by V. K. Ludwig
“W… wha… huh?”
“Mate,” he repeated, one brow arched. “As in procreate? Crossbreed? See… our females have gone extinct many —”
“You’re going to what?” The tiny specks returned, blurring my vision. My heart pounded against my ribs, making me scoot back until my spine rode up against the cold wall. “No. No, no, no… I can’t… I won’t let you…”
“Sert!” he shouted out, got up from his chair, and pulled something from his pocket. “Please don’t give me any trouble, Eden. I really can’t lose this assignment.”
He walked up to me, a small, red pin clasped between his fingers. Cornered with a wall to my left and a headboard to my right, there was nowhere else for me to retreat. I smacked his hands away as he approached which only proved futile.
The healer quickly clasped both my wrists with one hand, the pin needling me at the back of my neck.
They wanted to breed me.
Suddenly, memories flickered before my heavy eyes. A green gaze hovered over me, belonging to the black-uniformed soldier who had captured me. The faint hint of rosemary he carried on him still clung to my nostrils, running bile up my throat. His hungry moan floated all over me again, and I shuddered at the memory of his hard cock grinding against me.
“You need to calm down,” the healer said. “Nobody will force you to anything. Rape is punishable by death.”
My thoughts turned foggy, my limbs heavy. “You’re going to breed us?”
The healer gave a tug on my legs until I lay flat on the bed, propping the pillow underneath my head before he wrapped me in the blanket once more. “Not breed. Mate. There’s a difference.”
I wanted to scream.
Completely lose it.
But all I could do was stare at him, my breathing too even, my heartbeat too steady.
“There was an accidental genetic mutation to our females when we mined a certain metal on our home planet Cultum. Our last female died a few decades ago. But even before that, we went for a while without female offspring.” He grabbed the remote from the desk and placed it next to me on the pillow. “Because we’re so closely related, human females are compatible with Vetusian males. That’s why we’re here. Simple as that.”
“I won’t ever —” A knot of desperation stole my voice.
“It’s possible that you aren’t even a match for any of our males. I already sent your genetic sample to the lab for profiling. But if you do share a Gaia Link with a Vetusian, we do insist on a six Earth months period of consideration. After all…” His voice faded away, looming in the background of my sub-conscience using words like fate and destiny.
I took a deep breath, getting ready to let out an ear-shattering scream, but my words came out a mere whisper. “I want out of here.”
“I know you do. This is only temporary while our engineers construct the new habitats. Once I feel like you’ve adjusted to your changed circumstances, I’ll check if we can place you somewhere more permanent.”
He moved away to grab a bottle of water from underneath the desk, which he placed on the quickly crowding nightstand. “For now, this will be your room. We will provide meals and I will check on you daily. There are many recordings of movies our cultural team approved. Books are in that shelf over there. Your bathroom is around the corner, and our engineers designed everything similar to what you’re used to.”
“Where are the others?”
“Ardev Five holds around two million females at this point,” he said without hesitation. “Males, families, and single parents are on Seneca, which is currently right outside your atmosphere.”
“Families?” I gave a tug on the blanket, but it only slipped underneath the twitch of unreliable fingers. “What happened to my mom and my dad?”
“Can’t say. The genetic profiling will help us reunite you with them if…” His silence implied the grim words he held back. If they are alive. “Anyway, we’re a bit… short-handed. It might take a while, but you can give me their names and last known location. I’ll gladly hand the info to our department for interspecies relations.”
“Gail Bates,” I said. “And my dad was… is Sergeant Major Daniel Lee Bates.”
He worked up a cocky grin. “An army brat. Can you tell me their last known location?”
“Hilo, Hawaii.”
Fidgeting with his wristband once more, he swiped his finger through the air as he presumably wrote down the information I had just given him.
“What was your profession?”
“I’m… I’m a nurse.”
“An assistant to a healer!” He gave another tug on the blanket where my numb fingers failed me. “Did you like it?”
“Does it matter?” I asked, the sarcasm palpable on my tongue. It didn’t sound like I would be going back to it. “Seems to me —”
I choked on the rest of the sentence.
Right beside the desk stood a woman with a tray in her hand, blonde curls falling from a high ponytail. “I brought dinner. Prime rib with roasted sweet potato and a garden salad.”
“Eden…” The healer’s warning tone did nothing to calm me.
I kicked my legs as hard as I could, flinging the blanket off me. Half a breath later, I rolled off the bed and hit the high-pile carpet with an oomph.
“Help me!” I cried, begged. “Please get me out of here.”
The woman cocked her head, her hazel eyes disappearing behind evenly paced blinks. “Should I call for assistance?”
“What?”
“She’s not real, Eden.” Melek hooked his wrist underneath my arm, pulled me up, and shoved me back into the bed. “She’s an droid. Like a robot.”
My throat wrenched down a thick swallow. Smaller, smaller, the room shrank to a suffocating tightness. No! She couldn’t be! She had to be real. Had to get me out of here.
“I want out of here!” I screamed, tossing myself back and forth between wall and Melek’s shoulder. “Let me out! Let me out!”
