by Presley Hall
I glance over at her as she crouches down and stands again with a thick metal cable in her hand. She shuffles to the edge of the torn-away corridor and tosses the cable over the edge. Then she lowers herself and begins to climb down the cable like a rope.
My heart thuds as I watch nervously, hoping she’s recovered enough from the crash to do this. But she moves pretty confidently as she climbs down, using the exposed edges of the torn ship as footholds. When she reaches the ground and releases the cable, I follow.
I was right. The ship looks to be cracked in half, and from down here, I can see that the second layer is made entirely of coils and pumps.
It’s what I see in the third layer, the bottom of the ship, that has me running again. Elizabeth must be on the same sort of adrenaline rush I am, because she’s no longer staggering behind me. In fact, she almost overtakes me as we both sprint across the grassy clearing.
Beside the cracked ship, there are pods. More than a dozen, at least, maybe even two dozen. They must’ve been dislodged when we crashed. The rest of the pods that were arrayed in the bottom of the ship have been completely crushed by the weight of the vessel. There would be no survivors in that. The pods on the ground, though—they’re still intact.
We get to the first one, and I peer inside. Everything looks normal. The girl lying within looks asleep. Nothing looks damaged.
Elizabeth presses her face to the glass for a moment before shouting, “She’s alive!”
She starts scrabbling at the sealed door to the pod, and I rush forward to help. I push my fingers between the gap of the door, but the mesh sealing the pod air-tight has no give.
“Shit. She’s going to lose oxygen!” Elizabeth gasps as her fingers scrabble at the smooth container.
I redouble my efforts, trying to squeeze my fingertips under the seal. I bend and push and pull, but it’s like trying to pry open a car door with my bare hands. There’s nothing to grab on to.
“It’s not working. Fuck.”
Elizabeth curses and steps back, wiping her palms on her pants. Then she suddenly turns away from the cryo-pod, scanning the grass around us. She makes a sound of triumph and jogs a few yards away, leaning down to scoop up a football-sized rock.
She carries it in both hands as she runs back, and when she reaches the pod, she raises the rock high and brings it down sharply, smashing it against the glass.
“What are you doing?” I blurt, shocked. “We don’t know how these things are supposed to open. She could die if you break that!”
“If I don’t break it, she’ll die anyway.” She glances up, catching my gaze. Blood still mats her hair, and her expression is grim. “Now that they’re no longer attached to the ship, they’re losing oxygen. I don’t know what protocols are supposed to be followed to bring someone out of cryo-sleep. But we don’t have any choice.”
I hesitate, my heart thundering.
She’s right.
These women might die either way, but at least smashing the glass has a chance of helping them.
Quickly, I cast about for something I can use as a bludgeon. I find a piece of heavy pipe lying in the grass nearby and pick it up.
With shaking hands, I swing the thick pipe against the glass in the same spot Elizabeth already hit, breaking a large hole in the cover of the cryo-pod.
A muffled groan comes from inside, and my heart jumps. My legs feel like they can’t move.
Is whoever’s in there okay? Are they dying?
5
Charlotte
Elizabeth reaches in through the large hole we made in the pod’s glass front. I lean over too, peering in and watching as her fingers find the woman’s neck and feel for a pulse. She brushes shards of glass away and then pries the groggy woman’s eyelids open.
“What…?”
The woman’s voice is faint, but it seems to be enough for Elizabeth. My friend glances up at me and nods sharply.
“She’s okay. Or, okay enough. Break the other cryo-pods open. Go, go!”
I sprint to the nearest pod and swing the piece of pipe with all my strength. It takes three tries, but a hole finally opens up in the glass. Inside the pod, shards rain down on a young, pretty face.
Thrusting my hands through the ragged hole, I carefully wipe the glass away from the girl’s pale skin.
Just like the woman in the other pod, her eyes fly open after a moment, dazed and unfocused. They’re so big and blue that they almost look doll like, and even when she looks right at me, I’m not sure she’s seeing me. She sucks in a deep lungful of air, and when she exhales, it’s on a low groan.
More sounds of shattering glass rise up behind me as Elizabeth gets to work too. We have to move fast if we want to save all these women before they run out of oxygen.
I brush some more glass out of the blonde girl’s hair. Her eyes are growing clearer, and as they do, I can see panic start to seep across her features.
“Shh, shh, you’re okay,” I tell her, trying to pretend it’s not an obvious lie. “It’s okay. You’re safe now, I’m going to get you out of there.”
“Let me out!”
The girl starts struggling, hands reaching up to press against the tight confines of the pod. When she looks at me, her eyes are wild and confused.
“Okay,” I promise her. “I will. Just stop moving, okay? You’re going to hurt yourself. I’ll let you out.”
If I can figure out how.
“There’s a release latch on the inside!” Elizabeth yells as if reading my thoughts.
It takes me a second to locate the latch she’s talking about, but the second I find it and press it, the top of the pod disengages from the bottom part. I lift it up and shove it away, and the girl inside sits up.
She looks disoriented and scared out of her mind. I want to help her, to explain what’s going on, but I can’t spare more than a few seconds.
