Challenged (Mates for the Raskarrans #8)

Chapter 6

CHAPTER SIX

Angie

W hen I find the stairs at the end of the corridor, I head up and keep going until there are none left to climb. I burst through the door, hoping to find offices. Hoping to find people working in those offices. But I emerge into a corridor identical to the one two floors down. The lighting is still dim, the shadows deep, the silence deafening. There isn’t even a background hum of electronics like in the pod room. The only thing I can hear up here is my panting breath, my pounding heart.

I try the first door I come to. It slides open easily, revealing a bedroom behind it. It’s a nice room, clearly for the brass, with a large double bed, a desk and chair, plus another door on the far wall that probably leads to an ensuite bathroom. Someone has been sleeping in it - there’s a pile of what looks like animal furs in the middle of the bed, clothes tossed over the back of the chair, bags stashed in one corner. The clothes look similar to the handmade garments Liv and Lorna were wearing. Not a lab coat or an executive suit jacket in sight.

I try the next room and the next, finding much the same behind each of the doors. In the last room I try, the bed is made up with ordinary linen, the air cool and smelling of dust and disuse. I slip inside, pulling the door shut behind me. The lights overhead flicker into life, and I lean back against the closed door, sliding down it to the floor as the weight of my spinning thoughts becomes too heavy to bear.

Nineteen years. Cryostasis. Alien planet. Breeding program.

It’s ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. I try to remind myself of that, to not let the creeping doubt and fear get any louder. Not let the memory of those yellow eyes rise in my mind again.

Clothes. I need to get some decent clothes. The right clothes can be like armour, and the vest and panties combo I’ve got on right now is just not cutting it. I’d kill for a pencil skirt and crisp blouse, a pair of heels. Uncomfortable though they are, heels put power in my step.

The first drawers I try are empty, but for the dust gathering in them. The cupboards are mostly empty, too, but I do find a jumpsuit shoved in the back corner of one of them. It looks like the sort of thing industrial tier workers would wear and smells musty as all hell, but still, it’s an improvement on the vest and panties. I pull it on, and it’s surprisingly close to my size. Enough to make me wonder if I was supposed to find it. The initials ‘KD’ have been embroidered into the chest pocket. A cute little detail. Make it seem like the suit really did belong to someone else.

I glance at myself in the tarnished old mirror. My hair is a little tangled, but it’s not greasy or matted, so that’s a good start. I look pale, though how much of that is the unflattering strip lighting that’s ubiquitous in this place, I don’t know. There are dark bags under my eyes, though, and a nasty bruise on my neck that is definitely nothing to do with the light. I touch my fingers to it, hissing at how tender it feels.

And blink back to Baxter yelling at me again.

You’ll pay for this, you little bitch. I will make you pay.

He was so out of control in that moment, but I wasn’t afraid. I thought I knew what payment he would extract, and I was willing to pay it for the satisfaction of seeing him so utterly undone. Pain is temporary, and I could cover up a black eye in my sleep. The memory of Baxter’s humiliation would satisfy me for years.

But he didn’t hit me. Even though his eyes flashed in the exact way I’d come to anticipate, the violence never followed. Not until later, anyway.

It comes back to me now, a rush of memory, so vivid it’s as if I’m living it all over again. Walking home from work, feeling light. Powerful. I humiliated Baxter, and he didn’t hit me for it. He’s too weak, too pathetic. A worm cosplaying as the big, strong man. I know his secret, and he knows that I know. He had the chance to put me in my place and he didn’t take it, which means my place is forever changed.

I have all the power now.

I’m thinking about how I might leverage that power when he steps out of the shadows of an alleyway, a look like murder in his eyes.

I don’t waste breath trying to appease him, to beg for my life. I just run. Run as fast as I can. But for all heels might put power in your step, they’re fucking useless for running in and Baxter is bigger, stronger, faster. He catches up to me in moments, an arm like a band of iron going round my body, pinning me to his chest.

“You asked for this,” he says, and for a heartbeat that seems to last an eternity, I’m sure he’s going to start ripping at my clothes.

Instead, he slams a syringe into my neck, jams the plunger all the way down. I feel the strange cold of the contents spreading out, making my body go limp, my head spin. My vision goes blurry, then tunnelled. The last thing I’m aware of is that arm around me, holding me tight to Baxter, as my consciousness floats away.

“Angie?” Liv’s voice snaps me back to the present. “Are you okay in there?”

“Fine, go away,” I say, still reeling from the force of the memory.

“You need some space, I can understand that,” Liv says, her voice brisk, her impatience with me barely contained. “When you’re ready to talk, come find us. There will be someone inside the base most of the time. There’s a canteen on the ground floor and some bedrooms - that’s a good place to look. If you can’t find anyone indoors, try outside. The exit is at the end of the long corridor. I know you don’t have any shoes right now. We’re going to look for some for you. I’ll leave them outside your door.”

