Page 43 of Meat

Ravnar was marking her. Claiming ownership. Not just for himself, but for the whole pack.

She belonged to them now.

She belonged to the ukkur.

CHAPTER 16

The day was bright and clear. A fresh, cooling wind washed over the rocky mountainside, bringing with it the sweet scent of the strange alien wildflowers that grew in patches here and there among the stones.

After several days of traveling, they had come into the mountains where the going was slower. They had stopped at midday on a little shelf-like area to spell the skriks, which were tired from the long upward climb. Ravnar had gone off to scout the area and search for food while Krogg set up his equipment for a bit of cooking—Alyx was constantly hungry now with her new condition.

Meanwhile, Alyx and Jale sat and talked, having one of their impromptu language lessons.

They were sitting together near where the skriks were tethered and feeding. Alyx reached over and plucked one of the wildflower blossoms from a tuft sprouting from between the rocks. She and held it up for Jale.

“What call?” Alyx asked the question in the nith language, as best as she could anyway, and Jale answered in the same.

“Red.”

As he spoke the answer, Jale quirked a quizzical eyebrow at her, as if to say, “you already know this word, little one.”

Alyx shook her head, swinging her long hair. Jale misunderstood. She plucked another flower, then a third, until she had three blossoms of three different colors. She repeated her question in her own broken version of the alien tongue.

“What this?”

Jale’s face brightened with understanding of what she was asking now.

“Mkkz’ki“ he said, telling her the nith word for flower.

Alyx struggled to repeat the word back to him. It felt awkward and unwieldy in her mouth. Too many consonants all jumbled together. It took her a few tries to get it right, but when she did, Jale grinned at her encouragingly.

Over the past five days, Alyx had managed to pick up some of the language under Jale’s patient tutelage. Her pronunciation was terrible, of course, and her understanding of the grammar was rudimentary at best, but already she knew enough to communicate a little bit. She had learned numbers through one hundred, basic colors, the names of some simple objects like stone and tree.

And now flower.

In the night, Jale had taken it upon himself to teach her the words for some body parts as well, naming each one before he kissed or touched her there. Alyx always had trouble concentrating during these night lessons. Her other ukkur mates distracted her with their mouths, with their fingers…

Still, for only five days of study, Alyx had learned a great deal.

However, the changes in Alyx’s mind over that short time where nothing compared to the changes that had taken place in her body.

She was pregnant.

It wasn’t that she had missed a period, or even that she had developed morning sickness already. Even that would have been bizarre after such a short time. But what had actually happened was even weirder.

Alyx was pregnant-pregnant.

As in, she looked like she could pop at any given moment.

After only five days, her belly was already round and swollen as a ripe melon, her skin tight as a drum around her distended womb. She had a dark pregnancy line down the middle and everything. Her typically innie belly-button had even popped into an outie.

As an OB, Alyx had worked with hundreds of pregnant women back on Earth, but being on the other side of it was a totally different experience.

It was incredible.

It probably should have freaked Alyx out, the fact that she had gotten so pregnant so rapidly. It went against everything she had studied. It clearly wasn’t normal human physiology at play here. She should be in a constant state of panic due to that incredibly rapid growth.

But so far she had kept her cool.