Sword of Minerva (The Guild Wars Book 10) by Mark Wandrey (great books for teens TXT) 📕

With an effort, Sato brought himself to the present. He pulled out their money and began looking through it. “I only have 260 pesos,” he said. She shook her head. “But I have a thousand quetzal, too.”

“We don’t like to take them,” the woman said. Then she looked at him and smiled. “The lobsters for your girlfriend?”

He almost said no, then stopped himself. “Yes,” he lied. “It’s our…anniversary!”

“Oh, that’s sweet. Okay,” she said and reached under her register. It was a chart with all manner of Central American currency. She calculated the exchange and took his money, giving him change in pesos.

“Thank you so much, she’ll be so pleased.”

The bags were heavy and unwieldly, mostly because of the gallons of water holding the lobsters. The butcher warned him that the lobsters would only live for a few hours, and to cook them soon for the best flavor.

Luckily he was only a short distance from the hotel. He had to stop twice to rest his arms. “I’m not used to carrying stuff in gravity,” he admitted to himself. The hotel was in view, so he bucked up, lifted the heavy bags, and continued on.

The clerk was doing some sort of paperwork at the desk. He nodded when Sato went by, so Sato nodded back and walked to their room. The truck hadn’t moved, but the door to their room was open. He stopped in the doorway, the dim interior harder to see in. Then he saw a tiny figure lying on the floor, its head covered with Nemo’s bud, arms writhing and flashing with scintillating patterns of light. A familiar doll was lying next to the figure.

“Oh, shit,” Sato said, and dropped the bags. “What did you do?”

* * * * *

Chapter Nine

Rick came alert instantly at the sound of Sato’s concerned voice and the bags hitting the floor with an unusual plopping sound. His pinplant-augmented memory immediately produced a playback of his surroundings for the last several hours. He was horrified by what he saw.

When he’d decided to sleep, Rick had set several criteria for being awoken. Anyone breaking into the room, of course. A call from Sato. The truck being messed with. Those were the criteria of alert. Anything else would just be observed. He’d needed to do this because as soon as Sato left, the Nemo bud had started to crawl around the room, exploring.

Rick decided the under-sized Wrogul couldn’t unlock the door, so he didn’t set up an alert for the cephalopod’s movement. He wasn’t alerted to the alien’s wanderings, but they were recorded.

The bud slithered around the room, examining the bed, squirming up onto it, and across the sheets. It moved onto the dresser and found the old-style television. It turned it on and watched some of the Spanish language programs. Getting bored, it then took the back panel off the television and took the control board apart.

“Primitive,” it decided and left the machine in pieces.

A sound outside the door attracted it, and the bud quickly slithered down to the floor and across the room. It listened at the door. Rick’s hearing could only detect a voice, but not the words spoken. After a moment, the bud moved right to the edge of the door. There was a gap underneath. No more than five millimeters. A tiny gap even to the small Wrogul.

First a tentacle explored the gap, getting the measure of it. A moment later, the entire body began to squeeze through. In bare moments, with a slight squishing sound, it was through and outside.

Several minutes passed, then the door opened slowly. No breaking took place; the lock could clearly be heard clicking from a key. Rick slept on as the little girl walked in, her head covered completely by the Wrogul.

She walked to the open tank and bent over, submerging her head in the water for a long minute. Then she stood, walked to the center of the room, sat on the floor, and lay down. The only movement afterwards was the slight pulsing of the Wrogul’s mantle as it used the water it had just gathered to breathe, the girl’s own respiration, and two of the alien’s tentacles penetrating her skull.

Rick hadn’t laid down on the bed; he didn’t need to. The armor locked itself in place, and he simply sat in the chair while his biological body slept. At Sato’s exclamation, he came instantly alert, replayed the last several hours in an instant, and cursed.

“Damn it, what’s it doing?” he said, and moved with blinding speed toward the Wrogul.

“No, stop!” Sato snapped just before Rick would have grabbed a tentacle to pull it away from the little girl. “Look at the tentacles.” He knelt next to the pair and carefully pointed at the girl’s temples. Two of the Wrogul’s tentacles went into her skull, one on either side of the temples.

“What’s it doing?” Rick asked.

Sato sighed and shook his head. “I have no idea. We should have locked it up before I left.”

“I didn’t think it could get out,” Rick admitted. He reviewed the memory again. “Damn thing went through a gap under the door this big.” He made a tiny space with his fingers.

Sato nodded. “They have almost no bones in their body, just like Earth’s octopus. I remember…seeing…”

“Sato!” Rick snapped, bringing the other man around. “Now isn’t the time. What do we do?”

Sato moved his translator from inside his shirt to outside so it could see the Wrogul’s pulsing colors.

“It’s not talking,” Rick said. “I already read the color patterns.”

“Nemo’s bud,” Sato said, shaking his head. “It needs a name; this makes it harder. What are you doing?”

The two tentacles withdrew from the child’s head with no sound, leaving behind only a tiny trace of blood. Rick cringed slightly at the sight. The