Page 78 of Feast

Slaine growled and licked his lips as if that sounded appetizing to him.

“Do you understand?” Ika asked.

The nith nodded its elongated head eagerly.

“Good.”

Ika let go of that repulsive tongue, and it slurped back inside the nith’s jaws like a retreating animal with a life of its own.

“All right,” Ika said. “Let’s begin. What are you doing here, and what have you done with Rolf?”

***

The nith spilled the entire story. It had all started with the nith that had captured Ika a few days before—the ones that Thusar and his pack had killed. When those nith had not returned to their base as expected, another squadron had been sent out in two vehicles to search for them. They had found the wrecked vehicle and dead nith. And they had found something else too.

Rolf.

The lone ukkur must have been out frantically searching for Ika (an image that made Ika’s heart ache with sadness and guilt) when he came across the nith wreckage. By dumb luck, the nith search party had arrived at the same time, following the homing beacon embedded in the vehicle’s circuitry.

There had been a fight. Rolf had killed and maimed many nith, but in the end he was outnumbered and outgunned. The nith overpowered the lone nith and subdued him with the same tranquilizing injection that they had used on Ika.

Then the nith had split up. The first group had loaded Rolf into one of the vehicles and taken him away. The other two had traced Rolf’s tracks to his den and set up an ambush in case there were other ukkur attached to the place. They had obviously miscalculated how many and how dangerous.

“Where did the others take him?” Ika snarled, brandishing the knife. “Where did they take Rolf?”

Despite its battered and swollen face, the captive nith sneered at her.

“To the slaughterhouse.”

A cold feeling seized Ika’s stomach. She had heard about the slaughterhouse before. That’s where the other nith said they were going to take her and turn her into meat. Is that what they were going to do to Rolf?

The nith captive laughed bitterly. It was an ugly clicking sound. “The slaughterhouse is where we send all the escaped ukkur slaves that we recover. We cannot send them back to the ksh farms. Once an ukkur has tasted freedom, it is impossible to make him work again. But that doesn’t mean we have to let his meat go to waste.”

Ika growled. She was ready to jab her knife straight into this nith’s black heart.

“How long ago did they take him?”

“Over an hour ago,” the nith hissed.

Ika’s heart sank at this news. Her throat tightened and her eyes filled with tears.

“We’ll never be able to catch up with them,” she muttered.

“Not on foot,” Gunnar said.

Ika looked up at the bearded ukkur. “What do you mean?”

Gunnar looked down at the nith captive.

“You said there were two vehicles, right?” Gunnar seized the back of the nith’s collar and jerked the hideous creature to its feet. “If you want to live, then you’ll show us where the other vehicle is parked.”

CHAPTER 25

Gunnar jammed the throttle to the floor, the engine roared, and a surge of adrenaline coursed through his veins. Trees whooshed past precariously close on both sides as the vehicle careened through the forest. Gunnar had never driven before, and the steering mechanism took some getting used to, but he was starting to get the hang of it.

He had to admit, as much as he hated the nith, those bastards made some great machines.

The vehicle was a hovering personnel carrier, a rectangular craft of gleaming steel and black polymer with the driver’s controls up front followed by three rows of bench seats and a small cargo bed stacked with some big crates. There was just enough room for Ika, the other ukkur, and the nith captive who had become their reluctant navigator.