“You’re going to cost me this assignment,” he muttered low, pinning me down and then… tchk… another prick against my neck. “Of course, I had to end up with the difficult one. The door is DNA-coded to me and the guards only, so don’t even bother trying to escape.” And as my limbs turned heavy and my eyes slowly closed, he said something sounding awfully familiar. “Vetusian or human, I feel sorry for your mate. You’re a handful. You want out of here? Then you better behave. Are you going to behave?”
The answer came as if in a trance. “No.”
Chapter 5
Eden
Hard and unforgiving, the cold metal of the door chilled against my ear. Behind it, a gentle hum of voices in conversation rushed by my room. Heavy footsteps accompanied them. Some fast. Some slow. Each beat clutched my lungs, squeezing all hope out of me.
How long had I been in here?
Six weeks?
At least five for sure.
With no window and no outside contact, it was kinda hard to tell. Days blended into nights and nights into days, the meal trays my only sense of time. Oatmeal, pancakes, and French toast meant morning. But what if they did the breakfast-for-dinner thing? In that case, anything would mean nothing at all.
I gave a shove against the door, knowing full well it was a waste of time, no matter how much strength I used.
DNA-coded.
Melek’s words haunted me as I tugged again.
He approached it, and it opened.
I approached it, and it didn’t.
If we both approached it at the same time, what would happen was easy enough to explain. I’d run. He’d run behind me. In the end, he’d give the voice command for my tranquilizer implant to sedate me. Hours later, I’d wake up with a massive headache — on the wrong side of this god damn door.
I’d had three of those massive headaches so far.
Four if I counted the one when I first woke up in here.
If this door opened now, I remembered there would be a long hallway behind it. White wall
s lined both sides, shaped like a honeycomb, and breathing. They expanded in a gentle rhythm as if they were organic.
“Please step away from the door, Eden.” The speaker crackled. “I’m in no mood to chase you down the hall today.”
I complied and walked back over to my bed, mumbling, “I wasn’t even standing at the door.”
It retreated sideways into the wall with a hiss, and Melek stepped into my prison with a blue box clasped in his hands. “All rooms are monitored. But it doesn’t take cameras to tell you’re spending a lot of time standing by that door. The smudges on the wall tell the tale.”
I replied with little more than a grunt, watching how he placed the box on my desk. “What’s inside?”
“More oil pastels to keep you busy,” he said with a wink over his shoulder. “You still good on paper?”
“I guess so.”
Melek checked on me daily.
Did he, though?
I turned around and counted the nudges I had scratched into the wall. Each day I dug my nail into the plaster, the powder clinging white to my fingertips. I counted eight sets of five, plus two single lines.
Might have been accurate — most likely not…
Melek tapped against one of the many drawings which now decorated the wall above the desk. “Eden has entered the blue period. The cabin in the upper state of New York.”
“It’s upstate New York, and I only had blue pastels left.”
“I know! Which is why I brought you a bunch of yellow, orange, and red. Your favorites.” He gestured me to get up. “You know the drill.”
I sighed and stepped up in front of him, spreading arms and legs so he could scan my vitals. Again. “I was healthy yesterday and every day before that. Pretty sure I’m not dying today, either.”
He hovered his gloved hand over my body, his eyes narrowed, focused. “Hilarious. We’re trying to establish health records for everyone. Besides, you got your final set of vaccines three days ago, and we need to make sure you don’t have a reaction. Jal’zar ice fever is no joke.”
“How is that thing with your promotion going?”
It’s surprising what isolation does to you after a while. Why else would I have cared? But Melek provided my only conversation, and only for a few minutes a day. Bad company was better than agonizing loneliness.
“It’s going,” he said, pulling the glove off his hand. “You know. Still got some studying to do. Can you tell me what day it is?”
“Tuesday.”
“Not even close.”
Melek watched me intently as I flinched a little. Or perhaps a lot. I could have sworn it was Tuesday. But that pity behind his eyes said it all. Poor, confused Eden has no sense of time left. It made a heaviness drop through my core, turning my innards into a nasty twist.
“It’s to be expected that you’re mixing up days,” he said, and I hated how easily he had read my confusion. “If you wouldn’t have smashed that clock I gave you against the wall, you might actually know that today is Saturday. Try to stick to a schedule. That should help. We also loaded new movies today.”
“I don’t want new movies.” My voice came out a warning snarl, followed by a chopped, “I… want… out!”
“The good news is that you don’t show any symptoms of a reaction to the last vaccine. Can you guess the bad news?”
He flat out ignored my outburst.
Heat crept into my limbs.
I had to get out of here. Had to —
“Eden? Want to guess?”
My eyes jumped to the loaded breakfast tray sitting on the desk behind him, mumbling, “I lost weight.”
“Pardon me?”
“I lost weight!” I shouted, annoyance scratching my throat.
A deep sigh accompanied the way he pressed his lips into a thin line for a moment. He pulled out the desk chair and sat down. Bending his leg, he rested one foot on the opposite knee, letting his hands form a steeple in front of his chest. “Why are you making this so hard?”
