Page 67 of Claimed By the Alien Assassin
Next up, a press photo: me standing by a newly built community center. I place a ceremonial wrench on a plaque. Flashes. The wrench clinks. I feel the cold metal against my gloved palm—roots of rebellion repurposed as symbol.Engineers step forward, beam for the lens. I laugh, bright and engineered.
But alone, I feel its edges: vengeance, public illusion, the cost of waiting for Dayn.
Later, at an indoor round-table between IHC officials and local council members, I sit at the end, tapping tuna-salad crumbs from my notebook. They discuss “liaison protocols” and “chain-of-command harmonization.” I flip to a drawing I made: Dayn’s hand trapping mine. I sketch no longer. The margin remains empty.
They propose something brilliant in business-speak: "We reconstruct while ensuring colonial oversight and interoperable command with Alliance coordinators." Translation:We run this show.
I nod and take notes. Smile. Speak affirmatively when asked. Confirm communities are “engaged in policy formation.” All the while, I replay the taste of his lips, the weight of his scaled hand.They’re building a fortress. He’s in its cell.
That night, I return to the command shed—the one he freed me in, we loved in—and run fingers over soot-pitted metal. I linger at the folds where he used to stand. My stomach hollows as the cold settles in. I press against the console where he once whispered, “We did it.” The words echo still.
The radio crackles and the Alliance-connected PS takes stage again: “Tomorrow, Ms. McClintock, your presence is required at the official colony recognition summit. Attendance of your partner, Corporal Vash, is also expected, pending final clearance.”
My breath stops.
I stand, fists clenched around air, and whisper: “You have to be kidding.”
A pause. An invisible breath. “He’s in their cell.” My voice thins.
This is the price: to play the diplomat while the heart of my rebellion remains caged.If I walk that summit line smiling, I smile as his jailer.And that breaks me more than any gunfight.
I gather my datapad, my notes, adjust my pin—engineer’s lanyard by day, revolution’s spark by night. I practice the speech again. I practice the laugh. I practice the handshake.Smile for freedom—even if its reason is locked behind bars.
I sleep fitfully, dreams shredded by the image of Dayn’s clawed hand reaching through prisms of steel mesh. I wake at dawn to an Alliance-message reminder: “Be ready. Media will be live.”
I breathe the humid rainforest air. It smells like hope. It tastes like deception. And I walk out of the battered command shed, head held high. Somebody has to play this game.
If I want him to see me at that summit—not alone—I’ll have to play diplomat. On their field. By their rules—even when I don’t believe in them.
Because behind every pose is a promise—to us. And I will hold that promise, even when I feel far from whole.
So I press my palms together, whisper into the sky:I’ll save you. I’ll save us both.
Then I step forward into the light.
The main square hums with hushed conversations—whispers bubbling through the colonists like a secret heartbeat. I drift through, arms full of repair kits and tangled wiring, and everywhere I go I hear their voices curling around my name:
“That monster… Dayn saved my boy.”
“He stood between me and the guards. He didn’t hesitate.”
“I saw his scales as he held the Vortaxian down. It wasn’t horror—it was awe.”
I pause before a fresh-faced mother and her daughter who smile shyly at me. “You really believe him?” I ask softly, kneelingto their eye level. The little girl nods fiercely. “He’sourkind of monster.”
I stand and press a hand to my chest. Their belief kindles a flare of hope inside me—brighter than any alliance façade.
I’ve spent the last twelve hours in a whirl of electric fervor, rallying engineers, miners, even childhood teachers to rebuild. Prefab structures have been torn down, replaced with sturdier modules—trio-layered beams, reinforced power conduits. We race against administrative timelines set by Alliance reconstruction protocols, which stipulate months for what we finish in days. They haven’t caught on yet.
When Marisol the systems engineer—a quick-witted woman usually buried nose-first in orbital comm grids—mentions signal channels, my pulse quickens. “We need a flag,” I tell her, voice low and determined. “A sign that wasn’t created in their press office. Something raw.”
She flicks a tool—soldering iron humming—then winks. “Give me an hour.”
I slip away, heart pounding, to the comm shack I commandeered. Oil-smudged generators drip in the corner, fans hum, and screens reflect hundreds of blinking signals. There’s a weather beacon atop the communications tower—left harmless by Alliance engineers. I climb the narrow ladder, each rung echoing beneath my boots, and reach the panel.
I place my palm against the control host, taste my own adrenaline—sweat and grease mixing hot on my tongue. My fingers tap into the beacon’s frequency matrix. I reroute a subspace uplink, reassign the Holonet breadth to our message circuit. In moments, my heart races so loud I think the technicians below can hear it.
Then I speak into the mic, voice steady even as it shakes:
