Page 141 of Mates for the Raskarrans #1-6

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Lorna

I wake to the familiar clunk of the cell doors unlocking, my thin prison blanket wrapped tight around me. I can hear rain falling outside and it’s normally cold at this time of year, but I’m cosy for once. I don’t want to get out of bed.

“You’ll miss roll call, lazy bum,” Rosa drawls, coming to sit on the end of my bed.

I look over at her. She’s wearing a soft looking linen top and leather trousers instead of our usual Mercenia jump suits. It suits her. She looks softer.

“You’re speaking to me again?” I say, my heart thudding with so much hope and joy, I just know it will break me if she changes her mind again.

“You’ve been holding out on me,” she says. “Looks like you’ve got quite the story to tell.”

“What?” I try to sit up, but it’s like I’m pinned down with something. A solid, warm weight hanging over me, pressing into my bare skin.

Why am I naked?

“What would you do if you were free?” Rosa says, leaning closer.

“Rosa, I’m no good at that game.”

“Wrong answer, Lolo.”

“I’m not… I can’t…” I frown. “You just called me ‘Lolo’.”

Rosa grins.

All her teeth are knives.

I wake with a start in a bed laden with silk sheets and coverings, the soft material slippery over my bare skin. It’s decadent and comfortable and awful - the bedroom of a person with lots of money and no taste.

“I don’t think this is it,” Rosa says.

She’s dressed in a long silk nightgown, and picks at the frills on my bedside lamp, her lips pressed together into a disapproving line.

“You’re not supposed to be here. I’m dreaming.”

“Then wake up,” she says, her voice teasing. Sing-song.

I bite my tongue, pinch the skin on my arms. It hurts, bad enough that I hiss, but I don’t wake. It still feels like there’s a solid bar weighing down on me, trapping me in place.

“Sleep paralysis,” I tell myself. I’ve had it enough times in my life. “It’s just sleep paralysis. You can wake up.”

“What for?” Rosa says, dropping onto the end of my bed. I can barely see her, and I’m not sure if that’s better or worse.

“What for what?”

“What are you waking up for? What would you do if you were free?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been free. I don’t know what free is. Stop this, Rosa. Let me wake up!”

“What’s the rush?”

There’s such malice in her voice it makes my lungs constrict.

I turn my head to the side, looking at the door to my room - shut at the moment.

There’s a thump from somewhere beyond it, the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs.

They’re so heavy, the door rattles in its frame, and I want to scream, but in the way of dreams no sound comes out.

I reach a hand up under my pillow, feeling for a handle, but it isn’t there.

It isn’t there. I try to scream again as the thumping footsteps reach the other side of my door, the handle turning with an ominous creak.

I jolt awake in my cot bed on the transport shuttle, the alarms blaring all around me.

They talked about safety drills, but with the cavalier attitude of people who don’t think anything’s ever going to go wrong.

I don’t know what to do, only that staying in my room is probably a bad idea.

I’m naked under the scratchy blankets. I should get up. Get dressed.

No, not naked. Just topless. I’m wearing a pair of trousers made from soft leather. I should be cold in the sterile dorm room, but I’m not. It’s like there’s a furnace at my back. I want to snuggle back into it, let it envelop me, but the alarms are blaring and I know that means I should move.

“Don’t want to go down with the ship,” Rosa says.

She’s wearing a Mercenia issue jumpsuit, almost the same as her prison one, but not quite. She has a dead-eyed look to her, the same as the birds in the aviary.

Not the aviary, I think. Please don’t take me there.

“It’s your dream,” Rosa says. “It’s up to you.”

I struggle against the heavy weight that’s still pinning me down, but I can’t shift it. When I struggle against it, it only tightens around me.

“What would you do if you were free?” Rosa says, kneeling beside my bed, her face close to mine.

“Stop it,” I say, my heart hammering in my chest as I renew my struggle against the thing pinning me in place. “It’s my dream.”

“That’s what I said, Lolo.”

Lolo.

“You don’t call me that,” I say.

She shrugs a shoulder.

The alarms blare louder, and suddenly the weight is gone. I get up, pull on my jumpsuit. Stuff my feet into the uncomfortable boots. Run out into the corridor.

It’s chaos - twelve frightened women all shoved into a small corridor, not sure what to do or where to go, only that something is horribly wrong. I look round at them, but every time I catch someone’s eye, it’s Rosa grinning at me.

“It’s your dream. It’s your freedom. What are you going to do with it?

” she says, then laughs, and suddenly we’re all rushing down the corridor, through the belly of the ship, towards the side where the escape pods are.

