Chapter 13 #2
Arnina's Boy Toy stayed in the room with us the whole time, working on something. It looked like he was going through records he had pulled from a desk, popping small crystalline cubes into a slot and rapidly swiping through a display projected onto nothing but air above the desk.
Zale hovered, watching at a distance, but not engaging again.
A while later, Arnina's Boy Toy eventually sang something out to the room, and the teenagers dropped what they were doing with us and rushed over to him.
They held out their wristbands one at a time as he made a swiping gesture in the air.
As his hand moved, images popped up in the air above the wrist band.
He went through each one, looking at them.
Some of them he made a separate gesture, and the image dissolved.
He did that with every image or video he was in.
I watched intently.
The strange thing about it was that the videos and images he was in, he was fuzzy in all of them. Despite that, he still made the dissolving gesture.
I walked over to where Arnina stood next to the giant tech board covered in text, both alien and human.
"Bet he's paying them, though if he is, I wonder why he didn't just hire someone with, you know, experience with alien languages?" I mused.
"They were nice to me," Arnina said. "None of the other zoo patrons did anything."
"They also are definitely uploading videos of us to somethin'," I pointed out.
I had observed the teens doing something that looked a lot like recording to an app on their wristbands. I also noticed that whenever they opened those apps, Zale would immediately walk away and pretend to be doing something that turned his back on the camera.
"Does that matter?" Arnina asked.
"It does if you want to quickly convince a bunch of stuck-up elf cats that you should have basic rights," I pointed out.
"They aren't..." Arnina trailed off, not finishing her sentence as she often did. I'd known her long enough to know that the girl sometimes forgot what she said out loud and what she just thought.
"They stuck us in cages and ignored us until dude-bro got a crush on you.
" I flipped my hair over my shoulder. It felt dry.
My scalp was a little itchy too. I needed to find a shampoo that was a better mixture for my hair needs.
"They couldn't even be bothered to do basic tests to measure our ability for higher mental functioning.
They assumed we were animals with no real context. That counts as stuck up to me."
The teenagers left, leaving us in the room with Zale, the Boy Toy, and the guards.
The Boy Toy smiled and sang something to Arnina and she immediately followed after him.
I shrugged and trailed after, Zale close behind me, a hot heat in the corner of my awareness.
There were more guards standing outside the office, and as we left, they peeled off to follow us.
Two more were at the bottom of the elevator.
Who was he?
He certainly didn't act like any of the other guards, and the Boy Toy a hundred percent treated him with deference when he wasn't actively trying to pretend like
Zale wasn't there.
There was a power dynamic here I didn't understand.
We walked out of what looked like the entrance to the zoo, a place with narrow entries where people would have to pass through a scanner. Large posters were plastered up on tall displays. I stopped at the same time Arnina did, the image sending a shock of pure, unadulterated anger through me.
It was a giant poster of Arnina.
Buck naked.
"Shit, Neen," I said. "Fuck these guys."
Arnina sang something to her Boy Toy.
“I asked him to take them down,” Arnina murmured. She said a word in their language to me, then repeated. “Down.”
He walked over, reached up, and ripped the poster off the wall. He then tapped his wristband and sang a few things into it, including the word “down” again.
Then he rolled the poster up into a tube and handed it to Arnina.
"What a good boy," I muttered quietly.
Arnina threw her arms around him, squeezing his waist.
I looked away as they snuggled, only to catch Zale staring at me. I flushed, avoided his eyes, and looked up at the sky.
Gah, I was being so weird with him.
Half the time I felt bold and mischievous, and other times I felt embarrassed and was unable to meet his eyes. If I could just manage my emotions, I could act like a normal person and be consistent. But no, instead, I was just flip-flopping around like a freak.
I took a deep breath and tried to shake off the negative self-talk.
At least he was an alien.
It wasn't like he knew that my behavior was abnormal.
Arnina sang something else. Then we started walking again.
We ended up at an untouched grassy strip the size of a two-lane road that ran alongside the zoo. It had one huge turnout marked with oversized metal plates on the ground where vehicles could pull over, but there wasn't a parking lot.
