Page 23 of Argurma Warrior (The Argurma Chronicles #1)

M eg blinked up at her ceiling. Her eyes felt achy and crusty, and her cheeks were chapped and tightened from where her tears had dried on her face. All in all, she felt horrible. She swallowed and grimaced at how raw her throat felt. At some point she’d exhausted herself enough that she’d fallen asleep, but it didn’t make anything better. She just couldn’t believe how she could have been so wrong.

She was a little disappointed that she’d been wrong about Terri, but it was devastating just how wrong she’d been about Kaylar. Although he was a bit sharp and brutish, there was what appeared to be a sort of genuineness to him that she appreciated, and something so sincere about everything that he did and said that it had made him almost heroic in her eyes. Meg snorted in disgust. She’d actually felt unworthy of him when he planned all this time to hand her over to his council without a second thought. Even after she told him about Dale—he didn’t see what he was doing as the same. Denied it even. How couldn’t he see it? He would be imprisoning her in a situation beyond her control where she would lack any freedom or autonomy.

And then there was her lame attempt to kill him.

Meg sighed in disgust and rolled onto her side. Who was she fooling? She’d spent days fantasizing about him. As angry as she’d been, and as scared, she’d only half-heartedly tried to kill him. It was no wonder that he disarmed her as easily as a child.

Although she wouldn’t have been much of a challenge to him even if she was giving it her all, but if she possessed a bit more killer instinct, she might have done more damage when she still had the element of surprise. It disturbed her that, despite his plans for her, she didn’t want him dead. That he risked termination when he returned weighed heavily on her mind. Clearly, returning to his world was a terrible fate for both of them for very different reasons. It was stupid for them to go there at all.

Sadly, as angry as she was, she couldn’t hate him. It was impossible to ignore the fact that he genuinely believed when he captured her that she would have been better off, even with restricted freedoms and comforts. She bit back a bitter laugh recalling Kaylar bidding her to enjoy the room while she could. Of course, he had been aware but he had also strived to treat her like a guest rather than a captive. That was not the action of someone who callously was looking to seize someone as their prey.

Granted, it was entirely wrong, and it still didn’t excuse the fact that he never told her, but she could kind of see it. Not that she wouldn’t rather throw herself off the roof of the laboratory than go to his world if it came to it, but she couldn’t say that in operating by logic alone that he was completely off-base with his assumptions. She wasn’t stupid. After leaving Phoenix for the City, and her subsequent failure to find any of the migratory groups that traveled the coast and seeing the unending barren wasteland, now she knew without a doubt that Earth was dying. Staying there was a death sentence, even if a slow one. She didn’t want to stay but on the same token, she sure as hell had no intention of falling in line with his orders either. If only he would see that their best choice was to go somewhere else?

So, now what was she to do?

Sighing, she sat up and threw her legs over the edge of the bed. She was far too pragmatic to waste any more time lying on her bed raging against her situation. She needed to find Kaylar and try to talk to him again now that she had a clearer head and not just reacting to the shock of being blind-sided by all of this. She needed to convince him that abandoning his duty would be the better choice for both of them.

She bit her lip. What if she succeeded and he decided to just leave her there? She did just try to kill him. He might not consider her worth the trouble after that. He did feel for something for her, she knew that much but for a confessed cyborg who has been programmed to rely on logic rather than feelings, it might not be enough to sway him into keeping her around. Of course, even if he did—would she be able to trust him again? Would she just be using him to escape Earth and potentially sacrifice his own freedom and life for her own security? Could she live with that possibility?

Meg groaned and scrubbed her face with both hands in frustration. Too many unanswered questions. This whole situation was a complicated mess. Unfortunately, there was no easy way to unravel it. And certainly, no way at all that didn’t involve communicating with a certain alien. It worked before. There was no reason why she couldn’t make him see reason again.

