Lost in Amber

by Esther Rabbit

  It scared her witless to realize how much of her sanity she’d put in James’s hands. She’d been a string puppet abandoning everything into hands that were no longer there. Zoey needed her life back, she needed to be her own person, not somebody’s girlfriend, somebody’s workmate, somebody’s neighbor.

  She wrapped herself in her pale green bathrobe and her pulsing, bleeding head in a pink towel, and strolled to the living room after her purse. She stepped firmly on the wooden floor this time.

  To hell with panic and fear. If she lived to see another day, she wouldn’t do it as a coward. She did not want to be that person anymore. The world shall not belong to the meek, but to the brave and mighty. So with great determination, she dug through her purse and pulled out her phone to text Sam and spun around to set herself on the couch.

  Heat rose in her chest as she eyed the couch and gasped, phone slipping through her fingers the second she forgot to breathe. Jasper was sitting on her couch, elbows on his knees, his torso leaning forward inquisitively, amber eyes piercing through her.

  Zoey had dropped her phone yet failed to hear it crash against the floor, so she looked down, mapping the surroundings. Her phone was still in the air, two fingers away from the wooden floor, frozen in thin air like she had been a few moments ago.

  “Are you gonna reach for your phone anytime soon?” Jasper asked matter-of-factly from the comfort of her couch.

  She swung to get it and hid behind the couch closer to her.

  So much for the mighty bravery. “Are you here to finish the job and ‘take care of me’?” she asked in a small voice.

  “I am here because you’re hurt and probably confused. And you left your apartment door unlocked. So, on a subconscious level, I think you wanted me to come after you.”

  “Are you a magician? Are you here to prove a point? Because this is not funny,” Zoey communicated from behind the couch.

  Jasper stood up and slid his hands into the back pockets of his pants. “The answers are, ‘it’s complicated’ and ‘no.’”

  “Go away!” Zoey warned as she heard his footsteps getting closer to her.

  He leaned to see her back propped against the couch, knees to her chest, holding the pink towel that had been on her head close to her heart, wet curls sticking to her face, green eyes staring back at him.

  He doesn’t sound like a menacing psychopath, but psychopaths are intelligent—luring their victims into thinking they’re safe, acting in cold blood.

  “Please,” he said. “I can see you have an open wound, you bled all over your towel. I could just freeze you again, heal you, and disappear, but you’d live the rest of your life wondering who I was and roaming the Earth after me.” He smiled and extended a hand.

  “I thought you were catching up on your sleep.” she muttered under her breath.

  “No such luck. I can’t sleep with a guilty conscience. C’mon!” A hand awaited to pull her to her feet.

  In all the times she’d seen him in the elevator, he’d rarely even whispered good morning. Instead, he was either reading or fiddling with his smartwatch, unlike their other neighbors, who were chatty and pleasant, who refreshed their lipstick or tightened their ties in the mirror while making pleasant small talk. The one time she thought about striking up a conversation besides the obvious elevator greeting was last Halloween, when she asked him if he had plans for the evening. She was holding two large boxes filled to the brim with wannabe-creepy crafts, and he just said “Halloween is for children.” It served her enough to label him as outdated and astoundingly boring. She’d never tried since.

  “How are you planning on ‘healing’ me? Do you have a license?” Zoey did not want to detach her back from the couch and pushed herself further in when she saw him walking towards her with his outstretched hand. He was now in the space between the kitchen counter and her couch, crouching until he met her gaze and, for the second time tonight, froze her in place.

  “You could say that.” He smirked and she felt his hand reaching to cradle the back of her head, settling on the wound.

  Whatever he was doing felt like warm, pulsing light. She couldn’t exactly see it, but it felt like a light heartbeat. It was uncomfortable having a man she didn’t know so close to her, feeling his breath and hand in her hair. Not being able to move. Again.

