FORTY-FIVE

KING HAD NEVER wanted to know what a piece of luggage felt like, but he knew now. He’d been carried recklessly through a network of tunnels, slammed into walls, dropped, picked back up, and sometimes dragged by a leg. But the humiliation of being so easily manhandled never found a firm grasp. The creatures, sights, and sounds he passed in the hallways were far too distracting.

The Nguoi Rung were everywhere, inhabiting the caves just below the mountain exterior. Some, like Lucy, were young women, performing what looked like ordinary household chores. But there were others. Happy children. Serious adults—young adults. The oldest, in human years, could only be as old as Weston had been here. Fifteen years. While the females all appeared to be wide-hipped and ready for childbearing, the males ranged in size and stature. Some, skinny and diminutive, sat on logs, scratching with sharpened rocks on long smooth ones. Writing. Others, with bulging muscles and low brows, carved out cubbies in the cave walls or fashioned weapons.

Lucy dragged King up a winding stone staircase. With his hands still bound behind his back, he tried his best to hop up the stairs on his arms, but Lucy moved too quickly. More often than not, his back pounded into the next stair. As they passed by a row of circular windows that looked out over the jungle, King realized exactly how massive Weston’s tribe, family, whatever he called them, had become. This wasn’t a village. It was a city.

The staircase ended and the floor evened out. Apparently, Lucy’s favored status granted her a room separate from the cubbyholes the others lived in below. They entered a room shaped like a slice of pie. Light streamed in from two large-hulahoop-sized, ten-foot-deep holes in the rock wall through which a blazing blue sky could be seen. And while moisture clung to the torrid air outside, the interior of the mountain felt cool and dry. If not for the smell of rotting flesh, he might have imagined this as a theme resort for the rich and bored.

Lucy casually discarded King onto a stone platform about the size and height of a coffee table. Its rough stone surface was scarred with a variety of scratches, like a cutting board, and smelled like an odd mix of every imaginable bodily fluid. What had taken place on this surface before his arrival, he couldn’t say, and he didn’t dare entertain the thought. Turning his attention back to the room, he watched Lucy walk toward a kind of stone table. It jutted from the wall, apparently part of the mountain itself. The five-foot-deep, six-foot-wide counter was simple enough, but something odd caught King’s attention. A small rounded depression, perhaps an inch deep, surrounded the outside edge, coming together at a small hole in the center of the table. King glanced down. A hole had been drilled in the floor. A dark brown stain clung to the stone around the hole.

Lucy turned from the table, revealing a row of sharpened stones that had been hidden by her body, similarly stained. She opened a handmade wooden chest, covered in symbols similar to the ones he’d seen in the tunnels with Queen while in pursuit of the VPLA and Sara. At the time, the Death Volunteers had seemed like the largest danger he would face on this mission, and they’d almost killed him, Queen, and Sara. But the Death Volunteers would be like a holiday weekend compared to the hell in which he now found himself in. A hell that was about to get hotter.

Arms full of straw, sticks, and a few logs collected from the chest, Lucy set to work arranging them expertly in a fire pit built into the floor. Once she had a bottom layer of straw, covered by sticks, housed beneath a pyramid of four logs, Lucy struck a flint stone to the floor, sending up a cascade of sparks. After two more attempts and a lot of blowing, the blaze came to life.

“What’s for dinner?” King asked.

“You,” Lucy said casually as though talking to a head of lettuce about to be hacked into a salad. Lucy began testing the sharpness of her stone blade collection, rubbing them against her fingers.

King realized that the comparison to lettuce might not be far off the mark. He examined the scratches etched into the surface of the stone on which he sat. His eyes widened a bit more. He was sitting on a cutting board. A very large cutting board.

“I don’t think eating me is what your father had in mind when he asked you to watch me,” King said.

Lucy squinted at him like only an angry teenage girl can. “Father doesn’t know everything. I have been taught by the old mothers, too.”

“I thought they were banished.”

“I see them when I want. Across the river. Father does not know.”

In his heart, King didn’t want to know, but had to ask. “And the old mothers have taught you . . . what?”

Lucy smiled. The little girl was gone, replaced by something feral. Though he had not seen them yet, King imagined the old mothers looked something like the girl in front of him now. “How to cook.”

Lucy might be intelligent. She could speak, maybe even read or write. But any knowledge she had was taught to her by Weston and the old mothers, including morality. Her moral compass, so immature and tutored by inhuman minds, had been corrupted. He was sure that the Nguoi Rung, being intelligent ancestors of modern humanity, could be taught right and wrong. But like humans, they could also be taught to hate. To be evil.

“It doesn’t bother you that I’m talking to you?” King asked.

Lucy stopped with a rock blade in hand. “Why should it?”

“Because I’m like you.”

Lucy raised an eyebrow, which was more of a start to the hair on her head than an actual eyebrow. She smiled, revealing her sharp canines. “You’re nothing like me.” She squatted next to him, playing with the rock blade. “I’m strong. You’re weak. I’m smart. You’re dumb.” She thumped her chest. “I’m Nguoi Rung. You’re human.”

“Weston is human.”

“Father is alpha. Not human.”

King sighed. She was totally brainwashed.

