A/N: Wow, three reviews! I have to admit that my interest in this story was waning until you guys showed up and gave me my second wind. Thanks for R&Ring!

I apologize in advance for the short length of this chapter. It was originally longer, but I cut off some of it (which will become the beginning of chapter 4) to find a better stopping point. The action's starting to pick up now, and I hope you all enjoy. (:

Disclaimer: Lexx belongs to the lovely people of Salter Street Films, etc etc etc not mine etc

Chapter Three: The Collar

"I thought they were all dead," Xev said, cautiously stepping back from the site of the disturbed ground as if she expected a very large, angry Insect to erupt from it at any moment. Her feelings were rather conflicted; another part of her wanted to run back over and collect as much protoblood as she could. But luckily this desire was overridden by her persistent survival instincts, which were currently telling her to get. Away. Now.

"We are in the Dark Universe," Kai answered. He put an almost imperceptible emphasis on the word are. "It is possible that a small remnant of the Insect Civilization still exists on this planet."

"That's just great news." Having traveled more than halfway back to the Moth, Stan now stood with his arms folded defensively across his chest, an effect that was somewhat ruined by the way he nervously cradled his hands in his armpits. "Can't we go back and talk about it in the Lexx?"

"That would be a wise option," Kai agreed. His words did little to reassure Xev and Stan, and neither did the way he continued to gaze fixedly at the roiled dirt.

The silence persisted for several more seconds before Stan announced, "Right, then," and proceeded to climb back into the Moth's eyehole. This maneuver was interrupted, however, as he shouted and leapt back out, displaying a sudden sort of distressed alacrity.

"What is it?" Xev asked with interest, advancing toward the Moth to get a better look. She eyed the creature that had startled Stan as it sat up erectly in the cabin. It was small and slender with a long, thin tail and was covered in attractive golden fur with black spots. It stared back at her with unsettling lambent eyes, and pupils that were nothing more than narrow vertical slits.

"A domestic feline." Kai walked up beside Xev, glanced at her, and then expressionlessly looked off somewhere to the side.

"And what's a domestic feline?"

"As far as I can deduce from the memories of the Divine Predecessor, it is a type of parasitic mammal. It invades the homes of weak humans, particularly elderly females."

"It sounds kind of dangerous," Stanley observed, keeping a safe distance.

"I don't know, maybe we can learn something from it," Xev countered. She looked to Kai.

Kai merely gave one of his noncommittal head tilts, which seemed to be his substitute for a shrug, before advancing toward the Moth and picking up the feline. It hissed and struggled, but then settled down to a baleful glower once it realized that the dead man was unresponsive to its claws. He climbed carefully in through the Moth's eyehole, cradling his small burden, and was followed by Xev, while Stan clambered in more tentatively.

As the Moth whirred up into the air, the ground behind it trembled.

xxx

"This was a bad idea."

"Be quiet, Stan! Kai, will you help me get it out?"

"It appears to be enjoying its current location."

Xev sighed. Sometimes Kai's neutrality could be maddening. She gave up trying to extract the errant feline from the Lexx's nerve cluster, where it was stubbornly lodged, cheerfully swiping a many-clawed paw at anyone who came within range. She was starting to agree with Stanley – maybe bringing this creature with them wasn't so clever, after all – but it had been her idea in the first place. She didn't want to admit that she was wrong. As she stepped back from the nerve cluster she sent an exasperated glance at Kai, who was standing several feet away, watching.

"Well, it was wearing something around its neck," she said, trying to salvage the situation. "A collar. That should help us, right? Somebody else must live here." She put the back of her hand up to her mouth and sucked on it; it was riddled with shallow scratches.

Stan looked doubtful from his position on the floor. He was sitting on the step, forsaking his usual stance at the helm due to its proximity to the angry cat. "Yeah, but we don't know anything about them. We haven't seen any people yet and this place doesn't look exactly friendly, does it? What kind of people would live alongside Insects, or even survive on the same planet with them? Not anyone I'd want to meet."

