Breeder Read online

  Blindly, I reached out with my now free hand. Warm, strong fingers took hold of mine, squeezing firm, and I allowed Nad to guide me from my bed and away from my pod. The noise from the storm outside, combined with the singing, masked our movements. Guilt tightened my chest at the thought of the lights going back on and Dawn and Avery discovering my pod empty, but I didn’t know what Nadeusz had planned, and I didn’t want to get either of them in trouble. Besides, too many of us was bound to get noticed, and I’d never told them about what had happened with Rhett and Nadeusz down in the hole. I guess I’d been ashamed, even though it hadn’t been my fault. But the other women had zero reason to trust the Trad, and there wasn’t the time to try and explain things now.

  I was putting all my trust fully in Nadeusz. Moving silently through the birthing ring, I allowed him to lead the way. I had no idea where he was taking me and I prayed I wasn’t going to regret this.

  “This way,” he hissed, pulling me along.

  I sensed him push through a door.

  “Be careful,” he said. “We’re in a stairwell. Take it slowly.”

  I didn’t like not being able to see where I was going. The bulk of the baby inside me had altered my balance, and I worried I was going to miss a step and tumble down to the bottom.

  “Haven’t you got a flashlight or something?” I hissed back.

  He still had a grip of my hand, making sure he’d hold me up even if I did fall.

  “I have light, but we can’t use it yet. Darkness is our friend right now. And stop talking. Your female voice will get us noticed.”

  I clamped my mouth shut and allowed him to guide me. I shuffled forward, worried my toes were going to fall off a step, or that I’d walk face-first into something—though my bump would take the worst of that impact. But I tried to trust in the Trad whose fingers were still tightly clamped around mine. I sensed the space open up around us and a door swinging open and shut again. A faint light was filtering through from somewhere up ahead, allowing me to see my surroundings, everything becoming more defined as my eyes grew used to it. We were in another corridor now, but I still had no idea where we were going. A flutter of panic made my heart race.

  “Wait, stop!” I pulled back on him, drawing to a halt. “Before we go any farther, you need to answer some questions. Why are you doing this?”

  “Rhetarz will keep trying to get at you,” he growled. “We need to get you away from him.”

  I asked him the question that had been burning inside me ever since I’d arrived at the facility. “Tell me what happens to the women after they’ve given birth. Where are they all now?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On how...desirable...they might be considered. A very beautiful woman, like yourself, will be sold off to a wealthy Trad.”

  I ignored the fact he’d just called me very beautiful. “And the others?”

  He shrugged. “They’ll go to the whore houses in the city.”

  My mouth dropped open. “Whore houses? And what? Get fucked until they conceive?”

  One side of his lips twisted. “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “Jesus Christ. So the Trads don’t even care if it’s their child that’s conceived.”

  He grabbed my other hand so he was holding me by both. “Some of us do, Tara. We’re not all the same. Remember that.”

  I shook him free, still unsure if I should trust him. This was all so fucked up.

  “You could be trying to take me to some place worse. This could all be a trick and you’re about to sell me to some underground trade in human women, for all I know. Shit, you might even be selling the baby inside me.”

  My mind tumbled with possibilities, and none of them were good.

  Nadeusz cocked his eyebrows at my hesitation. “You’re actually considering not coming?”

  “The last time I rushed into something, I ended up in this situation.” I gestured at my swollen belly. “So, yeah, I’m considering not coming. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m on the verge of giving birth to an alien baby. At least if I’m here, I know they’ve got all the right equipment and I’ve got the other women around me.”

  “I’ll make sure you’re somewhere safe for the birth.”

  “And the other women? What about them?”

  “We’re working on it, but I can’t do anything about them right now. I can get you out of here, though. It’s a small step, I know, but it’s at least in the right direction.”

  I felt horrible at the idea of abandoning the others. They wouldn’t know what had happened to me and would worry for my safety. I couldn’t even go and say goodbye to any of them, and that made me feel wretched. But when my time came, and the baby was born—and I could feel that day growing closer all the time—I’d be taken away anyway, and they still wouldn’t have known what had happened to me.

  I’ll come back for them, I promised myself. If I was able to at any point, I’d make sure they escaped, too.

  I hesitated again, and Nad let out a growl of frustration.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, thinking of something. “You said ‘we.’”

  “What?” He glared at me in exasperation.

  “You said, ‘we’re working on it.’ Who the hell are we?”

  I suddenly noticed where the light was coming from. Over Nadeusz’s shoulder, I spotted an exit. Movement came from the open doorway, and a voice called out, “Are you two coming? We’re running out of time.”

  My mouth dropped as Mikotaj stepped out into the corridor. And he wasn’t alone. With him was the slave, Diarus.

  “What the hell?”

  So, they were all in on this together? My mind spun, trying to work out what was going on.

  “We’re part of a rebel group called the Zeimias,” Nadeusz said. “Not all of us believe the way the polityk does things is right. Some of us work against them.”

  I lifted a hand. I’d heard that word before. “Who or what is the polityk?”

