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Stella
My period always sucks, but I find that in Kahn’s care, it sucks considerably less. He’s so attentive, and he looks after me in every way possible. I am being taken care of so incredibly well that it almost feels like I’m doing something wrong when I decide to sneak out once I stop bleeding and start feeling better. I can’t stay captive. I need to move. Being cooped up is making me crazy. I did almost fall asleep in the bath, but that’s just because I haven’t been able to get the hell out of Kahn’s rooms.
I tell myself that I’ll just be careful, and I won’t be long. I’ve spent a lifetime learning how to evade soldiers, after all. If I get caught, it’s because I’ve been very stupid. And I’m never stupid.
I step out of Kahn’s room, and…
“Stella?”
My name, spoken in a human voice, makes me freeze. I know that voice. I know what it means. It mans the end of everything. It means I’ve been caught. Instantly. After weeks on the run, after leaving everything I ever knew behind and venturing into the uncivilized wilds, after getting shot and being sick and getting alien abducted without even noticing it and then captured and thrashed, I’ve been caught.
By someone I know.
Maybe that fact should make me homesick.
Maybe it should fill me with guilt.
All it does is make me freeze.
That is not the voice of a stranger. It’s a voice from the past. My name, spoken in those familiar, if a little shocked and stern tones, drags me back through time to when I was half my age and my size.
I can hear footsteps approaching. Overhauling me.
Why can’t I move? After all this running, why am I suddenly staying still and just letting this happen?
There’s a kind of helplessness that only emerges around people from the past. If I met this guy now, I wouldn’t think twice about running, or fighting, or…
A big hand clamps down on my shoulder. I know logically that it has to be smaller than Kahn’s. No human’s hand is bigger than Kahn’s. Somehow, though, it feels bigger and heavier. It is like something reaching out from the depths of years to grip me and hold me still.
He turns me around, and I find myself looking into a grizzled, wiry, square-jawed face.
“Rex.”
“I told him I’d find you,” he says, his eyes burning with glee at the sight of me. “I told him I would do whatever it took to bring you back. And now here you are.”
Commander Rex is far from a stranger to me. You could say he’s something almost like an uncle. He had a place in my family home for a very long time. I played around him and his soldiers when I was still a child.
He’s grayer now, and more intensely devoted to the cause than ever. There might have been a brain in his head once, but now every bit of him is slavishly devoted to the cause and the man he serves.
“I knew there was a reason I was drawn to stay on this vessel of evil,” he says. “I knew I had a calling here. It was you, Stella. I must have felt you. It’s so good to see you.”
A glimmer of a tear lights the corner of one of his eyes. He’s thinking about all the praise and adoration he is going to get when it turns out he rescued me from evil aliens. I look around him, and see that true to form, he is not alone. Rex never travels without a contingent of soldiers. They are maintaining a respectful distance, but their excitement is palpable — as is my dread.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “You’re safe now. We can get you safely back to Earth. We can take this ship and all its technology to your father’s stronghold. We can…”
The newer, braver, bolder part of me finally speaks up.
“No.”
It doesn’t say a lot. But it says what matters.
He cocks his head at me in surprise. He expects me to be grateful to him as a rescuer.
“You want to stay here?”
I nod.
Rex makes a sound of deep concern. “You cannot possibly be happy as the captive of this alien beast. Has he put his hands on you? Has he besmirched your purity?”
