Abducted by a. What, Exactly?
I woke up in a box.
That was my first thought, box, before the details resolved themselves.
Padded walls, off-white, slightly curved at the corners.
A low shelf built into one side with a folded blanket on it.
A sealed hatch at the far end, oval, set into the wall at about knee height for a normal doorway.
Warm air that hummed faintly with the sound of environmental systems.
Not a box. A containment space. Clean, well-lit, the kind of setup you'd build for transporting something fragile.
Or someone.
I lay still for a count of ten, keeping my breathing even, taking stock.
I'd woken up in bad places before. Not like this, but close enough.
A cargo dispute on Kepler Station when I was twenty-two, where the relief crew got delayed and I ran out of rations for three days.
The month I spent in the med-bay on Outpost Gamma after the pressure seal blew.
You learned, after enough of those, that panic was a luxury.
Panic burned energy and made you stupid, and I was already behind on information.
So. Facts first.
I was lying on something soft, a pallet, maybe, covered in dense fabric that held heat. My station coveralls were still on, which was a small mercy. My boots were gone. I flexed my toes experimentally. No pain. No restraints. My arms moved freely when I lifted them.
I sat up.
The space was smaller than I'd thought. Maybe three metres by two, the ceiling low enough that I could have touched it standing on my toes.
The walls were that same padded off-white, seamless, without visible joins.
The air smelled faintly of something organic, not unpleasant, just unfamiliar.
Underneath it, so faint I almost missed it, was that other smell.
Earth and musk and warmth.
My stomach tightened.
I remembered. The cargo bay. The flickering lights. That impossible scent rolling through the corridor like smoke, and my body going still and quiet in a way I hadn't chosen. The shape in the dark, the horns, the hand cupping my head so carefully. The cold sting of a needle.
Right. So I'd been abducted by a – what? A monster? An alien? Both?
Aliens. Actual, real aliens. We'd spent my whole life arguing about whether anyone else was out here, and the answer had always been a shrug.
Grainy footage, conspiracy forums, the odd "landing" that turned out to be a weather drone or a hoax.
Officially, humanity had never met a soul. Officially. So much for that.
"Fantastic," I said, to the empty room. "Really excellent life choices, Mara. Walk towards the scary smell in the murder corridor. What could possibly go wrong."
My voice sounded thin and flat. The padded walls swallowed the echo.
I pushed myself to my feet. The pallet shifted under me, surprisingly stable. I crossed to the sealed hatch and pressed my palm against it. Cool to the touch, smooth, no visible control panel. I pushed. Nothing. I ran my fingers along the edge, looking for a seam, a release mechanism, anything.
The hatch stayed sealed.
I stepped back and looked around the space again, slower this time.
The blanket on the shelf was woven from something soft and dense, not wool, not synthetic, something in between.
There was a shallow depression in the wall that I'd missed on my first scan, about the size of my hand, with a small cup fitted into it.
Water, maybe. I lifted it and sniffed. Clean. Cold. I drank.
The water tasted faintly mineral, like something drawn from deep underground. It was the best thing I'd tasted in weeks. I drank until the cup was empty and set it back in its depression.
My hands were shaking.
I looked at them. Watched the fine tremor in my fingers. Fear response, delayed onset. My body catching up to what my brain already knew, which was that I was alone in an unfamiliar place with no exit, no weapon, no idea where I was or who had put me here.
Or what.
The thought of those horns. That size. The hand that had caught me before I fell.
I sat down on the shelf with my back against the wall and pulled the blanket over my legs. It was warm, heavier than it looked. I pulled it up to my chest and made myself breathe.
"Okay," I said. "Okay. You're alive. That's something. Whoever took you went to a lot of trouble to make a nice comfortable cell. That probably means they want you alive, which means you have time."
Time for what, I didn't know. But it was better than the alternative.
I'd counted to eight hundred and forty-three when the hatch opened.
Not slowly. Not with any warning. One moment it was sealed, the next it was sliding sideways into the wall, and I was on my feet before I'd decided to stand, the blanket falling from my lap, my back pressed flat against the padded wall behind me.
He filled the doorway.
Eight and a half feet, maybe more. I couldn't tell exactly, because the hatch was built to a larger-than-human scale and yet he was ducking to fit through it, his horns nearly brushing the frame.
His eyes found me immediately. Huge, liquid, almost all pupil in the dim light of the corridor behind him.
He looked at me the way he had in the cargo bay, like something he'd spent a long time searching for.
I didn't move. I wasn't sure I could.
He stepped through the hatch, and the space that had seemed small before became tiny.
He had to stoop, his horns angling down, his shoulders seeming to take up the whole width of the cell.
I came up to about the middle of his chest. If he'd reached out, he could have touched me without moving from where he stood.
He didn't reach out.
He crouched.
He sank down slowly, folding his legs beneath him, and I noticed the hooves then, dark and heavy, clicking softly against the floor as he settled, until his eyes were level with mine.
His tail curled around behind him and lay still against his calf.
One slow sweep. Calm, I thought, and then wondered how I knew that.
From his belt he drew something small and metallic. He held it up, not towards me but between us, and pressed something on its side. A light blinked amber.
"Can you understand me?" His voice was low. I felt it in my chest before I heard it properly, a vibration that ran through my ribs. The words came out slightly off, the cadence strange, as if they were being assembled in real time.
Translator. The device in his hand was a translator.
"Yes," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. "I can understand you."
"Good." He set the translator on the floor between us. "I am Keth. You will not be harmed."
