by Kate Rudolph
“It’s what drew me to you, the way you flew without wings. Fearless.” He leaned closer, but didn’t touch.
“I’m afraid of plenty of things.” Spiders, super murky water, dying alone. But she wasn’t about to share all that. “You say you can’t fly, but what you can do sounds so cool. I wish I could do it.” There was freedom in soaring through her routine and she could just imagine what it would be like if she didn’t have to worry about coming down hard.
Their gazes locked and that awareness came back. She wanted to close those inches between them and taste him. She yanked herself back. “So what do wings have to do with anything?”
Oz sat up straighter. “Nothing, I suppose. Or not much. I just wanted... it’s not important.”
“Were you showing off?” She laughed, she couldn’t help it. And she wouldn’t admit it, but those wings were impressive.
She didn’t know if aliens—Zulir—could blush, and if they could the dim light of the room hid it. But he did duck his head. “Anyway,” he cleared his throat. “Matching. We all have a spark, as I said. That’s what we call the lightning inside of us. But it’s nothing compared to that of a Matched unit. Usually two people, though there are rare cases of larger groups, who fit. They’re bound together and can amplify their powers. I’ve heard legends say that there were Matched units who could take out warships. Usually the Matched are both Zulir, but we’ve found other... compatible species. Humans, for one. But the Apsyns are opposed to such Matches, despite the fact that a bond should be sacred. It’s not outlawed outright, even they wouldn’t go that far, but in the extremely rare circumstance that a human or other alien is mated to an Apsyn, the alien is treated like a pet, not a person. I can’t imagine how it works. It’s an abomination. The treatment,” he was quick to add. “Not the Match.”
Emily thought of the times she’d been strapped down, when other aliens were brought in and used their powers against her. And an idea began to form. “They wanted to amp up their powers, didn’t they? That’s what they were doing.”
Oz nodded. “That’s what we suspect. And if they succeed... Matches are rare. It goes beyond any regular sense of compatibility until everything fits. Thoughts, feelings, molecules. If the Apsyns can harness that power without a need for Matches, we’re finished. And if it takes humans for them to do it, I can’t begin to imagine how many they’d be willing to sacrifice.”
OZ LEFT EMILY TO WATCH over her friend after that. He could see she had a lot to think about and he didn’t want to crowd her thoughts. He’d done enough damage already.
But he wished he could stay there beside her. He’d answer any question she had, talk about anything just to snatch one more second with her. He wanted her. He’d wanted her from the first, but this went deeper. Something in her called to him. Settled him. It made him wonder if he’d finally found something he hadn’t even realized he’d been looking for.
They were still deep in enemy territory and he couldn’t get hung up on that.
Solan was sitting in the main room and fiddling with a small device. When Oz took a seat next to him, he sat it on the table and it gave off a faint orange glow. “Privacy mode,” Solan explained. “The humans won’t hear us.”
Good. He would tell Emily anything, but that didn’t mean she was ready to hear what he and Solan had to say. And he suspected the call they were going to have to make wouldn’t go well. “She said she just wants to go home.” It had been eating at him for hours. Emily hadn’t brought up the desire again, but it hadn’t needed to be stated.
“Wouldn’t you want the same thing?” Solan asked.
“I would if it weren’t impossible.” He pushed himself up from his seat and paced, careful to stay in range of the privacy device. “She thinks that it’s been months since she and the others were taken.”
“To her it has been. Humans are barely capable of space travel. They have no idea about all the universe has to offer. Why would she know just what it took to bring her here?” Solan said it all so calmly. He had no emotional connection to the humans, not beyond compassion for their wounded friend. And Oz should have been the same. Maybe he would have been capable of that if Emily weren’t there. But she was, and he didn’t want to take this last thing from her. “There’s nothing we can do about it. Let’s just call Cru. He needs this update. And this is going to force the asset to move. Things are falling into place. We’ll be off planet soon enough.”
Soon enough. But the humans would still be stuck far from home with no hope of going back. “What do we tell them?” he asked.
“What we need to. We keep them safe and do our job. What else can we do? Now, are you going to snap at Cru?” Solan looked at him in challenge.
Oz shrugged. He couldn’t promise how this conversation would go. Especially when Cru learned how Oz had almost screwed everything up.
“Let’s get this over with.”
It was clear they’d caught Cru by surprise. His uniform looked a little ruffled and the rest of the crew wasn’t with him. “What’s this about?” he demanded. It was loud enough that it would have woken the humans if not for the privacy shield.
“News,” Solan said. He was the one that talked during these things. Most of the time. He handled Cru better. Came from having the same aristo blood running through his veins.
“What happened?” He glanced at Oz but didn’t say anything. Oz stayed silent.
Solan relayed the events, for the most part. Grace brought the humans to them. One was injured. They needed medical treatment and safe haven.
He didn’t reveal what Oz had almost done.
Cru furrowed his brow for several seconds, thinking over what Solan had said. “This can change nothing. Dump the humans. Finish the mission. We—ru...we... fe...pu—” the feed cut off.
