Page 9 of Breed

Having secured her as is necessary, I step back and admire my handiwork. There is something very vulnerable about her. I do not know if it is the impossibly soft flesh which feels incredibly pliable and warm under my fingers, the feeling of which remains with me even now that I am not touching her. She is a vessel I want to fill. But this has been a very eventful day, and there are forces at play more important than my raptor lust. Soon, I will take her. I will make her scream for me. I will stretch every tender part of her around me and I will indulge my most twisted pleasures. But not yet.

“Stay here. If anyone knocks on the door, scream like you’re being ravaged.”

She blushes bright red beneath her blindfold. The way these humans change color as a result of their emotions reminds me of some of the behavior of the smaller non-sentient lizards on our world. There are creatures which flash and pulse with light to blend into their surroundings. This human might want to be invisible, but she is lit up, her face glowing and her eyes bright.

The mention of ravishment excites her. And her excitement pulls at the strings of my own desire.

She’s soft, pretty, supple. She’s vulnerable. She is prey. I will devour her completely.

Soon.

3 THE SAURIAN, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE

Lettie

I hear sounds of him leaving, but not through the big metal door with the bar across it. He did not move it. Instead, I hear faint squeaking. More like the sound of a wooden door being opened. Has to be the wardrobe. Must be a way out through there.

I hear it close, quietly. He’s trying to hide the way he’s exiting, but I don’t need my eyes to observe. And it’s going to take more than a few bits of rope to keep me bound. I like rope. I like it a lot. It’s a little bit of a hobby of mine, actually. Not so much the tying, but the escaping.

When he was tying me, I held my elbows apart. He wrapped it somewhat tight, but he didn’t want to hurt me, and he didn’t know how much tension to put on the rope. All I do now is slide my forearms back together in a prayer position and there’s enough slack in the rope to start wriggling my hands back and forth until I can pull the first loop up and over my hands. Then another. Then another. Then the entire coil just unrolls itself. From there, I yank the blindfold off and untie my feet. I’m free, to a certain extent. And I’m not all that far from being properly free. All I have to do is get my clothes back and sneak out.

First things first. There’s the safe, which he told me not to go near, but it has my suit in it. I have to get that back. With that back, I can do almost anything. Shan did warn me it would be dangerous to try to open the safe, but it’s also pretty fucking dangerous sitting in the saurian criminal underground mostly naked, so I reckon I’ll be taking that risk.

The fact that I’m even getting the opportunity to try is a testament to how underestimated I am. He must think I’m so pathetic to be contained with a bit of limp rope and a blindfold. I must seem like the most hapless, helpless little creature he’s ever encountered.

And as for the wardrobe escape path, that’s so unoriginal as to be damn near cliché. You couldn’t write this stuff. I wonder if he knows how obvious it is? He probably doesn’t care. Shan doesn’t seem like the type to be interested in things like opinions.

I get up, pull my boots on, and decide to check the wardrobe before I get started on the safe. I didn’t hear him disarming any traps, which makes me assume it is safer than the, well, safe. Wearing t-shirt, underwear, and boots, I cross over to the wardrobe, running my hands over it to see if it hums or ticks or does anything else that might indicate some kind of trap that’s going to take bits of me off if I activate it. I sense nothing.

When I risk opening the doors, I find that they swing for me easily, though they’re a bit heavier than I would expect them to be. The wardrobe has some clothing in it, undershirts and things of that nature. Everything is built to saurian scale, like you’d expect.

It does not take me long to find the switch that makes the back panel open. It’s not particularly well hidden. Just looks like a nail sticking out of the back of the piece of furniture. I reach up and jiggle it a little, feeling the way the mechanism must release behind it as it clicks and whirrs just a little. It’s all so simple. I pause before I actually open the secret door. I’m not dressed, after all. I need my suit.

That is going to be more dangerous. I can already tell that the safe does have security measures. There’re ports on the front that look to me like flamethrowers, and that’s just for starters. It’s a box of potential death, so I’ll be careful.

I have to assume that the safe is going to be dangerous if I put the wrong combo in. Fortunately for me, I was listening and watching when he opened it the first time. Thirteen clicks to the right, two to the left, and then another five to the right again. I know the directions, because I watched the way his arm flexed as he manipulated the door. Observation is the better part of survival.

This is going to be a risk, but it’s one I have to take. Without the suit, I’m nothing more than meat on legs in a world full of hungry predators.

I scuttle over to the safe and put in what I think is the correct combination before there’s a chance to get nervous and second guess myself. There’s a satisfying clunk as the door disengages. I stand as far back as I can, and swing it open slowly in case there’s some kind of incendiary charge or some…

BOOM!

There’s now a dent in the wall opposite the safe, a burnished hole the size of my chest.

He was right about it being dangerous, I guess. An incendiary charge big enough to rip me into pieces just went off. My ears are still ringing from the sound of it, and the acrid smell of what has to be old-fashioned gunpowder pervades my every breath. This room has no ventilation, and explosions are dirty.

Fortunately, my suit is made of better stuff than the explosive. I snatch it out of what remains of the blasted open safe, kick my boots off, and drag it on quickly. Putting the suit on is not like getting dressed. It is like pulling on my skin again. I feel so much better. I feel as though I am whole again.

I don’t check the rest of the safe’s contents. There could be more traps and tricks, and I don’t want to end up missing a bit of a limb because I got too curious. What’s mine is mine, and what’s his is his.

Feeling myself again, I go back to the wardrobe, shut the door behind me, and pull the nail to open the secret back. A tunnel opens up in front of me, quite a spacious one. It looks meticulously maintained, which doesn’t surprise me. All of Shan’s things I’ve encountered so far are very simple, lack adornment, and are very well taken care of. I can see about ten feet in front of me, and then it curves to the left. Anything could be back there. Anyone could be back there. But as far as I am concerned, there’s only one thing to do:

Follow the tunnel.

It seems to be empty.

I can’t hear any footsteps besides my own as I move, and I can barely hear mine, so I know I will hear anyone, or anything else that happens to come. I know how to be quiet. I know how to stay unseen. The tunnel is lit here and there with dim LED type lights, electrical embeds which for all I know contain sensors. If we were on the Mare, there wouldn’t be a single step I could take that wouldn’t get me detected if I were just to walk past the lights. We have surveillance on every inch of the ship. We have pressure-weighted sensors. We have sound sensors. We have detectors that can sense when light flickers with the passing of a body. We have cameras. We have everything, mostly because you can’t stop the tech girls from iterating their gadgets and technologies and testing them wherever they can. That’s why we know so much about this city and its citizens. Because there are women floating above who take a possessive interest in seeing and knowing everything. Gossip is elevated into an art form and a science on the Mare.

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