Chapter Sixteen: High flying

Flying had been routine before the Catrion War, and to some extent, remained so afterward. I'd never flown on a commercial airline before but I'd heard many stories from those who had. Airline passengers typically faced brutal security procedures, nauseating g-forces, and obnoxious neighbors in the seats next to them. Supposedly, those peanuts in the tiny packets made up for the drawbacks of flying.

I had yet to see a six-ounce packet of dry-roasted nuts anywhere.

It wasn't a stretch to say I was dissatisfied with the Catrions' customer service. I could live without flight attendants but I swore I was the first passenger in all of flight history to experience actual flesh-and-blood, in-flight torture.

The Catrions had conveniently forgotten to spray me with their queer, nourishing liquid. As such, I wasted away somewhere between dehydration and starvation.

And then there was the pain.

My wrists and ankles, sore from their constraints, craved a second of freedom so they could again remember the peace of healing bruises. Likewise, my shoulders longed for the ability to rotate and relax. I didn't know how long I'd been shackled, but it had been long enough for every joint in my body to hurt from being held still too long.

While I dangled there, Aidyn's lifeless body remained frozen. As my condition deteriorated, it seemed my perception of hers did too. The worse I felt, the worse she looked.

Her failing health did nothing to boost my low morale. I was responsible for what she was going through. Deep down, I knew she wasn't cured of whatever sickness she had had because of what the Catrions had done. It felt like her swiftly-approaching death was an intentional part of my punishment.

Defeated, I almost wished I'd never sent that damned cry for help.

While wallowing in my misery, I heard a crash out in the corridor. Seconds passed by without any other indicators of activity happening; I began to think I'd imagined the crashing noise. Just when I felt the most disheartened, having convinced myself of my own insanity because nothing else had happened, the room's sliding door hissed open.

Because I'd attributed the racket in the hallway to the Catrions, when it wasn't, I hoped my shocked expression didn't make me appear too unwilling to leave.

A girl floated into the room. Until she came in further, I couldn't see her face. From teh limited view I had, I saw she was dressed similarly to me before I'd surrendered to the Catrions. Aside from the color of her bikini top, the only difference in her raiment and what I had worn were the pants. She had on a pair of Victor's khakis; I knew they were his because of the extra length bunched around her ankles. Also, she had a sweat stained men's blouse with the front unbuttoned and loose.

In the recesses of my mind, I recognized her wavy blond hair, but I couldn't remember her name.

Before she noticed me, she spotted Aidyn. "Figures," She turned her head, looking around some more. "Ah, there you are--Victor said you'd be in here somewhere."

Her voice reminded me of her name--there stood Nellya in the flesh.

"Is this a dream?" I asked stupidly.

She shook her head. "Nope, I'm here to rescue you."

"My hero!" I swooned as dramatically as I could in my misery.

"I'll remember that," She pulled a short pair of red bolt cutters from a back pocket. Subconciously I prayed she'd be gentle with them; piercing guns petrified me and they paled in comparison to the chain-snipping might of her fiberglass monster.

Fortunately, she cut the other end of each pair of handcuffs, the ends not near my flesh

Once I was free, I thanked God for the absense of gravity. My sore limbs would have suffered even more if they'd dropped limp. Even so, Nellya had to help work the kinks out of my muscles before I could do anything on my own. For seceral tense minutes, she massaged my shoulders and legs by gingerly bending and stretching each muscle group.

When the ability to move had returned to me, Nellya pulled the clothes I'd had on earlier out of another of her pockets; I was too tired to care how much she seemed to have on her person.

"Here, put these on," She said, handing me the clothing while bending to fish something out of her pant leg. Despite looking incredibly awkward, my sword slid down next to her calf. "Take this too, you'll need it in a sec."

Fear welled up inside of me--the condition I was in was not one I cared to fight off Catrions in.

However, I reached for the sword nervously with my tail; I wished Victor and his sledge hammer were nearby.

As I finished getting dressed, Nellya pondered a solution to Aidyn's situation. Concluding she had no choice other than to free her, she attacked the lock on the shower door.

The opening glass door sounded like a plastic food container with slimy leftovers inside, "Shh-lock."

The once-trapped liquid erupted out of the shower. Miniscule droplets and churning globules exploded from the the largest mass of the liquid and bounced around the room. Each time a drop of it splashed me, I winced; each wet spot burned terribly. I was sure it was the same stuff I'd been in before, but it had never burned me like that before. All I could figure was it had been too long since I'd last had the liquid touch me, my skin was reacting to it.

