Broken

Evernight
Publishing

www.evernightpublishing.com

Copyright© 2014 Erin M. Leaf

 
ISBN: 978-1-77130-836-6

Cover
Artist: Sour Cherry Designs

Editor:
Karyn
White

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

WARNING:
The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is
illegal.
 
No part of this book may be
used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission,
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

This
is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any
resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or
dead, is entirely coincidental.

DEDICATION

To my
husband: I followed my heart and you came with me. Love you always!

BROKEN

Planet
Alpha

Erin M. Leaf

Copyright © 2014

Chapter One

Sky
stared irritably down at the unconscious
Xyran
and
frowned. “Shit.” His legs sprawled across the dead shrub in a way that left no
doubt about their broken state. His left arm, too, was bent in the wrong
direction, and he had a lump on his head the size of a golf ball.
Or at
least what I think is the size of a golf ball, since I haven’t seen one since I
was a kid,
she thought, frustrated.
Just walk on by. He’s dying. Nothing
you can do.

She
didn’t move. Neither did the
Xyran
. “Dammit,” she
muttered, crouching down and putting two fingers to his forehead. His eyes
fluttered behind his lids, but he didn’t wake up. His skin blended
chameleon-like into the dry scrub and rocks, and she would never have seen him
if she hadn’t tripped over his stupid foot. “You’re an asshole,” she told him.
He didn’t even grunt. “Your people steal women and use them as sex slaves.
Therefore, you’re an asshole by default.” No response.

She
sighed and looked around as she squatted on her heels. Dead trees and grass
rustled in the breeze. Far off, over the dry brown ridge, all that was left of
Blue Mountain, she saw a couple of turkey vultures circling, but otherwise, no
sounds interrupted her personal idiocy. “You can’t take him with you,” she told
herself. “He’ll try to kill you the moment he wakes up. Or rape you. Or rape
you and then kill you.” She stood up and turned on her heel. She didn’t get
farther than three feet before she cursed and turned around.

“Sky,
you are such a moron,” she muttered to herself as she hacked down a couple of
slender trees, long dead, then slipped her axe back into the loop on her pants.
Next, she stripped some kudzu from the ground, the only green plant in the
desolate landscape, and used the vine to bind the trees into a makeshift travois.
Her axe banged against her leg, but she ignored it. “He’s not going to
appreciate this, you know.” She lashed more sticks across the tree lengths,
forming a rough platform,
then
dragged it as close as
she could get it to the
Xyran
.

“Why
couldn’t I find an injured
Alphan
? They’re supposed
to be the nice aliens.
Pretty gold skin, mostly not weird
looking, very sexy.
I’ve heard they’re looking for wives. They sound
like good guys. But no, you found a mostly-dead
Xyran
.”
She gently rolled the alien onto the travois, wincing when a few of the sticks
snapped. It would probably hold, but still, she hoped his ass didn’t fall
through the weave. He was pretty big, definitely taller than she was, and at
least twice her bodyweight.

That’s
what happens when you get to eat as much as you want your whole life,
she mused as she wrapped more vines around his torso
to lash him to the travois. He didn’t move or speak the entire time, not even
when she had to shift his broken limbs.
You grow into Mr. Muscle. And then,
when someone has to drag you around, you just lie there like a giant,
speechless, lump.

She
glared at him for a moment, pissed as she tried to catch her breath. The
Xyran
weighed a ton.
Still no response.
Ugh
. She tied another vine around his
broken right leg. That one was really messed up in the thigh, and she didn’t
want the ride down to her shelter to jostle it. The left leg was broken in the
middle of his shin, probably both tibia and fibula. His left arm was only a
little bit crooked.
Sort of.
Well, okay, it was a lot
crooked, but the skin wasn’t broken, so that was good, right? It wouldn’t be as
hard to fix as his leg.

