Fathom (Mermaids of Montana #3) - Elsa Jade Page 0,75
be forced to come after us.”
Lana’s head whirled. It wasn’t the slack planetary security the Cretarni needed to worry about…
Unless she was still fooling herself, just as she always had.
If the Cretarni took her zaps, she could go back to her old life. Maybe she’d even be welcome on Tritona. But the Cretarni were going to destroy Tritona… She’d wasted her moment of choice on fear, and let others—first the Tritonesse, then the Cretarni—talk her into running away. Again.
Without conscious thought, she surged up against the manacles. There wasn’t much slack but for once she was glad of being small because she managed to get her hands to the strap of needles around her throat while curling away from the desperate reach of seven-fingered Cretarni hands. Tearing at the collar was like ripping away a necklace of leeches, and blood spurted.
If she died, they couldn’t keep taking the components to murder a planet, could they? The fatalism gave her a reckless strength.
Maybe this was why Sting kept fighting.
With a scream and a wild, errant pulse of sonics that broke across three octaves, she heaved away from the manacles and the grasping finger-claws. She got one bare foot braced on the decking, gathering herself for a zap—
The Cretarni doctor lunged forward with a trident and speared Lana through the heart.
Or it felt like that anyway. Another scream wrenched from her, no power this time, only pain, as the prongs of the trident splayed outward across her chest and released a countershock.
The zap she’d conjured crackled in blue-white spiders across her skin and flared up the trident.
The doctor leaned hard into the trident, shoving Lana back to the crates as the power flowed out of her. A fist-sized bulb at the other end of the spear glowed electric blue.
As if Lana was nothing more than a damned battery charger.
The tines of the trident ripped at her pajamas as she squirmed like a gaffed fish. The smaller Cretarni jumped closer to thrust a syringe against her neck, and in one frantic heartbeat, her vision shrank to nothing more than the doctor’s dull orange glare.
“Is this what you wanted?” The Cretarni’s hiss-hoot was mostly hiss now, her egg tooth jutting much too close to Lana’s face. “You could’ve just given us what we needed”—she twisted the trident—“quietly and we would’ve left you on this wretched, ignorant world, pretending this was all a bad dream.”
“Run away,” Lana whispered.
“You could’ve, when we were done with you. Yes, your heart would’ve failed eventually without the necessary electrical charge to power your muscles, but until then you could’ve lived your miserable, half-scummer life however you liked. But no, you had to fight. And for what?”
“Enough.” Cinek pushed the doctor back and reattached the needle collar. “Ask no questions for which your own answers would scatter like ash. Get this done so we can leave.”
Lana let her head loll, and through her tunnel vision, she focused on the trident that the doctor set aside with one last disgruntled hoot. Somehow, the lightning rod device had focused the zap into the bulb. But the rod hadn’t drained her, or they wouldn’t need to use the needles now. If she could grab the lightning rod herself…
But her arms felt as heavy and cold as river rocks, even without the needled bands, and the one around her neck was making her thoughts equally inert. She’d donated blood before and never felt this paralyzed. Maybe if she rolled off the crates toward the rod? Rolled like a rock… Ugh, she was being stupid. The Cretarni soldiers were right there, and now even the little one could stop her with, like, three of his seven fingers.
Every being in the universe had more power than her, it seemed. And she was losing what little she had—erratic and frightening, yes, but the zaps had been all hers—because she’d been too afraid, too weak to make the power her own.
Loathing gurgled through her, colder than the draining of her blood. She didn’t deserve the power.
But Tritona didn’t deserve to die.
If there was only one way to stop this…
She couldn’t hold her breath to kill herself, not when what little Tritonan heritage she could claim would keep her blood oxygenated long enough for the Cretarni to do whatever they wanted before she died—or revived, whichever was worse. Despair was like a second tidal wave behind the loathing; she was going to be the death of Tritona, just as the Tritonesse had dreaded.