I don’t respond. She waits a moment, then I hear the shuffle of her footsteps heading away from me, leaving me once more to my thoughts.

For a while, I just sit there, staring at nothing in particular, trying to process the memory of Baxter, the horrible sensation of his arm around me, the sharp pain of that needle piercing my skin. I never thought, never even considered that making me pay could mean something worse than a beating. Baxter couldn’t do his own job without me holding his hand. I would never have credited him with the imagination to come up with something like this.

Drugging me. Abducting me.

Nineteen years.

It obviously hasn’t been nineteen years, but the fact is, it could have been nineteen days. Nineteen weeks, even. How long was I kept under before they brought me here? What might they have done to me in that time?

The jumpsuit feels suddenly abrasive against my skin. I scramble out of it, checking every inch of my arms, my legs, pulling up my top to check my stomach and breasts.

Nothing. No marks, no cuts. I feel a little raw, but nothing hurts besides my neck.

My neck. It’s still bruised. I scramble to the mirror and study it, looking at the colour. It’s the greenish-yellow of several days’ worth of healing. Days, not weeks. Definitely not months.

Still, the knowledge that anything could have happened to me during those few days burns at all my nerve endings. My skin crawls, and I want nothing more than to jump in a shower. Scrub myself clean. As if soap could wash away the violation.

No marks, I remind myself. No marks and nothing else hurts.

I take a few deep, slow breaths, trying to release all the panic, the fear. When I’m somewhere close to calm, I get dressed again. Try to pull myself together. There’s nothing I can do about what might have happened in the days I’ve lost, so there’s no point dwelling on it. I need to move forward, work on problems I can actually solve.

Like getting out of this place and getting home.

I look again at the mirror, the tarnish on the surface. The smell of dust in the air, the way the strip lights blink in and out, as if there’s not quite enough power to sustain them. A back-up generator running, probably. Perhaps that’s why the whole twenty-year time jump thing. To explain why this place is so old and disused.

All these abandoned military bases are in really remote places. One closer to civilisation would have been reused, repurposed, or otherwise demolished to make way for something else. Wherever I am, it’s a really long way from home. They don’t need to take me all the way to an alien planet to achieve that.

The panic expands again. Away from the contained civility of the world inside Mercenia’s borders, anything goes. It’s the realm of dissidents, rebels. The rule of law doesn’t apply. Getting rid of a person out here would be easy.

No, I think. No. Breathe. Be rational.

Just because it would be easy doesn’t mean it’s what they’d do. It might be the wilds out here, but that doesn’t mean the staff on this experiment have lost their humanity.

A nervous giggle flies out of my mouth.

Humanity.

They’re trying very hard to prove some of them don’t have any of that.

But even as I think about prosthetics and heel lifts and stage makeup, my mind goes back to those yellow eyes, looking at me. The wildness behind them - something untamed and raw.

Not a military sort of look. That’s why it looked so unusual. I expected control, discipline, and got something else and my brain interpreted it as alien.

That’s definitely all there is to it.

Yeah.

The fear and panic crescendo once more. Pushing them down is getting increasingly difficult.

It was just dark down in that basement. In good lighting, not still a little hungover from whatever cocktail of drugs they gave me to simulate cryostasis, I wouldn’t be so easily unsettled by them. The seams would show.

Their humanity would show.

But the only seams showing around here are my own. I feel frayed at the edges, the fear impossible to stamp out. It doesn’t matter what’s true, every scenario is awful, and the more I think about it, the more possible it seems that no matter what I do, I’m not going home again.

No. No, no, no. I’m not on an alien planet, and I’m not going to be shot in the wilderness like some deserter, either. Dr Novak’s experiments are all recorded so they can be reviewed and re-examined at later dates. There will be cameras everywhere in this compound, hidden in light fixtures and crevices. They have it on record now that I’m not supposed to be here. There’s a lot that can be done to cover up mistakes and errors in these kinds of experiments, but they can’t just erase a whole person. The wrong person asking the right questions back home could trigger an investigation. Killing me off would be an entirely unnecessary risk. Cheaper and easier to just send me home with an apology, a compensation package to keep me quiet, and a promise to introduce better protocols to prevent something like this from ever happening again.

It feels plausible enough, but it does nothing to dislodge the ball of fear that’s now sitting in my throat, making it difficult to swallow.

Because you don’t actually believe it , a little voice in the back of my head whispers.

I stand up. I need to move. Need to do something. Take action. Stop thinking, start doing.

Food, I think. I’m hungry. My stomach feels empty, like it hasn’t been fed for…

Nineteen years.

Another high-pitched giggle escapes.

Don’t think , I repeat to myself over and over. Don’t think. Just do.

I go down the stairs, listening hard for anyone approaching, but hear nothing. There are three levels to this military base. The top level that I’ve just come from, the ground level, and then the basement. I go for the ground level first, thinking to head for the canteen Liv mentioned. The door off the stairs opens into another identical corridor.

