I lean my face close to his.
“Still breathing,” he mutters. “Or were you hoping to kiss me before I died?”
I jerk away, my face coloring. “I was trying to see if it was worth wasting my time saving your useless life,” I snap.
His eyes are still closed, but the hint of a smile plays around his mouth. He may look worse than he ever has, but at least he’s regained consciousness.
“Rest now ’cause soon you’ll be drinking this water like your life depends on it.”
Because it does.
He ignores that, falling back to sleep, but his breath is shallow and uneven. It hitches occasionally, and I find myself listening for him to take the next breath, and the next.
I force myself to back away and get to work making a fire. It takes a few trips to find the right kind of wood, and I mentally high-five myself for buying the expensive fire-starting coils I found in the marketplace.
Within about half an hour, I have the water boiling, and I put some clean water aside for me to drink later. Then I drop the roots of the zebra plant into the rest of the water to let it steep. The roots are a dark red, and they stain the water until it looks like blood.
Gross.
I check on the commander again. He’s shivering, but his forehead is damp with sweat.
Fever.
I can’t wait any longer.
I take the water off the fire, dipping a cup into it. It feels like it takes forever for it to cool down enough to drink, but as soon as it’s no longer scalding, I shove one of the commander’s saddlebags beneath his head so he can sit up.
“Korzyn?”
No reply.
Roaring fills my ears.
“You don’t get to check out after I’ve gone to so much effort to keep you alive,” I snap. “Open your damn eyes.”
I cajole. I whine. I attempt to pour some of the water down his throat, but he starts choking.
“Come on, Korzyn. Please.”
He cracks open his eyes, and they’re so red they match the color of the water.
“Never…thought I’d hear…you say…please. Must…be…dying.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re not dying. Now hurry up and drink this.”
I make him drink most of the water. He attempts to stop, and I threaten to pour it over his head.
He glowers at me, but his color is slightly better when we finish. Is his breathing more even as he closes his eyes?
I’m exhausted. I feed the mishua, drink some of the clean water I put aside, and curl up next to the commander, watching his chest rise and fall.
Chapter Five
Sarissa
The aliens jeer at us, poking their sticks through the bars. We fight over space as we all attempt to flatten ourselves against the wall, but we know how this ends.
We’ve been on this ship for days, and it appears our captors are bored because they’ve decided we’re their entertainment.
“Dance, human, dance!”
Blaire bares her teeth. “Fuck you.”
This makes one of the purple aliens incensed. He slams his palm print on the screen by the door as if ready to come into the cage and drag her out.
I step to the front of the group. If he comes in this cage, I’ll rip out his throat with my bare hands. From the expression on some of the other women’s faces, they’re thinking the exact same thing as me.
One of the other aliens pulls him away from the palm screen.
The first alien lashes out. He reaches his stick between the bars, catching Kelly in the shoulder. The expression on his face is savage as she screams, falling to the ground with a smell like burning hair. The other aliens pull him away, but the damage has been done. I slump to my knees, my brain going blank as I stare at the beautiful young life that has just been snuffed out for no reason at all.
The aliens are fighting amongst themselves, with one of them screaming and waving his hands at the bastard who just killed Kelly. A door opens, and all the other aliens go silent as the one who is clearly the leader walks down the steps. He takes one look at Kelly lying dead in our cage, and he gestures at the alien next to the one who killed her. I’m so numb I can’t even feel happy when the alien who killed Kelly is killed in front of us as well. I turn my back on all of them as women erupt into sobs around me.
The aliens leave us alone with Kelly’s body. One of the women next to me looks like she must only be sixteen or seventeen. She curls up into a ball on the floor, rocking herself as she whispers something under her breath over and over again. I lean closer.
“We’re going to die, we’re going to die, we’re going to die.”
My heart breaks for her. I was seventeen once. And while life wasn’t good, it certainly wasn’t this hell.
“Hey there, what’s your name?”
She glances at me, still repeating her words on a loop. “Winter,” she says. “We’re all going to die.”
I survey the cage, the pale faces, the trauma clear in everyone’s eyes. And I get to my feet.
“Listen up,” I say. “What just happened to Kelly should never have happened. She deserved to live. We all deserve to live. We need to play this smart. They want us to dance? We’ll do a fucking jig if that’s what it takes. We are going to get out of here alive, and when we do, we are going to make the Grivath pay for everything they’ve done to us. And we’re not going to stop there. We’re going after these purple bastards. Humans are no longer going to be sitting ducks. They may have taken us unaware, but I promise you, if we work together, this will be just another shitty memory we bury under our beds with all the others.”
“And how, exactly, are we going to do that?” a voice pipes up.
“We need to make plans.
