Page 120 of Sky Song
“All of us. We’re the rightful warriors, sacrificing our lives to protect Meeus.Theycan’t stop us. We’re many and we walk in the shadows.”
She’s deranged,Cricket thought, and it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. She looked at the row of the cages, taking note of the stooped figures of five alien men and women caged along with Kim.
Ren and Lyle weren’t even looking at the cages, busy going through the equipment that lined the opposite wall. They hooked the shiny device to and read information off several screens that showed graphs and grids with numbers. There were cabinets with drugs and instruments, and a gurney. Syringes. Restraints. It was, all in all, an awful place.
“Evil, evil aliens. They gobbled up Earth - easy pickings - and now they want to infest Meeus, the last human stronghold. Look at him!” Kim flung her arm toward the imprisoned Sakka who gnawed on his own arm. “He sucks blood, like a demonic beast. Abomination!”
Cricket looked. The Sakka was out of his mind, sick, probably on drugs. If he sucked blood, it wasn’t because his kind preyed on humans.
Briefly, Lyle turned to Cricket. “I can’t believe I have to remind you, but we don’t have a lot of time, my hearts. What did Kim say to you?”
“The usual, that she walks on the right side of humanity and I’m a bugman with a small soul.”
“Ah, that train is never late, is it? Ask her who put her in this cage.”
“Who put you down here, Kim?” Cricket translated.
“Why, the same people who put all of them here.” She gestured to the neighboring cages. “This is their secret hiding place. They’re afraid of me but they can’t afford to lose me - I’m their precious investment.” Kim laughed at Cricket’s blank look. “I am taking their drugs. I gave my body up for science.” She made quotation marks with her fingers when referring to science.
“Like… Igor?” Cricket guessed.
A shadow crossed Kim’s mulishly resolute face. “Igor. He had an innocent mind. They tricked him, made him believe in the goodness of their plans to violate nature in the name of progress.” She spat the word out. “And then it was too late. His body was irreversibly damaged by the time he came to me, and no matter what we did together, we couldn’t reverse his condition. What should have been harmless killed him, that’s how unnatural he had become.”
Whereas the gist of it was more or less clear, the details were still elusive. What exactly had ‘they’ done to Igor? What happened to him at the end?
“Did you take Igor’s place?” Cricket guessed again.
“No one can take Igor’s place. You die - they cross you out and start with a new number. I volunteered. If I want to win this war, I have to be like my enemies!”
Cricket’s eyes moved over Kim’s cage. She whirled around. “Lyle, she’s a subject! And Igor was one of the subjects. He was one of the Greek letters, I’m certain of that.”
“Yes, my hearts, they’re all subjects of different things.” Lyle nodded at the row of cages. “Ask Kim if she saw the doctors take notes of her tests.”
Cricket did, but Kim only laughed in response and shook her bottle-brush head.
“Tell her we’ll let her go if she helps us get the records,” Lyle added.
Cricket asked, but another sneer was her answer. “I see your language skills are handy-dandy to your alien masters. For now.”
He’s using me,the persistent conviction flitted through Cricket’s mind, sadly in line with Kim’s derisive words.
Cricket sharply turned away from Kim. “If she truly put herself in this position to root out ‘evil’ from the inside, she would not want to leave. She wants to walk Igor’s path.” Suddenly, the contradiction snagged her and her eyes flew to Lyle. “But Igor wasn’t caged.”
“Perhaps only the recalcitrant ones are caged,” Lyle murmured, his attention everywhere at once.
“And the rest? Tricked into submitting to trials?”
“Perhaps they don’t know they’re in a trial.”
Ren finished his search. “I checked the computers. Shady shit, they run all kinds of experiments, but there’s no record of the one we need.”
“Disappointing but not surprising. Scramble all of it.”
“Already did.”
Lyle’s fine brows twitched when he gave the room another thorough eye sweep. “Let’s get out of here.” He pulled out his gun.
Cricket’s head whipped around. “What are you…”
