Page 66 of Saved By the Alien Hybrid
Her eyes fluttered shut. As his breath ghosted over her lips, a macabre vision played across her eyelids. It was a memory of her final moments on theLeto, staring through the glass of her pod at the man she loved in the pod across from her. Except now, where Felix had been gazing sadly at her, it was Rentir trapped, pressing his hands to the glass and calling to her in confusion.
She ducked her head and pulled away. “I can’t,” she said breathlessly, putting distance between them. “I’m sorry.”
“Why can’t you?” he asked in a pleading tone.
He’ll talk you out of it. Don’t.
She gritted her teeth. “It doesn’t matter.” She referenced her holomap and then set out again, trying to ignore the way her thoughts raced in the background.
“It matters to me,” he said, catching up to her. “There’s fear in your eyes when you pull away from me, Cordelia. Do you think of me as a monster? Is it me you fear?”
“No.” She looked up at him in exasperation. “Of course not. I’m afraidforyou.”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He caught her by the elbow, drawing her up short. “Cordelia, please. You can trust me with this, I swear to you.”
She chewed her bottom lip, at war with herself. God, she wanted to trust him. She wanted to bare it all and let him talk her out of the blame she knew she shouldn’t be carrying and yet couldn’t lay down. It felt faithless to even consider it—both to him and to Felix.
Taking a deep breath, unsure what she was about to say, she opened her mouth to speak.
A distant rumble made them both freeze. The boughs overhead danced wildly in a rush of sound as a dropship soaredby overhead, briefly casting them in shadow. They looked at each other for a moment, then turned and ran for the bike.
CHAPTER 29
Rentir flew aslow as he dared through the forest, darting between tree trunks and beneath sprawling boughs as Cordelia clutched him. He had his tail wound tightly around her like a safety belt.
The dropship was just ahead of them somewhere, traveling with a surety that implied they had the location of another female.
What were they doing? They hadn’t set foot on Yulaira since the rebellion, and now suddenly it was worth the risk to claim these females?
Thalen proposed that they were waiting them out rather than trying to reclaim their facilities with the meager skeleton crew they had. In the fifty-seven years they’d been operating, there had never been any sign of rebellion, and so the Aurillon had not seen fit to keep sending large squadrons to Yulaira to oversee the operation. They’d been left with a few dozen auretian guards and just as many soft-handed, profit-minded overseers. Many of them were dead now, killed by their hubris.
Those who remained had no way to call for help. Fendar worked tirelessly to disrupt any attempt at long-range communication, never leaving his room full of holoscreens—not even to sleep, lest he miss an alarm. That meant the only recourse for the auretians remaining on theGidalanwas to bide their time and wait for the freightliner that would come to collect a load of teserium that had never been mined. They’d been planning for that eventuality, finding ways to barricade themselves in and setting the mines with charges that could blow the entire haul to rubble if it came to that.
In all that time, the most the crew of theGidalanhad done was make their orbital strikes and interfere with local communications. The Aurillon saw themselves as too valuable to be fodder for angry hybrids. Yet now, they were willing to risk themselves to kidnap the human women. Why?
Cordelia patted his thigh, pointing at something off to his left. The dropship—they were hovering over a small lake. Their thrusters were boiling the water below, creating a curtain of steam that partially obscured them.
Rentir slowed and set the bike down behind the expansive trunk of an ancient tree. Cordelia slid off the bike with graceful movements, slinking closer to the lake one tree at a time. He followed her as she ducked behind a bush, palming his blaster with his right hand and unsheathing his knife with the left.
“Careful,” he murmured into her ear.
She shivered, looking back at him with that same simmering look she’d had just before she’d pulled away from his kiss. She shook herself, turning back toward the dropship.
“What the hell are they doing?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” he said, holding back the frond of a fern to see better. “It almost seems like they’re scanning the water for something. But why…”
Something dark breached the surface. It wasn’t until Cordelia gasped that he realized what he was looking at. A human female, looking up out of the water with dark eyes. Halfher hair was plastered against her face, the rest billowing around her in the water.
“It’s Sophia,” Cordelia said, gripping his arm. “We have to help her.”
Sophia was slowly drifting toward shore, her eyes locked on the dropship. It turned suddenly, so the open door was facing her.
“There!” one of the males inside called, pointing at her. The male beside him dove in, surfacing quickly and cutting through the water with sure strokes.
