by Poppy Rhys
“What do you mean? Who do they think I am?”
Kahn placed a hand on the table and leaned, peering down at me. “What were our names?”
My eyes narrowed and I set my elbows on the table, no ounce of guilt within me when I pointed at Kahn and then Dason. “Trouble, and Kidnapper.”
Dason hmph’d, as if he didn’t like the name, while Kahn’s sly smile had his fangs peeking through.
Lonan came back, shutting the door behind him and pointedly staring from me to the clothes still on the couch. “Why aren’t you dressed?”
Kahn and Dason chortled as they hurried out the door, leaving me alone with Lonan who continued to look at me like ‘what are you waiting for?’
“Technically,” I tapped a finger on the table before I stood, “I am.”
Stick’s—Lonan’s—mouth thinned and I got the impression my response annoyed him. “That,” he gestured to my prison suit, “is dirty.”
I looked down, the tight suit that had initially felt suffocating—but I was used to it now—had self-cleaning smart fibers. The Concord didn’t want to waste unnecessary amounts of water for laundry.
In fact, getting waterboarded in the lab was the closest thing I’d had to a shower since I’d left Earth.
Thinking of it like that, I was a little grossed out myself.
Deciding I wasn’t going to win this battle—and that I didn’t want to—I picked up the clothing from the couch, aware that Lonan watched me the entire time. It was made of that hemp-like fabric that matched the sheets, the pillows, and the cushions.
I was starting to think it was all they used around here, except whatever they wore as pants. I eyed his bottoms then. Black and sleek, like thermals.
“Is something wrong?”
“Nope,” I quickly said, making my way to the bathroom Dason had showed me earlier. “Be out in a jiff.”
Once behind a closed door, I peeled the orange suit off my body and gave myself a speedy bird bath. When I lifted the off-white piece of clothing Lonan had given me over my head, I realized it was a sleeveless dress. It hung to my knees and cinched around the waist.
Tiny shells decorated the hem, and shell ties pinched at the shoulders, the excess dangling against my upper arm and creating a musical tinkling sound whenever they clacked together.
Having no bra and underwear wasn’t as obvious when wearing a skin-tight jumper that held everything together, but in this dress, everything felt a little too free.
The clouded mirror caught my eye and I groaned at the ratty state of my red curls. I needed a good shampoo, tons of conditioner, a wide tooth comb, and about an hour to get it back to a manageable mane.
I peered closer, gingerly touching the cut on my forehead that was now stitched shut. Frowning, I tried to remember if at any point in the last day or so I’d felt a needle prodding my skin, but I couldn’t recall anything.
I looked at my palms. The crescent cuts from my nails were nearly healed, leaving only small red marks where the flesh had parted.
Someone had stitched my cut for me and healed my hands...
Brick had saved me from being suffocated by Rezz...
Kahn and Dason had fed me...
Lonan had given me something clean to wear. I didn’t think he’d done it so I wouldn’t have to be reminded that I was an escaped criminal, but honestly, peeling that suit off boosted my mood considerably, even if that wasn’t his intent.
I scratched at my reddened chest. When had anyone—besides my dad and Preta—done something for me like these aliens had?
Memories evaded me, because there were none to recall.
I opened the door, giving one last look at my hair before walking out...
And smacked right into Lonan’s bare chest.
I stumbled backward, and he caught my elbow, steadying me before I shook him away.
“What are you doing just standing there?” I smoothed my dress, trying to ignore the tingling on my skin where his hand gripped me.
“Waiting.”
I rubbed my elbow. “You had to wait right here?”
He didn’t answer as he held up my now-cleaned white prison shoes. I regarded him suspiciously, wondering if he’d picked up the one I lost when the mob dragged me away.
“Thanks,” I mumbled, taking the shoes and quickly shoving my feet in them. He turned and headed for the front door. I followed, still a little shaken and annoyed. “Where are you taking me?”
“I have work.”
I sighed, stepping around him when he held the door open. “I could just stay here, and go back to sleep.”
He shut the door, shattering that hope.
ELEVEN
I FOLLOWED LONAN THROUGH the sandy streets, keeping close as we passed other aliens that openly stared at me. My training would dictate caution and observation. These were aliens. I didn’t know anything about them.
It was a new ballgame, especially since I didn’t know what biological oddities they could harness against me. For instance, I would be hard pressed to pick a fight with Kahn or Lonan since they could fry me with their hands.
I was unsure what Dason and Brick could do yet, but I, unfortunately, had some time to watch and find out.
As we walked, I noticed no one spoke to Lonan. Some sent him wary looks, others pity. They were expressive, like humans. None of them looked like the alien I was trailing. Instead, they resembled Dason and Brick. Darker skin, darker hair, and none of the sharp nubs along their jaws.
Were Lonan and Kahn not native to this city?
We continued on through the streets until we neared the back of the city, coming upon a bank of large, raised, humming blocks in multiple rows.
“What is this?” I asked, feeling the heat rushing off the blocks. Static tickled the air around me.
“These power the city,” Lonan answered, rubbing the sharp black double-nubs on his jaw.
I followed him through the rows as he examined the blocks, his silver brows pulled together in concentration. Sometimes he’d hover a hand above them as if he were testing something.
“O-kay...” Was it his job to babysit the generators? “This is what you do every day?”
He didn’t answer, his attention focused on a block that hummed quieter than the rest. His hands pressed against it and I stood back.
His arms sparked to life, their blue glow lighting up the area around him, and he gripped the block. It hummed loudly, like it was receiving a charge.
Once he let go, it was functioning like most of the others.
“You charge the batteries,” I mused aloud.
“Yes,” he uttered, still concentrating on the blocks we passed.
“Is this what Kahn does too?”
He glanced at me, his eyes a stormy white, just like Kahn’s had been this morning. A spark shot across the glassy orbs, like lightning. It was hypnotizing and severely inhuman at the same time.
“Yes.” Again, he charged another battery, the static in the air popping against my skin. It wasn’t entirely uncomfortable, but it certainly felt weird. “Do you have a name?”
“I do.” He’d been the first to ask me that question. “It’s Charlie.”
His lips moved just slightly while he charged another block, like he was saying my name under his breath. Why did that make my fingertips feel strange?
“What does Dason do for work?” Curiosity got the best of me, and now I needed to know what each one did to contribute to this civilization that shouldn’t exist, on this planet that shouldn’t exist. Maybe it was naïve to believe there wasn’t sentient life beyond Earth, but it just never occurred to me as a possibility.
“He monitors humidity.” Hands charging a block, Lonan’s gaze pinned me, sparks of electricity floating over his cloudy white eyes. It felt oddly... intimate. “If the air is too dry, it could be dangerous. Fires could start.”
I nodded at the sense that made. “And Brick?”
He blinked, rubbing his nubs as he moved on. “Who is Brick?”
Ahh, shit. “The big guy. I don’t know his name...”
Did I just detect a smirk? I couldn’t be sure, because it disappeared quickly. “His name is Zaid. He does stonework. Helps to restore the buildings.”
“Restore?” I turned my gaze back toward the city where the stone dwellings looked perfectly pristine on the outside. “They look fine to me.”
“Yes, most of them do now.” He glanced toward the city too. “They weren’t before.”
Consider me intrigued. “Before what?”
Lonan straightened, leaving the charged block alone, and turned his stormy gaze on me. For a long minute I didn’t think he was going to answer, and I started to wonder if I had something on my face.
“There used to be hundreds of my kind,” he answered, and my eyes dipped to his moving mouth where I noticed he had a set of double-fangs, just like the others, reminding me of predatory fish.
“There looks to be hundreds still here,” I said slowly, thinking of the size of the mob, and the people we passed on the way here, but I fed into what he said because I was curious. “What happened to the others?”
