Page 20 of Taken (After the End #6)

Chapter Twelve

Rhen

When he didn’t fuck me after the fire, I lay awake beside him in bed panicking while his huge shoulders rose and fell at ungodly long intervals that told me he was sleeping soundly. I replayed the events of the evening a hundred times, always arriving at the same conclusion:

This is it. He’s done with me.

Clearly, he didn’t like my dancing. Everyone else seemed to—it was kinda sweet, the visible softening of the females toward me and toward each other the longer I moved—but my big monster man didn’t once offer to join me.

He didn’t like me braiding people’s hair.

He watched with what I thought looked like interest, and it was clear his people liked it, judging by the line they formed, but maybe I should have offered to braid his hair first?

Maybe he was doing the insecure man thing?

Maybe I didn’t give him enough attention.

After the fire, he’d looked so angry with me back in the tent, and then he’d shoved me off when I presented myself for him.

So, I lay there, after giving myself a day off from trying to escape, panic swimming through me like a school of piranhas, until I decided that I needed to move.

At the same time, I also considered that…

maybe I should think about staying when I eventually got back to the Sucere Chamber…

I remove the pretty clothing he gave me and put back on the tattered shreds of my Sucere uniform—happy to find my green beans still in my pocket and my name still stitched into the tag on the breast. I find rope sitting on top of the chest and quickly wrap it around myself—it’s basically the only thing holding my uniform up at all, but whatever.

I’ve never been modest. Back in Portugal, there was a local fountain where most of the tiny town gathered after a rain to bathe together.

I think about Portugal now. How, even with my limited skills, I never felt like I didn’t have a place.

But what am I here? If I can’t keep him happy for a week, I don’t want to know what happens to me when he tosses me out onto my ass, leaving me for males like Jiral…

And I’m not sure how many jellybean teeth I can earn just through hair braiding.

I fight the urge to give the monster who’s got the best dick I’ve ever encountered a goodbye kiss, feeling more confident that I’ll actually get away this time with how hard he’s sleeping. And as I back away from him, I debate…wondering…if this is the last time I’ll see him.

Knowing I won’t get to make the choice of whether to return to the tribe or to stay in the Chamber if I say goodbye with a kiss and accidentally wake him, my shoulders slump in defeat. I bite my bottom lip and blow a kiss over my shoulder as I make my way out of the tent and into the dark night.

“Hey, Pam, you there?” I ask when I’m far enough away from the camp that the bonfire still raging bright looks like the light of a match at this distance.

“Rhen…I am…still here. And I regret to inform you that the humidity level of the Sucere Chamber is now below fifty percent.”

I wince. The Chamber was programmed to stay around sixty-five and, thanks to me and the portal door I left open, it’s dropped significantly.

“Without enough moisture in the Chamber atmosphere, and given that the horde ransacked the reservoirs, there may not be enough liquid to sustain the Sucere passenger population.”

“Yes, yes,” I say, flustered as the wind bites at me like puppy teeth through every exposed opening in my clothing. “You explained this before and the pressure isn’t helping.” I take off at a jog.

“While I regret to cause you…undue stress, I must inform you that I have already…begun protocol sixty-three…and if the humidity level drops below…forty percent…I will be left with no other choice than to seal Bay Twelve and terminate those passengers…”

“Bay Twelve?” I squeak.

“Yes…Rhen…”

“That was my bay.”

“Yes. Priority twelve of twelve, these passengers are most expendable, so will be jettisoned first.”

Jettisoned…expendable…insignificant…

I trip, flail and fall on my hands, grating them on the hard sand and reopening wounds from two days ago. I groan and sigh, roll onto my back and blink up at the sky.

Oh wow.

I hadn’t noticed the stars before and by golly, the sheer quantity of them is utterly discombobulating. I inhale deep, and then deeper still. I hold, thinking about how folks back home always used to talk about how small we humans were compared to the vastness of space. But that’s not true, is it?

Humans have incredible power. The power to change an entire planet, take it from what it was and then, through our own actions, consumption and growth, reduce it to this. And then to persevere and continue on, dance around fires, fight and resist in a land with no flowers.

We’re not insignificant. We’re significant against space, against our planet, against the creatures that once inhabited it and the new terrors that inhabit it now.

