Tiny and Fierce Margo Collins (acx book reading txt) 📖

Security at the station hadn’t been interested in the con activities with Evik and Alder. No, they’d specifically been interested in me, and me alone. After all this time, I thought my existence had melted into the fabric of space. I wasn’t important enough to keep chasing, despite my expansive list of criminal activity.

But I’d been wrong.

As the only successful hybrid that came out of that galaxy-forsaken place, of course I was still a prize to be caught.

I’d been on the run… for long enough now that I could barely remember what it was like in the electrified cage.

It had been long enough to walk a few feet back and forth. Tall enough to nearly stand upright. Not nearly wide enough to spread my wings. My real wings. Those opaque expanses of pearlescent skin stretched over hollow bone. Delicate, yet strong enough to lift a thousand-stone Odonata into the air.

I’d been a healer in my other life, before the specimen ship had snatched me on a relief mission to the outer stretches of my planet, where those who did not embrace the industry of the larger cocoon cities made their homes. I remembered the great, metal beast, reaching its sun-hot pincers down between the hairless trees. I’d kept them from grabbing a child, one only days removed from birth. One whose wings had not yet unfurled.

But they had taken me instead.

Damaging my wings in the process. So severely that, though they healed and I could move them, I would never fly again. More than that, my wings were part of my… my speech. The way I communicated with the world around me.

Broken. So very broken.

It was only a few star cycles before they clipped my wings completely.

And then came the needles, and the tests, and the vat of liquid that smelled and tasted like the valley of the dead back home.

I learned my abductors’ language, as they pumped me full of noxious liquids that sent me into convulsions punctuated by hallucinations of my mate and the young ones who’d not hatched before my mission, the pale-yellow eggs so full of promise. They would be long birthed now, grown with mates and egglings of their own. I used to wonder if they had the pearl of my wings or the sky of their mother’s. My mate would have moved on, as was our custom when a partner dies.

It had been so long since I flew over the forests and parishes of my planet. So long since I soared high above the tall city and dipped low to run my tri-jointed fingers through the cool blue waters of the great lakes.

And I would never go back. Not on the off chance it would cause the scientists to also return. Plus… I didn’t belong anymore. Not with the way I looked, not with the way I was. Not with my mechanical wings.

From what I knew, having hacked into a highly-classified database under the identity ‘Splice,’ my abductors—who, I determined, had been acting on the Bufo Alvarius Empress’s orders—had not stolen more of my kind. Not since the enactment of the Peace between Planets pact and the creation of the Universal Equality Federation. Experiments like the one that had stolen my life, my mind… and my wings, were now outlawed.

Yet, I’d still not been safe.

Retrieving an old splice, apparently, was still fair game.

The ship rocked to the side and the human girl muttered something unintelligible as the ship’s AI, Blue, instructed her to keep a steady hand on the controls. I backed off the mental buzzing and opened one set of lids. I could focus, easily, on more than one thing at a time. So half my concentration could watch the human girl while the other half kept thinking over once again being on someone’s active radar.

“It’s not like I’m playing Asteroid here, Blue. Give a girl a break.”

“And if I don’t stay on your case, Lise, we’ll end up a pile of space junk.”

“Scaredy-cat.” The girl named Lise laughed out loud.

“Human error.” The AI poked back, its voice pleasant and teasing.

It was strange to hear such a relationship between a ship and its captain. Of course, I knew AI had personality functions, but I’d rather not have a piece of machinery talking back. To each their own.

The other part of my mind was back in the cage, watching the scientists move about the room. We were on a ship, not the one that had taken me, but another, larger one. Sterile, too white, too bright. Too clean. I could not smell the soil in the air or the sun on my face. My wings had been placed against a large wall of light, held in place by giant pins. They took pictures of it that showed the skeletal structure beneath and the veins that were once active rivers of blood and fluids.

A part of me, separated, placed on a wall like art.

That’s what one of them had said—my wings were like art. They could sell them once they were done with them. They would make a great deal of money.

I learned that money was no more than digital currency stored in giant computer banks. Things used to buy food and homes and luxuries.

That was what my wings were to them.

I began to change, feeling my body grow weak with the aches and pains of a second DNA changing the fabric of my identity. Later, I remembered only the screams.

I thought they were another creature’s pained cries.

Eventually, I realized that I was the one screaming.

“Where the hell we headed, anyway?” Alder’s voice, calm and direct, broke the quiet that had descended on the bridge after Lise had navigated the field of space debris. I knew him well enough to catch the undercurrent of excitement. He was always up for an adventure, especially if that adventure included someone he found… sexually appealing.

That wasn’t something I’d thought about in the many long years since escaping the laboratory.

“Somewhere safe, just to get a breather.”