Total pages in book: 60
Estimated words: 56021 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 280(@200wpm)___ 224(@250wpm)___ 187(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 56021 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 280(@200wpm)___ 224(@250wpm)___ 187(@300wpm)
“NO!”
She shouts the word suddenly and lifts the gun back to me. Her finger is curled around the trigger. No trigger discipline. No discipline of any kind at all. This young woman is showing all the signs of having been let run amok.
“How long has it been since you saw Shan?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she repeats. “This isn’t about Shan. It’s not about men at all. It’s about me, and what you did to me. It’s about what you thought you had the right to do.”
“I took you to the wilds and left you there to survive, or not. You did. Being angry at me now doesn’t make sense. Whatever you’re angry about, I don’t think it’s something I did.”
“You made me a mother,” she says, twisting her face up on that last word.
“I didn’t do that. Shan made you a mother. He’s the one who bred you.”
“It would never have happened if you hadn’t been trying to shoot the ship down, if you hadn’t been trying to get a human to see if we could be bred. I was your experiment. Are you happy with the results?”
As she asks the question, she pulls the trigger. A bolt of deadly energy shoots toward me, catching me in the left shoulder. It is like being punched, apart from the bit where I start to bleed from the not quite entirely self-cauterized wound she just inflicted.
“I’m going to make you suffer like I did,” she says. “I’m going to take you away, and leave you on a distant planet, far from anyone you know or love. I’m going to do to you what we tried to do to Captain Sullivan. Full circle. Happy ending. Happily ever after.”
The wound hurts, of course. That’s what wounds do. Her threats don’t scare me as much as she probably intends them to, because she has effectively just told me she is going to keep me alive. If she wanted me dead, I’d have taken an energy bolt to the head.
“What do you think of that?” She prompts me with the question, and I realize she wants a reaction. It’s not enough to hurt me for revenge. She wants to savor every moment of it. She wants to hear my anticipatory fear.
She is a twisted creature.
“Tell me, or I will shoot you again. I will shoot you again anyway, of course, but I’ll shoot you sooner. And more. There are parts of your anatomy you won’t be able to pretend don’t hurt.”
At this point, I’m starting to think it might have been smart to bring someone with me. I could really use the back up.
Allie
Sullivan got me packed into Wrath’s shuttle with some other supplies. It was honestly all far too easy. He didn’t suspect for a second that I would sneak onto the shuttle after he told me not to.
I was thinking about revealing myself on the way up, but I decided not to. Instead, I stayed hidden then followed Wrath as he started wandering the ship. The shuttle bay to bridge passage is actually very intuitive, so it turns out.
While Lettie paces back and forth, and Wrath asks where her baby is, I sneak out the other side of the door and sidle down the hall. Having cleaned this ship for years, I have an intimate knowledge of all the back passages and secret paths on this ship.
I know where she will have put Shan. There’s really only one secure place on the Mare, and that’s the brig.
There’s nobody else on the ship. Not even the engineers who should be here. The Mare had felt increasingly empty for an extended period of time. Now it feels like a ghost ship. Not even the delighted giggle of a baby who doesn’t know it is at the center of a civilization-wide crisis.
I find them all in the brig, locked away behind force-field shielded bars. I have no idea how Lettie managed to get them down here, but I’m impressed. She might be insane, but she’s damn efficient. Maybe she does deserve to be captain. Maybe being captain is about getting things done, no matter what those things specifically are.
“Allie!” Casey hisses. “Over here!”
Casey and Cadence are in the same unit together. Shan and his baby are in the one next to it.
The kid is cute. It is green, like its father, with a yellow belly. It has brown eyes like Lettie, and the universe’s most adorable mohawk. It looks more human than saurians do, but much more saurian than humans do. It has chubby little hands which it is using to hold onto its father’s horns.
It’s a cute baby. I don’t know it’s name. I don’t know that it has a name. I don’t really talk to anybody since Lettie declared herself captain, so it probably does have a name of some kind.