Page 3 of Guardian's Heart

A cry moved through the ranks of the spectators.

"Go ahead, shoot me, and have the wrath of the Space Guardians on you," I challenged the hundreds of potential buyers. These males and a few females weren’t cowards, but they all had one trade in common: they were all unscrupulous cutthroats at heart who would never do anything to endanger themselves. They enjoyed outdoing each other by owning the most exclusive slaves or by abusing somebody weaker. Most of them were in the company of their bodyguards, but even though those males and females were paid to risk their lives for their employer, they weren't about to take on a Space Guardian. They might have outnumbered me, but they all knew that the Ohrurs took any injury to their precious Space Guardian seriously—retaliations were not limited to the individual.

"Get them out," I instructed Monrag.

"You are costing me millions of credits," he whined.

"It'll cost your life if you don't comply," I informed him.

The impenetrable black walls of the cage slowly dissolved, giving me a view of eight huddled figures and a ninth standing away from the group. I barely had time to register hair in the color of a black abyss before she came flying at me.

NOVA

Compared to the restof my life, being abducted by aliensdidmake the top ten list, but not first place. Not knowing what would happen and where they were taking me sucked, but I had worse things happen to me.

When I was six, I got snatched by a gator and nearly drowned when it pulled me into its underwater cave. I still have the scars from its teeth on my leg where it snatched me. Thankfully, my daddy had been sober enough that day to jump in after me. He killed the gator, gifting me one of its teeth, and made it into a necklace to remind me to be more careful in the future. It was the one thing the aliens didn't take from me. Go figure.

I'm not saying being almost eaten by an alligator is more traumatic than being abducted by aliens, but I was so young then I hadn't learned yet to control my fears. So, judging by the fear factor, the gator won.

I stared at the impenetrable black walls of the cage that held me and the other eight prisoners—four men and four women.No noise from outside reached my ears. I had zero indication of where we were or what was about to happen to us.

Us, as in eight other fellow prisoners, four women, four men, and me, the odd one out as usual. Not that the others had known each other or were couples or anything. They were as much strangers to each other as I was to them, which only underlined how little I fit in anywhere. Not even the end of the world, an alien invasion, or alien abduction bonded me to the members of my species.

A few months ago, an alien race—the Cryons, as I later learned—attacked Earth and took me and many others prisoner. At least, I'm guessing that it had been a few months. It could have been weeks for all I know as I lost all track of time since they took me and others from one place to another. The only thing they kept the same was that we were bound and thrown into cells. I had tried to keep track of time, but it was an impossible task. Lights dimmed at a certain point in time and remained dim for a certain amount of time, and we called it night. Usually, we would sleep during those hours, but I had slept throughout manydayhours as well. There was just nothing else to do. Staying in some kind of physical shape was a challenge with my arms constantly bound behind me, limiting what little I could do. By my estimation, a month had passed between my abduction and my arrival on another planet. Which one? I never found out. But I probably spent another two weeks, with other prisoners there as they were brought in and taken away.

Somewhere down the line, a translator was shot into my brain, so I could now understand the despicable species that was my new enemy. Yay.

Not that it did me any good. All I gleaned was that we were being taken somewhere else to be auctioned off as slaves. In the end, there were ten of us left, and now we were nine.

I didn't blame the other eight, as I called them in my head. They had tried to talk to me. It wasmewho hadn't seen any sense in making conversation withthem.

To what end?

I could have asked, hey, where y'all from?

They would have told me, Spain, North Dakota, Shanghai, wherever.

I would have said,Well, ain't that somethin'? I'm from Louisiana.

They would have squinted and strained their ears, trying to figure out what I said.What?

Even if we got past that, so what? The woman with the blonde hair was from France, the guy with the big belly from Italy—so much for tall, dark and handsome—the older man came from wherever. The point was it didn't matter. We had zero control over where we were going or with whom. During the past couple of months, I had met hundreds of people, maybe more, none of which I had ever seen again. So why bother getting to know one another? It would only bring pain.

I knew. I had lost everyone I had ever cared about. And none of them to the Cryons.

Plus, people had never given a shit about me, so why should I care about them? Now, of all times, when if there was even a sliver of hope of escaping, it could only be one of us. The more of us there were, the slimmer the chance of getting away would be. Screw safety in numbers. Only one of us might be able to fly under the radar.

If someone had asked me why I wanted to escape, I wouldn't have been able to answer them. It wasn't like I could just hitch a ride back to the swamps. I might not have the slightest idea of where I was, but I did know that I was far from home. So far that my only option would be to hijack a spaceship—and trust me, I thought about that too—but there was that slight problemthat I had no idea how to fly a fucking spaceship. My only option of escape was to find a place where I could hide. Alone. It was unlikely that any of the others had real survival skills—least of all on an alien planet. Selfish as it was, heroism had never been my thing. I wasn’t the kind of person who stood up for others. As far as I was concerned, it was aevery man for himselfsituation. Missy would be disappointed in me. The thought of the only person who had ever been a mother figure in my life left me with a deep stab through the heart; then again, Missy had been very pragmatic too. She might not have lived by theeveryone for themselvesmentality that was second nature to me—probably courtesy of my dad's genes—but I knew that when push came to shove, she would have done the same thing in my situation.

I wasn't somebody to just give up. Tucker, my older brother, gave me a T-shirt for my twelfth birthday. It had been old, from a Goodwill store, but it became my favorite. Several sizes too big, I grew into it and even wore it the day the aliens took me, incidentally exactly twelve years later. It featured the image of a guy beaten to a pulp, black eye, swollen lip, the whole nine yards; the image had faded over time, but not his extended middle finger. That part had survived the passage of time and lived longer than several of our washing machines.

That's you, Tucker said when he threw it at me,you never know when to give up.

God, I loved that shirt. Made it my mantra.Never give up.

As a thank you, I had stuck my middle finger at him, making him grin.

That's the last memory I have of him. A few weeks later, he disappeared. He drove out with some buddies into the swamps and none of them ever returned. Daddy found their boat a few days later. But there was no trace of the boys.

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