Page 20 of Taken By the Alien Killer
“I hate being a pawn,” I tell CynJyn, too loud, then quieter, which makes it worse. “I hate that everyone smiles like I’m a parade float for peace. They talk about legacy and ports and tariffs and songs—great, fantastic, let’s get bards on payroll—but I didn’t vote for this with my body. Sneed schedules mybreathing.” I swallow, and the drink turns to heat where it lands. “And I don’t even hate him, which would make it easier. Kaspian is… nice. He listens. He didn’t even gloat when I dropped a wineglass like a debutante. He made a stupid little shore in his palm for a tree and it was sweet and I wanted to kick him into a fountain for being earnest.”
“You hate the wall,” CynJyn says, bumping me. “Not the guy stuck on the other side of it with you.”
“I hate the wall,” I agree, and then the wall grows eyes in my head. “His eyes,” I hear myself say, and my throat softens like it forgot how to be defensive. “Rayek’s. That molten-coin color? Looks flat from a distance, predator-flat, and then you stand close enough to count the layers and it’s… it’s not flat. It’s deep. It’s somuch.And the scar over his left eye—jagged, not elegant, like something that didn’t want to let go. When he’s thinking hard it pulls a little, and his mouth goes tight, and I know before he knows that he’s about to say something he’ll pretend he didn’t mean.”
CynJyn’s smile tilts. She doesn’t save me. “Go on.”
“And his hands,” I breathe, because the words have started and stopping feels like choking. “When he’s planning, he holds his fingers like he’s balancing a thought between them. Whenhe’s worried, he taps his claws against his thigh—three beats in, three out, like a drill he can’t unlearn. When he’s… when he’s proud of me, he does this thing where he almost smiles and then the corner of his mouth—” I demonstrate on my own face, ridiculous, drunk on honesty. “He thinks I don’t see it.”
“Star.”
I finally look up. CynJyn has her eyebrows in thatI win the obviousposition. “You are so not over him.”
“I am—” I try on a lie; it splits at the seams. “I am extremely complicated about him.”
“You are in love with him in a way that is not convenient for dinner seating,” she says, squeezing my elbow. “It happens.”
“It is not supposed to happen to me.” I scrub a hand over my face. The glitter there moves like tiny constellations. “I’m supposed to be a crest with a pulse.”
“You’re a person with a crest,” she corrects lightly. “And he is a person with a job, and those two truths are trying to kill each other in public.” She glances toward the dance floor where a masked noble nearly drops a flute of something neon and recovers with vaudeville grace. “Make him see you, or stop looking. But don’t split yourself in half forever. You only have one spine; stop letting everybody else rent it.”
“That is not helpful,” I mutter, but my head tips onto her shoulder anyway. We stand like that, friends being scaffolds, until Boo Boo appears, brandishing two new drinks and a mouth full of calamari. “We’re definitely not blending,” she announces, which I think is about social classes or beverages or both. Smurfette hacks a photobooth to spit out a strip where our faces pixelate into constellations and the caption reads NO GODS, NO MASTERS in glitter font. We cackle like witches. Chuckles throws on a remix that feels like trouble and sunlight at once, and then we’re back in the center, letting the Drop shake the stuck parts of us loose.
Time warps. It’s a ribbon, then a puddle, then a coin flip I keep losing. Nobles try too hard not to stare; a Kilgari bouncer gives CynJyn an approving mandible flex that may be the closest thing to sainthood the Drop offers; Lloyd starts a call-and-response chant that collapses into laughter when half the room gets the words wrong. I drink more than I should. My cheeks go hot, my limbs soft, my mouth honest. I talk about tariffs, then about thunderheads on the west ridge, then about how it isn’t fair, and in the same breath I describe the exact sound Rayek makes when he clears his throat to hide a laugh. CynJyn listens like she’s catching treasure in a net.
We spill out at something like dawn pretending to be midnight, the sky bruised purple at the edges. The Midge purrs where we left her, but three slots over there’s a luxury skimmer gleaming like an expensive sin. Pearlescent body, starfield ceiling inside, a smell like cedar and money. A valet drone drifts by and decides not to see us because someone in a sequined cape is making a scene two meters away. Smurfette produces a cloned key fob like a magician annoyed she has to do tricks for free.
“We are borrowing,” she says, scandalized. “Language matters.”
“I love crime,” Boo Boo sighs.
“Get in,” CynJyn tells me, and my body obeys before the part of me that remembers consequence can argue. The leather is buttery and warm; the interior lighting blinks to a private night sky, tiny stars pulsing at a heartbeat pace. Lloyd folds himself into the front like a human crash test saint. Chuckles sets a playlist that feels like falling softly. We lift and the Drop dwindles into neon dust.
The wind through the vent smells like stone cooling after a hot day, and beneath it is salt, and beneath that something like dawn. The estate’s distant lights stitch into a quiet pattern; vineyards blur into thumbprint smudges. I stretch out along theback seat, boots kicked off, CynJyn’s thigh against mine, Boo Boo’s jacket rolled under my head. The hum of the engine finds the ache behind my eyes and smooths it. My hair smells like sugar smoke and strangers’ cologne; my skin is tacky with glitter and sweat and the last of my good intentions.
“Best kidnapping ever,” CynJyn murmurs, slinging an arm over my waist.
“Borrowing,” Smurfette sings from the floor.
“Borrowing,” CynJyn echoes. “Sorry. We’ll return it with more miles and improved karma.”
Chuckles cues another song—low, coastal, waves built out of synth—and the skimmer becomes a cradle. I hover on the edge of sleep, where names loosen and the night gets kind. Everything I’ve been holding slips a little. The leather breathes cedar and warmth into my cheek. The wind lifts the fine hairs at the nape of my neck and cools the sweat there. I think I hear my own breath and it sounds like the sea in a shell.
I’m not asleep, not yet. I’m balanced on the lip of it, suspended. In that soft place, truth doesn’t need armor. My mouth moves before I can teach it better manners; the name slides out of me like a secret that was tired of hiding.
“Rayek,” I whisper, and let the dark catch me.
The skimmer glideslike a guilty thought over the vineyards, hush-quiet, lights dimmed to a discreet pulse. CynJyn’s hand is warm where it anchors over my ribs; Boo Boo snores like a kitten in a dryer; the starfield ceiling blinks slow and sweet. The hum of the engine is a lullaby with teeth. I keep floating at the edge of sleep until the estate’s perimeter lights assemble themselves out of the dark and line up like soldiers, and the civilized world remembers my name.
“Gate Seven,” Smurfette whispers from the floor, already awake, already plotting. “Same blind spot, same ivy.”
CynJyn angles the skimmer low. Gravel whispers beneath us. The night holds its breath. Through the cracked window, the air brings me cool stone and the distant iron taste of the sea, a cleaner scent that cuts through the hoverlounge sugar smoke braided into my hair. We settle in the shadow of the service wall with a sigh that sounds like we didn’t do anything wrong.
“Three,” Lloyd murmurs from the front. “Two… now.”
We slide, a little flock of sinners, under the lifted curtain of ivy. Rust rasps my jacket; leaves brush my cheeks. For one heartbeat I’m a child again, ditching tutors, tasting dust on my tongue, the thrill of getting away with something painting my pulse neon. Then we’re inside. The skimmer purrs itself into silence. Smurfette kills the cloned fob with a snap, the light on its face winking out like a secret. We scatter.
“Text me when you’re vertical,” CynJyn breathes, tugging my braid, kissing my forehead in the same motion. “And drink water, you remarkable disaster.”
