Page 1 of Consume
Chapter One
Titanium bit into myback, shivering cold through my clothes until my muscles ached. The ship must’ve inhaled deep space’s frigid temperature for an eternity. That, or the room I currently lay sprawled in held too many frightening memories for it to ever be warm again.
Not just my memories, but those that resided inside the minds of the hundreds of dead aliens who lurked inside me. Pushing against my skin. Waiting for me to let them out.
If only I knew how.
I stared up at the walls and ceiling of the Vicious room on theViciousspaceship, both of which had earned their name a hundred times over. My clasped hands rested on my stomach, still flat, but from the old medical texts in the infirmary, that would change in about a month or so. The life growing inside me while cocooned in so much ghostly death weighed heavily on my mind. I prayed to Feozva that the spirits inside me wouldn’t hurt her—I’d already decided my baby was a girl—whether intentionally or accidentally. They might do to her what they were doing to me—changing me trait by trait, scale by scale, into one of them. Not a ghost. But not quite human either.
“Absidy,” a low voice said from the doorway.
I dragged my gaze away from the walls and ceiling since that was where every answer I sought to find was written. Well, almost every answer. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t read more than just a few flashes of letters. When I stared at the Saelis writing straight on, it looked like claw marks scratching the passage of time in long, neat rows. It was more than that though. I just didn’t know what.
Pop stood in the doorway, his hand on the metal frame, his hesitation eating up the space between us. He was making himself look at me, what was left of his younger daughter, and I knew it hurt him to see me like this. But as hard as he tried not to let that show, acting as if my changed appearance didn’t matter, the truth was etched as deep as the lines on his face.
“Poh has found something she thinks you’ll want to see,” he said.
I hauled myself up into a sitting position, then propped my arm on the floor to push myself the rest of the way up. My long, yellowed claws scraped the titanium, the horrible screech dragging a shiver down my back. They needed another trim.
Pop stepped into the room and offered me a hand. “Any dizzy spells?”
Once I was on my feet, I shook my head. Since my sister, Ellison, had disappeared from our lives again, he’d taken on the role of Dr. Jones in an unofficial, fatherly sort of way. His was much less annoying, and despite the circumstances, more than a little thrilled about my pregnancy.
“How’s the morning sickness?” he asked.
I squeezed his hand, careful of my claws. “Geyser-filled.”
“Your mom had terrible morning sickness with you,” he said, leading me out of the Vicious room. “Even sounds set her off, especially the sound of my voice, she’d say. I’m about 66 percent sure she was joking.”
I chuckled, though I’d heard this story a hundred times before. Pop’s idea of doctoring me was to assure me I was normal when we both knew I was anything but. Still, it got him to talk about Mom, a topic he’d skated wide circles around since she’d died in a fire on the planet Wix. My memories of her were spotty but warm, and I always wondered what she’d be like if she were alive. What she might think of me now.
Inside the dining room, faint traces of grilled hapnea breasts still lingered from lunch, but the hard expression on Poh’s albino face rolled my stomach in a different direction than the smell. Something was wrong.
Twenty thousandthings were wrong, and one of them compelled me to turn right, away from Poh. I wanted to tap an imperfection on the wall with my index finger, then one of Esmerelda the Space Vixen’s nipples on the torn poster, the crack between the double doors that led to the kitchen, the telecom.Tap, tap, tap, tap. Just like Doctor Daryl had before I summoned his ghost inside of me. But I willed the compulsion away.
If I ever laughed again, I was sure I would let out a nasally squeal like Nesbit, the ship’s old engineer, whose spirit was also inside me. I was hardly me anymore—a ghost magnet, fugitive, suspected murderer, and bioterrorist—both inside and out.
“What’s wrong?” I demanded, and it sounded like a mix of me and a Saelis hiss.
Crispin, a pilot we’d kidnapped and now didn’t know what to do with since he knew too much, winced from his spot at the table/gurney. He’d trimmed his scraggly beard and today wore his long, dark hair in a ponytail to better reveal the fading drug-filled haze from his brown eyes, which were almost always aimed at Poh.
She clenched her fangs together, the twin gray-scaled streaks cutting down the center of her white face wrinkling between her eyebrows. “I need to show you a video.” She pointed her Mind-I, a small black plastic device usually implanted inside people’s heads and caused more trouble than they were worth, at the wall behind her.
Oh good. More videos. I’d starred in two of them myself that had gone viral just a month ago, one spun with lies and the other about my very real nightmare on this ship. The lies and the nightmares were far from over.
“This one doesn’t have you in it,” Pop said as if reading my mind. He guided me into a chair across from Crispin and sat next to me.
“This was taken at a hospital on Wix.” Poh shifted closer to the screen, her chunky ass-kicker boots squeaking on the titanium floor.
An overhead shot of a long hallway appeared on the wall behind her. People bustled about, some dressed in white doctor smocks like Ellison’s. Poh sped up the video until a large, dark frame blotted out half of the hospital shot. It lumbered up the hallway, and Poh paused the video and zoomed in.
“Who does that look like to you?” she asked, her yellow eyes sharp.
I squinted at the screen. The zooming feature had blurred the picture, but the movements had seemed familiar. The shot had paused when the person had glanced left, and most of the profile was visible. A stocking cap like Pop’s, black sunglasses, dark, puffy coat... I stood, blinking at the shape of the nose, the curve of the mouth and jaw.
“Captain Glenn,” I breathed.
Crispin glanced over at me. “Taken two days ago. See the time stamp in the corner?”