The Boy Toy placed his hand on a column that stood in front of the turnout, and one of the metal plates abruptly shifted, rolling back like a set of blinds over a missile launcher.
Instead of a weapon, a sleek, aerodynamic vehicle lifted out of the ground, hovering in the air as the metal sheet slid back into place below it.
One of the guards moved to a different panel and another vehicle rose up out of the ground while the Boy Toy Makrus, Yreta, Zale, Arnina, and I climbed into the first one.
The seats were comfortable, if way too big for me with their oversized padded cushions that squished around me, holding me in them like a hug.
Arnina’s Boy Toy pulled out a mesh webbing and secured it around Arnina like a five-point seat belt.
Zale moved in front of me, reaching towards my belt.
I grabbed it before he could, copying the boytoys movements quickly, getting myself strapped in before he even finished with her.
Zale watched me for a moment then sat across from me, facing me.
I looked around the cab rather than at him.
I couldn’t handle that heat right now.
Yreta climbed into a seat in the front that had levers and buttons around it in a semicircle.
She placed a small orb in a recess in the car's dashboard.
The vehicle itself had one huge tinted window as a domed roof, so I looked all around us.
It was dark out.
As the vehicle lifted up higher in the air, I could see the entrance of the zoo below us.
We didn't fly over it, staying directly above the grassy strip. I could see the curving walkways of the zoo snaking out below us, leading back along the twisting turns. I saw the edge of one of the larger pens, and then the car was flying away.
It followed the path line of the grassy strip, from what I could tell. As we moved higher, we merged into a stream of other vehicles. The other cars had similar bulbous glass domes, but they were all tinted like ours. I pressed my face against the glass to try to get a better look.
I glanced back into the car, and suddenly the floor of the car vanished.
"That's wicked!" I gasped out as the glimmering lights of the metropolis below us came into a full, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view.
My heart pounded in my chest as I stared wide-eyed at the glittering city below us. It was a galaxy of lights. Stars made out of building windows, comets of vehicles whizzing in the air above, below, and around us.
There wasn't any nature.
There were the grass roads that laced in between the rounded edges of circular and spiral buildings. On one roof of a particularly tall tower, there was what looked like a garden, but as far as I could see, amidst the glowing lights of the night's sparkling disco blanket, it was all city.
It sprawled.
"I think we're on a moon," I mused, thinking about everything I’d seen so far but hadn’t had a chance to really process.
"That planet we're able to see sometimes looked populated with the lights and all on the surface, but there were forests and snow and shit.
Obviously, we're not that high up, but this all looks like a city to me. "
"My pen in the zoo had more trees than I'm seeing here," Arnina said. "Though, let's see what it looks like in the daytime."
I reached out and grabbed Arnina's hand, squeezing so hard my metacarpals crushed together painfully.
I could feel tears welling as she squeezed back, and I opened them wider to try to avoid crying.
The reality of our situation was ever so much more real looking out at the city and the planet in the sky. Earth might be lost to us forever.
"We might not get home," I choked out, taking a deep, shuddering breath. "We might be stuck here forever. What are we going to do?"
I didn't enjoy my life on Earth all the time, but that didn't mean I was ready to have it torn away forever. It didn't mean I was ready to give up on humanity.
"We're going to do nothing," she squeezed her hand again. "I, on the other hand, am going to get an alien sugar daddy and take care of us both."
Girl, what?
The unexpected ridiculousness of her statement, paired with the stark potential reality of it, churned its way into an almost manic hilarity.
I burst into laughter.
"You did not just say that," I chuckled, wiping my cheeks. Had I been crying, too?
"What happened to not using language that is derogatory toward women? Now you're going to what, exactly? Suck a dick for a ride home?"
Why did I have to say it that way?
She was trying to lighten the mood, and I took the rollercoaster of our fears and desires and exposed them to the air with my darn bluntness.
She recoiled, shaking her head.
"There is nothing derogatory about doing what you need to survive," Arnina said. "Any person who does what they must do to live should never be ashamed of it."
Those words stilled something in me.