  “They’re the governors for each of the districts across Tradrych. They’re all overseen by the Rzard, which is our government, but they’re responsible for their own districts. They’re the ones who are controlling this use of human women.”

  “So you don’t think what’s happening here is right?”

  “Of course not. We don’t want to use women as slaves. We want to keep our planet populated, and we miss female interaction, but we should have gone about it the same way as the Athions, like Diarus here, and simply offered women the chance to start a new life on Tradrych. We should have promised them everything their hearts could desire, put them in palaces and treated them like queens....not like this.”

  “I had no idea the Athions had done that.” My gaze flickered to Diarus. “Is that where you’re from?”

  “Yes, it is, and you wouldn’t know what we’d offered humanity,” Diarus said. “It happened after you were taken.”

  Miko scoffed. “Of course, it’s far harder convincing Earth women to volunteer to come and live with us when we look like this.”

  He was talking about how they looked in their natural state, rather than the human guises they’d worn on Earth.

  How could I tell them they were beautiful in spite of—no, perhaps because of—their differences?

  “We really don’t have time for this,” Diarus interrupted. “The power could be back on at any minute.”

  Nadeusz focused on me, sparks of orange and reds dancing around his dark pupils in the poor light. “You need to make a decision, girlie. We’re not going to force you into anything, but if you’re going to come with us, it needs to be now.”

  I sucked in a breath and nodded.

  I hoped I wasn’t going to live to regret this.

  Chapter Thirteen

  With Miko leading the way and Diarus close behind him, I followed, my hand supporting my bump. Behind me, Nad brought up the rear.

  We took the same doorway through which Miko and Diarus had appeared. Nad closed the door
behind us, plunging us into darkness for the briefest of moments before Miko had a bag slung over his shoulder and there was rustling as he took something out of it. A moment later, he lit up some kind of fluorescent tube and illuminated the way in a pale-white light.

  We had entered into another stairwell—this one also leading down. I fought off a wave of claustrophobia. How far beneath the ground were we going? We were deep beneath the building now and moving at an angle, so I was sure this was going to take us beyond the ground of the facility above. The Trad baby moved inside me, as though picking up on my distress.

  Still, I worried I had made the wrong choice. What was I doing, running beneath the ground with two Trads and an Athion slave? I must be losing my damned mind. But then the alternative wasn’t exactly rosy either.

  We kept going, moving deeper and deeper. I’d practically been confined to a bed for the past couple of weeks, and in cryostasis before that, and my muscles had weakened. Adding in the extra weight of the Trad baby and the strain that was putting on my body, I quickly tired.

  Diarus and Miko forged on ahead, but Nad was behind me.

  “Hey, slow down,” he called out to the others. “Tara is struggling.”

  “I’m fine,” I snapped, not liking to be thought of as struggling.

  “Don’t be stupid. You’re pregnant. This is harder on you than the rest of us.”

  He had a point, but I still hated feeling like the weaker sex. But the weight of the baby was making my back and hips ache, the size compressing my lungs and other internal organs, so I struggled to breathe deeply.

  “Okay. I need to stop for a moment,” I admitted, coming to a halt. I used the wall of the stairwell to prop myself up, the stone cold against my spine. The wall wasn’t made from any kind of Trad-made material now but was the red dirt of the desert surroundings.

  “Is she okay?” Miko asked as both he and Diarus climbed back up the steps toward me.

  “I’m fine,” I replied, not liking how they hadn’t addressed me directly. “And I’m capable of answering my own questions.”

  Miko pulled a face. “Sorry, Tee.”

  I cocked my eyebrows. “Tee?”

  He shrugged. “You can shorten my name to Miko, so I figured I can shorten yours to Tee.”

  I was too tired to argue.

  “We can’t rest for long,” Diarus said, looking past me up toward the dark stairwell we’d just come down. “They’re going to notice we’re missing soon.”

  I put my hand out and straightened again. “It’s okay, I’m good now.”

  Nad frowned at me. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  I appreciated that they were looking out for me, though I still didn’t really understand why. They’d want something from me, I was sure of it.

  “Why me and not one of the other women?” I asked, needing to know.

  The males exchanged glances with each other.

  “Rhett’s a mean motherfucker,” Nad said eventually. “He’d put his mark on you, and he would have kept going until he had you.”

  “Had me?”

  “You’d give birth to this baby and be handed straight back to him so he could put another one in your belly.”

  I looked around at their faces. “But isn’t a similar thing happening to all the other women in the facility?”

  “There’s something about you,” Miko said. “You seem different.”

  I shook my head. “Well, I’m not. I’m just a girl—same as all the others.”

  Nadeusz fixed me with his dark gaze. “You’re beautiful, and courageous, and smart—”

  I stared at him in bewilderment. “I’m none of those things.”

  “Then you don’t see yourself the way we do.”

  That use of ‘we’ again. Did he mean that they all thought of me that way? I struggled to see it when right now I only felt like a vessel for the creature growing inside me. And I wasn’t courageous—I’d simply done whatever it took to survive—and honestly, right now I wasn’t sure that being somewhere underground with two Trads and an Athion slave when I was on the verge of giving birth to an alien baby was the smartest thing I’d ever done either.

