Had she been taken to the steel city?
"Anna, drink." The Orki pressed the end of the hose to her lips. Closer to her, she couldn't take her eyes off his. Emotion swirled in the depths of white, tiny dots of color rising to the surface and then slipping away. His brows were heavy, mobile, and expressive. They told her more than the lips between double white tusks. His brows lifted and lowered with his emotion. He was hairless, but it suited his beautiful color.
She gave him a weak smile.
He answered with a rolling purr that went into her head, fizzing through her body, a pervasive soothing warmth. She knew that sound. It spread a lovely intoxicating lassitude through her. She could just curl up into his chest and never leave. Tapping the hose against her lips, she opened her mouth, the first drops of water spelling cold and clean onto her lips. She drank that down; the Orki watching her mouth, his eyes growing heated.
A curious sensation answered the suggestive ideas in the Orki's expression, inspiring an answering warmth in her middle. She knew him. She knew this male on an intimate level. The knowledge of it hovered on her periphery, just out of reach.
"Now that you have had something to drink, I wonder if you would be able to answer a few questions? And I will be able to answer any of your questions."
Annabelle tried an experimental word to see if she could speak. "Yes."
"It is especially important that I ask these questions now, before the memories fade. Please say the first thing that comes into your mind. Do not search for an answer. I would like to know if you remember why you would not open your mouth."
"I didn't want the hive to get inside of me. They were trying to get inside." Saying it made her remember it, the pressure of wet cold all around her, the sense of things pushing in and trying to climb inside her mind and body.
As fear built into a hard ball, a choking threat, the Orki cupped one side of her face and leaned over her, the reassuring rumble increasing. His touch connected her to him, spreading sounds of comfort, chasing away the chilly slime-coated darkness that wanted to drown her.
The female voice said, "Very good. Now, if you don't mind, I would like to ask you what was trying to get inside and what they planned to do when they got there."
Annabelle opened her mouth to answer, then closed it. She didn't know. They were someone vast and big and insect-like. A hive of black beetles. A swarm of springtime hoppers. Insects with hands and pig noses.
"Pig. Mama pig!" A fresh memory bloomed red behind her eyes, crowding in and taking over.
"Could you repeat that, please? My system did not understand." Eid said tonelessly.
"Benjere was teasing Mama pig. He threw rocks at her. He made a mess of the vegetable garden and was trying to cover it up. He broke the fence. He was there, around the corner of the barn, watching. He was still there. He saw me find Papa. He knew what happened and never said anything. He let me be cursed, but he was the curse-I could hear his heart, his thoughts, because after he was buried the hive pupae ate his remains. They are everywhere. Everywhere. Dorsus is infested with them."
The memory was so real in her head. Just there, superimposed over her past and too huge to take in.
Not grasping the emotion, Eid ignored it. Instead, the disembodied voice explained, "The adults are called hungries. The Orki term is—" Eid made a noise that sounded like a low baritone sound of disgust. A human man might be able to imitate it, but Annabell didn't have a chance. "The pupa stage is relatively harmless. They are small, with their spiked snout-shaped noses, and six appendages for digging. They cannot mate, only eat and take nourishment back to larvae and soldiers. They require a queen to mature."
"I don't understand. I don't understand. Is that memory real? How can that be real? Where did that come from?"
"I do believe the memory is real. The hungries’ have developed unusual abilities. As the Orki have done, they have adapted to the planet. I have tried for many years to eliminate them, but they are tenacious creatures. Every attempt has failed. This is not a surprise. The Creator aliens did not intend for them to replicate. They dumped the clean-up crews here expecting them to die. Unfortunately, they did not. They are not the only created creature on this planet. Dorsus has some unique properties, indeed."
The Eid woman spoke in clear, concise common words that Annabelle understood. Each word had its own definition. When Eid put them together in such strange ways for an explanation of baffling events, they made no sense at all. She stopped hearing anything after Eid said the memory was real.
"I am not the Woman of Woe, my brother was. He was jealous, petty, and stupid. He's dead. His family is dead. Very bad men came from the steel cities and killed them. Mark is dead. Mama is dead, and Papa died first trying to protect Benjere from the sow he teased, so she would cover up his careless actions," Annabelle said out loud.
She waited for a voice, an inner negativity, to answer her and deny it. All she heard was the loud purr of the white-eyed Orki standing next to her.
Chapter 16
I Can See You Clearly Now
They kept her in the blue room for days. An armband wrapped her left elbow, another band wrapped her ankle, where she received the scratch from the hungries consort. Tubes led into and out of the snug black bands, and there was another,for comfort, between her legs. Annabelle didn't understand any of it or how it worked. The bed itself changed shape and grew arms on command. A monstrous thing, with spider-like interchangeable rods and odd joints acting on Eid's command.
Eid and Doku-ni helped her piece together missing days and hours. As they recounted difficult-to-believe events, the conversations prompted feelings and memories. The Orki was her mate, her One, and she was in Homeland.
Frustrating holes in time existed, however, including some of her time with Doku-ni. Their mating night, as he called it, the night of their bonding when he bit her, had faded to a filmy shadow, one of the first memories to be eaten by the hive.
He recounted it to her, speaking in a mix of Orkish and common. Annabell squirmed with discomfort while listening, her face heating with embarrassed fascination. She couldn't believe she had done half of what he said. Doku-ni told the tale with relish, and she hid behind her hands giggling and whimpering with every word. It was too intimate an event to be spoken out loud.
Climbing into the bed with her, he held her from behind and curled around her body. Voice low and growly, he whispered their story in her ear, his arms crossed over her naked front, his hand lightly clasping her throat in a sensual embrace. She wanted to hear every detail, but the more she heard, the more uncomfortable she became.
Doku-ni rubbed his tusk up the line of her neck. Echoes of emotion and pleasure tickled at her nerve endings as he teased, his voice between a growl and a purr. "Soon, redress. Soon Doku-ni will fill Anna. Take Anna.
