by Roxie Ray
I could barely breathe, let alone think.
As the edges of my sight started to fade into black, though, I felt something—or someone—yanking on my door. It made a little flutter of hope shoot through me right before I passed out.
Whoever this stranger was, I was their problem now.
1
Sawyer
It was like waking up from a dream into another dream into another dream. All around me were blurs of light, noises—occasionally, even touch. At first, I was too lethargic and disoriented to even react to the sensations, but as an icy cold splash of water crashed down on my chest, I forced myself to move my hands so I could shield my face.
Or at least, I tried. But something held me back—either paralysis, or some kind of bondage, and in the haze of my semi-consciousness, I couldn’t figure out which reality would be worse.
I didn’t know how long I had been out for. There was no way to develop any sense of time at all. Separating reality from nightmares was equally impossible. At one point, I was in a white room, shivering and strapped to a table. It could have been a hospital, except for the fact that I was naked—naked, and I was pretty sure someone squeezed my left breast. At another point, I was upright, surrounded by a blue glow that whirred around me like a CAT scan—only, to my knowledge, they didn’t conduct those with the patient’s hands locked into metal cylinders that clamped down tightly around my wrists.
Consciousness ebbed and flowed like a drought-stricken river for what could have been days, weeks, months—I had no way of knowing. But finally, when I was able to sink my teeth into it, I wrenched my eyes open and made sure not to let go.
It wasn’t just a desire to be awake that I’d grabbed hold of though, I quickly realized. It was the sound of crying that I finally latched onto until it guided me back into the real world again. Wailing would have brought me to even quicker. My ears were well attuned to the shrieking of children on the playground when they’d fallen off the swing set or tripped and skinned a knee. But this wasn’t like that—no, it was soft, gentle sobbing. The kind that I heard from kids when they’d been bullied. Broken. When they’d lost all hope for ever being happy again.
And once again, I didn’t know which was worse.
The ground beneath me was rough and deep black, as were the walls. The only light source to be found was far enough away that it barely even cast a glow—and to my horror, between me and it were a set of heavy-looking metal bars. The solid kind.
I was in a jail cell. That much was quickly apparent. And though I was the only person in my particular cell, from the sniffles and sobs that echoed all around me, I could tell that I wasn’t the only one interned here.
I didn’t know if that gave me comfort or just made me even more scared.
There was a gown wrapped around me, dirty and grayish. It was so thin that when I looked down, I could see my nipples through the fabric—someone had obviously removed my clothes and determined that I didn’t need a bra. I just wished they would have given me a coat or a blanket or something to make up for it. The cell was too cold to be dressed the way I was. I heard a chattering and realized it was my teeth clacking against each other. When I exhaled, my breath billowed around me like smoke.
Cold, all but naked, incarcerated and alone. All things considered, it wasn’t exactly how I thought I’d wake up from—
Crap. I couldn’t even remember the last thing I remembered. My head felt heavy, like I’d had too many drinks at one of Aiden’s fancy dinner parties, and my mind felt like it was operating on its last few brain cells. There were only two of them left, and they were terrified.
I gulped, my throat felt like sandpaper.
They were terrified, and so was I.
“Hello?” I called out. My voice sounded as scratchy as it felt. My tongue might as well have been made of lead. But I wasn’t going to get answers by staying quiet. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
Suddenly, the sound of crying all around me lessened by one. There was a sniffle, then an awkward shuffling in the darkness of the cell across from me. But no matter how hard I squinted, I could only make out the shadowed form of a person—either very short, or on their knees.
“Hello? Do you know where we are?” I scrambled forward, too, wincing as my metal cuffs clanged against the bars of my cell. “Can you help me? I don’t know what I’ve done, but—”
“You haven’t done anything,” a female voice rasped from the other cell. “But that’s not what you should be worried about.”
“What do you mean?” I blinked, trying to make out the woman’s shape a little more clearly, but there was no use. It was just too dark. “Where are we? Who put us here?”
Just barely, I could make out an eager nod. “Yes. That’s what you should be worried about. It’s not what you’ve done—it’s what they’re going to do.”
A shiver trickled down my spine. As far as reassuring words went, those were pretty bottom of the barrel. But wherever I was and whatever was going to be done to me, this cryptic figure was the only help I had right now. I’d have to do my best to glean from her what I could so I could find a way out of this mess.
“There’s been some kind of misunderstanding, obviously.” I licked my lips and put on my best teacher voice, the one that I used to find out who’d been flushing their underwear down the toilet or which one of my students had eaten all the green crayons. “My name is Sawyer Aniston. I don’t belong here, and I’m sure you don’t either. But to sort this out, I need you to tell me where we are and who you’re so worried about. I’m certain that if you allow me to speak with them, I’ll be able to get us both out of here in no time at all.”
Instead of an answer that time, the woman returned my questions with a maddened cackle.
Uh-oh. That couldn’t be good. Had Aiden pulled some strings and gotten me thrown into a loony bin? I’d never thought he could do something so malicious, but then again, I’d never thought he’d end up cheating on me with his best friend, either.
