Page 62 of Taken By the Alien Killer
“Are you all right?” I ask, quiet, when we cross at the end of a figure, breath ghosting my cheek.
“Define all right,” he says, with a shadow of a smile that doesn’t rise to his eyes.
I almost laugh. I almost say the thing we’ve both been choking on, that we would be great friends in another life where I didn’t belong to him like an estate belongs to a baron. I almost say it and then the instructor claps briskly and my mouth forgets courage.
After rehearsal, the day splits into meetings: seating arrangements with men who love charts more than people, a tasting for confections I will not taste, a five-minute scolding from the minister about the solemnity of vows which makes me want to steal his hat and throw it in the fish pond.The staff buzzes. Sneed glides—always where I’m not expecting him, always with a slate, always with that clean emptiness of expression that makes you want to confess even if you’ve never sinned.
Every hour I look for him. I search the edges of rooms, corners of corridors, the shadow line under the chess tree where he lives in my head like a saint carved of war. I hunt for gold eyes at the back of a mirror, for the tilt of shoulders I could spot in a hurricane. He isn’t there.
I don’t mean to ask Sneed. The question jumps out of me in the south hall when he surprises me by existing at the exact place my breath misfires. “Where is he?” I demand. The words sound like I’ve never learned please.
“Which he?” Sneed says, crisp innocent.
“Don’t,” I warn, stepping into his air. “I know about the transfer. Is he… gone?”
Sneed’s gaze flicks—the smallest movement toward the high windows as if horizon is a person strolling by. “Personnel matters are private,” he says, which is a lie with a well-tailored suit. “I am sure Commander Rayek will… find the appropriate place to be useful.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It is the only one I am prepared to give,” he replies, and there it is—a glimmer in his eyes, bright as a pinprick: satisfaction, relief, maybe both. Approval. I want to smack it out of him. I want to hug him because he thinks he’s protecting me. I do neither. He inclines his head the width of a virtue and slides on, leaving the lemon scent of the polished banister to pretend it’s conversation.
That night, I slip. Not out of duty—duty has tall fences and a hired staff—but out of the high windows, into the house’s other bloodstream, the one I mapped as a teenager with mud on my boots and a pocketful of stolen apples. The observatory at the topof the east tower is empty but for dust motes and the telescope that does not care about weddings. It smells like old paper and cold glass. We used to sit cross-legged on the floor here, Rayek and I, and argue about constellations while CynJyn fell asleep on the rug and pretended she wasn’t listening. I press my palm to the telescope barrel and feel nothing but metal.
The armory is cleaner than it has any right to be at midnight. The racks gleam. The inventory reader blips once in mild panic that someone has entered outside of normal hours and then recognizes me and decides not to be a hero. I stand in the spot on the wall where my shoulders remember cold stone and my mouth remembers heat and I tell the room: “Don’t you dare.” It doesn’t listen. Rooms are loyal to history, not threats.
The cliffs are honest the way air is honest after a lie. Salt licks my teeth. The dark is giant and mine. I stand on the outcrop where he likes to watch the river pretend it’s not headed for the sea and I say his name into the wind. Akura answers with waves folding themselves politely against rock. The stars stare like jurors.
CynJyn tries to crack me like a safe with laughter, with plans, with the dangerous joy that has saved me more times than any protocol. She sneaks into my room with a bottle the color of bad decisions and a grin so wicked it should count as a weapon. “Okay,” she announces, toeing off her boots. “Hear me out. We crash your wedding with a streaker squad. Minimal nudity, maximum horror. I’ve already got Boo Boo and Chuckles on board. Smurfette is negotiating paint.”
“No,” I say into my pillows, and even I can hear how dead my voice is.
“We could just streak the rehearsal dinner,” she tries. “A tasting? A tasteful streaking. Very art-house.”
“Cyn.”
“Okay, then I perform a very long, very moving interpretive dance during the vows. The theme is ‘lineage but make it horny.’”
I have to laugh at that; I do, a weak little hiccup of sound that makes her eyes go wet with triumph. She climbs onto the bed beside me and pokes my cheek. “There she is.”
“She’s not here,” I say, staring at the canopy. “She’s… somewhere else. I don’t know where. I feel like I’m wearing someone else’s life and the seams don’t match my bones.”
CynJyn sobers, rolls onto her back, the gold on her horn catching the lamplight. “Then tear it,” she says. “If it doesn’t fit, tear it. Who cares if the seamstresses cry. We can buy them tissues.”
“I don’t know how,” I whisper.
She laces her fingers with mine, warm and solid. “You’ll remember.”
The days speed up. Dressmakers, florists, nobles, charts. A cousin I last saw when I was ten appears with a mustache and a story about goats. A woman from the IHC stands in my dressing room doorway and praises our family’s commitment to unity and I nod in the right places while imagining her tripping over her dignity. Kaspian is kind and distant, warmth on a dimmer switch; when we do find ourselves alone for a breath—between double doors, in the hush before the hall—he looks at my shoulder or my ear, but never my eyes.
“Big day,” he says.
“Mm,” I agree.
“I hope you… feel seen,” he adds, and I don’t know whether to laugh or set the curtains on fire.
Every night, after the house believes I have stopped being a person, I reactivate the old comm band I hid in the false bottom of my jewelry box. It’s military grade, battered, a thing Rayek taught me to love and then took away because I kept using itto order pizza from the flight deck. I press the casing until the hairline seam pops. The little screen wakes with a tired hum. The signal range isn’t great—but it’s honest, and that’s more than most things in this house manage.
I stare at the input field until the blinking cursor feels like judgment. I type the first thing that’s true.
