Endosymbiosis

23. Cremation

His hand on the glass wall behind me slid down to land on my waist with a velvety touch and I wondered what else he was capable of doing with his fingers; and how would his skin feel on mine... I drowned in his eyes drowning in mine, unable to look away as I watched his nearness torture me when it wasn't near enough.

"So will you stop resisting and surrender to the journey?" I whispered, blocking the lights of the Milky Way in an eclipse.

Kadi flashed a smile he used as a weapon... A very effective one, by the way.

"I was never very good at resisting..." He purred. "Usually I just... Take what I want."

My skin crawled.

"And what do you want now?"

"I want to..."

Before he could speak, however, sirens exploded around us, painting the waters with red lights that screamed that we were in danger.

• • • ֍ • • •

We ran into the ship's main hall and slithered wet across the floor to land head-on into the fageine's gun barrels in front of the control panel. Behind the glass windows a blue star was approaching, so bright I had to shield my eyes to see the soldiers.

"What is happening?!" I backed away from the weapons, but the fageines continued to aim them in our faces. "Let me talk to Bleine."

I tried to approach the panel, but the barrier of soldiers stopped me.

"She's not available."

But we kept getting closer to that blue star.

"But we're going to... We're..." I pointed to the star, but none of the fageines seemed to mind.

I tried to advance to the panel before we dove into the plasma, but a fageine in front of me slammed the gun into my face so violently that I collapsed. I blinked at the red blur that trickled from my lip onto the glossy floor, while the chaos of Kadi's screams sounded so far away it seemed to reach out to me from another world beyond the cloudy layers of pain that enveloped me.

They wouldn't let us deviate from that star... Because it was our destiny. I felt Kadi's hands pulling me up.

Bleine was behind this? No... It wouldn't make sense. She needed what I kept... Only the Queen could be behind it, impregnated in Itopis with her disease, corrupting the soldiers around us, making herself responsible for my mother's death... And now for mine as well.

"You're all going to die too..." I snarled at the soldiers, who didn't even move. "Did you hear me?! We will all die!"

But they didn't care; because the Queen didn't mind burning some of her soldiers infiltrated in the Empire's armies if that way, she could destroy the hope I held in me. I could see her growing stronger in Itopis, indestructible, invincible, until she was eternalized on our ashes... And I couldn't stop her.

I turned to Kadi, fire in my eyes, explosion in my voice:

"He needs to get out! He is our only alternative!"

"I don't know... I don't..."

But I did. So I screamed at the top of my lungs, in a desperate plea:

"KITTEN!"

Kadi immediately collapsed to the ground, writhed in an explosion of violent roars that clawed at his throat. The fevino's claws emerged, tearing at the edges of his skin and the beast flew beyond the confines of his body. The fevino fell on the floor shattering the fageines, whose shots had no effect as they bounced off his yellow scales. The milky bodies were torn by the claws and hurled through the air, transformed into nothing but a slime spread across the floor. I stumbled and hid behind one of the walls as claws and projectiles flew across the room, waiting for the only moment I could reach the control panel.

The remains of the floor-shattered fageines then began to crawl and coalesce into a milky, gooey mass in the center of the room, from which pseudopods began to protrude and retract. It was a mega-fageine; who rose in a tower and threw himself at the fevino, engulfing him in an enzymatic embrace that burned the beast like acid. The fevino tried to escape with his claws tearing the inside of the mega-fageine, but more and more the creature destabilized the beast inside, making impossible to escape. The yellow scales began to corrode, layer by layer, until, at some point, the acid would reach Kadi...

I saw a soldier's gun lying on the ground and picked it up, trying to aim with trembling hands at the eye where the fageine's consciences and pupils had converged, but I missed the first two shots. On the third, finally, I hit close to the big graze eye, destabilizing the mega-fageine enough that the fevino managed to free one of his paws and open a huge rip in the surface.

The pseudopods of one of the fageine that had not yet been engulfed in the mega-fageine wrapped itself around my body. The creature snatched the weapon from my hands, with nothing I could do to stop it with my human weakness. I tried to break free and hit the enemy, but then a sound exploded like an atomic bomb in my ears.

PAIN.

The vision faded from my eyes and the ground left my feet as a silent scream tried to leave my throat and failed. I gasped like a fish out of water, choking on emptiness as my essence was plunged into pain... Pain... Pain... Pulsing, pounding, throbbing...

Kill me... Was I speaking out loud? I didn't know anymore.

What was the difference between the inside and the outside anyway?

Red... That should be the difference. But it was everywhere.

I collapsed in my blood, pierced by a projectile that went through my back and exposed my insides to a world it should never see. The red pooled, reminding me of the river I swam in in the Blood District, a warning that I now lived. I wouldn't die drained, but depending on what had been hit, I might not come back from the darkness.

Everything had become a confused blur... And I swore to see the fageines dissolve as their bodies touched my blood... But what...

I felt warm hands on my body, human, and heard a distant voice whispering indecipherable words in my ear, trying to pull me back to the surface...

At that moment golden figures dominated the environment in a tsunami of gold and I felt the icy touch of a metallic hug enveloping me. My body was slowly lifted off the ground, and as much as I tried to stay awake, I ended up plunging into darkness.