by Emma Vance
“I forget what its like to not know anything about this place. Clio, the blue alien female you just met, was nice in comparison to what you will deal with. To not know what would happen if you didn’t give in. If you don’t follow the rules, you will die. It’s that simple. They won’t keep you around. They won’t beat you. Humans are expensive, but Stryxx’s reputation is worth more. And having a pleasure female who tries to escape? That is more damaging than simply killing you all and buying new women.” She toyed with the fabric folded across her chest, not seeming to care that it basically revealed her entire body. “I understand,” she continued. “I was like you, once. Believe it or not I wanted to escape too.” Nisha looked thoughtful.
“Maybe we should show them,” Mei added. “Maybe then they will get it.”
“Nothing will change my mind,” I said, chin lifting. “I won’t be staying here.”
Some of the women who just woke up were huddled together and one or two were still rubbing their eyes as if in a dream. Maybe it all was a dram. I pinched myself hard on the arm just in case.
Nope, still about to be an alien sex slave.
“You need to bathe,” Nisha said, her voice weary. “Likely use the bathroom. Eat. Once that has been accomplished, Kat, Mei and I will take you around and show you everything. It’s important you know as much as you can before making any decision that may affect your life.” Nisha’s eyes slid over us as if she didn’t want to see us. Or like she was seeing someone else.
But I didn’t care if she was being a cold bitch. A tour could help me find a way to escape, if I could shake these guards.
I looked over at the large male guards haunting the tent. They were like sculptures, clothed in golden plates with only a bit of their forearm exposed. I couldn’t imagine how hot they must be in that get-up, like a chicken in a roasting pan. The guards looked like a drawing of a soldier you would see on the side of an Egyptian pot—muscled, faceless warriors. Their still silence made me the most nervous out of everything so far. I wondered how I could get past them when they seemed to be everywhere.
Well, I would just have to figure something out. There was no way I was staying here and accepting this fate. Not without a fight.
Chapter Four
Beatrice
Nisha led us to a large, polished pool that looked like Roman marble bathing houses I’d seen in a book from my college art history class. We were all expected to bathe together in the cerulean water and some of the girls were squeamish about that.
Not me.
Growing up in over-crowded foster home after over-crowded foster home meant I didn’t have any issues with privacy or the lack thereof. I was a little suspicious that they were getting us naked in order to take advantage of us though, so I washed fast, scrubbing my body with a rough quickness that made me wince.
Pippa flat out refused to wash, but Hazel was next to me, going just as quickly. Washing the dirt, sweat and smell off felt great, and I don’t know why, but being clean made me a little bit more confident about getting out of here. Like I felt more like a person.
We were given this weird alien food that was like eating an overcooked bowl of pasta, with grey chewy bits I didn’t want to ask about. It wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever eaten, and I needed to keep my strength up.
Pippa looked suspiciously at it when the food arrived.
“I promise it isn’t drugged,” Nisha said. “I’ll tell you when things are drugged.”
I glanced up at Nisha in alarm. The tone of her voice was conversational, like things were drugged often. But looking at Nisha now, I saw some of the cracks I wanted to see earlier. This girl wasn’t calm and complacent. She was wearier than anyone I’d ever seen. Her eyes were pinched at the sides, mouth tensed as if it was like that perpetually. She didn’t seem like she was lying or manipulating us. Just resigned.
Then again, I’d been screwed over in the past by trusting people I shouldn’t have before. When you were in foster care, you learned never to rely on anyone. You only looked out for yourself.
“Nisha, no offence, but why should we believe you?” I asked, and a few other women turned their heads to look my way. “We don’t know you, we don’t even know if you are really human. I mean, you could be a robot or something. At this point, I’d believe anything. All I know is that you seem like you’ve got an extreme case of Stockholm syndrome and it isn’t rubbing off on me.”
Nisha leaned back in her chair and smiled, the first major movement of her lips that wasn’t a bland, noncommittal expression.
“It feels good to talk to other humans. We haven’t seen new ones in so long. I’m from Denver, actually, so I’m definitely human. I don’t think a robot would know about Denver.”
“San Diego,” I responded, my brows drawn together. I still wasn’t sure if I trusted her.
“I’m from Florida,” said Hazel, “Orlando.”
“Phoenix, not that it fucking matters right now,” muttered Pippa. The other girls went through a chorus of where they were from. One was from Maryland. One from Toronto. It felt like the most normal thing we could do.
“Now that’s done, do you want to tell me what you mean by ‘you’ll let us know which food is drugged’?” I pushed my half-eaten bowl of unknown-stringy-substance away.
“Some of the food and drink are. But it’s obvious what is, and they won’t slip it to you. From what I’ve gleaned, the blue female—Clio—is correct. This is actually a great place to be sold to, as strange as that sounds. The women don’t get beaten or hurt here generally. We are well-fed, clothed, and respected for the most part. They even give you a choice of whether or not you take the ‘sex-poison’.”
That made us all sit up a little straighter, and everyone was quiet.
Nisha smiled faintly, and it was anything but happy. “I didn’t call it that. A human named Sarah, who used to be here, coined the term. But it’s fairly apt.”
