Chapter 10

PALOMA

As the second sun begins its descent, the woods darken, adding to my fear. I don’t do well in dark places, not since the journey to Kovos, and especially not with this particular orc guarding me. Not that I trust Grak, but he’s quickly become the Devil-I-know over the one I don’t, the one who clearly hates the idea of infecting his people with my presence.

“If you think I’m weak and will destroy your people, then let me go,” I urge from atop his orc-horse.

“I have my orders,” Verig says.

“Tell Grak I fell from the horse and you couldn’t find me.”

“This is a gorja, not a horse. And he would not believe such a lie, as you could not evade a skilled warrior. No human could.”

I don’t mention that I nearly did when I hid in the smelly hay earlier. Only Grak knew I was there, no other, including two warriors.

“Can we make a deal?” I ask.

“We do not have time for your foolishness.” He points to the ground. I lean over to see what he’s showing me.

An orc lies on the ground, face down, partially hidden by foliage, blood pooled beneath him.

“Oh my God. What happened?”

“This is Fotak. One of our scouts. He was not supposed to be here, though it’s not an area we’ve ever had trouble.”

Without warning, Verig’s gorja breaks into a full gallop. My body bounces up and down, with only the male’s arm around my waist keeping me from falling. My hands have nowhere to go, nothing to grip except the warrior’s legs, but that feels wrong, like a betrayal to Grak, a monster to whom I owe nothing, especially my loyalty.

I grab hold of the gorja’s neck, but when I pitch my body forward, Verig tightens his grip. With no options left, my hands settle on my legs, leaving my safety to the warrior. I don’t trust him, but I don’t believe he’ll break his promise to Grak. These orcs don’t forgive mistakes.

“Why did you call Grak Atox? Is Atox a title?”

“You have it backwards, female. Grak is his title. Atox is his given name, but only a few are permitted to use it. Those he trusts.”

Which doesn’t include me. After all, I am to be his broodmare. Not that I should care, but damn, I feel slighted. Grak, I mean Atox, says his people are different from mine. Yet both see me as a woman to be used.

Time slows and the second sun sets as I ride with Verig, who aside from having his arm around my mid-section doesn’t touch or talk to me. This allows me to relax somewhat until we emerge through the woods into a huge clearing at the base of a mountain.

“Mount Racha,” Verig informs me.

A large colony, with dozens of orcs spread out tending to chores. Some carry wood and stoke fires, while others prepare food. A few hone weapons while remaining ever-vigilant, watching the tree-line. In the distance, smaller groups of males spar with knives and swords, their chests bare and glistening with sweat, long black hair swinging behind them, but they are in the minority. The rest of the orcs look like ordinary people tending to the daily necessities of the settlement. It’s not that different from New Earth, except they have warriors who actively train, unlike the guards of my colony who lounge.

As we approach, many of the orcs stop their work to stare at me. Not a single one smiles a welcome. I don’t even know if orcs can smile with those tusks in the way, but there’s no mistaking the contempt on their faces. They don’t want me here. At least I have something in common with Atox’s people.

I still haven’t figured out what type of title grak is. He led the group that accompanied him to my colony, so I’m guessing he’s a squad commander.

We ride past the clusters of orcs, toward the mountain. Except for weekly trips to Pen’Kesh to sell produce and leather goods, this is the farthest I’ve traveled from New Earth.

“Dismount,” Verig orders.

Easier said than done, given the height of this creature. “How?”

With a slight growl I interpret as annoyance, Verig lifts me, holds me over the side, and drops me like a sack of grain. My feet hit the ground, but I lose my footing and land on my ass, looking like a fool in front of a group of orcs, several of whom bare their tusks.

Verig, despite his promise to Atox, ignores the snarls aimed at me and addresses a female orc heading toward us. She wears a leather tunic over trousers, but it’s the two knives in the harness slung over her chest that interest me. One looks like a kitchen knife used for flaying meat. The other is a seven-inch dagger. Definitely not a utility knife. The material isn’t quite metal or stone. A mix perhaps, though I don’t know how that could be made given the lack of industry on Kovos.

Atox carried a knife of similar design in his harness, but not Verig or any of the other orcs I’ve seen. This woman wears those knives and a small ax at her hip with a confidence that matches any guard in my colony. Perhaps she’s a warrior and the orcs don’t oppress their women like the men of New Earth do.

Her lower lip curls as she flashes her tusks and slowly runs her eyes over me, scrutinizing me as I rise to my feet and brush the dirt off my pants. The contempt rolling off her is so thick I step back, bumping into Verig. He pushes me away from him, none too gently either.

Contempt-filled Orcan words fly at Verig, who nods. The woman’s dark green eyes grow more hateful as she sneers at me. At least she reacts to me with honesty, which surpasses how my own people treated me. They pretended to care about me and lulled me into a false sense of safety before betraying me.

