2. Taylor
TAYLOR
Iwoke up moaning. And not in a good way.
Ouch. The side of my face hurt, my shoulder throbbed, and both palms burned where the stone had skinned them. One knee felt swollen beneath my field pants, and a bruise was already hardening along my hip.
But this wasn't my tent, or the dirt floor of the jungle.
I sat up with a squeal so fast I gave myself whiplash.
I would have scooted back too but my head hit something behind me.
I wanted to look, I really did, but I was not going to take my eyes off the most dangerous thing in the room at that moment.
Which was a bright pink thing with large eyes, tentacles and some sort of legs.
Also it was looking right at me making some sort of odd wailing sound.
Holy. Shit.
I swallowed and moved my eyes for a fraction of a second to look to the side and snapped my eyes back on the tentacle thing. It was bright pink and wet-looking, like a popsicle someone had licked and put back. Then I moved my eyes to the right and snapped them back.
I was surrounded by aliens. Honest to god alien life.
The squid tentacle thing was not in a water tank.
The gigantic grasshopper thing next to it moved its little claw hands, and a frightened sound escaped me before I could stop it.
My pulse hammered against the sore side of my face.
There was no door, no familiar voice, no one on Earth who knew where I was.
The dread was too big for my body, so my brain did the only thing it could: it shrank the whole nightmare down to a word small enough to hold.
Fine. This was fine. I knew it was a lie even as I grabbed it, but it was the only shield on offer, and I dared anyone else to react better.
Then what sounded like an actual language came from my immediate left. I slowly turned my head and stilled. This was the most humanoid-looking alien yet. Except the alien was blue: a deep, striking blue, with sharp, elegant facial angles and knobby crests tracing the sides of the forehead.
Those knobs were all I could focus on before my vision started swimming. For one panicked second I decided this had to be an elaborate prank — prosthetics, drugs, the world's cruelest hidden-camera setup. Then the blue alien blinked sideways, and the prank explanation died. I was going to faint.
Him or her? Neither? The mouth kept moving and noises kept coming out. I managed to calm down enough to hear it: several different languages. Probably the same short phrase repeated each time, like the alien was trying to find a common language with someone. That someone being me.
My heart was still battering my ribs when I forced air past my teeth. "Uh. Hi?"
An idiot. I had a degree in archaeology and that was all I could manage, but at least terror had not stolen speech completely.
More noises came back. I didn't understand any of it. But the alien seemed relatively safe, so I turned my head in the other direction and wished I hadn't.
A wall. But not a normal wall. It was a partially transparent barrier sealing all five of us inside a cell, with a diagram of lights running across it like some space-age sci-fi lock.
The hallway on the other side was dim, but I could still see dark gray walls that looked like steel or something similar.
Across the corridor, shallow mesh racks lined up with the cells, each holding scraps of clothing and whatever the prisoners had been carrying when they were taken.
Prisoner property. My god. Where the hell was I?
A faint vibration trembled under the floor. And the humming—the same sound from the temple right before the lizard thing walked toward me on two legs.
The lizard!
I whipped my head around fast in all directions but didn't see that lizard guy.
I braced against the dark gray wall behind me and tried to slow my breathing.
It refused. I kept my knees bent and my hands ready, trusting none of the strangers around me.
At least the lizard thing wasn't in here with us. It must have kidnapped me.
So, aliens are real. What the hell.
Nothing more happened except for the blue person in the corner facing me, gesturing toward me, and repeating the same short question in language after language.
They were trying to communicate with me directly.
Maybe it was some kind of computer or cyborg and not alive like the rest of us.
I looked again. No, there were cuts on the arm. Definitely alive. With green blood.
I looked away willing myself not to puke.
Dear lord I didn't want to be sitting in puke for who knew how long.
And why did they take us — me, the squid, the grasshopper, the whole cellful of us — anyway?
Sacrifice? Experiments? Interplanetary zoo?
I snorted at that last one, imagining myself in a cage with a sign about me made up of crap because they knew nothing about humans. Or did they?
Shit. What was going to happen to me? I looked around the room and jumped when the pile of blankets in the corner moved. Turns out it was not a pile of blankets but another alien.
From the corner, the blue alien spoke, their voice raspy and mechanical. "Do you understand this? Archive language partial —"
I turned so fast I startled her. Her? I had zero facts about blue-alien biology, but the voice read female to me, so I decided she was a she until somebody corrected me — a policy I was prepared to extend to the whole cell.
"Yes! Yes! Oh my god yes. Where am I? What are you? What is this? What happened—"
She raised up a hand, apparently the sign to shut up was universal. The next words came smoother, like a bad signal suddenly finding the station.
"You have been taken by slave traders. We will be sold at auction.
" She said it the way you'd report weather.
"The crew discuss their inventory in the corridor.
They assume the inventory does not speak their trade tongue.
" A pause. "They are wrong. What planet are you from? This is a very obscure language."
I think I had my mouth open so long I drooled on myself. Slave trade? Abducted? What planet am I from? Honestly that last one shouldn't have surprised me, not with the company in the cell.
I swallowed. "Uh. Um. Earth. In the solar system. Milky Way galaxy. A spiral galaxy."
I didn't know if that was enough info and I didn't get a chance to ask.
Because at that moment we were thrown around the room.
I bounced off the transparent lighted wall, which was not just a wall.
It was also some sort of electric force field.
The shock knocked the wind out of me, leaving my skin stinging and my muscles twitching.
A strangled scream tore loose when my lungs finally unlocked.
I landed on the blanket-like alien, which was very warm like a heating pad.
It threw me off with such force that I flew across the cell and slammed shoulder-first into solid steel.
Pain burst through my ribs; I gasped and folded around it.
Across the room, sparks spat from the force field until the alien dragged its fabric-covered mass away from the barrier.
Everyone was making noises, probably everyone's version of pain. So I added to the cacophony. "What was that? What happened? Has this happened before?"
The ship bucked again before anyone could answer.
I hit the solid wall and the others collapsed across my back in a pile of limbs, tentacles, and deceptive alien weight.
Before I could drag in enough air to yell, gravity let go.
We lifted in a heap; then the ship rolled and slammed us into the active force field before dumping us against solid steel.
The charge cut off the instant we left the field — enough to convulse you, apparently, not enough to kill the merchandise — but my muscles kept sizzling and twitching like they hadn't gotten the memo.
Pain stripped every voice in the room down to sound.
If this was a ship and we were in space, the hull screaming while gravity lost its mind was probably not a good thing.
I groaned as I raised my head wondering how much more of this we could survive. The giant grasshopper thing looked like it had broken one of its arms. It was holding it, making a weird chittering sound as green goop dropped out. Oh my god, I'm going to puke.
I looked away and swallowed, trying to get my stomach under control. I could not puke now. I didn't know what was going on, and I did not want to die, but I also did not want to be locked in somebody's private collection.
I crawled until I could get my legs under me and slowly stood waiting for the next time for the ship to tilt for us to be thrown against the wall.
The transparent wall lights were off. Dull gray lines remained where they'd been.
The electrical hum of the force field was gone, but the physical partition — a thick slab of transparent alien glass or plastic or whatever horrible space material this was — remained.
I ran over — and pulled up short, hand in the air, because I had very recent memories of what that thing did with current in it.
No lights. No hum. I tapped it with one knuckle, braced to snatch my hand back.
Nothing. Okay. I smacked it with my hand.
It was solid, but cold and inert now, no longer buzzing with that convulse-you-senseless current.
You could barely tell that there was a wall there at all.
Still transparent, even with the lights off.
I hit it, kicked it, then I started yelling and banging on the wall. No one came.