"They must be absolutely terrifying," Xev retorted. "Only complete monsters would keep a furry little animal as a pet."

Stan appeared to decide that it wouldn't be a good idea to argue with her any further, because he remained silent and merely gazed at the loveslave dubiously. The scratches on her hand, coupled with her frustration after attempting unsuccessfully to lever the cat out for the past forty-five minutes, had brought out the cluster lizard in her. The stress and hunger didn't help, either.

Xev sighed again and put her hands on her hips. It was only then that she realized how little Kai had spoken recently, and she turned to look at him. He was gazing expressionlessly at her, and continued to do so, unperturbed by the fact that she had noticed.

"What?" she asked, disgruntled.

"The Lexx is currently incapable of producing food. It may be in your best interest to seek these people out, even if they are… unfriendly. In any event, you and Stanley will die without sustenance."

The way Kai spoke as if he didn't factor into the equation always bothered Xev. She suspected, uncomfortably, that if she and Stan ended up dying on this planet, Kai would remain completely unaffected. He seemed to read the expression on her face and reminded her, "The dead do not eat. I will, however, accompany you and Stanley if you wish to leave."

"See, Stan? We don't really have a choice."

The captain stood and sighed, glancing at Kai, acknowledging the dead man's point with reluctance. "And how do you propose we find these people?"

xxx

"Are you sure you know where you're going?" Stanley asked anxiously, slogging along behind his two companions with a certain pitiful lack of athleticism. His red jumpsuit was stained up to the knees with mud.

Flat gray clouds had descended while they'd been in the Lexx, and a light drizzle was beginning to fall; dank mist was rising up from the forest loam, ghostly and bluish in the growing darkness. The silence was heavy and discouraged speech. Xev almost jumped when Stan's words violated the seemingly impenetrable quiet, and she turned to look at him. She had been watching Kai.

"Yes," the assassin replied, without inflection. The black fabric of his clothing glittered with moisture. Several minutes ago he'd released the cat, and watched intently as it streaked off and disappeared; now he was still following its trail, although Xev could detect no hint of one. Kai's mind was incomprehensible to her. Somehow he knew what he was doing, and she had to accept that; to trust that.

The image of the feline's collar still nagged at her thoughts. It had been apparently carved from a solid chunk of semi-translucent green stone, with strange symbols, like pictographs, neatly tracing its circumference. She knew what they represented. They'd had legs, too many legs.

She hoped that the cat was not leading them to its keepers, as it was intended to do.

"Xev, Stanley. Stop." Kai spoke so suddenly that Xev didn't even have time to register his words before he shot out a hand and pushed her backward. Stan, too, was tripping in the opposite direction, and the ground was all wrong, it shouldn't have been above them…

And then the earth was falling away, revealing a horrible, segmented creature, its carapace quivering in the open air like a putrescent fungus. She could see her scream reflected in its multi-faceted eyes. And she could hear the sound it made, a moist, chitinous clicking, as it turned its attention slowly toward her. Something viscous oozed from its mandibles. If she'd had more time for reflection, she would have realized that each of those fanglike appendages was longer than her forearm.

It screeched as its side erupted in green slime and it redirected its malice toward Kai instead. He stood impassively, holding his brace between his fingers; ignoring the way the Insect's blood dribbled down from the instrument and onto his hand. The Insect paused, its flesh undergoing small upheavals of pain, before it rippled furiously across the ground in his direction.

Kai raised his arm. Xev lifted herself up on one elbow, watching as the gargantuan creature, so immense and ponderous as to seem to be moving in slow motion, reared over the assassin. He took aim and fired his brace once more, but Xev saw nothing more after that as the Insect descended upon him. It was unable to cease its momentum and it crashed and skidded and took down several rotting trees as it fell.

