Page 2 of Leviathan

I'd gotten pretty good at crawling on my elbows and toes.

I rushed over to the desk, eyeing the array of controls I didn't know how to use. For a moment, I considered just mashing all the buttons to see what kind of mayhem it would cause. It was the same urge that had caused me to set fire to the store room. That and I’d seen Evangelia playing with an alien lighter, leaving it out where it was easy for me to steal. I'd managed to keep myself off camera when I set the fire, but the destruction cut my food rations to a quarter of what I had before, as the entire station starved while they called for help.

It meant the arrival of a supply ship that scared them.

I looked at the screen’s magnified image of the ship. It was massive. Even at this distance, its spherical bulk swallowed a patch of stars, carving a dark absence into the glittering backdrop of space.

Its surface was black, not the flat black of painted metal, but something deeper. Light slid across it and vanished, leaving only faint ripples of reflected starlight to reveal the curve of its hull. Without the glowing targeting outline projected by the display, I doubted I would have been able to track its shape at all. It blended almost perfectly with the surrounding void, as if it were a black hole that pulled in the darkness between the stars.

They were so scared of that giant chocolate bonbon of a ship that they had taken the entirety of research data for this station and packed it into the cube on the table. They wiped all of it from the system. It was now impossible to hack in and download it.

But it could be stolen.

If that ship was planning to steal it anyway, then it was a bartering chip.

Plus it belonged to me.

I picked up the cube and wrinkled my nose as my skin stuck to it for a moment. Something green coated one side, a thin smear that looked almost organic. It felt slightly tacky against my fingertips, tugging at my skin like half dried glue as I shifted my grip.

I waited for pain.

Nothing happened.

No burning or itching, no discoloration on my skin. As far as I could tell, the mysterious green goo was merely unpleasant rather than dangerous.

The door behind me slid open.

I turned, lifting the cube up over my head.

"I'll smash it!" I snarled.

Evangelia held out a small jar, a light green glow to it that matched the tacky substance already coating the cube.

"This is the only way you survive," she said, her voice hard, the bright light from the corridor accenting her frame like the halo of a sun peaking out from behind the dark circle of an eclipse. “You think you can get out of here if I feel like stopping you? I can snap your bones without even thinking about it.”

My leg twinged, the memory of a pain healed over. The medical technology was better than anything on Earth, but it couldn’t take away those moments of fear and suffering.

It couldn’t take away the memory of her face turning into a blank mask of utter boredom as I screamed on the ground, the sharp stab of my femur cutting through my skin.

When I first met her, I was so relieved to not be alone, to have another human being with me. Being abducted was bad enough, but having to face the reality of cruel alien life seemed somehow easier with another human heart to lean on.

But it didn't take long to find out that Evangelia didn't have a heart.

She might look like a human, but that was by design, not birth.

I stretched my arms up higher.

"Lo hago!" I snarled with all the fear of the wild beast I had been delegated to be. "I promise you I will break it into a million pieces! "

"That thing would survive atmospheric re-entry on any known habitable planet," Evangelia said, her lips twitching slightly with an aborted smile before settling into the blank, deadpan expression that was natural to her when she wasn't performing emotions to attempt to manipulate me. I'd seen her do the same performance for the scientists, but it never seemed to reduce their fear and apprehension when speaking to her. The scientists who tormented me were afraid of her, and it only got worse when she smiled and pretended to joke around with them.

"If you need to lob it at the floor to satiate your primitive needs, then do it; it won't damage it. Neither will your pathetic little tantrum save your life," she continued. "What is going to happen is I’m going to pour this on the cube, and you can take it with you and continue on your merry little way to escape this station."

I lowered the cube, clutching it to my chest.

"Why?" I demanded as I inched back toward the ventilation shaft, even though I knew I couldn't crawl into it faster than she could close the distance. That facsimile of a woman would rather lift me up off the floor by my ankle then crouch down to inspect a broken bone; she wasn't going to have any trouble dragging me out of the shaft if I tried to flee. "Why would you let me escape? Aren’t you the one who sold me to this lab?"

There were pieces to the puzzle I didn’t have, conversations I’d overheard but didn’t understand.