Alienation

by S E Anderson

  "I order you to let me stay." Her voice reminded me of her mother's. "I order you."

  "I ..." I couldn't let her get hurt, even if she wasn't going to let me get away so easily. "Fine. But I have to admit something to you. This is a dream. A really scary one. You can stay and watch, but you have to stay hidden, okay? And as soon as you get too frightened, you want out. You know what you have to do?" She shook her head. "You have to run as fast as you can back to your room, pull the covers over your head, and stay there. Then you'll wake up. Can you do that?" She nodded vigorously. "Okay."

  I pushed the door open. Her hand squeezed mine. And there they were.

  They heard the door open and turned to face us, pulling out what looked like silver guns. Lana scrambled to safety behind my skirt.

  I didn't know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't them. Itzi and Sonota glared at me. Three thoughts raced through my mind all at once: One, this scene looked exactly like a movie I had seen, but couldn't place. Two, they had guns, but they looked like our guns, Earth guns, and not something fancier or more high-tech, which was lame. And three, this could very possibly be the last thing I saw in my life.

  "What are you two doing here?" I sputtered. Lana took off that second, pushing off my skirt and dashing down the hallway. I didn't watch her go, trying not to draw any attention to her. With some luck, neither of the men had spotted her.

  And she wouldn't have seen them recognize me.

  "What are you doing here?" Sonota—I think—spat. It was harder to tell them apart in this awful lighting than it had been earlier when I could actually see them. "You are supposed to be on the other side of the palace."

  "And you were supposed to wait for me to finish the job."

  "The job?" They looked at each other and laughed. "You really think you were the one doing the job?"

  "Wannabe," one said, coughing into his hand. Ah. So that was Itzi.

  "What the hell are you talking about?" I sputtered, forcing myself to stand my ground. If I ran now, they would kill me for sure, not that staying here was any smarter. The truth formed in my head, but I needed to hear them say it—to waste time, or to save it.

  "Man, just shoot her," Sonota spat. "She's no use to us. It's too late for her to play her part."

  "Woah, woah, woah! Hold on there!" I said, frantically trying to add a few minutes to my increasingly shortening lifespan. "You want to kill me, fine. But tell me why first. I don't want to die in the dark."

  I could see why people in movies said that kind of shit. It was all I could come up with to stop them from shooting me on the spot. It wasn't likely to work, but who knew? Maybe the two of them were as dim-witted as I pegged them to be. I was counting on it.

  "You want to know why?" Sonota laughed, clutching his chest like I had just told a joke. "You're not going to beg for mercy? You're just going to ask us why?"

  "Well," I said, "I know you two are going to kill me. That's inevitable. You're too intelligent to let me go, and I can see there's no other option."

  Shit. Now I was treating them like Lana. Maybe I was shaving minutes off my life rather than adding to it.

  "Veesh, yeah, we're intelligent," Itzi boasted, much to my surprise.

  "So the only thing ... the only thing I ask for, in my last minutes, is the truth."

  "Well, I don't see how that could hurt," Sonota said, cocking his gun sideways like he was a gangster in a bad movie. The barrel glinted in the party light. "You see, Maakuna doesn't give a shit about robots. That was just a ploy to bring you into the game. He's after something much, much more valuable."

  "He is?" My eyes widened. I didn't have to fake my surprise. "What is it?"

  "The mayor's private passcode," Itzi interjected, "giving Maakuna—and the entire organization—direct control over the ICP. We can take over the city's budgets and authority without using the robots as our middlemen. Much more secure than their faulty programming."

  "I was a distraction then?"

  "You were the fail-safe. If the alarm went off, you would be the one they found. Not us. We'd be out of here in seconds.”

  I swallowed, hard. I knew I couldn't trust Maakuna, but I still felt betrayed. I wasn't going to give up so easily.

  "Strange," I said, reaching a hand to scratch my head. "That's exactly what Maakuna said to me when I accepted this plan."

  "What?" they asked, almost simultaneously. Their eyes widened.

