Sari tore through the crowded market place, pushing and shoving past dozens of beastmen with her legs screaming protest and her lungs burning. She wasn't going back to Kurtz. She'd rather die.
Leaping through the air, she knocked over a basket of apples that rolled into the humans' path. Between the stalls, a flash of blue could sometimes be seen, there one second and gone the next. Gritting her teeth, she poured on the speed, blinking sweat and sand out of her eyes.
Occasionally, she could see him sampling fruit from a pile, taking a bite, taking a second bite if he liked it, and putting it back if he didn't.
Sari rolled her eyes.
Well, if the boy didn't want to help her, she wasn't going to beg. At least his rat-thing seemed to care, since it squeaked and circled around the humans giving chase, tripping them up occasionally. Twisting around to laugh at the muscle-bound thugs as they struggled to keep their footing, she didn't stop in time to avoid a tree trunk of flesh and slammed into it, looking up while rubbing her nose with a groan to see the biggest of the humans staring down at her with a mean smirk. "Hey, little girl," she snarled at him, hissing and baring her fangs when he caught her by the cuff and lifted her, kicking fruitlessly, to his beady eye level, "where do you think you're going?"
She grabbed his hand, sinking her teeth into it. He reached back and she braced for a blow.
Only, "Mind putting her down?" A clawed paw squeezed the thug's wrist, and Sari peered down to see a sandy-haired man in a uniform she'd never seen before looking up at her. "You okay, kid?"
She gaped at him. "Who are you?"
And he grinned, showing off a mouthful of fangs. "Name's Viral." After a jerky nod, she planted her bare feet on the human's face and pushed off with a hard kick, flipping backwards while the man howled with pain, and landing on her toes.
A series of grunts and groans got both their attention, and Sari spun around to find the boy from the pod calmly eating an apple amongst a pile of incapacitated humans with swelling cheeks and lumps on their heads. She scowled. "What took you so long?" She demanded, marching up to him with boiling fury. "They almost caught me!"
He stared down at her impassively, and offered an apple. Still angry, she snatched it from his hands and devoured it down to the core.
"Simoun?" Among the defeated humans, the rolling the melons on the ground, the complaining beastmen, Viral stood apart, staring at the boy like he was seeing a spirit or a hallucination. Sari watched him warily for a moment, before asking the boy if he knew him. The boy shook his head with a frown, his wolf ears pinned against his head. Viral made as though to reach for him. "It's me."
"I don't know you." A subtle tremor running through him, he backed away, shaking his head. "That's not my name." Then he started sprinting in the opposite direction, with Sari and Boota on his heels. It wasn't long before she lost track of him in the crowd. Eventually, she ran without direction, shouting for him with the only name he'd accepted. "Blue! Where are you, Blue?!"
As luck would have it, she managed to catch sight of someone wearing the same uniform as the sandy-haired beastman, and followed him out of the market to the ship docking area, where Blue was being loaded in on a makeshift stretcher made of tarp, with Viral overseeing.
Sari snarled at the sight, feeling betrayed.
There weren't just beastmen milling about the ship, though. There were humans, and they all seemed to be taking orders from the sandy-haired beastman. He must've been someone important, then. Like a politician or a captain, but who would ever put a beastman in charge of an entire vessel?
She snuck onto the ship before they closed hanger door, slipping easily into the shadowed corner, and then into the ventilation system, where it was dusty and warm and clapped her paws over her nose to muffle a series of violent sneezes. Once that was done, she shook sand off her coat, and started crawling, keeping her keen ears tilted towards the ventilation slits. There seemed to be a lot of buzz spreading through the ship regarding a young beastman, along with the name Simoun.
Finally, though, she located him in the lower levels of the vessel. They'd put him in a cage.
"I've told you, already." Blue bared his teeth at the sandy-haired beastman and the human he had with him. "My name's not Simoun."
Viral looked pained. "Simoun wasn't a beastman." Blue looked surprised at the admission, like he'd been expecting more of an argument. "I let my emotions get the best of me. I'm sorry. Is there anyway you can tell us what happened to him?"
Blue looked down at his claws. "He saved me."
"I see." Though his voice was carefully neutral, the look in his golden eyes was fond. "He always was a bleeding heart."
Sari frowned. It was hard to hear with how quietly they were speaking. She had pressed her head against the cool metal when a warm body snuggled up against her.
Squeak. Squeak.
"Boota," she hissed through her teeth. "Stop moving so much!" A creak from the vent made the voices below pause.
When she peeked through the vent, a pair of slit golden eyes stared back. "Why don't you come on out?" Sighing, she pried open the panel and slipped through, dropping soundlessly on her padded feet with a defiant set to her jaw.
Viral chuckled. "Looks like you're already making friends." And before Sari could react, he unlocked the cage. "Make yourselves comfortable," he told them, grinning widely. "We're going to earth."
A/N: After all this time, I'm afraid this is as far as I got with this story. With that said, I've always wanted to at least get them on the ship with Viral because one of the reviewers for this series was absolutely correct. Viral absolutely take this pair under his wing, so to speak.
