Alluvial Valos of Sonhadra Book 1 Read online

  And Preta...Her… She looks…

  Healthy.

  She looks fed. Not that greenish just-got-injected-with-serum-and-I’m-about-to-hurl ‘fed’—she looks even better now than the day I first saw her, this must be what she looked like before the research team took an interest in her.

  Initially, I’d been relieved as hell when I’d gotten the transfer from the men’s levels to the women’s. I assumed reassignment to their part of the ‘hood meant, among other things, that it’d be less dangerous.

  For me, it was.

  For the women? I did not fucking know women could be so damn evil. My first day there, I broke up a broomstick party. The shit those bitches do to the newbie and weaker inmates is sick. Not that men are any better, it’s just that there’s this expectation that women are the gentler, fairer sex.

  What-fuckin-ever.

  A few hours of their cat-calling me—an event somehow as equally disturbing as when the male inmates did it—and I was of the opinion that there should just about be a prison-wide wipe. Almost none of these freaks deserved to live—

  I caught sight of Preta.

  She didn’t see me; she was with two other women. Quiet. No active, harmful activity. Technically, they weren’t doing anything interesting at all, and THAT was the part that made them stand out. They were softly laughing, smiling; they looked so normal in their issued garb.

  By pure chance, Preta glanced up, and caught me watching. As soon as her eyes met mine, my boots might as well have been locked to the floor; I was stunned—she was so pretty. She however, looked away quickly, and whatever she muttered to her pals had them giving me looks so discreet that if I hadn’t already been staring so hard, I’d never have noticed they were doing it. She told them not to look—I’m sure of it. She probably said, “The new guard is watching us.” I sure was. I kept watching too. She was my job. The rest of them could be damned.

  Every shift, I watched her try to buoy her friends, Quinn, Lydia, and Zoya, and watched them comfort her too. I saw a woman who was trying to make the best of her circumstances.

  Basically, I creeped on the ‘criminal’ with a heart of gold and a million-dollar smile.

  Not that she ever turned it on me. She tried to ignore me, but I saw her flash it easily at her pals.

  Then they took her friends away, and I watched her become needy—not for replacements, she knew the other women would never be her friends—but she couldn’t help it that her system was jonesing for a unit. It was exactly the outcome they wanted to see from her, their little experiment.

  Experiment. That’s exactly what she is: lab-made. We’re talking crates of serum and a special, chemical-laden, specifically nutritionally designed diet with a friggin’ team of medical professionals who were assigned to dole all that out, and monitor and keep her system in order.

  How in the hell did aliens living in dirt manage this? The smaller of the two chewed up a leaf and spit it into my bullet wound for fuck’s sake! That’s the extent of their med-care abilities!

  “Should we leave them?” I hear them asking each other. I am futilely wishing for my guns, my knife, even the shock baton in my hands right now, but part of me grudgingly appreciates that they keep their voices low enough not to bother Preta. Despite whatever they did to her… she doesn’t look hurt. I resist the urge to flip the weird, fuzzy caterpillar-blanket off of her midsection and see for myself if they…

  I swallow, and take careful hold of it to gently tug it over her instead so that she’s covered neck to knees. I don’t know what happened, but I know for damn sure I don’t want her feeling any more vulnerable than she already will be in front of our captors and her possible rapist. Thinking it has me glaring at him. For good measure, I spread that look around at all of them and part of me tries to relax because two of them at least are backing away—the ones that were with me. But not the one that was alone with her. I bare my teeth at this monkeyballmuncher.

  Despite trying to avoid it, Preta rouses a little anyway. Unlike after her visits to the lab, her eyes don’t have the drugged look; confused, yes, and even though she doesn’t look like a run-over raccoon—something she jokes that she resembles on experiment days—she still looks like she could use sleep. Or maybe that’s just me, needing to see her peacefully resting a little longer, so I can assure myself that she’s okay. That whatever they did to her, she’ll be alright.

  “I’m here, Sol,” I tell her as I set my thumb to stroking her collarbone, her throat.

