If you like music while you read, try "World So Cold" by 12 Stones. It's what I was listening to while writing this chapter.

*****

RIKA

Rika looked at Reece nervously and sighed. "I don't know. They had him too. When I got loose I brought him with me."

"My name's Reece. Reece Bertram."

"You two didn't exchange names when you were fleeing together?"

"Yes, we did," Rika said, flustered. "I just meant, I haven't met him before yesterday."

"The day before," Reece corrected her.

Rika frowned. "Right. Yeah. It's hard to keep track when we were traveling nights." She looked at the bright sides of the tent, then turned back to Jared, letting him see her very real tension. "You need to wait before moving into the plains. They've been setting traps. If you roll over the wrong stretch of land, you'll explode. They don't want you to make it into the trees. They're going to try to stop that happening."

"You want me to believe these primates have explosive technology?"

"It's worse than that," Rika replied, stifling the urge to tell him how stupid he was. "It's chemical. Organic. They figured out how to blow up the land for their agriculture and they're just adjusting it for this. But it won't show up on the sensors. It's all natural matter."

Jared made a note on the tablet in his hands, then looked at the two men who'd stayed near the tent flap, standing with their feet shoulder-width apart, and hands behind their backs. Like soldiers at ease.

Rika swallowed hard.

"You've had quite the adventure," Jerad said quietly, watching her.

Rika let her tension and panic about these men show. She lifted her bound hands to try and run one through her hair and push it back. Her fingers trembled, and they tangled in her hair. It took her a moment to unhook them and get her hair off her face.

"You have no idea." She let her lip tremble and her closed her eyes, focusing on the panic that set her heart racing again. "Please, I just want to go home."

"Truly?" Jared said like he was surprised.

"Why do you sound surprised. Those.. those things kidnapped me and put me in a tree. They talked about killing me. You think I want to just.. hang out?"

Jared stared at her for a moment then tapped on the screen of his tablet several times. "I found this interesting," he said.

Rika's heart spiked even higher.historical

"It's a note you made in the logs a few weeks before you were taken. It's under your employee number, and since you were the only human here—that we know of," he said with a glance at Reece, "I assume you won't try to tell me it was made by anyone else."

Then he read it aloud. "Natives are proving far more emotionally intelligent than first believed. Demonstrations of rationale, compassion, and awareness of emotional needs above and beyond physical survival. Recommend deeper analysis before removing them from the natural environment to be certain original mission parameters and suppositions are correct."

He looked up at her. "This was yours, correct?"

"Yes."

"And yet, you are eager to leave?"

She gaped at him. "They are far more complex and intelligent than we gave them credit for," she said frantically. "I was already seeing that then—I know it far more now! But their peaceful existence is anything but when you get close to them! I watched their leaders kill two people, in cold blood—one of them human! And only because they'd lied. They just.. they just attacked them there, on the spot. It was.." she let herself mentally go back to that afternoon when Hannah and Marryk had been killed, and she shuddered.

"So you no longer believe they are compassionate?"

"They are! To each other, at times. Especially between mates. But they are.. ruthless. Death to them is.. it's nothing. A part of life. They carried on a meeting with two dead bodies on the floor and barely blinked!"

Reece stared at her, wide-eyed. Jared turned to him. "Did you see this too?"

"No. I was.. I was brought in from the portal on the other side. I.. I didn't know what I was getting into."

"So their emissaries brought you?"

Jared shrugged. "I was drugged and woke up in this world. It took a while to figure out what was going on."

"Why did they bring you through?"

"I don't know. But I was told there was a.. a group of humans that have known about them for a long time and they've brought others through as well. I was just there a few days. They never told me what they were going to use me for."

Rika shuddered again. "They have.. rites. They do them naked and they fight each other and.." she dropped her head, letting herself feel the overwhelming fear and tension curling in her gut. "Please, Jared, please.. take these bonds off. I need to breathe."

"Naked rites, you say?" he said, ignoring her request. "To what purpose?"

"I don't know. They were challenging each other and.. and fighting. But then at the end, they all celebrated."

"And they just.. took you along?"

Rika closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "The one who took me is a leader among them. I gather the rite was designed to make his position stronger, or something. But he took me as a.. a prize. He.. spoke about mating me." She thought of the fight between the disformed and the equines and shuddered. "He took me because he didn't trust me to leave me alone."

"But didn't they have you imprisoned?"

"Not the whole time," she said and grimaced like she didn't want to think about it. "Sometimes he took me around with him.."

Reece shifted uncomfortably in his seat, Jared stared at her. Rika dropped her chin but looked up at him through her hair. "Please, Jared, I feel like my skin is going to split. Please, I'm begging you. I'll do anything you want. Just take these bonds off!"