Sliding from the bed, she walked toward the door, curious as to whether or not it was locked. She was initially so angry that she hadn’t bothered to try the door to see if she was locked in. In fact, she would have been more interested in locking him out if she’d believed for even a moment that it was possible. She was still angry but now that she was ready to really talk to him, she hoped that he had the good sense to not imprison her in there. She did not believe he would given that he was expressly giving her time to cool down until she was ready to talk—and therefore she figured that he was leaving it up to her—but she couldn’t be certain until she tried.

“Only one way to find out,” she muttered, eyeing the door as she approached.

Grasping the handle, she turned it and heard the telltale click before pushing the door open. The empty hallway stretched on beyond the door, leaving a direct line of sight to the elevator at its end. She knew that Kaylar wasn’t going to be lurking out there, waiting for her to talk to him but she couldn’t help but to be a little disappointed that he wasn’t.

“Okay, but it’s not locked. That’s a good sign.” Unfortunately, she had no idea where to even start looking for him. “Maybe in the labs,” she mused aloud.

It seemed likely that he would be in there digging up more metal or wires if he was not at the ship itself working on repairs. She wouldn’t attempt to go out there alone to look for him—especially without something to protect herself, which, up until that moment, had always been the Argurma’s incredible bulk—but it cost nothing to check the labs they had been working in. She could get lucky and find him there.

Stepping into the elevator, she tapped her foot impatiently as she waited for it to descend past the lobby level where she usually met him to the first level labs that they were stripping. The elevator hadn’t frightened her since the first time she’d been forced to take it alone to meet him. Her lips quirked. She’d been angry with him then too. Not just angry but pissed off that her second time on the elevator had been made alone when he’d known that she was frightened of it. Now she was just impatient. Looking back, she now appreciated that he’d forced her to confront and work through her fear. She hoped she would be able to look back at her current anger so positively in the future.

The door finally slid open with a soft ding, revealing the stark lab floor. Unlike the upper floors which had an occasional print hung up to bring some life to it, the lower levels were even more unnerving with barren bleakness. The subtle hum in the air from the lights made her skin prickle as she stepped out of the elevator.

“Kaylar? Hello?” She shivered at the faint echo of her voice.

She didn’t hear anything that suggested someone moving around in the first set of lab rooms that they had already begun to clear. She crept past them, glancing in both rooms as she passed, seeing nothing but the same wreckage of parts amid surfaces and various equipment coated liberally with dust.

Lips thinning, she headed further down the corridor. Doorways half ajar dotted the space with a larger door at the end. Her head craned to the side as she peered at the final doorway, its flickering light briefly illuminating its interior in short little bursts. It wasn’t unusual to come across a room with some issue with its lights, but in most cases, it was faint enough to be nothing more than a slight annoyance. None of the rooms they’d been in yet had lights that flickered so strongly that the room would be brightened for a moment only to be plunged into complete darkness the next as that room appeared to be. Perhaps she should try to locate new bulbs? She knew how to change them since it had been one the first things that she’d been shown to take care of upon arriving at The City.

In this place, however, they typically didn’t bother. Kaylar said that the fixtures were old and could easily be the source of the issue. Even if it wasn’t, he viewed it as unnecessary to waste their time searching them out when their stay was only a short one. But the way that room’s light was flickering crawled under her skin, making her anxious. She didn’t recall the lights doing that when they were down there before. Perhaps there was something wrong, like a broken power line, that would need to be shut down. Meg had seen Kaylar do that a few times to deal with sparking, broken cords. It could be a more severe problem, however, if it was causing the lights to flicker. She might not be able to fix whatever was wrong but at least she could take a look and let Kaylar know when she found him in case it was an emergency situation.

Her skin prickled anxiously as she closed in on the room and stepped inside. Her heart jumped as the room was promptly plunged into darkness, the air crackling for a moment before the light flickered dimly and then again brighter overhead revealing a long tank at the far end of the room. She paused uncertainly, staring at it as it was obscured by darkness once more before being illuminated again.

Perhaps she shouldn’t have come in there. She didn’t recall any of the other doors even being open now that she thought about it. And certainly not this last one.