  She exhales and her eyes droop even further, her entire body relaxing at the sound of my voice and it fucking kills me. This sense of security is false—I haven’t been able to keep her safe. I’ve even tweaked the roster so that I was the one escorting her back and forth to the diabolical doctors—she should not trust me, I do not deserve this blind faith.

  I brush her hair back from her temple, dislodging a flower that got stuck in it—it’s actually kinda pretty so I fit it back behind her ear, trying not to crush it as I clumsily tuck the little stem into her locks, ignoring the excited voices of the aliens as I do it—and for the friggin’ millionth time, think I wish we hadn’t met like this. She should never have been in Alphapod. She didn’t belong there, or the crash, and she doesn’t deserve this—whatever happened to her here, and whatever is going to happen after this. She should be back on Earth. If we’d met—

  I pull up a little, but I don’t stop petting her. It’s making the worry lines creasing her forehead almost disappear.

  If we’d met before this all happened, I don’t know if Preta would have liked me.

  I can guarantee I’d have liked her.

  I can’t shake the belief that she’s not a whole lot different now than she was before Alphapod happened. I asked her once; how she could still smile. Her answer?

  “Oh, please. This place is nothing; I used to work in Customer Service.”

  The memory makes my mouth tip up.

  Preta rewired my brain. Prison’s changed me too, even if I wasn’t technically the one behind bars. I feel like I’ve grown up and aged ten years in just the few months of that hellhole. As I stare down at her, ignoring that we’re being silently watched (what else is new? Aliens instead of cameras; such a fucking step up) I decide that if I’d met Preta before, I’d have recognized something this fucking special, and I’ve had gotten my shit together for her. I know she thinks she was just a fuck for me, but that wasn’t it. Not for me. And somewhere inside her, she does trust me. We really hit it off, we have something, chemistry.

  Or it’s her programming.

  Brutally, I squelch the voice. I don’t want to hear it.

  Needing to escape the turn my thoughts are trying to take, I drag my eyes away from the puppy-dog stare I can’t seem to quit whenever I get in her vicinity. I look at our surroundings, still ignoring the assholes watching us. The ceiling is the underside of a tree. Everything, the walls, the floor; dirt, because we’re in damn tunnel within a mess of tunnels under the ground. We were airlifted here by garden art come to life—just like she warned me, these freaks are not dead trees, and I so desperately need her to be okay so she can give me shit later about exactly how wrong I was—and they flew us to a giant weird-ass tree, and dove through a friggin’ hobbit door at the base of it to introduce us to their creepy lair.

  A creepy lair that does not look creepy at all right now. It looks warm, safe from whatever the hell creatures are out in the jungle trying to attack us at all hours, and from the quiet, I am going to assume we’re the only humans here, which is not all bad since our own kind were only too happy to kill us. Or at least me. I comprehend that they wanted to keep Preta as a plaything.

  Fuck.

  I relive the fear that she’d be mobbed, and my heartbeat ramps up, along with my fury… and my sense of helplessness. My leg’s throbbing intensifies as my blood pressure rises and I have to close my eyes and try to calm myself down. She’s… I don’t know what happened, but she seems okay. And maybe I can find ou
t. I slit my gaze, struggling for diplomacy as I stare down our captors. Rescuers, if they aren’t actually hurting us, but that’s to be determined. “What did you do to her?” It’s the calmest I’ve been since before we were set upon by other humans. I’m actually feeling more calm than I have since we crash landed. Worry notwithstanding, the rest of me thinks we’re all good now.

  Right.

  Just because they haven’t torn us apart doesn’t mean that everything’s good, that they intend to leave us unharmed.

  “Fed her,” one supplies. It’s the big one that picked me up from where I was helplessly splayed on the ground, not even able to drag myself to Preta in time to save her—not that I could do a damn thing to save her.

  Deep breath. Fucking leg.

  He’s also half of the duo that is responsible for my leg wound being rinsed and wrapped up. I’d have been real grateful, if I hadn’t known Preta was with the third one, and when she called out my name, I thrashed around like any minute I’d go full superhero and get us out of this.

