Page 7 of Dark Space
I blamed this ridiculous humanoid brain for my current predicament. Surely it was the useless mass of wrinkled grey matter within this thick skull that tempted me to raid the Prince’s on-board treasury for a third time, rather than walk away with the considerable fortune I’d already amassed during the first and second visits.
And surely it was this form’s dull instincts that hadn’t warned me of the fact that the Prince was capturing every moment of that third raid on his security feeds, recording my plundering visit in the kind of detail that would have me thrown straight in a Council cell for a millennium.
Andsurelyit was the same weak instincts and the slow response of this meatsuit that gave the irritatingly pretty Prince and his black-haired companion time to clamp the dark matter chain around my ankle, a chain that blocked me from drawing new light.
Surely.
I scowled at my fingers.Who travelled with their treasury, anyway?
Perhaps it was all the Prince’s fault. He was basicallyaskingto be robbed.
Now, I was not only trapped in some kind of secret, high-security cell, I was trapped in this odd, distasteful body, a form I’d based on my twin sibling, who wore it to please his cyborg and cephalopod partners.
I didnotsee the appeal. Bits of it were hard and bits of it were soft. For something that so closely resembled pillars, the legs and feet were oddly clumsy. The muscles were held together with some kind of fragile flesh-straps, which seemed like a critical design flaw. The hair didn’t seem to serve much purpose, other than falling into the eyes and obstructing vision. The skin organ needed a surprising amount of upkeep, and surely needed to be thicker to serve its purpose.
And toenails.Why?
I hadn’t spoken to him since my capture, but the Prince came to glower at me every week or so. At least, I thought it was that often; I had no idea where we were, or what the time was, and therefore no idea how much of it might be passing. I suspected he was checking that I was still alive, which I assured him in the affirmative by greeting him with a wide, taunting grin. I might be bored out of this tiny mind, but I wasn’t going to tellhimthat. I also wasn’t going to let him know that Iwasgetting weaker by the day. The dark matter cuff stopped me changing back to my trueform – or into any other form, for that matter – and although I could still control the light residing inside me, I couldn’t gather any more to consume, or to use, and therefore to escape. I’d been already drained when they caught me, and the light I had was all there was – until the Prince let me go, or I starved.
Despite the threat of slow death, I enjoyed his visits. I liked his shimmering skin and his black eyes, liked his waving auburn hair, and enjoyed the way his horns curved back from his face in a graceful arch, bracketing his serious expression. The Roth forms were humanoid, too, but were built with considerably more muscle than the one I was wearing. Their skin grew a layer of impenetrable scales when they were threatened, and their black fingernails turned hard as claws.
I looked at the hands attached to my arms. ‘I bethisnails wouldn’t break,’ I told them, and I started working on the dark matter chain again.
The cuff around my ankle didn’t seem to have a weak point, though logically I knew it must. The technology to fuse dark matter with a malleable metal found on the moons of Ellin in Sector Twelve was ancient, and the knowledge to reforge more of it lost, but dark matter chains still existed here and there. Some were with the Tirians, and some in a locked facility controlledby the Intergalactic Council. Clearly, the Roth had gotten their hands on a pair, which the Prince had used to great effect.
My broken nail tore; blood welled as pain flared through my hand.
‘Useless,’ I told it, and scraped the next available unbroken nail over the cuff.
I knew it was a long shot, but I couldn’t sit here and donothing. I’d rather dosomething, no matter how hopeless that task was, than sit here and slowly waste away until I starved to death, or the Roth Prince decided to give me to his King, or drag me before the Tirians and the Intergalactic Council.
My nail wore down to the quick. I paused, considering my toes. Could I make them bend that way?
Light flickered at the edge of my awareness.
Even stuck in this ungainly body, I retained some of my true nature. My eyes had not changed with the shift, so they could still detect light in any form. Sometimes I’d watch the comings and goings of the ship, seeking out the light and heat signatures of the Roth Prince and his crew as they went about their business. They were an odd lot, going through the motions each day, with the ship plotting an erratic course across the stars; if there was a logic to our travels, I couldn’t determine it. For a ship carrying the crown Prince of a species obsessed with conflict, this orb seemed remarkably reluctant to seek it out.
It didn’t make much sense, but I also didn’t care. I’d been stealing from species that had died out long before the Roth decided to slither out of the sea. The Prince could do as he pleased, as long as I eventually found a way to escape.
The light flickered again.
I frowned. It was a heat signal – anewone. Too small to be Roth, too bright to be dead.
‘What areyou?’ I said to it.
It didn’t answer, which was fair enough. It was an odd little thing, its light layered like a star, with a core so bright that even other species could have almost seen it. The Prince and a second Roth – the black-haired one – were clearly interested in it, standing close and watching the little light as it stretched out prone on the Prince’s royal bed. The Roth were having a conversation – they gestured and shifted their stance and nodded – but the light didn’t react.
Eventually, the Prince wrapped something around the light; I grew bored, turning my attention back to the cuff.
I examined the chain’s anchor for what felt like the thousandth time. It was attached to the cell’s smooth floor by a thick ring of metal, and no matter how closely I looked, I could never find the joint.
‘Right,’ I said to my toenails. ‘Time to see if you serve a purpose.’
Light flared outside my cell.
I looked up, surprised.
One wall of the cell was glass, opaque on the inside – to any species but a starling, anyway – but transparent to those watching from the outside. The glass slid back, revealing the black-haired Roth, and the thing – the new, many-layered light – in his arms.
