Her blood was slowing, her heart was giving up. She could feel almost nothing, except a desire to sleep.
Almost as though she were dreaming, she put her hand out to the alien’s arm, and the muscle moved beneath his flesh. He was so hot he almost felt scorching. She looked at him, and he looked back very seriously at her, saying something quietly.
“I’m cold,” she creaked. But the words caught in the sticky iciness of her throat, and it sounded like the croak of a frog.How funny, she thought.
She leaned into him, and he pulled her close to his body, and then she was being lifted up, warmth enveloping her, creeping into her body and sinking down to her bones. She began to shiver again, but she felt like she was being pulled from a dark hole.
Her eyelids went heavy again.
And then everything, for the second time, went black.
Chapter Nine
She woke up withoutopening her eyes. It was a trick of survival that she had somehow honed; think first, breathe slowly, listen, and only when you know what you’re walking into, open your eyes.
First, she was warm. Perhaps even uncomfortably so. Something was draped over her, perhaps something heavy, and her skin was in contact with something hard and cooler than whatever covered her.
She was not in pain.
She stirred ever so slightly, as she might have done reacting to a dream, and felt something heavy on her ankles and wrists.
She allowed herself a glimpse through her eyelashes.
It was dimly lit, the predominant color coming to her a dark brown.
She closed her eyes again. There was an odd scent in the air, like back home when lightning storms streaked across the sky.
She waited for sound, but nothing reached her except for the low, constant drone she recognized as the workings of a ship.
She opened her eyes.
Brown came from whatever was draped over her, which she shifted as little as possible in order to move it away from her face. Dark walls, striped in some way, came into focus.
She sat up. Or tried to. Her wrists were caught midway in the action, and her ankles were the same; something tugged at them and she had to twist awkwardly to position herself on her hip, her hands on the floor, and her body twisted to allow her to look up and around.
A cell. An actual cell, not like the one she had been confined to by her previous captors, but rather, a dank cell for prisoners. No windows, barely any light. She could make out other cells around her, but the light was dim and she couldn’t see if any were occupied. She looked up and around, finding nothing but the darkness of the walls and the confines of her low-ceilinged cage.