  I drop the pissing contest when I feel her fingers close over mine; I didn’t realize I’d moved my hand over hers, but I did, and even in her sleep, she’s unintentionally reminding me there’s too much to lose. I can’t leave her alone here. I have to hang on. I’ll be fine. I ignore all the clamoring in my head; sepsis being my biggest worry. I grip my burning thigh, and glare at all of them. “That all?”

  They look confused.

  “What did you do to her? Where are her fucking clothes?” I grit out. Fucking pervs have her underwear like trophies. It makes me feel a little better that it looks like she damn near killed the alien that took them from her. “What are you? What do you want with her? And what is that thing on top of her?” I didn’t mean to ask this, but it’s freaking me out. However, saying the words on top of her makes my mind go to what they had to have done to her, and my stomach twists and squeezes so hard I feel like I’m going to barf. My head pounds, so does my leg—

  “We are the Kahav,” the nurse is the one that answers this time. He has nice hands, I think stupidly, and I hope the one that was in here with Preta was as—

  I want to grab at my pounding temples, but to do that, I’d have to take either my hand from my leg or from Preta and that’s not happening. So I just keep staring at the weird trio.

  “She is our azibo…” he pauses here, like he’s waiting for me to interrupt and tell him she’s not their damn anything, “her strange clothing was filthy, and that,” he uses all three of his weird fucking fingers to point to the caterpillar, “is keeping her comfortably warm, as you already should have guessed.”

  His tone has turned into, ‘and I think you’re being a dickweed about this.’ I narrow my eyes at him. “I didn’t ask what it was for,” I bite out like a prick, but fear keeps trying to get a hold on me and the dread, the knowledge that the one did more to her than just strip her is trying to drag me down and beat me. “I asked what it was.”

  Not even when I was fighting them to get to Preta did they slip in expression—until now. The one that pulled that sticky shit from my mouth and carried me looks a little fucking affronted, like me questioning this is an insult. “It’s a kru-kru skin. Yatavi?”

  My little translator? It learns. And it just committed yatavi to memory, in that tone, as ‘happy now, asshole?’ Despite myself, I smile.

  As I fought them and cursed them earlier, they spoke to me. My translator did its friggin’ job, and I would have started to calm down once I registered that their words were matching their actions: carefully fixing me up, trying to calm down the crazy bastard they had on their hands—but there was the whole ‘Preta’s getting raped next door’ that I was having trouble getting over it enough to relax back and be appreciative. And they kept repeating a word like it should have a whole lot of meaning to me. “What’s a gazebo?”

  All three look confused, but only for a second. “Azibo,” one enunciates—the one that was with Preta—and the mossy things above his eyes slash down just like eyebrows and he looks like he’s worried I’m super stupid. Something seems to dawn on him, some comprehension. “You really can’t care for her alone.”

  Exactly my fears, as well as my reality, and fuck him very much for pointing that out. “And you just happen to want the job, that it?”

  Now his strips of moss scrunch together and he turns to the other two for translation, and it’s my turn to look confused. “How is it you two can follow me but this clown can’t?”

  “Clown,” the dumbnut mouths, and he doesn’t have to understand a damn word I say to get that I’m insulting him. Which, I realize with a hard nip of fear—that antagonizing the alien life forms that have full access to Preta is a supremely stupid, stupid thing to do.

  “You blooded our heartstones,” the big one pipes up, tapping his chest.

  Yeah. That was fuckin’ weird too: they tried to get me to kiss rocks, and I’ve seen enough prison riots to know shit coming at your mouth is only the beginning, and when they steadied my head for it, I thought they’re going to break my teeth, and I was about to have a mouthful of alien dic—

  But they just tapped rocks against my lips and then popped them into holes in their chests. Plants started moving on top of them, big pink flowers sprouted, but at that point I figured the combo of helplessness, panic, and fury was making my eyes see things. Now though, I’m staring at their very serious faces and it’s hitting me that they’re aliens—why is it so hard to believe their hearts are rocks and they can do things with plants that would make the Gardener’s Association back home bust a nut?

