He looked down at her, towering and deadly. Only the heat coming off his body touched her now, an invisible force-field to the elements.
“Evil people may be paired together?” Kat kept her eyes on Dommik’s dark ones. Her nipples pebbled against her shirt, she sucked in her stomach and lifted her chin. Caws and high-pitched cries rose from the Molucs, their excitement at being home was evident in their raucous frenzy. “Maybe we shouldn’t paint everyone as black and white. Some people lose their way and that one person was meant to bring them back.”
A twitch of a smile hit the Cyborg’s lips. Kat leaned into him, intrigued by the show of emotion. She knew better, she didn’t even know the man, but she couldn’t deny her attraction to him.
He lifted his hands and tugged the lapels of her jacket. Startled, she watched as he zipped it up to her neck only to tug the hood over her head. Long, white fingers, painted metal in their strangeness, tied the hood at her nape.
The Cyborg leaned forward until their faces were an inch apart. Kat thought he might kiss her and the need to stay and feel his mouth was almost as strong as her need to run and find a weapon.
“Good thing there’s no such thing as fated mates,” he whispered, his breath hit her lips. Kat shuffled as the ache built at her core. An ache that badly needed to be soothed.
His nostrils flared and his face darkened. Dommik jerked back with disgust on his face. He turned from her and strode toward the exit.
What did I do? Do I smell bad?She looked down at herself dwarfed by a jacket that reached her knees. Kat glanced up just as he walked out into the wind and swirling snow.
Kat called after him, “You can’t go out there in just a skin-suit! You’ll freeze.”
“Make sure you get all of this in your report,” he grated back at her as the hatch closed behind him. The Cyborg vanished in the white.
She looked around as the wind was cut off and everything went quiet. Two androids were inside the glass cage and cleaning it. She wrapped her arms around herself feeling her skin prickle from the heat and the cold and the betrayal of her body tingling with desire.
Eventually, the heat left her and she was just a shivering stick.
The androids finished up what they were doing. The Moluc’s habitat closed up with all traces of the furry creatures gone. Kat felt alone. She didn’t know why she stood there and waited until it occurred to her she was waiting for Dommik’s safe return.
Bastard.It wasn’t her job to wait on him or for him even if her life directly depended on his.
“It might come for you too, Kat, you’ll have to be strong now waiting for it and even stronger if it comes for you.”
She was always waiting and had been ever since her birth.
Her parents had been doctors and like all doctors had followed the Hippocratic Oath.‘I will do no harm...I will prevent disease whenever I can but I will always look for a path to a cure for all diseases...’
They had met in the civilian medbase outside Gliese while the settlement of the off world colony went underway. It was once a military base during the great war against the Trentians but now it was a growing homeworld for half-breeds. Earthian and Trentian couples; ruled by both species and the appointed representatives that lived planetside.
Kat sighed and walked back toward the console room. The drag of the jacket flapped against the back of her knees.
Her parents had contracted a parasite from a local food source on the planet. It stayed dormant in their bodies, living and growing in their guts, invisible and alien. When her ma got pregnant with her, her parents made their way back to Earth.
Kat was going to be an Earth-born human. They wanted unrestricted access for her to go to the best universities, the best hospitals, the best ‘Earthian’everything. It wasn’t until her mother was in her third-trimester that something went wrong. She started to form blisters all over her hands and feet.
When she was delivered, her mother never recovered, she only grew worse. First, it was the blisters, then nausea, body aches, and insomnia. Her father started to show symptoms too and it was then that a group of officials seized her parents and herself and placed them into quarantine.
Kat was too young to remember much, she only had vague memories of doctors with white masks on and her grandmother’s musings. Sterile rooms and small spaces.
The parasitic outbreak was streaming on every channel back then and doctors from all over the universe, Trentians and Earthians alike came together to save their sick people. They eradicated the species that carried the parasite, ensuring no new people would unknowingly get infected.
Many people died because there was no way to cure it once the symptoms began to show and everyone else was forced to take a vaccine.
She had watched her parents bloat and boil until they eventually popped like the blisters that started on their feet. Her child-like eyes shielded from them only by a glass barrier. Her father had curled his body around her mother’s corpse as black mucus dripped from his nose.
The doctors took her away from that world and kept her in quarantine for years. But she exhibited no signs of the dormant, microscopic parasite.
Kat had learned a lot back then, she learned how to take her own blood, run the medbay machines, test her own urine. By the age of seven, she could change her feeding tubes and run the physical exertion tests, her toys were replaced with medical equipment.
When she turned ten, her grandmother won the case for her guardianship, but there still wasn’t a cure for the Gliese parasite. Only a preventative treatment, a shot filled with nanoparticles that cleaned out the system, it worked for all illnesses but it was only temporary. So, Kat was released from her white prison and from the impersonal doctors, her medical toys and into a world filled with metal and green, blue-grey skies, and water that fell from above. A world where the temperature couldn’t be regulated and where food wasn’t served in packets.
Kat took the preventative shot right after her grandmother died. Her fingers came up to rub the spot on her arm.