  And then she was suddenly free. He’d restored her back but somehow, she couldn’t bring herself to look at him, so she looked down instead, searching the wooden floor with her eyes.

  The pain was gone. The pulsing warmth had ceased as well, so she studied his poreless skin and defined jawline, the corner of his lips slightly turned upward and eyelashes the color of sand. He fixed her with his eyes and grinned.

  “All done.” Jasper slowly untangled his fingers from her hair and traced another finger on her forehead. “You will forget everything that happened,” he said, looking into her eyes, observing her every feature. In all his training years not even once had he encountered a subject to resist his skills. Her green eyes stared wide. It wasn’t working and this could only mean one thing.

  “Up you go.” He took her hand to pull her up from the floor.

  “It’s…gone,” she said, touching the back of her head. “I don’t feel it anymore. How…?”

  “I think you’d better sit down.” His head dropped in resignation. He knew it right then, crystal clear.

  Zoey took a seat and watched him as he went from thought to thought, debating with himself. He was uneasy, and so was she, pressing her hands together while taking a chance at the unknown.

  “Well?”

  He stopped and took a seat on the couch next to her. Concern clouded his every feature as he braced to speak.

  “The world as you know it will change, you’ll change with it, and you’ll remember it all because you can’t forget. I have to show you something first.” He moved toward her window, pushing the curtains aside.

  γ

  “Let the fuck go of me!” Sam awoke to find herself being carried down a dark hallway by two men in white uniforms. It looked like she was either in a hospital or the likes, frantically trying to fight their grasp, jerking her every joint in an attempt to set herself free. They had grabbed her by the arms, lifting her as she fought the tide. Panting, exhausted, she felt them pulling at her flesh to steady her.

  “Why are you doing this? What the fuck is going on? Do you all work for that creep?” she screamed, but her questions remained unanswered as they reached a door. She propped her aching legs on either side of door frame as the men pushed her in violently. They kept silent while dropping her on the freezing floor and locking the door from the outside. The tiles were filthy and grey, broken in some places, missing entirely in others. It was too dark to make sense of the whole room, but that did not keep her from trying. Sam twisted her fists in anger and slammed the floor as she gave out a broken cry. She was not broken, just bruised and scraped and angry out of her mind. They picked the wrong day to mess with her, whatever their plans were. Whether they wanted to harvest her organs or sell her into human trafficking, she was ready to fight back. To think what kind of creeps went to speed dating and for what means revolted all the nerves in her body. Creeps feeding on desperate women who were only looking for hope—and she had been one of them. How did she allow herself to succumb to this madness? To trust a random guy calling himself Sam, to come home with him…?

  She raised her head in panic, realizing that was not how it went at all. She was still in a daze, her mind fighting to clear the fog. He’d broken into her apartment. She’d tried to attack him with a knife. He’d taken the knife off her without touching an inch of her body and lifted her off the ground as if she were on strings. He had been toying with her brain. In a swift move, she lifted her dark hair into a bun, removing all the annoying strands stuck to her face.

  Focus! That’s what she needed most if she was going to come out alive. She examined the dark room, the small window with metal bars above what looked like a b
ed. A shabby, torn-out bed with worn-out covers and nothing else. It was too dark to map out every single detail, but she kept searching for a weapon, something, anything she could possibly grab and hit with. The floor felt greasy and stained her fingers in her avid search. There was no time to waste on details, but fight to get her life back. That very life that felt off just days ago. Everything she held dear went through her mind: the image of her dad, his eagerness to take her fishing when she was only twelve, and his desperate attempts to shape her into the son he never had. He had taught her everything she’d later use in life. He’d taught her that persistence is success and failure is just an excuse for people too lazy to keep trying, he’d taught her to play poker and win, and to skin hares after he went hunting, although she was not too proud of the latter. Survival skills. And all the cells in her body worked to help her pull through as she lowered her hand to touch the only possible weapon in the room: her belt.

  γ

  Zoey came closer to Jasper and stared out the window.