“What the fuck is sex poison?” shouted Pippa, breaking the hush around us.
“It’s lansian root tea. It helps you become aroused. But, if you take it, its effects are permanent. And you will need sexual release, with the help of a male, often. If you don’t get that release, then it becomes . . . bad.” Nisha swallowed, and her eyes grew shuttered, as if remembering something she’d rather not.
“Why would anyone voluntarily take that? It sounds like you are being roofied or something.” I shook my head. There was no way I was ingesting anything like that.
Mei cleared her throat. “It can make things a little easier.” She shrugged, folding her hands in her lap.
“Especially if your client is a fugly slug beast,” muttered Kat. Mei shot her a grateful look.
Good God.
I hadn’t even allowed myself to think what sort of alien creatures would frequent a sex planet, or the various kinds of aliens there were in the universe. But now, it was all my mind dwelled on.
Nisha led us to a sort of lounge area where other females sat on plush, maroon-colored couches. If I didn’t believe we were on another planet before, I believed it now.
We were surrounded by female aliens of every single color, permutation, shape, and size. Some of them I couldn’t tell where their eyes began and their mouths ended. There were many alien females like us though—humanoid. Maybe their skin was an unnatural color, or they had three boobs or something, but we looked fundamentally much the same, and we probably had the same parts.
“We are in the section known as the luxury gardens. This is where the ‘higher end’ females are kept,” Mei said, complete with air quotes.
“So, we are high-class sex slaves,” I commented, my voice dripping with sarcasm.
Pippa snorted.
We walked outside and into a botanical garden of sorts. Huge hedges were surrounded by brightly colored flowers and twisting vines. Elaborate fountains were dotted around stone walkways and other aliens were gathered around them, drinking and laughing with each other. It was the first time I had seen male
aliens other than the guards, and I found myself drifting closer to the other human women for safety. Some of the male aliens were scary looking—like fucked up half-human/half-elephants with green oozing fangs and rough-looking scaled skin. But some appeared normal. They would’ve passed for a human man, except for one would have whiskers, or a tail. Most of them watched us as we walked past, and I could feel their hungry gazes. But they didn’t try to touch us in any way.
Nisha and Kat spoke to a few other female aliens, who looked curiously at us.
Something occurred to me. “Nisha, how do we all speak the same language?”
“We don’t. You all had translator chips imbedded in your neck. They put it in when they captured you.” She tapped underneath her hairline.
My hands immediately went to the back of my neck. Sure enough, there was a small bump at the base of my neck.
“It’s not a bad thing, it just means you can understand what’s going on around you. Which is a good thing,” said Kat.
I wholeheartedly agreed—unless they used it to control us. “Does it have a tracker device in it?”
Nisha sighed. “I told you, there isn’t any way to escape from this planet anyway.”
She led us down another flowery pathway to a giant tented room with a large platform in the centre of it.
“This is where females entertain clients,” she said, as we all filed into the room.
“You mean get fucked by aliens against our will,” said Pippa.
It was clean, at least. But as I stood and looked at the large bed in the centre, I felt myself growing more and more sick. There was no way I’d be able to do this. I had to get out of here. Or die trying. I couldn’t live in a place where I had no control over my body, getting attacked every day by things that were not even human.
We walked down a long path that was lined with trees. The further we got the sparser the vegetation was, and the bleaker the planet felt. In the distance there was a giant curved stone wall as high as a sky scraper.
“So far, this feels like Arizona,” joked Pippa.
I followed the direction of her gaze. As far as you could see was golden earth, few plants, and a blinding, beating sun, that felt much hotter than the Earth’s. It would be much harder to run if we were surrounded by a barren wasteland. How could I escape when there was nowhere to escape to?
We got closer to the stone building, curved like a colosseum from ancient Rome. The more we moved towards it, the louder a distant roar grew. Like a stampede of a hundred animals pounding the earth at once.
When we were almost upon the building, I recognized it for what it was.
Cheering.
We approached an opening in the stone wall, which led to a long narrow staircase, going up.
Nisha turned to us. “Welcome to the pits.”
Chapter Five
Beatrice
Gladiators. We’d landed on a planet of sex slaves and fucking gladiators.
“So, let me get this straight. If we don’t behave, they just toss us in there?”
We peered over the edge of stone, watching an arena below. Hundreds of aliens fought in a large sandy area.
It was a bloody mess, the yellowed sand stained red.
There was every kind of alien you could imagine fighting in the pit below. Giants, beasts, something that resembled a cross between a squid and a lion—all engaged in a bloody, vicious battle. Various body parts were strewn about in the dirt. The crowd was screaming, jeering and going wild.
“Yes,” said Kat, so quietly I almost couldn’t hear her above the din. “They don’t give you a chance. You are thrown in unarmed. Sometimes the males kill you for sport before the real fighting begins. The crowd loves it.”
Kat shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. “We watched our friends, who tried to escape, killed this way. It was awful.”
We watched the battle in silence, the girls all clinging to each other, some with their mouths open, others with tears streaming down their faces.