“Did you do that?” Oz asked. He leaned forward and waved his hand over the holoprojector, but it didn’t do anything.
“No.” Solan looked concerned. He stood up and went to the window, looking out into the night. “Nothing’s lit up. Not that we know where the ship is, but doesn’t look like any fighters have been deployed. Apsyns might just be amping up their security. Scrambling signals. Or there was a flare somewhere. Plenty of reason for comms to cut out.” His communicator beeped and he pulled it out of his pocket, looking relieved as he read the message. “Ax confirms it was a signal scrambler. The ship is fine, but they need to reroute some relays before we can speak again.”
“Any worry the message was intercepted?” They were using the highest level encryption the Synnr techs had to offer, but mistakes could be made. Accidents happened.
“Not from Ax.” Solan put his comm away but didn’t disengage the privacy screen.
And now that one crisis was averted, anger flowed in Oz’s veins. “How can we just dump them?” he demanded. “They’re people! And they need help.” He couldn’t fail Emily again, not when he’d already done it once before.
Solan was thoughtful. “He didn’t say where we should dump them.”
“What?” Oz was too angry to think straight. He wanted to hop onto a shuttle and go throttle Cru for even suggesting it.
“It’s possible that he meant to get the humans out of the way so that they’re safe,” Solan proposed, testing out the theory.
They both knew Cru too well to think that was his meaning. But the call had cut off before he could clarify his order. “What are you thinking? There’s no place on Kilrym that will be safe for long.”
“That’s why we don’t leave them on Kilrym.”
“And where do you suggest they go? They can’t exactly board a public shuttle.” Oz had racked his brain trying to think of an easy way to get Emily off the planet without making her pose as his property. Nothing obvious had presented itself.
“We take them to our ship.”
He said it so simply with a clever little smile that Oz wanted to punch off his face.
“Where they will be at Cru’s mercy?” Maybe that was unfair, but Oz
could still remember the captain’s cruelty when they were boys. And he knew Cru was barely better than an Apsyn when it came to non-Zulirs. Could he really trust him with Emily?
Solan glared. “He’s not the best man for the job, perhaps, but don’t make him out to be a monster. If we can get them to the ship, he’ll keep them safe. And we can take them to Osais. At least back home they’ll have a chance at a life.”
Solan had a point. There was nothing for the humans here, and any other path they took would have them abandoning their duties. They couldn’t do that. They weren’t deserters. “He’ll punish us for going against orders.”
His companion shook his head. “I can handle the captain.”
“What about the rest of the humans?” Emily and her friends weren’t even half of who they knew was being held by the Apsyns.
Solan frowned and looked away. “We can’t. Going back for them will compromise everything. And it could get the asset killed. Do you want to be the one to tell her parents that?”
He very much did not. But that wasn’t reason enough to sacrifice those lives. What else could they do, though? “I don’t want to just leave them there.”
“We’ll do what we can. Let’s worry about these humans first. We can’t take them all at once, not with the size of our shuttle. And we can’t leave whoever is left unguarded.” What Solan wasn’t saying was that whoever got left on the ground might be forbidden from joining the other humans on the ship. There would be no dropped connections when Cru met them in person. And his orders would be final.
“Let’s figure out the logistics. We can’t be gone with the asset needs us. And I’m ready to go home.”
What would Emily think of it? Would it be enough to make up for all that she had lost?
Would she be willing to look at him a second time? To see him for who he really was and not the role he’d been playing?
He shouldn’t get caught up in hopes. They’d only hurt when they came crashing to the ground. But his heart beat faster at the thought of showing her his world.
She’d be safe. And if that was all he could give her, he hoped it would be enough.
Chapter Seven
EMILY’S BACK HURT AND her head ached. At some point in the night she’d fallen asleep slumped over next to Lena and it hadn’t exactly been restful. She looked at her friend but saw no change in her condition. Oz had said she shouldn’t expect it, but that didn’t mean that she wouldn’t wish for a magical recovery.
Her stomach growled. Emily couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. Dinner? Had they been fed before they fled? The aliens—Apsyns—hadn’t been the best cooks. At least, she hoped the bitter gruel they’d subsisted on was the result of bad cooking and not some Zulir delicacy.
What did aliens eat? Her stomach demanded she find out now. But first Emily had to check on everyone else.
If she could find them.
She ducked her head into the room she and Luci had been given but the bed was empty. Joel and Zac’s room was empty as well. She checked the store room where they’d first huddled together and didn’t see anyone there either. But when she listened she could hear sounds coming from the main part of the apartment. She followed her ears and found humans and aliens all gathered in the kitchen area, standing at the counter and watching as Oz put down a steaming plate of something.
It didn’t smell like gruel.
He looked up and smiled at her and Emily wished her body didn’t respond. Even if the whole buying her thing had been a misunderstanding, he was a freaking alien. One of the same species who had been performing experiments on her for months! She couldn’t trust him.
That’s not fair, her thoughts whispered. She’d be outraged if someone thought the same about her just because some humans somewhere did shitty things. She wasn’t going to be some alien racist about this.