We’re herded inside, our bodies bumping into each other as we try to find a seat like a deadly game of musical chairs.

I find a vacant one and sit down in it, drawing the belt round me and clipping it together, just as a loud metallic grinding sound vibrates the whole room.

And then we’re floating, drifting, spinning, the ship getting further and further away outside the little porthole windows, a planet rising up to meet us as we go faster, spin more, round and round until it feels like my brain is squeezing out of my ears and everything goes black.

I blink awake and I’m in a tent, soft ground beneath me. Sand. The beach. I’m sick. I’m dying. I…

“Lorna.”

Hands on my face. Big hands. Familiar. I blink a few more times. Look up at the face staring down at me. A green face with big, brown eyes. I should be scared. I should be terrified. But I’m not. I feel okay. I feel better.

I feel safe.

Then I remember who he is.

“Shemza,” I say, sitting up.

Pain lances through my skull, and I press my hand to a spot above my left eye.

“Oh, what the hell?”

“You bumped your head,” Shemza says, stroking soothing fingers over my brow. “In the river. Do you remember?”

“The river?”

“The bank collapsed. You fell. The river dragged you far and fast. You bumped your head on the rocks at the bottom of it.”

“But, this is the tent on the beach, it’s… I’m still asleep, aren’t I?”

“You are unconscious, yes.”

“Then where’s Rosa?”

He frowns. “Who is Rosa?”

I look round, and sure enough, there she is, sitting by the entrance to the tent. This time she’s wearing my wedding dress, and she’s been ripped apart, an enormous slash across her chest. She smiles, and her teeth are pink with blood, a long trail of it dripping from the corner of her mouth.

“That is not the female who died on the beach,” Shemza says.

“No, that was Penny,” I say. “But I don’t remember her. I don’t remember what she looked like. So I get Rosa instead.”

“This is not right,” Shemza says.

“Yeah, well, the real version of you doesn’t speak my language, so she’s not the only messed up thing here.” I scrub at my eyes. “I just need to wake up.”

“Lorna, I am not speaking your words. This is the dreamspace. We can understand each other here.”

I freeze, my heart pounding in my chest. Rosa keeps grinning her bloody smile.

“The dreamspace?” I turn to Shemza.

He strokes a hand over my face. Too real.

I can feel the scrape of his slightly roughened skin as it grazes over my cheeks, just like when he touches me in real life.

And my head pounds right above my eye where he says I bumped my head, and I half remember that.

Falling and tumbling and turning and not knowing up from down.

“I fell in the river.”

“You did.”

“I bumped my head, and I’m asleep?”

I think of the furnace at my back when I was stuck in bed, a weight over my body pinning me down. An arm around me. His arm.

“You’re asleep too?”

He cups my cheek in his hand, presses his forehead against mine. The heat of him bleeds into the aching spot, soothing it.

“Yes, linasha,” he says. “I thought it was my exhaustion dragging me into sleep. But it was you. Your dreamspace called me in.”

“Linasha?” My heart soars and plummets at the same time, as if it’s torn itself in half inside my chest. I blink tears out of my eyes.

“I said you were holding out on me, Jojo,” Rosa says.

Of course now she calls me Jojo.

“Go away,” I snap at her.

“Answer my question, Jojo.”

“Go. Away.”

She crawls across the tent floor towards us like something out of a horror film. Shemza’s arms go around me, drawing me tight to him.

“This is not right,” he says again. “The dreamspace. It is broken somehow. It must be your injury.”

“Broken,” Rosa echoes. “That sounds about right, my girl. That’s what you are, isn’t it? Broken.”

“Shut up.”

She cackles. “I thought you wanted me to speak to you again?”

“My Lorna.” Shemza’s voice is low, commanding. He draws my face back to his, forcing me to look into his eyes. “She is not real. She cannot really be here. Do you know how I know this?”

“How?”

“Because it is only you in my heartspace. I want no other. When I look at you, my whole spirit soars. When I look at her, I feel nothing. I do not know her face. She is come from you. You bring her here. You can make her go away.”

“I don’t think I can.” The words squeak out of me, my throat tight.

“Do your counting,” Shemza says. “Tell me five things.”

“Five things…” I take a deep breath, try to clear my head.

“It won’t work, Jojo,” Rosa says. “You have to answer my question.”

“Brown eyes,” I say. “Full lips, cheekbones to die for, green skin, tousled hair.”

I touch the leather of his trousers, the soft skin of his chest, run my fingers over his clawed nails and sink them into his hair. Then I press my ear to his chest on one side, listen to his breathing, press it to the other to listen to his heart.

“Say something,” I say.

“Something,” he says, and I nearly laugh.