Read Second Wave for Free Online Page B

was so bloody bored with being bored.
    Wandering back to the water bottle and nutrient bars, he sat down and ate and drank the lot, despite his uneasy gut. He barely finished the last one before he was out like a light.
    He wasn’t sure when he awakened that he actually was awake. Someone had put cuffs and leg irons on him and shackled them to the bulkhead. The second big kid was outside the net, his crate pushed up against the wall, his head drooping against his chest, fast asleep. No sign of the first kid.
    The overhead lights were dimmed to conserve energy. The ship’s engines still hummed in the background, so they had not landed. Marl wondered where the frag they were taking him anyway. Back to Kezdet?
    He hadn’t had any news the whole time he’d been in the mansion, hadn’t dared go out to try to learn anything else lest he get the plague. Once he began drinking himself to sleep, he’d often wondered just how well Khorii had cleaned the kitchen of plague anyway. He’d enjoyed some spectacular hangovers that made him think he was definitely about to die. But he had continued to live, and he wanted it that way. So he’d stayed put. What had happened in the meantime? If kids were standing guard over him, apparently the Federation cops were still out of commission.
    This was no Federation brig either. Even if he hadn’t recognized the subtler features of the Mana ’s cargo hold, the onboard boneyard was a—ha-ha—dead giveaway.
    When he sneered in its general direction, which was when he saw the movement over there. Just movement, like air currents shifting which, naturally, they didn’t much on shipboard other than what came out of the ducts, and that wasn’t exactly active.
    He kept watching. Maybe some of the water from the hose had dripped onto the mesh and was dripping down—maybe that’s what he saw. Maybe he needed his eyes checked.
    But no, the floor around him was now totally dry, so the netting would be, too. It was plas-encased titanium, so it would have shed the water long ago.
    He watched intently. He wanted to stand and go over to the net and peer through it to get a better look, but his legs had fallen asleep and, shackled as he was, he was on a rather short leash. Why did he bother about it anyway? Probably just one of the bloody cats using Jaya’s parents’ graves for a sandbox.
    “Ssst,” he said, trying to wake his guard and for some stupid reason trying not to make much noise about it. Face it, he was desperate for entertainment.
    The boy didn’t stir. Marl thought maybe his food or drink had contained a sedative so they could come in and chain him without any bother; but the way the guard was snoring, you’d have thought he was sedated, too.
    A bunch of times, Marl had thought the mansion kitchen was a nightmare, and he’d wake up back on Maganos, but then sometimes he’d thought Maganos was a nightmare, too, and his life before that and before that. So this new nightmare wasn’t exactly startling. It was unusual though. Marl fancied himself well-grounded in reality, however nightmarish, and he didn’t usually see things that didn’t actually seem to be there.
    Another movement caught his eye as the cargo bay hatch slid open and there was a soft plop followed by small muffled footsteps across the bay.
    Marl saw the cat at the same time the cat saw him. The wretched thing was hard to see in profile, a gray-stippled cat against a gray shadow-stippled background. But when the cat turned its face toward him, its big gold eyes glittered with red in the dark.
    Marl didn’t know why he hated this particular cat so much except that Khorii seemed to love it and it had a better life than he did overall. It didn’t deserve that. Whereas Khorii and other imbeciles saw small furry beasts as alternatively shaped stuffed pandas, to pet and cuddle and play with, Marl had always been interested in how tough they were to catch, how loud they screamed, how fast they stopped when he took them