The order Vrateus had maintained on the Dark Anomaly was gone within hours once the crew had taken over. Complete and utter anarchy had reigned ever since.
Wyck snuck into the gardens—a desolate and abandoned place, now that Malahki was no longer there. The damirian had been last seen the day Krakhil had locked the captain in a storage room while Nocc and the others overpowered Wyck and tied him with Lesh’s chain. The rogue errock and the dimo then tricked and attacked the two women.
Malahki had helped the captain escape that day, alerting him to the attack on the human ship. The damirian disappeared shortly after that. Wyck hoped for its sake that Malahki had managed to hide somewhere. Though chances were, it’d been attacked and eaten sometime during the past weeks of anarchy.
Vrateus was concerned about Malahki’s fate. He’d instructed Wyck to watch for any trace of the damirian whenever possible.
Neglected, the gardens had been slowly deteriorating. Some parts had been growing out of control, wild and unkept. In the others, the plants withered and died—the planters here stood almost bare of green already and overhung with dead foliage.
Walking between them, Wyck collected some of the fruit that had survived, then ripped off an entire vine of edible leaves, withered but still green. Not finding any signs of the damirian here, he headed back.
A small nook behind a planter by the entrance caught his attention when a faint whiff of an old scent reached him.
He snuck around a large planter, staying close to the wall. Clicking a flashlight on, he shone its ray into the nook.
A rusty smear on the floor must be what had left the scent. Someone appeared to have bled here. Considering the state of things lately, it could’ve been any one of the crew.
He turned to leave. Then the ray of the flashlight illuminated a short string of characters on the wall, just above the spilled blood on the floor.
It wasn’t written in Universal because Wyck couldn’t read it. Though, he believed that the characters had a meaning. They reminded him of letters forming words. The lines and swirls had an order and had been drawn in that deliberate way he’d come to expect from written language.
Back at the entrance to the human ship, he tilted his head back to clearly display his face to the camera above the door then knocked.
The door slid open, revealing Nadia’s beautiful face, a gun in her hand pointed at his chest.
“Come in.” She stepped aside promptly, aiming the gun behind him.
As soon as the door was closed and locked, he hugged her to him. The feeling of her warm, soft body in his arms and her sweet familiar scent made everything right with the world, even in the middle of the chaos they called the Dark Anomaly.
“I got some fruit,” he said, when he’d gathered enough willpower to tear himself away from her.
“Fruit?” Her eyes lit up.
She’d had a healthy appetite lately, which pleased him greatly. However, she’d also been craving odd things. Most were from her home planet, Earth. He didn’t always know what they were, but he wished to get them all for her. Nadia was his family, the future mother of his son. She deserved to have anything she desired. It frustrated him that he couldn’t get everything she wished for her.
“Do you want some?” he asked, happy to fulfill this one wish of hers.
“Yes, please.” She smiled, and he couldn’t resist stealing another kiss from her.
Svetlana took the mesh bag out of his hand. “I’ll get it washed and peeled. You just keep kissing there.” She waved her hand at them.
Wyck thought about the letters on the wall, breaking the kiss.
“What is it?” Nadia frowned, sensing his concern.
“Nothing to worry about, my sweet.” He kissed the tiny wrinkle that had formed between her slim eyebrows. “I just need to ask you something.’
He walked over to the table where Svetlana had already unpacked the fruit.
“How are things?” Vrateus asked, setting the tablet he’d been reading aside.
“Wild.” Wyck leaned over the table, propping his hands against it. “I’ve found something.”
He picked up Vrateus’s tablet. Recalling the characters he’d seen, he recreated them on the tablet’s screen from memory, by gliding his finger over the lit surface of the slate.
“Do you know what this means?” He turned the screen to the captain.
“No.” Vrateus stared at it closely. “What language is it?”