I took a few steps closer, his eyes drawing me in like a magnetic force I couldn’t pull away from. Less than an arm’s length separated us, and I tilted my head back, examining his long face, square chin, and fine nose. His features were humanoid, but his aura was feral, his eyes unnatural, and his sharp teeth clearly alien.
Heat pulsed off his body like an electric current, and I wondered if his skin would shock me if I touched it.
I startled, looking to my arm where his palm brushed upward toward my bare shoulder. Pops of static electricity skittering along my skin.
“I can show you,” his low voice rumbled. Before I could suck back the air to ask how, his palms cupped my face, fingers nestling into my curls, and his thumbs pressed gently against my temples.
The world fell away, and a different time, a different place, materialized around me like a faded and flickering holograph that took shape the longer I stared.
I was in the middle of a battle, the seas surging to my left, and the skies cracking lightning and thunder above me. War raged along the black-sanded beach. The aliens from the underwater city were fighting against creatures that resembled dragons. Vines crawled over their forms, allowing them to easily blend in with the swaying forest for the ones that weren’t prowling the skies.
The ground seethed, caveats opening, sucking people under just as the seas rose, dragging beings into its depths. Lightning struck the beach, frying dragons that didn’t move quickly enough.
Death. Death everywhere.
I turned, recognizing the four aliens that ran from the sea on a fifty-foot wall of water, seemingly raging the storm forward like the next wave. Their faces and bodies morphed into creatures from the depths that made my knees tremor with fear.
Sharp fins fanned down their spines, along their forearms, behind their ears, ready to lance anything that neared them.
Lonan’s fury roared over the clamor of battle, echoing through the air like aftershocks of an explosion. The skies answered his call, his brethren on the ground resounding his thunder as bolts of lightning reigned down, blasting bodies.
The impact was too bright, turning my vision white as I screamed.
The world faded, tearing away, and bringing me back to reality.
Lonan hovered over me, his hands no longer touching my face.
I clutched my heaving chest, doubling over, heart thrumming through my body like I was on speed. My mind raced as I retraced everything.
There’d been so many of his kind. Not just those that looked like Dason and Brick—Zaid—but aliens that looked like him and Kahn.
I could feel their rage, their pain, their satisfaction as they battled, even as they fell, lifeless.
“Where are they now?” I asked, looking up at him as I sat on my knees, still catching my breath.
He crouched down to his haunches, the look in his eyes ghostly, haunting. “Dead.”
I coughed, my throat dry. I was taken by surprise at his blunt response.
“We fought many battles.” He offered a hand and I took it. “Others lost hope and died waiting for Ghishwy to return.”
Once I was standing on my feet, he bent down to brush the sand from my knees and it momentarily shocked me. Before I could jerk away, he was already done. I retracted my hand, rubbing the skin that zinged with his residual static.
“Who’s Ghishwy?” The name felt weird on my tongue.
“Our Creator.” He went back to charging the less than productive blocks like he didn’t just project images of his memories into my head. No human could do that, and our differences were glaringly obvious once again.
“Your Creator? Like, a god?” I felt ridiculous even asking. Who believed in gods anymore?
“She came from the skies,” Lonan told me, refocusing on his task. “She remade us in her image, taking our primitive civilization and instilling intelligence and purpose into my people.”
My gaze narrowed, and I wasn’t quite sure I believed any of this.
“She gave us the knowledge to manipulate the forces around us.” Lonan scrubbed a hand through his silver locks, his muscled arm flexing with the movement, and I was embarrassed that I found it mesmerizing.
I thought back on this morning, and the water parting around Dason’s feet before rushing Kahn’s bed to extinguish the fire. Was that Dason? Could he manipulate water, while Kahn and Lonan wielded electricity?
“Why?”
Lonan’s jaw clenched, like he was torn about something. “Some believe she and the other Creators only came to this world to mold us into fighters for their battle games. Others believe the Creators loved us enough to open our eyes to much more than our previous primitive existence.”