After the momentary stinging, I began feeling slightly better. It wasn't much, but I felt less exhausted. It was almost like eating a banana or granola bar as a pick-me-up after spending the entire day hacking at ivy on the back of the house or trying thin out a wild thicket of bamboo; I got enough out of it to feel replenished for a short while but anymore than that was being wishful.

Nellya dunked her hands into the pool of liquid; more of it splashed out. An icy shiver zipped down my spine just watching her hands plunge further down.

Ripping the oxygen plug from Aidyn's nose, Nellya pulled Aidyn's unconscious body from the slime. Taking her outer shirt off so fast it flipped inside-out, Nellya wrapped it around Aidyn's shoulders. Before doing anything else, Nellya buttoned the shirt and tossed Aidyn over her shoulder.

"Come on, let's go."

The door whirred open again.

"You first," she said, "I'll cover your rear."

Still too tired to fully understand everything Nellya said, I gave her a confused look.

"You're kidding, right?" I fumbled for the scabbard of my katana, "I don't have a clue where we're going."

She shook her head and frowned, ushering me out the door. "Just go--you'll know where when you're out there."

Kicking off the wall behind me, I obeyed despite not knowing any more than I had moments earlier.

"You can't miss all the other humans, you'll be fine."

Brushing past her, I repeated her last words. "Other humans?"

Nellya didn't answer my query, probably because she went into alert mode. Her tense, ready-to-kill-something energy inspired me to try and put my own game face on. Of course, my off-to-war attitude was insignificant next to hers, but I was encouraged to be able to conjure that energy in spite of my exhaustion.

Sure enough, just outside, a man in his late fifties stood guard; between his bare tired chest, his clistening compound crossbow, and the baggy blue jeans that made his bony frame stand out even more, I didn't know what to think. When he saw me, he nodded once and fell in line behind Nellya.

Stunned to even see someone other than my friends, I bounced off opposite walls, zig-zagging in the general direction I thought I'd come when the Catrions carried me to my most recent imprisonment. SInce all the walls pretty mych looked the same, I hadn't had a chance to recover yet, and on my way to be chained I'd been rather distraught, finding my way back to my suited proved difficult.

Fortunately, Nellya was there to point me in the right direction.

"Hey," she called, "We're not going back to the room your stuff was in cause it's too far from Victor's established safe zone."

"Safe zone?" I muttered, again receiving no confirmation of what I'd heard.

"Chuck should be up agead," The man's high-pitched voice wheezed and cracked; he sounded older than he looked. "He'll know which way to go,"

I appreciated the help offered by the stranger but considering I didn't know Chuck either, I didn't know how helpful he'd been.

Where Chuck was supposed to be, I found a frantic Victor; he had his sledgehammer in hand and his dirting eyes told me we still weren't safe. When he caught sight of me, the corners of his mouth curled upwards into a nervous smile; seeing Aidyn in the condition she was shattered his brief happiness. Instantly, his lips tightened into a menacing scowl and a flicker of rage flashed in his eyes.

Experience told me I'd be the one to confront that fury later on.

"Come on," Victor's palm pressed flat against my spine and together we darted down several hallways I'd not yet been in. Every time we went through another door, victor sealed it shut the second Nellya and the anonymous man made it through.

Roughly ten minutes of running brought us to a part of the space ship I'd only seen from a ventilation duct. Judging by Victor's continued frenzy, we weren't safe yet.

Without hesitation, Victor and Nellya stuffed Aidyn and I into the safest corner of their apparent stronghold; it was a spherical shower in an apartment smaller than mine had been. Surrounding this appartment, other apartments and former crew quarters formed Victor's beehive.

Each hallway, room, and closet begged a Catrion to creep through; security was so tight the Catrion would be dead three weeks before it first thought of attacking. The sheer volume of people emprisoned on the Kyokujitsu astonished me. I'd been wrong in assuming my friends and I were alone in our captivity.

Alaric met Nellya, Victor, and I as Victor and Nellya locked AIdyn and I away. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimmer of affection in Alaric's face. As quickly as it came, it was gone. Unless I was mistaken, Nellya's appearance sparked his change in character. Nellya didn't notice Alaric's peculiar behavior although I cringed at the gory mess named Alaric that would have resulted if Nellya had noticed his affection.

In the shower, Nellya helped me change Aidyn's clothing to something more exposing. I also swapped my baggy cargo shorts for a pair of short shorts. Our hope was that in doing this, Aidyn and I could recover faster.

