Page 48 of Bound

“We’ll stay here until nightfall,” I reply. “Then we’ll have to find somewhere else.”

RYCH

The two gladiators swagger out of the courtyard garden.

“Do you trust them?” Chrissie asks.

“With my life,” I respond. “Even that vrexer Klynn”

“They’re very…full on,” she says.

“They’re both lifers for the dome with no chance of freedom. It is all they will ever know.” I shake my head. “If it could be any different, I would do what I could to get them out. But they’re both in the dome by order of the Galactic Council.”

“And yet, they can go free into Tatatunga?”

“Both have trackers. If they attempt to stray without permission, they will die.”

“That’s horrible!” Chrissie says, clutching at my arm.

“It is Tatatunga. It is the dome. It is something that one day I hope will be resolved for them. Until then, they must fight and entertain in the games.”

She puts her head on my chest. “I hope that too.”I run my hand up her arm, and she sighs. “Sometimes I wonder what I angered to end up here,” she says, her eyes gazing up at my face. “Then I see you, and I think about fate. Fate is what drives this galaxy.”

“Fate is what comes to all of us. You are my fate, Chrissie. You are the turning of a star, the bright light which fills my existence,” I murmur, pressing my nose into her hair and drinking down her scent.

“That should be a song,” Chrissie murmurs.

“Maybe it will be, one day. A song you can sing to our younglings, when we have somewhere all to ourselves.”

“You mean that?” she asks, one hand delving into my feathers. As usual her touch makes speaking difficult.

“For you, I’d shift planets, move moons, and explode stars. You are worth it,eregri.”

As she settles in my lap and her breathing gets deeper, I luxuriate in this time to have with her, simple and easy.

At least until Maxym and Klynn return with a crash several nova-hours later.

“You have to get out of here,” Maxym says urgently as I help Chrissie to her feet. She blinks away the sleep. “The Loxzian is intending killing you and taking your mate. It is her he wants.”

“He won’t have her. Not while I have breath in my body,” I snarl.

“We can cover your tracks,” Klynn says, drawing a sword from behind his back and handing it to me, along with the pulsar pistol belt he wears around his waist.

“How the vrex did you get all these weapons out of the dome?” I ask as Maxym passes me a psi-grenade sling.

“Do you think anyone challenges a fully loaded gladiator?” he says with a semblance of a smile. “The captain agreed,” he concedes, “when we told him they were for you.”

“He doesn’t trust Loxzians, says they’re a slippery bunch,” Klynn adds.

“There was something else too,” Maxym says. “He was with a reptilian species I thought I recognized. Not Oykig. Scaly, mostly purple, able to blink.”

“Fenek?” Chrissie says out loud.

“Drahon,” Klynn growls.

The word drills through me with an unpleasant familiarity. Maxym looks at us both blankly.

“They were…our enemy?” I force the words out.

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