by Rayann Marse
"Clean and fresh," he told her as he dried her with a towel the size of a human blanket. "A new beginning."
His words were meant to cheer her up, to remind her that this wasn't the end of the world. Their relationship had barely begun. It was an unformed, infant thing. Her entire life had preceded it; the rest of her life would come after.
It didn't work. All she wanted was to go back to what they had been a couple days ago.
"Come," Amnay said, leading her out into the hall. "We have to be there."
This time, he took them on a straightforward path. They passed many of his people, and Amnay kept his eyes bravely forward. He didn't flinch, and his gait didn't flag.
They eventually came to a wide door. It led to the mouth of a long hallway. The bars of cells lined the hall on either side. The first pair of cells started twenty feet away from where Kozue and Amnay stood.
The combatants were already here. Kozue didn't know which was Slych and which was Agron. They were both ugly brutes, covered in scars and scabs.
There were other males here, too. One had painted a circle on the floor, which the combatants would use as a makeshift arena. The other males stood outside it, equidistant from each other. Kozue was too focused on the combatants themselves to try and decipher the role of the others.
"Which one is your brother?" Kozue asked.
Amnay looked at her in terror. He clamped a hand over her mouth.
"You shouldn't speak," he whispered. "The challenge can't be interrupted."
Kozue said nothing. But she wanted desperately to know who to root for in her mind.
She did get her answer, in an unexpected form.
"Slych!" a female voice called.
It had been long enough since Kozue had heard another human that she had trouble recognizing this voice. But it wasn't just any woman. It was Tina Cassidy, the writer whose placement in the mission was a bit of an enigma to Kozue.
Now Tina was reaching a hand through the bars. Kozue wanted to run forward, to comfort the woman and show her she was not alone. But she didn't dare move or make a peep for fear that Amnay would be put in even greater danger. She didn't want to imagine the fate of a male who could not control his concubine, who let her roam and bend the rules of society as she saw fit.
Apparently, Tina's act of simply reaching out a hand to her champion was seen as being in bad taste. One of the other males in the hall raised a blade and stepped toward the bars. He was going to chop at her hand. Kozue clamped her hands over her mouth, trying hard not to scream.
One of the combatants moved like a flash, kicking the male with the blade hard in the gut. He bent in half, gagging and sucking at the air. The male who had kicked him did not look at all disturbed by this incident, or by the challenge to come. He looked utterly confident, disgustingly cocky. Kozue looked into his eyes, and all she saw were perverse fantasies of what he would do after the fighting was done.
So, she now knew which one was Slych.
The other was Agron. He was taller than Slych, bigger in every way. He looked like a nightmare given form. He was either a sloppier fighter or simply a more frequent one; his scars and wounds outnumbered Slych's. From what Amnay had said, Kozue knew that Agron had taken one of the other human women as his concubine. And he might gain Tina by the end of the day.
It was impossible to tell he was related to Amnay. Where Amnay was soft and gentle and childishly curious, Agron was hard and cold and sharp all over. He looked, Kozue decided, like a creature who didn't realize that consensual sex was a thing. She tried not to think about the treatment her fellow woman had gone through at his hands. It was no wonder this Agron wasn't happy with his latest concubine; the woman probably fought him at every turn. Perhaps that fresh, still bleeding wound to his ear was from her.
Even so, Kozue found herself in a tough position. For her own sake, for Amnay's, she had to root for this creature.
If Slych won, then Tina would be safe. If Agron won, Amnay would be. No matter how the fight went, the outcome would be good for someone. Perhaps that was the best way to think.
Now, the two combatants stood across from each other in the combat circle.
One of the males outside the circle shouted a command.
And the fighters rushed at each other.
For a while, nothing much happened. No one was hit. The fighters were perfectly matched, parrying and striking and dodging. There was an air of ceremony about the first segment of the fight, as though both fighters had agreed to take it as a chance to learn each other. Perhaps that was one of the eternal edicts of the challenge.
After that, the fight swung in Slych's favor. Agron was the first to bleed. Kozue sank against Amnay's side. Her tiny weight was almost enough to cause him to stumble, he was so weak in the knees. But he did not fall. He didn't move much at all. Kozue knew he was merely putting on a brave face; inside, he was a storm.
To Agron's credit, the wound to his ribs didn't bother him. After as many wounds as he had sustained, it was no wonder. He kept fighting.
The pace of the fight was no longer ceremonial. They were actively trying to kill each other. Defenses were probed, reactions tested, strategies attempted.
Suddenly, Slych was hurt. He was hurt badly. He had a terrible gash to his shoulder. It was already welling blood; streams of red dripped to the floor.
Agron used his opponent's weakness to his advantage, pressing forward. Despite Slych's best efforts, the tide of the fight had made a sudden turn. It was Agron, now, who was on top.
Amnay showed no reaction. His lips were set tight, and his eyes were moist. Kozue held his arm tight.
Tina cried out again for her champion. Kozue shut her eyes, trying to block out the noise. She wondered where it had gone so wrong. How her and the other women had been so quickly and thoroughly swallowed up by this strange society. How powerless they were and how little choice they'd had about any of it.
