“Maybe we should stop for the night?” Alex panted behind her.
Lily placed her hand on her hips and turned back, breathing deeply. “I’m worried we’re still too close. If more aliens arrive and the other women tell them where we went, they might come after us.”
Alex leaned against a tree and clutched her side. “We’ve been walking nonstop for hours!”
“Yes, but we’ve been moving at a snail’s pace. You saw how fast that guy ran.” Lily let out a huff and took in their surroundings once again. Rustling from the treetops to her right drew her gaze, but she couldn’t make out much in the dim light. Unease lifted the hair on the back of her neck. They’d need to find shelter soon. “You’re right, though. We can’t keep trying to hike like this. Let’s just go a little farther. We need to gather dry branches and kindling anyway.”
“Okay. Okay. Just give me a minute to catch my breath.” Alex sank to the ground and tilted her head back against a tree. “Where are you from?”
That was always a difficult question for Lily to answer. Her upbringing had been…interesting, to say the least. She wasn’t from anywhere, not really. “Right now, I live in Portland,” she said without elaborating.
“Cool. I’m from SoCal.”
Lily was relieved to see Alex’s breathing slowly become more even. The rough days ahead would be a hundred times harder if she wasn’t in shape. Lily took the pause to sit and catch her own breath. She squinted to her right at an odd vine that appeared frayed at the end.
“Do you think they did a West-Coast grab or something?”
“Could be,” Lily answered, half paying attention. She forced herself not to reach out and inspect the vine until she could examine it in daylight. Might not be a vine at all. She cringed.
“What do you think they want with us?”
“No idea.” To be honest, Lily hadn’t spent too much time thinking about her abduction. Her parents had always trained her to focus on one problem at a time when in a survival situation. Expending mental energy worrying about the past, when she should be keeping her mind focused on their safety, was dangerous. For now, it didn’t matter how or why she’d been taken. What mattered was how they could make it until tomorrow.
In the dim light, Lily witnessed Alex roll her eyes then shift until they were facing each other. “Look, I get that you’re not super chatty, but I’m barely keeping it together here. You realize we’re on another planet, right? And we’re breathing? Not crushed by a difference in this planet’s gravitational pull? These are things I can’t not discuss! If I’m gonna make it, I need someone to talk to.”
Lily gave Alex what she hoped was a sympathetic smile. “Sorry.” She caught the woman’s exasperated look and continued, “Sorry! I just don’t talk a lot. I get stuck in my head.”
It wasn’t that she didn’t like people. She loved people. One of her favorite pastimes was plopping herself onto a picnic blanket and people-watching. She liked to observe, though, not participate. It was the one downside of her otherwise awesome job as a hairdresser. People expected to chat while they spent hours getting their hair done.
Alex let out a deep breath and studied Lily for a moment longer. “It’s okay. I’m just being needy.” She rose and brushed the dirt off her jeans. “Alright, Lily from Portland, what now?”
“Now we cover our tracks so anyone following will lose our trail.”
***
“Here they are,” Alex panted. “Another load of rocks for your perusal, madam.”
Lily cracked a smile and paused her digging as Alex trudged toward her, arms full of stones. They’d been attempting to identify knappable rocks after finding a small stream yesterday and settling into their camp but had yet to find any that fractured well enough to use as a blade. While Lily had been in charge of digging a Dakota fire hole, Alex had been tasked with grunt work.
The stones tumbled from Alex’s arms, and Lily bit her lip, recognizing a few gritty ones she’d already explained wouldn’t work. Poor girl would get that frustrated, defeated look in her eyes again if Lily pointed out she’d hauled some of those heavy stones for no reason.
Alex had been working herself so hard. Harder than Lily had expected from a person unfamiliar with the physical requirements of primitive living. Normally, Lily would’ve never suggested a person expend massive amounts of energy transporting rocks from one place to another, but she needed to build this firepit, and digging in the compacted earth was about as tough as hauling rocks anyway.
The small fire she’d kept going to keep the lurking animals at bay, stave off the chill at night, and boil the water from the stream was great, but they had yet to find a type of wood that didn’t burn incredibly fast. This type of firepit would help it last longer and reduce the amount of smoke rising from their camp, hopefully concealing their location from any aliens who may have attempted to follow them. The early stages of setting up a primitive camp were always tough, even tougher when she didn’t know the materials she was working with. Her growling stomach urged her to move faster, knowing a search for food would be next on the agenda. The few charred alien minnows they’d managed to catch had been underwhelming, to say the least.
“Anything usable?” Alex asked, watching her sort through the
