by Loki Renard
“Why?”
“Because I pay them to do so. I give them money, food, shelter in return for their service.”
“You must be very powerful,” she said, looking at him with curiosity. He noticed that she didn’t seem to be impressed by his power. It was simply another piece of information to be puzzled over, like the talking walls.
“There are certain advantages which come with wealth,” he said. “I prefer to use that power to help those in need, where I can…”
“And buy people,” she cut him off before he could sing his own praises.
“I’m not usually in the habit of buying… people.”
“You don’t think I’m a person?” She gave him a slightly curious, slightly offended look.
“Yes, you’re a person… but… this is all more complicated than I can explain in a few minutes,” Kyren replied. “Just know I don’t intend you any harm. You are going to be very well looked after.”
She gave him a dubious look. He did not blame her for her skepticism. She was a very special case. An anomaly he had never dreamed of—though perhaps, when his collection had begun, he had dreamed that he might one day obtain a specimen of the distant past. He had never considered that the original humans might still be so similar to his own people. He had certainly never thought that the one he obtained might have a rare and delicate beauty that made his heart melt whenever he looked at her. He would have to be careful, or she would soon have him wrapped about her little finger.
Two maids brought the meal he had ordered. Kyren noticed that Tara seemed particularly interested in them. Her eyes did not leave the women for a single moment that they were in the room. The interest seemed to be mutual, not surprising given that Kyren rarely had female company of the kind that wore simple cotton dresses and crouched on their chairs rather than sat on them.
“They are your servants?” She asked the question as the maids left. “You have women who do what you tell them to do?”
“They work here, pet,” he explained gently.
“Are they allowed to leave? To go home?”
“Of course.” He saw where she was going with her line of questioning before she asked the next one.
“Can I go home too?”
“It’s different for them,” he said, removing the cover from the plate. “You’re not a maid.”
“I’m a… pet.” She said the words uncomfortably. “Is it better to be a pet or a maid?”
“For you, being a pet is the only option,” he said, pushing the plate toward her. “Here. Eat.”
Tara looked at the contents of the dish, a light poached fish on a bed of mashed roots. He thought she would surely be tempted, as it contained many of the same ingredients she might have eaten on Earth. But it was not to be.
She screwed her nose up and shook her head. “I don’t want this.”
“You haven’t tried it yet.”
“I don’t need to try it,” she said. “It looks weird.”
“It tastes good, pet. Try a little.”
His cajoling did nothing as Tara shook her head. He knew she must be hungry, but she was fighting his will. Refusing to eat was one way to control the situation. He couldn’t allow that. She was light as it was, and he needed to get some extra weight on her, but not at the expense of her obedience. All pets needed to learn that they ate when food was provided—not when they decided to.
“Very well,” he said, pulling the plate away from her. “I will eat it.”
She crouched there on the chair and watched him eat, those great green eyes solemn as they stared at him. He finished the plate quickly and pushed it into the wall slot where it would be sent back to the kitchen and sterilized.
“Well,” he said. “I think it is time you had a nap.”
“I’m not tired,” she said, predictably.
“You’re exhausted,” he replied. “You’ve been ripped from your home, transported millions of miles, and taken into the custody of an alien master. You need sleep, pet.”
“I don’t,” she insisted stubbornly. “I need to go back. To my home.”
“Listen,” he said. “I know this is not an easy situation for you. I know you are scared, and angry…”
“You don’t know how I feel,” she interrupted. “You can’t tell me what my feelings are. You don’t know me. I don’t know you. You should let me go back to my village. I want to go back home.”
Her words trailed off into wateriness, her eyes filled with tears, and Kyren wished nothing more in that moment than being able to actually send her home. It was out of the question however. Aside from the financial costs of such a journey, it would be unethical in the extreme to send her back to Earth, a planet ravaged by disease and radiation. She was better off with him than anywhere else. She just didn’t know it yet.
“You need rest,” he repeated. “You will feel calmer and happier when you have slept.”
“Why?” she whimpered. “Why won’t you let me go home?”
His heart threatened to break with hers. Unable to do anything to fix the situation, Kyren did the one thing he could do. He picked her up, pulled her close to his body, and held her tightly. She did not resist. She was soft against his chest, curling up against him for comfort against the circumstances he was responsible for. He stroked her hair gently and tried to explain what was happening to her.
“You are part of something special, pet. Something that has extended for many thousands of years. You are part of an unbroken line which began in the seas of a cooling primordial Earth and spread its tendrils throughout countless star systems. You are human.”
“I know I am human,” she sniffed. “I don’t know why it matters.”
“Because you are the first. One of the first. At one time, there was only one human species. But there are many now. All a little different, some so different you’d barely recognize them. You are one of the originals. You have a rare and important bloodline that must be preserved. You are priceless.”
“That doesn’t explain why you keep calling me pet. That doesn’t explain why I can’t go home. That doesn’t explain… anything… so I’m rare… so what?”
“You’re more than unique and rare,” he said. “You are…” He closed his mouth and shook his head. “At this moment, all you need to know is that you are mine.”
