by Amanda Boone
She wanted that goddamn baby out of her.
Something turned over in the bottom of her stomach.
She glanced down at the doctor delivering her baby. He was a nice guy with soft hands but judgmental eyes. Nevertheless, the flick of his brow told her that something had gone wrong. That small change in his face barely preceded the wild wailing of the monitor next to her head. She stopped screaming long enough to choke on her own spit. Then she glanced up.
“Code blue!”
“The hell is that?” Anastazja croaked.
But then her eyes rolled to the back of her head. Her eyeballs slipped back and forth, unseeing. Her whole chest expanded so much that she thought her heart would blow right through her.
“Call the father again.”
The father? What father? Anastazja hadn’t seen her college boyfriend since they’d conceived this demon, and before that they had hardly spoken in three years. She couldn’t even guess what continent he was on.
“Call the father.”
“Can you get the receptionist?”
They echoed each other like a bunch of busy bees.
Anastazja wished they would shut up.
That was her last thought.
Suddenly they were lowering her back down. She didn’t have the strength to keep her eyes open, but she could still feel them buzzing around her head. She could sense the hands on her chest. She even heard the monitor start moving so fast that there were no more discernable beats.
Then she couldn’t hold on anymore.
She let that demon child go.
She let the earth go.
She let herself go.
***
A brunette woman with a dull bob cut and almond eyes pulled up to Lovelace Medical Center in New Mexico to collect her prize. She shut her car door, locked it, and made her way to the front door, all the while twirling the keys around in her hands. Today was the day she had been waiting years for.
Adoption. What a sweet idea.
She signed in and made her way up to neonatal administration. All the paper work was in place. She felt like she could fly. Her head was inflated with endorphins, her body almost literally on cloud nine.
So soon.
So soon.
Less than an hour later, she was walking right out of the very same front door with that new baby in her portable car seat. She had the prettiest emerald eyes the woman had ever seen on another person and skin that glowed.
“You’re gonna be a star,” she whispered as she strapped the baby into the backseat.
She rounded her minivan and climbed in, shutting the door and putting her own seatbelt on. She kicked the engine into the gear and backed out, still humming that tune. She remembered turning her wheel all the way to the left and then to the right again. She remembered slowly backing out.
Then it happened.
It was like a switch flipped in her head. Off. Her hands started moving. Thoughts flooded her mind, memories, a woman screaming. Pain. She swerved the wheel back and forth, her right foot flooring the gas pedal as hard as she could. The parking lot whizzed past her on either side.
A concrete pillar stopped her car.
The entire front of the van crumpled. An airbag exploded out of the wheel, but the whiplash from the impact had already killed the woman.
The baby wailed up until the paramedics arrived.
To this day, no one could explain how she had managed to survive.
Chapter One
Tessa glared at the beast across from her. Two sets of bars separated them, her cage and the ape. But it didn’t matter. They were in the same room. She hated it, with its scars and its blunt teeth and its red eyes. She hated the fur that covered its entire body, barely allowing any of its form to bleed through.
She had seen images of herself in what they called a mirror, and she looked nothing like it. In fact, she quite liked the way that she looked, with her glowing skin and her emerald eyes. She liked the curve in her body, the slim form of her frame. But for some reason they treated her like they did that thing. That ugly, disgusting thing. What was wrong with her that she deserved the same fate?
In the beginning she thought it was her eyes, because that’s where they focused. From before she could remember, they’d been sticking stuff in her face. They would give her these serums for the pain, but it was never enough. It’s like they couldn’t figure out how she worked. She could always feel it, almost all of it.
But then they stopped going for the eyes. Tessa figured it was because they couldn’t learn anything. She shook her head. She wished she knew what they were looking for.
And yet part of her understood nothing would convince them to stop. There was no end to her ability to surprise them. She had noticed that much. And yet…and yet they just kept coming for more. She was special, they said. Different.
Tessa held on to that. It was the only thing she had.
The sound of those footsteps, a sound she knew far too well, pulled her out of her thoughts. There were two different sets. The woman, Lexi, wore heals every day when she came to get her. She must have known Tessa hated the sound. There was a man with her—Jeb, with the shiny black hair and the thick glasses.
Lexi jabbed her keys into the lock without looking at Tessa. She never looked at her. Tessa peered through the bars at the light scowl on her face. Lexi hated her. She just knew it.
“Come on, Tessa. Time for your exam.”
Tessa gulped. It came every day, but every day she wished it wouldn’t. They took her by her hand like she was a child and led her down the hall, past the sign that read “Containment Room” and then beyond that, to the elevators.
Her heart started pounding as soon as the doors closed the three of them in. She glanced to her right and to her left at the people on either side of her, but she couldn’t let herself do what she wanted even though the urge nearly drove her insane. She needed to let her mind free, needed to let it consume her, but she held her tongue. If she let herself go again, she would hurt more people. Then their friends would come.
