Page 38 of Alien in the Attic

The urge to roar burned Arccoo’s throat. He did his best to tamper his emotion, but his voice still shook with anger.

“What about your son’s judgment?” he asked. “I trust Carmen with my life. Don’t I count for anything?”

“Three strange women fall from the sky,” the king said, his eyes becoming narrow. “We heal them, house them, and meet their every need. How do they repay us? They turn you, my own son, into a usurper.”

“Usurper?” Arccoo shouted, his voice echoing around the high walls. “I have done nothing but serve my people since birth. I have toured the galaxy, broken bread with tyrants, aided coups, all for the sake of Thryal’s diplomatic needs. Until meeting Carmen, I was nothing more than a tool of your government. For the first time in my life, I feel like my own man. I know what I stand for. And I stand for a free and peaceful Thryal.”

“You stand for an alienbitchwho has corrupted you with temptations of the flesh,” the king said, nearly spitting every word. He slammed both hands on the table and pushed himself from the chair. “If you speak another word against the future king, I will strip you of your power and toss you and those three mongrels to fend for yourselves in the void.”

Arccoo did not recognize this man before him. The father he’d grown up admiring was stern but just. He was open to ideasand ruled with compassion. This xenophobic old fool standing at the end of his ancestral table was an ugly brute with a mangled heart.

“There two diseases are plaguing our planet, it seems,” Arccoo said. “That of the body and now, I see, one of the spirit.”

Chapter 16

Carmen

“We are on our own,” Arccoo said as he closed the door to Carmen and her sisters’ living quarters. He stood there scowling at nothing for a long and tortured moment.

Picking up on the vibe, Sofia nudged Elena. She cocked her head in the direction of the balcony. Elena replied with a quick nod,and both sisters stepped out of the room, allowing Carmen and Arccoo to have some privacy.

“What happened?” Carmen asked, keeping her voice soft. Arccoo was going through something he didn’t know how to deal with. That much was obvious. The last thing she wanted was to make him feel attacked or pressured to speak in any way.

She trusted they knew each other well enough by now that he would confide in her when he was able. Right then, she thought the most important thing was to let him know that she was there for him.

“My father, the king…” Arccoo paused. He clenched his jaw as if the words tasted sour on his tongue. “He does not agree with our assessment of the situation.”

Carmen brought her hand to his elbow. She slowly grazed it up his triceps and across his shoulders. His muscles were tense bricks. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked, keeping her touch light and reassuring. “It’s okay if you don’t.”

“Nothing is okay!” Arccoo snapped, taking a huge step toward the center of the room.

His movement was so abrupt that it caught Carmen off guard. She stood there with her hand up, caressing nothing but air for a full second before turning on her heel to look at him. The outburst was small, but it was enough to raise a few internal alarms. She would be prepared to get the hell out of his way if he started losing his temper.

“Everything’s changing,” her prince said, his breaths picking up speed. “Old, ignorant ways are returning, and I am powerless to stop them.”

“Maybe humans and Thryals aren’t all that different,” Carmen said. She tried to sound casual. The intensity building in Arccoo was radiating off of him like invisible smoke. She could feel it all around her. She could sense it working its way into her, and all she could do to counteract it was to remain calm.

Arccoo coughed out a dry, humorless laugh. “Before your arrival, I would have scoffed at that comment,” he said. “Now, I’m inclined to agree.”

So, this is my fault?she wanted to say.Had me and my sisters not literally flown across space to come here, Thryal would be a serene Utopia?It was hard to stop the one-sided argument in her head once it got going.Did you ever stop to think that these problems were already present? Maybe we were just the catalyst in exposing it.

Although the urge to unload all of this frustration on him was burning a hole in her gut, Carmen forced herself to snuff that fire out. Fighting would only do more harm. Instead, she would try to be more productive.

“You know, on Earth… Well, in America, anyway, a lot of people kept their prejudices quiet for so long that the overwhelming perception was that stupid things like racism had gone away,” Carmen explained. She sat down on the edge of the bed,sounding more like a parent educating a confused child than a woman conversing with her lover.

“That was complete bullshit, obviously,” she continued, sounding more like herself now. “All the same hate, ignorance, and anger were there. The difference was that the media wasn’t discussing it in such frank terms as they had previously. So if a white person attacked a non-white person, they chalked it up to personal differences. Or they claimed that one of them, usually the one with darker skin, must have done something to provoke the other. Sure, the family and friends of the marginalized victim knew the real reason and spoke it plainly to anyone who would listen, but white people weren’t listening.”

She paused, wondering if she was getting lost in the weeds. Almost as if he sensed her trepidation, Arccoo took a long, slow breath in and exhaled. “You’re saying that we’ve been deluding ourselves by believing our baser instincts were things of the past.”

Carmen smiled, relieved that he understood and wasn’t mad. “Exactly.”

Arccoo sat beside her. “You’re right,” he said. “I know you’re right because I’ve seen it in other civilizations all my life. When you attend a diplomatic conference, a ceremony, or a dinner as an outsider, you can see what others can’t. You notice the way previously warring factions tense in each other’s company, how they whisper to each other when another species walks away. But when it’s your own people…” His voice faded, and he lowered his head in shame.

“Missing the forest for the trees,” Carmen said. She laid her head on his big shoulder.

They sat silently with each other, just breathing and existing. Had their situation been less dire, it would have been a sweet moment, the kind of quiet comfort Carmen was longing for in a relationship. Closing her eyes, she could almost imagine they were back home and the biggest problem they had was waiting for a spaceship to arrive.

“Knock, knock,” Sofia said as she entered the room without knocking.

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