5. Runaway Mate

Lettie

It takes a few minutes for the chill to leave my bones after his warning, but I shake it off. Whatever he will do to me is irrelevant if I do a proper escape — which is what I intend to do. I need to get back to the Mare. I want my own room. I want my captains. I want the life I had, the cozy yet exciting life of a pirate.

My suit has been taken, but I am in a room full of objects, and like I always say, a room full of objects is as good as an escape room. I'm getting out of here, and I'm going to take the tunnel out.

Before I do that, I go through Shan's wardrobe and I cobble together a bit more of an outfit. Thank god I still have my boots. That's the part that would be very hard to recreate with handmade items. All I need for the rest of the outfit is enough to keep my flesh covered. The shirt he gave me this morning is a start, but I grab more, a leathery sort of overcoat thing which I belt around my body to give me a bit more bulk and more protection from the elements. It is scaled, which is good. I wonder if saurians might mistake me for one of them if I can wear enough scaled stuff.

It's probably a bit of a long shot, but always worth thinking about. My biggest challenge here is not drawing attention to myself by being a fleshy human lump. I hope there's a little more variance among the saurian population than I've seen so far. I hope there's shorter, rounder saurians. Probably not. I'm probably going to stick out like a sore thumb no matter what I do.

I feel a brief pang of guilt as I open the back of the wardrobe. I do feel a little as though I am betraying some trust he has put in me, which is silly. I can't be identifying with my captor this quickly. I have to remember why I'm here, and what I came to do. I have a mission. I need freedom. I need to think of my future. I need to worry about what the hell is going on in my womb, which has now been left awash in his seed.

I run down the tunnel this time, not worrying about surveillance. Time is of the essence now. I need to get back to the place he and Avel met, and I need to get into the city proper. My captains are waiting for me.

Shan

We are meeting in what Wrath calls his war room. It's a small room with a big round table in it, thirteen of us ranged around it. Some of these saurians I know, others I only know by reputation. I am sure this is not the only meeting he is having like this. Wrath prefers decentralized command. Each of us reports to him, and to him alone. No one saurian knows enough to bring him down. He doesn't live down here with the rest of the crew. I don"t know where he lives. Nobody does.

"We've been making some big moves lately," Wrath says. "We have struck the alpha where he least expected to be struck. We have attained his wealth. He may still have the official trappings of office, but he has no funds with which to back it up, and that will make him desperate soon enough."

Usually I hang on Wrath's every word when he speaks. Not because I find him a fascinating, charismatic figure, but because I need to understand him better than anybody else does. Today, my attention is split. I keep thinking of Lettie, my human mate. I keep catching mental whiffs of her scent. The memory of her is maddening and it makes it very difficult to pay attention to this meeting.

"Now that Thorn has discovered the fact we've cleared out his reserve, taken every bit of precious metal out of the place — that is going to lead to retaliation. No doubt about it. By my reckoning, we have hours, not days, until the alpha's forces come down those tunnels and try to exact what they call justice. It's time we cleared out of the burrows for a bit and took refuge somewhere even the alpha fears to tread. I want you to go to those who report to you, then go to your secondary and tertiary locations. I want you all spread out. No more congregating. We'll use the letterbox network to communicate, and runners as usual. Make sure to keep an eye on Thorn's known associates. Keep your ears to the ground. Alright. Let's go. Shan, I need to talk to you."

Everybody files out of the war room except me. There are jealous little glances and some curious ones. A private one-on-one with Wrath is the dream of all his generals and lieutenants.

"How is the human?"

"Very good."

"You're fond of her?"

I don't want to lie to him. Partly because lying to Wrath is a bad idea, and partly because I want to tell everyone I encounter how incredible Lettie is. I don't like telling anyone anything, but the experiences I've had with her are too good to keep to myself.

"She's amazing," I say, knowing I am providing him a certain amount of leverage with the admission, but also knowing it's best to be honest where I can. The more truth I can tell, the more trust I build, the more I avoid his suspicions.

"It's good to find a mate, isn"t it. A real mate. One who is capable of making you feel hot to your core, even when the day is chilly. We're cold-blooded creatures, but a real mate could make an ice storm feel warm. Saurians don't know that anymore. That's one of the many things the alphas have taken from us. It's not natural for a saurian to live under the tyranny of a single leader. We're not made that way. We're not pack or herd creatures. We're individuals who crave mates and family, and a life outside the walls of a city."

I've heard Wrath's speeches before. I know what he preaches. He doesn't think anything about Grave City is right. He thinks Alpha Thorn, and all the alphas before him have been co-opting our natural saurian instincts for family and instead harnessing them to serve the city and the alpha himself.

Wrath reaches out and squeezes my shoulder.

