Page 153 of Sky Song
“Shot during a ‘home invasion.’ Kim barged into her home and shot her. Bam.”
It wasn’t the closure Cricked had hoped for. “All of it is rather pointless, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know. If some schmuck of a doctor poisoned my lover with a concoction spiked with alien body matter, I'd be one tight ball of mad, too.”
“So mad that you’d pick up a weapon and kill her?”
“Possibly.”
“The worst of it is that Dr. Nura didn’t kill Igor. He didn’t have to die at all. He was like me, and I’m alive and well. But Kim brainwashed him into thinking he was evil because of the alien DNA. He tried to ‘cure’ himself of it, and that was what poisoned him.”
“And if Dr. Nura hadn’t made Igor a subject, none of this would have happened. So there’s that.”
“True,” Cricket said, pensive. “Was there anything on the news about Dr. Ragberg?”
“Nope, nothing about him. But when Kim talks - and we have no reason to believe she won’t - his name will surely come up. He might avoid prison, but his career is over. I’m telling this from personal experience with our judicial system. His social credit has just tanked forever.”
Dr. Ragberg had worked tirelessly to build himself up on Meeus. He even married strategically. Would his wife divorce him now? It would be a fitting punishment, but Cricket felt no satisfaction at the doctor’s fall from grace. She felt nothing at all.
She gently stroked Lyle’s cheek as he lay unresponsive against her.
“Does he turn violent?” Ren asked about him.
“No. He doesn’t even get up anymore.”
After Ren left, Cricket snuggled next to Lyle. Eventually, the music stopped, and the club had grown quiet. Only the mechanical equipment continued its inanimate hum.
At some point, Lyle had grown restless and moved his arms erratically as if swatting unseen enemies. She tried to reposition him on the floor, but he resisted. Mindless, he pushed at her hands, attempted to stand, failed, called for something in the language she didn’t know.
“I’m here, my love. Stay with me. Stay.” He seemed to respond - not to her voice but to her presence, his face seeking her body heat. She wanted to give him his sedative pills, but he wouldn’t cooperate, and she couldn’t force him.
On impulse, she took off all of her clothes, giving Lyle a greater sense of her. He seemed to have responded to that, curling all around her and settling. She lay naked on her side within his lax embrace, stiff and painfully uncomfortable on the hard floor, and cried.
The door bursting open woke Cricket up from her dreamless slumber. Lyle’s labored breathing and hammering hearts came into focus at her back. She blinked against the lights, zooming in on the intruders.
Paloma was the first to come inside the room, in a way, as she sprawled on the floor, sliding toward the corner where Cricket lay with Lyle. Ren followed, stumbling in, pushed from behind by someone’s heavy hand.
Several others walked in after Ren and Paloma, and Cricket’s heart started thudding inside her chest from hope and apprehension.
Thank you, mama.
The newcomers were Rix. They lined up against the walls, five or six - she was too disoriented to even count. They were all dressed in long dusters over the simmering dark-blue jumpsuits that clung to their tall, supple bodies. Several pairs of overly large black eyes were trained on her corner, she knew it as surely as she felt their simmering energy that was spiked above the normal levels just a tad from being on high alert. In a flash of clarity she knew that it must be the altered part of her that allowed her to feel the Rix energy with such ease.
Ren assisted Paloma to her feet and hugged her, as if hiding her in his embrace. Only her scared violet eyes peeked from above Ren’s arm at the aliens.
Suddenly, Cricket’s eyes cleared and her brain engaged, chugging along. The Rix defenders. They were here. She swept her eyes over them again, and one snagged her gaze. Tall even among his kind, with white hair pulled into a braid.
“Simon?”
A blast of cold air came off of him, discouraging familiarity. “Cricket,” he uttered in her language, the sounds smooth and clear, the tone even frostier than his gaze which was already as cold as the space vacuum. “Stand up.”
She stared at him from her position on the floor. Simon. Finally, her old prejudices had a face. He was the man who nearly killed mama. And here he was ordering her around like he owned her.
Resentment stirred.
She unfurled her body, disengaging herself from Lyle’s listless limbs. It took an effort to force her stiffened joints to move, but she managed. She slowly rose to her full height, too slim from forgetting to eat, lithe with the power Rix genes had gifted her.Hisgenes.
She stood in front of them naked, chin high, looking at each one in turn. Dizziness assaulted her but she held herselfstill until it passed, refusing to give away her weakness. Their energies flared briefly before settling, like the males couldn't quite control their inner response at seeing her body.
