by Tammy Walsh
I recalled a whining sound that grew in volume and pitch from the shuttlecraft. I had no idea what was causing it but it didn’t sound good. I didn’t want to know what would happen when that noise reached a crescendo.
And then Chax said those words that still made me tremble.
“I love you,” he whispered in my ear. “I will love you until the end of time.”
That’s when I knew it was over. There was no escaping this time.
The shuttlecraft exploded with metallic blue light and brought a wave of intense yellow fire in its wake.
Then the shooting began.
Lasers zipped through the air from the woodland behind the shuttlecraft. One beam struck Iron Hoof and knocked him off his feet. He was quick to toss the launcher aside and run for cover. The launcher exploded with his own grenade.
The fire was fierce and intense as it washed over me and Chax. He took the brunt of it. Though there was pain in his face, his eyes were on me the whole time. He brushed a strand of hair from my face. Then he threw back his head and screamed in agony.
Unable to keep his feet, we fell to the ground. But Chax’s arms remained wrapped tight around me.
“Someone came!” I said to him in disbelief. “Someone came!”
Chax’s eyes were shut.
“Chax?” I said.
I ran my hand over his face.
“Chax?” I said. “Wake up.”
A red line marred his cheek and when I turned his face to one side, my stomach twisted. His suit had been burned from his body. His back, arms, and legs were charred black, his flesh pungent and crisp. Only his face, chest, and front were untouched by the flames.
My leg hurt too but it was nothing compared to what he’d gone through.
Armed figures came running through the night. A female Yayora dropped to her knees beside me and doused the flames still alive on Chax’s body with her hands.
“Take it easy,” she said. “Try to relax.”
“Chax,” I said. “He’s hurt. He needs your help.”
The female Yayora turned to him. His skin was red and raw where it hadn’t already burnt off. She returned to focusing on me. Couldn’t she see he needed more help than I did?
“Help him,” I said. “He needs help!”
The female Yayora took something from her pocket as more of her species ran over. Their eyes were big and yellow and wide, looking for any danger that might come from the dark.
“We don’t have long,” one of the Yayora soldiers said.
The female Yayora jabbed something in my leg. I was in so much pain I barely even noticed it.
“He needs help,” I said. “He needs…”
The words turned to nonsense on my lips as my head dropped back on the grass and I fell unconscious.
Save the few random sounds and images I recalled as I passed in and out of consciousness, I remembered nothing more about that night. But it instilled a desire in me. To find Chax and make sure he was okay.
Shink!
The door slid open, revealing a small figure. I caught the briefest glimpse of light behind her. Yayora welded a shuttlecraft in the middle distance. They shouted to one another as a worker dropped a metal tool.
The door slid shut, blocking them out. I was left with the female Yayora. She carried a tray laden with food.
“You’re awake,” she said.
Her smile was warm and genuine. She was the same Yayora I saw outside, the one who ran to my side to help me and Chax.
“You must be hungry,” she said, placing the tray beside me on the bed. “I didn’t know what you like to eat, so I brought a little of everything.”
None of it looked appetizing. They were lumps of jelly. It didn’t help they were brightly colored.
“Thanks,” I said.
An uneasy silence passed between us the way it always did between strangers.
“I’m Stari,” she said.
“Maddy,” I said.
The uneasiness returned with a vengeance.
“What happened out there?” I said. “I mean, I know what happened. Just… what happened?”
“You were waylaid by Iron Hoof,” Stari said. “He knew where you would be and at what time. After you injured him before, all he had to do was wait for you to turn up.”
“How could he know where we’d be? I mean, no one else knew where the shuttlecraft was.”
Stari’s eyes shifted to one side. It told me everything I needed to know and the blood drained from my face.
“He knew?” I said. “How?”
“The Changelings told him.”
“How is that supposed to be fair?”
“It’s not. None of this is meant to be fair. If it was, there’s a chance you might escape.”
“But when we reached the shuttlecraft, we were going to take off.”
“The shuttlecraft wasn’t real,” Stari said patiently.
“It was real,” I said. “I saw it.”
“You saw what they wanted you to see. It was a prop, an empty shell. It was no more capable of flying than I am. I’m sorry, but trying to reach the shuttlecraft was always doomed to fail.”
It took a while for me to process what she was saying. It was all fake? How could that be?
“We were in a reality TV show,” I said. “They gave us a mission. To reach the shuttlecraft before it exploded.”
Stari took a seat beside me.
“There have been other contestants,” she said. “Many others. Some were even more successful than you. They reached the shuttlecraft and flicked the switches to fly away, only it wouldn’t take off. It couldn’t take off. The Changelings in the control room blew it up anyway.”
It was a lot to take in.
“No,” I said. “The trackers had to do it.”
“The Changelings in the Control Room blew the ship up and then edited a tracker into the shot later to make it look like they were the ones who did it. No one in the gameshow ever escapes. Not ever.”
