Ice Planet Barbarians (Ice Planet Barbarians, #1)(4)

Even though it goes against everything inside me to do nothing, I’m terrified too. It’s too easy to sit down and huddle with the mass of girls again. To sit and wait and see what happens when someone disobeys the unspoken gag order. And I hate myself for it.

A moment later, the redhead’s dragged to what I thought was an examining table. I watch in horror as one of the ball heads slaps some sort of mask over her mouth. When she goes silent, I realize it’s a muzzle of some kind. My own mouth thins, my teeth clamping together. I feel sick as her hands are stretched over her head and bound at the far end of the table with a cord that snakes around her wrists. Her hips and legs hang over the edge and I start imagining the worst.

She continues to kick and flail as one of the aliens grabs her skirt and rips it from her body.

“Don’t look,” Liz whispers to me.

I look, though. Someone has to look. Someone has to see.

Sick at heart, I watch as the redhead bucks and tries to free herself. I watch as the first alien undoes the front of his uniform with a touch at the collar. I watch as his friend makes laughing comments as he mounts the gagged woman.

I watch, dry-eyed and full of hate as they laugh and get on top of her over and over again. It seems to go on forever. At some point she stops fighting and goes limp, and I hope she’s passed out. I hope she doesn’t remember any of this.

Liz squeezes my hand. “Kira says they have standing orders that they’re allowed to ‘discipline’ any misbehaving captives.”

I nod and finally look away as the aliens talk in their weird language and switch places once more. I’m guessing she’s good and “disciplined”’ by now. I want to scream, but loud noises aren’t allowed. I dig my nails into my palms and gaze down the row of pale faces in the pen with me, trying to figure out which one is Kira. A girl at the end with silky, flat brown hair is weeping with her hands pressed to her ears. It’s as if she can’t stand to hear what’s going on, but the redhead is silent. There’s only alien chatter.

That must be Kira. She’s the only one who can understand them, thanks to the device implanted in her ear. I scan the others. They’re in shock, eyes averted. One girl wears a look of horrified grief, and I wonder if she was a screamer, too. I decide I don’t want to know. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to drown out the world. Trying to exist in a quiet bubble where none of this is real. Where if I pinch my arm hard enough, everything will go away and I’ll wake up.

But when I close my eyes, I see the redhead’s face as she’s raped. I see the ball head’s face as he jokes and yammers away in his alien language as he rapes the girl. As if it’s no big deal, just another day at the office, typical water-cooler shit.

Liz is right. We’re nothing but cattle to these things. They’re going to sell us to someone else to rape, to eat, or both. Or something else more horrible that I can’t even imagine.

I’m not going to take my fate sitting down, though. I cross my arms tightly over my pajamas, draw my legs up, and study my surroundings. I look at each nook and cranny of the strange walls, trying to determine if there’s anything I can grab that can be used as a weapon.

Because I’m going to kill those pebbly, gross bastards if they ever try to touch me.

? ? ?

No one else comes on board the ship for the next week, so I’m starting to suspect we’re “full.” Which is good, considering that our tiny hold gets more and more crowded-feeling with every hour. Now with Dominique—the brutalized redhead—squeezed in with us, we feel like sardines.

Not that anyone is jumping up to complain.

Liz and I talk quietly during the night, when the guards leave us alone. We must be heading out to space now. Our ears have been popping repeatedly during the last few days, and we suspect we’ve begun traveling at a high speed.

And we don’t know what to do about it.

“We start with killing the guards,” I tell Liz and Kira for the second time tonight. “The little green men seem to have the basketball heads doing all the grunt work. I think if we get rid of the orange ones, maybe we can bully our way into demanding a return to Earth.”

“Tiny flaw in this plan, Georgie,” says Liz, ever the practical one. She gestures at the bars of the cage. “We’re on this side, and they’re on the other side. With guns.”

“We need to do something to prompt them to open the door.” Kira’s quiet voice cuts through the darkness. “I would say we could wait for another captive to show up, but . . .”

“Yeah,” I say thoughtfully, my gaze sliding over to where Dominique huddles in a corner, alone. She’s been a straight-up mess ever since they’d returned her to the cage. She’s quiet now, of course. She spends her waking hours with her fist stuffed against her mouth and biting down on it, tears streaming down her face. And she resists all attempts to befriend her or calm her down. It’s going to take time and patience, and because we’re all crammed into something the size of a closet, patience is running short at the moment.

I look back over at Kira and Liz’s grim faces, thinking hard. “What if we all pretend to be sick the next time they come to feed us?”

“That won’t be too hard,” Liz says. “Those seaweed bars are fucking nasty.”

But Kira shakes her head. “And what if they decide that since we’re all sick, they’ll just dump everyone into space? We’re extras, remember? As long as they have their quota in those pods, we’re expendable.” She gestures at the lockers on the opposite side of the room.