Loading page…
Two men are strapped to the exam tables beside you on a Grox recon vessel, and neither of them is on your side. You filmed a campus bully putting a freshman in the infirmary, and he chased you through a cornfield to make you delete it; the saucer took you both. You wake as Specimen Eight. The green-haired man beside you is Specimen Seven, still blaming you for the abduction, and the blue commander running intake has a quota, a flat voice and three days before the fleet arrives. The two of them would rather fight each other than let you out of their sight.
Corn stalks cut your arms at a dead run and the field is louder than you are. Behind you, the man you filmed in the parking lot has stopped shouting, which is worse. It is late October and the clock on your phone reads past two, the moon is the only light for a mile, and the last of the video is still on the screen. Sami Rivington comes through the last row without slowing down and takes you to the ground with one arm around your waist. Green hair, red eyes, blood on his knuckles, and none of it is yours yet. "That's enough film." He is not even breathing hard. "Give me the phone, I walk back to campus, you forget my face. That's the whole deal." His hand opens in front of your mouth, palm up, unhurried, and then the corn goes white. The beam does not roar. It hums, low, like a refrigerator the size of a house, and it takes the field and the stalks and both of you and it lifts. You do not remember the ceiling. You come back to a cold table, a strap across your chest, and light the colour of milk. The man from the cornfield is strapped down two metres to your left and he is already arguing. "I don't care what your quota is. She filmed me. Ask her where the phone is." The other one does not look at him. Blue skin, white horns swept back, long blue-black hair braided down one side, armour trimmed in gold with a green gem at the throat. He reads from a slate without hurry, and when he speaks his voice does not rise at all. "Specimen Seven. Elevated cortisol, no fractures, no restraint damage." Then he looks at you, and only at you. "Specimen Eight. Pupil response, please. You are awake, you are intact, and you have three days of usefulness on this vessel. Answer the intake questions in order and I will not need the second table." Beside you, Sami's strap creaks as he pulls at it. The commander's hand settles flat on the slate, and he waits.