“Go, Kat!” she screamed, but by then she was hundreds of meters from the ship. “Tell them what you saw! Come—”
The ground that had been rushing beneath her as the creature dragged her disappeared suddenly, and only a void replaced it. Her attention snapped to where the ground had been, beneath her. She thought she saw falling rock at the edges of the blackness. The terror of falling gripped her, and she opened her mouth to scream as the sensation of a rapid fall shoved her stomach to her throat.
She twisted in the air. A whirl of images: the shuttle against the low-slung green sky, the hand of the creature, bare and wiry with strength, on her ankle. A thought about dying. A sense of calm.
Then everything went black.
CHAPTER2
A pale, blue light shimmered on a ceiling. Sonya blinked several times, her memory searching for an explanation. She thought of pools and gymnasiums, her astronaut training and the ocean, before the events preceding her blackout rose violently to the forefront of her mind.
Her heart clanged against her chest. She closed her eyes to buy herself some time to think.
Okay. She was alive, so that was one good thing. She scanned her body for pain and sensation: she didn’t feel injured. Also good. She was lying on a hard surface, and it was moist and warm. She heard water droplets, felt humidity, and sensed…
A presence.
She opened her eyes and turned her head, first in one direction, then the other, then back to the ceiling as she absorbed what she had seen.
They were all around her. Dozens of them. Humanoidaliens.Like the creature who had grabbed her ankle and dragged her along the planet surface at such a terrifying speed, their torsos were thick, their legs like tree trunks, and their bare arms bulged with muscle.
She took a single breath, contemplating her situation. They all seemed to be staring at her.
But trying to think her way out of the situation was taken off the table by her survival instinct, which made her act before the idea even occurred to her conscious mind. She had pushed herself up onto her hands and knees and started clambering backwards before she even realized she was doing it.
Many things were off. The information came to her in disjointed spurts: she felt cool, the air seemed breathable, the planet was nothing like the part she had seen, the light was strange, the aliens were still staring at her, all but inert, she had no shoes—
Within moments, though, her backwards scramble ended with a dull thud against something rock solid but fleshly soft against her back.
It was the creature. The animal that had caught her. The animal that had hunted her. She knew it before she even swiveled her head, but when she met its eyes, she knew for sure.
He was definitely humanoid. She hadn’t been wrong about that. Two legs, two arms, hands with five fingers, a muscular structure that was very, very similar to human males. She guessed he was more than seven feet tall. His skin was the main thing that was different about him. It seemed almost luminous, a blue-green hue that, painted on the walls of a room, would have been calming.
But painted over the bulky, well-shaped muscle of this mega-alien, it was not calming at all. Shoulder-length hair that at first glance appeared black, but shifted with a green luminescence in the light, framed a face with unsettling features.
Unsettling because they combined together to give him… it… an attractive appearance. His eyes were unmistakable: a dark, dark blue through which veins of shimmering green-blue sparkled with electric, shifting light. The light was the same color family of his luminescent skin, of the currents of greenish tint running through his hair, and of the aqua light shimmering on the ceiling.
She was mesmerized in spite of the fear gripping her. What biophysical process could make eyeslooklike that? And why was she so convinced this was the same beast who had grabbed her? She recognized him instantly, and her confidence in her memory was absolute.
It reached down and wrapped a large hand around her neck. It did so while staring into her eyes, holding her hostage with only its terrifying gaze, as it moved its hand in a languid, slow motion that she could easily have escaped.
She made no effort to do so, though. Even as she asked herself why not.
Only once its fingers closed slowly around her throat did she act on her fear: her hands flew to its wrists and she dug her fingers into its skin as she flailed and twisted. But as she had realized on the gangplank, the creature’s strength was so much greater than hers; all her energy and chaotic motion did nothing to it. It didn’t even shift its weight to compensate for her own wild momentum.
After fighting futilely for a few minutes, she relented, still trying to pry its hands from her neck. It had closed its fingers tightly, but not enough to impede her breathing, and since she certainly wasn’t choking, she stopped fighting so furiously. She was doing more damage to herself than the creature was.
When it didn’t respond, she glanced down and gasped. Her body wasn’t covered byanything. Her eyes darted from side to side. She saw the exo-suit. lying a few feet away from her. Next to it was a pile of clothes. Her jumpsuit. Underwear. She lowered her eyes to her own body to confirm what she knew had to be true.
She was naked. Stark naked.
Reflex kicked in and she squeezed her legs together to protect her modesty from the faces in the crowd. After doing it, she nearly laughed. It was preposterous, worrying about shame and embarrassment in front of an alien species.
But the instinct remained with her all the same. She wasn’t much of an exhibitionist with humans, and being naked had practical pitfalls as well.
She let her arms fall from the creature’s wrists and hugged them close to her chest.
“Calm yourself.”