"You drugged me and put me in a box."
"Yes."
I waited for an explanation. An excuse. Something. He just looked at me with those enormous dark eyes, patient and utterly unselfconscious, as if he had all the time in the universe and intended to spend it crouched on the floor of my cell, watching me breathe.
"Why?" I demanded.
"Because you are mine."
The words landed flat and certain. He said them the way other people state the obvious. The sky is blue. Water is wet.
"I'm not yours," I said. "I don't know you. I've never seen you before in my life."
"I have seen you." He tilted his head slightly.
The motion was strange on a face shaped like his, all heavy brow and wide-set eyes and a broad flat nose with flared nostrils.
Bovine, I thought. He looked bovine. Like a bull, if a bull stood upright and had hands and watched you with an intelligence that made your skin prickle.
"Three rotations ago. Your scent, in the atmospheric data. I knew."
"You–" I stopped. "Atmospheric data. From where?"
"Not your homeworld – Earth, our records call it.
You were far from there." The translator gave the words a strange weight, as if the names were foreign to his mouth.
Which they were, I supposed. "A mining relay, alone in the dark.
A survey ship passed through the sector three rotations ago and sampled what the station vented into space, and your scent signature was in the data. A Peritan trace, faint and alone."
"Peritan," I repeated. "What's that?"
"It is what your kind are called, beyond your own world. The name the intergalactic community uses for you." His head tilted, as if my not knowing were the strange part of all this. "You did not know you had a name?"
"We didn't know there was anyone out here to give us one," I said. "So there's more aliens? Not just your species?"
"Millions of species. Yet I am interested in only one of them." His eyes stayed on me. "What is your name, little Peritan?"
I wanted to protest at both being called little and a Peritan – why couldn't he just say human – but there were more important battles to fight.
"Mara."
"Mah-ra." He tasted my name on his lips. "Maaaaa-raaa."
"My scent signature." I said the first thing that came into my head, to stop him repeating it again. "You smelled me. From space."
"From the data." He said it as if there were a difference.
"The survey ships sample as they pass – gas, dust, whatever a place leaks into the dark.
I process it. Your scent–" His tail flicked, quick this time, agitated or eager, I couldn't tell.
"I knew immediately. I have spent three rotations arranging a return mission. "
“Rotations?”
“One rotation is the passing of all five seasons. A full cycle.”
Three years. He'd spent three years arranging to kidnap me because he'd smelled me in a dataset.
"You're insane," I said.
He considered this. "No."
"You took me from my home. You drugged me. You put me in a padded cell in what I'm assuming is a spaceship."
"Yes."
"That is insane behaviour."
"It is necessary behaviour." He shifted, his hooves clicking softly against the floor. "Among my kind, a scent match like this–" He paused, searching for words. The translator crackled faintly. "It is everything. It means we are–" Another pause. "Bonded. Meant. You are my mate."
I stared at him.
He'd just described every alien romance novel ever written. The fated-mates thing, the scent bonding, the earnest conviction that destiny had delivered him the woman of his dreams and all he had to do was take her.
Except those were fiction. Silly, harmless fiction. This was real. This was an eight-and-a-half-foot alien crouched in front of me, telling me I was his because he'd sniffed me out of a weather report three years ago.
"No," I said.
"No?"
"No. I'm not your mate. I'm a human woman who was working a night shift on a relay station, minding my own business, and you abducted me. That's not romance. That's kidnapping."
He went still, his eyes never leaving my face.
"I understand that this is difficult," he said. "That you did not choose this the way I did. But the bond exists. Your body will recognise it. The Claiming Serum–"
"The what?"
He reached for his belt again. This time he drew out a small cylindrical container, dark and smooth. He held it up so I could see it but didn't move to give it to me.
"The Claiming Serum," he said. "It will make you compatible. Your body will respond to me the way mine already responds to you. Heat cycles. Scent bonding. The ability to–" He paused. The translator crackled. "To produce."
"Produce what?"
His eyes, if anything, grew warmer.
"You will understand when it happens," he said. "It is sacred, among my people. An omega who produces is the highest gift. The most precious thing there is."
I looked at the cylinder in his hand. At his enormous dark eyes. At the careful way he was crouched in front of me, keeping his bulk below my eye level, giving me space in a room where there was none to give.
He wasn't hungry. He wasn't aggressive. He looked at me as though I were something fragile and irreplaceable.
That was worse.
"I want to go home," I said.
"I know."
"Take me back."
He didn't answer at once. The hand holding the cylinder lowered slowly to his side.
"We are already past the point where that is possible," he said.
The words were flat and inflectionless, and they should have felt like a threat. They were a threat, weren't they? A declaration that I was trapped, that there was no going back, that my life as I knew it was over.
But he said it the way you'd report that the ship had left the dock. Not cruel, not triumphant. Just a fact, a piece of information he was handing me because I'd asked for it.
And underneath the fear, underneath the anger, underneath the part of me that was already calculating escape routes and wondering how hard it would be to take down something three feet taller than me, there was a warmth.
Low in my belly. Spreading slowly. I'd noticed it when he came in, I realised. That same strange, wrong calm I'd felt in the cargo bay. My body relaxing when it should have been coiling to fight.
A threat response, I told myself. Adrenaline doing something strange. Shock, maybe, or some chemical interaction I didn't understand.
Not him. It wasn't about him.
He watched me with those huge dark eyes, patient and still, and I told myself the warmth meant nothing.
I almost managed to believe it.