“There’s more than one Creator?”
My suspicion hiked further. Weren’t gods usually jealous beings? Would more than one share a single world? It didn’t make sense.
It was more plausible to me that an advanced race of aliens was behind this ‘creator’ mumbo jumbo. Call me a skeptic, but after my naiveté about there being no life beyond Earth was shattered—clearly, considering where I was currently standing—the possibilities of other races were wide open.
Who knew what was out there if this planet existed—and it surely did, unless this was all a very vivid corporeal hallucination.
“Yes, there’s more than one.”
“How many?”
Lonan spared me a momentary glance, as if my interest surprised him. “At least nine.”
“Nine?” My eyes widened, and my brain sputtered. He paused again, looking at me more closely.
“Are you all right?”
I blinked, composing myself and waving a hand. “Yeah, I’m fine.” Why this information irritated me, I had no fucking clue. The idea of a worldwide scam irked me. Clearly these aliens had been manipulated by... other aliens.
My suspicious nature just wouldn’t allow me to think there could be celestial beings out there that came to this planet out of the kindness of their hearts to bestow ‘knowledge’ upon these people.
I realized that may have sounded hypocritical, considering I’d prayed before, but it was more of a self-comfort thing. When it came down to it, faced with the possibility of there actually being supreme beings reigning over the universe, having tea parties, and pitting their followers against each other like a game of football, it sounded like a fucking joke.
“What are you thinking?” Lonan asked, closer than I realized, as if I’d involuntarily drifted nearer to him while I was inwardly fuming.
“That you’ve all been duped.”
I cleared my throat. I didn’t mean to say that out loud, but it happened.
To my surprise, Lonan’s lips split into a wide smile while he continued to infuse electricity into a block. It was contagious, and even his predatory teeth didn’t stop my lips from hiking up at the corners.
He had
a surprisingly beautiful smile. For an alien.
“What do you call your kind?” He asked curiously, the grin still tugging at his mouth.
“I’m human.” I followed him further down the row. “What about you?”
“I’m valo.”
“Valo,” I repeated. “What is this planet called?”
“Sonhadra.”
I mimicked the word. “Kind of pretty for a place that’s so deadly.”
He chuckled, a low, resonant sound that tickled my ears. Something else pricked my ears too, and I scanned the area around me.
“Oh no!” I groaned, catching sight of Rezz bounding toward me. “Hide me!” I rushed Lonan, disappearing behind his back, his large frame easily concealing me, but Rezz had already spotted me.
His thunderous, thumping footfalls grew closer and I couldn’t help the squeal that gushed from me as Rezz skidded around Lonan, kicking up sand.
I moved quickly, circling to Lonan’s front, trying to avoid the giant lion-bird that was determined to tackle me.
Round and round we went, orbiting Lonan like he was the center of the universe while I tried to avoid Rezz and his giant paws that swiped at my ankles.
Lonan did nothing to help me except laugh like it was the best entertainment.
“Why are you laughing?” I exclaimed, turning in the opposite direction when Rezz tried to cut me off. “Stop standing there and do something!”
A yelp split from my lungs when Lonan scooped me up the next time I was at his front. I looped my arms around his neck, locking my ankles and curling my legs when Rezz rattled his tail and looked like he was going to pounce both of us.
“Rezz,” Lonan warned. The big lion-bird groaned when he sat his butt in the sand, as if his fun had been squashed. Meanwhile, my heart thundered in my throat like it was going to fly out of my mouth.
“Will you be all right?” Lonan’s face was entirely too close to mine when I looked up at him. His eyes continued to swirl a cloudy white, and every place our skin connected, it prickled with an electric current that raised goosebumps along my arms.
I nodded, unable to find my voice.
The sound of more footsteps pulled my attention. Kahn sauntered up the row, a mischievous glint in his eye.
