Page 19 of Taken By the Alien Killer
“Good,” CynJyn says, already rummaging through my closet like a raccoon in a jewel box. “We’re going for ‘heiress borrows her mechanic’s jacket and sins appropriately.’”
She pulls together a look that makes my mother’s ghost-shriek echo through the walls: black trousers that actually let my legs move, a cropped top in deep green to humor the crest, an old pilot’s jacket I filched from Father’s storage when I was sixteen because it smelled like dust and story. They braid my hair back messily, smudge my eyeliner on purpose, and give me a pair of scuffed boots that have seen a life. When I look in the mirror, I recognize the girl staring back: the one who races rainstorms and laughs too loud and doesn’t apologize for wanting.
We wait until the supper’s toasts begin—and the champagne flows and the cameras crowd—and then we slip. Smurfette feeds a whisper into the utility network that makes the east stair sconces flicker like a haunted chapel. Boo Boo stages a distraction argument with a footman about cheese knives that drags Sneed two corridors away. Lloyd lifts the gate-side ivywith those big hands like he’s holding up a wedding veil; CynJyn checks the timer, eyes flaring bright at the count.
“Three,” she murmurs. “Two. Now.”
We slide under, breath pressed flat, shoulders brushed by rust and leaves. The air smells like old water and copper. My heart goes wildfire; my tongue tastes like battery. The drone above us whirs away obligingly, tricks the blind spot, and the next breath we’re through, boots scratching dusty stone, running the service path that skirts the vineyards into the scrub where nobility pretends the world ends.
The Midge sits on the ridge like a sulking beetle, paint flaked, hoverpads whining in a low, familiar key. Chuckles pops the passenger door and the interior coughs up the perfume of ionized dust and sugar. We pile in: Lloyd up front because he’s a human airbag, the rest of us a knot of elbows and laughter in the back. CynJyn slaps the dash; the console flickers. The skull speaker lights its neon eyes; a beat slides into the metal, impatient and hungry.
As we lift, the estate shrinks behind us into a tidy glow. The vineyards comb the hills into neat waves; the towers hold up the sky like stubborn fingers. I look back once and catch the faint glint of the guards at the east wall and—for a breath that hurts—the silhouette I know by posture alone, high on the parapet, watching the ridge line. The night blurs him into ink. The night blurs everything.
The hoverlounge floats where the highway breaks and the land forgets which way is down. A platform suspended on humming anti-gravs, wrapped in a spine of neon that throbs pink and ultramarine, it looks like a jellyfish someone taught to love bad decisions. The underside glows with safety lights for the sober; the top is a kaleidoscope of bodies and lights and the promise of anonymous joy. The wind up here tastes like ozoneand fried sugar and melted plastic, a carnival no one can shut down.
We slip into a parking lattice and the Midge settles with a satisfied chirr. At the entry ramp, a bouncer the size of a freight crate—Kilgari, four arms, glossy carapace catching the neon—checks IDs with two hands while the other two direct traffic. CynJyn leans in, murmurs something in Kilgari that sounds like a dare and a blessing, palms a little black chip the size of a fingernail. The bouncer’s mandibles flex in a grin; their upper hands stamp our wrists with a phosphor sigil that blooms under the UV wash.
“Welcome to the Drop,” they rumble.
The ramp hums up into the pulse. The floor inside is semi-clear, layered glass looking down into the lit struts and the traffic far below—like walking on a river made of light. Sound hits like weather; bass wraps my chest and shakes loose whatever’s stuck in there. People move in eddies, all color and heat and breath and laughter that doesn’t carry last names. A wall of screens stutters and glitches in beautiful ways. Lights travel like comets and come back as confetti.
CynJyn grabs my hand and squeezes. “Let’s make you remember you’re alive.”
I squeeze back, because for the first time in days I don’t feel like a statue with a borrowed smile. We step forward into the neon and the noise, and the air tastes like a thousand bad decisions I desperately want to make.