But she still remembered what it felt like to be strapped down to that bed while they pumped her full of electricity. She still remembered the despair when Oz offered a paltry sum to buy her freedom.
“Are you hungry?” he asked. His smile had dimmed a little, as if he could look into her head and read the shape of her thoughts. The hint of fang peeking out from under his lips was a reminder of just how alien he was.
She didn’t want this to become a thing. Oz and Solan were helping them now and they didn’t have to. Hopefully they’d be able to find a space ship to send them home. She didn’t need to let this toxic resentment grow within her until it poisoned her against everything. So she forced the emotions down, forced it all away.
She could do this.
And she was hungry.
“What are you eating?” she asked, walking up and slinging her arm around Luci, holding her close.
The girl groaned as she ate half of what looked like a dumpling. “It’s so good,” she said. Or that’s what Emily thought she said around the glob of food in her mouth.
“It has actual texture,” Zac added, eating a bit more delicately. “And spices.” Joel was too busy wolfing down his portion to say anything.
Oz put some of the dumpling things on a plate and pushed it towards her. Emily looked for a spoon or something, but everyone else was eating with their fingers so she dug in.
Oh god.
It was better than sex. Okay, it was better than she assumed sex was like. She’d been too busy to get around to it back on Earth and she’d been a bit preoccupied since then. Flavor exploded in her mouth, juice and meat and delicious. She stuffed the rest of the thing in and barely bothered to chew. Then she took another, trying for a bit of decorum.
It didn’t work.
She only realized that there was something dribbling down her chin when Oz offered her a napkin. Her cheeks flamed and she quickly wiped away the evidence of her animalistic eating. The next dumpling she ate like a civilized person, and even though she was still hungry when that one was done she forced herself not to immediately reach for another. She dabbed daintily at her lips and gave Oz a grin. “Those are good.”
He smiled and it was like the sunrise, bright and a little overwhelming. “It’s nothing. I figured you could all use a meal.”
“It’s something,” said Joel, coming out of his own alien dumpling-infused haze. “The shit they were feeding us barely counts as food.”
Emily shuddered to think about it.
Oz made more dumplings.
It was a good breakfast. Sure there were no bacon and eggs, but Emily could live with that, especially if Oz had culinary skills like this. But eventually they had to face reality. She explained what Oz had told her about the Matching stuff and how he thought the Apsyns wanted to somehow steal those capabilities from humans. He watched quietly as he cleaned up the kitchen, neither interrupting her nor contradicting her, though he did add some context when she didn’t know the full story.
The others had questions. Emily couldn’t answer most of them. Oz did what he could, but the fact remained that they were still a group of escaped humans, one of them comatose, a long way from home with no way to get back.
Yet.
Emily remembered what her shitty little law school apartment looked like and she wanted it back so bad she could cry. The walls had been paper thin. Her neighbors seemed to breathe pot smoke rather than air, and she had to studiously ignore the scratching she heard in the walls. But it had been hers and she’d earned it.
Oz’s hand covered hers. “Are you alright?” he asked.
The others were talking amongst themselves, not intentionally giving her and Oz privacy, but it happened nonetheless. “I had a life, you know.” She shouldn’t dump this on him. He didn’t need her baggage. But now that she was feeling safe for the first time in months it wanted to burst out. She’d been too focused on survival to really think about all that had been taken from her. “As soon as I pass the bar I’m supposed to become an associate at the firm I clerk for. A real job. A real life.”
Oz came around the counter and stood next to her, his hand landin
g on her shoulder. “I’m not sure what all that means, but if I could give it back to you, I would. I’d do anything for you... to feel safe.” That last bit was tacked on quickly and Emily decided not to dwell.
“Do you have lawyers here?” she asked. “People who study the law?” She couldn’t imagine a world without it. How could people protect themselves if they didn’t know the law?
“We have lawyers,” Oz assured her. “But I’m not sure what bars have to do with anything.”
She couldn’t help the little laugh that escaped. “So far there’s been a lot of drinking involved.”
He squeezed her shoulder gently. “How does a lawyer in training learn to do the tricks you performed? I can’t say that I see how the two go together, though I’m not particularly familiar with Earth’s customs.”
“Trials would probably be more entertaining if we had to flip our way through them,” Emily mused. Though she couldn’t imagine all the training necessary on top of her soon to be required billing. “No, I was a gymnast when I was young. All through my childhood. I wanted to be an Olympian. Never quite got there, though I did medal in state in high school. Even made it to Nationals once.” But never to the top of the top. She shouldn’t feel bad about that, she knew. But even her parents hadn’t been able to hide their disappointment at her constant failure to go all the way.
“There are more words in there I don’t understand,” Oz said. “But it sounds like this was something competitive for you? That you loved?”
Did she love it? She’d felt so free when she gave it up, when she realized her body didn’t have to hurt all the time and she could actually have free time. But then she remembered what it felt like to soar through the air. That was another kind of freedom.
“I did love it,” she said. “But I couldn’t do it forever.”
Solan called Oz away and Emily was relieved. She didn’t want to get in too deep, but the longer he was around, the more she was sure it was going to happen.