The expression was written wrong. Because while we aren’t small, we still don’t matter against the thing that’s greater than infinite space. The only thing that is.

Time.

Against time, even planets are small.

Time has existed before there was and will exist after there is.

I’m fighting now to save a blip in time, to give those Sucere humans and maybe a few of their next generations a chance to exist because that’s all any of us ever have.

A chance at something. I feel tears coming to my eyes now at the awesome understanding of the chance I’ve been given.

To paint in museums that once stood. To paint with blood against bunker walls. To paint the desert sands of a time that exists so far after the Fall. To try to save humanity. To maybe be their downfall. To join a pack of monsters, to make love to one of them. To fight with sex and teeth and claws.

I think about my parents, blurry faces I can no longer keep a full grip on in my memories.

I think about tia and avó Marias, avó Paolina, tia Leonor, tia Benedita, and tio Jo?o.

I think of Hugo, who I once bathed with in the fountain and had desperate sex with in a bombed-out building around the corner right after.

He’d cried the whole time and I’d cuddled him in my arms.

I think about the monster who screeches like he’s being gutted any time he empties into me, his cock knotting us together right after.

I wonder if he’ll be upset or relieved to find me missing when the sun crests the horizon, knowing that regardless, he’ll get over it. Because time stops for no one.

I exhale finally and blink, my eyelids blotting out the cascade of stars twinkling like the ghosts of forgotten worlds, lost somewhere in the eclipse of time. They, too, don’t matter to time, but they matter to me. They are significant, I think as I roll onto my knees. They matter. I matter.

I grin and rise onto my feet, dust off my filthy fucking uniform and start to jog a little bit faster. I exhale again, even more emphatically. “Don’t worry, Pam. I’m on it. I’ll close the door.”

“It is good to hear that you are…confident…Rhen. Confidence and optimism are good traits in successful Sucere Project team members.”

I laugh, the sound swallowed on the next breeze—a breeze which carries with it another sound. A softer one. “Huh.”

I keep my ear to the wind and my arms pumping at an easy pace knowing that I’ve got another three miles to go, grateful that the caravan hasn’t moved farther than it has. I haven’t been part of the moving process yet and I’m curious about the sail structures I’ve seen from afar.

Aside from the sails, which I’ve never seen up close, there are large wooden platforms, some as big as fifteen meters by fifteen meters, but I don’t know how they’re being moved.

Anytime I’m dragged back into camp, his tent is already up or hasn’t been collapsed yet, and after he catches me, he always keeps me inside of it for… a while.

The soft hissing sound comes at me in a second wave a little while later, carried on another breeze.

The sky is a different, lighter color—the dark indigo fading into a murky gray along the horizon.

I haven’t been able to see where I’m going at all and the fact that I’ve only fallen three times, stumbling over large rocks, is a miracle.

I only know where to go because Pam’s voice corrects my course every so often. Other than that, I just run straight.

“What is that, Pam?”

“Would you like me to take a reading…Rhen?”

“That would be great.” I come to a stop and hold my arm up towards the eastern horizon where there’s nothing. To my left is a rocky outcrop, not too far off. Behind me, to the south, there’s a lone mountain way, way off in the distance. “Thanks, bestie.”

“You are very welcome…Rhen. You are also my best friend. Ha. Haha. Ha.”

I shiver. I don’t know if it’s Pam’s terrible laugh or if it’s an even eerier premonition, but the goosebumps crawling up the back of my neck have me glancing over my shoulder.

It’s dark that way. Looking back toward camp, I notice the fire’s either out or I’ve traveled far enough I can no longer see it.

From what I’ve noticed, the tribe tends to wake late into the morning and sleep late at night.

If I’ve calculated everything correctly, then I should still have a couple hours before the first being rises.

If I keep my pace of some obnoxious number of miles per hour, then I should make it.

After all, whatever sound I’m hearing is too soft to be his pounding feet.

His footsteps are spaced way too far apart.

I didn’t recognize them as footsteps the first time, that massive loping stride, but I know that sound well by now and that’s not what…

“Rhen…I regret to inform you that I am unable to ascertain the name or nature of the incoming species.”

“Incoming…what?” I lose my voice.