The Drop isan electric fever dream pretending to be a building. The floor hums like a beast under glass, the bass turning my bones into tuning forks, and the lights—gods, the lights—spill over everything in pinks and electric blues until even the shadows look expensive. The air tastes like fried sugarand ozone and a fake apricot smoke that sticks to the back of my tongue. We step into the current and it swallows us whole; CynJyn tightens her grip on my hand and yanks me toward the center where bodies move like a storm found rhythm.
“Rule one,” she shouts in my ear as glitter hisses from a ceiling vent and salt-dust sparks across my lips, “if you can still think about duty, you’re doing it wrong.”
“I always think about duty,” I yell back, but the DJ slams the beat and my body votes no with both hips. The gang sluices around us—Lloyd shouldering a path, Boo Boo already sniffing out a food stand, Smurfette counting cameras with a predator’s calm, Chuckles grinning like low light was invented to honor him. I’m laughing before I know I’ve started, a hot, startled sound that tastes like freedom.
A glass appears in my hand, glowing violet under the UV wash. It’s cold and sweet and a little dangerous; bubbles pop sharp as sparks on my tongue. Under the blacklight the stamp on my wrist blooms into a tiny galaxy, and for a second I let myself be just a girl with stars on her skin. We jump as the bass dips and rises; bodies brush and break away; someone slings an apology in three languages; I sling one back in two, and we’re all grinning like we got away with a crime.
Except no one ever gets away with being who they are. A cluster at the edge of the dance circle catches the light wrong: cloaks cut too perfectly to be “unmarked,” a half mask paired with a family crest ring, posture that screams portrait practice. Nobles, badly disguised, slumming it as oxygen. One of them laughs too crisp for this place; another can’t stop glancing at the nearest camera to make sure anonymity notices them. I tip my glass to shield my face, which is useless because the metal thread in my jacket loves UV like a cat loves sunbeams.
CynJyn clocks them too. “Tourists,” she says, rolling her eyes. “They come here to purchase a pulse.”
“Maybe they’re here for the synth-calamari,” I say, and then a ribbon of hot oil and fake lemon snakes through the air from a food pod and my stomach forgets politics. We surf the crowd to the counter where Boo Boo already stands, dual-wielding skewers with a look that saysfight me.
“Share,” I beg, reaching.
“Trade,” she counters, hooking a brow. “One coil for whatever’s in your rave goblet.”
“It’s probably poison,” I warn, hand already out.
“Then we’ll die sparkly,” she decides, and gives me the bigger piece. The batter shatters between my teeth, crisp giving way to silky chew, sauce dripping down my knuckle. I lick it and don’t care who watches. That’s the point here—nobody’s supposed to care.
The DJ swings the tempo into a dirty groove and the floor answers, a thousand steps laying down a single heartbeat. The layered glass shows a ghost of us from below—fractured reflections, girls and boys and everyone in between smearing into color. A strobe catches a ribbon-wrapped pillar and a streak of gold slices the dark in my periphery. My heart misfires; I whip around like I’ve heard my name. It’s a column. Just a column. The relief is nearly anger.
“Okay, your face did a thing,” CynJyn says, leaning into my shoulder so I feel her laugh through my bones. “Snack-spotting or future-sighting?”
“Pillar,” I say, taking another swallow I don’t need. “Pillar pretending to be my bad decisions.”
Smurfette appears at my other side, eyes narrowed at the ceiling rig. “Pillars are suspicious. They hold up capitalism.”
Chuckles barks out a laugh and steers us toward a lower bar where the lights stop trying to undress us. The counter is matte graphite, the bartender a glitter-armored oracle who lookslike they know more secrets than the senate. “What’ll make you forget your surname for a half hour?” they ask.
“Myfirstname for ten,” I say, and a glass slides to me smelling like smoke and citrus pith. I sip and the edges of the room sand down. The bass drops a floor deeper. The Drop leans in like it wants to hear me confess.