“Kaylar, are you in here?” she called out hopefully and cringed at the hollow echo of her voice flung back at her.

“I guess not,” she muttered as she stepped back a pace and slowly turned to look around the room in the brief snatches that the lighting allowed.

Something whirled overhead and her eyes slowly lifted just in time to see an enormous metal claw on an arm come swinging toward her. She squealed in shock as she dodged it, the claw slicing through the air where she’d been only seconds earlier. It clinched and expanded in a grasping motion, the lights flickering more aggressively as if the power in the room were feeding it, as it rotated on the axis of its arm back toward her.

“What the fuck! No. Stop !” She shouted, jumping to the side as it came whirling toward her.

To her surprise, it slowed and jerked to a stop, the wide pinchers of the claws slowly folding inward as the arm bent, raising the claw back to the ceiling. She watched it lift intrepidly as her stuttering breath wheezed from her in time with her pounding heartbeat.

“Identify,” a mechanical voice commanded.

Her eyes roved around the room uncertainly. Was that an AI? She didn’t think humans had anything that advanced to communicate so clearly at will, though her grandfather said technology had been growing rapidly when the fall came. Whatever it was, it didn’t possess anything like the smooth voice of Degarath that communicated with her on the Argurma ship. This AI’s voice possessed a hard, clipped sound that was broken up and crackled with static.

“M…Meg,” she called out.

“M-e-e-e-e-e-g,” it drawled out in a long crackling stutter. “Human voice rec…rec…recognition verification—c...c…confirmed. Initiating…alpha delta—” it crackled indecipherably but she jerked as the claw swung down past her toward in a smooth motion toward the metal tank at the far end of the room.

Latching onto the rectangular object, it spun, turning the tank several times counterclockwise, lighting it up with small bursts of air releasing from it. Meg stared. Something was definitely happening and suddenly she wasn’t sure if she should even be in the same room with whatever that was.

“Maybe I should go find Kaylar,” she mumbled, backing away several paces before stopping indecisively, her teeth sinking into her bottom lip.

Maybe she was being hasty in running away. It had only reacted after identifying her as human. Perhaps it was something that had been waiting to entrust whatever was in that tank into the care of a human.

“Fuck. Okay, just a quick peek and then go get Kaylar so we can decide what to do about this. Because this shit is not normal.”

Screwing up her courage, Meg crept over to the lit-up tank and glanced quickly inside. She froze, her mouth rounding as she gaped down at what it held.

An attractive, curvy woman with long lengths of brown hair spread beneath her, lay there beneath a frosted lid. There was a bluish tinge to her skin though she otherwise appeared to be sleeping.

“What happened?” she mused aloud.

“Dr. Alexandra Huskley,” the voice crackled in response. “Subject initiated emergency trial cryogenic sleep with impending crisis on September twelfth, twenty-seventy-two.”

Her grandfather would have been sixteen at that time. It aligned with his stories of the fall. Although she knew that the voice wasn’t physically present in the room, Meg lifted her eyes again toward the ceiling.

“Impending crisis?”

A long crackle distorted a number of its words before clearing. “—with no communication from mainland, and the failure of the supply deliveries, the lab attempted numerous failed communiques to the home office.” Another long, frustrating crackle filled the air as the lights flickered like a stuttering pulse around her. “—deceased members of the team, Dr. Alexandra Huskley initiated emergency protocol—” another long, loud crackle, “—until identifiable assistance could arrive and Dr. Huskley could be revived.”

Meg swallowed. “And what is the date now?”

“Calculated date…December twentieth, twenty-one-thirty-seven.”

“Fuck,” she whispered. “How long until she’s revived?”

“Approximately forty-seven hours,” it replied.

She nodded and backed away from the tank and the sleeping woman. “I definitely need to talk to Kaylar. Things are going to suddenly get more complicated.”

As she glanced one last time back at the only other human on the island, she just hoped that it was not something that was going to bite her in the ass.