“I’ll be back. Stay here,” I tell her breathlessly. Then, hefting my piece of pipe, I move to the next pod.
My arms ache as I swing the piece of pipe over and over, unlatching and shoving open pod after pod.
I don’t count how many women climb out of the pods. Everything is a blur as I move as fast as I can, intent on saving every last one of them. Finally, I run toward another pod to open it—but stop when I realize it’s already smashed and empty.
There are no cryo-pods left to open.
Breathless and exhausted, I toss the piece of pipe onto the grass and look up to survey the clearing. Twenty or so women are spread out around the space. Most of them are out of their pods, although several of them cling to the metal edges of the containers as if they’re not quite able to stand on their own yet.
They all turn to stare at me and Elizabeth, their eyes wide.
“Is everyone alive?” It’s the stupidest question I’ve probably ever asked, but my mind is in too much disarray to come up with anything better.
A few of the women nod. None of them speak.
Elizabeth is standing a few yards away from me, and we share a look. Some of the color has come back to her face, and it looks like the small cut on her head has stopped bleeding.
“We need to check if there are any other survivors,” I say, moving toward her. “I think most of the passengers were in the other half of the ship, but maybe there are a few people in this section who managed to strap in before the crash.”
I think of the captain. Of the guards who detained us for snooping in the cargo hold.
Are they alive?
And if they are, what are we going to do about them?
The crash was brutal.
The captain, the crew members who caught me and Elizabeth in the cargo hold, and everyone on the command deck were all killed. We didn't find any other living passengers besides the women from the cryo-pods.
This part of the ship wasn’t as heavily populated as the living quarters, and I have no idea what happened to the back half of the ship and everyone on it. Maybe more of them survived than in the front h
alf. Or maybe none of them did.
After we finish our hunt for survivors, we gather all the women in one of the mostly undamaged rooms on the ship. The Foreigner II has no power, but light seeps in through the windows. As Elizabeth starts tending to people’s injuries, I flip through the stack of folders and flight documents we found in the captain’s cabin.
When I open a particularly thick one, my breath hitches.
Oh, God.
I flip through the pages, the pit in my stomach growing deeper and deeper as I read through the contents.
The folder, and everything inside of it, leaves me empty. Everything I’ve always believed in, everything I’ve always thought about my government, my planet, my people—gone.
The first page is the beginning of a dossier, written in alphabetical order.
Aaron, Tara. Age twenty-five. Blood type, measurements, bio, occupation, notes, pictures, and estimated value.
Value.
Tara Aaron, whoever she was, was supposed to be traded as currency. I know this because at the back of the folder, there’s a list of items I don’t recognize, with names like “contact holographs,” or “Texariot heat-tracking monitors.”
Those also have numerical values next to them in a currency that I’ve never seen before. And the most damning thing? The worst fucking part? The United States Department of Defense seal is on the bottom of each paper, signed and dated by the Secretary of Defense. I’ve had dinner with the Secretary of Defense.
I was—am—the wife of a senator. Nobody expects me to do anything outside of coordinating dinners, fundraisers, and looking nice for the cameras, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t want more. I wanted to prove myself and make my own way in our political system, wanted to right the wrongs I saw in the world, to be more than just Joseph’s wife.
But now…
Now I have this folder. It’s tangible proof that the government I always admired, the one I wanted to be part of, was rotten to the core.
If I’m reading this right—and I’ve read it so many times, I’m sure that I am—the government planned on selling the women in the cargo hold to aliens for the sole purpose of gathering the strange items listed in the back of the folder.
Human trafficking.
Or more likely, judging by the identical revealing outfits the women are wearing, human sex trafficking.
Elizabeth finishes checking the last of the women and walks over to me. Her head wound has been cleaned up, and she has a small butterfly bandage over the cut. She looks down at the folder that’s open on my lap, and even though she hasn’t read through it like I have, I can see in her eyes that she’s already guessed what it is.
I nod wordlessly, and her lips press together into an angry line.
“Son of a bitch,” she mutters.
That about sums it up.
“I don’t understand why they bothered manning the ship with people like us—with linguists, doctors, scholars, all of that—when all they were really doing was sending women into space to be sold.” I glance down at the folder again, my stomach turning.
“Maybe they were trying to do both. Trying to tack a little diplomacy onto what was essentially a trade mission.” Elizabeth snorts. “I’m sure we weren’t the only ones who had no idea what was really going on. But the captain and a lot of the crew definitely did.”
She’s right. I’m so furious I want to scream or cry or smash something. I want to know who approved this mission. I want to make them pay.
But I can’t do any of that right now. I’m stranded on an alien planet with two dozen survivors of a terrible crash, and I’ve got to deal with the reality of that before anything else.
“Is everyone all right?” I ask, nodding my head toward the group of women.
Elizabeth nods. “No major injuries, thankfully. But we’ll need food and water before long.”
As we talk, I notice the other women casting glances our way. I don’t know quite how it happened, but somehow, Elizabeth and I seem to have been nominated as the leaders of this ragtag band of survivors. Maybe it’s because our faces were the first ones they saw when they woke up.