  “What am I looking at?” She aimlessly tried to figure out if his eyes had been fixed on the restaurant in front of her building or the sidewalk where teens were crowding, exchanging cigarettes.

  “We’re clear,” Jasper said, turning to face her after mapping the street. They were standing at an arm’s length from each other, her arms crossed and eyebrows raised.

  “Now have a seat.”

  She did just as instructed and never took her eyes off him as she sank onto the couch facing her front door. He was standing in front of her, coffee table between them, but the look on his face gave away that he wished to be anywhere else. He tensed and then somehow straightened his shoulders, pushing himself out of his thoughts and into the now, like an athlete getting ready for performance. He rubbed his hands together and took a straight pose, tilting his head slightly back. Zoey kept watching as he arched his fingers, that were now covered in spots of pulsing light, almost like beaming stars. She felt her throat dry in an instant. With the move of a finger, the cushions detached themselves from her couch, floating over her head, twisting in slow motion. She covered her mouth with one hand and clutched her knees to her chest with the other. Every small object in her living room was now in the air: her stationery, her purse with its contents floating out, dancing their way up. Then went her keys, her crayons spread all over the room in a lingering drift along with her wallet, her tampons…

  Her tampons!

  She glanced in panic, not knowing exactly what to do with the goosebumps, her pounding heartbeat and the sight of her most intimate belongings floating in plain sight.

  The crayons invaded the space between her and Jasper, but he never broke eye contact. She stood up, mouth open, and gently lifted her hand to get ahold of a crayon. It was real, everything she was witnessing was as real as the bathrobe wrapping her shaking insides. She glanced back at him, his expression stern and distant, yet, somehow—compassionate?

  “You can call me Jasper, it’s my Earth-given name. Where I come from our names are slightly different, and it would be difficult to explain in Earthly terms. Imagine a soundwave or a certain personal frequency you feel inside when someone is calling you. Our names don’t have actual sounds to them.” He saw her expression, alert and curious, crayons still lingering between them.

  “You’re an alien?!” she got all struck and flustered, acknowledging the sight of him and taking it all in. It was hard to fathom how just hours ago everything had unpaired logic compared to the happenings between the 2nd and 3rd floor.

  “I could say the same about you, you’re pretty alien to me as well.” The corners of his mouth went up with slight amusement. “You use language for everything, you paint your nails and adorn your hair with things you don’t need, your bedtime stories for children are terrifying—yet you have no idea what happens beyond your country, let alone your planet…” He rolled his eyes at her, seemingly amused.

  She needed more time to take it all in, to process and separate all the information she was receiving. Her breath stopped short. If panic had shades, they’d all be shining on her face.

  “Why are you here? Why can you lift things? Are you reading my mind? Do you feed on cats?” She asked without even breathing.

  “I think the first thing you should know is that I am not here to harm you nor your planet in any way, but all the opposite. And the cat incident was just that—an incident. I don’t know if you’re ready to hear it all at once, but, to put it in simple, less glamorous words, we have certain perks. Life on your planet started over three and a half billion years ago; life on ours started over eleven billion years ago, so we’ve had time to work on our skills, our tech is slightly different, and for generations we have been born with extra sensorial gifts—telekinesis, among others. Parents can choose lifelines for their kids, enhanced skills. Our course is chosen before we are born, and we get the necessary gifts to carry it through depending on how the percentage of each skill grows during our development. I cannot read your mind, nor would I like to. As a species, plainly speaking, you are at the beginning of the road and we are somewhere in the middle by comparison.”

  “How can your profession be chosen for you? Is there no free will? Are all your paths, your destinies, already written?”

  “Destiny is something you still believe in because you run on hope and you do not possess the tech to show you otherwise. You only recently found out the sex of your babies before insemination.”

  “You can do that?! I mean here, on Earth?”

