Page 23 of Her Alien Boss

We are around halfway up when the elevator stops and Drak steps in.

Drak is my closest counterpart. He works under me, technically, but I tend not to make too much of it because he is very dedicated to his work, needs close to no managing, and very much hates being reminded he is not in charge.

“Where’s the human?” Drak asks. “Did she miss the flight?”

“She’s with me,” I say. He knows that, because he can see her on the leash. He’s pretending not to see her just to be an asshole. I glance down, and see that she did step back behind me when he got in. Maybe she wanted to make space for him, or maybe she found him intimidating. Either response would have been reasonable. Drak is a polarizing and intimidating figure. He is missing his lower left arm and his left eye. There are a great many stories as to why that is, but nobody really knows the truth.

“Oh, see, usually lab supplies stay in the lab,” he says with maximum passive-aggression.

“She’s not a flask of acid. She’s a living being. An intelligent one. I took her with me to ensure that nothing happened after the warp incident. It was better than leaving her in the medical bay all night.”

He snorts at me, then looks at her, and snorts again. “Don’t get attached,” he says. “She’s part of the machinery.”

“What does that mean?” Evie asks me. “Part of the machinery? What machinery?”

Drak’s brows rise, but he does not say anything. He does not consider the human to be a real person, as it were. He performs a lot of experiments on living things, and I am not entirely convinced that he sees members of his own kind as being particularly untouchable. Essentially, Drak would take anybody to pieces if it served one of his creations.

“Don’t worry about him,” I say. “I am taking you into my office. We have some matters to attend to there.”

“The training phase,” Drak says. “For now, you’ll need that body to create the mind we need.”

I give him a death stare. I do not want him to frighten Evie. I can feel her pulling back on the leash to try to get away from him by going around to the other side of me. I let it out to allow her to do that. I don’t want him anywhere near her.

* * *

Evie

That alien freaked me out. I’ve seen a lot of strange things among the aliens. I’ve hung out with the Antari guard who had more eyes than I’ve had hot dinners. Nobody has freaked me out the way that Drak just did. I don’t want to put it down to his physical problems. I think you could be missing an arm and still seem very chill. He seemed the absolute opposite of very chill.

He had an air of menace and detachment that is still sending chills through me. He looked at me like I was nothing. No emotion whatsoever. But there was interest, and intent. Like he had a plan for me. Physically he was kind of, well, attractive. Dark hair, cut shaggy. A missing limb. A scar on his face. The remaining eye a brilliant green. I knew the second I looked at him that he was the bad guy. The sort of guy Rustle would think was an alpha.

“What is wrong with that guy?”

“What isn’t wrong with him?” Arkon says. “Don’t worry about him. I am the one in charge of you. I am the one you answer to. He has no right to you.”

I can almost hear an unspoken ‘yet’ at the end of that sentence, but I don’t want to say anything about it because thinking about it scares me.

“Here,” Arkon says. “In here.”

He leads me into an office space that is, like everything, an alien-sized place with alien-sized items and a general scale that makes me feel like Gulliver on his travels.

Arkon picks me up and puts me on a soft table. Sort of like a medical table. After Drak, it freaks me out a little. Part of the machinery, he said. I don’t want to be part of the machinery. That seems like a very bad thing.

“Just what are you guys wanting me to work on, exactly?” I ask. “Like, what’s the job?”

“You’re training to interface with a new tech,” he explains, much as he has before, much as I was briefed while still back on Earth. And yet, somehow it doesn’t sound as reasonable now as it did before. There’s no quitting this job, I guess. Even if I wanted to, there’s no easy way home. If I want out of here, I’d have to convince him to send me home.

I park that idea as Arkon starts fiddling with some machines I don’t recognize. Are they the machinery I’m supposed to be part of? They look like medical devices of some kind. There are dials and tubes and little suction-y things, and…

He turns to me and gives me a stern look that catches me off guard and gives me those excited zippy feelings I’m probably not supposed to have. This man is incredibly attractive. Even with the extra arms, he has an air of complete authority. I noticed that a lot of the people coming in were being checked by security as they did. Security practically bowed to him as we came past, though they had their eyes on me like the little two-armed freak I am.

“In the meantime,” he says. “We have the matter of the forty-three thousand more credits for the damage to the ship.”

I’d forgotten about that. I mean, I guess I thought he had already dealt with it, maybe. I guess not. It was deferred, and now it’s going to be not deferred.

“Oh. Uh. Yeah. That was a mistake.”

“It was,” he agrees. “A mistake for you.”