Page 48 of Monsters in Love: Lost in the Stars
Daisy squinted at the swishing tail of the cyborg. How had she even missed that this wasn’t a droid? Sure, it had been easy enough to write off the fluid movements as due to technological advancements, but the confident swagger and brutal lethality conveyed in his movements could have only been from a living male. A malfunctioning droid was a headache, but an alien male was entirely unpredictable.
Hadn’t her brother drilled such warnings into her head about trusting strange men, especially aliens? Alien males couldn’t be trusted to not whisk away human females when the opportunity presented itself. When news came to Earth regarding the events on Turongal, everyone was suddenly taking it much more seriously. The idea of being stolen by a strange alien had been frightening, but not more than the thought of remaining on United Earth and directly under the yoke of her family. She would rather live on an alien world far from their immediate supervision where she had at least a chance of finding some small measure of her own happiness far from the strict rules of society on United Earth. It had been worth the risk. And it still was. She wasn’t going to give up now just because there was a small hiccup in her transportation.
She suppressed the guilt that immediately rose over such callousness, but she didn’t have time or headspace to break down over what happened to the crew. She was grateful to be alive, and if this alien was the means of remaining alive, then she would take it. She could allow herself time to process once she was safe.
The first step to feeling safer was getting clothes. She couldn’t parade around in a sheet forever. That meant she was going to have to make another request of her reluctant rescuer.
“Umm, hey, you… whatever your name is…”
“I am Zil,” he cut in.
“Zil,” she repeated. She drew in a deep breath. Okay, maybe there was hope. If he was offering her his name, he couldn’t be all that bad despite his rudeness. Clearly he was going to treat her respectfully, like a person. “I’m Daisy McGillin.”
“Not Fuck?” he asked, his voice dismissive as if he were not only bored with the conversation already but just couldn’t care less.
She frowned at the curling tip of his tail as it swished languidly. Was he screwing with her?
“Very funny. No, not Fuck.”
His head turned, one bright red eye turning toward her. “Very well, I’m updating your identity in my systems. What is it that you want this time, Daisy McGillin?” he asked tersely.
She gaped at him. That jerk. He was making like she was the one being demanding when he was the one who put conditions on helping her. All she did was insist that he assist her as per the treaty. It was hardly unreasonable. She was the damn victim here.
“Just Daisy is fine,” she gritted out, all hope for an amiable passage of time with Zil rapidly disintegrating. “I was just going to ask if we can find something for me to wear that will be easier to move around in—and warmer. I need a TRS, a thermoregulation suit, to start with.”
There was a definite chill that was getting more noticeable as they moved away from engineering. She hadn’t noticed it before when she was still recovering from cryosleep, but now that she had been near enough for the engines to warm her, she was starting to notice the cold bite in the air.
Zil snorted as his eye rolled forward with the turn of his head. “The temperature of the ship is slowly dropping. It will be weeks before it becomes lethal for you, but very well, we will return to the flight deck and strip one of the crewmembers. There should be someone approximately your size.”
Her skin crawled as a sickly feeling settled in her stomach. “You aren’t seriously suggesting that I pull a TRS off of a corpse and wear it?”
Again, there was that quick glance back at her, which seemed to be solely because he found her complaint unreasonable enough to frown back at her.
“Yes. They no longer require the covering. It is logical that you utilize it.”
“No. Not just no, but hell no! I am not wearing something that someone was decomposing in. I refuse!”
He grunted quietly. “Then what you have is serviceable until we come across something else… if we do.” He paused, his head tilting slightly to the left. “Do human crews travel with spares of these suits?”
Her lips tightened. “No, not usually. They are self-cleaning. Everyone gets one. Mine was stored with all my belongings in the cargo hold so that I would have it upon arrival to transport into the colony, along with all of my clothing.”
A rumbly laugh escaped him, the gravelly sound making her skin prickle despite the annoyance she felt blooming hotly through her for being laughed at.
“And that is where you hope to find something to wear?” he asked, his rough voice casual.
“Well, if not mine, then something. I’m sure clothes get transported to the colonies all the time.”
He inclined his head in agreement. “This is true. Humans, like many species, demand luxuries from their homeworlds, which is what makes their vessels attractive to pirates. There is a low probability of finding other garments as most of the supplies being transported were stolen. Your cargo hold is nearly empty. It is the first place I looked for salvage.”
The heavy sickness in her stomach increased, and Daisy tightened her sweat-dampened hands on the sheet around her. “But not everything, right? There is still a chance?”
He cast another sideways glance at her.
“It is unlikely.”
“But not impossible,” she countered stubbornly.
Zil gave another unenthusiastic and—if she wasn’t mistaken—a somewhat put-upon grunt. “If you insist, I will escort you there so that you may see for yourself. And what will you do if there is nothing?”
She swallowed back a wave of nausea, but if push came to shove, she knew that she couldn’t afford to be too squeamish. Not if it kept her from freezing. The ship was feeling increasingly colder. “Then it looks like gory hand-me-downs it is.”
She refused to worry about it. She just needed to locate her trunks within the cargo bay. Which reminded her…
“I hope your tech has recently been upgraded. The cargo bay is secured with the latest security technology,” she called up to him. She refused to jog anymore to keep up with his damn long-legged stride. Shouting was easier. “It will not be easy to bypass.”
“I doubt that it will be an issue,” he replied evenly.
Daisy frowned at his back in response to his blasé tone of voice. It was as if he actually believed that it would be easy to gain access. She smirked and rolled her eyes. He was going to get a rude shock.
Except that didn’t happen.
“How… how is the entire cargo bay empty?” she demanded moments later as she stared at the massive empty space. The only evidence that anything had been there at all were the piles of discarded cord that had tied freight down and a few broken boxes left half-spilled over the floor. “This can’t be happening.”
Zil slid her a sidelong look from the corner of his eye and huffed with amusement. “You did not actually think that an attacked cargo freighter would have been left with all of its cargo intact, did you?” The corner of his mouth turned up in the smallest hint of a smile. “Time to go collect the gory hand-me-downs now, yes?”
Daisy glared daggers at the male’s back as he turned and walked out of the cargo hold without even a drop of concern for her. Un-fucking-believable.