Page 55 of Her Alien Boss

“Evie? I’m here.” Arkon’s deep voice emanates from beside me. He moves into my field of vision, his big, four-armed body rippling with something like relief. “You’re okay,” he says.

I look at him and I feel my eyes mist with tears. It feels like it has been a long time since I last saw him. I wonder how long I was sick for. I wonder how scared he was.

“I’m sorry,” I whimper. “Am I in trouble?”

“No, baby, you’re not in trouble,” he says, dipping into a very human form of speech. His calling me baby is the most intimate thing I think he has ever done with me. It makes me feel warm all the way to the very core of my being.

“Oh, my god!” I sit up and grasp for him. “Thank god that was all a dream.”

Arkon wraps me in all four arms with the most tender and sweet of embraces, kissing the top of my head, which does make it ache suspiciously. The pain is not too bad, but there’s not usually any pain at all, so I wonder…

“It was not all a dream,” he says gently. “We had to capture you, destroy the machine, and retrieve your brain to return it to your body.”

“There’s some light scarring, but that should go away in the not too distant future,” the doctor says.

“I was actually in the machine? He actually took my brain out?”

“He did, but it wasn’t your fault. He had engineered the interface to lower your perceptiveness and thinking. He thought that if he gave you a technical lobotomy, you wouldn’t have free will.”

“And that didn’t work out,” I say, my eyes filling with tears.

“It, uh, well. Things happen. It’s not your fault,” Arkon says.

“It is my fault! I drank the drink that made me agree to have my head chopped open.”

“Sweetness, he was going to chop your head open one way or another,” Arkon says. “That’s what men like him do. They manipulate.”

“I could have been more careful.”

“You didn’t do any damage,” Arkon reassures me. “It was a mess, but humanity is always in a mess one way or another. Some of the tech was sheared from the robot in their explosions though.”

My eyes widen.

I did it.

I did what I said I’d do.

“So there’s illicit alien tech on Earth now?”

“Yes,” Arkon sighs. “There is. Humanity has access to potentially build very high thermal panels, if they can reverse engineer what they have.”

“Oh, I bet they can,” I grin, clapping my hands together.

“I bet they can too,” he says. “But there’s one other thing you need to know. It’s important. And you need to stay calm when you hear it.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re pregnant.”

I stare at him blankly.

“You’re going to have a baby,” he says. “My baby. Our baby.”

“Was I pregnant before I got put in the robot, or…”

“Yes,” he says. “You’re very early on, but you are pregnant.”

There is one thing to do with this news: pass out about it.