"You feel like a son to me," he says. "I know that's a strange thing to say, seeing as none of us were raised by fathers, but I want you to know I've taken an interest in you. I'd like to see you mate well. We deserve to live the way we should, you and I."

This is only the second time in my life a saurian in a position of authority has taken a shine to me. The first time changed my life…

Many years ago…

"There's something wrong with him."

"I know. He's a creepy little thing. But it's not his fault."

I am four years old, and I can hear the nursemaids talking about me. They talk about me a lot. I disturb them. They never say it to my face, but even if I did not overhear them, I would see the disgust in their expressions when they look at me.

"Is it just his eyes?"

"I don't think so. There's something about him. He's not one thing or another. He's not a predator. He's not a tank."

"Must have been an interesting mating."

"His egg was left on the doorstep. A home-lay."

"There's a lot of home-laying at the moment."

I listen to them prattle to one another, not understanding most of what they say, but knowing that everything about me is weird, and strange, and bad. It is a heavy burden that makes a dark weight sink from my chest to my belly. I don't know what the feeling means either, but I know it's bad.

The others are playing, running around and shrieking their heads off. I am sitting still. I don't run unless there's a reason to, and no reason is not a reason.

Most of the other whelplings are little chunky creatures with round bellies and generous arms, big heads atop their bodies. The nurses pick them up regularly and play with them often. A little yellow-scaled female saurian with a flare on her head and short little nubs of horns running over her forehead has been carried around for hours it seems.

I am taller than the other hatchlings. I do not have their rotund build. I am short, but I am already broad shouldered and covered in muscles. I can climb out of all the pens and partitions they try to keep us behind. I can run faster than all the other whelplings, even those who were hatched in earlier incubations.

I sit still and I wish that I felt some kind of warmth. There are heat lamps, of course, but it's not the same as being held. The nursemaids pick up the others sometimes, but I don't know why they never seem to want to hold me.

One of the nursemaids is passing, so I stretch out my arms to be picked up. We must all take our turns. That's what they are always telling us.

"No, Shan," Nurse Marnie says. "It's Elva's turn."

Elva is a little purple-winged saurian. She has bright violet eyes and she giggles readily as the nurse scoops her up.

"Up! Up!" I have limited verbal skills, but I know how to tell her what I want.

"Wait your turn," she says curtly.

I have not been picked up in more than three days. I ache with loneliness. Sadness quickly turns to something else: anger. Deep anger. More anger than I can really fit inside my body. Sometimes the other whelpings scream and shout and cry. I don't do that. I never have. Maybe I cried once, a very, very long time ago, but I don't think it did me any good.

Nurse Marnie walks around the corner and I hear her talking to the Matron. Matron is kind, but old. She has overseen the nursery forever. She walks with a hunch and we all know that her knees and back hurt. She is kind in a way no others are kind. It goes deeper.

"Black eyes is complaining again. We should have crushed that egg."

"We incubate all eggs, regardless of provenance. And we tend to all young, regardless of their appearance." Matron sounds disapproving, but Nurse Marnie doesn't care. She keeps talking in that tone the nurses use when they think we aren't listening or just don't understand.

"I don't like touching him. He gives me the creeps."

My hands ball into fists.

Two predatory hatchlings come running past. They are slightly unsteady on their big feet. Their jaws are open as they pretend to fight with one another.

I am angry. I am angrier than anybody else. They are happy, and I hate them for it. The feeling is a big red ball inside me, and it moves from my chest to my stomach and emanates throughout me.

I let out a roar, but it is not a playful shriek like theirs. It is a full roar, a sound that comes from somewhere deep inside me, maybe even beyond me. It is so fearsome, both of the other hatchlings stop in their tracks. I throw myself at them, following rage and instinct. I don't know what I am doing. I have never seen a fight before, but my body knows what to do. I start to hit the others. I hit them with all the feelings that appeared inside me when I heard the nurse talking about me. I hit them and I hit them.

They start to shriek and scream, unable to defend themselves because they have never been hurt before. I am the worst thing that has ever happened to them. I feel like the worst creature ever to be hatched on this world. I become exactly the thing the nurses think I am. Unworthy. Evil. Wrong.

"Easy, easy! Little man!"

Large hands sweep me up off the ground as Matron picks me up. She is soft in a way none of the other nurses are soft. She has a long neck and very large eyes that always seem to be lit with kindness. I can hear the popping and cracking of arthritic limbs as she lifts me to her bosom and carries me away. Later I will realize that holding my hefty frame must have caused her pain, but she picked me up because she saw that I needed to be picked up.

I am shaking and I am crying, and I know I have been very bad, but she does not say a single cruel word, or censure me in any way. She takes me to the kitchen and she sits me on the counter, and she makes me something to eat.

"There is nothing wrong with you," she says as she offers me a spoon of mashed meat and grain. "There will never be anything wrong with you. You are special, and you have your place."

