Page 2 of The Naga Scavenger’s Precious Mate

Just one more strike against the technology-hating Clan. I should take it as a sign to leave their land and find better places to forage and scavenge for interesting parts. Bitter Storm destroyed anything they found, anyway. There was no point in sticking around. Yet I stared with morbid fascination as they gathered all the pieces and started torching them. It would not destroy the metal, but as the fire blazed hot and fierce, it warped everything inside it, melting parts until they were unrecognizable.

My eyes flicked from the destructive blaze up the mountain flank from where I’d come. High up there, another plume of smoke was filling the air. This plume was fading, indicating that the fire had gone out, but it was a mark of where that other piece of the skyship had struck Serant. It was far too deep into Bitter Storm territory to be safe, and yet, I knew I’d be visiting it next.

Something pulled me there; called to me. I had made the wrong choice by playing it safe and going here. The treasure was up there, and I was going to claim it. Even if I had to go into the heart of enemy territory to get it.

Beneath my hiding place high in the tree, the half a dozen Bitter Storm warriors were departing. They had not spotted me; they had never caught so much as a hint of my presence or that of the recently departed aliens in their working skyship. It made me wonder, did more wrecks get visited that way? Had we just never been in time to catch them in the act?

“Come on, Srazz,” I said to my pet when it was finally safe to slither out of the tree. “We’ve got treasure to hunt for. What do you say?” His black nose lifted into the air. His white and black streaked body shivered with excitement as quills lifted along his rump. Then he chortled and bared his yellow teeth. That’s what I thought.

Determined, I set out into the woods, back uphill. My ability to navigate unknown terrain was the best in the Clan, the envy of many of my Water Weaver peers. Today I was extremely glad that I knew how to pick the quickest, quietest paths toward the other half of the wreck. I was tingling with excitement, certain that my discovery was going to be life-changing.

Chapter 2

Farah

Everything was cold. I didn’t understand that because I lived in Arizona, Phoenix, it was always warm. I hadn’t had frozen toes like this in so long that I struggled to even interpret the sensations. Had I dipped my feet in a tub of cold water to cool down after a long day at work? Had I spilled my glass of iced tea and its abundance of ice cubes in there? What was going on?

The last I remembered was that meeting with little Abe’s parents at the daycare I worked at. Had I managed to bring up my concerns about his temper and inability to share or play together? I was sure I had, but now I couldn’t remember how the talk had gone. A vague sense of disquiet started to fill my mind and I knew; something had gone very, very wrong.

A room flashed before my eyes, which made me realize that I’d been in complete darkness before that. How had I not noticed? This room was dreary and gray, utilitarian. It wasn’t a room at the daycare, because those were all painted in cheerful but calming colors to promote a calm and safe environment for the kids.

No, this room was somewhere else. Jail. Fudge, where had that word come from? Why was I thinking of a jail? I was a good, law-abiding citizen. There was no reason to think I’d ended up in jail somehow, but once that thought had filled me, I couldn’t shake it.

There was only a single table in the room, with a chair on either side. When I glanced at the table, I realized immediately that my hands were cuffed to a metal ring at the center of the metal surface. My stomach swooped into my shoes, bile rose in my throat, and panic clawed at my chest. I was right, this was jail.

I recalled it then, the reason. It swept away the fear and panic to make place for furious anger. How could they do this to me? They had no proof! I was innocent. Abe’s parents, they were to blame for this, when all I’d wanted to do was get them the help they needed to care for their atypical but wonderful child.

My colleagues had been right to warn me not to do it, that those rich parents wouldn’t take kindly to being told their child could be considered less than perfect. Not that I thought so, Abe was cute and sweet, he just needed better care than a busy daycare like ours could offer. Those parents had thrown me to the wolves, rather than face reality. Or maybe they were facing it, but they were doing it in secret and making sure no one could ever know the truth by shutting me up for good. That’s how it worked, I should have remembered that.

Guess you could call that my fatal flaw, the desire to believe that everyone acted out of the goodness of their heart. The ultimate optimist, that’s what my father used to call me before he’d passed away. Farah with her heart on her sleeve.

