It took a few seconds of complete and total horror, sitting frozen before her, to come to terms with that. I was going to be sold. Like cattle. Most likely to another freaky-looking alien, and maybe even to be bred like a pedigree dog or something.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured again, her head bowing lower. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do, Miss Human.”
“Brinna,” I announced in a hoarse growl as I shambled to my feet and staggered a few steps. My calves tingled and my toes, dammit, they were completely numb. “My name is Brinna Blake.”
Enola didn’t answer. She looked on in silence while I wobbled around like a newborn giraffe, stomping my feet to try to get some of the feeling back in them. It was no use. My knees shook dangerously, my legs still tingly and numb as I tried taking a few more steps.
I only managed three or four paces before my ankles buckled. Shit. Catching myself against one of the glass walls, I bit curses under my breath and stared out across the rows of other transparent cells around me. Oh my god. There were hundreds of them, all packed into a massive cylindrical chamber, arranged in an organized helix design that spiraled along the inside of the narrow chamber one right after another. But beyond that? There was no way to know anything about whatever alien-spaceship-thing was carrying us. There were no windows, no way to see where we were or where we might be going.
“Is this … Are we inside a spaceship?” I had to be sure.
“Yes,” Enola whispered as she looked out across the other cells, too.
I swallowed hard against the blinding panic that threatened to send me whirling into a full mental breakdown.
No. I couldn’t lose it. Not now. I-I had to figure this out. Somehow, I had to find a way off this ship.
I had to find a way back home.
3
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE
Enola apparently knew a lot more about our situation than I did and, basically, it was bad. Worse than bad. Horrible, really. But it was hard enough to make my body walk the length of my tiny cubic cell, let alone have a full-blown mental breakdown. I had to conserve my energy. I might need it later.
Right now, I needed to think. I had to figure this out.
Somehow, I’d been abducted from Earth by these alien beings from the Alzumaris system. How or when that had actually happened, I couldn’t remember, but it didn’t matter. Trivial details compared to the much bigger problem: I was trapped here, probably a few hundred billion miles away from Earth, locked in a glass box aboard a spacecraft headed straight for what sounded like an intergalactic flea market. That was the situation—well, based on Enola’s hushed, terrified descriptions, anyway. It was hard to get more than a few words out of her at a time. She kept her head down and her voice low, almost as though she was afraid someone might overhear us.
“How do you know all of this?” I asked as I sat against the wall opposite of her, my gaze drawn out across the other cells around us. None of the other alien beings caged inside had even tried to communicate with us. Some seemed unconscious or sleeping, while others were pacing like caged lions, growling, mumbling, and never making eye contact. Could they even talk? Or were we the only ones?
“My species is considered ‘borderline’ intelligent, so we know a lot about the workings of other systems within the galaxy,” she admitted, almost as though she were ashamed of it. “I am … um, well, I was an apprentice studying in our Innovative Technologies Academy. I’ve studied extensively in hopes of developing alternative energy sources, specifically those found within planetary cores. A few of our findings attracted interest from the Alzumarians, so I guess you could say we have been researched heavily—interrogated for anything useful and studied because of our physical adaptions.” She rubbed at her dainty, pointed chin as she murmured, “But we still aren’t considered intelligent by their standards, so we don’t have any citizenship rights or protections under their legal system.”
“Adaptations?” I struggled to keep up with her hushed, precise speech. She certainly sounded educated—way more than I was. Science had never been my thing.
Okay, so, school in general hadn’t been my thing. I’d made decent grades, but only because I spent hours memorizing notes and rereading every textbook chapter. It seemed like I had to work twice as hard as the rest of the kids in my class to make my mediocre grades. And science? Ha, yeah. I only barely remembered anything about biology. I’d taken it freshman year of high school, and that had been a while ago. Mitochondria were the powerhouse of the cell, that part I remembered.
“Evolve or die.” She gave a darting, uncertain glance up at me. “We are all here because we survived the environment that produced us. Or, I suppose, in some cases the environment where we were planted.”
I chewed at the inside of my cheek, still struggling to wrap my mind around it all as I rubbed the tender spot right at the base of my skull. A raised knot of flesh there about the size of a penny seemed to be the source of the crippling pains that came and went like swelling migraines. Every few minutes, I had to stop our conversation, set my jaw, and breathe through one of them. They came and went fast, usually only lasting a minute or two. But every time, it felt like my head might explode.
“Planted,” I repeated. “You mean by the Alzumarians, right?”
She nodded slightly, making her strange hair swish over her scaly brow. “It’s no coincidence that we all look essentially the same in build. Upright, bipedal, two arms, two legs, two