No one.
Not ever.
It’d been fake from the get-go. No chance we were going to escape. And that meant all the pain and challenges we’d faced had been engineered by the Changelings.
My eyes drifted down to Stari’s wrists. They were exposed and showed no seam of skin as Chax had described if she was a Changeling in disguise.
But she could still be hired by the Changelings to play this role. This could be fake too. Couldn’t it?
How did I know I wasn’t still in the TV show? For all I knew, I could still be neck-deep in their twisted game.
Still, there were little things that told me differently. It was in the look of shock on Iron Hoof’s face when the shooting began and he got hit in the shoulder by a bolt of plasma. It was on Stari’s face when she showed up to help me.
It was real. At least, it seemed real.
The Yayora were as terrified to be getting involved as I was at seeing them there.
Were they acting? Or was it genuine?
I went round and round in circles and none of it made sense.
I needed Chax. He would know what to do.
“How is Chax?” I said. “Is he okay?”
Stari took my hands in hers. The distressed look in her eyes was a dagger in my heart. She looked away from me.
“We did everything we could to save him,” Stari said. “But his injuries were too great.”
I heard her words but my brain refused to process them. They didn’t make sense.
“That can’t be right,” I said. “He’s a Titan. They can heal really fast. He’ll be okay. Just give him time.”
“We did. I’m sorry.”
“Just let him rest,” I said. “He’ll pull through.”
“He is at rest. Now.”
That single word, “Now,” turned her entire meaning on its head. Not that it wasn’t obvious before. I just refused to accept it.
And just like that, she shattered my entire world.
I clung to the hope I
misunderstood her. But I wouldn’t question her. That would make it too real.
“I’m sorry,” Stari said.
The tears were in my eyes before I blinked again. They ran down my cheeks but I couldn’t feel them.
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
Stari looked up at me.
“He’s still out there somewhere,” I said. “He has to be.”
“I know it’s difficult to accept,” Stari said.
“He’s too strong to be gone. He’s still out there fighting. I know it.”
“I could show you his body if that would help.”
I searched Stari’s face for any hint she was bluffing.
I found none.
I decided to call her bluff, tell her I wanted to see his body. Even if she took me to see him, I would assume the body wasn’t his. It would be fake, a forgery they’d made, like this entire gameshow.
“Yes,” I said. “I want to see him.”
Stari searched my expression before nodding.
“Then follow me,” she said.
The door slid open automatically as she approached it. I got up and moved toward the doorway but couldn’t pass through it.
Stari stood on the other side and waited patiently.
“He’s this way,” she said.
I stared at the seam line that marked where my room ended and the rest of the base began.
But it wasn’t only a base. It was a whole world where Chax no longer lived. He was dead on that side of the door. In this room, he was still alive—to me anyway. To keep him alive, I had to stay in this room. If I stepped outside and saw his body, if I accepted he was gone, it would infect this room and remove him from all existence.
I stepped back.
The automatic door slid shut. Stari was there a moment later, appearing in the doorway.
I fell back on the cot and sat with my head in my hands. A deep chasm opened in my chest, a hole so big and deep I knew I could never fill it.
Stari let the door slide shut behind her. She stood there for a while and didn’t say a word.
“I’ll… come back later,” she said.
She turned to leave.
“Am I free to leave?” I said.
“The door’s not locked,” Stari said. “You’re free to go anywhere. But I hope you won’t leave yet. We need your help. If you go up to the surface, it’s only a matter of time before they find you. Then there will be nothing we can do for you.”
Tears overtook me and wracked my entire body. Stari let me grieve. I wept for my loss. Chax was gone.
And he was never coming back.
Time slipped through my fingers as I fell in and out of sleep. When I slept, I dreamed of him. When I awoke, I thought of him and wept. I cried so hard, I grew exhausted. One wracking breath would barely leave me before another came nipping at its heels. Then I would fall asleep and begin the cycle again.
Sometimes my dreams were delicious reenactments of the intimate moments we spent together. But most of the time, they were filled with pain and anguish.
His final words featured heavily.
“I will love you until the end of time.”
But his time had been cut short and now I had to face the reality of enduring life without him. I would never forget him. I would always remember him. I doubted I would stop mourning him for years to come.
Then, after countless hours of living my grief-stricken life, I awoke and the tears didn’t come quite so hard. They still came, but it wasn’t like Niagara Falls every minute of every day.
I could move. Although my eyes hurt and my body was weak, I felt a little more like my old self.
True love was a rare thing. I should know. I’d spent my life looking for it. I’d had relationships that lasted for years and the love never burned with this intensity. I suppose when you were forced into a warlike situation of survival, you developed bonds quickly—bonds that usually took a lifetime suddenly happened in hours.
What was I going to do? Wallow in self-pity here forever or get on with finding a way back home?
Alone.
My lips curled and my eyes seeped with the threat of more tears. I didn’t know where the water was coming from.
