Page 10 of Commander’s Mate

“My name is Harper Avery,” I said. “I was taking out the garbage.”

Scarlet barked out a humorless laugh. “Hell of a way to avoid chores.”

It was so wrong, so awful, so perfectly human that I laughed too. One sharp laugh that turned into something dangerously close to a sob. Nora reached for my arm, and I let her.

Across the room, two women who were definitely not from Earth watched us with large pink eyes. Their skin was purple, their hair teal, their ears pointed, and a fine ridge ran from their hairlines down their noses. They looked like special effects and old fairy-tale royalty and living proof that my entire understanding of the universe had been too small.

One of them lifted her chin. “You are newly stolen as well?”

The translator turned her words formal and precise.

“Yes,” I said. “Are you?”

“I am Kyanna Guryon of Halor. My father is governor. These beasts have made a grave error. He will send rescue.”

I wanted to believe her so badly that it hurt.

Scarlet crossed her arms. “How sure are you about that?”

Kyanna’s lower lip trembled, but her voice held. “Very.”

“Good,” Scarlet said. “Then I hope your father is fast.”

Days blurred after that. Or weeks. Time had no manners in a room without windows.

Food came twice a day in dense cakes that tasted like something between meatloaf, sawdust, and regret. Drinks came in soft pouches. The toilet area had no privacy worth mentioning. Women cried until they had no tears left, then grew quiet, then started talking because silence was worse. We traded names, stories, fragments of worlds.

Kyanna told us about the Consortium and the Sargus Empire. Nora asked careful questions about diseases and reproductive biology until Scarlet told her to stop before she made us all throw up. Zoe started stretching in the mornings and somehow got half the room moving because sitting still made panic worse.

Scarlet told us about her dog, Billy, then walked away before we could comfort her.

Nora admitted she was a nurse and immediately became the person women came to when they were dizzy, bleeding, or too afraid to ask the alien keeper for help.

I told them about Cherry Street, the broken trash bag, and my brother’s awful taste in television. By then Earth already felt like a word from a language I used to speak.

Sometimes, when the room slept, I stood at the viewport that showed streaks of color instead of stars and imagined the car still idling by my house. I imagined Mrs. Dorn noticing the recycling bin. I imagined my brother texting me some stupid meme and getting no answer. I imagined the police finding nothing but maybe a scuff mark near the curb and a trash bag tied badly beside the bin.

How long before a person became a missing poster?

How long before missing became presumed dead?

I pressed my forehead to the cool viewport and tried not to make a sound.

On what might have been the final day, the keepers came with guards.

They made us strip.

I will not write much about that. Not because I forgot. Because I refuse to give them more space in my mind than they already stole.

They washed us like animals, examined us like products, and dressed us again in the same thin white shifts. Then they tagged us, lined us by category, and marched us through a corridor toward what Kyanna whispered was an auction house on Ursaga.

Auction.

The word sat in my stomach like ice.

Scarlet moved closer to me. Nora took Zoe’s hand. Kyanna lifted her chin again, but she was shaking.

Somewhere beyond the walls, an alarm began to scream.