snout full of uneven rows of sharp teeth, or a flat face with two poisonous fangs.
There had always been endless speculation about which Thagzar was worse to meet, but as far as Kanthi was concerned, both were equally dangerous. They’d all earned the name of ‘snakes’ from his people. And he currently had ten in the same room with him, six flat-faced and four with prominent snouts.
They seemed to be moving with purpose, approaching various tables and hissing at each other in calm tones. It was creepy – almost conversational.
Kanthi watched them, memorizing everything. He knew the room to be a laboratory, one that he had searched long and hard for because of what it housed.
Suddenly, the door opened, bursting with such force that it banged into the wall, bouncing off of it. A single Thagzar stood there, heaving with his arms outspread as the other creatures looked up at his entrance. Kanthi tensed, silently drawing out one of the knives sheathed in his armband, straining unsuccessfully to hear their words.
He wasn’t going down without taking a few of the demons with him.
Finally, the creature spoke, his hisses wheezy and out of breath. The other snakes chimed in with strangled hisses of their own, and Kanthi watched as they became increasingly agitated. Rather than keep up the easygoing pace they’d all exhibited minutes before, the snakes were rushing now, haphazardly placing jars and files all over the place. They were scared, which only worried Kanthi more.
Did they know that he had infiltrated their base? Had they found his camp? As the dozens of possible scenarios (all of them bad) buzzed around in his brain, he forced himself to sit quietly in the ceiling, and wait.
Within minutes, the reptilians were leaving the room, some at a run. They slammed the door, making Kanthi jump as he had half-expected them to throw grenades back inside at him. But, as the silence remained and no one was sent inside to find him, he breathed easier.
If the commotion just now hadn’t been about him, then he had to assume that some other poor bastard had just gotten their full attention, which meant that he may very well have a distraction on his hands while he raided their lab. In which case, he knew that he’d better act fast.
Kanthi left the ceiling much more easily than he’d hidden in it, taking off at a run to swoop down and literally hang from a rafter, using the acceleration to swing his feet and let go so as to land in a tight roll, protecting himself from injury. In the end, he finished on his feet, crouched with his fists out and his eyes open.
Still, no one came in.
Keeping his guard up, Kanthi stayed low, sweeping the room with precision and detail. He may not know how to read their language, but he knew the Thagzar sign for what he was searching for: two harsh slashes inside a circle, something his people had come to associate with death.
As familiar as he was with it, he still almost missed it. It was in a small vial that was shadowed by far more impressive ones, hidden in the back of a test tube rack on a high shelf with a yellowed label. It seemed to Kanthi that it had been deliberately hidden; not much of a surprise as Kanthi’s people had been hunting for that single formula for decades.
It was a biological weapon, the best the Thagzars had ever created and the worst Kanthi’s people, the Eiztar, had ever been cursed with. It was an airborne toxin, designed to target embryos and inhibit them from taking hold and, ultimately, result in miscarriages.
It was a tragic thing, to watch mothers and sisters become pregnant, only to know that they would wake up one morning and lose the child, becoming forever scarred from the experience. It was a loss that touched not only the victims but everyone around them, a reoccurring tragedy that had been plunging his people into a planet-wide depression for decades.
Not to mention, now that it had been going on for over twenty years and his generation was old enough to see it, they were finding that the initial loss of life was only a small price in the toxin’s overall process. By targeting their women like this, the reptilians were ensuring the extinction of the Eiztar’s species, once and for all.
The reason for the toxin’s invention was, in Kanthi’s opinion, even more sinister. It had been less