Page 51 of Owning His Pet
That argument might work on Freak, if he turned his brain off. It would work because he’d find it cute. The Lizard King does not find me cute, and it does not work on him.
“Seize her,” he says. “Prepare her for punishment.”
“No!” I cry out.
I am taken in two pairs of lizard hands and stripped down entirely. My nudity becomes an immediate source of shame as I cry out for my Psyon lover. Surely he won’t let anything badhappen to me? If he’s going to stop it, he has to stop it very, very soon.
I am pressed across a table and held down while the Lizard King makes comments about getting the very worst of his canes for this occasion. I am shivering and trying to rise, but there is no chance of doing that. These evil aliens have me and they have no intention of showing me any further mercy.
“After the kindness we showed you, you decided to act against us,” the king declares. “There are tens of galactic dollars in damage from what you’ve been doing, and missed productivity.”
“Like the torture machines they’re working on?”
“Like the torture machines they’re working on,” he says, with an apparent complete lack of shame.
He is standing in front of me so I can see him in all his cruel lizard glory, and the cane too, a long wand of some kind of substance that looks as though it is covered in the same skin he is. It’s a creepy sight, and one that gives me real fear.
“This is going to hurt,” he says. “And you deserve every bit of pain you are about to suffer.”
He walks around behind me, swishing the cane as he goes. He is drawing out the moment before I am punished, letting me anticipate the terribleness of the events about to unfurl.
Smack!
Suddenly, the cane bites across my bare flesh with wicked intensity. I draw in a deep breath at the first flare of pain and let out a scream.
“I told you,” he says with barely contained sadism. “You had full warning of what would happen to you if you tried to escape or interfere with the ship, but you did it anyway. All you had to do was be good for me. All you had to do was play nicely and you’d have lived out the rest of your life here.”
Smack!
The cane comes down again with aggressive vengeance. A second line sears directly below the first, and another scream follows. I very nearly fly out of my body, or so it feels.
This is nothing like what Freak’s discipline felt like. It is cold, calculated, and designed to do one thing: hurt. There will be no softness after this, only an expectation of obedience. And if I don’t give them what they want, then there will be more pain.
I cry out for the ones I love. I cry out for my father. For Freak. I scream for mercy. None of those three things seems likely to come. I have been lost to the dark side of the universe and I may be beyond reach.
Maybe they’re not even trying to find me. Any of them. Maybe, I think, as the cane lands for a third time and the crescendo of pain peaks again, he was never going to come.
I’ve been abandoned.
The Lizard King gives me three more harsh strokes, each one of them worse than the one before. His merciless beating is nothing more than recreational cruelty, and I hate him for it. I hate everyone. Freak, too, for leaving me to this fate.
“Put her in the brig. Let her suffer,” he says when he is done. “And take that suit away from her. She has lost the privilege ofclothes. She can cower in our prison, naked and punished, until she comes to her senses.”
I am carried off to the brig by the lizard guards who have no guilt about what they have just participated in. They do not see me as being in any way human, as it were. I am nothing to them. Not even a sentient being deserving of mercy.
“I don’t know how the Psyon puts up with her,” the Lizard King mutters just as they take me away. “She’s so disobedient and dramatic. One must spend near constant energy on keeping her out of trouble. A very poor pet indeed.”
“She remains edible, sire,” one of his underlings says.
“True. She does.”
I am thrown into a small cell in the brig. There is a plastic bed with a plastic blanket, and nothing else. I stand, crying. When I twist to look around at what was done to me, I see bright red marks still searing into my skin. Whatever that awful implement was, it has effects beyond the immediate.
Eventually, I try to lie down. I have to do so on my stomach, for obvious reasons. I am crying tears of soft misery, because nothing I have done has worked and all of it has made me worse off. I thought I could go out into the universe and take care of myself, but it turns out all I am really capable of is almost drowning in my spaceship, getting kidnapped twice, and ending up a prisoner. It’s all a bit pathetic.
At some point, I dream of Freak.
He is in the room with me, looking at me with golden-eyed compassion.
