Page 24 of The Naga Warlord’s Virgin Mate

“I am not even sure why I brought you here… It was just boyhood fantasies, I don’t see any of the pictures on the boxes that I remembered. I’m sorry Nomy. I should have taken you somewhere safer.” He sounded so dejected that I felt sorry for him. He’d pinned his hopes on a faint memory from when he was little it seemed. At least I was pretty sure he wasn’t wrong, but the screens on the boxes had turned off since then. I didn’t know if I could fix that, but it gave me an idea.

For that, I needed Krashe to help me get to those cases so I could open them up and have a look. “You took a chance,” I said, and tugged on his arm until he moved to curl it around my shoulders. A hug seemed to be just what he needed, as soon as he was engaged in touching me, he went all in. Pulling me into his lap, his tail flicked up to curl around my waist while his arms held me by the shoulders. I was instantly much warmer and extremely grateful for that, I hoped that wherever we ended up settling wasn’t going to be this damn cold.

“Look, a week ago you didn’t even know I existed and all you could think about was starting a war so you could feed your Clan. A week ago, you thought all technology was evil. You went through a lot of changes. It’s okay to feel a little lost right now.” He curled his lips into a snarl that bared his sharp fangs, putting them right in my face even though he didn’t make a noise. I bared my teeth right back at him, snapping them together.

That pulled forth a grin that turned into a low, husky laugh and a head shake. “I am not feeling lost!” he said. Then he lifted his chin to look at the cabinets again and admitted more quietly, “Maybe just a bit conflicted. My mother, she studied all these places, and all this technology. When she was lorekeeper, she would preach to the Clan about the dangers and tell the stories of the warmachines. When she passed, the Queen took over, and her stories are much more threatening, all technology is bad, not just the machines that walk. We can never know which relic is a disguised weapon that can bring about another calamity.”

He paused to lift a hand and gesture at the room, “My mother would say that this place is not harmful, that we must study it to learn from the past. The Queen would say we needed to raze this place to the ground, any piece of technology could be what kills us.” His eyes narrowed on the shelves across from us where Kiwi was somehow clinging with his paws to the glass doors while he peered inside, wings slowly fluttering like a butterfly.

I grinned at the antics of the little creature. “Look, Kiwi’s not concerned about what’s on those shelves. I think your mom was right, you know? Ignorance breeds fear, and fear breeds hate. That’s not healthy, there’s a middle ground here that should work for us.” I knew only too well how ignorance made people say hateful things. When I’d first ventured outside in my wheelchair, it had really gotten me down when people stared or asked rude questions. It was the kids that made me feel better, just casually wondering what had happened to me.

“Hmm,” Krashe said, “Middle ground. Like this agriculture you spoke off, instead of war?” he grinned to show he was finding humor in it. But I knew he genuinely cared about the fate of his Clan. He didn’t feel like he’d left them, even though his Clan considered him a traitor. I had to help him find peace with that because I was really certain there was no way for us to go back to them.

I patted his chest, smiling back while hiding my own churning mind as I rapidly thought of options. “Agriculture, I once read that the Aztecs and Incas were very successful at growing things at high altitudes, maybe some of their techniques could work for your people.”

I had read books about them back on Earth, mostly because I found it really fascinating how they had built things that still stood strong and tall after all these years. If I dug really hard, I might remember some of the things they did, and I was sure that Krashe could help me figure out the rest. The question was, would his Clan even be willing to try these things?

Joxra and those warriors had let us go, but I was sure that another encounter would just result in battle again. That fat, selfish Queen probably had standing orders to kill us on sight. I didn’t really fancy running into more of them, but I did really want to find the other humans like Vera that had crash-landed with me. They were with the blue Naga and I knew enough by now to know that those were from Thunder Rock, the exact place Krashe had intended to steal their freaking land from. Not great at all.

“Come on, carry me over to the shelves and I’ll see if I can pull up those pictures again.” At least that was in my power to do. I didn’t have high hopes that we could get them to work, but maybe they were simply touch-activated. I was no medical expert either, but if Krashe had seen an image that had made him think ‘fix spine’ as a kid, that part should hopefully be easy.

Another thought came to mind, this was a hospital. Hospitals on Earth had wheelchairs and hoverchairs. What if this one had, too? We needed to look for them, what if one of those still worked somehow? If we couldn’t find the thing, a chip or medication that would help restore my spinal cord, a wheelchair might ease the sting. I felt a thrum of excitement just thinking about it, being mobile on my own would give me so much more freedom!

Not that I minded being carried around by Krashe but when he was fighting… Or just when I wanted to go to the freaking bathroom, or explore this room on my own. Yeah, a wheelchair of some kind seemed far more plausible to find around here. If those datapads Krashe had still worked, a chair might still have a charge too.