Fuck, this goes beyond mere betrayal. They pulled my world apart, leaving me to question everything I thought I knew about the other species here. What if everything they said about the orcs, vints, bantarans, and moxxels have been lies?

When we landed on Kovos, Council said their highest priority was the safety of all humans in the colony. Before that, they said medicine on Kovos would save my mom. They’ve been lying from the beginning.

Another thought strikes, completely shattering the last fragments of hope within me. What if the Mayflower doesn’t come next month? Or ever?

Despair settles into the deepest recesses of my being.

I’m utterly alone.

“Voken,” the woman orc says to me, not hiding her sneer.

“Hi,” I say back, clueless as to what voken means. I throw in a smile, but that doesn’t improve the situation. Verig flicks a hand at the woman, as if dismissing her, and steers his gorja back toward the forest.

The woman’s eyes travel up and down me once more without a hint of approval or welcome.

“I’m Paloma,” I introduce myself while offering my hand.

She stares at my hand. Right, that’s a human custom. I switch to a wave, wondering if I should be so generous with random gestures without knowing how these orcs will interpret them. I flash another smile, hoping it will at least make me look friendly. “What’s your name?”

She cocks her head, so I point to myself and say, “Pa–lo–ma.”

“Polowma,” she says slowly, imitating my name, then follows with, “Vek avi nok.”

“Can you understand me?”

She stares at me.

Okay, then. She doesn’t have a language chip. It appears orcs and humans have more in common than they realize. Neither colony buys language chips from the bantarans to give to everyone, only the people they deem important. The males.

She grabs my upper arm and practically drags me along, pulling me inside a cave. I hate dark spaces. I’ve had a fear of them since our time on the ship from Earth. When that cendagi… I shove the memory aside. The past is just that. Past.

Except I can’t breathe, just thinking about it. I yank free of her hold and race out of the cave. I promptly slam into the massive orc blocking the entrance.

“Fegra ti.” The woman points down the wide tunnel. Fear of the damn be damned, it appears I don’t have a choice. Yet again.

Steeling my nerves, I focus on one foot at a time as I move deeper into the tunnel that widens to fifteen feet. This isn’t just a simple cave, but a massive tunnels system. A dark, cold maze of stone passages with no end in sight.

Round light disks embedded every ten feet in the tunnel walls light our way. I wonder how the orcs power them since there’s no sunlight inside here, no obvious electrical conduits, and from what I’ve seen in my three years on Kovos, not a single battery on the entire planet. New Earth uses solar panels and wind powered electricity, but we don’t have the materials to make batteries, and the orcs level of industry is less advanced than ours. So where did the orcs get these lights?

I’ll ponder that question later as I have more important things to worry about, like where my new guard is taking me. She shoves me to get me moving again.

The dim light makes my fear of the dark manageable since I can still see who and what is around me. A few smaller orcs, children, race by in the opposite direction, heading outside the tunnel. The lead child, who appears to be eight or nine, glances up at me and comes to a dead stop. The other two children barrel into her.

That’s when I see it… a smile on the little girl who stopped short. At least I think it’s a smile. The corners of her mouth hitch up, revealing tiny tusks, but I swear that smile reaches her eyes.

Seeing kids running, playing, and smiling gives me a glimmer of hope that the orcs aren’t all bad. That they care about their kids.

And I have to say, orc kids are cute. A lot cuter than the adults. The oldest of the three kids, the girl, wears her hair in a braid down the middle of her back, reaching half way to her backside. The ridges on her forehead look like baby fat almost, and her skin doesn’t look nearly as thick as Atox’s. And dimples! She has the most adorable dimples.

I bend down and smile at her while pointing at myself. “Paloma.”

“Paloma?” she mimics my pronunciation nearly perfectly. Then she looks at me and pats her chest. “Evve.”

“Evie?” I repeat back, questioning if I’m saying her name right. I can’t incorporate the guttural sound overlaying the v in her name. The orcan language is very odd, but at least it uses sounds similar to English, with a few that come from the back of the throat. I’ll have to figure out how to make those sounds.

If I stay. Which I am not doing.

Evve reaches out to touch my face. Her little fingers brush the corners of my lower lip where my tusks would be if I had any. The worry on her face soon fades and she’s back to smiling, or rather the orc version of a smile, which sets me at ease. If this little girl doesn’t fear running into the unknown in the tunnels, then I can be just as brave.

Little Evve’s fingers trace along my forehead, as she takes in another difference between our species. I find it interesting how my weight often made me stand out as different or less in the eyes of my people on Earth and New Earth alike. But among the orcs, it’s my lack of orcan features that stands out. Their eyes don’t wander down my hips and belly. They only tilt their heads in curiosity when they see that I’m missing tusks and ridges.