“Um,” I said as the cackle died out. “Was it something I said?”
“There’s no getting out of here, Sawyer Aniston,” the woman snapped back at me. Suddenly, she lunged at the bars, thrusting her face into just enough light that I could see bruises, a split lip, and a missing tooth. I could see blood. “You’re a sex slave now.”
I tumbled backward at the sight of her to the sound of more insane giggling. Some of the blood on the woman’s face was dried, crusted over, black with age and dirt—but some of it was fresh, like it had just been drawn. I could see why she was mad now. Someone had beaten her, badly, and so often that all of her bruises and black eyes faded in and out, crossing over each other like a gruesome watercolor.
But the woman had been right, too. I was concerning myself with the wrong things right now. The right concern—the most important one—lay within those two words.
Sex slave.
I clenched my eyes shut immediately. My heart was racing now, pushing all of whatever sedative must have been keeping me unconscious for all of this time out of my veins. But that wasn’t what I wanted now—not at all. I wanted to go back to sleep. I wanted to wake up in a nice, safe hospital bed with a mild concussion and my parents there by my side.
At first, I’d thought I was dreaming, but this was no dream. This was an outright nightmare.
But no matter how hard I tried to sink back into sleep, it didn’t come. There was no waking up from this—I was already awake.
This was real.
Which meant I had to keep pushing for information from the madwoman, crazy or not.
“Sex slave to who?” I asked, shuffling back towards the bars. “Is this some kind of…underground gold-class thing?” I bit my lip, thinking fast. Aiden might not have been my fiancé anymore, but when I looked down at my finger, his ring was still on it. “Please. My husband is a prominent businessman. He’d be horrified if he found out I was being kept here. He knows journalists, too. There will be people looking for me.
If you could tell me who to talk to, I’m sure I can make them see sense.” I didn’t exactly love the idea of hitching myself to this woman, especially with the way she howled in laughter at every single word I said, but I felt bad for her, too. She’d been hurt. Terribly. As much as I needed her for information, I also knew I couldn’t, in good conscience, leave her in this awful place. “I can get us both out. Do you understand me? Tell me who I need to talk to and I’ll make sure they let you out with me.”
It was a reasonable offer, as far as I was concerned. But to the madwoman, it was apparently just the most hilarious thing I’d said yet.
“Bargaining? With them?” The woman threw her head back, roaring with laughter now. “Sawyer Aniston, you poor, naive child. They don’t care who your husband is. They don’t care about anything at all.”
“Who are they?” I pleaded with her. “Please—”
“Aliens,” the woman hissed. “Aliens—and they don’t give a single intergalactic shit about you or what you want.”
Aliens. It was the craziest thing she’d said yet. Aliens were conspiracy theory nonsense, just like Sector Seven where everyone joked that the sectors were carrying out human experiments and creating portals through space and time.
Aliens couldn’t be behind this, because frankly, aliens didn’t exist. But when I told the woman as much, I only got more giggling in return. I considered myself a pretty patient person, but admittedly, the way she was laughing was really starting to get on my nerves.
“Look, can you please just cut the tinfoil hat business and tell me—”
“I did tell you,” the woman barked—but then a clang echoed down the hall and her voice dropped to a hiss. “But if you don’t believe me, why don’t you just ask him.”
Footsteps followed the clanging noise. Big, heavy footsteps—the kind that only a big, solid nightclub bouncer or a gold-class bodyguard could have made. The woman scrambled back into the darkness as they drew closer, but even though I was shaking, I forced my fingers through the bars and used them to pull myself up so I could peer out of them.
This was some kind of gold-class human trafficking racket. It had to be. And when whatever thug they’d sent down here to check up on us finally showed his ugly face, I’d show him what a mistake they’d made by bringing me here. I might have only been a kindergarten teacher, but no woman showed up to school every day to face down forty tantrum-throwing, glue-eating, overprivileged blue-class children without a little courage on her side. No matter how scared I felt on the inside, on the outside I’d have to be brave.
Unfortunately, that courage died in my chest as soon as I caught sight of the man coming my way.
He was impossibly tall. Impossibly broad. His body looked like it had been sculpted from stone, with more muscles on him than I could even count.
But that wasn’t the part that scared me.
No, the part that scared me were his horns, long, curved and sharp at each point like some kind of devil’s. The part that scared me was his skin, so fiercely red even in the low light that he looked like he’d been lacquered with bright, shiny paint.
The part that scared me was the yellow of his eyes as he bent down to level his gaze with mine. The searing heat of his breath as he sniffed me, then snorted in exhale. The resounding fury of his roar as he bellowed at me in a language that I didn’t understand—a language that didn’t even seem human.
Before, I’d tried to go back to sleep, but now I could feel my knees turning to jelly beneath me and all the blood in my head rushing away.
As I crashed to the floor, the last thought in my mind was that the madwoman and I had both been wrong. This wasn’t a gold-class human trafficking ring, and it wasn’t an alien spaceship, either.
This was hell—and the first demon I’d come across, I’d already managed to piss off.
