Page 36 of Consume
Josh put his arm around her and peered at me from behind his dark curls. “What makes you so sure you can reason with the Saelises? They’ve waited over two hundred years to finish the Black War. That’s a long time to hold that amount of rage, and it won’t just go away if you tell them to please turn around and forget everything that happened.”
“I still have the Saelis female ghosts inside me,” I explained. “There are answers written in the Vicious room where they were kept that I feel I’m close to figuring out. Maybe the ghosts and the writing will help me convince the Saelises somehow. Poh said that when I speak without iron, I am speaking in Saelis.”
“Where is Poh?” Crispin muttered, looking around.
“I can make them see that I’m trying to help their females cross to the other side, but...” I sighed and rubbed my temples. “But that humans only use 10 percent of their brains and I’m having a hard time figuring it all out.”
“That’s a myth, by the way,” Franco piped up.
“That I can’t figure it all out?”
“No, that humans only use 10 percent of their brains. We use more than that.”
Moon gave him a side-eyed glare. “You’re not helping.”
“Right. Sorry.” He smiled at her, and she seemed to thaw some. “Can you show us a picture of their ship with your Mind-I?”
Moon retrieved the Mind-I from her pocket, powered it on, and aimed it at the wall above the captain’s chair. Soon, a massive ship appeared, its shape blotting out the starscape behind it. It looked old but menacing, its color as black as male Saelis scales, the front of it pointed like a Saelis snout. At the bottom of the screen, a caption read March 8, 2675, the date Earth was destroyed.
I shivered and looked away, unable to stand the thought of stepping foot on that ship, or any of their ships. It terrified me, and I still had no idea what I would do exactly to stop them. How do you reason with a species that hates yours so much, they’d annihilate an entire planet and all its inhabitants?
“Can you make it 3-D?” Franco asked.
“Lemme fiddle with it,” Moon mumbled.
“What are you looking for, Franco?” Pop asked.
Franco tapped his chin as he studied the picture. “A way on that ship.”
“You won’t be able to fly right up to them close enough to wave, that’s for sure,” Josh said. “Not if their weapons are strong enough to blow up planets. You’ll need stealth.”
Ellison looked at him, a small, grateful smile on her mouth, obviously noting the “you’ll,” not “we’ll.” Good. For her sake, I didn’t want him to come.
With a hard flick of Moon’s thumb on the Mind-I, a three dimensional image of the Saelis ship erupted throughout the room. It shadowed its hard, dark edges over everyone’s faces and smothered out most of the overhead light.
Everyone went quiet as we stared, as if we were already trapped inside the ship.
“If there is a way to board,” Moon began softly, “where will you hide?”
I flicked my gaze up to the air vent on theVicious’s wall that warped the upper side of the Saelises’ ship. A spider-legged doppelganger had scurried through it only a month ago, trying to murder us all but only succeeding with Randolph. Who knew how long it had been lurking there, waiting to strike.
“The air vents,” I said. “Their oxygen needs can’t be all that different than ours because they terraformed The Black and lived there alongside humans.”
“What about their sense of smell?” Pop asked. “Or any of their other senses that could detect you? How’s their hearing? I’m afraid I need a lot more information before you just...” He waved his hands in the air and then bowed his head.
“All great questions,” I said gently. “We need answers. But as we’ve seen today, we’re running out of time. Speed is the most important thing we need to worry about.”
Pop drilled me with a disapproving look. “Hardly, Absidy.”
“You’re right.” I crossed toward him and bent to kiss his cheek. “It’s one of many most importants.”
“You being the highest,” Mase said from behind me. “If we lose you... IfIlose you...” He shook his head, his expression twisting with pure torture. “Nothing else matters, not even the end of the world.”
“Agreed,” Captain Glenn said. “I don’t follow religion as deeply as our resident assassin, but I agree with Poh, wherever she is. There are a great many things I don’t understand in this universe, but what I do know, deep down, is that this tremendous responsibility to save humanity falls on Absidy. Who and what you are... What you’ve done for this ship. You are connected to all of this, and for that I’m sorry, but...but I will do everything in my power to help you succeed.”
I simply nodded since no words could sum up the amount of gratitude I felt for him—or the absolute terror he’d inflicted.
Mase came up behind me and palmed my lower back, his next exhale caressing my ear. “I will do everything, too, and more. Always.”