“You’re mean,” she sniffed, the tears beginning to flow again.
She was too tired for this, and Kyren knew it. He couldn’t explain centuries of culture, space exploration, and various other events to her in the first five minutes of her residence in his home. Ordinarily, he would have put his pet into one of the acclimation cages, a simple, easy to clean enclosure. That didn’t seem suitable for Tara.
He ran his fingers through her hair and lightly scratched her scalp in a way she seemed to find soothing. “You do need to rest,” he said. “And I need to tend to my business affairs. I don’t want to cage you, but I can’t leave you to your own devices. I think I will put you in my bedroom. The bed is comfortable, and you will be safe there.”
She offered no further resistance as he picked her up and carried her to his bedroom. It was not the sort of space he usually would put a pet in. There were lots of soft furnishings and valuable objects. If she should become violent they would all be at risk. But Tara had not shown many signs of violence, and he would not leave her long.
She was already a somnolent weight in his arms as she slumped against him, closer to sleep than she would ever have admitted. Kyren laid his prize down on the bed and turned the covers over her. She made a soft sound that could have been one of comfort as her cheek met the smooth silken pillow.
“Get some rest, pet,” he murmured, brushing his lips over her temple. “You will have more answers soon.”
He left, locking the door carefully. His home felt different now, a little more full than it had before. He liked thinking of her curled up in his bed. It had been a very long time since any woman had lain there, but it felt right that Tara sh
ould be there now. It was the most protected room in the whole grand complex, and she was the person he wanted to protect most.
Chapter Four
Having conducted his business, Kyren returned to check on Tara. There had been several hours of work to attend to, but he had only done an hour of it. He wanted to be by Tara’s side, not dealing with the musty minutiae of his everyday affairs. His business dealings, which usually enthralled him, were not enough to so much as distract him.
He opened the bedroom door quietly, not wanting to disturb her sleep. Upon looking in, he immediately saw that the bed was empty, the covers thrown back. He was not surprised that she hadn’t slept in the bed. She probably wasn’t used to that kind of comfort. It was quite common for his pets to choose a hard floor over a soft bed of hay if they had been raised in harsh conditions.
Not wanting to frighten her if she was asleep somewhere odd, Kyren quietly checked beside the bed, underneath the bed, and in every corner of the room. He checked in the wardrobes. He even checked in the drawers. He could not find her.
As he looked in the last possible hiding place, a nook between two wardrobes, and found it likewise empty, a chill went through him. His chest tightened with the sudden stress of the idea that he might have obtained the most precious pet of his lifetime and somehow lost her within minutes. Had she escaped? No. She could not have escaped. There was no way out of the room at all. He knew that for certain, and yet she definitely wasn’t there.
“Tara!” He called her Earth name as he hauled back the bedding for the second time, just in case she was somehow hidden beneath it. She wasn’t. The bed was bare. He picked the pillows up and shook them, as if she could perhaps fall out of them. All he got was a small puff of dust.
“Pet!”
There was no response.
He turned around, inspecting the room. There were no windows, just the light panels that projected pleasing outdoor scenes. There were a few vents, but they were the size of his palm. She hadn’t escaped through them. The walls were a foot thick and reinforced for safety. There was no way for her to have escaped… and yet… she was gone.
He hit the button beside the door. It connected directly to his security team.
“Sir?”
“We have an escaped pet,” he said. “I want every door in the place locked. Every window sealed. Every man we have looking for her.”
“Yes, sir.”
The compound was locked down with professional precision. Kyren’s men knew their job, and his keepers knew theirs. Every pet and person in the place was soon accounted for—apart from Tara. It wasn’t possible, and yet, it was happening.
“Sir?”
One of Kyren’s private officers had marched a young guard in front of him. The young man was trembling nervously, beads of sweat standing out on his face as he avoided Kyren’s gaze.
“What is it?”
The officer nudged the younger guard. “Tell him what happened.”
“Uh.” The young man cleared his throat several times before speaking again. “I was on security monitoring detail an hour ago. There was a maid… or a… a woman… she asked to be let out of your bedroom.”
Kyren stared. “My pet used the intercom and asked to be let out… and you did it?”
“She… uh… didn’t sound like a pet. She said she was locked in, sir. We had no reason to suspect anything. The maids do come and go quite regularly. Sometimes they forget their keys. We get multiple requests a day for access. She sounded just like one of them.”
Kyren’s jaw dropped. In the midst of his anger and concern at having lost his pet, it did not evade him that her escape had been nothing short of brilliant. The few seconds she’d seen the maid had been enough to give her the idea of impersonating one. She’d worked out how to use the intercom herself after seeing him doing it. And she’d been smart enough to manipulate the guards. He’d suspected it from the first moment he’d looked into her eyes, but now he was certain. Tara was smart. Too smart for her own good. Far too smart to be treated as a pet.
