“Who is that!”
“That is you. It is your reflection.” He speaks as if I am stupid. But I am not stupid. I am confused.
“I don’t look like that. I have yellow hair and blue eyes.”
My reflection tells me I have neither. I have dark hair and dark eyes. My hair is shining and glossy and falls in curls. My eyes are deep and mysterious, and my lashes are thick. I am beautiful. So much more attractive than the shiny-faced elite I was used to seeing in the mirror. I stare at myself for so long the light begins to change around me.
“You know nothing, bounty. You do not know who you are. You do not know what you look like. You are a tool of the company you worked for, and nothing else.”
His words are rough, but he has invested a lot in ripping this illusion from me. There must be some reason for it.
“I forgot my own face? How could I not know what I look like?”
“You were programmed not to know any better. The implants and the augs you wore warped the world. You are barely sentient, human. You think what you are allowed to think within the acceptable parameters of experience, defined for you by those who know better. You have not had an original thought in years. At every turn, your intellectual agenda has been decided.”
“That’s not true. I have thoughts and opinions.”
“Opinions are what a fool mistakes for a thought. When you form an opinion, you are submitting to the agenda of whoever inserted the topic into your consciousness. Do you like apples or oranges?”
“Oranges.”
“It doesn’t matter. You wasted time and energy and the space in which you could have thought about anything else in the time I occupied your mind with that question. That is how the game is played. You are forever made to think of specific agendas. Whether you agree, disagree, submit, or rebel, it matters not. Your attention has been captured, and so have you.”
I try to digest all that means. It’s too much. It’s too far reaching. The last twenty-four hours have consisted of nothing but a series of veils being ripped away. My sense of safety. All comfort. My very self has been crushed and removed, cut and destroyed, and here I am with two light melted scars aching at my temples, in the custody of a monster who has not made his intentions clear.
“What is happening, Rath?”
“Answers are for those who understand the question they’re asking,” he grunts. “Don’t worry about the why. Worry about surviving. We are going back to Megaris.”
“Then why did you run away from the rescue party?”
“More questions which have no meaning,” he growls.
“Why aren’t I dead?” There’s a question that does have some meaning. He doesn’t answer that one either. Instead he grabs my naked form up from the side of the bank and hurls me bodily into the river. I hit the water with a shriek, but he is not long in following me in. His massive arm wraps around me as he hauls me up over onto his stomach. He is floating on his back, like a big, mean pool floatie, and I am held atop him, the sun on my naked back, and all the sensitive areas of my front pressed against the rippling hardness of his alien form.
Rath seems to be protecting me. I don’t know why. He won’t say. But his actions are speaking louder than any words, especially the action where his big, clawed hand splays over my rear, contouring to the curve of my ass as he holds me against the ridge of his alien rod.
He’s naked.
All our clothing has been abandoned. Torn in the crash, ripped in the dash from rescue, and finally scattered to the waters which carry us ever swiftly onward toward whatever destiny might await.
I can feel the thickness of his alien rod against my stomach. I have never seen him naked, but I can feel it, and the feeling sends hot charges of need through my brutalized body. His grip on my ass is intimate and possessive. The way he holds me makes me feel safer and more secure than I ever have, even as I am confronted with the realization that I have never known anything about anything.
“I want to mate with you, human,” he says, running his claws through my hair, tenderly.
“You were ripping my face off an hour ago,” I remind him. “And you think I’m a brainless human who’s never had a feeling or a thought.”
“Thoughts, no. Feelings, I am sure you have many of those. I want to feel them with you.”
I have wanted something like this to happen for as long as I can remember. I have wanted Rath to look at me and say sweet things to me, and give me all the carnal attention I can take.