Page 67 of Taken By the Alien Killer
“Left,” Daddy murmurs, guiding me around a scatter of petals too artfully placed to be accidental.
“I have eyes,” I whisper back. “Mostly.”
“You look like your mother,” he says, voice caught on something big. “You look like yourself.”
“Which is it?” I ask.
“Both,” he says, and that makes my throat tight.
The aisle is a river of faces. Nobles in their best armor of silk and smiles. Old friends hovering close enough to murmur hope as I pass. Foreign dignitaries pretending we’re interesting. A little girl in the third row—hair in tight coils, dress too stiff—tips her head and grins at me like we’re in on something together. I wink, and she almost explodes with the effort of not cheering.
“Breathe,” Daddy says out of the corner of his mouth.
“I am,” I lie.
Mama stands near the front, posture so perfect it makes the cypress look slouchy. She has a hand on Daddy’s empty sleeve in readiness for when he gives me away like anyone can own me. Her eyes find mine, sharpen, soften. She nods once, just for me. I nod back because I am not a goat.
CynJyn sits on the aisle, first row left, in a dress she swore she’d never wear and horns she decorated with tiny white flowers like a dare. She catches my gaze and flicks her eyebrows in a code only we speak: you okay? I tilt my head a millimeter: define okay. She scratches the tip of one horn: I have a plan. I inhale restrained laughter and nearly trip. She presses her knuckles to her mouth, triumphant.
The minister waits under an arch that looks like a white wave. He has a book and the kind of serenity that makes me want to teach him to swear. To his right stands Kaspian, all clean lines and solemnity, a statue commissioned by a mother with very specific notes. He is beautiful in the way a museum piece is beautiful—untouchable, well lit.
“Hey,” he murmurs when the music lets him get away with it, voice pitched for only me and Daddy. “You look like something people will write poems about.”
“I hate poems,” I say.
“Good,” he says. “Me too.”
“Aw,” CynJyn whispers from the front row, just loud enough for my ear. “They’re adorable.”
I scan the edges—the back row shadows, the balcony mouths of stairwells, the slice of corridor where the chess tree throws its leaves like confetti on the stone. I search the hovering gallery where a journalist adjusts her lens and rolls her ankle under the weight of it. I look to the east tower window that holds the observatory like a secret I’m tired of keeping. I try not to look like I’m looking. I fail. My face stays serene.
“Left foot,” Daddy murmurs, like I’m five and the stairs are tall. “Good girl.”
“Don’t,” I warn, and he chuckles, and that chuckle is home.
We stop at the step because tradition knows how to draw a line and make you stand on it. The music rounds a corner and softens; the brasses tuck their elbows in; strings smile with their eyes. The veil floats; I resist the urge to swat it like a fly.
The minister opens his book. The wind lifts one page and puts it back, helpful. The crowd breathes as one organism. In the corner of my vision, a drone camera blinks a red light that means later someone will slow my face down and call it meaning.
“No Rayek,” I say under my breath, a sentence no one hears but my mouth. It falls between my teeth and disappears. The line behind my ribs pulls tight.
Kaspian shifts, a small recalibration. He finally looks at me, not my shoulder, not my ear. For a heartbeat his eyes are naked. He sees me. He does not smile, exactly, but something in his face remembers that good men can hate cages too.
CynJyn lowers her chin—solidarity, a tilted crown. She doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t need to. One of her hands curls around the edge of her seat, holding herself in place like she’s daring the universe to ask her to move.
Somewhere two rows back, Kaspian’s mother inhales the way a person inhales at the start of a story they’ve been writing in their head for years. A cousin dabs his eyes. A general wonders about the weather over the northern fields. The orchestra waits for the next cue, bows poised, an inside-of-the-throat hum in the air.
Daddy squeezes my fingers—quiet question. I squeeze back—quiet answer.
I lift my eyes to the crowd one more time, to the shadows that used to hide miracles. Nothing. Just people with their hopes and their clothes and their mouths waiting to perform.
And at the edge of the platform, composed as a rulebook and sharp as a guillotine in good lighting, Sneed watches me like a hawk.
The high officiant’s voice is a river cutting stone—measured, old, relentless.
“By the covenant of our houses,” he intones, the vowels polished with centuries, “by oath and line, by witness and weather, we bind what was promised to what was pledged.”
The orchestra folds themselves into quiet like a handkerchief. The sky courtyard holds its breath. The veil floats in my periphery, a tame cloud behaving itself. My bouquet is a tight white animal under my fingers; the stems bite my palm through silk wrap and I don’t loosen my grip because it’s the only honest pain I’m allowed right now.