I could pretend to be strong. I could pretend like I was ready to move on. But I knew in my heart I wasn’t. I doubted I would ever be ready.
But I also couldn’t stay in this room forever. I needed to figure out a way to return home. I put the question to Stari when she came with my latest offering of jellied food.
“Not easily,” she said. “Earth is a long way from here. A small shuttlecraft wouldn’t get you there. Well, it would, eventually. But you might have died of old age by the time you arrived. A large ship could take you if you had enough credits.”
“What are credits?”
“They’re the galaxy’s currency. To allow trading to take place smoothly between so many different races, we needed a universal currency system. That’s the credit.”
I felt a tingle up my back. There was something she said earlier that sounded strange.
“You knew I came from Earth,” I said. “How could you know that?”
“Because you’re famous,” Stari said.
She took a device from her pocket. It was a cube that sat easily in the palm of her hand. A holographic image beamed up from it and presented a replay of the scene from when I was trapped in the strange Changeling room when I first arrived.
“We know everything the program Controllers want us to know about you,” Stari said. “Local cuisine on Earth. Famous sights and a basic history of your planet. Tourism will probably pick up there because of the coverage.”
Strange to think I was famous now. On a planet I’d never heard of before.
The holo showed me meeting Chax for the first time. Then the scene shifted to us making love. I felt a little embarrassed with Stari standing there watching but she took no notice. Then our adventure continued with us receiving our mission to find the shuttlecraft. Our conflict with Iron Hoof and our time in the barn, turning the tables on the Changeling siblings. Finally, we made it to the shuttlecraft.
The fire consumed us both. Chax turned his back on the flames. He wrapped his arms around me to protect me as best he could from harm.
Stari sniffed and wiped a tear from her eye. Our final scene affected her more than all the others combined. Any concerns I’d had about her being a stooge of the Changelings evaporated upon seeing her genuine sadness.
No Changeling could fake those emotions. Maybe that was why they liked to watch shows like this. The emotions were strong and real. They could mimic them at home, even if it was only superficially.
“They’re replaying the events of the episode because they’re resetting for the next one,” Stari said. “At least, they’re supposed to be resetting. Our scanners indicate there’s unusual activity. They’re up to something else. Something they’ve never done before.”
“What?” I said. “What more do they want?”
“You. They want you. The image cut out when the Yayora stormed the scene. We’ve never done anything like that before. The viewers saw something. They’re not sure what, but it was more than the Controllers wanted. And if the Changelings hate anything, it’s losing control of their TV shows. We rescued you. Now they’re looking for our base.”
I never realized they’d taken such a risk with rescuing me.
“You put the Yayora at risk for me?” I said. “Why would you do that?”
“Because we need you. We’ve been underground, preparing to attack them for years. We now have the forces we need to take back our home planet. The only thing we don’t have is the knowledge of their communication systems. At the very beginning of your episode, you mentioned you were an engineer on your home planet. Were you telling the truth?”
“Yes,” I said.
Stari breathed a sigh of relief. She braced my shoulders with her hands.
“Then rescuing you was worth the risk,” she said.<
br />
“You have lots of engineers,” I said, and pointed toward the door. “I saw them working on the ships outside.”
“They’re mechanics, not engineers. We need a communications expert.”
“Surely you have someone like that here already.”
“We did. But when the Changelings first came, they murdered them all. Anyone with knowledge of advanced technology. They left the rest of us alive. Fodder for future episodes.”
“I don’t understand how I’m supposed to help you.”
Stari took a seat beside me on my bed. The Yayora were small people and her legs barely reached the floor.
“To explain, I’m going to need to tell you about what happened when the Changelings conquered us,” she said. “Yayora are peaceful and not skilled in the art of war. We had few colonies and never had much desire to spread beyond our home planet. They defeated us easily.
“They disappeared anyone who they considered a threat. Our politicians, military personnel, our scientists, and engineers… It was a slaughter. They took control of everything and turned us into slaves. Some of us fought, most didn’t.
“Then they divided our planet into sections with tight security defenses around them. There was no way for us to pass from one section to another. We were not only trapped on our planet, we were trapped in our small sections. They used our planet as a giant TV studio to play out their dark and sinister games. Whenever we got in the way, we were cast aside and considered nothing more than collateral damage.
“When we fought back, we became an extra obstacle in their TV shows. They tortured and beat us, showing anyone who tried to stand against them would be dealt with harshly. We hid wherever we could. Underground, mostly. That’s where we are now. An old research facility we hadn’t used in years. We hid and built ships and weapons, hoping one day to return to the surface and fight the Changelings and win back our home.”
“What’s this got to do with me?” I said.
“We know the Changelings have a Control Room somewhere in this section. It’s where they run Lovers’ Escape from. We know they’re out there but we have no way to find them. They’re invisible, cloaked somehow. We need you to use their technology against them, to find their location so we can take our planet back.”