Hopefully, me staying with Aidyn when the spray of water came on would heal her of her condition, like when the Catrions had placed us together to fix what they did wrong to her.

Almost immedeatly after Victor and Nellya shut the shower door on us, the spray started. ONce again, I cringed at the fierce burning although this time it gradually diminished as my body became more accustomed to the liquid. Over time, I felt better until my body could recover no more without a long sleep.

Aidyn however continued looking horrible. I didn't have to be a doctor to see she was sick. Her unconscious body endured constant tremors; if she she shook any more, I'd think she were having a seizure. Not surprisingly, her cold skin was whiter and paler than I'd ever seen on a living person. Blue veins streaked across every inch of her body, some melting into oblong bruises. Her skin was slimy to the touch, and I doubted the constant spray of liquid coating us both was the cause.

This was what I had done to her.

Because I never heard the Catrions mention her sickness since demanding she be healed, I couldn't know for sure they'd done much of anything. For all I knew, Aidyn would need a human doctor to survive whatever the Catrions had done to her. Since that wasn't available, the best I had was from the Catrions, whose level of trustworthiness didn't encourage me.

The possibility existed I'd sealed her fate in sending a plea for help--with a forceful intervention guaranteed, the Catrions could care less about some dumb girl's demands to heal another silly human.

Aidyn's deteriorating health fell on my shoulders.

Worse yet, it wasn't my first screw-up. No, this was just my most recent failure in a growing sequence of successively-worse failures. Because of me, my friends and I would probably never see our families again. Before I gave cause to Aidyn's probably death, Victor alone had had a connection to his old life. Sure, Leroy and I were related but Leroy was my nephew, my responsibility; Aidyn and Victor were cousins, friends, equals. Thanks to another stupid act of selfishness on my part, Victor's sole reminder of the dull, happy peace we'd all had was crumbling away from ever living again.

Sighing to myself, I wondered how far the damage I'd caused would go. Whereas Victor's agenda from the very beginning had been to resist the Catrions, I had strived to be nonconfrontational. Victor refused to stay put when the Catrions first placed him in a cell, thus, he managed to erase the Catrions' memory of him and evade recapture. In contrast, I submitted to the Catrions without question. Each time I knew the Catrions were coming for me, I'd done little to fight back. The most recent time, I'd even stripped down and went quietly, like the good little prisoner I was. How I'd expected my friends to benefit from my surrender, I couldn't comprehend.

Whether hours or days had passed, I knew not. The spray of numbing droplets had ceased for the seventh time a while back yet I still hadn't left the shower once. Nellya had visited twice to deliver fresh clothing and to help me change Aidyn. Apart from her two visits, I never interacted with anyone; every break from my isolation was a welcome relief.

Hence, when Victor knocked on the shower door and invited me to stretch my stiff muscles, I couldn't contain my excitement. We only stayed in the apartment outside the shower's round walls but I appreciated the change in scenery all the same.

"How's Aidyn doing?" Victor massaged the back of his neck. "Have you noticed any improvement?"

My heart sunk deep into my gut, practicaly falling into my left leg. "Oh," I'd heard the truth hurt, though I'd never imagined it could hurt to tell the truth. "She's--erm--she's the same as ever."

He nodded, looking away from me. "It figures," His face scrunched up into a look of smug weariness.

"She'll be fine," I lied; there wasn't any evidence to suggest she'd be fine.

Victor sighed. "It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have to worry about her health on top of everything else." He shook his head.

Confused, I sat down next to him, using my tail to better position myself without gravity. "What do you mean?"

"Sorry," He took my hand in his. "I forgot you haven't met hardly any of the people we have on out side."

He was right; I'd only met one other person on the ship and had yet to learn his name.

"How many others are there and how'd they wind up here?"

"I don't know how they got here, but there have got to be fifty or more people." When he saw my astonished expression, he continued. "All I know is they're trapped here too and they expect me to map the ship out for them."

"Is that what you've been doing since I saw you last?" I pretended not to be upset by my isolation.

He shrugged. "When we're not fighting off Catrions, they've got me leading small groups of people as far as I can without getting lost."

"How far have you been going?" Although Victor had already spent loads of time exploring the ship, I didn't know how far he could go before getting lost.

"That's the thing," He cracked his knuckles without thinking. "They expect me to remember exactly where every thing I've ever found is." He inhaled a long, deep breath of air through his nose. "Not only that, but half the time they think I can also take them to the stuff of theirs I haven't yet found."