2
Haelian
I paced along my columns of troops lined up in front of the Avant Lupinia. When I looked out across the ranks, I saw a reckoning.
Once, this ship and these men had been under the command of my greatest friend and ally, General Kloran, as he sought out a species in the galaxies that could mate with our own. Now that we had found one—the humans of Earth—the ship would be mine, and his men along with it in a new mission, far more dangerous than our last.
But as I searched for the right words to address them with for my first time as general, I struggled to know exactly what to say. It was no longer just the future of our species that was on the line—there were other lives at stake now.
Human lives. Lives that I was asking my men to sacrifice their own wellbeing to protect and defend.
“We know well who the Rutharians are,” I called out across the columns. Identify the enemy. It wasn’t my most inspiring beginning, but it was a start. “They are named for their ruthlessness, but their actions speak far more loudly than any single word could convey.”
I scanned the faces of the men before me. I was happy to see Nion among them—a young warrior, barely old enough to be considered anything more than a cub at age twenty-one, but a veteran just the same. He had fought the Rutharians in skirmishes across the galaxies already and nearly lost his leg in the process. Had it not been for the careful attention Kloran’s mate and wife, Bria, he would not be standing here, whole and ready to fight again. For Nion and his squad, an explanation of the Rutharians was not necessary. But what we were fighting them for this time—that, I knew, would require a little more information.
“The rules set in place by the slave trade commission have been broken.” I tucked my hands behind my back as I about-faced. “Time and time again, the Rutharians have stolen otherwise willing breeding slaves from reputable auction houses. They have forced them into servitude beyond any contract that the commission would approve. They use these stolen slaves, not for breeding, but for pleasure. Forced mating. Rape.”
I let the word ring out, knowing that it would be one to make the men’s bloods boil together as one. As I scanned their faces now, I saw several sets of purple eyes turn a shade of red at the very mention of it. Rape was an unforgivable offense all the galaxies wide, but especially to we Lunarian men. Even without sufficient Lunarian females to mate with, not one among us would even consider committing such an atrocity.
But this, too, they all knew of. Rutharians were not simply ruthless in battle—they were ruthless in all aspects of their lives. For too long, the commission had been unable to keep their plundering ways in check. But finally, the Rutharians had gone too far for us to possibly ignore.
“And now, with the future of our species hanging in the balance, we have new information that has finally forced the high council to allow us to act against the Rutharians openly, with every bit of the ruthlessness they have shown us for all these years.”
It had been a long shot, of course, but between Kloran and myself, we had managed to spur the Lunarian High Council to a unanimous vote on the matter. Toward the back of the ranks, I spotted Kloran with his arm around Bria. Their cub, Kaliope, was cradled safely in Bria’s arms—all the proof we needed that humans and Lunarians could interbreed our species into one.
“We now know that human females are suitable mates for our men, if they will have us. But their home planet, Earth, is not aware of other life throughout the galaxies.” A murmur of discontent fluttered through our ranks like an incoming tide. “This poses a problem for us, of course—but a more pressing issue still is the one that has been laid at our feet by the rogue slavers who captured General Kloran’s own bride, Bria, from Earth.”
I stopped in the center of the columns and drew myself up to my full height.
The next thing I told my men, I knew, would make every set of eyes before me turn the shade of freshly spilled blood.
“Human females have been torn from their homes by these slavers. Hundreds, perhaps more. And the bulk of these women, we now know, have been handed over to the Rutharians. Treated like livestock. Subjected to every horror those s
nakes could possibly imagine. As I said, our people can successfully interbreed with human females. If they will have us.” I paused, knowing the full weight of my words now. “But the Rutharians do not care whether these poor, helpless females will have them or not. They only know how to take. Steal. Inflict pain and destroy.”
A growl rose up from the ranks, a hundred snarls slowly churning into one. From the back, Kloran gave me an approving nod.
And as I suspected, every set of eyes I looked into was red as a dying sun.
“It is our mission to retrieve these females. To ensure that they are given safe passage home—or, if they would prefer it, to live among us. To be given a new lease on life. But before I am able to lead you on this mission, I must know for certain…” I raised my voice up into a roar of my own. “Will you fight for these females?”
Again, a hundred snarls spoke as one. “Yes!”
“Will you give your lives, if you must, to see that they are rescued from Rutharian brutality?”
“Yes!” This time, the affirmation was even louder than before.
“And when our mission is done, will you do all that is in your power to ensure that no act so sinister as this will ever come about to the galaxies again?”
There was no singular yes to be had this time—only a hundred war cries of two dozen different houses or more, rising up like a wildfire that had caught in the heart of every last man.
I held my hand up to them all in salute. It was all I had needed to know.
“Then let us give these baz-terds the justice that they have for far too long deserved!”
Amidst the roars and snarls of battle this time, I caught a small smile flicker across Bria’s face. Baz-terds—a human word. One that she had taught Kloran, and Kloran had taught our people. It was becoming a favorite amongst our warriors especially, though few of them had any idea what it really meant.