AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER ONE
Vivian
The seven-foot blue alien marched me down the bright-white hallway, his pace unfaltering no matter how hard I tried to yank my upper arm from his grip. He had one and a half feet and two-hundred pounds on me, but I refused to stop trying.
“You can’t do this, you know. It violates the Geneva Convention and the Brasília Accords.” It was a futile argument. My ship had obviously flown pretty damned far from Earth while I was in cryo. But I clung to my sense of justice and spoke with all the authority of my position as captain.
I tried to give him a steely glare, but he refused to face me, so I wasted the effort shooting daggers at one of the large purple horns curving down around this side of his head. Another pair stuck up from above his forehead, ending in vicious points that could gut a person. They offered a stark reminder that I shouldn’t be fooled by the technology surrounding me—these aliens were fighters at their core.
Well, so were humans.
“Hey, I’m talking to you.” A snarl bared my teeth. I might not have his fangs, but I still had bite.
His jaw hardened, and his eyes remained locked on the corridor in front of us. But he had a tell—his tail. He held it up behind him so the end hovered above his shoulder, and every time I spoke, the purple triangular tip twitched.
Continuing to ignore me, he yanked me to stop in front of a stainless-steel door. With a wave of his phone, the control pad mounted to the wall beeped, and the door clicked open. One last shove propelled me into the room with enough force that I had to take two quick steps to keep from falling. By the time I caught my balance and whirled around, the door had slammed shut.
“Great. Just great.” I rubbed at my arm, pulling up my shirtsleeve to expose the finger marks already purpling into bruises on my golden-tan skin. He’d done the other arm yesterday, so now I had a matching set.
“Friend okay?”a little voice said in my head.
“I’m fine,” I murmured. When I’d first heard the voice a couple of days ago, I worried I’d hallucinated it. Then I realized I was surrounded by aliens. Who said some of them couldn’t be telepathic? I asked his name, hoping he’d come back with something I never could have imagined. Instead, I got a sensation of running and pouncing with the faintest whisper of half-formed words—maximum good hunter. I’d settled for Max.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“Room too small.”A feeling of restlessness and irritation layered over my own.“Me want free.”
My heart pinched. Me being in here was bad enough, but the voice sounded like a small child. Who were these monsters to contain a child in a place like this? Max should be out, running free in the sun, exactly as he wished.
Spurred on by the need to rescue us both, I hurried over to the cabinets lining one wall of the examination room, tugging on one handle after the next. “Locked. Always locked,” I muttered as I tried the last one. “Can’t someone be sloppy just once? Preferably a drawer with lots of conveniently located scalpels.”
Without one of their phones, I was screwed. They used them to unlock everything. Unfortunately, all my years of training on how to captain a spaceship hadn’t given me any pickpocketing skills. It turned out studying a complex mixture of topics ranging from orbital insertion mechanics to leadership strategies didn’t help one iota when a bunch of aliens decided to make you their lab rat.
I spun around. The only other thing in the room was an examination table, complete with straps. I suppressed a shudder. It hadn’t come to that—yet. But it felt like it was only a matter of time. They’d already taken lots of blood, made me pee in multiple cups, and waved silver wands all over me during numerous scans.
The door clicked open, filled with the bulk of my guard, dressed head-to-toe in black. He stepped into the room, his dark eyes daring me to try something. A few days ago, I’d learned the hard way there wasn’t any point without some kind of weapon to even the score. A massive bruise spanned the ribcage on my side, the dark purple slowly going green and yellow. It still twinged every time I moved my left arm. The most humbling part of it all was I doubted he’d meant to hurt me—he was simply that much stronger.
He stepped aside, andsheentered. The doctor. As tall as him, she had horns and carried the same amount of muscle. She wore a light-blue jumpsuit, which seemed like the alien version of a white lab coat. Only the softer lines of her face and the slight swell of breasts hinted at her gender—at least until she spoke, her voice an alto in contrast to his deep bass.
She barked a command, and he gave me one last glare before stepping outside. No, he hadn’t meant to hurt me—it had gotten him in trouble with the boss—but he hadn’t minded doing it either.
Her eyes raked over me, eager and assessing but lacking any true warmth. The doctor didn’t want me injured. Injured lab rats weren’t optimal test subjects, and that’s all I was to her.
I’d spent the first week trying to talk to her, asking repeatedly about my ship, my crew. Then one day, I must have irritated her too much, because she injected me with something that made me pass out. Waking up hours later in my small cell without any idea of what she’d done to me was even worse than a regular examination. I’d kept my mouth shut ever since.
“She no nice,”Max said.“Me no like her, no matter how many treats.”
I suppressed a snort of laughter, picturing her holding out ice cream cones while the little boy turned his back.
“No. Me eat all the treats. Me not stupid.”The voice sounded smug.“No make me like her.”
This time I did laugh, quiet puffs of air sputtering from my nose as I fought to keep my lips pressed together.
The doctor’s purple eyes snapped to my face, coolly assessing. Then she shrugged and pulled a scanner from a pocket, running the silver wand over me. The device beeped, and her lips pursed as she shooed me over to the examination table.
I had to hop to get up on the surface, the height set for seven-foot tall beings instead of a shorty like me.
When I lay back, she activated one of the big scanners hanging from the ceiling overhead. It hummed to life, and my fingers dug into the examination table’s lightly cushioned surface. What were they doing to me this time? And why?