Once again, I think back to my colony, wondering why of all the women in New Earth, Council sold me. They didn’t have to give my father a council seat. There are plenty of single women with no family in our colony. No family to complain if they were sold off.

I peer down at Evve and the two kids behind her. They don’t look like monsters. If anything, I must appear to be the monster to them. I suspect these kids have never seen a human, or perhaps any other species living on Kovos. They remain here, protected by their people. People who care about them.

As my father’s betrayal threatens to unravel my ability to survive the hell I’ve been thrown into, I rise and look down at Evve. Hell might not be the right term. She’s like a flower in the middle of a dark forest, literally. She doesn’t fear the unknown.

I wish I had her courage.

Evve tilts her head, then looks over at my guard, who I’ve nicknamed LB. That stands for Lizzy Borden, not because I think she’s going to kill me, but that axe dangling from her hip isn’t exactly a sign of the neighborhood welcome wagon.

“Ebi fa?” Evve asks.

“Lo,” LB says, running a finger along one of her tusks as a human might tap her chin while thinking. “Petiv. Vash, Evve.”

The kids run off, laughing and giggling. I guess happiness is universal, at least when it comes to children.

“Dag,” LB says, shoving me forward, confirming my suspicion that she doesn’t like me.

As we pass yet another two branches of the tunnel, I kick myself for not paying attention to our route. How will I escape this labyrinth if I get turned around down here?

The next few minutes with LB don’t go any better as I point to myself, repeat my name, and wait for her to do the same. She doesn’t give me her name. Oh, I know she understands precisely what I’m doing as she watched my exchange with Evve with the eyes of a hawk, but LB doesn’t want me here.

We step into a side chamber, a storage area. Ceiling-high shelves line the perimeter of the twenty-by-twenty-foot room. LB points to my jeans and blouse then holds out her hand. When I shake my head—which is an excellent way to get on LB’s bad side—she forcibly undresses me.

At five-six, I’m not short, but I am compared to these orcs. I might as well be a kid being undressed by her mother the way LB stands over me and tugs at my shirt.

Wet fabric never peels off a person easily, but my clothing is also on the tighter side since Lily disappeared. She was the only one willing to tailor clothing to properly fit my curves.

LB loses all patience and yanks my shirt over my head, but it gets stuck on my boobs. She’ll end up ripping it.

“Let me do it,” I say as I wiggle out of the shirt.

LB scowls, shoves me down on the ground, and yanks my pants off next. Damn, she’s strong, handling me like a rag-doll. She has the strength of a human man, the tusks of a wild boar, and the disposition of one, too.

When I stop resisting LB, tears fill my eyes. Fighting off Atox won’t work, and I don’t know where my backpack is. My birth control pills are in there.

I have no way out of this situation, unless I do as he predicted and try to kill him. But I’m not a killer. Even if I could bring myself to try, the orcs would kill me for sure.

Left in nothing but my bra and panties, I shiver, more from my fear of what’s to come than from the cool air in these tunnels.

“Pej,” LB orders, motioning to my undergarments.

I toss the last vestiges of human society aside. As I stand there completely naked with my arms crossed over my chest to cover myself, and tears spilling down my face, I swear I see a moment of hesitation in LB. Her thick brows purse, and her eyes move down me again.

To my relief, she doesn’t stare at my nearly naked body. That disgusted expression she wears began the second she laid eyes on me and has nothing to do with my less-than skinny self. She’s repulsed by the fact I’m human, nothing more.

LB bundles my clothing together then thrusts a leather tunic at me.

With shaking hands, I pull it on. It’s too damn tight in the chest and it reaches my knees like a dress. The one place I excel, my boob size, makes the tunic uncomfortable, but it’s dry and clean.

“Vek, lo faikon.” LB motions me to follow her.

After leaving the storage room, she turns down a side tunnel much narrower than the main tunnels and with a lot less light. There’s a dark wood door cut to fit the surrounding stone perfectly. LB flings the door open to a dark chamber, pushes me inside, and slams the door shut.

I spin around and pound against the wood while looking for a handle or even a crack in the door, anything which I can use to pull it open.

Terror races through me in this dark, unknown space. The lack of noise heightens my anxiety. Anything and anyone could be inside, watching me… targeting me. Or perhaps I’m alone and standing on a precipice to a deep pit. One step could be my last.

A scratching sound makes me whirl around and raise my fists, ready to strike whoever is here. More than once, I spin in another direction, listen, and then nothing happens. I reach for the door and my fingers brush against cool stone. I inadvertently moved away from the door.

With fear as my companion, I sink to the floor, pull my knees to my chest, and wait…