A corridor splashed with rust-coloured stains.

Basement first. I’ll explore the basement first.

As I head down, I hear voices. Female voices. Liv and Lorna. I’m grateful for my lack of shoes, allowing me to sneak along the corridor silently.

“…got to be some supplies for them in these crates…”

“…Vantos will bring clothes, Razhan will have told him…”

“…shoes, though, will they know to bring shoes…”

I pause by the door their voices are drifting through. Press my back against the wall and try to breathe slow, quiet. Listen in.

“Even if they don’t, and we don’t find anything here, we can figure something out.” Lorna, her voice peppy and cheerful. “There are enough pelts lying around that we could make some basic boots. They won’t last, but they don’t have to.”

“Great,” Liv says, sounding far more unhappy. “Welcome to Lina’s forest. We’re going to look after you, but we don’t have any shoes.” She huffs and I can hear her shifting her weight. “God, my back is killing me. Are you doing okay?”

“I’m mated to the village healer. I get as far as thinking an ache might develop and I’m given a remedy for it.”

Liv chuckles. “I wish Gregar was that practical. He just paces and snarls at things and wishes we could be back at the village.”

“Your back would be aching there, too.”

“I know, but he’d be more comfortable with it. Any of those remedies Shemza’s giving you something he can give to me?”

Liv’s tone is suggestive, and Lorna laughs in response.

“Well, there is an ointment - it’s made with boiled up envida bark. Good for muscle aches, apparently. Though maybe you’d prefer Gregar to massage it in.”

I stagger away from the door, throwing myself into another room as their laughter echoes in the corridor behind me. The door slides shut, muffling them enough that I can no longer distinguish words in the rhythm of their speech. Overhead, more dim strip lighting flickers on in response to my presence, revealing a communal shower block, benches at the edge of the room, some lockers off to the right. I head for them, slipping between two rows so I’m no longer visible from the doorway, then lean back against one, sliding down to the floor again as my legs grow wobbly beneath me.

Sweat prickles on my neck, the small of my back, as my breathing quickens, my heart thundering in my chest. I try to relocate some of my certainty from before - prosthetics, contacts, makeup. Hell, even the fear of being shot in the wilderness would be preferable to the voice in the back of my mind currently repeating over and over that too much of this feels real.

It’s not real. It’s not.

I am not on an alien planet.

It’s impossible.

I’m not sure how long I sit there, frantically repeating the same three thoughts in a loop. But what is time anyway, if nineteen years can pass in a blink?

I close my eyes. Try to think with more force.

It’s not real.

I am not on an alien planet.

It’s impossible.

It’s…

The door clicks open, snapping me back into the present moment. Soft footsteps sound as someone enters the room, and I freeze in place, willing whoever it is to turn around, walk back out. I don’t want anyone to see me like this. Don’t want to see anyone. Don’t want to face the possibility that Liv and Brooks and Lorna weren’t lying to me.

They have to be lying. Have to be.

I hear shuffling, the soft thud of clothes falling to the floor. Then a low voice, male, starts a tuneless hum. That sound cuts through all of my panic and fear, my head going silent, the humming the only thing I can hear.

Humming, and then the gentle sound of running water.

One of the actors has made a mistake. He’s come to wash the costume off. If I confront him as the green body paint drips to the floor around him, as the glue holding the prosthetics in place disintegrates, there won’t be any more trying to convince me. No more opportunity to plant seeds of doubt, for the clever location choice to burrow underneath my skin, for their impeccable acting to make me start to believe the impossible.

All I have to do is step out from behind these lockers, catch this guy in a compromising position, and it will all be over.

I move slowly, my bare feet whispering against the tiled floor. Each step roots me more firmly in my body, my focus narrowing down. Carefully, I creep round to the front of the lockers. Look out from behind them to where he’s showering. He’s still humming to himself, apparently oblivious to my presence.

Good job, too, because for a long moment I just freeze. Stare.

Watch as the water runs over his perfectly toned, muscular back, down his firm, pert butt. The tail is a little distracting, mostly because I can’t see any visible seam or join where it’s attached, but there’s no failing to notice the physical perfection of this specimen. Not overly muscled, but strong, lean. Broader shoulders, narrower hips. His arms move as he lathers up some soap, wiping it over his chest, giving me a perfect view of all his musculature rippling under his skin.

My mouth goes a little dry. Other places get a little damp.

Breed with an alien.

I’d be down for a little role play with this guy.

In any other circumstance.

He tips his head back, turning his face up to the hot water. I jolt back behind the lockers, heart hammering in my chest, cursing myself for my momentary idiocy. I’m not here to enjoy the view. If that guy sees me before the costume starts to come undone, this chance is lost.

I need proof, irrefutable proof of their lies. I need to hold it in my hands, tangible and undeniable.

And I don’t need to wait for the paint to start to run for that.

I take a steadying breath, count to five in my head.

Then I dart round the lockers into the shower area.

Grab his tail and pull.