True to his word, Isu keeps me for his own. I spend my days and my nights, not that I can tell the difference between them, trapped in the burrow of his making. We make love many times. He always leaves me sated and dripping his hot seed, but I am human and it is my nature to seek the light, no matter how satisfying the dark may be.
“When do I go out?” I have asked the question before, but I’m going to ask it again. And again. I need the sun. I crave it. All the way down here, I feel as though I am buried.
“You do not go out,” he says simply. “This burrow has hundreds of tunnels. You could easily become lost, and I do not want to have to find you, or worse, not find you. You stay with me, here, in my rooms.”
“But I want to go outside. I want to see the sun again.”
“We don’t go out of the burrow, Aspel. It isn’t safe. And, until I have the time to take you through it myself, you don’t leave these rooms. Do you understand?”
“Of course I understand,” I say, somewhat bitter. All I have been through, and what do I have to show for it? I am a prisoner all over again, in a cage no bigger than the farm enclosure I lived in. Unlike the farm, this world is not calibrated to my needs. I cannot exist in the dark. I need the sun. I need space to move and I need… freedom. I never knew I needed it before, but suddenly it is all I am consumed with.
“Don’t pout,” he says, taking my chin between his thumb and forefinger. “I will keep you busy.”
He means with sex. The appetites of his lust match mine, but there is more to existence than being fucked repeatedly by a dominant alien beast who takes my tender flesh and makes it hot, wet, puffy, and sore.
“I want to go to the surface. I want to see the sun.” I am insistent.
“Stop asking. You will never see any sun again,” he snaps, becoming impatient with my repeated requests.
He is wrong. I will see the sun. I will be free. I am beginning to feel my way into myself. In the farm, all the conditions were controlled to keep me content. I had just the right food, just the right water. I had company. I had everything I needed. But I don’t have all my needs met here. It is too dark, too confined. I am hungry and not just for food, but for a taste I have recently acquired: freedom.
Isu has declared himself my master, but I don’t care about that. Vargons declared themselves my owners long before he did, and they no longer have me. That means I can be free.
“Be good,” Isu says. “I need to attend a matter of importance. l will see you later.”
He will not see me later. Later I am going to be up on the surface of this planet, finding my way to more fertile lands, or at least seeing the sun. I crave the light. This confinement is more than I can bear.
As soon as Isu leaves, I get ready to leave as well. I want clothes. I manage to find something in one of the chests. It’s a robe of some kind. A little big, and it drags on the ground, but it covers my body and I like that.
I am beginning to think of many things I like, and many I dislike. It is a new experience, one that was catalyzed the moment Isu asked me if I agreed to be his.
Clothed for the first time in a long time, I sneak out, moving along the pathways. I can’t see very well, but I know that I want to go up, and I can feel when the ground rises. It fell steadily on the way down, so as long as I keep going up and up, I should be able to reach the surface.
I have to dart down passages to avoid others like Isu. The Fendinn are loud, which helps me avoid them. They have heavy feet and they make the walls reverberate when they walk. Every time I start to feel the ground shake, I get out of the way, until finally I am near the surface. Light filters through the tunnel, draws me up and out.
I expected guards, some kind of resistance, but it must be as Isu says, they do not like going to the surface and so see no point in guarding it.
But it doesn’t make sense. Isu said there was danger up here. How could there be danger, but no guards? Not even a door. I am able to walk straight out into the sunlight.