Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80439 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80439 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
I stare at him, feeling a welling of a sensation I haven’t had before. He’s so fucking hot right now. Muscular and prepared for all eventualities? He has a plan B?
“Did you think the ship wouldn’t come?”
“Drako was too fucking smug,” he says. “And I always have a backup plan. They’re going to hunt, but they’re going to get bored. They’ll take Drako, I think, and leave this planet. Then we can try and…” He breathes. “Survive.”
I nod. Right now I don’t care what tomorrow brings as long as tomorrow doesn’t bring Vikar custody.
I snug as far as I can to the end of the log to try to make space for Thor, who looks impossibly uncomfortable. He is able to lie on his side after a little shuffling, his head in my lap. I pass the time by braiding his hair. Neither one of us speak. It’s not safe to.
We’ve been in danger the entire time we have been on this planet, but we have never been in danger like this. This feels like death itself is stalking us. Suddenly, I am deeply afraid of Drako as well. He has shifted in my mind and become a horror again.
A little time passes, and we hear voices approaching. I used to think it would be nice to be around other people again. Right now, I would be so happy to never, ever hear another person’s voice again.
“They can’t have gotten far. They were on foot.”
“If we had hounds, we could apprehend them in a matter of minutes.”
“If we had hounds, they’d rip them into pieces. Jarl Drako wants them in one piece. Keep looking. They came through here in a panic.”
Thor and I make eye contact. Drako is giving orders. He must have a lot of rank. He tried to make himself sound like a settler, little more. But this is not what happens when a settler…
“What the fuck is that?”
We can’t see what it is, but the tone of the soldiers hunting us suggests that they don’t like the look of it.
“Looks like a big bug,” the other one says.
Thor and I make even more intense eye contact, our eyes widening as we understand something the men trying to kill us do not. I have a brief impulse to help them, but there’s nothing we can do.
“It’s coming over this way… argh!”
There is the sound of weapons fire, and then a general screaming and sounds of what I can only describe as consumption. Maybe some stray horde creatures are out here looking for food. They seem to have found it.
We are not going to be able to leave this hiding place until the horde goes back to sleep. Right now they are crawling everywhere, searching for remnants of crash proteins and such. It’s awful. But they have just saved our lives.
I do not know how long it is until we speak again. Hours, certainly. No more voices come our way, and the forest is still, as far as we can tell.
“It’s going to be okay,” Thor says. “Two ships lost around the same planet will draw further attention. We still have a chance at rescue, and one hopes that there was some distress signal sent before it was destroyed.”
I don’t think there was. I think that ship was there one moment, and gone the next. Whatever weapons the Vikar are using, our ships are not able to stand up to them. I do not argue, though. I will not steal hope from him, even if I cannot manifest it myself.
By the time we crawl out of that log, I can no longer properly feel my limbs. That is a mercy, because as feeling returns, they start to burn and ache complaining about the abuse they have suffered in the course of survival.
Thor then moves us to a dense part of the bush, where he has set up a very small camp under a tarp. It’s barely a camp in the proper sense of the word. It’s a few rice rations that we cannot heat, and a flask of water. Both of them taste like heaven to our parched throats.
“I couldn’t believe…”
Thor puts a finger to my lips gently. No talking. We cannot risk being overheard by people who are close, or surveillance that might be listening in. I understand his meaning, but it creates an ache inside me. I need to speak so badly, to hear him tell me what he saw when the horrible thing happened, to hear that I am not alone even though his presence tells me I am not.
I lie down on the ground, my head resting on my forearm, and I am asleep in an instant.
It is not a good sleep. It is the rest of exhaustion, the slumber of hunted prey. I am restless, waking every time the forest makes the slightest sound, but then falling back to sleep almost immediately all over again. I miss the comfort of the cave. I miss Drako. I miss Thor, strangely, though he is right beside me. You aren’t really with someone if you can’t hear their voice, or at least communicate in some way besides haunted looks.