Slych was wounded again. He fell, was nearly stabbed through the heart. He barely dodged the stab. But he was flagging now. The cockiness was gone. Slych was now fighting for survival. Fighting desperately. But losing his grip.
Someone was crying loudly. They didn't sound human. But the languages of fear and sorrow, it turned out, were universal.
And again, Slych was on the ground. Kozue saw the blade coming, saw the look on Slych's face, and decided it would be his last moment of life.
But it wasn't. Slych was on his feet in the next instant.
Agron started to turn, to counter what was coming next, but he had no time. And a second later, he had no head.
Kozue froze solid, staring at nothing.
Rather than celebrate, Slych came storming down the hallway toward them. Amnay was frozen, too, unable to speak or to move. Slych plowed through the middle of them, pushing them apart. He likely didn't think twice about the act — he was just trying to get out of this hallway as fast as possible — but Kozue saw the awful symbolism in it.
A long while later, or what only felt like a long while, Amnay let out one long, shuddering breath. He turned and left the hall on stiff legs. Kozue tried to follow, but this time Amnay made no effort to slow down for her sake. He left her behind, alone and weeping for him. And for herself.
Chapter Seven
Kozue had a sense that there was very little time left. She could feel it. Things had changed for her.
The routine she had shared with Amnay, the lovely private life mostly undisturbed by the gnawing guilt at the back of her mind, had been an illusion. An impossible thing, balanced and tipping on a precipice, and now it had finally fallen over the edge.
She looked everywhere for him. All their little places. She walked every row and column of the hall of pillars, again and again. The past stood before her, a vast and open book of endless stories. But she didn't want the past. She wanted the future. Future with Amnay.
She checked the library, too. He wasn't there. She walked randomly through halls until she came back to the room th
ey had shared. He wasn't here, either. Nothing had been changed. The bed was unmade; the wash bucket was there. The floor hadn't even completely dried yet.
Kozue locked the door. She lay in the bed on the floor, smelling him. Wishing something unprecedented would happen, some miracle to keep them together.
But she knew better than that. Everything died eventually. It was just that the good things died so much faster.
Eventually, she fell asleep. She hoped that a solution would come to her in dreams. But that didn't happen. Rather, her fears returned in new forms, burning to life in the surreal intensity of nightmare.
***
A loud noise awoke her. She rolled onto her stomach and squeezed her eyes shut. Whatever was coming for her, she didn't want to see it.
Strong male hands grabbed her by the waist. They were gentle but roughly callused. But they were the calluses of constant tinkering rather than battle.
It was Amnay.
She spun herself around in his arms and pressed into him. He smelled of sweat and musk, still wearing the clothes he'd had on at the challenge. It must already be the next morning; Kozue felt well rested.
"Where have you been?" she asked.
There was a deeper stench there, soaked into his clothing. Something stale and greasy. Wherever he had been, it was somewhere gross. Had he been hiding in some engine compartment, a nook in some industrial area of the ship?
"I will show you," he said. "Don't be afraid."
"I'm not," she said. "Not anymore."
"You have to trust me. We have a chance to be together. If that is what you want?"
"Yes," she said, burying her face in his chest and breathing deeply of the sour smell of old sweat and the deep male musk. "Is that what you want?"
"Yes. Some days... a lot of days before we met, I was sad to be me. Without a concubine. I only ever wanted one, a single female to share everything with. Someone to learn with, to be excited with. To change things with. Now I'm glad I never had anyone else, because now I have you."
He stood up straight now, lifting her off the floor. He carried her over to the door; he reached up and grabbed the remote from the crack in the wall above it.
"I was challenged," he said. "I declined. They said they would kill me. They are coming to do it now. So we have to leave."
"Leave?" asked Kozue. "But—"
She had been about to say something concerning the other women and her responsibility to them. But a sound of angry voices reached her from the hall. Someone was coming, and they were near.
With a push of a button, the screen was on. The scene was essentially the same. It was Amnay's ship, light years away. But there was a change. The room was clean. All the clutter had been removed. The bed had been made. The floor gleamed as though freshly polished.
"Amnay," she said. "Someone's been in your ship."
"It was me," he replied.
"But that's... impossible. It's too far away. Isn't it?"
"For any means of transit these barbaric fools are aware of, yes. But I know a way. We're out of time."
He stepped toward the screen.
The door exploded open. Amnay turned his back to the explosion, sheltering Kozue. He grunted in pain as his back was peppered with flying debris.
Several males came storming in. They bore spherical objects. Grenades. They meant to blow Amnay to smithereens.
Rushing forward, he carried Kozue toward the screen. She winced, bracing for impact, with no time to figure out what crazy idea Amnay had or whether he was just plain crazy.
They hit the wall, and it was like running through a stretched membrane of bubblegum. It clung to them a moment, stretching before them, but then they broke through. And suddenly they were in Amnay's ship.