  Wait—I kissed their rocks, and they can understand me?

  I look at Preta’s rapist.

  Not fucking happening.

  “Settle yourself, neron,” the big one says with a sigh. Translation: simmer down, man. “There is no need to feel territorial against us. We will protect her with our lives, just as you do.”

  I’m waiting for the taunting edge to his words, but it doesn’t happen. He just keeps talking like this is all a given.

  “Having more to feed and care for her can only be good, yes? You will need our help until you heal.”

  Not trusting, but feeling like I’m landing somewhere between there and hope, I finally manage, “Alright. What’s an ‘azibo?’”

  Nice Hands is all patience, like he’s aware I’d totally know what it is and he’s only supplying the explanation for this foreign word so that I’m on the same page. “An azibo is—” he starts, but my translator’s caught up to it now, and I snarl as my body jolts, causing my leg to get jacked up.

  “—a mate. We will be woven to her, and through the Sproutling… we are all connected,” he finishes, looking at me in dismay now. Like, ‘great, we’re stuck with this crazy bastard,’ because, ‘simmer down, neron’ or not, if I’m understanding the impression I’m getting both from my words and inside my head correctly, they intend to share Preta. With me.

  Oh, hell No.

  My brain fires away at this, and I point to Preta’s rapist. “Did you make her kiss your—” I grit my teeth, count a breath, and spit, “rock?” I slam two fingers over my chest where my aliens’ rocks went, and I see he’s got a rock too, with little… orange... flowers… I cut a glance at Preta’s hair and a red haze covers my vision.

  “My heartstone?” He looks to the other two, then back to me, and nods.

  I turn on the other two. You think I’m your—” I don’t pause my words, but I feel my ballsack shrivel, “‘azibo?’”

  They look fuck-all confused. “She’s our azibo; you’re our tribesman, fellow husbandman.”

  “You two,” I point to them, “don’t fucking touch her, got me?” I am in no place to make demands, but it’d be awesome if they didn’t know it, and I’m not sure what I’m dealing with intelligence-level wise, so why not try for the big dawg position?

  ...Doesn’t work.

  Nice Hands looks unimpressed. “You would refuse her feeding? Starve her?”
Now he’s starting to look disgusted—at me, like I’m worse than three aliens wanting to have their turn on her—so I clarify.

  “No. You can fucking bring her food whenever she wants food. But you don’t touch her.”

  I’ve got three confused aliens staring at me. I run my tongue over my teeth and lean my shoulder against the hard-packed wall behind me. “What part didn’t you understand?”

  “You can’t be this dense,” the tall one says easily—not smirking, but it’s not a friendly smile either. “We will have her also, and you will accept it. This will keep her nourished and provide for her better. Set aside your pride and see that you have not been able to care for her properly—”

  CHAPTER 15

  MACEOUS

  When we close the door on his ridiculous efforts—ridiculous because there is no way he has the power to make himself so much as rise and walk, which only serves to infuriate him further—I release a sigh that is nowhere in the vicinity of relief. “We can be pleased that he cares enough not to wake her if he can help it,” I say at last.

  Not taking his eyes from the door, Petrichor intones, “That one is damaged.”

  Knowing that our new tribesman won’t be likely to calm at the reminder, something we’re attempting to give him time to obtain, my voice is pitched low when I reply, “Considering what we came upon, I’d say he has every reason to be this protective of her.”

  Bortammos nods gravely. “Truth. Perhaps the attacking tribe has killed our azibo’s other husbandmen. They looked ragged, and driven. Remember that there are tales of tribes that stalk and hunt each other, and in light of this possibility, his wild fury makes perfect sense.”

  Chor looks ready to collapse, bole-weary. “The matter of how to ease his concern is the question.”

  “Words do nothing,” I remind them. “Actions prove everything. We have to show our new tribesman that we’ll be good husbandmen. We can start by healing his leg.”