Still, the tender, caring, thoughtful, and attentive way he had behaved with me had me weak in the knees. I wasn’t so naïve as to not realize that my response to him was exacerbated by the fact that he had rescued me. But, technically, so had the others on the team. And yet, despite Doom’s striking beauty and Reklig’s undeniably handsome features—unusual though they were—those other males didn’t draw me like Reaper did.
Even now, as I stared at him working in an almost symbiotic fashion with Madeline, I couldn’t help the pang of jealousy at the visible bond between them. Madeline had no interest in Reaper. The way she looked at Reklig spoke volumes about the depth of her feelings for him. But she was beautiful, smart, her technical skill highly respected by her team, and now on full display before me. I had nothing but the ability to fluently speak the Creckel language. Then again, that language might have evolved over the years of our imprisonment here.
However, my somber thoughts were quickly silenced. Just as the pair had finally managed to gain access to the Kryptid interface and to project it on a large, holographic screen, an alarm sound went off. At first, I thought Madeline and Reaper had triggered it by hacking into the control panel, but the sound was actually coming from the armbands of every member of the Vanguard.
“Madeline, Reaper, disable that damn thing ASAP. We’ve got incoming,” Doom said in a tensed voice. “Thanh says the spikes from the trap damaged the ship’s broadcast system.”
Reaper uttered a series of swear words that took me by surprise. I’d heard my father say similar things when upset, and my mother chastising him for it. But a thundering sound in the distance, quickly approaching, drew my attention. Blurry at first, I finally started seeing the hulking silhouettes of at least a dozen, large creatures running our way.
A cold shiver ran down my spine. I knew these creatures. They’d killed Laam and scarred Grol the one time I’d helped them sneak outside of the base. We’d used one of the Kryptid access codes Grol had spied when one of the Soldiers had come for a delivery. The Creckel had still been small at the time. Using his camouflaging ability, he’d hidden in the lift and memorized the code the Soldier had used before sharing it with me.
It had been my first and last time out in the sun. We’d been so drunk with freedom we didn’t notice the Zebier lurking nearby, eating from the poisoned berry bush. We tried to run back to the lift when we finally saw it, but the beast was too fast. Brees saved my life by throwing herself at it, knocking the Zebier off course. I’d rushed inside the lift as the rest of my companions—three in all—darted towards me. Grol and Brees made it, but just as Laam was stepping in, the Zebier projected a two-meter long tongue with some sort of hooking spear at the tip. It had been a horribly lucky shot from the creature that stabbed the vulnerable underside of Laam’s back leg.
Grol darted back out to help his little brother, but the Zebier’s large paw swatted at the Creckel, its vicious claws almost blinding Grol and leaving a nasty cut on the side of his snout. Laam tried to fight back but became limp and sluggish, the Zebier’s venom paralyzing the poor Creckel before it eviscerated him. Anyone with eyes could see Laam was beyond help. I remembered crying to Grol to come back. But it was Brees that got him to relent, growling at him in that typical manner that ordered a Creckel to come at once, immediately followed by her firing the bladed darts under her scales at the Zebier.
The creature had screeched in agony as many of the darts found their mark despite the Zebier’s protective scales. Fired at such close range, very little could survive a Creckel’s dart attacks. My parents lost it on us when they heard what happened. The Soldiers were even more furious we’d dare to exit the base the next time they came to bring us supplies. Brees’s venom had killed the Zebier, and its rotting corpse had remained at the entrance along with Laam’s, giving us away. At the time, I hadn’t realized what they’d meant when they’d said if we went out again, it wouldn’t be Zebiers only taking us out. They had likely added the spike trap then.
“I might know the code to stop it!” I exclaimed. “Assuming they didn’t change it…”
Reaper’s head jerked towards me. I loved that he didn’t question or challenge my statement, but simply extended a hand towards me to that I could come forward. It made me feel respected and like I belonged to their team as an equal.
“I can’t read Kryptid,” I said apologetically. “But if you can bring up the right screen, I can try the code we had used before.”
I psychically projected an image to Reaper and Madeline of the screen I had so often stared at back in my youth. At the time, we’d had free use of the lift to go from the basement to the entrance. But the reinforced exit doors had been locked until Grol had gotten that code for us.
“You rock!” Madeline exclaimed with an excited voice. “I think I know where to find that.”
Her fingers flew over the interface of her armband and a couple of screens flashed on the holographic display before stopping on the one I had shown them.
“That’s it! That’s the one!” I said.
Reaper extended his forearm towards me, giving me access to the interface of his armband. I started entering the eight-character code—which I couldn’t say if they were letters, numbers, or simply symbols—when the angry roar in far too close a distance from us startled the living daylights out of me. Shaking, I resumed entering the code. But just as I hit the submit function, I realized the code had more than eight characters. My stupid, clumsy fingers had probably accidentally plugged in more symbols when I jumped.
“Shoot…” I muttered when a series of symbols flashed on the screen, clearly indicating wrong code. “Sorry. Let me try again.”
This time, I blocked out the menacing sounds from the creatures and focused on plugging in the code. I could have wept with relief and joy when the soft rumbling of the system running the trap suddenly wound down, like an engine shutting down.
“Yes!” Reaper hissed, as if for himself. “Stran!” he shouted.
The Creckel mentally poked me, half a second before rolling onto the terrain. No glowing dots appeared before me, and no spikes came out.
“Well done, team,” Doom exclaimed with a grin, before winking at me. “And you, too, Janelle. You keep impressing me.”
My face heated in pleasure. He exchanged a look with Reaper who nodded in response to their silent communication.
“Let’s take you to safety,” Reklig said in a grumbling voice while pulling Madeline into his embrace.
A buzzing sound behind him drew my attention. To my shock, a pair of bug wings, different from Reaper’s, were flapping as he took off. At the same time, a long and scary tail began protruding from the base of his spine, easily reaching two meters in length with serrated spikes on one side, and a vicious looking blade at the tip.
“Let’s take you to safety as well,” Reaper said, drawing me into his arms.
My head snapped to the left at the sound of cracking sounds. My jaw dropped and, for a moment, I feared my optical aid was malfunctioning as Doom began to morph into a terrifying appearance.
His scales appeared to thicken, some of them fusing into some sort of armored plate all over his body. The scales on his cheeks and forehead also fused into a sort of helmet covering his head and the upper half of his face. A series of vicious spikes protruded from his forehead and all over his arms and legs, while two scorpion tails emerged from his shoulder blades before recurving over his shoulders. On each forearm, long scythe-like blades grew from under the skin, aligning with his arms. And below the scorpion tails on his back, two frilled membranes with razor sharp edges and blade-like spikes came out of his back like the tiny wings of a nightmarish fairy.