When Krashe brought me to the nearest cabinet, I opened the door carefully and reached out even more carefully for the nearest box with a small screen. All that caution was thrown out the window when Kiwi screeched and leaped inside, pouncing on the box on the front row as though it was prey. “Chirp kee kee!” he yelped and shot back into the air with frantic flapping of his wings when the small screen lit up beneath his small paws.

On his wild exit from the cabinet, I got a face full of leathery wing and lashing tail but I didn’t even care. The small screen had lit up and on it was a small schematic of a Naga body, displaying the bones and indicating a small spot along the tail vertebrae that blinked with a blue dot. Krashe was right! These were some kind of chips for the spine.

“Damn Sleara, careful with our female now!” Krashe rumbled at the small creature, his tail coming around to block the final wing strike in a lightning-fast move. He was still rumbling at Kiwi when I squealed, unable to hold back the first true excitement that this might actually work. If there really was a capable surgeon left to insert one of these…

I reached up and curled my fingers around the horn on Krashe’s chin, tugging at his face in the right direction. “Don’t get mad, look Kiwi got the pictures to work. You were right! Krashe, this might actually work.” If this technology was compatible with my human body. Then it could work, because Krashe’s spinal cord was unlikely to be very different from mine, wasn’t it? A dog or pig wasn’t even all that different from a human in that department. A girl could hope.

“This one isn’t for the right spot though, let’s keep looking.” Krashe held me up to as many of the boxes as I wanted, not every screen wanted to light up when I touched it but those that did all showed me an image that seemed to indicate a spot along the spine of a Naga. They were ranked from tip to neck and shelved accordingly—if I read the schematics right—so all I had to do was find the right shelf that approximated the same vertebrae on my spine.

When we did find it, I wasn’t sure which one would be the right one. “Look, I have an incomplete break on my L2, it’s low on my back.” I touched the spot for Krashe so he knew what I was looking for. “I can’t tell if that spot corresponds with L2 or L3 on you guys. You have so many more vertebrae…”

Krashe solved my conundrum in one fell swoop. “Pick all the boxes you think might be right. I am strong, I can carry them all and the Shaman will know.” I really, really, hoped he was right, but I didn’t protest this solution. I just needed to make sure that he rested up before we continued our journey. How far was it to reach this Shaman?

With a disconcertingly large pile of boxes stacked together next to Krashe’s backpack, we finally settled down on the medical cot for sleep. Krashe had insisted on feeding me more rations, and then he’d briefly left to set up snares outside the building, hoping to supplement our dwindling food supply with something freshly caught.

When I curled up in his arms for a few more hours of sleep, I felt light and giddy. We’d found what Krashe had remembered as a child, although I was now sure that his mother must have guessed what they were for and told him. I had hope, even if I still didn’t know much else about what the future was going to look like. It did look like I might have a chance to walk again, that was a dream I hadn’t even contemplated back on Earth.

Chapter 16

Krashe

I still could not get used to the sight of Naomi on that strange little cart thing. I missed having her in my arms all the time, but I understood why she wanted to be on the strange contraption. If I couldn’t decide where I wanted to go, it would drive me a little crazy too. Now she was the fast one and I was forced to keep up, racing after her while she raced off to check out a strange plant, an interesting rock, or a spring.

It wasn’t hard to admit that that was nice too, to see her wonder at the pretty things she could discover on this barren piece of land. It had always just been that to me, empty land inhabited only by the evil revenants that sought only destruction of anything alive. But Naomi seemed to find beautiful things wherever we went, and she made me look at that strange building by the lake with new eyes too.

I could remember many good things about it now, I probably spent months inside those walls as a youngling. Exploring them with my mother and my father. I’d long condemned those memories as reckless proof of my mother’s bad judgment, a type of betrayal to the Clan. Now that I had reexamined those memories as an adult, I realized that my parents had always gone into new places with care.

They had never just let me play wherever I liked, keeping me mostly in those upper hallways where the evidence of my drawings still remained. In a place where I couldn’t just stumble across the old bones of the ancient dead, trigger dangerous machines, or be spotted by a wandering revenant. They had also only ever visited this place during the warm season when the revenants always wandered further north for some reason.

If I’d discovered one of those carts Naomi was now using as a youngling, I could well imagine how much fun I’d have had with one. It was an odd shape for my mate to use, but it made a lot of sense if you imagined a full-grown Naga on it.

There was a seat, and a tray-like platform below it, which hovered just above the ground, skimming along the shrubbery. A Naga could sit on it, and then have the rest of their long tail curled up on that tray. Naomi’s legs dangled above the tray, unable to reach it with how short she was, which wasn’t quite comfortable so we’d stuck the backpack with supplies and the fur I’d tied around our precious boxes on it. Now she could lay her legs on the soft furs I’d placed over the top, and have more furs wrapped around them so they stayed warm.