Kozue twisted in his arms, looking back. She could now see, as though it were a flat image, the bedroom back on the Menin ship. The other males were no longer there, but several primed grenades sat on the floor, blinking red.
Amnay shouted something, an alien curse, and turned his bed up on end. He carried Kozue behind it, sheltering her again.
The sound of the explosion never reached them. The screen on the other end was destroyed before much of anything could get through. But all it took was one piece of shrapnel.
It tore through the mattress, just above Amnay's shoulder, and kept going. It tore through the wall like an artillery shell, sending a dust of shredded metal outward. Kozue shut her eyes tight to protect them.
From somewhere in the ship, frighteningly close, something else exploded.
"It's damaged the ship!" Amnay cried. He flipped the bed back down, dropped Kozue onto it, and ran out of the room.
Alarms now blared everywhere. They screamed and flashed red. Whatever had been destroyed by the shrapnel, it must be something important.
But she trusted Amnay to take care of it. Unafraid but deeply surprised, Kozue twisted to look at the wall where the image of the Menin ship had been. It was now just a wall, blank and flat.
How had he done it?
And why had he lied? To keep her from toying with something she didn't understand. It would have been dangerous.
It wasn't just a live feed with little to no delay from light years away. That would be impressive enough, a technology that should have been impossible. But Amnay had gone further. He had created teleportation.
After a minute, he came rushing back into the room. His shirt was smoking and his eyes were red and watery.
"We have to leave," he said.
Kozue hopped out of bed and followed. They ran out of the room and down a short stretch of hallway. They reached a cockpit, where an Amnay-sized chair stood before a wide window. The ship was shouting various warnings. Putting her ear close to the translator on Amnay's belt, she could understand them.
"Decaying orbit. Irretrievable decay. Catastrophic damage. Evacuate now or brace for violent landing."
Amnay was busy fiddling with a set of closet doors. Kozue stepped past him, approaching the window and setting a trembling hand on the back of the pilot's chair.
Outside, stars smeared past. The artificial gravity still worked, and so Kozue stood rooted softly in place as the universe spun out of control around her. A planet slid into view, big and blue-green, like a supersized Earth. She had enough time to see dense cloud and make out the yellow coastline of some huge continent before she was once again facing the stars.
"Here," Amnay shouted to her.
She turned to look. He had opened a closet of sorts. It was empty, lit by a dim red light. But it wasn't a closet. It looked more like the barrel of a gun, cylindrical and dark.
"An escape pod?" she asked.
Amnay didn't answer. He stepped over to her, grabbed her by the arm, and shoved her into the pod. He showed her how to do up her harness. Although there was more than an enough room for Amnay inside still, there was only the one harness. She thought that she might sit on his lap, that they could ride together, but she knew that was impossible. Whatever G-forces they were subjected to would cause his weight to crush her against the straps of the harness, shattering her sternum and rupturing organs.
"What about you?" she asked. Though her whole body shook, she felt calm. It was the utter strangeness of the situation, the impossibility of it. She felt as though she was dreaming; she didn't feel as though she was in any real danger.
"There is another," said Amnay. "But there is no way of knowing for certain where we will land. If you come down someplace safe, you should stay there. I will try to find you."
He touched her face, tugged gently at her hair, and bent down to smell her. It was a goodbye of sorts, but not a long-winded one. She wished that the truncated nature of it was simply because he was confident they would see each other again. But she knew it had more to do with the increasingly urgent warnings from the ship.
There was no time to say and do all the things she wished to do. Her only hope as the door of the tube slid shut and sealed her in a stuffy, red-lit tomb, was tha
t she would have a chance later to make good on those wishes.
There was an explosion. She was pinned to her seat as the pod shot up the tube. It really was like a gun. For a moment, she imagined she was one of those old-time circus performers, being shot out of a cannon. But for her, there would be no net to land in. No crowd to applaud her bravery.
At least she didn't have to worry about looking good. She felt her face, skin, and muscles changing. It felt as though they had turned to goo, melting into her body.
The end of the barrel flashed past through her little windowl and all she saw was black, speckled with stars. They ran together, smearing into strings like Christmas lights. And then black patches appeared, dancing and coming together by the hundreds. Kozue passed out, arms lifting and head lolling as she fell toward the planet.
Chapter Eight
When she woke up, she felt like she was still falling, even though the view from the window was static. She figured that this meant she had only just landed. The feeling of motion persisted for a short time, like when stepping off an escalator.
All she saw was green, washed out in bright sunlight. Space debris or the deforming effects of heat during its penetration of the atmosphere, had damaged the window. It was scuffed and milky.
Kozue struggled with her harness, trying to remember the instructions Amnay had given her. She finally got it undone, stood up, and promptly collapsed into the door.
Her hand, scrambling for purchase, fell onto the handle. The door sprang open; she spilled out into warm sunlight, falling into a bed of grass. It tickled her, moving against her like tiny, soft brushes in a rush of humid, warm breeze.
She was filled with buzzing joy. It was relief and joy at the simple fact that she was still alive. All she could do for the next several minutes was stare up at the sky and laugh.