"It must be tough," I ceded.

Judging by Victor's abrupt change in tone, it was.

"Tough, ha! It's like they think I'm not trying to find what everyone needs!" I can't help it if I haven't found all the clothes we need!"

I didn't know what to say.

"To top it off, we need to find a way to move every one away from here so we'll be safer from the Catrions."

"How so? It's not like we can get off the ship." It seemed to me like there was no escaping the Catrions while we were aboard the Kyokujitsu.

"They aren't as numerous as you think," With no choice, Victor's temper started cooling down. "They're only in about a tenth of the entire spaceship. Most of the ship is empty."

Because I was in shock, I didn't respond.

Shaking his head, Victor either accepted his problems for what they were or accepted he couldn't solve them; I couldn't tell. "We might be able to move small groups of people to a safer part of the ship, but I'm worried the Catrions will attack the first ones to move before we get a chance to relocate enough people to fend off an attack."

He brushed his bangs out of his eyes and pushed his fingers through the rest of his hair; I didn't know why I'd never noticed before, but he was quite dashing with long hair.

"I'm hesitant to try a mass exodus because we'd all have to crawl through the ventilation ducts and maintenance shafts to get anywhere I think might be safer." He hunched forward. "I'm sure there's a way to get somewhere safe without using the them but there's no way of finding it and guaranteeing it's Catrion-free."

Victor's defeated tone of voice reminded me of school, the day my mom started teaching us advanced chemistry. I had understood the concept well enough but explaining to Victor why a gummi bear had burst into roaring flames was imposible. He'd understood the sugar in the gummy bear reacted with the potassium-chlorate yet the exact mathematical reasons why went in one ear and out the other.

Because I wasn't paying attention, another generic response escaped my lips. "Everything'll work out eventually."

Victor cocked his head to the side, staring into my eyes.

Feeling incredibly stupid, I fumbled for something more to say. "Maybe you've just got to wait for the right-" I was an idiot, no doubt in my mind. "-moment."

Victor slumped his head back down. "Maybe," he didn't sound too convinced.

I couldn't take it anymore. I'd had enough of Victor's self-doubt. "Changing the subject, do you know where Leroy is? The last I saw him was submerged in a tank."

As I'd seen him do several times, Victor buried his problems in his subconscious so he could help someone else. "I wish I could say we have him safe and sound but we don't."

Every minute trace of happiness in me plummeted into the abyss.

"Nellya told me she thinks she might know where he is but she said getting to him would be tricky."

Stomach acid climbed my esophagus, leaving a sour bitternes on my tongue; I hoped closing my mouth would stop the upheaval of vomit.

"If we weren't always fighting of Catrions, we would have tried to rescue him already but for the time being we can't spare the manpower." Victor looked liked he wanted to cry. "I'm really sorry."

Though he wasn't the target of my rage, Victor became collateral damage because of it. "Quit talking like he's dead unless you know he is, and if is, then freakin' say it!"

Silently accepting my treatment of him, Victor shuddered away from my anger.

Upon realizing my mistakem I wished I could take back what I'd just shouted. The tear rolling down my cheek as I leaned over to hug him was genuine.

"I didn't mean it to come out like that," I whispered, wondering if our nightmare would ever end.

"I know," He stroked my hair affectionately. His touch felt warm and loving on my cold, clammy, almost-bare back. Deep down I wished never to move from his hold.

"Drib specifically asked me to watch out for him," I wept openly. "I'm responsible for him!"

"We're all in this together," Victor said.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, Victor's wise words angered me.

"We all made the same mistakes but we can each bear each other's burdens collectively. Taking care of Leroy is everyone's responsibility now."

Sniffling, I looked up into his glossy eyes, searching for the sincerity I knew was there. For once, I wasn't alone.

"You don't blame me for getting us in this situation?"

He shook his head, "Nope, not anymore, and I'm sorry I ever did."

The hurricane-sized storm cloud over my head had a silver lining, I just had to fly through the eye to see it.

*****

Author's Note: Though comments are appreciated as always, I'm fairly certain the next chapter of the story is unfinished which means the next chapter will take a lot longer to arrive than this one did since I've got to write the last half of it. The only reason I'm not 100% sure is the next chapter only has like three pages in this notebook, and I'd have to go through piles of school stuff to find the next notebook. Just know that another chapter is coming, even if it takes a while.