Damage Control - ARC Read Free

the
cage, he walked quickly to one of the odd-shaped room's corners and
retrieved an object that had been hidden from Piper's view. It was
a pale grey cylinder, about the size of the big man's thigh. He
must have flipped a switch on it, because it began to hum, and he
waved it over the spot where she'd vomited and all the vomit
disappeared.
    "Nice vacuum cleaner," she remarked.
    "Clackloob cleadle," he replied—if it really
was a he. It seemed to Piper that the voice was a woman's. But
then, she could have been imagining it. After all, she hadn't eaten
anything for who knows how long—not that had stayed down,
anyway—and she was dizzy and having trouble focusing her eyes. She
sat down on the cushion, and the person, whichever sex it was, left
with the vacuum cleaner, locking the cage this time.
    She let her body slump onto the cushion and
closed her eyes: she couldn't really see through them, anyway. She
thought she heard sloshing again, but couldn't be sure if she was
hearing or imagining or dreaming it, or if she was awake or asleep
or somewhere in between. She thought she heard voices: a man's and
a woman's. She thought she should try to make out what they were
saying, but then she couldn't bring herself to care.
    No longer feeling hungry, she lay there,
alternating between a desperate craving for some kind of change and
an irrational wish to lie there undisturbed forever. Never quite
alert and never quite asleep, she had no idea how long she remained
that way. She only knew that at one point the two voices came
nearer, and someone began to spoon something into her mouth. By
reflex, she swallowed.
    She didn't notice when the spooning stopped
and she fell asleep.
    When she awoke, her headache was gone and she
was alone except for the sloshing sound. She used the box, relieved
to find it empty and clean, then had a drink of the lukewarm water
and looked at the six-sided plate.
    To her surprise, it contained what appeared
to be pieces of fresh fruit and cooked meat, although she couldn't
have said what kind of fruit or what kind of meat. It smelled
delicious and she suddenly felt very hungry. She began cautiously
by biting off the tiniest corner of one of the meat pieces, but it
tasted so good that she soon had the whole plateful finished. Then
she went back to the cushion and slept again.
    This time she woke with the voices quite
close: her captors must have come back while she'd slept. She sat
up and saw them reclining facing each other on the two closest
brown heaps, the big man on the heap to her left and the smaller
one of ambiguous gender on the heap to her right.
    At first she thought they were having an
argument: their strange words exploded from their mouths with a
vehement force. But they looked relaxed, maybe even happy, their
facial expressions and body language suggesting an intimate chat
between close friends. Between them was one of the heavy-looking
wooden blocks, and now the deep carved recesses in its top were
filled with what seemed to be strange fruits, nuts and flowers.
Occasionally, one or the other of the lizard-people would reach for
a handful of these and eat it.
    She couldn't be sure—she'd been so hungry
when she'd last seen them—but it seemed to her that they had
changed their clothes. At least, she didn't remember having seen
the shapes of their chests before. And yes, they definitely both
had chests—male chests. On the big one, that was to be expected.
But the smaller one, despite its male chest and masculine bearing,
had unmistakably female hips and a decidedly feminine voice. It
wasn't even one of those voices that could have belonged to a man
and been softened by training and practice.
    Piper stepped to the water-box for a drink,
and froze. She looked through the bars at the reclining pair and
suddenly understood. "You're not wearing disguises," she said to
them, even though she knew they couldn't understand her words.
"Those are your real faces, your normal clothes, your regular