Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 66904 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 335(@200wpm)___ 268(@250wpm)___ 223(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 66904 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 335(@200wpm)___ 268(@250wpm)___ 223(@300wpm)
“We should blow something up!” she shouts on her way off the bridge.
Before she was abducted, Raine was very clear we were not to blow anything up. Even if we really wanted to. We are following that order. We don’t know what consequences would follow for the captains if we were to…
“They’re fucking on the roof of that bone house,” Ame says. Ame’s usually quiet. She mostly does surveillance and used to report directly to Raine, and nobody else. Some of us had never spoken to her at all until we got stuck on this saurian planet.
“They are not… oh, they are.”
I reach over and turn the screens off. “We shouldn’t watch that. Ame, don’t you dare turn the recording on.”
“It auto-records. I can’t stop it. Captain Sullivan instituted that policy years ago.”
“Then don’t you dare watch the recording. That’s private.”
“I would never,” Ame says.
“I would!” Sasha swings between hyper-focus, hyper-vigilance, and just general hyperactivity. She’s a genius, and she is also completely uncontrollable. Sullivan was good at keeping her busy, and Raine was good at keeping her under the thumb — but now there’s nobody to step into the gulf of leadership left by those two, and Sasha is like a chainsaw blade that came off an operating chainsaw. Actually, that’s a good description for a lot of the crew.
Nobody is coming to save us. So I decide to go down to the planet, to bring at least one person back to save us.
2 TIES THAT BIND
Lettie
I didn’t get free. I started to think about the filthy, unseemly, and downright humiliating things that happened to the captains, and I just went kind of limp in Shan’s arms as he finally hauled me up into a better grip.
“Give me a blindfold. I don’t want her finding her way back out here.”
“Good idea.”
Thick fabric is wound around my head, leaving my nose free, but only just. I am wrapped up like a mummy from the neck up, which leaves me with my other senses to attempt to compensate. Touch is the one that immediately comes to the fore. I feel the powerful rippling of the creature behind and beneath me, holding me in his outlaw arms. He’s not being rough, but he is being firm. He has me in a hold that will not allow me to escape, though it will allow me to wriggle. Every motion I make gives me more of a sense of his body.
His massive form makes me feel small, and that is a rarity. I generally feel as though I am taking up too much space, but I don’t even take up his entire lap. It has been a very long time since anybody made me feel this secure. There is something about being blindfolded that promotes relaxation too. I’ve seen this done to scared animals of all species, but I always figured people were too smart. Maybe not. Maybe I’m nothing more than a scared animal in the grip of an intelligent predator.
I draw in a deep breath, and I smell the unmistakeable scent of alien males all around me. There is something almost intoxicating about the pheromones they are emitting. They are like little keys of desire looking for a lock to slot into, and with every breath I take, I become increasingly saturated with them. My brain is being addled, and there’s no hope for clarity now. Between touch and scent, I am more captured than I was when Shan snatched me out of the bushes.
The journey is not long, or perhaps it is and I have no sense of time while huffing saurian pheromones like someone discovering a new addiction. I had wondered why Sullivan and Raine didn’t try harder to escape. Now I understand. These aliens generate sexual serotonin, if that’s even a thing. That’s what it feels like. It feels like every receptor in my mind is wide open and begging for more.
I am picked up and put over Shan’s shoulder. I feel his scaled shoulder pressing into my soft belly, the blood rushing to my head as I am carried what feels like down a deep and winding ramp. The air becomes stiller, and a little more stale. Sound stops traveling in the way it does outdoors and instead starts to bump against heavy things. We are underground. We are getting progressively more underground with every step.
I am guessing that I am being taken to Shan’s room. And I am also guessing that Shan’s room is underground, along with all the other outlaw saurians. The place has the feel of a subterranean frat house. Laughter echoes through passages as the story of how they captured a human starts to spread. I hear myself being described in crude terms.
“Thick and juicy human treat.”
“Fuckmeat,” another growls.
“Human holes,” another adds. They are riffing on a coarse theme, until I feel myself swing around fast with Shan’s spinning motion.