~Gal-Met~

Chapter 1

            Have you ever felt like that you belonged somewhere? Even if the place was strange? K932 had never felt that way. She hadn’t ever felt that way, even though she had lived in the space colony AZ-247 for the past eighteen years of her life.  Thoughts like that did not cross K932’s mind, however, because she was a slave. She had been born a slave, had grown up a slave, and was convinced that she would die a slave. There was no such thing as a “free” human being in the space colonies anymore. The only free humans lived on Earth, and even then, they were considered a lesser people than their Gal-met rulers. The Gal-met had come to Earth over a hundred years ago and had completely taken over. Humans had been enslaved for a short while after, though treaties had been worked out to free the “noblest” of the humans. In other words, those with enough money behind their name and lies behind their teeth had been spared from slavery. Even now, there were laws protecting slaves from unfair treatment, but like many such things, it was only a piece of paper.

            It had not stopped K932 from being beaten and it had not stopped her bones from breaking. And now it was not protecting her from being falsely accused of her master’s murder. A high ranking Gal-met captain named Zeik, a cruel man with a handsome face, had been her master, and had been discovered dead in his home this morning.  K932 had seen the Gal-met who stabbed Zeik and had been the one to raise an alert to call the authorities. Instead of running, the man had seized her in a grasp like iron, and placed the knife in her hand. When the police arrived, the man presented K932 before the authorities as Zeik’s killer. They addressed him as Marlex, and listened as he recounted the tale of how he had come to visit Zeik over a matter of business that morning, only to find K932 standing over his corpse with the bloody knife in her hand. It was a lie, and she tried to tell them, but the Gal-met officers would hear none of it. Marlex had disposed of his bloody gloves, and it would be her prints on the handle of the blade. Slaves accused of murder of even humans were either executed or imprisoned for life after a brief hearing,  but the murder of a Gal-met by a human, particularly a high ranking Gal-met military officer, was punished with immediate execution. No questions, no trail, no chance to defend oneself. And so this is how K932 had come to be running for her life.

            As they stood there in front of the living complex that Zeik had called home, K932 began to feel the familiar, cold feeling of utter terror in her gut. It had taken years, but after long hours of merciless punishments from Zeik, K932 had grown accustomed to holding that fear on a tight leash and keeping it from sending her into hysteria. The officers turned their backs part way to the Gal-met and to K932, who was now standing on the tips of her toes to keep the iron grasp of the man from pulling her arm out of its socket. Gal-met, aside from being much taller, were also several times stronger than a human. K932 had no hope of breaking the grasp by herself, and so she did not try. She just waited, refusing to let her fear get the best of her. It was then, as the officers were talking to one another, that Marlex’s communicator went off in his pocket. He tried to ignore the incessant beeping, and it stopped after a few moments. It began beeping again a split second later and he pulled it out with an exasperated sigh. The distraction caused his grip to loosen just by a fraction, but it was enough.

K932 wrenched her arm from Marlex and had begun to run. She had no idea where or why, for a slave was just a slave, and not used to following impulse. But she ran anyway. She wasn’t particularly fast, nor was she strong, but the officers and, while Marlex had noticed right away, the officers had had their attention elsewhere and it took them a few moments to realize that she was gone. She ran now through the center of the large city floating in orbit above Altaria, the Gal-met’s home planet. It was about three-quarters the size of Earth, which lay many, many light-years away. The space colony was called Trinidad by some, but its official name was AZ-37. It was the twelfth colony to be launched above Altaria to accommodate the increasing population of Gal-met. Each could hold an average population of twenty-three million Gal-met, along with a small population of slaves. One of the laws of the Gal-met was that once they had conquered a people, the ones they let free stayed free. You were either born into slavery, or you weren’t. As a result, accommodations had to be made for slaves so that they kept up an ongoing supply.

            Above K932, an enormous transparent dome stretched a mile above the city. Enormous living complexes rose high into the artificial sky, their concrete faces cold and still. A sliver of Altaria’s pale green surface was just visible to the east over the skyline and a sea of stars filled the rest of it. When Zeik had let her out to go fetch things for him, she had often paused by the large fountain in the center and just stared at those stars, wondering what it was like for the humans before the Gal-met. Few records remained, as far as she was able to tell, of what life was like before the Gal-met arrived. Either they were kept out of the hands of slaves or they had been destroyed. The only books slaves had were the ones they either stole or were given by their masters. 

