Page 24 of On A Rift's Edge
“Ayudame, por favor.” A man’s voice came from the tank, and the crab leader let out a series of clicks and squeaks which might have meant “I told you so.”
Kat lunged forward toward the ladder, but Lyall gripped his shoulder to stop him, and Kat took a few steps back.
As excited as he was to learn that the human captive was alive, he had to admit it was much safer to have Lyall take the lead in this situation.
Lyall patted the sides of his living leather armor and a pair of curved swords, like matched fangs, appeared. He climbed up the ladder and a moment later was yanking on a bare arm. He leaned over the pool and dragged out a naked man.
The human prisoner appeared to be young, maybe Kat’s age or a little older. Chunks of translucent golden jelly fell off his light brown skin. He had short black hair and a body almost as muscular as Lyall’s.
Kat rushed up the ladder and helped pull the man onto the narrow platform that ran along the edge of the stasis container. The glass-like covering had shattered into chunks that rested on the viscous liquid like ice floes on a warming ocean.
“Are you okay?” Kat belatedly remembered the captive had spoken in Spanish and switched languages. “¿Estás bien?”
“I’m fine now, chico.” The man switched easily to Spanglish and wiped more of the gelatinous material he had been suspended in off his face. He turned to Lyall, giving him a wide smile. “You’re not human.”
“No, I’m not.” Lyall had a grip on the guy’s arm, and his tone was sharp. “Whether you’re human or not, you’d better tell me how you ended up in a hopper stasis container and if any of those fucking frogs are around here.”
“He needs to lie down.” Kat couldn’t believe Lyall was adding to the emotional trauma the freed prisoner must be experiencing. “I can do a quick medical assessment here, but we need to bring him to a hospital.”
“Fucking frogs.” The man repeated Lyall’s phrase and broke down laughing. “That’s hilarious. Especially coming from a fucking dog.”
He punched Lyall in the stomach, grabbed him with both hands, and threw him into the pool.
Kat gave a strangled scream and might have had tried to protest if the man hadn’t swung at him next.
The blow connected against an invisible barrier that dropped down over Kat’s face, and he fell off the ladder, landing on his back on the floor.
He had a few seconds to realize that the living leather armor Lyall had given him covered his entire body under his clothes, including a translucent shield that protected his face. Then the prisoner sprang into the air, landed in a crouch before Kat, and transformed.
His overall shape remained humanoid, but his hands now ended in four webbed digits. Amphibian eyes with oval pupils rimmed in gold regarded Kat, and his smile grew wider until it took up most of his face.
Lyall had been right. Hoppers looked a lot like killer frogs.
Kat tried to scramble away, his movements awkward in the restrictive armor he was wearing. The hopper darted forward and grabbed him with his clubbed fingers.
He lifted Kat in the air, blinking his golden eyes at him as if trying to figure out if Kat would fit in his mouth.
“We were trying to rescue you.” Kat struggled, but given that his feet were dangling in the air and his attempts to break out of the hopper’s sticky grasp were failing miserably, he couldn’t do much to escape.
There was a loud thump, and the entire stasis container vibrated with the impact of something large against the inside wall.
Great. Kat had insisted on going into the abandoned military base because an alien crab had told him a human was trapped there. Now Lyall was the one trapped, and Kat was about to be eaten by a frog monster.
“What are you, chico?” The hopper cocked his head at Kat. Then he switched to one hand, holding Kat a meter off the floor with ease. He extended the clubbed four digits on his other hand, and the air rippled in front of him.
Nothing felt different to Kat, but something had changed. The living armor encasing his body retracted, pulling back over his skin until he felt only a cord twining around his neck.
His watch buzzed, and Naomi’s voice came through a voice text.
“Kat, Mom’s been trying to reach you, but you have your notifications silenced. Call her about the family dinner on Sunday, okay? Thanks, bye.”
That was impossible. He was inside a riftland, and his watch shouldn’t be working.
It didn’t matter. He had been captured by a killer frog, and he needed to focus on staying alive.
“You’re human.” The hopper lowered Kat to the ground and rearranged the grip on his shirt. The toe pads on his hands left gooey spots on Kat’s torn clothing. “Why are you wearing living leathers and working with a hellhound?”
The frog man tilted his head toward the stasis container, which continued to shudder violently from Lyall’s attempts to free himself.
