Trapped (The Condemned Series #1) - Alison Aimes Page 0,76

assigned to guard her while she collected soil samples. Like the rest of the Command Council soldiers assigned to protect the scientists, he’d never warmed to her. Nor she to him. Still, right now, his familiar voice was the most beautiful thing she’d ever heard.

“Pratt…” It was hard getting the words out, the force of the drop driving her tongue to the roof of her mouth. “No…idea.”

“Hear…me?” Pratt’s distorted voice had grown shriller. “Help!”

“No…panic.” Even knowing it was futile, she tried to turn. She only succeeded in exhausting herself further. “Nothing…to do.” She let her muscles go slack. It offered no change in her position, but it did conserve energy. “Other…crew?”

There was a momentary pause. As if Pratt was assessing whatever he could see.

“No.” Pratt’s single word was laced with despair.

“For…the…better,” she pushed out. Whatever this was, it wasn’t good. She didn’t want Bella or any of the others anywhere near it.

It was almost impossible to believe only two weeks had passed since she’d quietly slipped onto the Academy shuttle, part of the scientific team charged by the Command Council with exploring distant planets for viable plants that could be cultivated on Earth.

Of course, she’d had her own reasons for coming, but she’d been excited to think she might, thanks to her expertise in soil ecosystems, be a part of the team that found a way to save Earth’s remaining survivors and break the cycle of famine, blight, and death that had been plaguing their planet since the disappearance of the great forests and the onset of the dust storms.

It would have been a tremendous triumph. Especially for a girl who’d only been allowed to return to school and study such an undignified subject as a twisted punishment. After all, as her esteemed father had said, who better to study dirt than dirt itself?

And if that ‘dirt’ somehow found her sister Khyla alive…well, that would have been the answer to every prayer she’d had for the last two years.

“Where…are…we?” Pratt’s terrified bellow reverberated off the walls.

They were spinning and dropping so fast the walls had begun to shudder. The others’ screams grew louder.

“Don’t…know.” She tried to shout above the noise. Were they still on Dragath25? The heat was all too familiar, but the walls of this container were curved like the transport holds at the non-Council barracks back on Earth. She strained to turn her head a quarter inch. They seemed made of the same dull, gray-flecked metal, too.

Her heart beat a little faster.

Maybe she was crazy, but she almost would have preferred some kind of unfamiliar technology. Anything that might suggest whoever had stuck her on this plummeting hell wasn’t human. Because while being the first to encounter alien life might have been dangerous, she already knew how monstrous humans could be.

She shifted her focus to the men in her sight. The flashing light offered up brief glimpses of bodies barely covered in tattered scraps of fabric or nothing at all, their contorted limbs and torsos covered in crude tattoos that looked as rough as the men themselves. Some looked emaciated, the lines of each rib laid bare by the flickering lights. Others had the kind of thick bulk that came from eating more than their share. But one thing was constant. All had 225 PROPERTY carved somewhere on their skin. The big, bold letters blinking in and out of visibility like some terrible broken sign.

Her heart, already overworked, slammed harder against her ribs.

She knew 225. Bella had mentioned him often enough. He was the leader of the largest Dragath25 prison gang. Which meant the men in her line of sight had likely been his gang-mates, the most notorious of rapists and killers exiled from Earth by the Command Council.

She’d find no allies among them. Only another threat.

“P—pretty.” The ominous word issued from the giant whose outstretched hand was an arm’s length from her nose

He was staring at her. Or more aptly at the telling Command Council tattoo seared into her neck.

“Going…fuck…then…break…Council…bitch.” Though garbled, the giant’s underlying threat reached her loud and clear. “Can’t….wait…hear…scream.” The man’s long, matted rust colored hair stood up at all ends, exposing a low sloping forehead, pug-nose, and a raised, white scar that snaked from his eyebrow to the corner of his mouth. His eyes were beady yellow slits glittering with lust and the promise of pain.

It was a look she knew all too well.

She shrank within herself, her mouth going dry, memories turning her blood to ice, shattering in seconds all the progress