Page 13 of Challenged

It’s like she knows exactly what to say to get under my skin.

She probably does know. Probably studied some profile of me given to her by whoever Baxter paid to get rid of me. Lies, obviously, but close enough to the truth that she can use it to get to me.

Who you are, who you want to be, is your choice.

Tantalising.

A shame it’s bullshit.

“Well,” I say, climbing out of the pod. Brooks rushes to close the gap between us, arms spread, ready to catch me. I stumble, my legs feeling inordinately weak underneath me - the paralytic they gave me still not quite worn off, I guess - but steady myself, spreading my arms to help me balance. As I stand there like a starfish, I realise I’m wearing panties and a vest. It takes the wind out of my indignation, but I do my best to summon it again.

“Well,” I say again, “it’s been entertaining. I’ll give you that. But it’s time you stop trying to convince me of the impossible and send me home.”

I straighten my shoulders and back. It takes a moment for full command of my body to come back to me, but it’s not like when I first woke up. My limbs and torso are all there, waiting to listen to me. They just need a little push to get them all aligned and working together. Once I’m standing with some poise and sure I’m not going to just topple over on my first step, I look back to Liv.

“I expect you to have consulted your management by the next time I see you and to have a plan for my safe return to my life.”

I nearly add a ‘thank you’ at the end, years of being the one who always had to be subservient and polite hard to overcome.But just like I dropped that persona with Baxter in the end, I keep it away now. Then, with as much power as I can muster, I turn and head for where I assume the exit must be.

At first, the other pods block my view of pretty much everything else, but as I step out from between them, I see the door at the other side of the room, leading on to a long corridor. Everything is grey concrete, dim strip lighting, no decoration or personality. A military base, Liv said. Mercenia has thousands of them all over the world, many no longer in use since the Corporation Wars ended. An abandoned military base makes for the perfect location for an experiment like this. Doctor Novak is very fond of them.

I’m heading for the door when movement catches my eye. Stupidly, I turn to look toward it. See three more hulking figures standing in the shadows. One of them is enormous, the biggest guy I’ve ever seen, and the other two aren’t far behind him. Fear flares along my spine again, my heart tripping over itself as it races to beat faster, harder. My next breaths are snatched into tight lungs, and I try to keep my head high, walk swiftly past them, but they’ve noticed me now, and the one closest to me steps into my path, blocking my way to the door.

Much like with Shemza, the lighting is too dim for me to get a proper look at him. To identify where the edges of the prosthetics are, how makeup has been used to smooth out the transitions between his human features and the alien ones they’ve built on top of them. Unlike with Shemza, there’s something a little more rough-edged, a little more wild about this guy.

It’s not that his eyes are yellow - that’s easily explainable with contact lenses. It’s that there’s something about the spirit, the person behind those eyes. Something in the way he looks at me.

It all feels a little…

Alien.

The fear escalates. Shifts into terror.

“Get out of my way.”

I try to be firm, try to snarl or hiss or simply demand. But my voice betrays me, cracking and wobbling around the syllables, spelling my terror out for anyone to hear.

“Let her go, Rardek,” Liv calls from behind me.

The guy in front of me looks in her direction, then nods. Steps aside.

I hurry past him, head out of the room with my heart in my throat. It takes every bit of control I have not to run. Not to scream.

CHAPTER FIVE

Rardek

Iturn and watch the new female leave, my heartspace thundering in my chest. Dressed in the barest amount of clothing, with no shoes on her feet, her stature diminutive, she looks as vulnerable as any human female I have ever seen. And yet, despite the fear obvious in her features, in the jerky manner of her walking, there was something blazing in her eyes when she looked up at me. A ferocious little piece of her spirit, still burning bright. A fire that has leapt into my own heartspace and already consumes it.

My linasha. I know it as surely as I know I need to breathe, eat, sleep.

I stare after her until she passes through the door and out of sight. She is on the shorter side, not quite as little as Sam, but perhaps no taller than Lorna. Unlike Lorna and Sam when we first encountered them, my linasha does not have the hollow look of hungering. Generous curves sway as she walks, her hipsrounded and full, tapering up to a small waist. I want to run my fingers over every line of her, trace her shape until it is fixed in my headspace so well I would know it by a single touch.

But that fire in her eyes. I want to see that again even more. I continue to stare at the door, as if I could will her to turn round and come back just by the weight of my desire to look upon her again.

“Well,” Liv says. “Ahwusntexpectinthat.”

It is as if her voice breaks a spell that my linasha’s departure has held over not just me, but everyone. They all start speaking at once, and it is only in the sudden rush of noise that I realise how silent things had been a moment before, as if my linasha had sucked all the air out of the room and not just the breath from my lungs.

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