            The shouts of the officers pursued her and the crowd in the open area around the fountain all turned to look. A few of the Gal-met tried to grab her, but she slipped past them easily. Gal-met were very similar to humans, though they were larger and tended to average between six and seven feet tall. They were also very strong, and in open spaces were much faster than humans, but she was small compared to them, and unlike the pursuing officers, was not hindered by the throng of people. It was easy for her to slip between the close-pressed bodies. The m*censored* quickly parted for the officers, however, and by then K932 was already slipping around a corner into a back alleyway. It was just as she was turning the corner that she heard the telltale hum of a phaser behind her. Then there was a shout for people to get down, and a white hot light burst behind K932’s eyes.  She stumbled to the ground on the rough concrete with a cry and it took a second for her to climb back to her feet. The burning pain that shot up her left side made her head spin and she stumbled around another corner as the officers rounded the first.

            She spared only a glance for the gouge burned into her arm. Phasers fired a white-hot bullet of energy that seared through almost anything, but dissipated quickly after making contact with something. The wound didn’t bleed too much, for the heat had cauterized it almost immediately.  The seared flesh was also thin, and would likely break open later on, but it held for now. The pain was enough to make her stumble to her left, into a wall. She felt around the corner and let out a loud scream as a shot caught her right side and another burned a hole deep into her thigh, searing through her clothing and flesh and leaving an acrid stench of burning flesh in the air. Her eyes became blurry with tears as she fumbled her way along the wall slowly. Too slow. She could hear the officers approaching slowly. They knew they had her caught. This was the end for her, she knew it. Just as she prepared to sink to her knees from the pain and fear, the wall fell away from her hand and she tumbled sideways into darkness.

            She landed in garbage. It was pitch black inside wherever she was and the only thing that tipped her off was the smell. She had fallen through an open garbage port and, from the sound of things, it was about to be launched to intercept a garbage pick-up barge just outside Altaria’s atmosphere.  There was a loud humming and groaning as the doors of the ports slid shut, cutting off the shouts of the officers pursuing her. An alarm sounded outside and bright lights flashed on above her, making her bl
ink. The walls were slick metal and reflected the lights in strange, warped patterns. Half-way down the wall, about eight feet up from the enormous pit if bags of garbage, was a cat walk where Gal-met  walked about, tossing a few last bags onto the piles. They walked around the edges of the huge room, securing the doors. She wriggled deeper between the huge bags of trash, biting back whimpers and groans at the pain. Please don’t let them see me. Don’t let them see me.

            She felt the wound in her side break open as she twisted around and black spots bloomed behind her eyes with the pain as blood slicked her skin and clothes and the plastic of the bags. The voices and light faded a bit and she let her eyes close to keep from getting dizzy as the her head began to spin. She must have fallen asleep, for a very loud, very hard jolt shook her awake. She felt stiff and weak and her thoughts felt muddled. She touched her side and leg, and she felt the crusted blood on her clothes and the hole where the phaser round had burned through her flesh.  Her fingertips touched the barest edge of the wound on her leg and she nearly screamed as pain rippled up her side. It had broken open as well and the burn on her arm was protesting to all the movement. It was then that the floor of the room fell away from her and she tumbled down a ramp with the bags of garbage.  The breath left her lungs in a gasp as she landed on her stomach on a smooth floor. The bags tumbled over her and blocked out any view of the room around her. She lay there, trying to get her breath back and make her head stop spinning. Muffled voices reached her through the bags.

            “You’re the one who got us into this mess, ace. I don’t see why the General Selnath put you on point, anyway. You’re a complete idiot when it comes to flying. You don’t know how to follow or give orders and you nearly killed Luther and me along with yourself during our last drill,” an angry female voice practically shouted nearby.

            “Well the fact of the matter is, Areina, I am the ace and you have to follow my orders, even if they seem a bit crazy. If you were as quick to act as you are to reprimand me, then we wouldn’t have so many problems,” a deeper voice answered. “Not to mention Luther wouldn’t get dragged down with you.”

            The female voice harrumphed loudly and said nothing more.  A few minutes of silence p*censored*ed, punctuated by the crinkle of plastic and thump of bags being lifted and thrown. Then, a quiet voice spoke, barely audible through the layers of garbage bags.

            “He is kind of right, you know, Areina. He is our ace and we’re supposed to follow his lead. Even if we don’t agree with it.” The last seemed to be directed at the second voice. The female voice, Areina, made a noncommittal grunt and they fell into silence again.