  We continued down the stairwell. The sound of the storm had long since vanished, and I couldn’t help wondering if our disappearance had been noticed yet. Would Rhett and Kaja, and the others, automatically put two and two together and figure out what had happened, or would they be baffled by our escape? I knew I hadn’t had any idea that Diarus might be involved in any way with Nad and Miko. They’d all shown me moments of kindness since I’d arrived, but Nad and Miko had been cruel, too. I still didn’t understand what was going on here, though, and what their connection was.

  “We’ve reached the tunnels,” Miko called out from ahead of us.

  “Where do they lead to?” I dared to ask.

  “The city of Vrale, mainly,” he replied, “but there are other places along the way.”

  “What kinds of other places?”

  “Some people don’t want to live in the city,” Nad said from over my shoulder. “The polityk rule with a strict hand, and if you refuse to conform to what it means to be a Trad, you’ll be punished.”

  I frowned. “What it means to be a Trad?”

  “Tough, heartless, focused.”

  “Focused on what?”

  “On making Tradrych the most powerful planet, and Trads the most powerful species in the universe.”

  I looked around at them. “And you don’t all feel that way?”

  “Of course not.” Nad shrugged his massive shoulders. “We can appreciate that other species have the right to exist.”

  “That doesn’t mean Trads aren’t still the best,” Miko added, though there was a teasing note to his normally hard voice.

  Diarus snorted. “Speak for yourselves.”

  Miko cocked an eyebrow. “Rich coming from the slave.”

  “Intentional slave. I’ve been undercover, and I’ve paid for it, but if I’ve gone just a little way into unbalancing the polityk regime, all the pain will have been worth it.”

  I turned to Diarus. “You got captured on purpose?”

  “Yes. I’m a member of an elite fighting force on my home planet, Athion, called the Custos. We heard there was a rebel force on Tradrych, but we didn’t know how to infiltrate them. So I got myself captured and ended up here. Unfortunately, I didn’t know the Trads were planning on hitting Earth and kidnapping the women, or perhaps I’d have been able to figure out a way to warn you all. It wasn’t until you started arriving that I knew what the facility had been built for.”

  “That’s okay,” I told him, placing my palm against his muscular biceps. “It’s not your fault.”

  He stiffened at my touch and glanced down to where our skin met. Did he not like being touched? I snatched my hand away, my face flooding with heat. For once, I was grateful for the dim light to hide my embarrassment.

  “Let’s keep going,” Miko said, jerking his head down the tunnel. “The more distance we put between us and that place, the better.”

  As we walked, the tunnel widened, and we gained headroom. It had already been high for me anyway, since it was built with the big Trads in mind, but now Nad and Miko had enough space, too, and Miko’s mohawk no longer brushed the dirt from the roof. We reached branches and forks and crossroads, and it quickly became clear that these tunnels led to multiple places and weren’t just the case of being one straight passage between the city and the facility.

  Minutes passed, and I did my best to keep up with their pace, though I knew I was slowing them down. They all had far longer legs than me, and they didn’t have the addition of carrying a ten pound Trad baby inside them.

  Miko suddenly stopped. “Someone’s coming. Get back.”

  We all froze, and sure enough I picked up on the thud-thud-thud of heavy footfall approaching. At least from the direction we knew it wasn’t people coming after us, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t been called and alerte
d to our escape.

  Nad’s arm wrapped around my waist from behind, fitting underneath my bump, and his other hand covered my mouth, telling me to be quiet. His hard body slotted against my back, and I inhaled the scent of his fingers. His proximity did strange things to me—things I didn’t think I should be feeling considering the situation—but I couldn’t help it.

  He pulled me backward, and the others stepped back, too, so we moved like one being. I hadn’t noticed a crevasse dug into the tunnel wall, but that was where we ended up, with me sandwiched between the males. Once more, the poor light was our friend, and Miko cracked the tube he’d been carrying, and its light vanished, plunging us into total darkness.

  I was aware only of our breathing, and heartbeats, and heat from our bodies, and the subtle shifting of the baby beneath my skin. We were paused in the moment, just waiting for whoever was coming to either pass by without noticing us, or for us to launch into an attack. I hoped I wouldn’t have to take part in any fighting. Not only was I not in the right condition for it, I was a croupier, not a fighter, and I couldn’t imagine I’d hold up too well against a gang of angry Trads.

  The footsteps grew closer and closer, and with it came a light, guiding the newcomers down the passage toward us. I held my breath, pressing myself in closer to Nad, sensing the other two gather tighter around me as well. I did wish that I was wearing underwear, but I’d gone from feeling completely exposed and vulnerable back at the facility, to never having been more protected. I didn’t know what I’d done to deserve this treatment, but I was thankful for it.

  Shadows fell upon the walls, and then four large figures marched right past us, their feet landing in rhythm. They didn’t even hesitate and seemed completely unaware of our presence.

  We remained in position, giving them plenty of time to make it farther down the tunnel. Finally, Miko and Diarus stepped back out into the tunnel, and Miko cracked another of the fluorescent tubes, spilling pale light around the space.