Page 24 of Mutant Mine

I press myself back into my safe corner by the table. I look out of the window, trying to see the pink nebula again, but it’s not there anymore. The ship must have traveled too far.

Now that my stomach is full, my drowsiness comes back with a vengeance. My blood has been bubbling with adrenaline for hours — but the roller coaster can’t keep going up. Eventually it’s got to crash back down. I started today in the crawlways, plotting to break my friends loose. Somewhere around lunchtime, I thought I was going to get beaten to death. And now I’m a prisoner myself, with not one clue what the future holds. That’s pretty fucking exhausting.

Leaned back against the wall, listening to the faint background hum of the engine, staring at the stars… My eyelids start drooping. I fight to keep them open, but it’s too hard…

* * *

I WAKE UPwith a start. Roth is in the room now. His back is to me. He must have just showered, because he’s wearing a towel around his waist. His skin is still glistening damp. I’ve seen him undressed before, so this is nothing new. But last time, he wasn’t unsecured, alone in the room with me, and stood beside a bed.

Dread fills me. Is this what it was all leading up to?Iknewthere would be something. There was no way he was just going to feed me milk and keep me like a plump little pet.

“You expect us to share the bed?” I ask shakily. My voice seems too loud in the quiet room.

Roth turns to face me, and he’s so much bigger than me — such an expanse of solid muscle. He looks down into my eyes, and I want to look away, but I can’t. I’m like a rabbit frozen in the gaze of a predator. I press my back harder against the wall, working hard to keep my face from crumpling in fear.

This is it,I think.It’s happening now.All day, he’s just been lulling me into a false sense of security: leaving me alone, speaking to me gently, letting me eat. Maybe he just wanted the final moment of revelation to be a cruel shock. Or maybe he wanted me clean and fresh before I came to his bed, and that’s why he gave me a few hours on my own.More fool you, you blue son of a bitch. My crotch is a biohazard right now.

Roth turns away from me, breaking our eye contact. He resumes laying out some clean clothing on the bed, and speaks without looking at me.

“No. I will sleep on the floor. You will sleep in the bed.”

Huh?It takes me a second to recalibrate to what he just said, it’s so unexpected.

“No,” I say slowly. “I’llsleep on the floor.” That feels safer. The floor has fewer unwelcome connotations. He would wake me up if he rustled the sheets getting out of bed. He wouldn’t be able to sneak up on me.

“Very well,” Roth says. Now he’s busy gathering what must be dirty laundry and placing it into the chute in the bottom of the closet. He moves with quiet grace; power in every inch of him, his movements purposeful and controlled. He’s still not looking at me, as if I’m just not that interesting. “We will both sleep on the floor.”

I frown. “No, that’s not…”

That’s a waste of the bed. And the whole point of not sharing the bed was to get away from sharing a flat surface with him.

“You may do what you want,” he says, insufferably calm. “I will be sleeping on the floor.”

With that, he heads back into the bathroom, holding the clean clothes. After a while, he re-emerges wearing undershorts and a white t-shirt. They’re the same as I’m wearing under my jumpsuit. He wears them better.

Roth settles down on the floor with a pillow from the bed and a blanket from the couch. For a moment, I wonder why he doesn’t just sleep on that — but then I realize that he’s way too tall. He must have been very uncomfortable in his cell. And the cell before that. Probably for years.

“Computer, dim the lights to five percent,” Roth says. The automatic lights dim, leaving just enough of a glow for me to see by. He’s rolled over so that his back is to me, and is lying still, as if he’s genuinely trying to get to sleep.

I’m so tired. I can hardly keep my eyes open. For a moment, I consider the couch, but that seems pointless. If Roth wants to hurt me tonight, he will. Where I lie down isn’t going to be the deciding factor.

Tiptoeing across the room, I look at Roth’s back, rising and falling in a steady rhythm. He doesn’t visibly react, even when I kick off my boots and climb into the bed.

The sheets smell of him — the same sweet, smoky fragrance that I noticed when I collected his laundry, in another life. He must have slept here last night.

It’s a good smell. Comforting. I breathe it in slowly.

No. Wrong. Not good.Very bad!Frowning at my own tired brain, I flip the pillow over to the fresh side.

“Computer, turn off the lights,” I whisper.

For the first few hours, I lie tense and alert in the dark,listening hard for any movement — expecting to find him creeping across the room towards me.

But after a while, I hear the deep, slow breaths of sleep coming from Roth’s corner of the floor. Finally, I give in, and let go — drifting off into long-overdue oblivion.

15

Roth

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