            K932 had regained her breath by now and was trying to stay still and quiet, though it wasn’t very hard. Her wounds had not had time to form another hard crust of blood and she could feel the it pooling around her on the floor. It wasn’t much at all, she thought, but the wounds still burned and twinged every time she shifted. She lay there for a long time, listening to the Gal-met working with a growing knot of dread in her stomach. When they found her, they would kill her. She just knew it. She grew even weaker as she waited, and let her eyes drift shut. A few minutes later, a bag was lifted from above her, and then another. Two more were removed and she squinted into surprisingly bright light with three shadows leaning over her. As her eyes focused, they dissolved into three surprised and curious Gal-met faces. The knot in her stomach became cold, stark terror and her body began to tremble, despite the weakness and her commands to stop it at once. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

            The female had piercing blue eyes and flaming red hair that was pulled back in a tight bun. Her high cheek-bones and long, angular face gave her the appearance of a bird. Her lips were pulled up in a sharp, puzzled little smile. The two men were different, if no less curious. Their faces were both still rather young and soft-looking. The shorter of the two had close cropped dark-purple hair and wide orange-red eyes, and his mouth was twisted into a puzzled frown. The taller of the boys had dark-blue hair and quiet green eyes that held a tightly restrained fierceness that wasn’t lessened by the thoughtful twist to his mouth. The purple-haired boy reached down towards her and she flinched back so hard that she had to bite back a whimper at the sudden pain in her side. It was a reflex born from many meaningless and causeless beatings, more than the actual fear itself. Her eyes closed and she waited, but the blow she was expecting never came.

            “Look at the tattoo. She’s a K9 unit. Wonder why they threw her away?” K932 opened her eyes a fraction and looked up at the three. It was the one with purple hair that had spoken.

            Areina, the woman, shrugged. “Who knows, Luther? There’s no telling with the nobles in the space colonies. Pompous fools, all of them.”

            Luther frowned and looked at the young man with blue hair. “What do you think, Kane?”

            Kane hadn’t moved. His hair was longer than Luther’s and hung down in his eyes as he leaned over her. The twist in his mouth changed to a frown and he straightened, crossing his arms against his chest. “She’s been shot.  And whoever it was shooting at her was a terrible shot, to miss the kill three times.”

            Kane knelt in front of her and K932 drew away from him as much as she could. Her limbs didn’t want to cooperate and all she managed to really do was move her arms a few inches. When the young man reached out to touch her, she tried desperately to push herself up and move away, but his hands found her shoulders and pushed her back down with surprising gentleness. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to will herself to be still, but she couldn’t stop it as the trembling worsened at his touch. His hands wandered down her arm and to her side and finally down her leg. His fingers found the wound and she yelled briefly into the floor before biting her tongue so hard that she tasted blood. Horrifying images flickered through her mind of what the Gal-met man might do to her. It only made her trembling even worse. She felt Kane lean over her and then his hands were gone and he was standing. She opened her eyes and stared at his feet.

            “We have to take her to the medics,” she heard him say.

            Areina sniffed. “Why? She’s just a slave. Besides, we can’t leave our posts.”

            “Well what do you expect us to do, Areina? Leave her here?” Kane already sounded ruffled and his words were growing heated even as he spoke. “The phaser shot nearly hit the artery in her leg. She’ll bleed to death!”

            “She’s just a human, Kane.”

            “So what? Isn’t it part of our duty as soldiers, as pilots, to help those you need helping? Even if-“

            “What’s going on here,” a gruff voice broke in. Heavy footsteps sounded nearby and K932 lifted her head a bit and looked up at the man who approached. His head was shaved and his eyes were deep blue and hard enough to crack stone. He spared a glance for K932 before fixing his gaze on the three. “What is this?”

            “Sir,” came their collective answer and they all saluted the man. He waved the salutes off and waited for an answer. Luther’s voice was considerably softer than either Areina’s or Kane’s, and even ofter compared to this new man, yet he answered with a confidence that contrasted greatly with the gentleness of his voice. “It’s a K9 unit, sir, from AZ-37. Kane wanted to take her to the medics; she’s been shot, sir.”

            The man said nothing for a long moment and K932 turned her eyes down as the man looked down at her. He grunted and looked to Kane. “Take her to see the General Selnath. Let him decide what to do with her. But come straight back here. Understood?”

            The man had barely finished speaking and the three agreeing when Kane knelt and touched K932’s head. She shrank back from his touch and he seemed to hesitate before touching her again. When he did, his hands gripped her arms in the strange iron-hard grip of the Gal-met and lifted her off the floor. Gently, he set her on her feet and held her there.

