Chapter 1
Scarlet
There were a handful of times in Scarlet’s life when she found herself just stopping and being stunned by what was going on around her.
It was not necessarily a negative or a positive feeling.
Similarly, the times it had happened were an even mix of negative and positive.
It wasn’t quite an out-of-body experience, but it was definitely a moment when she just felt detached and amazed.
The first time she remembered it happening had been shortly after her thirteenth birthday.
She had been in yet another city she didn't recognize, dressed in another beautiful, sparkly, heavy, itchy gown, her hair yet again pulled back so tight it hurt, with her face caked in so much makeup she felt her skin suffocating.
Standing alone, always alone, in a hot spotlight.
Yet another beauty pageant. Yet another panel of middle-aged men and women who were telling her how ugly and imperfect she was. An instant before the moment hit and everything faded, she remembered being sick to her stomach because her mom was going to yell at her again for her failure.
Then came that moment of wondering just where the hell she was, what the hell she was doing, and why, why, she was doing it at all. She hated beauty pageants. She hated the entire scene. Nothing about it made her happy and the only reason she was there was because her mother demanded it.
It had happened again about ten years later, when she had been crossing the stage, graduating from nursing school.
An education she had needed to fight her mother to receive.
The moment happened after the gauntlet of handshakes, as she was walking away with her leather-bound book that held only a piece of paper promising her diploma would be coming in a few weeks.
That had been a good one. A great one really.
Her mother wasn’t in the crowd cheering for her, still so disappointed that Scarlet had surrendered a potential modeling career to work.
Scarlet was alone, but she was also proud of herself.
Pleased with herself. She didn't need a crowd when she could feel the satisfaction and joy so deep in her own heart.
Funnily enough, the next moment came only a couple months later when she had been sitting inside a spaceship, counting seconds to keep track of time since no one had a clock, waiting for the giant dinosaur-lizard alien that had abducted her to come back so they could steal his key to their cell.
Or rather their storage compartment, as she had since learned that was where she had been.
That had been, admittedly, the strangest moment of her life. She didn't think that she would ever have that moment again after that. It felt like she had reached the peak of disbelief.
But here she was, having another one.
She was on a starship again, but that was where the similarities to the last time ended.
This time, she was on a proper starship.
She thought the one that brought her to the planet Turv was impressive.
But that was like never seeing a boat before then spotting a jet ski and thinking that was the height of water travel technology.
Impressive, for certain, but it seriously underestimated just what it could be.
The starship she stood on now was a massive, luxury cruise liner in comparison. There were multiple floors and a city sized crew and technology so impressive it bordered right on the edge of magic to her mind.
The ship, named the Jutiron Stor, which apparently meant something like noble strider – or probably something even more poetic since the ancient domini language was very flowery – had seven levels that she could visit.
Not including the engineering and crew levels she didn't have access to, of which there were many.
It had no weapons but was very heavily defended.
That was on purpose. Where they were going, none of the visiting species were allowed to bring weapons of war.
It was to ensure peace between all the dignitaries.
It was also so massive, they hadn’t been able to directly enter it from Turv – the planet they had left from.
They had to get on a shuttle ship that took them up into space, past the moons, to where the Jutiron Stor waited.
It was too big to come down to the planet. It hadn’t even been built on a planet.
Which, apparently, was common for huge galaxy hopping starships.
And while space travel on Earth was cramped and stressful, she really was on a luxury cruise here.
She had her own room, and it was a large suite that had its own bathroom and a private closet and a huge window with a stunning view of the vastness of space.
It wasn’t just that she was on an amazing starship, moving from one galaxy to another an unimaginable distance away, that brought that sense of disconnect though.
It was that she was a barely graduated nursing student turned top tier alien doctor who had just come from checking on her friend who was pregnant with an alien baby.
It was that, just yesterday, she had a new language imprinted into her head that she was still getting used to speaking – making it her third known language and the second one to ever be imprinted.
It was that she was dressed in a flowing gown wearing alien gold and heading to a ringworld – whatever that was – in order to present her case for humanity to a coalition of aliens.
And it was that she was now standing on one of the many viewing decks of the ship, looking through a massive, half dome window surrounded by purple, alien plants, staring out at subspace.
And subspace was weird.
She hadn’t been able to see it on the last ship because it had no windows at all. So, this was her first look at the incomprehensible sub-dimension. It was brain melting.
The way starships traveled so quickly from one galaxy to another was by dropping out of space and entering subspace – which had been explained to her as like moving through the space between dimensions.
They weren’t even actually moving though.
The engines of the ship weren’t actually thrusting them forward.
It was closer to teleporting. They had dropped out of space and so, outside the windows, she could no longer see space.
Not to say that there was nothing to see outside of the windows, because there was.
It was just something that was so odd, her eyes had trouble focusing on it.
Like an optical illusion pattern that was constantly changing.
It actually hurt to look at for too long and she had to keep turning her gaze away to give her eyes a break.
But the weird thing was, whenever she did that, it would change.
The colors and patterns she saw looking directly at it were completely different from the ones she saw in her periphery.
Looking directly, she saw a swirling fractal of pastel colors that constantly shifted and changed.
Seeing it in her periphery turned it into a hard edged, crystalline structure with no color at all.
A mind fuck of a magic eye puzzle that was at once hypnotizing and intimidating.
And she stood on this pretty garden terrace of the luxury, royal alien starship, traveling through subspace at no miles per hour, dressed like an alien princess – because she essentially was one – with an alien medical degree wondering how her life turned out like this.
Well, she knew how but it still seemed unbelievable.
“Come to enjoy the view?”
She turned back towards the entrance of the terrace as one of her friends, sister really, came towards her with a smile on her face.
Alanna was a pretty girl who complimented her dark skin with bright colors and had let her hair go fully natural.
It was pulled back from her head into two, twin puffballs that were decorated with sparkling gemstones.
When Scarlet was abducted, she had been taken with four other girls.
She hadn’t known them before that moment, but they were sisters now.
Quite literally. They had been adopted by a male who was, essentially, king of the planet Turv.
Adopting them as sisters gave them protection and honor according to his people.
It also, unfortunately, meant that, according to the Coalition, they were the same as the domini and bound by all the same laws. Since Earth wasn’t yet capable of deep space travel, they couldn’t contact their own home planet.
In order to even get permission to try to speak to their families, the girls had to appeal to the Coalition to give Earth, at the very least, protected status. Atem, their alien brother, had volunteered to have Turv be Earth’s protectorate – which was only one step of the process.
That was why Scarlet and Alanna were heading to the ringworld that served as the seat of the Coalition.
Peony, the human pregnant with a hybrid baby and mated to Atem, was also coming since she was basically the queen of Turv.
Their other sisters, Holly and Hattie, had opted to stay on Turv.
Holly remained behind because she was a homebody and simply didn’t want to go, and Hattie was trying to avoid Tuvo – the alien she was attracted to who wasn’t attracted to her.
Hattie hadn’t said that’s why she wasn’t coming, but Scarlet was pretty sure that was the reason.
That was okay. This was apparently going to be really boring anyway. Peony, as adassani of the domini, and Scarlet, as a highly, alien educated woman were going to represent humanity. Alanna was also coming, she had insisted on it, but Scarlet wasn’t sure why.
She loved Alanna, but Alanna was kind of dreamy and she talked about seeing auras and feeling vibes and things like that. She was more of a hippie than a politician.