Nobody Left Behind 6 (Patreon)

Things are crazy here with repairing the damage to our roof. I thought they'd be able to just patch the shingled, but apparently, it involves pulling up much of it first.

Also, Ky's surgery was successful and she can see, so life is good there. She's making more art as she can.

I'm still writing when I can find the focus. Here's the next bit of Sarsuk's new book, after Siki was kind to him.

Nobody Left Behind 1
Nobody Left Behind 2
Nobody Left Behind 3
Nobody Left Behind 4
Nobody Left Behind 5

———

Siki’s dad stared at his perfectly seared, medium-rare steak and sighed. “A hundred different cuts of meat available in the market and only two kinds of vegetables.”

Mom kissed the side of his head before taking her seat. “Living with predators is not all that bad. There’s also three kinds of tubers, two grains, and a few different fruits … seasonally, at least.”

“Yeah, I know,” he grumbled. “I just miss—”

“Slavery to the krakun?” interrupted Siki with a little more venom than she’d intended.

Dad smiled and gave her paw a squeeze. “No, of course not, hon,” he said with a smile. “But you were too young to remember dinner back on the ship. I’m allowed to miss some things, even if I wouldn’t trade them for the life we have now.”

Siki nodded while she garnished a big bite of steak with a little wilted pretanio leaf. She stabbed it with a fork, then chewed the two bits together slowly. “Yeah, I get it, Dad. Hey, maybe you’ll win a garden plot this year.”

He chewed a bite of meat, grumbling, “Yeah, if a plague kills ten of our neighbors.”

“The waiting list is totally unfair,” grumped Mom. “They should do random draws each year instead.”

“Well, we could scoot my bed to the side,” offered Siki. “Set up some grow lights… make a little indoor patch like they had back on the ship—so long as you don’t mind me turning the lights off at night.”

Dad smiled for a moment before his ears drooped back down. “No, I can’t ask you to do that, hon. That’s your space. Besides, the superintendent would probably throw a fit if he saw. The lio hate the notion of bringing the outdoors indoors.”

“Well, you could always put them in pots,” she said. “Couldn’t grow as much, but something’s better than nothing. Besides, I’m…”

Her parents turned to look at her, and she bit her lip. “I’m thinking about transferring in the fall.”

Siki’s parents looked at her with sad eyes, but didn’t protest. She was growing up and nothing would change that.

“Just thinking about it,” said Siki again, trying to soften the blow.

# # #

When the lio left, he shut off the lights without a word. Sarsuk really hated that, being treated like a decoration instead of a person.

He sighed. He blew a raspberry with his lips. He hummed a tune. Nighttime was tough in the lab, mostly because of how endlessly it stretched. Eight hours of sleep would suit him just fine, but it would be twice that long before his captors returned in the morning. Even if he slept as much as he could manage, that still left him idle and bored for hours.

Would it have been so hard to set up a television on the bench? Even foreign language soap operas would be way better than sitting alone in the dark. Plus, it would give him a head-start on learning what that stupid hissing and yowling meant.

His hearts raced. What if this is a weekend? That would mean an extra forty-eight hours of distraction-free darkness! No, Siki said she’d see him in the morning. He was just catastrophizing again. She’d be back soon.

Images of his home world flitted through his mind. All of Krakuntec thought he was dead, but that was both a good and bad thing, really. In one claw, the empire didn’t realize he’d escaped justice and wouldn’t be sending out bounty hunters to finish the job. But in the other claw, no one would be searching for him, trying to rescue him either.

“Not that anyone would try to rescue me,” he grumbled, “if they knew.”

So, if he was going to get away from here, he’d have to save himself.

…Which was going to be tough, considering how the lio had imprisoned him.

Siki told him that his captors had stolen his head… No, that wasn’t precisely correct, he admonished himself. I’d asked if they’d stolen my head, and Siki had consoled me. She had never actually confirmed what happened.

“Pfft, whatever!” grunted Sarsuk. He saw his body dragged away for disposal. It was as good as gone now, and escaping without it was going to take a lot more effort than simply sneaking out. But on the plus side, the lio would totally presume that he couldn’t. They’d have let their guard down, and he’d just have to be cleverer than they credited him.

With nothing to do, Sarsuk sat forward from his couch and rested his virtual palms on the coffee table. Beneath them, he could feel two regular shapes: his communicator and his tablet computer. He slid a pad across the computer’s screen, following the single crack from when he’d dropped it a year back.