My thoughts spun from that jail room and into a warmer, fonder memory: My father laughing as he talked to me on his front porch, just weeks before he’d died in an accident at the factory where he worked. “I never had to comfort you over your physical aches and pains, you know,” he’d said to me. “Though there were plenty of those too.” He’d turned his withered face to me to wink with one deep brown eye. “So many strays you wanted to adopt, strangers you wanted to care for. Such a big heart, my girl.”

Yeah, and look what it had gotten me. A freaking one-way ticket to heaven or wherever this stinking cold place was, it sure as heck wasn’t Arizona. The memory of my dad’s front porch faded, pulling with it the warmth and the love I felt in his presence. This wasn’t right, where was I? I tried to pierce the darkness that surrounded me, a new wave of panic cresting over me.

I’d take the jail cell over this dark. What was going on? Why couldn’t I see anything? I was sick and tired of the coldness in my limbs, my body felt heavy, sluggish. I couldn’t move so much as a muscle no matter how hard I tried. I wondered if this is what it felt like for people with sleep paralysis. If so, it freaking sucked.

The jail cell spun back into my mind’s eye and now I was certain that I was dreaming. Maybe I wasn’t so far off with the sleep paralysis thing. I should consider myself lucky that I wasn’t imagining shadowy creepy crawlies sitting on my chest yet. That would really freak me out.

The gloomy room felt more familiar this time, I could even feel the cool bite of the metal cuffs around my wrists. Funny how cold and heat felt so similar that my brain struggled to tell the difference for a second. I was in this room while I waited for my trial, but sitting there I’d known already. I was doomed.

The government on earth had a zero-tolerance policy, and they considered prison inhumane so you were either fined or executed. There were no appeals like I knew had been the norm a few hundred years ago, there was just the hearing, and sentencing, and then you either got it or were free to go. Everyone knew that the chances that you walked out of a hearing room alive were slim to none.

Drawing in a shuddering breath, I wished I could raise my hands to feel the pounding of my heart in my chest. It was so cold in here, I didn’t remember that from before. I couldn’t recall the face of my guard either, so when he came to pick me up not long after, all I saw was a shadowy blur where his face should have been. It was creepy, but I had other worries.

My stomach tied itself up in knots about the next part; the crowd of reporters I was about to be thrust into. A whole horde of people who were shouting for my blood, accusing me of the worst and most heinous crimes. Asking me questions but never for the truth, never to know if I was innocent. Nobody dared to question the system, because they would be in my shoes as soon as they tried. The United Alliance of Races was a tyranny masquerading as a benevolent democracy. It was all a farce.

My memories blurred together, one after another, of the crowd, and the hearing. I still vividly remembered the judge sneering down at me from where he was enthroned. A silver wig on his head, a wooden gavel in hand which he slammed down with impudence whenever he felt like it. It was all so cold, so cruel.

I was really cold, I felt like I was drowning, and my body was growing sluggish and heavier by the second. Was it even seconds? Or were they minutes, hours? Everything was so confusing, it felt like what was up was down and down was up. Why couldn’t I open my eyes?

Screaming inside my head was the most I could do, it exhausted me to rage against the nightmares in my head and the nightmare that surrounded me. Wait, how did I know that anything was surrounding me at all? Wasn’t I supposed to be dead?

Another memory. This one of the tiny square little box they marched me into. It had vents that opened above my head as soon as the door shut behind me, fumes drifting down on me. When I spun on wobbly, woozy legs, I could see the face of the guard grinning meanly at me through the door. Funny how I remembered his face now, the two front teeth a bit crooked, his eyes glowing red in my mind. That was probably not the truth, but he’d seemed wholly evil to me in that final moment.

I drifted then, caught up in the blackness the same way I had been inside that tiny little room. That was supposed to be the end for me and yet… I knew it wasn’t. I was still so cold; cold enough that I feared that I was losing my toes and my fingertips to frostbite. The darkness that surrounded me was so black, and still, I started to think that I could see shapes. Was I dead, awake and trapped, or was I dreaming?

Maybe this was like drowning. Sinking, always sinking further down to the bottom of a fathomless lake. Yeah, that’s what this was. I was drowning. Then the nightmares really started, the fight for air, the desperation that flooded me at the idea of all that water on top of me. Fear, irrational though it might be, that something big and ancient was in that water with me, ready to swallow me whole.