Page 22 of Taken By the Alien Killer
He says nothing. His jaw works once. The scar doesn’t move.
I lower my hand. My eyes burn. Not tearful-pretty. Abrasive, like grit got under the lids, like the hoverlounge glitter decided to exact a price. I think of all the things I could say that wouldignite the room and calcify the rest of my life—the cruel ones, the desperate ones—and I am not brave enough to say any of them. Or maybe I am exactly brave enough to say none.
“I won’t bother you,” I add, which is ridiculous because he is paid to be bothered by me, because my existence is his itinerary. I hear Sneed in that sentence and hate it.
I take a step back, then another, then turn before my face finishes losing the fight. The door recognizes me and obliges, opening on a breath of cooler air that smells like stone and empty halls and my mother’s preferred floral blend diluted to almost nothing. Behind me, the room hums, the rig waits, Rayek doesn’t speak.
I leave, eyes burning.
CHAPTER 6
RAYEK
The upper terrace arena sits where the cliff wind can get teeth into you. Up here the basalt warms by day and sweats it off at night, and the air always carries a salt edge from the sea. I like it because the house sounds fade—servant bells, silverware, polite applause—and the only thing left is breath and impact. I key the grid, and the floor lines wake in a faint hex pattern. The drone lockers hiss open along the south wall and spill light like knives. Four spheres float out, matte black with pinprick optics, humming at that irritant frequency that makes the hair along my horns bristle.
“Program six,” I tell the rack. “Aggression plus twenty. Randomization high.”
The arena answers with a chirp and releases two more. Six is enough noise to drown thought.
I move.
First contact is always a test. They flicker wide to bracket me; one drops low to nip at my knees while another fakes the high strike. I give them the knee and feed the fake a palm heel that crunches internal gyros and sends it skittering, sparking blue. The scent of hot plastic jumps into my mouth. The others adjust. Good. Make me earn it.
I force my breath to the cadence we learned when the world was only orders and enemies—four in, hold, six out. Discipline has a shape; if I wear it, maybe it will wear me back. My body obeys better than my head. Hips turn, shoulders stack, weight moves in clean lines. I let the drones teach me speed and answer with economy. My claws catch rubberized shell and leave marks I’m not supposed to be able to leave. The grid hum deepens. The wind pushes across exposed skin, cool and honest.
But the mind is a rebel organ.
It slides in images wherever it finds a seam: green eyes under blacklight, glitter dust along a collarbone, the last two words she said to me in a voice that had cut itself down to the metal—Do you hate me?The look on her face when I stepped back. How soft a step can sound like the closing of a door.
I tighten my jaw until the hinge complains and drive a knee through a drone’s projected sternum hard enough to crack its casing. It shrieks, tries to recover, fails, and floats into the wall to sulk. Four remain and get cocky. They coordinate—two feint, two real—and for a breath I let them press so I can feel the pressure where it belongs, not in my ribs but on the body. I ride the pattern, break the right flank, roll under the left, come up inside the arc with an elbow that snaps off a sensor stalk. The hum stutters and resets. Sweat stings the cut in my lip from last night’s holo-spar. I taste iron and old anger.
I’m trying to remember what it felt like before I heard her say my name in the dark hall. Before the Baron laid the map of his hopes between us like we were both supposed to salute it. Before the gardens and their engineered light made her skin look like something you weren’t meant to touch and then dared you to. Before the smell of her sank into the Bishop piece on my nightstand so deep I can’t clean it off. Before I practiced sayingMy Ladyuntil it stopped sounding like a lie.
Discipline is supposed to be a tether. I make it a chain.
I call for two more drones because pain has always helped me think. They oblige like eager dogs and immediately try a wedge formation that would be smart if I were slow. I am not slow. I cut the point, fold the wedge, hop the sweep, and punish them for believing in geometry more than in hunger. The first and second break clean with the kind of crack that satisfies and the smell of fried circuits. The third gets cute and shoots a shock line I didn’t see. It bites the meat below my ribs and rides the scar there like it knows its history. The world jumps white. For a beat I am back under a sky on fire, sound full of screaming metal, orders coming too late to save anyone worth saving. I grunt, plant, rip the line with my hands, and throw the stunned drone into the wall so hard it sticks, drooping. The tremor in my hands does not stop when the current does.
I breathe. Four in. Hold. Six out. The wind brings me the smell of warm stone and cypress and something faintly floral the house insists on piping even out here, as if the scent of gentility can keep blood off the tiles.
The last two drones circle like they’ve learned humility. They haven’t. I bait a high kick, let one take my leg, ride the collision, and crush it between knee and forearm until it squeals surrender. The sixth freezes, as if stupidity is a survival tactic. I stalk it, because that’s what a vakutan always wants, and then I stop because that part is not allowed to run the rest of me anymore.
“Hold,” I say, and the last drone obeys. It hums nervously, optics bright, caught bird in a room that suddenly remembers it has windows. I wipe sweat from my brow with the back of my wrist. The salt stings the thin skin near my left horn ridge where the scar drags. The pulse in my throat finally slows.
It doesn’t last.
Her voice slides under the noise and lays itself along a nerve—low, frayed, too brave for its own good. Her eyes asking me totell a lie she could live with or a truth she could bleed out. The way she reached—just the forearm, just the heat—and how every discipline I own screameddon’tand my body answeredmove.She doesn’t know what she does to my honor, and I don’t know what to do with the knowing that she doesn’t.
“End program,” I tell the grid.
The hexes dim. The drone drops into its cradle like a relieved child. The arena goes back to being a ring on a roof where a man pretends he is only a blade and not the hand that shakes. I roll my shoulders and the ache in my back settles into something familiar. I can carry familiar. I always have.
Footsteps scrape at the stair. Not a guard’s cadence. Not hers. Light, careful, counting rhythm like metronome ticks. If politeness had a sound, it would walk like that.
“Commander Rayek,” Sneed says from the top step, voice pitched to be heard and not accuse. He arrives as if he’s been carried on a tray, immaculate in a dusk-colored coat that never holds dust. The wind fails to move his lapels. Even his pupils seem to decline draft.
“Seneschal,” I answer. I reach for a towel and scrub slow over my face and shoulders because I need the extra second.
He catalogs the broken drones with a glance that feels like a ledger balancing itself. “I see the equipment has enjoyed your company.” He tucks his slate under one arm as if to give the moment privacy, which means he is about to do the opposite. “Might I have a moment? It concerns the household.”
