RUN. SURVIVE. SURRENDER.
On alien worlds, the only way out is the Mate Hunt—where human women are chased, caught, and claimed.
We weren’t alone in the universe. And maybe it would’ve been better if we were.
When the star portals tore open the sky, alien factions carved Earth into zones of control—and left the rest to rot. The lucky hide beneath sponsor domes. The rest of us scrape by, waiting to be used up.
There’s only one way out.
Human women are universal breeders. Desired. Coveted. Hunted.
The Galactic Alliance offered Earth a deal—trade compatible mates to resource-rich worlds, get the medical technology and credits that keep our dying planet alive.
The Mate Hunt is the bargain: agree to be dropped on a savage alien world, run for your freedom, and if you’re caught… the choice is yours. Refuse and fight until the end. Or surrender—be claimed, marked, and bred by the hunter who takes you.
It isn’t kind. It isn’t safe.
But it’s a chance.
And sometimes the only choice left is whether to let the monster chasing you become the mate you can’t resist.
NAIA
The intake coordinator's office sits fourteen feet above current high tide. By next month, it'll be underwater.
“Miss Cross.” The coordinator doesn't look up from her tablet. Salt crust edges every window in this repurposed cruise terminal, and the whole building sways when the bigger waves hit. “Twenty-one signatures required.”
Twenty-one ways to agree that an alien can hunt me. Twenty-one variations on the same terrible bargain.
I pick up the stylus. My hand's steady. Eight years pulling drowning tourists from riptides taught me to lock down the shakes until after. Always after.
The evacuation notice for Sam burns in my pocket. Level Five Emergency Relocation, it says. Immediate transport to Calgary Highlands required. Thirty-seven thousand credits, due in full before processing.
Thirty-seven thousand, or my sixteen-year-old brother stays in Tide Zone 4 until the September surge takes everything south of Orlando permanently. The math is simple. Thirty days being hunted by an aquatic alien, or Sam dies in the same water I used to navigate for a living.
The irony was so thick I could taste the salt in it.
“Initial here to acknowledge Aylth's planet experiences regular tidal surges up to forty feet.” The coordinator taps the first box. Her nails are bitten down to nothing. “Participants must be capable swimmers.”
I almost laugh. N.C.
“Initial here to confirm you understand the hunter species possesses multiple prehensile appendages adapted for aquatic environments.”
Tentacles. Just say tentacles. But the clinical language makes it easier to pretend this is a normal transaction. Like renewing a diving certification instead of signing up to be bred by something that lives in the ocean.
N.C.
The next twelve boxes blur together. Risks of drowning. Risk of pregnancy. Risk of permanent physiological changes. Risk risk risk, as if any of us would be here if we had better options. Through the window, I watch a cargo ship navigate the drowned streets, floating over what used to be Bayfront Park. The water's brown today, full of whatever the morning storm churned up.
“Initial here to acknowledge consumption of the preparation tonic will create immediate and permanent changes to your body chemistry.”
My stylus hesitates. “What kind of changes?”
“Increased tactile sensitivity. Enhanced lung capacity. Improved underwater vision. Modified pheromone production that travels through water.” She rattles it off like reading a grocery list. “The changes make you trackable by scent even while submerged.”
So the ocean itself becomes my enemy. The one place I've always felt capable, and they're going to turn it against me.
N.C.
