by S E Anderson
Space wasn’t making me whole. Maybe nothing ever would.
"What's going to happen to me?" I asked, not lifting my eyes from the floor. "Am I staying here?"
"No way. I made promises to keep you safe and to get you home. I broke one of them. I don't intend to break the other. Blayde and I have had a talk. You're coming with us."
"With you? Where?"
"We're going to find Earth," he said, smiling reassuringly. "We're going to jump, we're going to ride ships, we're going to hitchhike and find our way right back there. It might take a while. And it might be dangerous. But I'm never letting you down again."
He looked at me with more intensity than I had ever seen in a man's face before. His eyes burned with a focus that didn't seem human.
"Until we find Earth, you're one of us." Blayde popped up with a bottle of something bright green in hand. "Here, this might take the edge off."
"Not sure if I want to try any alien liquors, Blayde."
She pulled a glass out and put it on the little coffee table in front of me. A second later, it was in my hand with a finger of green in it. "You'll have to get used to it because the closest Earth cocktail is probably a few hundred light-years away."
"Damn," I said. We drank the liquid together. To my surprise, it was sweet rather than hot, and I worried about the ease with which it went down.
"I can't promise we're going to make it back in good time," Zander said. "You know that time runs differently when we jump. It's possible it's already too late to get you back home to your family, but we will get you back to Earth."
"I saw Sekai at the party, one of the Killians we saved. She said five years have gone by. Maybe it's already been three years back home. Danny and Marcy will be married now. They’ve probably given up on finding me by now."
"Don't think worst-case scenario," he said. "Think survival. Focus on the here and now. Those are problems we can deal when we get there."
"It's going to be hard." Blayde put down her glass. "We're going to stick up for you, but we can't always be there. We've never had anyone tag along for so long before. You're smart, I'll give you that. Brilliant, even, seeing how you dealt with everything back there. You didn't scream once—at least, I didn't hear you scream. You were quick on your feet. But this isn't a dream, a movie, or a video game. However crazy the universe is, it’s real. And you have to be ready for that. Are you?"
I looked at myself. My leg was scratched open, though wrapped in a nice clean bandage. I had seen things I’d never imagined: aliens, robots. I fell down a highway, I was hired by the mafia, I crashed a party, I was held hostage, I fought off a herd of possessed robot people, and I had ridden a flying statue. Crazy, all right. Absolutely absurd.
"Oh, I'm ready." I smiled, falling back on the couch. "Do you know that since I met you two, I've had to say ‘Please tell me your plans before you kill me’ three times?" I closed my eyes, suddenly tired and wishing I were back in my bed on Earth. The only way I could get home was to go with them, even though that probably meant racing through hundreds of more terrifying planets before they found mine.
Until then, I sure hoped there was some half-decent pizza out there that wouldn’t try to kill me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
S.E. Anderson can’t ever tell you where she’s from. Not because she doesn’t want to, but because it inevitably leads to a confusing conversation where she goes over where she was born (England) where she grew up (France) and where her family is from (USA) and it tends to make things very complicated.
She’s lived pretty much her entire life in the South of France, except for a brief stint where she moved to Washington DC, or the eighty years she spent as a queen of Narnia before coming back home five minutes after she had left. Currently, she goes to university in Marseille, where she’s studying Physics and aiming for a career in Astrophysics.
When she’s not writing, or trying to science, she’s either reading, designing, crafting, or attempting to speak with various woodland creatures in an attempt to get them to do household chores for her. She could also be gaming, or pretending she’s not watching anything on Netflix.
Website: http://seandersonauthor.com/
Facebook: facebook.com/seandersonauthor/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sea_author/
Instragram: https://www.instagram.com/Readcommendations/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16568264.S_E_Anderson
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/S.E.-Anderson/e/B0719DFWSX