Page 29 of Alien Desire
The colour in her cheeks darkens still.
How do I explain it? My life sounds so different to hers.
“We Alphas are not raised by our parents.”
“Oh,” she says simply, her forehead wrinkling.
“I lived with my mother until I was five and then I was sent to be with the other Alphas, to be raised by them and taught how to be an Alpha.”
“And your father?”
“I rarely saw him.”
She looks at me with an emotion I don’t recognise in her eyes. It looks a little like sadness. “Being sent away so young must’ve been hard.”
I swallow. I have never spoken with anyone about this. “It broke my mother’s heart to be separated from her only child like that, so I hated it. Even though I made loyal friends who I would happily go to war with, fight side by side, I could never be happy there when I knew it caused her pain.”
She nods. “I understand.”
“It is why I visit her so often now that I have come of age. It brings jeers and jibes from my contemporaries — they call me my mother’s pet — but I do not care. Perhaps if I was disliked, it would be used against me. But I am known for my strength, my sound judgement and fairness. It is why so many have declared their backing for me to be my father’s heir. And so this little softness, this weakness, is overlooked.”
“You and your mum are very close?”
“We are.”
“I think that is a strength not a weakness. Family makes us stronger.”
“Then why are you alone, little Omega?”
She glances down to her hands in her lap. The picture of her planet Earth flickers on the screen behind her.
“When my family died, I felt nothing. Not grief, or anger or pain. Just a … numbness. I didn’t feel human anymore. I didn’t feel anything and I wanted to feel. To be alive. So I signed up to be a space cadet. I knew the training was harsh and punishing, that I would be pushed to my limits, but at least I’d feel something, pain, exhaustion, anything. And I did. I felt those things. And I found a new family of sorts in my comrades. But it was always superficial, merely skin deep. It never penetrated further.” She sweeps her hand over her face and smiles at me flatly. “But this planet has changed me. This frozen planet has melted my heart.”
I don’t understand entirely what her words mean but I perceive the sentiment of it, because something similar has happened to me since I woke on this planet to find a strange creature curled up against me. The muscle in my chest aches in a way it never has before and I have a need to fix everything for her. To make it all right. But I can’t bring back the dead. I can’t resurrect her family. There is nothing I can do to fix that.
“Tell me about your planet,” she says.
I pat my knee and she comes trotting towards me and sits in my lap like a good little Omega.
“It is not vastly different from your own.”
“Can you show me where it is on the star map?”
I shake my head. “Your maps do not show my part of the universe.”
“That’s not possible.”
“I …” How do I explain this to her? Does she have the capability and the imagination to conceive more than she knows? “This is not my universe.”
“What do you mean?”
“This is not my universe,” I repeat. “I come from another.”
She stares at me. “There is only one universe,” she whispers. “There were once theories that there could be others but it’s been proven nonsense. The experiments to find other universes failed.”
“Before I crashed here, my kind knew of two universes. I believe this may be a third.”
She stares towards the window where large clumps of snowflakes tumble to the ground. “How did you cross then?”
