Page 78 of Fractured Souls

“You weren’t prepared,” Nythian said matter-of-factly. “Humans rarely are.” He leaned in, his body pressing against hers. She was strapped in. He wasn’t.

Everything about him was hyper-intense. He became eerily still as he broke her gaze and stared off into the shadows, and all of a sudden he felt completely alien; she couldn’t even begin to guess what was going through his mind.

But she wasn’t afraid.

Not one bit.

She closed her eyes and forced herself to relax.

“Tell me,” he urged softly.

The inside of the ship was silent save for the faint, almost imperceptible hum of machinery somewhere. She imagined the desolate but terrifyingly beautiful landscape rushing past beneath them.

Sand so red it was almost the hue of fresh blood. Cerulean lakes so startling they could have been dabs of paint on an artist’s canvas. Wild green jungles, viciously confined by the desert.

Spires of pure obsidian stone, rising arrogantly out of the red dust, appearing so alien, so sculptural, so unwelcome in that bizarre landscape that they might be unnatural things, built by some advanced civilization that died out eons ago.

The colors blurred in her mind, mixing together to become muddy brown and grey and black and eventually deep maroon… the color of dried blood.

The smell returned… that god-awful smell…

She entered a trancelike state.

“They reminded me of the worst kinds of criminals.” Her voice sounded hollow. “There are some cases you get that are so horrible you can’t sleep at night… and when you finally catch the ones that did it, there’s this look in their eyes. They aren’t angry, they aren’t remorseful, they aren’t even surprised. They’re only thinking of what they would do to you if they had you alone somewhere, powerless. They’re thinking of what they would do to bring you down, to humiliate you, to crush you into the dust beneath their boots… To make you feel fear. That’s what they get off on. We have all kinds of names for them on Earth, but they’re just labels that don’t really get to the heart of what it is that makes them so repulsive. Antisocial personality disorders. Sociopaths. Psychopaths… Just labels.” Her hands curled around the arms of the seat, her fingers digging into the strange hard-but-soft black material. “We all have a bit of that in us, I suppose, but some folks… there’s something not quite human about them, but they think they’re so far above you. To them, you’re nothing to them but a means to an end. That’s what those Kordolians reminded me of.”

Nythian didn’t say a word. Her right hand tingled, as if a thousand ice-footed vakkandik were crawling across it.

“They killed my officers while we were trying to defend ourselves. We fumbled in the dark and managed to get one of them off-guard. Killed him somehow; I hardly even remember how we did it. Then the other one came, and I thought I was the only one left. He wanted to make an example of me. For that? We were just defending ourselves.”

“What did he do?” When Nythian spoke again, she hardly recognized him. His low voice cut through her trance like a knife, cold and deadly and loaded with the promise of death.

How could this be the same man who had held her so gently, who had gone to such extraordinary lengths to earn her trust?

She was still back there in the forest, lost and fumbling in the dark.

“Alexis. What did he do to you? I need to know.”

“Why?”

“So I can give him the slow and excruciating death that he deserves.”

“Those things don’t matter anymore. He’s already dead.”

“How?”

“I killed him. I smashed his face in and slashed his throat.” A bead of sweat slid down the side of her face. Funny, it was cold in here, so why was she sweating? “I wasn’t fast enough. The asshole took too long to die.” It had only been a matter of seconds, but it felt like hours in her mind. “He managed to get some sort of snapshot of my bio-sig. Sent it out to his people in space. There’s a big motherfucking bounty on my head right now.”

“You killed him.” Now Nythian’s ice melted a fraction; he almost sounded proud of her. Huh. The things that could make a Kordolian proud.

“It wasn’t just me. Without the actions of my officers, I wouldn’t be here right now.”

“But you are here. That bounty is meaningless now.”

“You know, it’s strange. After that day, I lived in the shadow of death. Those Kordolians… faceless assholes somewhere in space… they sent bounty hunters after me. All sorts. Human, Ifkin, Avein… Must have cost them millions of credits. I’ll bet their job was made a thousand times harder because they wanted me alive. I was under a protection program by then. Credit to my guards; there were a few near-misses, a lot of deaths on our side, but they kept me breathing. The attacks didn’t stop, though. Eventually, the Agency put me in the too hard basket and shipped me off to Miridian-7.” A wry snort of disbelief escaped her. “The Kordolians never sent one of their own, though. Wouldn’t that have been simpler? I just don’t understand it. I’m nobody special. I’m not even high up in the Agency ranks. Why would they go to all that trouble?”

“When did this happen?” His aura was still silent and scary and oppressive, but she found his presence strangely comforting.

Her brain tried to convert human units of time into Universal. Without her Link, she struggled. Mental arithmetic had never been one of her strong points.

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