Star Side

Chapter 23

So, the reason Levi hadn't thought of the brig as, well, the brig, as well as not storage either, was because he'd commandeered this room as his illegal moonshine distillery. And those force fields that were supposed to keep in the bad guys? Yeah, he thought those were environmental isolation devices for perishable storage.

"You were supposed to have read the manual!" I cried. "Take a multi-day test on it and everything!"

I got the rubber neck look for that.

"Two thousand, sixty-five pages," he said.

Whatever, we had more important things to deal with, like making a small prison cell meant to isolate little humans for a winged freak.

"Um, okay...if you could stand here?" I pointed to one of the empty, chrome and white lined cells. They were about as big as my bathroom.

The alien just looked at me.

The call of checking his alcohol must have suddenly become stronger than protecting me, for Levi had gone over by the cell closest to the door where glass beakers and the like that should have been in the science lab gleamed behind a sparkly, transparent blue energy field.

I sighed and rubbed my face. Levi wasn't the only one who hadn't slept well. Who would?

A few beeps on the control panel by the alcove-like cell and the energy field vanished with crinkle like a bag of potato chips.

The alien glanced over, long elfin ears perked high. His tail went still.

"Okay, um...hey, uh, buddy," I clicked my fingers until the alien looked back at me. "Can you, um..." But I gave up on imagining feelings or intentions and just thought of an arrow pointing into the cell.

After a minute of doing nothing, the alien sniffed, clicked, and came towards me instead to refill the space about me. Without the life support fans in the hall circling the air, the light scent of brimstone and something muskier came with it.

I rubbed my face hard again. If I couldn't make this work, Naomi would kill him, couldn't he get that?

"Ugh, Levi!"

"What?" He had a little glass stick in hand and was readying to take off a rubber lid from one of his concoctions, all held on stands meant for Bunsen burners.

"You said you talked with it before, right?"

He let out a low bark of laughter. "Oh no, sweetheart, you're on your own. Even if I did get something across, he'd take it as a threat."

"He hasn't even touched you this whole time!"

"Because he's afraid of me."

"You just said he looked at you like a predator."

"I said he felt like one," he sighed and put the rubber topper back on his beaker. "I'm so not up to this."

I groaned. "Leviiiii."

"Don't."

"At least brainstorm with me."

"No."

"Ugh!"

The alien wrapped about me, all while never touching me once, gave a low croon, almost like a question. Its hourglass pupils had narrowed, despite the darkened gloom of the brig, which was only lit by the one cell Levi used for his moonshine.

I tried going into one of the cells to see if the alien would follow, which he tried, only for the tiny cell to get mighty crowded for the two of us. He seemed to like that though and somehow managed to get impossibly closer. The amount of control he had over his body was amazing. If it were a normal human being it would have been impossible to hold one's body in such tight control without shaking at least a little. And to be so close as to feel all his heat without once touching his skin, which, I realized now that I was so close, was made of teeny tiny scales.