Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 62128 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 311(@200wpm)___ 249(@250wpm)___ 207(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 62128 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 311(@200wpm)___ 249(@250wpm)___ 207(@300wpm)
“Human.”
Someone hisses the word at me.
I turn to the saurian in the next cell. He’s a big, burly, gray creature with a massive neck flare and a horn in the middle of his forehead. His eyes are a mossy green, and he is dressed in what I can only describe as scraps of clothing intermingled with bandages. Whatever happened to him before he got here, it had to have been rough.
“Yes?”
“Let me out.” He lumbers forward, gripping the bars with hands that have cracked knuckles even through the scales, and dried blood both across the backs of them and under his long, claw-like nails.
This is not the sort of guy you want to be alone with overnight in a dark prison. This is the sort of guy that makes every gut instinct you ever had scream out at once. But I’m also very short on allies right now, so I don’t have the luxury of ignoring him.
“I don’t know how I’d do that. I don’t even know how I’m going to get out of here. There’s that big door over there. That looks heavy and very locked.”
“How did you get out?”
“I squeezed out.”
He nods briefly. “What’s your name, human?”
“Raine.”
“Raine,” he repeats it in deep, rumbling terms, as if committing it to memory. When he looks back at me, I see raw intellect behind his eyes. It would be easy to miss, given the way he looks like an incarnation of the worst kind of monster. “How did you get to this planet?”
“Came to rescue my idiot captain. Ex-captain,” I correct myself quickly.
He nods, his big horn making an intimidating arc through the air. “The one who crashed out by the bar.”
“Yes. I guess. So everybody knows about us?”
“Not a lot of aliens tolerated to be on this planet,” he says. “Even fewer of them end up the alpha’s resident fuck-mate.”
He’s speaking crudely, but I’m used to crude. If you let yourself be distracted by someone’s rudeness and brutish speech, you can miss a lot. This guy is clearly intelligent, and powerful. I get the impression he could break out of this jail just as easily as I can if he wanted to.
“There’s going to be a shift change in the guard,” he says. “In about three minutes. You’re going to want to be behind that door over there. Once they open it and come through, you’ll be able to slip through.”
“Thank you. What can I do for you?”
I know he’s not helping me for no reason. This information is going to come with a price tag, and I want to know what it is.
He reaches into a pocket in his pants, and hands me a thick piece of card.
“When you get out there, drop this note in the red box opposite the jail. That’s all you need to do.”
“Is it like a post box or something?”
He smiles, and I see sharp teeth, a couple of them broken, but all in all still a devastatingly frightening sight. There’s something about this character I have only encountered a few times in my life. He has the demeanor of a truly dangerous being.
“Or something,” he says. “Best not to ask too many questions. Let’s just do this little favor for each other, and call it there, eh?”
He speaks differently than the other saurians do. Avel and Thorn and the others I’ve met so far have a particular kind of dialect which I understand easily. It’s basically a broad, round, easy to understand way of speaking, which means their saurian anatomy makes the words gruffer and deeper and more gravelly than they sound out of my mouth. This guy, though, he has a harder accent, clipped and rough. Put together with his appearance, I’m going to guess that this is the kind of accent that saurians from the wrong side of whatever passes for tracks have.
I’m curious about him and about the rest of society. I wasn’t, up until this moment. I’m realizing that this is a socially complex world, and I’m already part of it, whether I like it or not.
“What’s your name?”
“Best you don’t know that,” he says. “Best you don’t ask any questions.”
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll read the note, then?”
“You wouldn’t make heads or tails of it, I reckon,” he chuckles. “Look at it if you like. Can’t say I care. Just get it in the box, alright?”
I nod.
I’m not sure what I’ll do once I escape. Try to make contact with the ship, I guess. Or more to the point, hope they’ve been tracking me and are ready to get me. It’s a helpless feeling, being stuck on this planet of massive predators. I’m used to being on the wrong side of the law, so I shouldn’t give a damn what Avel thinks — but I do. He’s gotten under my skin somehow. He’s fucked with my head.