’s waiting for me to answer, his eyes focused intensely on me under his brows. He fits this room, in stature and in style.
“I couldn’t tell you. I mean. I could. But won’t. Should, maybe? But shorn’t.”
“I can make you tell me, Suli. Or I can get my team to look into these things and discover what they’re about for myself.”
“I really, deeply, do not recommend that. What you’ve got there is enough to obliterate this entire city if you handle it wrong. Hell, I’m surprised you’re alive as it is. The suit doesn’t like being messed with. It’s not made to be handled by anyone beside its owner.”
“Similar to you, I imagine.”
He’s insinuating that I’m owned now. By him, presumably. I should correct him on that misapprehension before someone really gets hurt.
“I’m not one to be owned, my guy.”
He stare at me, deadpan. Waiting for me to be intimidated. If only such a thing were possible. He thinks he has all my tricks laid out in front of me but the greatest trick of all? That lies deep inside me, in a place he’ll never reach.
“Anyway, regardless, I’ve seen what happens to things you own. I have a tendency to break them.”
Thorn
She’s talking too much. I’d say she’s nervous, but it’s obvious she doesn’t get nervous. There’s something about her that suggests she’s almost incapable of those emotions, which is strange, because humans are traditionally universally regarded as being intensely neurotic and terrified, as any natural prey species should be.
“What’s wrong with you?”
She smiles broadly. “What isn’t wrong with me?”
She’s not going to tell me anything. She’s not going to cooperate in any way. Not unless I make her sore. I’m going to give her one last chance. Point out the position she is in. Hope she has some sense, though there is no evidence of that so far.
“You don’t have the suit for protection anymore. You don’t have anything left. You are my captive. You are my owned possession. You have no rights. You have no chance or hope of escape. And you are very close to screaming and crying for mercy you will not receive if you do not start talking to me.”