It lay there, burbling and twitching, dying. Saliva frothed from its gaping mouth. She stared, transfixed, and it took her a moment to notice that Stan was standing above her, offering his hand.

"Are you okay?" he asked, concerned, as he helped pull her back upright. A nod was all that she could manage; Kai was nowhere in sight.

But then she saw him, clawing his way out from under the Insect's corpse, so unaffected by the situation that an onlooker would think he'd just finished a perfectly normal, albeit somewhat messy, task. He staggered upright, and almost fell. Xev was briefly concerned before she heard the grisly sound of his bones realigning; the weight of the Insect must have pulverized Kai's internal structure. He paused while his body repaired itself, then sauntered back toward them, not even glancing over his shoulder at the still twitching creature.

"Well," Stan said, looking rather shell-shocked, "at least we know for sure, now. Insect civilization. I mean. You know."

Xev put her arm around his shoulder and squeezed gently.

"We should move on quickly," Kai said, brusquely shaking the green blood off of his hands. "The noise may have awoken others."

Stan didn't hesitate to follow Kai's advice, though Xev, admittedly the braver of the two, walked slowly past the gargantuan corpse to get a better look. The evening had become chilly, and its insides steamed and smelled rank. Protoblood smeared the earth around it like mucus. Suddenly feeling too cold, she jogged to catch up with Stan and Kai.

It wasn't long before the forest began to change. The diseased, decomposing trees gradually segued into healthier specimens, their leaves at the cusp of autumn. The ground became firmer, clothed in vibrant moss. The mushrooms protruding from the trunks of trees were saturated with color; beautiful, poisonous red and oranges, their succulent caps tender with life. Everything seemed to be more alive here and growing ever more increasingly so, as if the forest was dying from the outside in and its core still clung tenaciously to being.

Even though the last of the daylight was seeping from the gray horizon, Xev was beginning to feel more optimistic. Perhaps this planet had some good in it, too; although she'd still prefer not to live here, being stranded was no longer the horrifying prospect that it once had been. She even ventured to hope that the Insects might not come this far into the forest, preferring to choose the decomposing outskirts as their sole domain.

She paused, smiling, as she felt Kai's hand on her shoulder, and she turned to look at him. Her smile faded.

"What's wrong with him?" Stan asked, understandably alarmed. The assassin looked disoriented. Only then did Xev realize that his hand was trembling.

"Kai?" she pressed, her voice urgent, as he abruptly crumpled against her; his decarbonized body was too heavy, and with an effort she helped lower him to the ground.

"Xev. Stan. I must be out of alignment. I do not understand… I need…" he struggled for a moment, then stilled, lapsing into unconsciousness.

For a moment everything was silent. Xev and Stan stared at his motionless body, and then slowly turned to exchange a look of mutual dread. Xev's concern for Kai was eclipsed only by the gravity of their current situation; without him, they were essentially helpless. They were alone on a dangerous planet.

"Kai, please wake up," Stan said, helplessly.

"What's that?" Xev stood, slipping her arm out from under Kai's shoulders. A sound that she'd at first tentatively identified as the sighing of wind in the leaves was growing louder, stranger.

"The trees," Stan murmured. "Look at the trees."

Xev wasn't sure she wanted to. She lifted her eyes as if they were lead weights to see what was watching them from the darkness amongst the branches. Then she abruptly felt a sharp stinging sensation in her neck, and before she could raise her hand to feel what it was, the ground plummeted toward her and the world went black.

xxx

Everything blurred and melted together like mercury: clouds shifting too quickly across the night sky, forming fantastic shapes and then scattering again; bare branches, a black latticework of them, clawing toward each other, hungry; a stone, a single mountain, thrusting upward from the forest like a bleak, petrified deity. It had eyes, thousands of them, and they were in the form of glittering fire. Xev could take no more and she lapsed back into unconsciousness, her drugged mind hearing echoes of the wind in the trees.