Page 57 of Taken By the Alien Killer
I sit. The chair creaks the way it always has. I let my hands rest on my knees until the pulse in my fingers stops trying to be a drum. The message form glows up at me with bureaucratic innocence. Transfer Request: Planetary Garrison, East Quadrant. Reason (optional). Notes (optional). Effective date (pending). The cursor blinks with the moral authority of a metronome.
She laughed. Kaspian’s toy flapped like a broken bird and Star laughed because broken things trying are funny and holy in equal measure and I cannot be the shadow in every photograph of her life. I will not be the man who stays and turns himself into a ghost in the corner of every room.
“Write it,” I tell myself.
I key my ID. The slate accepts me like it always does: gold, scale, scars, and the kind of service record that makes paperwork snap to attention. The reason field pulses. I leave it empty. Words here will not make the hole cleaner. Notes. Empty. Effective date. My thumb hovers, then presses. The little chime it makes is precise and small, a silver coin dropped into a well whose bottom I will not hear.
Submitted.
I sit in the hum of my own choice until the room’s thinnest noises—air recirculator, the tick of metal deciding to cool—start to sound like voices I fought to forget. I stand. I wash my face. I look at the scar under my left eye and do not flinch. I lie down because the body demands ritual or it starts making its own, and I’d rather sleep than bleed slow on the inside without calling it that.
The following days I become the man the uniform expects: present, silent, useful. My routes tighten. My mouth forgets anything butYes, my LadyandUnderstoodand the half-wordsa guard uses to move people without being seen doing it. I take postings that keep me out of her line of sight because I am not iron and seeing her refracts me into pieces too small for the job.
It finds me anyway. Laughter at noon in the herb garden while she teaches a Kilgari cook a human card game and loses on purpose. A glimpse through the dining room door where she sits between her parents, posture perfect, a glass of wine she doesn’t want warming under the lights. Kaspian walks her to the threshold and does not touch her and somehow that not-touch reads louder than a kiss. Sneed turns three degrees toward her in every room, calculating, a planet forever adjusting to a star’s gravity. Every time my gaze brushes those frames, grit gets under the scale and burns.
I take it to the underground facility because the upper gym is for people who like to watch themselves do things. The lower room smells like rubber and metal and sweat that admits what it’s for. I cue three training bots at once because I need the noise to be honest. They wake with that cheerful tone that makes you want to break them, then come on hard.
I let them.
Movement eats thought. I ride it like a man who’s starved, scoring the rhythm across their joints, stepping inside their timing until everything the machine learned from a dozen men who are not me fails. The first goes down with a knee to the hinge that tries to be a hip. The second learns what its elbow was for right before I teach it what it can’t be used for. The third gets vicious and clever; I take the compliment and then fold it into the mat until it stops whistling at me. The room echoes. My breath saws. The bots lie in three contrite piles.
I win. It doesn’t change a thing.
Sweat stings the cut I earned in the hangar. The edge of my palm aches where bone spurs wrote their names and I failed to take the pen away. The mirror across the room returns a shapethat is, technically, me. I stare at him until he gets bored and looks down.
In the locker alcove, my slate pings. Acknowledged: Transfer Request, Rayek (Cmdr.), Household Guard → PlanDef East. Report to Seneschal for exit interview and clearance of armory issue. The stamp under it is friendly, impersonal, lethal. I exhale like I’ve been hit in the body where the muscle will complain later. Peace should arrive with that line. It doesn’t. Failure does, polite as a letter.
I towel off. I put on the clean version of the same clothes and climb the stairs to the corridor because graphs of duty don’t care about bruises that don’t show. Sneed waits at the far end, backlit by the prissy glow the house insists on for administrative holiness. He holds his slate like a prayer book.
“Commander,” he says, voice mild as milk. “There are administrative matters.”
“There are,” I say.
He studies my face the way a jeweler studies a flaw. “A shame,” he murmurs. “Abandoning one’s post is rarely as tidy as the form implies.”
My jaw works. “No post has been abandoned,” I say. “Only transferred.”
“Words,” he agrees pleasantly. “We must use so many to say so little.” He takes a half-step closer, not enough to be a threat, enough to be heard without the house catching it on a camera feed and editing it for posterity. “Attachment is admirable in dogs and in certain kinds of saints,” he says. “In a guard, it is… complicated. Inappropriate, some would argue.”
“Some would,” I say, and let it hang. If I give him anything else, I’ll give him blood.
“You will find the armory inventory ready for your sign-off,” he continues, tone back to business, as if he didn’t just salt awound for the sake of sanitation. “And, of course, the Baron will wish to… speak.”
“Understood,” I say. I go to move past him. He adjusts an inch to make the corridor feel narrower and then relents just before I have to brush him. It is a victory he will claim in a ledger under the headingCourtesy.
At dusk I take the outer cliff path because there are only so many ceilings a man can respect in one day. The wind off the sea licks salt into the scales at my temples. The drop is a clean, honest line like a cut no one bothered to stitch. The vineyards below are dark rivers; the river beyond them is a tighter braid of black. The house behind me holds its lights up like a city pretending it isn’t lonely.
I walk until my legs stop being a pinned insect and start being mine. I find the outcrop where the view remembers how to widen. I sit on the warm rock and let my hands learn its shape. The night smells like sage and stone and the kind of fire someone starts because they need a reason to stay up late telling lies.
Memory is a cheap god; it arrives without being asked. The first time she beat me at chess. Jam on her fingers, sun in her hair, a laugh so surprised by itself it tripped. The first time she called me by my name without title in it, not because she forgot, but because she remembered something older than rank. The look on her face in the hangar when the door finally shut and survival started to feel like more than a rumor. The weight of her asleep on my chest, her ear over the place the medic taught me to match to artillery and engines and, now, her.
“Imagine a life without her,” I tell myself, because men who make choices have to be able to say the whole sentence. I close my eyes and force the picture: mornings with no ridiculous chess tree to stand under, no jam to complain about, no voice saying my name like it belongs here. Evenings where duty is clean andempty and no one laughs badly at broken birds. A room that smells like oil forever. Silence that does not negotiate.
The image refuses to hold. It runs like water off a bad seal and leaves me wet and colder.
“Then why,” I ask the wind, because it’s cheaper than talking to a priest, “does the choice still feel right.”
The wind doesn’t answer. It is busy making the sea show its teeth.
