Kate
Pious’s words slam into me like a freight train. I recoil, stumbling over my feet, and quickly shift my position so there are a few counters between us. My armguards are on, I need to remember that. How quickly can I raise my hand and zap him with something before he does it to me?
I force myself to stand as still as I can, even when my insides are screaming for me to run. Running isn’t going to end well for me right now. I don’t even see any other exits out of this room. There are just the sliding doors we walked through before, and Pious is looming over them like a guard dog ready to bite.
“So skittish,” he says with a faint trace of laughter in his tone. “You’re like one of those little scurrying rodents from Earth. What are those called? Mice?”
“Where is my sister?” I ask as steadily as my voice will allow.
“You may look for her, if you like,” he says with a smirk and a wave of his hand.
I stiffen at his offer. Is this some kind of a trick? Will I walk around these icebox things until he shoves me into an empty one? “What game are you playing?”
The steel expression on his faceplate turns down into a frown. “Are you refusing the opportunity of looking for your sister?” He takes a step forward, and even though there are three rows of freezer boxes separating us, I take a step back. He cocks his head and barks out a laugh. “Is all of your gender as weak and pathetic as you?”
The feminist in me sees red, and I want to shout about how strong and brave all women are, but I know he’s goading me, trying to make me break.
And the truth is, in this situation, I do feel weak. Iamfrightened. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be trapped here, frozen with a bunch of idiotic men extracting eggs from my lady parts. But none of that is as important as me finding Claire and making sureshedoesn’t feel like that.
None of these women should feel like that.
I reach up, leaning a hand on the icy edge of the freezer nearest me. Floating inside is a girl my age with ink-black hair and skin the color of caramel. “I’m not refusing.” I shift my hand slightly as I talk, trying to aim my fingers at him, but it’s hard to tell with my hand at waist height if I’ve targeted him correctly.
“Your weapons have been disabled.” His words seem to weigh like a threat. I’m not sure if he’s lying or not. If he is, I shoot and hope I can hit him, and on the good chance I miss, he’ll retaliate and I’m dead. If he isn’t lying, I shoot and nothing happens, he punishes me.
Either way, I end up no help to my sister or any of the other girls stuck here floating in frozen goo.
“Your words don’t mean much to me, Pious. Whether you’re lying to me or not, but it doesn’t matter because I wasn’t going to do anything to you,” I lie.
“Lies. And forgive me for admitting this again, but I do like how your skin turns pink when you’re flustered. I’m beginning to see the appeal.” He traces a finger over the counter in front of him. I’m not even sure he realizes he’s doing it, but it’s creepy as hell.
I don’t say anything back. I don’t even move. I can barely breathe.
“When Rune was general, do you know what his plans were?” He drifts closer, slowly easing his way past each frozen container.
“No, I don’t.” My voice is barely more than a whisper. I want to know Rune’s plans. I want to understand what he wanted to do, what he tried to do. Mostly, what I think I want is for Pious to come closer to me. If he’s talking about my blushes, maybe I can talk him into taking off his helmet.
Or maybe I could just try and see if my weapons work and hope I blow it clean off his face.
He’s two freezer lengths away now, and still closing in.
“We needed eggs to fertilize. We needed to create another generation, and another after that,” he says.
There’s only one freezer between us, now, and he stands on the other side of it from me. “He wanted to mate.” A growl chokes out of his throat in disgust. “With one of you parasites. Procreate the vulgar way your people did. Exchanging their fluids and bacteria and diseases.”
Okay, that rules out trying to get him to let me take off his faceplate or the hope of me ever feeling like I wanted to have sex again. “I’m not a parasite.”
“Yes, you are.”
I don’t want to play his head games anymore. “Which container is my sister in?”
“I’ll negotiate with you. You tell me where Rune is hiding and I’ll freeze you in the same preservation unit as your sister.”
“Never,” I growl.
He leans over the counter, menacingly. “You would forsake your life, and that of your sister, for him?”
That’s definitely not what I was going for. It’s not at all what I meant. I meant he would never get to freeze me.Never in a million years. And I’m seriously starting to think Claire isn’t even here. Wouldn’t showing me Claire, frozen in a box, be a better way of persuading me to do something?
