The Girl Who Fell From The Sky - Rebecca Royce Page 0,79

fighting with them, but the other part just sat back and took in the show.

It was beautiful, in a blood-spattery and gory way.

Also sort of hypnotic. As they sliced ribbons of putrid Reamer flesh off their opponents, their movements almost had the quality of dance. In the world I was used to, fighting usually happened at a distance, either with ranged burr-launchers or plasma beams, so death, when it happened, was usually obscured. You didn’t have to see it up close. You didn’t have to hear it or smell it.

The Reamers screamed when they died. One, two, three of them. My men were efficient in dealing with their enemies.

But also, perhaps they were too focused. And I was, as well.

Because none of us noticed the two Reamers who’d broken off from the others, slinking in the shadows to come up behind me. And by the time I felt their hands on me, their filthy rags covering my face and stripping my consciousness, it was too late to scream.

I didn’t wake up on fire this time. I woke up in stages, one blurry layer of confusion at a time. Not on a sleepy interstellar ship. Not on a dusty, barbarian prison planet with kind, amazing, sexy as hell men, who inexplicably wanted to take care of me.

The room was gray, perfectly square, windowless, and antiseptically clean. It smelled of astringent, but with a musky undertone, like someone had disinfected it thoroughly, but a month ago, and the chemicals had hung in the air all that time, getting stale.

The cot beneath me left a lot to be desired, but it wasn’t horrible. Compared to, say, sleeping on rocks, this bed would be comfortable.

I wasn’t wearing my normal clothes, the soft, flowy garments Torrin had picked out for me. I had been stripped and wrapped in that weird, green cloth that Nox made into facemasks back home.

Home. Torrin. Nox. My men.

I sat up, got slammed with a rush of vertigo, and set my hands, palms flat, against the bed to steady the room as it spun. It took a couple minutes of deliberate breathing to not vomit, but I could feel my pulse in my temples, behind my eyeballs, even in my neck. My heart, poor thing, was doing its best.

But I couldn’t coddle it.

I needed to get home, back to the City-State. I needed to make sure Mattis and Astor were okay. Had they been captured, too? Panic rose up in my throat, threatened to choke me.

“You’re the senator’s sister, aren’t you?” came a voice from the shadows of one corner.

A woman’s voice. No, a girl’s.

She rose, and as she crept closer, I could see my assessment was right. She was a young girl. Had I known there was an adolescent on the trip with us? No I hadn’t, but I’d hardly been socializing with anyone. It wasn’t like I was looking to make friends with people who were going to cringe away from me like I carried the plague because of the well-known problem with my heart.

The girl in front of me was little more than a child. Her hair was long, blonde, and frizzed everywhere. She wore glasses—which confirmed her age as nine at the most. At ten, she’d be eligible to have her eyes fixed so she never needed glasses again. Eye issues still happened in our society, but everyone repaired or hid them. I stared at her face for a second. Her parents must have been very rich to have the newest synthetic glass on the lenses and the frames, so they survived the crash. Even the spaceships didn’t have such synthetics yet. Maybe I’d ask her later, when we got away, who her parents were. Or maybe I’d leave it alone. She’d clearly been through hell.

Her clothes were ripped, and it looked like something from my former life and not this one. She was still dressed as she’d been when we crashed.

“I’m Bianca.” I cleared my throat. “We came here looking for you.”

She nodded as she knelt down right next to me. Despite the dirty clothes, her hair appeared clean. She was a dichotomy of clean and dirty. It made little sense, but I was probably overthinking it. Maybe she didn’t have other clothes so she had to keep re-wearing hers.

It probably was that simple.

She put out her hand. “I’m Rae. Are you going to die?”

“Not this very second.” That seemed an honest answer. “We’re all going to die, one way or another, eventually. For now, I’m