Nicole Krizek Read Online Free PDF Page B

nearby.
     
    *****
     
    Lacy felt as if she was falling apart, piece by piece. In a moment she had lost everything in her life. She had lost her family, her friends, her home, her possessions, even her job. Thinking about her family had her crying even harder. She would spend the rest of her life not knowing how they were, or if they were happy. Had one of them adopted her cat when they realized she was missing?
    After a time, her sobs turned into seizing catches of breath in her chest and her tears stopped flowing. The men quietly sat with her,  while she tried to accept that she would never again return to Earth.
    She had always been the type of person that tried to not dwell on the past, instead looking forward. Those two men were her future and she didn’t know if that was a bad or good thing. She decided that she’d rather know what they intended to do with her than make assumptions.
    “Why did you buy me?”                              
     
     

CHAPTER 4
     
    Ty didn’t know if now was the right time to tell her about Arath’s problems, but when she sat up and looked at him, her large blue eyes still damp from tears, he knew she deserved to know the whole truth. “The simple answer is that we bought you to protect you. Honestly, though, it’s much more complicated than that.” Ty said.
    “I want to hear it all.” she said, determined to know.
    Ty reluctantly set her down and stood up. He always had to move around when he was having a heavy conversation so he would need to be able to pace. Lost in thought, he barely noticed that Kor had shifted Lacy into his own arms and they were both watching him.
    Ty took a deep breath and began. “I have to begin with a little history lesson for you to understand. Our race has a long history of violence and war. We are known throughout the galaxy as warriors, and for a time our advancements were mostly in the fields of defense and weaponry. A couple of generations ago we achieved peace in our quadrant and, thus, began other pursuits.”
    Ty left out parts of his people’s history, he didn’t think Lacy needed to hear about how aggressive his race could be while he and Kor were trying to gain her trust.
    “We reached an age of enlightenment, and during that time there were great advances in technology and medicine. Both fields that were believed to be of great benefit to the people. Even with our medical advances, there had always been diseases within our race, passed down through genes. A generation ago the Arathian Council decided that medical efforts were to be focused on the elimination of all genetic illnesses. A vaccine was created to do this and it had a wonderfully high success rate. It was administered to everyone on the planet within a year. Sadly, in their haste to help the species, they doomed us all.”
    Ty stopped for a moment as he thought of the day he had been given the vaccine, and how happy his parents had been that their son would not die from the hereditary disease that had killed his grandfather. It had been a day of joy.
    Tragedy followed soon after.
    He shook his head and continued, “The doctors hadn’t had time to properly test the vaccine for long-term side effects. After it had been distributed throughout Arath, it only took a year before we realized that we were no longer able to procreate.” He glanced at Lacy when he heard her gasp, but forced himself to continue.
    “The vaccine fundamentally changed our DNA and made it impossible for us to reproduce. So far, we haven’t been able to correct the problem. We have scientists back home trying to find a solution, but we also sent out science ships, like the Adastra, to seek help elsewhere.”
    “What do you hope to find?” She asked quietly.
    “There’s a legend on our planet, that we were created by another race, long ago. It was said that the race seeded many other planets in the galaxy. We hoped that if we found another such species, that our DNA would