  "That's right," I said. "He told me I was the one doing the important bit. He was worried you two knew too much about the organization, so he set you up to be patsies."

  The two of them looked at me like I had sprouted two heads. I gave them a sly smile, like I was somehow in control of this.

  "Is she telling the truth?" Itzi asked his partner, leaning to him to whisper but not making his voice quiet enough.

  "I don't know."

  "Maybe we should kill her for good measure," Itzi proposed.

  "I can hear you, you know," I said. "Maybe Maakuna was playing us both. He wanted both jobs done, but one would suffice. In the unlikely event that one of us would get caught, the other plan could go on without a hitch. And all without us being able to tell the authorities about it."

  "Or maybe," Sonota said, with a smirk, "he didn't care which investment paid off. Maybe he was happy with either one. So now we can do what we were told to do when you got back to the car and kill you."

  "Really? What a coincidence! I was, too."

  Not a coincidence.

  "You were told to kill yourself at the car?"

  "No, I was told to kill you," I sneered. "Both of you."

  "Really?" Itzi wasn't quite getting this. "But the boss man said—"

  "Fuck the boss man," Sonota snapped. "Shut up, Itzi. You sound like a child. She's fucking lying."

  "Why would I lie to you?" I said, placing my arms akimbo and taking up as much of the doorframe as I could. I watched their silhouettes shuffle uncomfortably. "I've only just met you. I have no reason to mess with you. Maakuna has done enough of that already, with both of us."

  I was starting to believe my own rhetoric. I forced that confidence onto my face, not sure if they could see it or not.

  "Come on," Sonota scoffed. "You just don't want to die. You'll say anything right now."

  "Oh please." I let out a cold laugh I didn't know I was holding in. "I was living in the Undercity. I've seen death and stared it in the face. You don't think I've contemplated it? I'm ready to die. What about you?"

  Dead. Silence.

  The room was so quiet that I almost imagined someone had hit the mute button on life. The two men didn't move an inch. They stood tall and hostile, but unwavering. There was not enough light coming off the party for me to see if my words had hit home.

  Finally, Itzi broke the spell.

  "She’s serious, man," he said, leaning over to whisper like he had before, still too loud to be inconspicuous.

  "I know she is. Now shut the fuck up."

  "Oh," his voice faltered.

  Which was exactly when a bright light turned on outside, spilling into the room and hitting my eyes like lemon juice. It burned bright, a blue that was almost white, and it hurt like the dickens. I tried to move, but I was trapped, not even feeling my own feet. The rest of my body stiffened.

  And then came the voice, loud and stern, followed by a high-pitched wail punctuating every word.

  "This is the mayoral police," she barked, the sound like crashing icebergs. "Put down your weapons. Place your arms, tentacles, and all other primary appendages above your head or in the air, whichever is applicable."

  Lana. She had gone to her father rather than going to bed. I could almost imagine the little girl dashing across the crowded lawn in her nightgown, rushing to her father to tell him about the monsters in his office. She had never believed this was a dream. Or maybe she did but needed her father for solace, except he would have known this wasn't a nightmare.

  The police had come to arrest the mons
ters and maybe even save her Amy Pond, only I didn't feel like I was being saved. I felt more trapped than ever.

  Itzi and Sonota were deep in conversation, ignoring the orders the woman repeated through the light in the window. Finally, Itzi understood the concept of whispering, and for once, when I actually needed to, I had no idea what they were saying.

  " Are you turning yourselves in now?" I spat. "Who do you think Maakuna would prefer to end up in the hands of the police? His henchmen, who know everything about the family, the organization, and him? Or the girl who doesn't know where she was this afternoon?"

  I grinned, taking pleasure in watching them squirm. I was Amy, after all, the good guy, the person bringing them to justice. Everything would be over soon.

  "They're not getting any of us," Sonota said.

  In an instant, he closed the distance between us and grabbed me by the neck. A cold, metallic rod pressed into my temple. Sonota's gun.