“How the heck…?” he wondered. A computer had to be simulating everything he touched, but how could the lio have known what to program into that model? It’s not like they could have scanned his apartment. By the time the crown executed Sarsuk, they had probably rented his apartment out to a new tenant and tossed his cracked tablet in the garbage.

But what he was feeling couldn’t be real. His headless body loafing around his old apartment with some inexplicable sort of psychic connection to his head? No. Despite all the crazy things he’d seen recently, he wasn’t ready to entertain that level of absurdity.

“Bah. Computer’s no damn good,” he grunted to himself. “Why couldn’t those damn cats leave me any form of entertainment?” He’d loaded his tablet up with a few dozen decent games, but he couldn’t play any of them without being able to see the screen. He couldn’t watch a movie, couldn’t listen to any of the songs he’d downloaded if his head was a thousand light years from where his body seemed to be.

“But I could make a call!” he said with a grin. He grabbed his communicator, and his talon hovered momentarily over the screen. He couldn’t see the screen, but in his flawless krakun memory, he recalled where every button would be located, where every alert would pop up, what every screen would say. He could probably operate most any application on the device just by tapping where he knew the appropriate button would be…

And do what? Even if he managed to call someone, he’d never know that the call went through. He couldn’t see them, couldn’t hear them, couldn’t talk to them. His pads lingered on the volume controls, reducing the level until the device vibrated twice in his claw, indicating it had switched to silent mode.

In frustration, he slammed his fist against the phone’s screen. It didn’t hurt much, but now he could feel that he’d completely shattered the pristine glass, leaving the tiny shards flaking off onto his pads.

He winced at his temper, at having ruined the expensive device, but then tossed it away back onto the coffee table. “Whatever. It’s useless to me anyhow.”

Idly, he wondered what would have happened if he had called someone. Would they see him with a head? Without one? Was his body a reanimated corpse? …Not that he’d be able to hear them scream if they did. He put his palms to his neck, but his head still felt like it was in place.

Sarsuk stood and explored the apartment. This seemed easier to do with the lights off, without the sights that contradicted his sense of touch. He closed his eyes to blot out the LEDs and shuffled about with arms outstretched. He went through his cabinets, his refrigerator, his freezer, his closets, the guest room. He checked every item he could reach, categorizing them in his vast memory by touch, exploring each one-by-one. He wasn’t sure how any of them could be useful, but there could yet be a way.

He found the airlock to the slave’s barracks and laid down beside it. Though he couldn’t hear what was going on within the apartment, he could still feel. He tapped on the hatch three times with a talon and waited before repeating. Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap. “Guys?” he called. “You in there?”

He waited with his pad just barely touching the hatch, but nothing happened. The hatch didn’t open, the cleaning crew didn’t send anyone out to investigate. He tried different patterns. Tap, tap-tap, tap-tap-tap. But still, nothing.

With a little fumbling, he found the cycle button and cycled the airlock so he could unlock the outer hatch. He reached inside the small metal chamber and tapped on the inner hatch. Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap. “Guys? Please come out!”

Of course, the slaves couldn’t open the inner hatch with the outer hatch unlocked, but at least he was certain they’d have heard him now. He pulled his arm back and locked the outer hatch, but still nothing. If the geroo were inside their barracks, they didn’t cycle the lock and send someone out to investigate.

Eventually, he wandered to the bedroom and searched there. His bed was just as comfortable—and rutted in the center—as he recalled, though he found it disorienting to lay down on his back. Something subtle and unsettling happened when his virtual neck twisted around a hundred and eighty degrees with respect to gravity. With the sensation of weight pulling his face down and his back up… It didn’t hurt, but it just wasn’t relaxing. It made him think back on when he was beheaded, and he’d rather not do that. Laying on his stomach was far more restful, far less distracting.

After sleeping an untold number of hours—he wished he could see a clock—he woke to find himself back on the couch. “Huh,” he whispered, wondering why that might be. He couldn’t recall wandering during the night, but here he was.

He sat forward once more and rested his palms on the coffee table. To his surprise, he felt two regular shapes: his tablet computer with a single crack across the screen and his communicator—the smashed screen restored to its original state.

He picked the smaller device up and ran his palm back and forth across the glass, but it was smooth and perfect, with no cracks, no shards of broken glass.

Thousands of light years away, the edges of the krakun’s mouth turned up in a smile. “Or perhaps, the lio did leave a game for me to play through after all…”

———

Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VLIWm8OJNrFo9X0S5XkRMPAD12DjgW_VV_qUB9V6DJ4/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?