And they would torture her.
Soon enough, they landed on the fourth level of the basement. After years of this, she had learned that the deeper they went, the scarier it got. They led her out onto the examination pad, a massive floor of metal and a bunch of wires. They hooked her up, stuck a bunch of sticky things on her forehead.
Wires.
Lexi stalked toward Tessa with a clamp in hand.
Jeb stayed off the platform, but he watched with apologetic eyes.
Tessa’s hands were slick with sweat. They were going to hurt her again. This kind of thing happened a lot. They would do something to her, break a finger or give her a bruise, and then watch. They would come to her cell two or three times a day to examine her condition.
She always healed, and when she did, it left them more confused and perplexed than before.
Lexi approached her with that same scowl. She wrapped her leg in that clamp thing. Tessa gulped. The metal felt cold on her leg. She pressed her palm against the platform and waited for it to come, whatever “it” would be.
Lexi stepped off the platform as soon as she could.
Then Jeb pressed a button and the thing started to squeeze her.
She glared down at it, her eyes wide with anticipation, panic spreading through her head like a silent scream. As it got so tight that her skin started to turn blue, she couldn’t handle it anymore. She turned her head up to the sky and let her jaw swing open.
Her screams bounced off the walls.
Chapter Two
They gave Tessa a mirror once every day for about ten minutes. She never wasted so much as a second. She gazed at herself, at her glowing skin and her green eyes. She examined each scar. She counted them, taking a mental inventory. New ones formed overnight since they had become so hell-bent on hurting her.
Today she saw her leg protruding from her body, black and blue with bruises. They broke her femur, they said, wanted to me
asure her pain responses, they said, wanted to monitor her healing, they said. Her thin leg had already begun to turn yellow. The bruises from that device they’d had on her were already healing. Apparently that wasn’t normal.
But she was supposed to be special anyway.
Her chest rose and fell with a sigh. Up on the first lower level, she rarely ever got that urge, the urge to break into their minds, the urge to destroy them. It was good fortune; she could hardly bring herself to control it when she did. But now something felt different. There was a tugging in the back of her mind. She wriggled her nose and waited for it to pass.
It usually did.
Except this time it didn’t. It grew until it was a pull she couldn’t ignore. As she stared into the mirror, she felt emotions that were not her own, heard thoughts, familiar thoughts but foreign thoughts.
Something beckoned her out of that lab. She pressed her palm against the cold glass of the mirror. Sweat sprouted out of her pores. She licked her chapped lips. She could picture expanses of green grass and white stuff…snow. Something cold against her skin. Something biting her nose. She could hear things flying overhead and moving back and forth next to her.
Then, out of her reflection, there appeared a face that wasn’t hers.
Something beckoned her.
A man. No. Not human. Special, like her. Her heart fluttered in her chest for this beautiful creature. Her eyes prickled with tears of surprise, of joy. Her chest felt like it would explode. The map of the entire lab ran through her head. She knew it like she knew the inside of herself, right down to the rat holes hidden behind machines.
Someone was out there, waiting for her.
All she had to do was escape.
***
Jrym dropped the last of the boxes onto the loading deck of the spaceship. He stopped, standing up and flexing his wrists. He gazed down at the fibers that formed his gloves, the fruit of fifty years of scientists hard at work and twenty years of soldiers testing it in the harshest environments Kahara had to offer. But he was neither. He winced as his partner, Alec, loaded the last of the crates into the cargo hall.
“That’s it,” he said, his eyebrows lifted with pride.
Jrym mustered a smile. It almost hurt him from the inside out.
Alec grimaced like he could hear his thoughts. “We need to get going. Before sunset, remember?”
Jrym almost threw up in his mouth. The thought of just one more trip to Earth, like this, made him want to die right then and there. But no, not quite. He had a plan to enact. He would go out quietly; Alec didn’t deserve to be caught in the middle of it.
Speaking of, Jrym glanced back at Alec in just enough time to catch him gazing back at him, that pitiful look in his eye. “You look like you’ve been run over by a rover.”
“That’s how I feel.”
Alec gulped. They had spent every hour of every day in and out of the spaceship, clearing it of everything the Kaharans could ever need. They went through years and years of waste and junk in light of the end of the worst era of Kaharan history.
They were the strong ones, the generation of fighting, because they had survived nearly a decade without a planet. They had managed to stay hidden. And, even now that the Kaharan Earth settlement had been solidified, that monuments had been erected and humans had been manipulated, they were still to remain hidden.
The future had never looked so bleak.
Alec placed his hand on Jrym’s shoulder. “You’ll find the Bonde soon.”
Jrym scoffed. It was that kind of optimism that kept Alec irrationally happy. It was perfect for an operation like this. “Our home planet is gone, along every member of my family.” He stepped even farther out onto the loading deck so that he could get a good look at the stars.
He would miss those.
Just not enough to stay.