  He was strong, and he was armed. Try as I might I could not break free of his grasp, even as he twisted an arm around me to hold me against him like a shield. He thrust me at the window, making it very clear he was holding all the cards.

  "Oy, you!" he shouted at the light. "Turn it down We need to talk."

  For some reason, the light obeyed. It shut off, and I could see a hovering craft outside the window with at least a dozen soldiers, all armed to the teeth, crammed inside it.

  "There will be no talking," the voice outside ordered.

  I blinked away the remnants of the blinding light that lingered in my eyes. "Come out now."

  "I think there will be some talking," Sonota spat back, giving me a harsh shake, "and lots of it. You guys have a hostage situation at hand."

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  It’s only a trap if you don’t see it coming

  Okay, so hostage situations?

  Now, I'm not going to say anything about anyone who's been through this before. It was probably very traumatic for you. Maybe you're still getting over it, or maybe it was nothing, though it's probably the first one. Sorry, I mean absolutely no disrespect.

  But here's a few reasons why anyone comparing the two occurrences—my case and your case—should refrain from doing so: one, you probably were on Earth dealing with humans. Correct?

  Well, I was on an alien planet. Being held hostage by ... well, extraterrestrials. And not the smartest ones at that.

  Two: Were you in a supermarket? A bank? I was in a palace. With probably a million secret entrances or exits for an occasion just like this, yet we were somehow barricaded into the heart of the palace in a windowless room full of high-tech computers and state-of-the-art security monitors. How security hadn't seen us before was a mystery.

  That brings us to part three on my list of 'improbable hostage situations you never want to be in and probably never will, yet if you were look out for these to know you're screwed:' the security? The so-called mayoral one?

  They were utterly useless.

  Within seconds of showing up, they spooked the duo into taking me hostage and dragging me further into the palace. With Itzi on my right arm and Sonota on the left, we raced through the building, going deeper and deeper.

  They shoved me into a room with more security cameras pointing at an old computer monitor than I had seen in the palace altogether. And, from what I could tell so far, this was the exception to all those secret entrances and exits because there were none in here.

  This room, I actually knew. Because, above all odds, they had taken me to the ICP's room. To its vault. It was how I knew full well there was no way in other than the one door, which Itzi had barricaded with some tables and chairs.

  To add it all up: hostage situation with two not-so-smart mobsters, my only way out being a gung-ho but inadequate security force that was unlikely to save me, and in a room that was the most defended in the entire city.

  I was completely and absolutely terrified.

  They shoved me against the back wall and fought over what to do. Nothing felt real anymore, not that it really had since I’d arrived on this planet, but right now I was having a full dissociative episode. I knew I was there, that I was living this, but it was like seeing the world through a fogged window, all my senses detached from my mind.

  My knees trembled and I sat.

  The room looked like a security conference room, or maybe mission control on Earth. Everything was set up around a large monitor on a desk in dead center, with one chair bolted to the floor right in front of it, all heavy and metallic. The ICP. I guessed my mission was in the dumps now.

  I crossed my legs and leaned against the wall, staring up at the ceiling and counting the decorative holes that speckled it like stars. Twenty-four big ones, thirteen medium, thirty-seven smaller ones on one panel. I counted another and found the same. Now to count the panels. Lengthwise. Longwise. Multiply. Then again with the holes.

  I did the math.

  It was a lot of holes.

  "Guys?" I called out. "Have you figured out your next step yet? At all?"

  Still no answer. They kept muttering between themselves, too low for me to hear. I got up and stretched my legs. I was still in the fancy dress, no shoes, with my iPod stuffed into that secret pocket in my hip to keep it safe, which wasn't very comfy, if surprisingly inconspicuous.

  Unfortunately, I had achieved the maximum points on every level of Angry Birds, and there wasn't any internet to download more of the game, so that didn’t help. Not to mention that I was too nervous to even try to enjoy any music.

