He clips the chain onto the collar, and I am thoroughly trapped.
“Wait here,” he says. “I have some business to attend to. This room has cameras all over it, so you will be observed if you try to do something stupid, and of course, punished.”
“Of course,” I reply.
He smiles and leaves me to my own devices.
I am sure this is a test. He is not going because he has something else to do. He is obviously going because he wants to see what I do next. He wants to see if I will panic, or if I will test the connection of the collar to my neck, or something else.
I can feel his alien eyes on me through the cameras located all through this room. I flick my middle finger toward the ceiling, and then I stand up. I am shaky. Soup’s not enough to restore the hunger I've been experiencing. The murketeers decided not to feed me during my journey. They thought it would make me easier to handle, but it almost killed me.
Submission to Warden’s authority is all I’ve got. I need him to take care of me and make me strong enough to escape him. Just a few days. That’s all I will need. In a few days I’ll have my strength back. I will know this ship. I will know Warden’s weaknesses. And I’ll be free.
It all starts with this first step up from the ground. He is right about one thing. Humans do need to crawl before we can walk. But once we learn to walk, it’s not that long until we find a way to fly. I’ll be flying out of here, and soon. I just have to crawl first.
The chain is long enough to allow me to lie down and stand up and walk a few paces from one side of the bed to the other. It is also theoretically long enough to lie on the bed itself. I decide to sit on the end of the bed. I am sure he will put me on this bed at some point.
I never expected to escape on the first day. My life is a series of escapes, one after the other, but they are never instant and they are never easy. I sit down and I observe. He has a communications panel in this room. Something which has the capacity to hail off-ship frequencies. They can get all the way to the IHPZ. That could be useful.
I am a part of something bigger. My crimes were never committed alone. If I can get word out, I might be able to be rescued. Especially if I can get a shuttle to meet them somewhere.
The plan is already coming together. The IHPZ was impossible to escape from. To me this ship is practically a wet paper bag. For all intents and purposes, I’ve already escaped.
“Comfortable?”
He returns through the sliding door which opens with an efficient hiss. I wonder how it is opened. Does it open for any solid object of the right height, or is it calibrated to his body somehow?
“Very,” I say. I am starting to feel more like myself.
“I’m going to unchain you and let you use the bathing room. Alone.”
“I thought I would have to earn that privilege?”
“You have.”
“Really? How?”
“By doing as I said, by waiting for me.”
“That was easy.”
“Obeying me will rarely be hard, pet. Most of the problems you have will be in overcoming your resistance to obedience.” He unchains me and gestures toward the fogged glass enclosure, a universal cipher for ‘bathroom’.
This is more freedom, and more luxury than I have ever experienced in captivity. Maybe he’s going to be soft. The scythkin all have their own cultures, their own little clutches hatched in the wild. There is no single scythkin culture. They share brutality and aggression, genetic similarities which carry across the species and make them act more or less the same. But not precisely the same.
Maybe I’ve gotten lucky.
There’s a water-based shower. That’s not common for scythkin either. When you’re made of blades, you don’t like getting wet. This is for me. This room has been modified for me. Made for me.
I wonder if he is one of those scythkin obsessives who worships humans. There are a lot of them. It’s not a real love. It can’t be. It’s just a fixation. Something stuck in their DNA from a long time ago.
The water is hot enough to feel good, not hot enough to burn. The pressure is intense, but not hard enough to hurt. The scythkin out there, Mr Silver and his green eyes, he knows how to please a human.
I wonder if he knows how to break one too.
I clean myself for the first time in months. Prior to this, I'd been reduced to occasionally mopping myself down with wet rags. My capture has been an unpleasant process. And my thirst for freedom is yet to be slaked, but it will be. Apparently, it will be a clean getaway too. Pun intended.
“Feel better?”
He is waiting for me outside the shower.
“What do you want to wear?” he asks.
“I don’t care.”
“My experience of human women is that they very much care how they are clothed. Either you are a rare exception, or you are being coy.”
“I’m not coy. If you want to make me some clothes, I’ll take leather pants, and…”
BAM! BAM! BAM!
There’s a sudden slamming at the door. A heavy fist and the scraping of harsh metal on metal. Someone is knocking, if that is the word for it. It sounds as though whoever is outside is trying to tear their way in, though for all I know, that is how this scythkin brood moves around their ship.
“LET ME IN, LITTLE PIGGIES!”
“What the fuck is that…”
He presses a finger to my lips, and lifts one to his own. “It would be better if you were quiet, human. What lies outside that door would happily destroy you if it knew you were here. Go into the bathroom, and be quiet.”
Warden
I answer the door, which is in the process of being shredded by furious scythkin claws. It makes a horrendous screeching sound as it opens, broken metal shearing off in the door mechanism. This is going to take some repairing. I hope Silver has the sense to stay hidden.
“What did you do?” He hisses the words without thought for rank or propriety. Scizzor has always been the black sheep of the clutch. Technically he is not entirely of the clutch. I adopted him soon after we hatched instead of destroying him and the female he hatched with. Scizzor and Saya have always been part of us, but not part of us at the same time.
“This is not a good time, Scizzor.”
“Tusk is telling me that there’s a human here. A terrorist.”
“Is he? Why is he doing that?”
I’m asking the questions more to myself than to Scizzor.
I told Tusk to keep this quiet. Scizzor is not ready to face a human, let alone one who committed crimes against our species. His thirst for vengeance is strong.
“I can smell her,” he declares.
“Fine. Yes. There is a human in my custody, but she is not here to be murdered by you. She is here to serve her sentence.”
“Was she a member of the Q’Ren?”
There is no point lying to him. I imagine he already knows the truth, and the truth is enough to make him very angry indeed.
“Yes.”
“She deserves to die.”
“Are we in the business of deciding who deserves to live or die?”
“No. We are in the business of slaying those who get in our way. And we are in the business of destroying our enemies. We should torture this one. Break off her limbs and beat her with them…”
“No.”