            “Can you stand?” When she didn’t answer, he loosened his grip on her arms slightly and she stood there unsteadily. Her leg ached and she could feel the blood running down to her foot. Once he was certain she wouldn’t fall, Kane knelt and tore a wide strip of cloth from her pants leg. Kneeling as he was, his head came up nearly to her chest. She stared at a point on the floor beyond his shoulder as he tied the cloth tight enough around her leg to make her clench her teeth and squeeze her hands into fists to keep from screaming. When he stood, her head only came up to his chest. He was just under six and a half feet tall, which was about average for a Gal-met man. Luther was only shorter than Kane by an inch or two, and Areina was shorter than Luther by just as much.

            Kane put his hand on K932’s shoulder and her knees nearly buckled under the contact. It was mostly from the weakness of having lost as much blood – it really couldn’t be that much, could it? - and only partly from the fact that her fear drove her to pull away. His grip tightened on her shoulder as he guided her out of the large room where they stood to one of the many doors in the walls, The door stood open onto a white hallway that was lined with more doors and other hallways. They turned one corner, and then another into a hallway very similar to the first. It ended in a big door, which opened into a large room with a hard tile floor and a large desk. Behind the big desk sat an equally large Gal-met man who was reading a report with a very bored look on his face. There was a scar that stretched from the corner of his right eye to the right corner of his mouth. The eyes themselves were a deeper red than Luther’s and his hair was a surprisingly human brown with wisps of gray at his temples. K932 observed him briefly before dropping her eyes to the floor.

            The general glanced up and straightened in his chair. “A human? What is she doing here?”

            Kane’s hand left her shoulder in a salute and she squeezed her eyes shut as her trembling started up again. She was surprised that it had stopped. “We found her in with the garbage, sir. She’s a K9 unit from AZ-37. She won’t speak to us, and we’ve no idea why, but she has been shot.”

            The general listened and nodded after a moment. He leaned forward and peered at K932 for a moment. “K9 unit? That’s expensive stock…I wonder what happened. What is your name, little one?”

            She lifted her gaze to the General’s face and dropped them to the floor again. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. She closed her mouth, swallowed, and tried again. “K932.”

            “Your name, child, not your number,” the general said, his voice surprisingly warm for a Gal-met. When she said nothing, he frowned and looked up at the three standing before him. “Not even a name.”

            Luther shook his head. “She won’t speak to us; she’s terrified. She flinched from me as if I were trying to hit her and all I did was try to move her hair to see her tattoo. From the way she’s been acting, the one that owned her before this treated her pretty roughly.”

            “Sir,” Kane said. “I’d like to ask your permission to take her to the medics, now. She’s bleeding badly and-“

            K932 didn’t hear anymore. Her heartbeat sounded loud in her ears and her breath seemed equally as loud. The strength in her body seemed to disappear all at once. She reached a hand out to catch the edge of the desk, but missed. The floor rushed up at her and someone said something rather loudly, but she couldn’t tell what. She fell in a heap on the floor and she was vaguely aware of the slickness of blood on tile beneath her and something strong and hard lifting her off of the slick tile as darkness took her.

Thanks for the comments, guys. I'm thrilled that people actually like it. ^ ^ It always makes me feel good when people enjoy what I write.

Well, I've finally fleshed out the first chapter a bit and started on the second. I'll put it up when I'm finished with it. ;o

i absolutely adored it!! I'm not much a science fiction person myself, but somehow you managed to grab my attention :) And good cliff hanger, but you know that a cliff hanger means you HAVE to continue..... so continue ;)

I'm seriously itchy now.

I pose to you the two basic questions of life:
1: What was the coolest thing before sliced bread?
2: If you make cheesecake in a pie crust, is it cake or pie?

1. Love, I think, love.

2. I prefer to think it as a pie.

Chapter 2

            It was the beeping of medical equipment and the smell of a sterile environment that K932 awoke to. She didn’t open her eyes for a long moment, but listened instead. She heard the soft shuffling of feet on the floor nearby and someone breathing deeply as they slept. The blanket pulled over her was scratchy and snagged on the bandages around her arm, leg, and her stomach as she shifted. The entire atmosphere of the place was nothing but calm and it took quite a while for her to remember what had happened. When she realized that, her eyes snapped open and she sat up quickly with a frantic look on her face. Too quickly, she realized, and fell back onto her pillow as the room spun violently around her.  