In that moment, she cements this childish outburst into a memory I will never forget. She teaches me that it is possible for some saurians to see the good in me even though I don't see anything good in myself.

We are supposed to stay in the nursery for the first fifteen years of our lives. Matron dies when I am five years old. I am six years old when I first run away. I am brought back and beaten. I am ten years old when I run away the second time. This time I am not brought back. They do not look for me. They are relieved that I am gone.

I find myself on the streets of Grave City. I am cold, I am hungry. I scavenge what I can, and I sleep curled up in dry corners that are sometimes warm. Grown saurians do not pay me any attention. They know very well that the young are the responsibility of the nursery. I am not their problem. I am not anybody's problem. I am happy. The happiest I have been since I last saw matron.

I can find food out here, and though I might be small and strange, nobody seems to feel the urge to point it out. Sometimes they walk through me, stumble over me, sometimes they curse me, but it's not personal. They swear at me the same way they swear at curbs and each other sometimes. It feels good to be cursed at by someone who doesn't tell me what a creepy little whelp I am.

I work my way through the city, following my nose for the best food. So much is discarded, more than enough for me to eat. They throw it into the garbage and I take it out again. I am eating better than I have eaten in a long time, and with every day that passes, I get better at finding better food.

I move slowly but steadily from the poorer parts of the city to bigger, fancier houses. Some of these are harder to get food from, though the food is better. They have guards patrolling, and they chase me away if they see me. They also have tall walls and spikes atop them and sometimes they'll even fire projectiles at intruders.

I don't worry about getting into the houses. I don't need to. All I need is the trash, and they don't defend that. I find the best pickings in the garbage cans outside the alpha's place. It becomes a matter of habit for me to visit multiple times per day, and the offerings always seem to get better and better. Over a period of days, they throw away more than scraps. They start to throw away what seems to me like entire meals.

I cannot believe my eyes when I sneak into the can and find a wrapped package of freshly roasted meat deposited there. I so rarely get meat, because meat is hardly ever thrown away. I don't even bother to leave the garbage can. I sit atop all of the other trash and I start tucking into the meal with so much enjoyment I don't notice that I am not alone.

"Hey!" I growl angrily as a big red hand pulls me out of the garbage can by the scruff of my neck.

"What are you doing, whelpling? Are you lost?"

I bite him. Hard. I have sharp little teeth, and they sink through the flesh on the palm of his hand. He holds me regardless, even as a slow trickle of blood runs down his hand and over his wrist. He does not seem bothered by the injury. For a moment, his eyes seem to twinkle with a sort of indulgent mercy I once saw in the matron's gaze.

"You're far too young to be out on your own. How old are you? Twelve? Thirteen?"

"Ten."

"Ten!" His brow rises. "You're going to be huge, aren't you."

"I'm already huge," I say, suddenly proud of myself as a result of the positive inflection in his voice. My size has always been notable. The nurses remarked upon it all my life, but I never thought of it as a good thing until this moment. The saurian speaking to me is the biggest one I have ever seen. His scales gleam red with a golden hue. He is made even more ferocious than I am, but he does not seem apologetic about it in the slightest. I doubt he has ever apologized for anything.

I'll call the nursery," he says.

"I'm not going back there! They hate me! And I hate them!"

"And why would they hate you?"

I stab a finger toward my eyes. "Because these are creepy. I'm scary."

He laughs, a big, masculine sound. I have not been in the presence of a creature like this before. I've seen grown saurian males on the streets, but they've never stopped to talk to me. They don't notice me. I'm like an animal scuttling around the feet of giants. I like the way he sounds. I like how nothing seems to be a problem to him.

"Those are your eyes, whelp. And fine eyes they are too, if they spied these leftovers from all the way behind the walls."

I guess I am somewhat inside the walls, but that's because the outer perimeter isn't really guarded all that well.

"I want you to come inside," he says. "I think you need a proper meal."

I am curious now. I look up into the massive, predatory saurian's face and I ask the obvious question.

"Who are you? Do you work for the alpha?"

He chuckles as if the question amuses him and carries me inside the mansion. I like being carried, and I like being fed, and I like this big red saurian who has been so nice to me. Much nicer than anyone else has bothered to be. I have been ignored and neglected for so long that it started to feel like that was just how the world was.

We get inside the big house, and my eyes widen as I see all sorts of signs of wealth and comfort I have never seen before. The air is warm here, warmer than the outside. They can control the temperature, a feat I've only seen performed in a hatchery before.

"Sona! Please bring our young guest something nourishing to eat."

"Of course, Alpha Thorn. At once, Alpha Thorn."

I sit at a nice, big table and a plate of food is brought for me. I start to eat, filling my face. I realize, of course, that I have been taken in by the alpha, but the excitement of that fact is much less intense than the excitement of eating good food.