Lucy stood and hunched out a hip. “You’re food. I’m hungry.” Then she laughed. Her voice sounded like any other teenage girl’s.

“How old are you, Lucy?”

Lucy sharpened the stone on another, chipping off flecks and creating a fresh sharpened edge. “Three.”

“You’re not three,” King said.

Lucy spun on him. Angry. “Am too! Father explained it to the other man before I killed him.”

King did his best to hide his growing concern. “What other man?”

“Big. Bigger than you. Dark skin.”

Bishop.

“How did you kill him?” Bishop would be hard to kill. Short of—

“I took off his head.”

King’s shoulders fell, along with his resolve.

Bishop was dead.

King fought back his mix of despair and anger, focusing on the problem at hand like he’d been trained to do. Let her think she’s three. Maybe they aged differently. She still acted like a teenager.

“Is this a kitchen? Do you know what a kitchen is?”

She huffed. “This is my room. Not a kitchen.”

“Well, I like your room,” he said quickly, fearing he’d offended her. “It’s very pretty.”

Lucy paused. The slightest of smiles shone on her face.

“Do you have a bed?”

A confused look slowly appeared on her face. Then she looked at him like he’d just pissed his pants. “You’re sitting on my bed.”

Despite King’s internal revulsion at this Neanderthal girl sleeping on what undoubtedly served as both cutting board and bed, he managed to force out, “And your bed is very comfortable.”

Lucy looked at him. “I don’t like it. It’s hard.”

“Why don’t you get a new one?”

Lucy scrunched her face. “A new one?”

King nodded. “A nice soft one.”

“Father says this bed is good enough. Fit for a princess.”

“My bed is soft,” King said. “Like sleeping on a cloud.”

Lucy sat at the edge of the stone bed. She rubbed her hand on the surface.

She’s hooked, King thought. Now to reel her in. “You know if we got married, you could sleep on my bed.”

“What is married?” Lucy asked.

“It’s what people do when they love each other. You’re not married?”

Lucy shook her head no. Her face grew serious.

“Father wears a wedding ring. He must be married to someone.”

Lucy looked baffled. She wasn’t bright enough to figure out she was being played, but she had enough sense to put together the puzzle pieces he’d laid out for her. Marriage equals love, which she apparently understood, and Weston was married. Ipso facto, Weston was loved, and she wanted what the father had. She wanted to be loved that way, despite having no idea what that meant. She looked in King’s eyes. “And you would marry me?”

“Absolutely.” The conviction in King’s voice was convincing, but not quite enough.

“Why?”

King smiled. “You have pretty eyes, for one.”

Lucy looked away, the faint bit of cheek not covered in fur revealing her blush.

“And like you said. You’re smart. I’m dumb. You’re strong. I’m weak. You’re Nguoi Rung . . . and I want to be.” Lucy looked at him again. “What’s not to love?”

“But I am a princess here. A favored child.”

“You listened to Weston speaking to me in the cave, right?”

Lucy nodded.

“You heard my name. What he called me?”

Lucy nodded, then whispered. “King . . .”

“You may be a princess here, but marrying me will make you—”

“A queen!” Lucy’s smile was wide now. “How we get married?”

“An alpha has to do it.”

Lucy bit her lip. “He won’t.”

“We can ask.”

She looked unsure.

“The worst he can do is say no.”

This seemed to resonate with Lucy. She nodded. “Okay.” She headed for the door.

“Wait,” King said.

Lucy turned.

“It’s customary for the male to ask for the father’s permission to marry,” King said quickly. He tried to ignore how screwed up this conversation was. It was almost as though Weston were multiple people. Father. Alpha. Weston. What else was he to these people? God? “If he says yes to you, I still have to ask him. Then he can marry us right away.”

Lucy stalked back into the room. She picked up the stone blade and leaned in close to King’s face. She stared into his eyes, as though looking for some betrayal in his words. King returned her stare with a smile. She grunted and cut his bonds. “Stay with me.”

King rubbed his wrists and stretched his arms. He had no intention of fleeing. Lucy could catch and kill him as easily as she no doubt did Bishop. While he would have liked nothing better than to escape into the jungle, Lucy was taking him to the one place he wanted to go more—to Sara. In the face of death he realized he would regret not getting the chance to get to know her without gunfights, explosions, ape-men, and bioweapons of mass destruction. But that could only be done if he first rescued her and then found some way to complete the mission.

As King walked he felt something solid in his pants pocket. He’d been unconscious when they took his weapons, but something had been missed. He searched his memory for what he kept in the pocket. The problem was, he didn’t normally keep anything in that pocket. He slid his hand inside, feeling hard plastic and two metal points. His hand flinched out of the pocket as his body remembered the shock that normally followed a physical connection with the metal points. He didn’t have to look to know it was Trung’s taser. The Nguoi Rung who had searched him had either not noticed it or thought nothing of it. He wasn’t sure if it would even work on the thick furred body of a Neanderthal hybrid, but it was something.

King stood and walked out of the room with Lucy. As they started down the curved staircase he’d been dragged up, Lucy stopped and turned to him, a gleam of teenage mischief in her eyes. “If he says no, I’m still going to eat you.”