A Gal-met was sitting in a chair beside her bed, his blue hair falling over his face as he slept and a woman dressed in all white was standing at another bed across the room over a patient who was also sleeping. These were the only other people in the room, yet it did nothing to ease her fear. Slowly she sat up once more and swung her legs over the edge of bed. It was higher than a bed meant for a human and so her toes barely brushed the floor. She looked down to examine the bandage on her leg and saw that she was dressed in a short, simple nightgown that tied in the back. Her old clothes, tattered as they were, would have been a more welcoming sight. The bandaged wrapped about her leg was tinged pink and the flesh around it was pale. In fact, her whole body was pale. She felt as if she had slept for days, but had in fact only been asleep for the better part of one night. Someone chuckled softly behind her and the noise made her spin around so fast that the room didn’t stop when her head did. Dizzily, she stared up at the tall Gal-met nurse who had walked up so silently behind her.

The woman had long blonde hair that was pulled into a ponytail at the base of her skull and shocking yellow eyes run through with thin lines of black. Her thick lips were curled up in a gentle smile and her hands were reaching towards K932 in a placating manner. When the Gal-met’s hands touched her, K932 froze and she squeezed her eyes shut as the woman guided her back down to lay upon the bed. Without a word, the nurse went about unwrapping the bandages around the wound on her arm. Blood crusted around the edge of the wound and stuck the gauze to her skin, but the wound itself was no longer bleeding. Nor was the wound on her leg. Through all this, K932 kept her eyes shut and her body as still as possible, though sometimes a slight tremble crawled its way down her body.

“General Selnath says that you came in on the garbage barge from AZ-37,” the woman said. Her lilting voice was soft and gentle and K932 half-suspected that the nurse was only talking in order to keep her awake, for K932 was quickly becoming drowsy again. The nurse’s hands paused and K932 had the feeling the woman had turned her attention elsewhere. There was the soft swish of fabric and the sound of metal sliding along metal. K932 opened her eyes and saw that the nurse had pulled a curtain around the bed, blocking out the sight of the Gal-met in the chair beside her bed. The nurse smiled down at her gently. “Let’s look at that hole in your side, shall we?”

K932 sat up with the *censored*istance of the nurse, who unlaced the back of the nightgown. She let the piece of cloth slide down her shoulders and stared blankly at the blankets covering her feet. The nurse paused as a frown and look of concern crossed her face. K932’s back was crisscrossed with a spider web of long scars, some as thin as a piece of hair and some as thick as a thumb. It all depended on what Zeik had felt like doing to her on that particular day. She could recount to you how many times she had lay on her pallet on the floor of Zeik’s room, weeping silently into her pillow, with her back too bloody and sore to sleep on. The only kindness Zeik had ever given her was to let her stay on her bed until the wounds closed enough so that she could work again, though he did that simply because an injured slave would look bad against his outstanding military record. A long burn also marred her pale skin, nestled just between her shoulder blades, as if someone had laid a hot rod of metal down along her spine.

The nurse’s hands glided gently over the scars and unwound the bandages. The air was cool against K932’s skin and she shivered slightly. The wound in her side, however, had not closed as well as on her arm and leg, and the crust of dried blood and thin skin split open and a trickle of blood ran down her side. The nurse wiped it away with a piece of gauze and had K932 hold it there as she began rewrapping the wound on her leg.

The nurse glanced up at her with a smile and then back down to what she was doing. “It’s not often that we have humans here. You’re lucky Kane’s squad found you when they did. Any longer and you would have bled to death. What is your name?” When K932 didn’t respond, the nurse paused in her work and looked up at the girl, her voice taking on the familiar sternness that all Gal-met’s voices did when addressing an incompetent slave. “What is your name?”

K932 looked at the nurse blankly from where she sat. Her name? Why did everyone keep asking her that? Zeik had never given her a name. It was always “Hey, you” or something similar. K932 looked away and wrapped her free arm around herself as she shivered again. “I have no name, miss.”

“No name? Why, that’s ridiculous.” The nurse sat back on her heels and peered up at K932 with narrowed eyes. “Are you sure about that?”

The sudden coldness in the woman’s voice made K932 shrink back from her. She curled her legs up and closed her eyes tightly. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Are you sure? Surely your mother must have-“

“That’s enough, Sera. Do your job and finish bandaging her up. Quit asking questions she has no answer for.”