While I eat, the alpha sits near me at the table and drinks something that smells rich and tangy. He watches me with indulgent amusement and some curiosity.

"How long have you been away from the nursery?"

I shrug between bites. "Weeks?"

Thorn glances over at his manservant. I think how nice it must be to have someone who does things for you. The nurses used to do things for me, when matron made them.

"Sona, can you please check to see if I missed any notifications about missing whelplings?"

"No notifications have been received, sir. I can tell you that. It is very rare for a whelp to go missing from the nursery. My wife and myself have raised our own, of course, but…"

"Please check again, Sona. We may have missed something."

"I never miss anything, my alpha, but I will check as you have commanded."

I've not seen a saurian like Sona before. He has a big scoop running from the very top of his skull and ending in a sort of blunted protrusion behind him. His skin is green, sort of like mine, but has fewer scales. His features are softer than the alpha's. Thorn is all teeth and tail and muscles. He is the biggest saurian I have ever seen, and he is also the nicest.

"Have some more," Thorn says, nudging a plate of cakes over toward me.

A female reaches around and removes the cakes before I can take another one.

"He shouldn't eat too much. He will make himself sick."

"You know best, Allegra."

Incensed, I snatch at the cake plate with both hands, filling my palms with as much cake as I can carry.

She laughs and pats my head. "There will be more. You will not go hungry again."

She has a nice demeanor. Nicer than the nurses.

Everybody here is impossibly nice, and I don't know why. There's no reason for them to be kind to me. As my stomach works away, full of food, I start to think the way I have learned to think on the streets.

"Are you going to eat me?"

"What?!" Thorn laughs.

"Why are you being nice?"

"When I see a whelpling crawling into my trash day after day to eat, I get curious," he says. "Sona! Get the matron on the line. I want to talk to that woman."

"I'm not going back!" I stand up, preparing to run.

"No," he says. "You're not. But I want to know why you are here. I want to know what happened."

Sona brings a tablet device that has a face on it. I recognize it as the nurse who became matron after matron died. She looks worried and confused to be faced by Alpha Thorn. I make a rude gesture at her when the tablet swings briefly around to me. Thorn lifts a brow at me but does not censure me for being bad.

"Matron, why do I have a little whelp here who has been left to wander the streets for weeks without so much as a missing report?"

"Oh," she says, as if she's surprised to be asked the question. "He's not a normal whelpling. He's aggressive. He was a danger to the others, and it was decided he'd be let go."

Thorn's jaw clenches. "How often do you decide to let young whelplings go, matron?"

"Not very often. One or two a year at most. Only if a whelpling shows serious antisocial tendencies that cannot be controlled. You might think it is cruel, but it better than the alternative."

"And what is the alternative?"

"Under previous administrations, hatchlings like the one you have would be terminated at birth. Letting them go gives them a chance at survival."

"Letting them go channels them into lives of desperation, crime, and gang activity," Thorn says "We are a predatory species living in the bones of the greatest terror ever to exist. Your job is to nurture the instincts of our kind and prepare all manner of whelps for the world."

"But he's not normal."

She repeats those words, with a darker intonation.

"What's so abnormal about him?"

"His eyes, alpha. They're dark as night. They thought he was blind when he was born, but he's never shown any sign of not being able to see. He barely speaks. He just looks at you with that hollow gaze, and he…"

"I've heard enough," Thorn growls. "The nursery can expect a complete review."

That is a dire threat from an alpha, even I know that.

"But we don't have to take him back?"

"No. I will keep him here."

She sighs with relief. She may lose her job, but she will not have to deal with me anymore.

Thorn ends the call and puts the tablet down. He turns to me and crooks a finger. "Come here."

I do as he tells me, mostly hoping there will be more cake. He reaches out for me, takes my hands in his, and makes me look at him directly. He doesn't seem to mind my dark eyes. He doesn't seem to mind anything about me at all, not my filthy condition, or my roughened, sick scales. He looks at me as if I am a very, very good thing. The feeling of being regarded positively by a creature as powerful as the alpha is life changing.

"You're not strange," he tells me. "You're exactly what a saurian should be. We are descended from hunters, not talkers."

"They don't like my eyes."

"That's their failing. Not yours. There's nothing wrong with you. You are perfect."

Hearing those words, I start to cry. I did not know that words like that could be said to me. I did not know that anybody could even think about me that way.

Thorn allowed me to grow up in his home. He raised me, in a manner of speaking. That is why Thorn will always have my loyalty. When he asked me to go undercover, work my way up Wrath's organization, and help him bring it down from the inside, I could only say yes. I was thrilled to have a chance to repay him for all his kindness.

I never expected to discover that Wrath was not simply the evil creature he was made out to be. I never thought the situation would become so complicated. I owe my life to Alpha Thorn. But I think I might owe my future to Wrath.