“Just get moving, and clean up that mess,” the woman blurted, doing her best to hide her discomfort with his unexpected advance while acting in the most official way she knew how, which was to order him to do something. Something he very much wanted her to command of him.
“Right, the cleanup. But after? You and me, we could?—”
“Just go!”
Zepharos turned, his hand on Maria’s back subtly urging her to walk ahead of him, once again his body blocking her from view. “Okay, okay,” he called back over his shoulder. “But think about it. I’ll come find you later.”
They were outside before the woman could respond. He quickly changed course, veering into a dense crowd. They vanished among the revelers in an instant.
“This way. I don’t think she’ll come out to see if we’re cleaning up a spill that didn’t happen, but we don’t want to take any chances.”
Maria stuck close to him as he moved, weaving through the crowd like a fish swimming upstream.
“That was impressive.”
“What? You mean that little chat? Oh, that was nothing.”
“You managed to get us out of there without raising an alarm, and you did it all with some impressively creepy charm.”
“Creepy? Really?”
“That was the point, right?”
“I was going for overbearing. But that doesn’t matter. All that does is that we get clear of the city proper. I stashed some very basic supplies in the woods. But first we need to get to them.”
“We’re not taking a road?”
“Not for long,” he said, nodding and waving a faux-drunken greeting to some revelers as they walked. “First, we swap out our attire for something different, then we simply exit the city as though we are somewhat inebriated revelers out for a stroll. No one will give us a second glance. We should be in the woods and out of sight in no time.”
“And then?”
“And then we run.”
CHAPTER TWO
They ran hard, and they ran far. Zepharos would stop for water and basic food, but only for a moment before they would start up again. He was like a machine. An incredibly fit one at that. And he pushed the pace more than Maria had ever thought she could endure. Even her recent training in preparation for the alien games she’d been unwillingly thrust into hadn’t prepared her for this.
Everythinghurt, and it didn’t look like that was going to change anytime soon.
Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Oh, how the hell did I get into this mess?she quietly lamented.
The answer was obvious. Maria had gotten into it when she’d been abducted from Earth by a carnivorous alien race. Raxxians, they were called—towering, green-scaled brutes that had taken her, and not for anything so cliché as anal probes. They weren’t interested in experiments. No, the Raxxians had a different purpose for their collection practices.
Those they took were to be food.
It had shocked the hell out of Maria when the aliens in herholding compartment explained it all to her. That in itself was shocking, but it seemed the little translation rune tattooed behind her ear was made of some sort of living pigment. She didn’t really care what it was so long as it actually allowed her to communicate with the others.
She’d received the marking from a particularly large and gruff alien man named Heydar. He was a prisoner as well, but this skill made him of particular use to the Raxxians. So it was that he’d been aboard their ship far longer than any would have thought possible. He should have been eaten by now, but that wasn’t meant to be.
Neither was that the case for Maria, apparently. She’d only been aboard the ship a short while when it came under attack, breaking apart and plummeting into the atmosphere of the nearest planet. It was a failsafe and reclamation design the Raxxian transport had in place. Rather than lose the whole ship, it would separate into individual holding compartments, which would then be retrieved by the nearest Raxxian recovery team.
In this case, however, a planet pulled them in, and the survivors were scattered across a wide swath of the alien landscape, the auto-landing features saving many, but not all. Maria had been one of the fortunate ones. That is until she was discovered and captured by a different sort.
Slave traders.
She was tossed into a filthy and slow-moving transport where she spent weeks upon weeks wondering what might happen next. She wasn’t going to be food, so that was a win, but beyond that, anything could have happened. Anything, including another human being hauled aboard, though barely alive.
Maria had managed to convince their captors to give her some medical supplies, nearly losing her voice from thecontinued shouting. She had to wonder if they’d given them to her out of kindness or just to get the human woman to shut the hell up. She didn’t care either way. The other woman needed help, and that was all there was to it.