“If I were meant to bond with a true Kaharan, then she’s dead now and I never will experience it. But if the alternative is true, and she’s on Earth, then she might as well be dead. I can’t scour the entire planet looking for the one woman who could save my life. A woman who probably doesn’t even want to be found.”
When Jrym glanced back at Alec, he wouldn’t even look at him. Jrym had said too much. He had let him into his head. That never went well. “Maybe the commander will help you.”
Jrym nodded. “Yeah. Maybe.” But he knew he was lying to the Kaharan. He sucked in a deep breath, pushing those thoughts to the back of his mind. He would dwell on them later, when he was alone and privy to his own thoughts, when he didn’t have to worry about a man who cared far too much for him breathing down his neck. It was unnatural. “We need to get that raider loaded.” He turned toward the main hub.
He had barely made it through the door before Alec cleared his throat. “Autopilot… right?”
Jrym nodded. Another lie. “Autopilot into the sun. Then I join you in space raider and we fly…home.” His voice broke on that last word. He was already dreading the moments he would have to be alone before he ended it.
He could handle his racing mind when there was another being in the room to soak up just a little bit of the energy. He could breathe through the debilitating pain. But alone. No. He could hear the screams of his bloodline, feel the pain as they died, one by one. Burned. And the thoughts they had left behind, they were his. The emotions. The memories. All his.
He had moments when he could forget, but those moments became sparser as time went on. Autopilot. Then we fly home.
He sat down in central control. The commander would never let a high-level soldier do something like this: clean, destroy. In any real society, he wouldn’t even qualify as an army official. But they weren’t a real society, and they might never be again. He started up the controls. As soon as everything was powered up for transport, he heard static coming out of the headpiece.
“Jrym? You there?”
Jrym sighed, his lips folding into a crooked smile. “Yes, I’m here.”
“All right. Can you do this?” His voice shook.
Jrym shook his head. It was almost as if Alec knew exactly what would happen.
Chapter Three
They didn’t come back to do anything with Tessa for three hours. Her only interaction came from the lab techs that brought her food. Sandwiches. She hated sandwiches, but she ate them anyway because she had to be good. Because she was getting out. Ever since that moment in her mirror, she couldn’t shake the intuition. She could do it if she tried.
If she really tried.
She stood up. Her leg had already begun to heal. She could walk on it if she bit her lip and didn’t put too much pressure on it. She had been pacing back and forth in her cage to practice. She made her way to the bars and wrapped her fingers around them. She gazed at the ape. How sad she felt for it. She wondered if it could escape, if it could even know that it could escape.
There was a window just down the hall. They opened it for fresh air every once in a while. Natural ventilation, she heard them whispering to each other. Tessa was confident that she could figure out how that thing worked…and if she couldn’t, she would just have to break right through it.
There were no clocks in her chamber, but she had been counting the seconds since the mirror. When she was a child, she thought it generous of them to teach her how to read, to tell time, math, history. She thought it was a good thing, meant that they were preparing her for the world, that she would one day get out.
She had never been more wrong about anything in her life.
They were just teaching her how to be a human being so that they could test and compare and torture. Never mind all of that, because now she was going to use all that they had taught her to get out. So she kept her head forward and counted those seconds, her own personal clock in the back of her head.
Then, finally, there it was.
The door.
Lexi came in with another tray. No sandwiches because it was dinner time. Mashed potatoes. Beef. Her mouth watered. She wa
nted the food. But she wanted out more.
So she stepped away from the bars.
Lexi unlocked the door, the sound of her keys mixing in with that of the animals.
Tessa had never touched Lexi of her own accord. All of their contact had been mandatory. It felt wrong, really wrong, but she went along with it anyway. She had the element of surprise on her side.
Lexi tried to rip her arm out of her grip, to no avail of course.
Tessa kicked her with her good leg, right in the gut. Then she limped down the hall. By the time she got to the front door, the alarms were already going off. They just barely drowned out Lexi’s overblown screams of pain.
When she wrenched the door open, there were two men standing there with gloves and masks on their hands like they would catch a disease just from looking at her. She let them grab her, turning her around. She put her strength in her head, and she unleashed in it all the power she had spent her whole life trying to deny.
The men stopped. They raised their hands to their heads and the two of them screamed, their roars joining Lexi’s screeches and the animal’s yelps.
Tessa didn’t wait a second longer. She dived into the hall. As soon as she made it halfway to the window, she heard the sound of boots coming at her. They were catching up fast and she was running out of time. She stopped limping and started running. She pushed through the pain, told herself to keep going.
“I’m special,” she said over and over again.
Anything to keep herself moving.
She had to get out of there.
She had to find that something.
She dove through the window without so much as pausing to open it, thrusting all of her strength and energy at the sharp barrier. She knew she wouldn’t have the time. The glass shattered on her head and shoulder. Her right arm scraped the side of the window as she tumbled out onto the dewy, New Mexican grass.