Page 11 of Dark's Savior

"Who knows. Something nasty down in the lower levels, for sure."

"Or maybe it was the Dark One. Maybe the tylian got too close to his territory," said a grex.

"Maybe the nillium is sending a warning."

"Hey, human!"

Aly looked around and saw a large lygin male waving her over. Aly did as told, and the lygin took hold of her arm and pulled her around to face a hole where a drill machine had drilled in the rock and was now inside, stuck. "Stop gawking and start fixing!" he said. He left her there to return to the crowd as the medics began bagging the tylian. Aly watched, wide-eyed, for a moment, getting one last glimpse of the torn body.

It wasn't the first body she had seen, but it still made her stomach twist. Many were found in caverns, and their deaths were usually not much of a mystery. Either they fell or something got them and, in that regard, there usually wasn't much to find save for bones. It was strange that the tylian, though shredded in parts, was still intact. Like something had toyed with it then just left it alone.

The unusualness of his death and where he had been found was likely why she heard them accusing the nillium this time; only now because the tylian had supposedly been where he shouldn't have been.

A shiver raked Aly's body. Maybe she shouldn't want to see the dark nillium again after all. If he supposedly did that to another. Then again, it might not have been him. He hadn't hurt her, after all.

But then, she hadn't trespassed into his territory.

"Why do you think he went down there?" she heard someone say. "He would have known better."

Aly stood there in deep thought, feeling sorry for the tylian, when she caught eyes with the large lygin, who gave her a nasty look. Heat rose in her face, and she quickly turned away.

Placing her hand on the cold, sharp rock, she crouched down and looked deeper into the hole. The drill was jammed in but not because it couldn't penetrate the rock. It had only malfunctioned, a red light blinking to tell her it just needed to be recalibrated. Aly crawled into the tight opening and stretched out her arm to open a small hatch on the drill's side showing the switches needed to turn on and off. The lygin could have easily done it himself but was obviously too large to get inside and reach. Aly was small enough to get through the tight spaces of the rock, making her at least useful in that regard.

She flipped the switches and closed the hatch, and the drill began to reload. She shuffled out of the hole just before it started again.

The lygin returned but didn't thank her. He didn't even acknowledge her. Aly watched him drill at the rock for a moment, wondering if he would find anything. She turned away before he noticed her staring and walked onward with a heavy breath.

***

She was working on fixing another crawler (the small bots that crawled up the cave walls and collected rock data) when she felt like she was being watched. And not in the usual way, like before with the Krull and their hawk-eyes or the grex with their lizard ones. It started with a chill running down her spine and the impulse to turn her head. When she looked around, no one could be seen, no matter how hard she tried to peer into the open cave entrances around her.

She finished fixing the bot and left the section where she was, but still, the feeling was there. She thought about the tylian again and felt a sudden great need to be around others. Mark was shown to be working on the twenty-second level according to her techband. She made her way up, thinking to just have a little chat.

When she got off the elevator, she found him in a small alcove against a cave side, taking apart rock and harvesting aulion, a silver-coated mineral, into the large buckets beside him. As she walked toward him, she admired the shine of his blue-black hair in the lamplight.

Mark turned his head and paused as he saw her. He placed the bits of aulion into the bucket and waved at her. She returned it with a wave of her own as she strode toward him. His face was dirtied by dust and rock fragments, but his smile was still bright, his dark eyes squinting slightly as the lights on his wrist blinded him.

"Hey, Aly, what's happening?"

Aly smiled, swinging her arms forward in a sort of shrug. "I was bored and came to say hello." She lied a little.

"Oh, yeah?" Mark straightened up and assessed her carefully. "You take your break pretty late, huh?"

"Not exactly," Aly replied sheepishly.

Mark made a silent 'oh' and smirked. "Braxin will get on your case again, you know."

"I know." Aly sat herself down on a flat-ish rock near the cave face. Mark watched her for a moment then looked around. No one seemed to be paying much attention to them, so he came over and sat down beside her. They sat for a moment just looking out over the wide chamber, and Aly began to feel more relaxed.

"It's crazy, huh...to think only a few months ago, we were on Grayhart 12 and just cruising along to that random-ass planet, all because Kate thought we homed in on some signal." Mark shook his head. He leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees. "And we thought we were gonna be such big-shots. Like we were gonna discover the next civilization...or maybe even find the vrisha." Mark bent his head.

Aly eyed him and smiled sadly. "Well, technically, we did discover a new civilization. Just not in the manner in which we were trained."

Mark blew out a quiet laugh. "Yeah, for real. Though I didn't exactly sign up to get kidnapped and forced into slavery."

"We’re not really slaves," Aly remarked.

"Might as well be for what they pay us," Mark grumbled. "And even if we could save enough together, they won't let us leave here. I know no one likes to talk about it but...we are prisoners, just without the name."

---