Now I’m really starting to wish I’d joined Girl Scouts as a kid.
How are we all supposed to survive out here?
I don’t know how to forage for food. It isn’t exactly something I ever thought I’d need to do, especially not on an alien planet where I don’t recognize any of the plant life. And I certainly don’t know what to do if we’re attacked by anything. God knows what sort of creatures live on this planet.
One thing I’m absolutely certain of is that there are creatures here. There is life.
After all, we haven’t suffocated from oxygen deprivation, and we are in the middle of a jungle. I can still remember the glimpse I got of the planet before we crashed, and I distinctly remember seeing large areas of both land and water.
And where there’s water and oxygen, there are animals.
I open my mouth to ask Elizabeth if she has any survivalist experience, but before I can say anything, a loud shout draws my attention.
One of the women—Sadie, I think her name is—jumps to her feet. Her eyes are a little wild, and her strawberry blonde hair is in disarray. She’s dressed the same way all the other women are, in a thin tank top and shorts so short they might as well be underwear. Thank God we landed in what looks like an alien jungle and not a tundra. From the brief glimpse I got before we crashed, this planet has different ecosystems on different parts of its surface just like Earth does.
“No!” Sadie shakes her head, tears glistening in her eyes. “No, this can’t be real. They can’t keep us here. I can’t be here! I need to go home. I—”
She breaks off mid-sentence, turning and racing from the room.
I shoot to my feet, and Elizabeth and I race after her. I can hear a few of the other women following behind us, their feet pounding against the hallway floor behind us. By the time I get to the ledge at the end of the corridor, Sadie is already shimmying down the cable.
Dammit, she’s fast.
Moving as quickly as I can, I climb down the side of the ship, clinging to the cable with sweaty hands. When my feet finally touch the ground, the blonde woman is already halfway across the clearing, heading for the thick forest that surrounds us.
The sun is high in the sky, and I can feel the warmth of its rays as I sprint after Sadie. My bathrobe flaps wildly, twisting around my legs, and I shrug it off so I can run faster.
I have to get to her. I can’t let her go into the woods by herself.
Just as I’m starting to gain on Sadie, movement flashes in my periphery. My head whips to the side just as something that looks like a massive bird swoops out of the sky.
I catch a glimpse of a huge beak and blue-black feathers before it dive-bombs me, snatching me up with a pair of large, taloned feet.
Shock tears a scream from my throat.
It’s scooped me up just like an eagle would scoop up a rabbit, and it flaps its huge wings, making gusts of air blow around my face.
“Charlotte!”
A hand latches around one of my ankles. My heart jerks, and I look down to see Elizabeth clinging to me. Another woman, tall and lanky, wraps her arms around Elizabeth’s waist. A third woman grabs my other ankle. More women rush up to help, and before I know it, I’m being stretched between the sky and the ground.
Each time I’m tugged downward, the bird screeches and tightens its talons, squeezing my bones and digging into my skin.
Shit. The women won’t win this tug-of-war, not without killing me. If the bird tightens its grip any more, I’m afraid it’s going to break my arms. I’m getting farther from the ground, and some of the women have let go, but not Elizabeth.
We lock gazes. Her face is a mask of fury and fear.
I know she wants to save me. I can see it in her eyes, feel it in the tightness of her grip.
But her hands are sweaty, and even as she tries to hold on tighter, her fingers fall awa
y from my ankle. As she drops to the ground, the bird surges upward. I’m lifted higher and higher in the air, and then Elizabeth is so far away that she’s just a dot of color surrounded by other dots of color.
Wind whips past me, chilling my skin. My robe is long gone, although my shoes stayed on during the struggle, and my feet dangle below me as the bird carries me swiftly through the air.
Gasping for breath, I look down at the tops of the green trees far, far below me. I can see a large body of water in the distance, not that it helps me any now. I know this bird is probably going to eat me or feed me to its young or something. Why else would it scoop me up?
I’m lightheaded and dizzy, barely clinging to consciousness, and I have the horrifying feeling that this is it.
This is how I die.
6
Droth
After our failed uprising against my uncle on Vox and our banishment to Nuthora, my men and I quickly realized how dangerous this planet can be.
The terrain itself can be rough and wild, and the other beings who populate this place alongside us can be vicious and bloodthirsty.
So one of the first things we did was fortify our position, staking out a cut of land several days’ travel from the nearest city and building a massive wall around the perimeter. We constructed our dwellings and other structures inside the confines of the wall, building them out of heavy wood we harvested from the forest around us and creating a small settlement for ourselves. It’s nothing compared to the palace I once lived in on my home planet, but I’m proud of the work my men and I did to make a place for ourselves even in exile.
Today though, the walls around our encampment feel too confining.
Maybe it has something to do with that strange feeling I had earlier. Even now, it gnaws at my gut.
Unable to stay still and unable to concentrate, I checked to make sure that the patrol had been doubled and then slipped through the gates, heading out on a solitary hunt.
Normally, we hunt in groups of at least two or three. And perhaps it is unwise to venture out on my own like this today.