  I went over the situation again, trying to make sense of it all. The family needed the Downdwellers, but for what? Tam said others had fallen to the Undercity before me, so Maakuna probably expected me to be one of the people who had been stuck down there for a while, desperate for a trip back to the surface, and instead got someone freshly fallen. He needed a pawn, someone unregistered to get inside the palace to get to the robot controls. But he’d been lying, hadn't he? He only needed someone to get caught instead of his goons. He didn't really need the robots.

  Or did he? He could have kept me in the dark, feeding me the same story he had fed Tam about shutting down the robots, yet he’d told me something different. Why? He must still have wanted the program entered, but it was more of a plan B, a way to get me to go inside without question and make some extra cash if I didn't get caught.

  That's where Itzi and Sonota came in, doing the other end of the business, the real end, the one the family did want done: getting a hand on the mayor's access codes.

  They wanted me because I wasn't real, not to the Alliance. Maybe not to the ICP. Even so, the plan sounded like crap no matter which angle you came at it.

  "Hello?" I called. Again, they ignored me.

  I used their cold shoulder to my advantage. If the ICP had been my goal from the start, maybe it was my ticket out of here. I tiptoed over to the main monitor, sat down on the chair, and searched for a power button on what I assumed was the tower. If it had one, of course. Alien computers probably weren't as simple as they were in Independence Day.

  It was already on. The second my butt hit the cold metal, the screen flickered to life, bringing up a stream of digits. The translator chip in my head did the heavy work, sorting through the shapes to show me it was nothing more complicated than a quantum computing system.

  Yeah. As in, there was nothing more complicated than that in the entire universe, at least, not that I knew of. This computer was powerful.

  I stood up again. No sense getting messed up in a system I knew nothing about.

  "What are you doing?" cried Sonata. Every muscle in my body froze, stiff as lead. I shrunk back.

  "He asked you a question," pressed Itzi.

  "Um ..." I said, losing confidence by the second. "I was bored. I was looking for video games. "

  "Liar," Itzi hissed.

  "You were trying to contact the authorities," said Sonota. "Weren't you?"

  "About what? They know where we were. I mean
look around you—we're in the most heavily surveilled room in this city. They know who you are, what your assets are, and everything there is to know about this." I indicated the room with a sweep of my arms. "It's not like I can tell them anything they don't already know. You have the upper hand, and they know it. I know it. I'm just fucking bored."

  "Very true," Itzi nodded.

  "But you have no plan," I said.

  "Yes, we do." He grinned, and I shivered. Why did I get the feeling I should be worried about them all of a sudden?

  "Finally!" I gave him a false smile, relieved that at least something was going to happen. "What is it?"

  "We're going to tell them our demands," Itzi bragged, and Sonota slapped him, hard, against the back of his tattooed scalp, sending the shapes whirling this way and that.

  "Oh, wow, big secret. What demands?"

  "We're going to ask for money," said Sonota. "Three million credits."

  "Why three? Do I get one?"

  "You?" He laughed again. "Of course not. One's for me, one's for Itzi, and the last is for common bribery."

  "Ah. Well, I’m glad to see you have this hostage situation properly budgeted."

  Inside, though, my heart was falling. They were actually making sense. And seeing Itzi and Sonota thinking for themselves was a troubling sight to behold.

  "You asked for a way out, too, I suppose?" I asked.

  "A stealth shuttle," Sonata replied, eagerly. If I wasn't sure they were going to kill me before, I knew for certain now.

  "I take it you’re threatening to kill me," I said, "and probably dismantle the ICP while you're at it."

  "Pretty much, yeah," he said, shrugging.

  "You know no one out there knows who I am, right? I'm not from some fancy Alliance planet. I'm from Earth. Or Vulcan. Not sure which alias I gave to whom at this point. I have no political allies or even friends. I'm a nobody, so you're wasting your time."

  "You think anyone will like a mayor who lets one of his guests get hurt during his birthday party? We might just have ruined his career. Your death would seal the deal. He has to save you, or the media will destroy him."