I knew why these women didn’t try to escape, if this was the punishment.
But what was better? Living this life, or dying to get out of it?
Watching the gory scene below, I was afraid of what my answer was. I looked down at the handful of gladiators facing off with two dragon-like creatures, the size of hippos. The creatures lunged forward, tearing one of the males apart with a snap of its jaws. Another dragon-hippo flicked its thorny tail and skewered a gladiator in the chest.
The humans let out a collective gasp as one gladiator rushed the monster with a sword. But the dragon tore the gladiator’s arm off his body and then lunged at the male, crushing him underneath its scaly girth.
I wouldn’t last five minutes in there.
We left before the battle ended, when it was clear the creatures would win, and the gladiators would be massacred. Most of the women looked too stunned to speak.
My mind was whirring. I needed to escape, and I needed to make sure I wasn’t caught. Easier said than done.
The three women who lived on the planet continued to explain things on the way back to the luxury gardens.
“There are other areas where females have sex with clients besides the luxury gardens. In the gardens, the males choose the females. But there are some places on Stryxx where the females can choose the males.”
“Why would anyone ever go there?” Eve asked. She had been in the container too and seemed the calmest out of everyone. Her demeanor was more curious than afraid. It was weird.
“Different reasons,” Kat answered. “Sometimes because they drank sex poison and need release. But sometimes . . .” She hesitated and looked away, like she was thinking about something specific. “Sometimes it is nice to be able to choose for yourself. To be able to feel as if you are in control of your own life.”
“What’s in these other areas? The ones where females choose?” I asked, needing as much information as possible. Maybe I could find a way to escape from there.
“There are three different buildings,” Kat continued. “One is for the guards. It’s where they sleep, fuck and do everything else. Another building is like a ‘discount’ house where less wealthy patrons can frequent and pay less to spend the night with a female who chooses them. The final building is for the gladiators.”
“The gladiators get to have sex with the females?” I asked, my forehead puckering.
“Only if they are chosen by a female or given one by Bardoa or a patron. But that’s very rare.”
“Have any of you been to these places?” I had trouble understanding why anyone would choose to have sex with alien dudes if you were stolen and sold into slavery. But I guess we all had our own ways of dealing with shit.
Kat nodded. “We all have.”
I gaped at her and looked from one to the other. They didn’t seem like they were joking in the slightest.
“I’m sorry, girls, I’m out,” Pippa said with incredulous laughter, throwing her arms up in the air. “Like, what are we even doing right now? Talking about fucking gladiators and drinking sex poison tea? Kill me. I’m over it. I want to die.”
“That’s your choice to make,” Nisha said calmly. “If you give up, you give up.”
“Hey!” I admonished Nisha. “Don’t say that to her.” I turned to Pippa and put my hands on her shoulders. “No, you don’t want to die. None of us do. We are going to live.”
Nisha rounded on me. “You think we lost the other human girls because they got bored? Half of them killed themselves and the other half got thrown in the pits trying to escape. If you don’t want to live, you can make that decision. If you want to survive, you will do what we have done.”
“Survive for what?” I asked. I’m not sure I wanted survival if it meant accepting I was a sex slave for life.
“The possibility of going home,” said Nisha.
“Is there a possibility?” My breath caught in my throat. I hadn’t even allowed myself to think of home yet. Not when I didn’t know the
first thing about getting off this sex planet.
“Maybe not. But for me, I will always choose life.” Nisha sighed and ran her hands through her long hair. “It’s a lot to handle, I get it. I’ll take you back to your quarters. They usually give new females some training and an adjustment period before you are expected to work.”
Work.
The word rang out, and the girls quieted. This was all moving so damned fast and I couldn’t grab hold of anything. I needed more time to think of a plan.
“I have a question before that happens.”
The three women all turned. Nisha gave me an expectant look.
I set my jaw. “Have any of you drank the sex poison tea?”
They all stared at me for a moment. Finally, Mei answered with a small laugh. “Beatrice, all three of us have drank it.”
“What?” yelled Pippa, her voice the yelp of a dog whose tail had been stepped on.
“We wouldn’t have lasted long here without it,” explained Nisha, her voice sounding so reasonable and straight-forward I had trouble matching her words to her tone.
Before I could question it further, before I could ask why you would choose to poison yourself when the effects were permanent, the blue female with the black razor teeth entered the tent. Clio, Nisha had called her.
“Ah. There you are. I need some of the females in the private selection room.”
There was a collective inhale of breath, and I felt the shift in the room. Some of the women even clustered together, as if to make themselves smaller, so Clio wouldn’t pick them. Clio smiled, her black teeth glinting.
Then she extended an arm forward towards me, her black claw-like nail uncurling.
“You.”
Chapter Six
Mekvar
Bardoa had requested an audience with us as soon as we had arrived on Stryxx. I hoped our cover story had worked to convince him we were here for leisure, but it didn’t help that Dragorians never frequented pleasure planets. But we did have shiploads of Stryxx coynes to use to mask our purpose. Hopefully money would ease the way where our lies didn’t.