Page 21 of Alien Peacock

“To break your self esteem,” Maeve says, strain in her voice as she keeps jumping to get higher. “It works, too.”

“Does it?” I spread my wings luxuriously, and all the reflections follow suit. If I don’t focus on any one of them and their ugly distortions, it’s like I’m hovering over an army of myself. It’s quite pleasant.

“Believe me. It does.”

After a good while I spot Maeve’s head, jumping straight up and then landing a finger’s length higher than before. I fly over and hover above her. “There you are. How high can you get?”

She supports herself on her knees, breathing heavily. “I don’t know. Is there a hatch in the ceiling?”

I point. “There’s an outline of one, that’s all I know. May I?”

Without waiting for her answer, I grab her under her arms and fly all the way up there with her.

I hoist the alien female higher in my arms, so that she can reach the ceiling. “See anything?”

Maeve places her palm flat in the exact middle of the ceiling, and then I have to dive out of the way of a giant cylinder that quietly descends until it stops with a soft hiss. It’s an open structure, full of various kinds of alien technology.

“That must be what makes the force fields,” Maeve says.

“Made,” I correct. “They’re all gone.”

Below us, there’s only the hemispherical hall with its metallic mirror surface. Our reflection is big and clear, but not too distorted.

I fly closer to the hanging cylinder and peer up through it. There’s a lot of daylight in between the latticework of machinery. “We should be able to climb through.”

“Yay,” ‘Maeve sighs. “More climbing.”

“I thought an alien without wings would enjoy that,” I tell her. “If climbing would be such hardship, why not be born with wings?”

“I’ll keep that in mind next time I pick my genetics,” she assures me drily.

As it turns out, we don’t need to climb. There’s a round metal platform that runs on a shiny rail and brings us up through the cylinder and out of the hall of mirrors.

When it stops, we step off and find ourselves in a new room, much smaller and looking a lot like a laboratory.

As I drop Maeve to the floor, I can’t resist holding her closer than necessary, just catching a hint of all the softness she offers. “There. We’re out.”

Maeve straightens her clothing. She’s looking pale and drawn. “That machine is a nightmare. Let’s make sure it can’t work again.” She extends her fighting stick and gives the exposed machinery in the top of the cylinder many hard, furious whacks. Pieces of shattered exotic material fly through the air, and I take a quick step to the side to avoid a big shard that comes whizzing. Blue sparks flash, and smoke starts rising.

Maeve keeps it up for a good while before she wipes the sweat off her brow. “I hope that broke it.”

I raise my eyebrows at her sudden display of fury. “You didn’t enjoy the mirrors?”

She shortens the stick again. “You’re telling me you did?”

I look around the lab. “It was a fun little experiment, I thought, compared to the gravity one.”

“I don’t like mirrors, even at the best of times. But yes, it should be just your thing. You have the looks for them.”

Taking a closer look at the cylinder, I give it two hard kicks where it counts. The whole structure slides down through the hole and hits the floor below with a deafening crash.

“I would have thought you do, too,” I inform Maeve. “Despite your lack of feathers or wings, you are quite a shapely female.”

She looks up at me with narrow eyes, as if she doesn’t believe me. “Yeah?”

I frown. “Is it possible that you don’t know about your own attractive features?”

“Do I have any?” Her voice is thin.

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