Page 6 of Infala: The Alien's Bond
Darla hadn’t thought about it, but now that Maureen mentioned it, she actually was hungry. Very hungry, in fact.
“Yeah, I could definitely eat.”
Maureen pushed herself up to her feet and offered Darla a hand. “Come on, let’s get some chow.”
The two of them crossed the chamber to a wall with a small textural anomaly on its surface.
“Here, this is how we get food balls,” Maureen said, pressing her hand against the rough spot.
A small hole in the ceiling opened up, though Darla hadn’t noticed any seams there, and a baseball sized orb of some green organic-looking material dropped into her waiting palm. She tossed it to Darla and repeated the process, getting a ball for herself as well.
Darla sniffed it. Pungent, with a hint of something that might be some sort of spice.
“Don’t try to figure out what it is,” Maureen advised. “Trust me, no one’s got an idea, and we probably don’t want to know. The only thing I am sure of is it’s gluten free.”
“How can you tell?”
“Ashanti over there is celiac. One bite of wheat products and she’ll be doubled over for hours.”
“A canary in your culinary coal mine, then?”
Maureen chuckled and bit off a piece. “Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, be glad today is green. The orange ones are a bit hard to get down.”
Darla was normally a somewhat picky eater, though not to the point of being a pain in the ass, but after whatever they’d done to her body when they took her, even that one whiff of the odd alien food ball had made her mouth water. She took a bite, ripping into the compressed food orb with a gusto that surprised her. She powered the whole thing down in under two minutes.
“More?”
Maureen chuckled. “Trust me, you’ll want to space them out. Food’s always available, but you need a lot of water to wash these things down, otherwise you’ll be all kinds of plugged up.”
“Ah, thanks for the tip.”
“Gotta look out for the new girl. And speaking of which, let me show you how to get water. It’s weird at first, but you’ll get used to it.”
Maureen led the way to another section of the wall. This one had a damp spot on the ground where it seemed a micro mesh allowed water to escape. Darla was not impressed.
“What are we supposed to do? Lap it up like dogs? Not exactly a high-tech alien wonder.”
“Just watch.”
Maureen stepped forward onto the mesh area, stopping just shy of the damp portion. She turned her head upward and waited. “Any second now.”
As if on cue, a trickle of water began flowing from the ceiling. She moved underneath it and filled her mouth, then stepped back to swallow.
“See? Easy. It’s pressure sensitive. All you have to do is stand there and it’ll turn on.”
Darla stepped forward tentatively. A moment later the water began trickling once more. She wasn’t as practiced as her new friend at catching the stream from above and wound up soaking her face, but Darla didn’t care. The water tasted amazing, and a side benefit of her messy drink was the added plus of washing the last bit of crud from her eyes.
“Better?”
“Definitely better. Thanks. But why do they do it like this? It’s such a weird system.”
“Beats me. Who knows why the Raxxians do anything? But at least we’ve got food and water, so I’m not going to look that gift horse in the mouth.”
Darla figured that was probably a wise outlook, given their situation. The two of them stepped away from the watering system so another captive could get a drink. She was jumpy and rail-thin. By the look of her, she wasn’t eating the alien food, and Darla wondered how long she could survive like that.
“Hey, Maureen?”
“Yeah?”
