Page 2 of Possessed by the Dragon Alien (Zarux Dragon Brides #6)

Lulit shrugged, but not indifferently. “Mostly? He’ll yell at you.

They make you clean the lower gutters or load the incinerator pits.

You need to make a big mistake for a major punishment, like estra-v, and even that’s really not so bad.

” She gestured with her chin at the supervisor, who had stopped to bark at another worker down the aisle, “He’s pretty lazy. ”

Nena nodded. She already knew, from her life at Settlement 112-1, the ways people made others small to bend them to their will.

“The real trouble,” Lulit went on, “is if one of the Twelve notices you. There are six emissaries and six chancellors, and they come to the gardens sometimes, to show off, to walk around and pretend they’re part of the world.

They all hate each other and are constantly trying to undermine each other, but they agree in their disdain for independent worlds.

” She waved a hand at Nena’s questioning look.

“I was an aide to a mid-level official for a short time before being transferred here. I heard more than I should have.” She flicked a leaf expertly into a disposal tray.

“If one of the Twelve stops, asks you a question, stares at you? Answer quick and deferentially. Don’t even look at them. Just keep doing your job.”

A shiver ran up Nena’s neck. “What happens if—?”

“If they take you to the towers, where they live, you’re done,” Lulit said quietly. “No one comes back.”

Nena let the words settle like soil after a heavy rain. She sliced three more stalks, then wiped her gloves on the edge of the tray. “Why?”

Lulit gave her a curious look for the first time. “Why do they take people, or why does no one come back?”

Nena shrugged. Both . “Why do they care about doing anything with us? We’re just workers. Prisoners.”

“Hard to say how their dark minds work,” Lulit said, turning back to her row. “Best guess is, we’re all people that the Axis conquered. They do it to remind the rest of us that we’re weak compared to them. Or for fun. Or to keep us afraid.”

A memory of her friends’ faces rose up, the way they’d been separated at the auction, the way the buyers whispered as they chose. Nena pressed her lips together. “I’ll keep my head down.”

“Good,” Lulit said. “You seem smart. Smart ones last longer.”

Well, that sounded ominous. They worked in tense quiet until the sky beyond the dome darkened. A rhythm emerged among the tray rows, interrupted only by the squelch of stems and low murmurs of air systems.

At the end of her shift, Nena was brought back to her cell, which was a white-frosted glass box with a cot suspended from the wall and a toilet with a sink beside it for basic needs.

New clothes came through a slot on the wall every wake and sleep cycle.

She lay with her hands folded on her chest, her eyes fixed on the faint honeycomb shadow of the ceiling overhead.

There was no silence, not really, just a thinner texture of background noise: the soft hum of water pumps, the distant hiss of something volatile, the thump-thump of her own pulse.

She tried to reconstruct the last moments at the auction.

She’d never actually been bidded on. Before getting to that part, a guard had yanked her out of line and brought her to a holding cell where she’d been left with two high-level Axis officials.

Nena had been exhausted, she’d collapsed on the floor, curled into a ball and made herself seem small, afraid of whatever fate awaited her.

But while she lay there, there had been an argument between those two officials.

They’d argued, not about price, but about her, and it was clear that they either didn’t care or didn’t realize she could hear every word they said, despite their hushed voices.

One had pointed at Nena with a sneer, her finger jabbing the air, and said, “Taghi does not want that one brought to Central. She says no Terians within sight of him. My master wants her in the auction and shipped off. Far away.”

The other had shaken his head. “No. Shorvis wants her brought to Central. He needs to be tested, after what happened.”

What had happened? Nena still didn’t know, as that had been answered with a hiss. “This is foolish,” the other official said. “I will get an order to stop—”

“It’s already done. The Terian is being transferred to Central on Shorvis’ orders and that is final.”

That was that. Shorvis’ aide won out and rough hands grabbed her up and shuffled her onto yet another transport. Nena had known then that her fate was sealed.

But what did it mean, to be “for Central”?

Who was “he”? She shivered, remembering how the officials’ eyes had flicked over her with disgust. Again, she wondered what had happened to her friends, whose voices had been the last familiar ones she heard.

Now they blurred together in her mind, but it was the eyes she missed most. The way people looked at you when you were known, and the difference when you were only a number.

A knock at the glass startled her. Nok9’s face appeared, pale and cold, then vanished as the door slid open. “On your feet, 93-A,” the supervisor said. “It’s time to return to work.”

Nena’s stomach twisted, but she rose and followed Nok9 into the corridor.

Her body moved, not with hope or resistance but with the inertial force of one who’d learned to adapt, to stay alive.

Each step brought her back into the mechanical light, the rows of hydroponic trays, the familiar, bitter smell of nutrient solution.

If there was a way out of this place, a way back to the wild, imperfect world she’d known, or better yet, somewhere more forgotten and free, it was hidden in routines like these, in the patterns that revealed themselves only to the persistent and the invisible.

Over the ten cycles that followed, Nena learned quickly.

She kept her hands steady, never falling behind, and let her mind drift to its own secret work: sifting for patterns, noting which prisoners entered and left, which ones spoke or stayed silent, how many guards in a typical shift, when the chemical reek of the outer gardens grew sharper, and whether the glass towers beyond the dome had any obvious movement at all.

She didn’t see her Terian friends. Not once.

Not even a hint of them, and that was its own kind of pain—sharp, but also a relief that they were not trapped here.

She forced her mind to catalog what she could.

There were at least two hundred workers, maybe more, all funneled through the same sequence of eat, work, rest, sleep.

Unsurprisingly, the garden supervisors discouraged prisoners from forming a connection, a friendship.

The only constant was the looming presence of the towers, their mirrored skins reflecting back the manufactured gardens.

She stepped up to her row as she did every cycle, sickle in hand, and began to cut.

Each motion was careful, pragmatic, the action of someone who understood that freedom was not a gift but something earned, day by day, with every calculated silence and every measured gesture.

The garden’s perfection pressed in on her.

It was a constant, choking reminder of the regime’s reach, but her mind drifted to the idea, so faint and dangerous it barely qualified as hope, that someday something real could grow here—a flaw, a seed of chaos—that couldn’t be pruned away.

Until then, she would watch. She would wait.

And she would survive.