I would have tossed the table lamp at him if it wasn’t for the way he had it anchored to my nightstand — along with everything else throwable. But who would talk to me then? Distract me from the mind-numbing monotony of my prison?
I swallowed my hiss, trying so hard to make him stay a little longer. And yet, it somehow came back up and lodged a scream from my lungs. “I want out of here!”
“Then eat your meals, stop trashing your room, and quit throwing yourself against a massive metal door!” he shouted back, his jawline tense, his eyes narrowed into slits. “You know what you have? A dire case of stubbornness and self-entitlement!”
I stared at him, pretending I wasn’t shaken by how he had yelled back at me for the first time. “Fuck you!”
“Oh, very classy, Eden.”
My cheeks turned hot, itchy. “You said this was temporary, fucking liar.”
“And you promised me you would stop escaping when I caught you the first time. But here I am, on double shifts because…?”
I pushed the words through gritted teeth as if parting them would cause me some actual physical pain. “Because I ran.”
“Because you ran,” he repeated, slapping his hands onto his thighs in an outburst of pure desperation. “Three times! Not much longer, and they’ll assign you a different healer because, clearly, I don’t know how to get you to adjust. You’re risking my assignment.”
His assignment. He kept bringing it up as if I gave a shit. Who cared if he lost his opportunity to invade a planet and enslave all the people?
“You are keeping me a prisoner!”
“In a room twice the size of my quarters, with meals served three times a day, your towels changed daily, and your sheets washed once a week. Excuse me for not wailing about your deplorable state of living.”
That itch to throw something again…
But I sat perfectly still.
“A cage is a cage, no matter how nice!”
Silence expanded to an uncomfortable degree, during which we stared hard at each other. His, green with rivers of blue woven through it, mine, a boring brown.
Someone had to break first - say something - and I didn’t mind being the one sending a snarky comment across. “Guess the Vetusian Empire prefers to keep their broodmares in gilded cages.”
“I hate when you use that word.” He rose and pushed the chair lazily back against the desk, making his way toward the door.
“Wait!” I called out, hating that bitter taste of desperation clinging to the back of my tongue. “Can’t you just… stay a little longer?”
I morphed into a pathetic beggar.
Pleading with the enemy for attention.
“Perhaps you enjoy arguments, but I don’t. I’ve got other females to tend to and let me tell you they’re a lot easier than you.”
I jumped up from my bed, a sudden panic making me tiptoe in place. “Melek…”
At the sound of his name, he turned around, sighed, raked a hand through his blond strands, and turned to look at me. “Ten more minutes. You argue, I’ll leave. You throw something at me, I’ll leave.”
“Okay.”
He shoved my breakfast tray aside and sat down on the desk, arms crossed in front of his chest. “You’re not a broodmare. And I loathe when you say that because I would give everything to be assigned to a female, Eden. Everything. My life, my eternal loyalty, my devotion. I’d kill for my mate. I would die for her.” His gaze lost itself somewhere on the track I had paced into the carpet, a slight shake coming from his head. “We want to love you, devote ourselves to raising children with you. Is that so bad?”
“Only if you invade a planet and capture the females, forcing them to breed with you.” As soon as I had said the words, I threw my hands up. “Not arguing. Just stating the facts.”
“Facts?” He scoffed. “When was the last time one of our males snuck in here and raped you? You’ve been in here for two weeks, and we didn’t even upload your genetic profile to our databank yet, beca
use you’re considered unfit to be matched at the moment.”
An invisible punch stirred my guts, making my stomach spiral, and my arms wrap around myself. “Two weeks? I’ve only been in here for two weeks?”
He pressed his palm onto his mouth, making everything else come out low and muffled. “I’m sorry. I had no idea your disassociation with time was quite that bad.”
My breath came in short, suffocating gulps. I got up and paced before my bed, each step matching the pounding beat of my heart. I had to get out. Had to… my eyes trailed to the door.
“Remember, it’s coded to my and the guard’s DNA only.”
“I wasn’t even looking at the door,” I muttered low. “What if I stopped breaking things, and spitting at you, and…”
“Act like a sane, mature, grown woman instead?”
He put such emphasis on those three words, my tongue cemented itself to my gums. Who could have blamed me for letting my sanity slip? Cooperating always seemed so… wrong. As if making Melek’s and my life easier was the equivalent to treason. A betrayal to humanity.
Before I managed to say anything else, Melek delivered another blow.
“Right now, we don’t have enough habitats for humans due to some… infrastructural issues.” Those last two words came out as muddled as if they had a dirty secret clinging to them. “Even if you were finally to adjust, there’s no room for you. As long as you won’t accept a mate who can supply adequate quarters, I’m afraid you’re stuck here.”
Despair trembled my body. “For how long?”
He shrugged. “Hard to say. Six Earth months, maybe. Might be more, but I’m not really in the picture when it comes to the work of the engineers.”
Half a year?
In a twelve-by-twelve room?
By myself?
A familiar restlessness pushed past my core, sucking all the blood from my veins, leaving me cold, numb. I was stuck, and the realization of that punched me in the face.
But spreading my legs for one of them?
Absolutely not!
Another flick toward the door.
“Don’t make me sedate you!”
