When I reached a sleepy downtown, I only met three earthlings, burrowed inside cardboard boxes and sleeping on the street. My implant sensed toxic compounds in their blood and I noticed two were intoxicated and a third was drugged with a strong opioid sedative. Talking to these three wouldn’t help. I peered past the men and noticed a glass windowed store with clothing inside. They would be the only witnesses to what I was about to do.
I grunted and thrust my elbow into the window. The glass shattered with a loud crash, and the three men raised their heads.
“What’r’ye’doin’ere,” one mumbled sleepily.
I stepped inside the window, my feet crunching the glass into the hardwood floor as I searched for the largest clothes I could find. I dressed quickly and heard the sirens in the distance. The three men crowded around the open window.
“Oi. They’re going to blame us y’know. Feckin’ criminal.”
“Can you tell me how to get to Vermont?” I asked calmly.
“Jimmers. Jimmers, are you seein’ what I’m seein’?”
“A purple giant. Shit that dope was good.”
“Fellas. I need to get to Vermont. How far away is it?”
“Brattleboro’s ‘round 20 minutes drive West,” one replied, punctuating his assistance with a loud hiccup.
“Thanks.”
“You ain’t from ‘round here?”
“No. I’m not. Tell the police my name is Hans Trout.”
I closed my eyes and activated my implant, focusing my attention on landing five miles west. I didn’t have too muchmore teleporting left in me, but I figured I could follow the signs along the highway and run all the way to Brattleboro, Vermont.
My ship was further north than that, in the woods just north of a small town called Winooski. If I could find some technology in Brattleboro, I could amplify my implant and increase my transport range.
Once I had my ship, I could find Minerva. Until then, she was at the mercy of her own government, if they hadn’t killed her already. The thought that she could be in serious danger or even dead urged me to move faster. I doubted Minerva needed my saving, but I had to try everything in my power to get to her… soon.
NINE
MINNIE
I thoughtthey’d kill me when they took me. They shot John in his house and separated us. They injected Vidar with something too, a frothing white liquid that looked like an anti-freeze based compound. If he were human, he would have certainly been killed from it. Without studying more data about his species, I couldn’t guess how the injections would have affected him.
If his skin could stop bullets, I told myself, it made sense to have hope that he could survive whatever my people flung in his direction. When the soldiers took me from John’s house, they shoved me in the back of a black armored van where the bound me in a straight jacket and shoved a filthy red ball gag in my mouth. I retched as we pulled away from the driveway of his old colonial. Tears welled in my eyes.
John was only trying to help. He didn’t deserve any of this. The soldiers stared at me with disgust as we drove. As we drove around sharp corners, I had no way of bracing myself. I fell off the chair and rolled onto the ground of the armored van. One of the soldiers pushed me with his gun. I tried to scream. Another angry-faced Hispanic soldier with dark hair and eyesthat would have otherwise seemed soft, kicked me back in the other direction.
“Traitor,” one of them spat. And then, the same soldier actually spat right on my cheek. The glob slid down my cheek and the ball gag deafened another one of my screams. I wriggled my legs and flailed them as much as I could in an attempt to regain balance, but that only angered them. Another boot hit me in the hips and then the armored van turned another sharp corner. My head hit the wall of the van and the horrid world around me faded to black.
A dull throb at the base of my neck awakened me. For a moment, I forgot where I was, and everything that had happened at John’s place. I could only feel the throb and as my eyes fluttered open, I was drenched in darkness. As I attempted to shift my limbs, I recognized that I was strapped to a table. I recognized that the stuffy air in the room and the complete darkness could not have been from John’s house.
My memories filtered back and I slammed my head back against the metal table. I was trapped. And thirsty. And hungry too. Once I moved and groaned, a doctor came in. He wore a mask and a white lab coat and he didn’t speak to me nor look me in the eyes.
“You will be questioned by the lieutenant in a few minutes. This serum will make you more amenable to telling the truth.”
My mouth was free from the ball gag, but I didn’t bother answering him, not like he expected a response. He lifted my sleeve and dabbed my arm with alcohol before injecting me with a clear serum. As my lids drooped, I wondered what mixture of compounds the man had injected into my veins.
I must have been awake for hours. When the drugs wore off, there were two armed soldiers in the room as well as the doctor who administered the drugs. They must have been there for a while and I must have spoken to them, despite not rememberinga single word. The man administered more drugs and then hooked me up to an IV. I felt my arms prickling right as I fell asleep.
I soon wished that I’d never woken up from that sleep. The next day, they tortured me. I’m loathe to recount the details. After the day was finished, they bandaged my wounds and burns. As I slept, I had a strange dream that Vidar was floating above me — not just above me, but above the facility where they kept me, above the United States, and just above the atmosphere.
“Did they kill John?” I asked him in my dream.
Before he could answer, a bucket of water landed on my face, forcing me awake once again. More soldiers. More instruments. More water. Oxygen harder and harder to breathe as they cut me, hit me, prodded me, and submerged my head. Did you tell government secrets, Dr. Hsu? Are you a traitor, Dr. Hsu? Did you force Dr. John Billings to cooperate, Dr. Hsu? It wasn’t long before I was unconscious once again.
