Total pages in book: 51
Estimated words: 46803 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 234(@200wpm)___ 187(@250wpm)___ 156(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 46803 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 234(@200wpm)___ 187(@250wpm)___ 156(@300wpm)
I was rash. I was annoyed at her destructiveness and her brash behavior, and she paid for it.
Though I feel guilty, I know the only meaningful thing to do about a mistake is rectify it.
“Lie down,” I tell her.
She doesn’t obey, so I press her back down against the bed, her breasts soft beneath parts of my palm as my hand splays across her chest to ensure her obedience.
“Down,” I growl. “When I give you an order, you follow it.”
She makes a disgruntled sound, mixed with a yelp from the pressure of her sore ass being pressed more firmly into the firm bed.
I take the medical scanner we use for humans and run it over the length of her body. She has been fighting a great internal battle. The scanner shows that she has almost entirely recovered from a significantly serious infection, and that the wound from the brutally archaic bullet she was hit with has also largely healed.
She is a tough little thing. As I perform this scan with her awake for the first time, I remember when she was brought aboard. I scanned her then too, as there was nobody else to do it. I would not call my brothers irresponsible, and yet they are. Since the passing of our father and the desertion of our mother, all matters of organization have fallen to me. Arkan maintains his position as eldest, theoretical head of the family, Zain can do as he pleases in his eternal role as renegade, and our other brother is lost entirely in the woods. That leaves me to be the voice of reason, the responsible one. Always the responsible one.
“Am I alright?”
She asks the question in a slightly worried tone, distracting me from my self-pity.
“You are strong,” I tell her. “And you are, against all odds, healthy.”
“Yeah, I am!” She grins. “I knew it. I feel great. Hungry, though. So hungry. And thirsty.”
“You may come with me,” I tell her. “We will go to the kitchen.”
I help her down from the medical table, take her by the hand, and lead her through the ship. It is a large vessel, and it is easy to get lost here. Plus, I cannot trust her out of my grasp, even for a moment. Humans can scamper surprisingly quickly, and once out of sight she would be close to impossible to track down if she decided to hide. My brothers and I used to play hide and seek around this ship all the time — which explains why my twin brother Rake has managed to disappear into the Euphorian woods entirely.
The kitchen I choose to use is the one reserved for family only. We had a secondary mess set up when we found ourselves transporting soldiers and villagers in the lower decks, and those facilities are still operational, but I would rather starve than eat shoulder to shoulder with our rough passengers.
Arkan has decided it is for the best to bring a pack of human soldiers back to Euphoria in hopes of using them as security for our interests. I believe they have their own interests and will never be anything even slightly resembling under control.
But that is the least of my worries in this moment. For now, I am in the cozy space kitchen in which meals were prepared for us when we were small. There is a refrigerator which I keep stocked with human-class foods. There is also a machine that takes essential minerals, vitamins, proteins, starches, etcetera and prints food onto a plate. I tend not to use that. It is possibly a technically superior way to eat, but I think something is lost in not eating food that has undergone the formality of being born, growing, and then dying.
The walls of the kitchen are a lemon yellow. The plates and other accoutrements are blue ceramic designed after the style of the old Euphorian ways, when settlements were small, before the major city dominated the landscape and the lives of our kind. They look like they could be antiques, but having fed a family of four boys, they have been reconstituted and replaced many times.
“Sit down,” I say, once again lifting her up into a chair. These are stools that sit at the counter and of course they are all too high for her. Nothing on this ship was made with human proportions in mind.
“I don’t want you touching anything, except what I feed you.”
Humans are filthy little things sometimes, and though this one is quite neat, she is undoubtedly dirty with the simple effects of being human and having laid in one bed for quite some time.
Her hair curls quite wildly but is hanging heavy around her face. She needs to be bathed after her long convalescence. That will be my next task, once she is fed.