systems blared, his eyes bright teal, lighting up the medical devices around him. His thoughts came to a halt as he stared at Alexa. Wake up.
“Questor!” he screamed. “Find Pigeon and get him here, now!”
Robotic arms shot from the wall to take Alexa’s vitals. Her eyelids fluttered, lips turned blue.
She was overdosing.
She was overdosing, and it was because of him.
Nineteen
Her body felt heavy. Her heart, weak. She was weighed down, trapped by a blanket of molasses. Her thoughts spun. Sometimes they made sense, but most of the time they didn’t. Not at first, at least.
But whether they did or not, she didn’t care. She knew she was going to forget them anyway.
When she finally managed to open her eyes, it was to a room so bright that it made her head burst with pain. Beside her stood Pigeon and Hysterian, and she managed to smile before she lost consciousness. If Pigeon was here, she was safe.
The next time she opened her eyes, the room was dim, and it was Hysterian alone next to her. She tried to speak, and he shot over her, said her name, but that was all she heard before the pain in her head returned and she fell back under.
The only constant was the heaviness and the forgetfulness. Besides that, she didn’t know what was happening, except that when her head wasn’t throbbing, time was passing, and she was comfortable. Someone was keeping her that way.
Bit by bit, things returned. Thoughts stuck.
Her conversation with Hysterian returned.
His skin? He said it was dangerous…
Alexa stared at the ceiling of the lab. She knew someone was beside her bed, but she didn’t turn her head to see who it was. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to go back to sleep yet or not.
If she needed to pretend.
Because she had needles in her arms, and her medical charts—though unclear—were on the wall opposite of her.
If Hysterian and the crew hadn’t known she wasn’t fully human, they did now. They had to know now. She’d been to the doctor before in her youth, and with one vial of her blood, they knew she wasn’t fully human.
So why am I not dead?
Hysterian was a Cyborg, and Cyborgs had been created for one thing only, and that was to destroy Trentians, the same thing she was…a little. She knew that ‘little’ was still a lot to a Cyborg, who’d been programmed since creation to kill her kind without mercy. Though they hadn’t waged war in nearly seventy years now, there were still skirmishes that happened between Cyborgs and Trentians frequently enough to keep the animosity alive.
She always thought that maybe Hysterian killed her dad because he married a half-breed. But then she’d shoot it down, knowing that wouldn’t make her father a target of a Cyborg. It wasn’t humans they were programmed to destroy after all. Just aliens. Her dad had been human.
And try as she might, she couldn’t figure out how she got into the medical lab at all. One minute she’d been in Hysterian’s bathroom, and the next? It was all a blur.
We talked. She knew they talked.
Alexa closed her eyes and tried to focus, but the more she tried, the harder her head throbbed. She whimpered.
It hurts. It hurts so much.
She raised her arms so she could bring her hands to her face, but they were too heavy to lift, they remained at her sides. Her pulse raced from the effort, and before she could sink back into stasis and stop her anxiety from building, a beeping sounded in her ears.
“Alexa?”
Pigeon appeared above her. The beeping stopped.
“You’re awake!” he exclaimed, glancing over his shoulder. “How are you feeling?”
“My head...” she croaked.
“Right,” he said, shuffling away. Something happened with the pallet she was on, and the IVs were changed by the robotic arms attached to it. Pigeon returned. “That should help, I hope.”
Pigeon glanced over his shoulder again. She tried to see what he was looking at, but there was only the closed door of the medical lab and some equipment.
He faced her. “I need to talk to you if you can manage it. It’s important, and we don’t have much time. Do you understand?”
She thought she did. She at least could tell Pigeon was worried about something, and since the pain in her skull kept her thoughts blurry, maybe whatever he had to say would jar them back into place.
“Yes,” she wheezed.
“Good. Try to stay awake and listen. I know you’re not human.”
Her eyes closed. There it was. Her