  “It’s still considered unethical and immoral to choose, but scientists can tell the sex of an embryo before insemination. But I have no time to take you that far back and answer all your Earth-versus-Opt questions. We’ve got more pressing matters at hand.”

  “Do you actually look like we do, or is this the form you take on our Earth?” Zoey’s questions kept coming. Contrary to his expectations, she was handling it better than he imagined. There was no fainting, no partial facial paralysis, no attempt to run for her life.

  “We look exactly like you at first glance, we get angry, we have kids, we love, we go to work, only it’s slightly different. I mean, if you think about how people lived like here in the ’30s, ’50s, ’80s, that’s very different from the reality you know today, isn’t it? And it’s not even that far off from where you’re standing.”

  He paused to see her stunned, wrapped in her robe and staring wide eyed at the floating miracle happening before her eyes. He was right, so right that it scared her. Her mom didn’t grow attached to a smartphone, nor was a tablet an extension of one’s personality, like in Sam’s case. Jasper could see the questions forming in her mind, too many to voice…

  “If you were going to ask what the future brings, I don’t know. The choices are all your own, and we took some different ones when we were at your stage, but you are far from joining the Interplanetary Alliance, I can tell you this much. The closest thing you have to that is the European Union— united countries for common benefits.” He saw the way she stopped to process things, connecting the dots. “What I mean is, the Interplanetary Alliance is a union of technologically and intellectually developed planets, and my mission here is to surveil and report the evolution of Earth as you’re in your primary development stages.” That alone should have offered some sort of relief, yet her face said differently.

  “And yet here you are, a superior species in my very rudimentary living room, telling me all this! What for?” she snapped.

  “Because you’re the one who can’t forget, and I have known about your existence for some time.”

  γ

  Emma twisted in her sheets, sprawling her arms and legs all over the bed. This was madness. The alarm clock read 4:05 a.m. and she could not lose another night of sleep over Frank. She turned onto her side, hugging the pillow, angry at herself for allowing him to take up so much space in her head.

  Saturday morning should not look like this.

  Somehow, she’d been expe
cting life to improve with the years. After thirty the rollercoaster should have been over and done with. She remembered all the heartfelt advice she gave her clients: when you went through a divorce, the last thing you needed to do was to give yourself time to mope over it, you had to push yourself with all your senses to do things, keep busy, try things you hadn’t before, make new friends, get a haircut, rediscover yourself through life and mend the cracks in your system with new experiences.

  Sam’s solution to all man-made problems was releasing endorphins, and Emma was quick to respond to the challenge and give CrossFit a chance at 9 a.m. today.

  She reached for her phone; after all, Sam was an early birdie just like herself.

  Pick you up for coffee after you shower?

  It was way too early for Sam to be awake; nevertheless, Emma was going to present her with a plan—she was going to take charge. For herself and for her friends, she had to take an active role.

  Thirty minutes later, she was still trying to remember her Facebook password, reliving the last time she had used it.

  γ

  Sam hid behind the door, belt tightly wrapped around her hands, ready to choke the first person who opened it. She tensed as she heard movement outside the door and readied herself for what was to come. She heard steps coming to a halt and keys working their way into the lock, jangling against all that silence. The door sprung open to reveal the same two men who’d put her there in the first place. She tensed and bolted for one of them, clenching the belt around his throat and pulling with all the muscles in her body as the other man grabbed at her legs and punched her in the back. The man she was trying to choke crumbled beneath her. It was working and she was not letting go. Even barefoot she kicked the other one in the face as she struggled to allow air into her lungs. He had punched her hard.

  This was it—now or never. She jumped to the side and started running down the long, narrow corridor toward the door at the other end, barefoot but determined as adrenaline took over the mix of pain, exhaustion, and fear. Wine from the bottle she’d dropped by the fridge still stained her toes and pants. The men were now running after her in their white robes, soles screeching on the tiles in their sprint. She slammed herself at the doors and pushed through with every living fiber in her body.