Page 1 of Undone
Remy
I’d never prayed so hard in my life as I did the day I was captured with Tater and Linette by beautiful aliens.
Beautiful aliens. Ha. I nearly laughed out loud in the back of the van where I sat on the cold, metal floor with my wrists and ankles burning from tight rope bindings. At first glance theywerebeautiful. But it was like meeting a hot guy—at first you’re just dazzled by the attraction—and then he makes a distasteful joke and the spell is broken—suddenly what was beautiful reveals itself to be ugly.
I glanced at Tater, but his eyes kind of scared me. Lately he’d been mentally and emotionally fragile. After watching our parents bombed, then killing a man who held his sister at gunpoint, he hadn’t been right. Being captured and having to pretend we were on the side of the aliens, it could break him. That scared me more than anything in the world right now. Tater was all I had left. Amber and the others who left the underground bunker to go God-knows-where, had no way of knowing we were alive. I tried to make eye contact with Tater, to infuse some of my wavering hope and strength into him, but it was useless. Jacob Tate’s eyes were lost.
In contrast, I caught the fiery look in Linette’s eyes, and it jolted me with a shiver. She was trying to communicate silently, and her fierce calculation freaked me out. It’s because of her quick thinking that we were still alive, but now we would have to live a double life. She’d so easily spouted the story to the Bael aliens about us being rebels, pro-change, and being prisoners of the U.S. military. I never would’ve thought of something like that. But she was an officer, and a strategist. I was a college biology major who wanted to teach middle school. That was a past life, though, and seemed ages away. As optimistic as I’d always been, even I knew there was no going back.
Linette began to wiggle, rubbing her shoulder against her gag, and moving her chin back and forth. Within a minute, the gag was down just enough for her to be able to speak. My heart gave a jump of fear that we’d be caught, and I searched the dark van with my eyes. Tater scooted closer.
“There’s no technology back here that I can see,” Linette whispered. “But I’m not taking the chance of talking too long, so listen up. They’re going to question us, so we need to have our stories straight.”
Tater and I both nodded and listened attentively. When Linette was finished, she shouldered her gag back over her mouth, and we moved apart again.
The van hit a bump that made me bounce and land hard on my tailbone. I cringed against the pain that shot through various parts of my body. My stupid ankle was still swollen and my head still throbbing from where I’d fallen in the greenhouse and knocked myself out when the alarms sounded. It was my clumsy fault that the three of us were here, in this van, instead of on those planes to safety with the others.
My eyes burned and I swallowed back the guilt. It would be so easy to give myself over to despondency. Too easy. Instead, I shut my eyes and prayed again. It was all I had left.