She
crouched down, grabbing the trees that framed the travois. “Damn you to hell,”
she said to him, then grunted as she stood, lifting up the end of the travois.
“Jesus, this is going to suck so
bad
.” She adjusted
the ends of the trees along her palms so she could drag it without gouging her
fingers. “You’re probably going to die anyway, asshole.” She kicked a rock off
the trail and began to haul him behind her. “And you weigh a
fricking
ton, too. So, you know, thanks for that. I didn’t
survive the flooding and the refugee camps and everything else just to drag
your massive ass up the mountain, you know.” He didn’t so much as twitch, so
Sky set her tongue against her teeth and kept going.
Not much else to do,
anyway.

Ten
minutes later, Sky stopped and glanced back at him, hoping he was still alive.
His skin had faded to a more bark-like tone.
Jesus, it’s instinctive,
she thought, a little freaked out. When she’d heard that the
Xyrans
could change their skin color, she’d envisioned a
group of green aliens walking out of a shiny space ship. She did
not
imagine their ability was some kind of defensive mechanism. Strangely, the
color of the bark looked better on him than the dust. She just hoped he didn’t
turn grey when she dragged him into her cave.
Because I don’t think I can
handle that. He’d look like a corpse.
Ew
.

****

The
good news was he didn’t turn grey. The bad news was the lump on his head was
slightly bigger.

“And
ice doesn’t exist in the middle of summer anymore. Even worse, it doesn’t exist
in the middle of winter, because there is no more winter, at least not here.
Earth is a hellhole these days.” Sky unlashed him from the travois as she
talked. “We’ve got flooding oceans and drought, or freezing, horrible swamps
swarming with crazy people desperate to get out. Not to mention the smugglers
and raiders everywhere.” She eased him onto her sleeping pallet.
“Nope.
No way did you pick this place on your own. Unless
you’re really,
really
dumb, and that’s always a possibility, isn’t it?”
She gently wiped the dark, purplish-red blood away from his face. “You picked a
crappy planet to die on, asshole.” She wrung out the cloth,
then
put it back on the lump on his head. Clearly the man’s skull was thick or there
would be more bleeding, right? “At least your blood is sort of red. If it was
green or blue, well, no way would I be doing this.”

She
twisted and surveyed the stuff she’d gathered to splint his legs and arm: wood
and leather.
Primitive stuff.
She sighed, not sure
whether she should be happy or sad that her mom had taught her the basics of
trauma surgery before she’d died. “You’re an asshole, but you’re a lucky
asshole. You landed on my side of the mountain, on hunting day, just as I was
heading home. And I’m the only one in two hundred miles who knows how to set a
bone.”

She
reached for the tea she’d made and considered how to prop up his head. She
needed to get some of the muscle relaxant she’d dissolved in the water into him
before she set his fractures or his own body would fight her.

“Dammit.”
She put the tea back down and stomped across the cave to her extra bedroll. She
dragged it over. “You’d better not stink up my bed, asshole.” She lifted his
head and shoulders and shoved the folded up mass of blankets underneath, then
stripped off his shirt. It was made of some kind of cotton-like material,
probably to protect his chest from his armor. To her surprise, three golden
gems winked out from his chest at her. She leaned closer.
God, that’s weird,
she thought, touching one with a finger. The gems were embedded
in his skin,
directly between his nipples, in a straight line. She shook her head.
Whatever.
That’s no weirder than body piercings
and tattoos, I guess.
She stuffed some more blankets under his neck.

When
he was propped to her satisfaction, she began feeding him the tea, rubbing at
his throat to get him to swallow. The forked tongue almost did her in, but
luckily, some scrap of memory about the
Xyrans
’ odd
anatomy floated to the surface of her brain and calmed her down before she
dumped the tea all over him.
Which would really have made
me angry, because this is the last of my muscle relaxant.

Finally,
she got enough in him to work with his injuries. She hadn’t been sure the stuff
would work, given that he wasn’t human.

“But
it did work, and now comes the shitty part. I sure hope you don’t wake up in
the middle of this.” She decided to do his arm first. It looked pretty
straightforward: no blood, no bones sticking out.