"Split them up,
" the Zelfon orders. "Take her to the physician’s ward for surgery. They will transport her back to her military base tomorrow morning."
"Don't you fucking touch her," Ax growls.
The Zelfon laugh and get back to eating. "And you, a Syndicate Kurrek. Did you not predict your luck would run out? We will burn you with the rest of the treasonous filth. By the end of tomorrow, your body will be reduced to cinder. You have been sentenced to the judgment arena!"
"Bastards," Ax curses.
Guards come from both slides. Ax lunges forward, but they quickly prod and beat him into submission. I scream. I cry so hard I have to force my palm over my mouth.
Bloodied, he crawls and tries to get back onto his feet. The bounty hunter steps on the center of his spine and prods him one more time.
He falls limp.
The Gerkis pull me toward the open doors faster than I can scream his name. There are no tears anymore. There is only anger, and I hold on to it like a burning sword.
If there is one thing that I know, it's that I should have never left the darkness. So I carry it with me in my heart instead.
If they kill my child, I will unleash it on the world. No one will survive.
Am I okay?
In the last forty-eight hours, I watched my friend get shot down by reptilian bounty hunters. We were taken into custody, chained, and abused. Giant bureaucratic toads found us guilty for treason. I've gone over what happened at least fifty times.
Now I'm waiting in a physician’s ward, bound to a surgical table where I am forced to stare at the rows of indecent medical tools that sit in a locked, glass shelf. These tools will be the ones to open me up, I reckon.
No, I am not okay. I am far from okay.
The door opens, and a young Gerkis alien walks inside. He grabs the medical tablet from the wall, hits a few buttons, and sits down to examine whatever crap my file says about me.
Although the physician is alien, there's something off about him. For one, he lacks the scales that the rest have. Two, his pupils are like mine. They are round.
He doesn't look at me, but I can tell he has a lot of opinions. "You're a very unlucky woman," he says.
I actually laugh. "You're telling me."
"They want me to force you to strip," he says.
"That seems to be the standard protocol," I say.
He nods and twists his jaw, possibly in thought. Maybe he didn’t expect me to be so careless with my responses, but I’ve been through too much to care.
"They want me to operate on you,” he says.
My eyes gloss over. "They want a lot of things, including my baby," I mutter.
This planet wants to take it all away.
"Correct," he says.
He turns and grabs a needle. Promptly, he plunges it into a bottle of liquid. I bite my tongue and prepare for another round of abuse.
He says, "I don't know if you know this. Your face is everywhere. A lot of people are looking for you."
"Why are you doing this to me? Do you get off on torturing innocent people?" I don't waste time on his small talk. I don't care how many milk cartons I've been on. I just want to get back to Ax.
"That alpha… Ax… He took you. Stole you from the Earth's Federation. That's a crime," he says. "I'm obligated by law to follow orders."