Chapter 3
Rose
I don’t know where I am. My vision has been getting worse and worse. I’m almost totally blind at night now, and bright spots flash in my eyes during the day, blocking out parts of my vision. I can hear noisy voices around me, catch glimpses of faces and bodies in my peripheral vision, so it’s probably the usual. Crowds of aliens watching me, laughing at me. Sometimes the lizard men let them touch me through the wire of my cage. Sometimes they make me run in circles like a dog on a chain.
I do my best to make them happy, because if I don’t, it’s only worse. But I can tell that I’m dying. It’s slow, but it’s still death. Today I can barely make my hands and feet move even when they whip me.
I thought that at some point I would reach a maximum amount of pain. But it turns out that there are so many kinds of hurt. More kinds than there are notes in the musical scale. And they don’t combine into a single melody, they layer like chords, louder and louder, impossible to ignore.
There’s the chime of thirst and hunger. There’s the throb of open wounds. There’s the ache of sore muscles and broken bones. There’s the scream of dehydrated cells. The stab of a headache, the dull squeeze of a sad heart. The scorch of humiliation. And those are just the ones I’m feeling right now as I stumble and fall and taste dirt.
The whip stripes my legs, and the collar around my neck chokes me as I’m dragged in one direction. I try to get up, but I just can’t. I know in my heart that this is the day that I die. If my body doesn’t give up first, my captors are going to decide I’m not worth hauling around from planet to planet.
I don’t care at this point. What’s one more note in the symphony of pain? But some animal part of me still is trying to avoid the inevitable. So I drag myself across the powdery dirt floor, desperate to put slack in the leash.
Hands grab me.
I cringe, trembling, only vaguely aware that these hands are different. They’re larger. The claws don’t bite into my skin. The rhythm of their gait as they carry me is different.
My neck hurts with the effort of holding up my head, so I lean into the stranger’s chest. My eyes hurt, so I close them.