Dead and Buryd: A Dystopian Action Adventure Novel (Out of Orbit Book 1) by Chele Cooke Read Free Book Online

Georgianna through the murk of the low lamplight. “Miss Oaks gave him something to help him sleep.”
    Georgianna lifted her head, glancing away from the notes for a second. Lacie’s round face gazed fretfully at her, her long, red hair pulled back and braided down between her tiny shoulders. The girl was much smaller than most of her age, an almost boyish frame that had yet to blossom fully with the flowers of her gender.
    “How does he feel now?”
    For a moment, Lacie hesitated. Her hand hovered above his forehead for a few seconds before she pushed back a fringe of unkept curls and placed the back against his pale skin. Georgianna found it sweet how Lacie could now dress wounds with relative ease yet still felt nervous checking a temperature.
    “A bit better,” she murmured, looking to Georgianna for confirmation.
    She made her way over and, careful not to place her hand down too quickly and risk waking him, she pressed her skin against his own.
    “Yeah, feels like it’s going down,” she agreed.
    She glanced at the wound Lacie was redressing, a nsiloq mark half uncovered, red and sore. Georgianna frowned. She felt a twinge of sadness every time she saw the young man, Jacob. From what she knew, Jacob had been sold as a drysta, a slave to an Adveni, not long after the Adveni arrival, and as a young teenager had been submitted to systematic abuse. She had seen a lot of torture over the years, she had healed a lot of different wounds, but this young man was different.
    Jacob Stone was barely twenty-one years old, and yet he’d been beaten, whipped, and given five different nsiloq marks, a pattern drawn into the flesh by a laser of Adveni design. Every Adveni had a nsiloq, a test to prove themselves ready for adulthood. Georgianna knew it hurt more than anything, and she couldn’t imagine how the young man had endured five before he snapped and made a run for his freedom.
    It wasn’t common for Veniche to be given a mark, not that Georgianna had seen. She’d heard stories whispered amongst the Belsa that the Adveni sometimes used the nsiloq to torture on an invisible setting. It caused the same pain and brought the same screamed confessions, but left no trace of ever being used.
    That was not the case with Jacob. Every design stood bright on his flesh. Swerving lines of blue over his calf, a geometric pattern in red on the front of his shoulder, circles and spikes in red and blue on his torso, stretched over his ribs. The red designs reminded her of burned flesh when it scarred. The blue marks, on the other hand, shone in his skin. The nsiloq laser didn’t put ink into the skin the way Veniche marks did. It was molecular, or so she had been told during one of her shifts behind the bar at Crisco, where she worked, by a particularly drunk Adveni. The laser targeted the cells and changed their design, creating a change of colour in the skin. She hadn’t really understood, not having had the technology to study the building blocks of the body, but she couldn’t deny that the effect was beautiful. Well, it was beautiful when it wasn’t forced on a young drysta because his owner wanted to hear him scream.
    Reaching out, she kept her hand against Lacie’s, stopping the girl from re-bandaging the most recent mark. Against his almost ghost-like flesh, the design was an angry, dark red, the lowest setting on the nsiloq laser. The design was shaky, unlike the smooth lines of an Adveni nsiloq, and it was clear that Jacob had been held down while it was administered, probably writhing and begging to be released. Georgianna frowned and leaned closer. It wasn’t bleeding; the laser didn’t produce blood, but it was certainly causing the young man a lot of pain, even weeks after its application.
    “Leave it open a while,” she instructed.
    “But, but it hurts him!” Lacie complained, looking desperately up at the older woman. Georgianna released Lacie’s hand and rubbed her fingers into her eyes.
    She wanted to be