Chapter Five
Tara kicked the dress out from her feet for what felt like the fiftieth time. It was too long and it kept threatening to trip her up. The maid’s uniform had been stashed in a locker in one of the rooms she’d visited after getting out of the bedroom she’d been locked in. It came to the lower shin on most of the maids, but on her it went all the way to the floor and a bit beyond. It looked awkward, but everybody seemed very distracted with their own affairs and did not pay much attention to her. She was glad for the little hat that covered her hair and took attention away from her face.
Nobody gave her a second look as she hustled out of the grand arch of Cirrus’s home. She walked a very long way down a path that wound between other smaller buildings and statues and all sorts of things. Kyren didn’t have a home… he had a… castle, or a palace, or a complex… it was of a scale she could barely comprehend, but she kept moving down the path until she finally came to a gate with soldiers standing at it. Just like everyone else, they didn’t bother to look at her as she walked through it.
She was still scared, just as she had been when she took her first steps out of the room she had met Cirrus in, but the fear of captivity was stronger than the fear of the unknown. Her fright at the doors, the big halls, the strangeness of the trappings of the new world she found herself in had faded once the bedroom door had closed behind Kyren and she had laid there in his bed, slowly realizing that what seemed so surreal it couldn’t possibly be happening, actually was. She was truly destined to be a pet. The instinct for freedom was so much more powerful than the fear of the alien world she found herself in—and it was that instinct that kept her moving past each strange sight, smell, and sensation.
Once outside the guarded gate she found herself standing at the top of a hill that looked out over an endless city. Tara had never seen anything like it. She had never imagined anything like it. She stopped and she stared at the shining buildings that stretched as far as the eye could see, tall and gleaming in all different shapes and colors. It reminded her of a termite colony, but it was so much larger. There were remains of cities on Earth, but they were crumbling ruins and most of them were only discernible by bits of misshapen black rock in the soil. Some people said that millions of people had lived in them thousands of years ago. She hadn’t known that could be possible until now, looking out over the city. How many people must live here on Udine? How could they live all packed in so close to one another with no wild spaces? Where did they hunt?
As she stood entranced and confused by the view in equal measure, a big metallic beast rolled to a slow stop in front of her. She was surprised to see that there were almost twenty people inside, sitting on seats, looking very bored given the fact that they were stuck in the belly of a beast. She did not know what it was, but she mentally coined it a rolling whale. That seemed the best way to describe the size and motion of the thing.
Large doors in the front of the thing opened and a few Udanese people got out of the metal beast and walked past her, heading to other destinations.
“Are you getting on?”
She watched the people walk down the streets, wondering if she should follow them. Her stomach was starting to growl and she was hoping she could find some food soon. It had been a mistake to refuse what Kyren had offered her.
“Madam! Are you getting on?”
Tara suddenly realized that the man in the stiff uniform sitting at the very head of the rolling whale was speaking to her.
“Me?” She pointed at herself.
“Yes. You. Are you going to get on?”
She supposed she was. She stepped in the door that the others had stepped out of and moved to an empty seat. Nobody looked at her. It seemed as though they were trying very hard not to. She didn’t know why, but she was glad.
The rolling whale set off before she sat down, propelling her backwards into the embrace of the seat. She grabbed the edges of it, holding on for dear life as
the whale picked up speed. It was very strange, to ride along faster than she could ever have walked or ran. A little scary too, but more fascinating than frightening. The other people all sitting so still and staid was calming, and they were almost as interesting as the contraption she was riding in. They were mostly men, but there were some women. They were all dressed in clothing that covered every part of their body, long skirts and pants and jackets that went all the way up to the neck. The hues were silver and gold, very fine and very imposing. Compared to most of the people on the bus, her clothing seemed simple.
Did they think they were better than her? The thought struck Tara as funny. She was an alien among aliens and they were more concerned by her dress than her strangeness. Though she was not all that strange, she supposed. She had two arms, two legs, and was roughly the same shape, if not quite the same scale. Their features were perhaps a little heightened compared to hers, sharper and more well defined. They had hard cheekbones and long straight noses. Their ears were larger too, but somewhat pointed at the lobes. In contrast, Tara’s snub nose and delicate ears seemed out of place. Or would have done if anyone had noticed. They were all taller than she, broader and with healthier skin, but they had not grown up in the wilds of an irradiated earth.
The rolling whale was passing through green fields that separated Kyren’s compound and surrounding areas from the city proper. There were a few small dwellings here and there, low shrubs growing in dense rounds low to the ground. Everything seemed very contained here, very controlled. She still wasn’t sure where they got their food from. There were no birds in the sky, no little creatures running about the land. She couldn’t see a single rabbit track or gopher hole. What had these people done with the animals?
As Tara watched the goings-on around her, she noticed that one of the ladies nearby had a small bag of food. The lady was reaching gloved fingers into the little crinkly baggie and pulling out round shining balls of something that smelled very sweet and utterly delicious. Tara did not know what it was, but the scent drew her nose and her eyes and made her stare. The woman seemed to find that concerning, as she tucked the bag away into a pocket and then looked pointedly in another direction.