The nurse’s head swung around as if yanked by a string. Kane’s head was leaned around the edge of the curtain and his sharp eyes were fixed on the nurse. They flickered up to K932 briefly and she shuddered. Something in those green eyes frightened her more than the nurse had. A careful fierceness, the same she had seen when he had found her, yet in that brief look she could see it prowling behind his eyes like an animal waiting to pounce. Sera’s mouth worked silently for a moment and she turned back to bandaging K932’s wounds as Kane’s head disappeared behind the curtain. The woman said nothing more to K932 and the girl said nothing to the nurse. The room was silent for a while longer, save for a static buzz of tension in the air that crackled between the two Gal-met.

Finally finishing with the bandages, Sera handed the gown back to K932 and stood with a sniff before turning and pushing the curtain back. She spared one disdainful look for Kane and disappeared behind a corner beyond a gl*censored* door at the back of the room. Kane merely watched her go. K932 looked at him while he wasn’t paying attention to her. He was slumped back in his chair with his arms on his chest and his legs stretched out so that the heels of his boots rested in the floor. If you could ignore the odd colored hair, the tallness, and the strange sharpness to their features, the Gal-met almost looked human. That was a thought that no free-born dared speak aloud, or even think. While they stood on fairly level ground, Gal-met and human alike did not like the thought that they were similar in any way. Free-born humans and Gal-met regarded each other as if the other race were nothing more than savage beasts and themselves the superior, civilized people. None of that bothered K932, though. She had never met a free-born human; had barely even met any other slaves. Zeik had kept her closed off from the rest of the world.

She was observing his uniform when she became acutely aware that his gaze had been turned back on her. Her face turning pink, she shifted her gaze to an obscure point somewhere to her left. There were windows along the walls and they showed a crystal clear blue sky with not a single wisp of clouds, and this made her eyebrows draw together in puzzlement. On the space station, all that was ever outside the windows was a vast blackness speckled with stars. It was only a small square of blue, now with a small wispy cloud crawling over it, but it made her feel a strange sort of longing. She wanted to go out and stare up into that blue forever. A chuckle brought her back from that thought and her head whipped around to look at the young man. His gaze was turned to follow hers out to the sky.

“I take it that you’ve never actually been to Altaria?”

She looked at him for a moment before realizing that the gown was still clasped in her hands, which were growing clammy. Her face turned pink and she pulled it around herself quickly before answering.

“No...I wasn’t allowed to accompany Zeik on his trips to Altaria.”

“I take it you’ve never seen a blue sky, then?” Kane glanced at her with those strange green eyes and tilted his head a bit at her nod. “Strange. And this…Zeik person? He truly did not call you by anything but your number?”

Again she nodded and this time he sighed, rubbing his right temple with his index finger.  She said nothing and drew her legs back up onto the bed, suddenly tired again. The tension faded from her and she lay down on her good side, facing Kane, and curled up beneath the blanket. His eyes flickered open and fixed on her. They seemed angry, but it was a quiet anger directed, not at her, but at someone or something distant. She stared at him for a moment, strangely not feeling so afraid, before closing her eyes and turning her face into the softness of the pillow. It was cool against her face and invited sleep. It was strange…She had expected the first question out of his mouth to be about why she had been on that barge and what had happened. She did not look forward to asking those questions when they did come, and they surely would. The chair beside her bed creaked, followed by the sound of Kane’s boots thumping on the floor. He reached over and laid his big hand gently on the back of her head. She didn’t move or speak – barely even dared to breathe – as she waited to see what he would do. But he didn’t do anything for a long time. He just stood there with his hand on her head, not moving or saying anything. Finally, his thumb brushed through her hair almost soothingly before he straightened and pulled his hand away.

“I am sorry for whatever happened to you, mikhan. Whatever we Gal-met think or say with our laws, things happen that should not. Someone will come shortly with some food and water for you, and likely someone else with questions. I will try to be here. I must admit, I am curious. Rest for now, mikhan. You need it.” His voice was followed by the receding sound of his footsteps on the floor. She listened to him go and pulled the blanket tighter around herself. He was…strange, for a Gal-met, at least based on the little she had seen of them. Mikhan is what he called her, but what did it mean? There was a certain endearment in his voice when he said that word, and it played over and over in her head quietly as she slowly sank into the softness of the bed and the numbness of sleep.

O.O MOAR >O

Good as usual ^^ I like the detail you put in. Though this chapter was a bit more rushed than the first. But it was still good :3