Total pages in book: 165
Estimated words: 159487 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 797(@200wpm)___ 638(@250wpm)___ 532(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 159487 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 797(@200wpm)___ 638(@250wpm)___ 532(@300wpm)
Cassie had thought the Mother Ship might be her permanent home once…before Sskarth. Before she’d let herself get swept off her feet by iridescent purple scales and pretty lies about crystal spires and forever-love.
“Idiot,” she muttered, blinking hard as her eyes stung again. “You were such an idiot for be believing he really loved you! And where did it get you? Bitten and infected with the freaking Hunger Virus—that’s where.”
But no—she was not going to cry into the alien beans. She had a chance here—she wasn’t going to give into despair. She wasn’t, she told herself firmly.
Taking a deep breath, she opened another cabinet and found a set of cooking implements that looked familiar. There were deep metal pots, flat heating pans, a bundle of long stirring rods, and several flexible silicone-like bowls that folded flat when not in use. One shelf held packets of powdered spice blends with Visskous labels— savory heat, sweet smoke, deep salt, and green herb mix. Good—at least whoever had stocked this bunker hadn’t completely forgotten about flavor.
Cassie took down the green herb mix and sniffed it cautiously after breaking the seal. It smelled a little like basil, a little like thyme, and a little like the inside of a freshly cut cucumber. Not bad. The savory heat had a warm, peppery smell that made her nose tingle pleasantly. She set both packets on the counter beside the kareth pearls, thessa mash, fen pods, loompa root, and broth stones.
There—ingredients. Now she just had to turn them into food.
She found a heating unit built into the counter and stared at the controls for a moment. Luckily, the symbols were standard Visskous heat markings, not some obscure scientific notation, so she could actually use them. She filled a pot with water from the filtered dispenser, dropped in two orange broth stones, and watched as they sank to the bottom and began to dissolve, sending up golden threads of flavor that swirled through the water like smoke.
The smell rose a moment later—warm and savory and almost painfully comforting because it smelled like Campbell’s chicken noodle soup.
Cassie closed her eyes and tried again not to cry.
For one stupid second, she let herself imagine Ravik and Severin sitting down to eat with her like normal people. As if they were back aboard the Mother Ship instead of stranded in a bunker on a dying planet.
She could almost pretend to herself that one of them wasn’t half-infected and the other wasn’t a terrifyingly beautiful Blood Kindred scientist who might be her only hope of survival. Like she wasn’t infected too, with a virus that might decide at any moment to turn her into a bitey corpse with bad skin and a craving for living flesh. Like she had hope again and everything was normal.
Then she took a deep breath, opened her eyes, and dumped the kareth pearls into the broth.
“Okay,” she said firmly, stirring them with one of the long rods. “Supper first. Existential crisis later.”
She was going to push her worries to the back of her mind and concentrate on the task at hand. It seemed like a sensible plan…at least, it was the only one she had at the moment and Cassie was determined to stick with it.
12
SEVERIN
The latest anti-viral serum wasn’t working.
Sev stared at the sample he’d mixed with Ravik’s blood last night in dismay. When he’d looked at it under the scope that morning, it had shown definite promise—which was why he’d injected his best friend with a healthy dose of it.
But now, the sample showed a definite regression. The Hunger Virus had taken over, hollowing out the cells to make tiny new virus factories that were pumping out replicates of themselves at an alarming rate.
Any scientist in his right mind looking at this sample would conclude that the subject who had been injected with this particular strain of the anti-viral agent Sev was working on had received no benefit from it at all.
And yet, Ravik was a thousand times better than he had been just that morning. He was talking again and even though he thought the curvy little human was his mate, at least he was thinking and reasoning once more. His eyes weren’t filmy anymore either—it seemed like he was on the road to recovery.
But how?
How, when the anti-viral clearly wasn’t working?
“Maybe it’s a combination of the one I gave him today and the one he had yesterday,” Sev muttered to himself.
Quickly, he made a new sample slide, injecting a tiny amount of the Beast Kindred’s blood and adding a drop of both the latest batch of anti-viral and the batch before it. He made sure it was mixed well, then looked at it under the electron microscope.
At first it seemed to be working—just like it had appeared to work that morning. But as Sev watched, the blood was slowly overtaken by the Hunger Virus. Before he could even begin to make notes about it, the entire sample was overrun.