Page 77 of Fractured Souls

“I don’t really know,” she answered, knowing better than to try and hide whatever this thing was that she was feeling right know. Nythian would just know. He always seemed to know.

He could hear her heartbeat, for god’s sake.

She didn’t even bother trying to understand it anymore.

He took the empty seat beside her, and now she could see his ruby-red eyes, so piercing they almost glowed in the shadows.

“For a moment there, I felt almost weightless… I don’t know. It was weird.”

“That must have been the gravity sensors adjusting to the new environment,” he said softly. “You are thinking about something else, though.”

“Just that the odds of me ending up here with you are so impossible that I almost feel like some higher power has done this to us… only I don’t believe in those sorts of things.”

“Some things are unfathomable,” he agreed. “But you have glimpsed the otherlife. You know that there’s something…”

A chill ran through her. “I don’t want to think about it. If some sort of fate has guided me here, then I’m the luckiest person in the Universe right now. But it could have been so much worse. There are a lot of people who don’t get a second chance like I did. I always can’t help but wonder. If something… you know, a higher power exists, why would it allow so much suffering to happen?”

Nythian took her cold hands into his. “Can’t say,” he said quietly. “We don’t know what exists beyond… so that question can’t be answered… as much as I sometimes hate that it has to be asked.”

He went quiet for what seemed like an eternity.

The red desert rushed by beneath them, ancient and immense.

“Alexis.” When he spoke again, his voice was cold, but she instinctively knew that coldness wasn’t directed at her. “Now is the time for you to tell me what really happened to you on Earth. I’ve heard you talking in your sleep. You are strong, but sometimes I still see the fear in you.”

“I…” She hesitated, not because she was afraid to relive those horrible memories again, but because of what it might do to him.

She had no idea how he would react.

“Tell me the truth, Alexis. All of it.” He squeezed her hands. “I need to know.”

“Why? You can’t change the past.”

“Alexis.” His voice became stern. “Tell me.”

She sighed. “Fine.”

And another rusted-shut barrier in her mind burst open.

Opening her mouth was like releasing the floodgates. She told him everything. About her job as a detective. About why she’d gone into this line of work in the first place.

About Tasha.

She spoke of Earth’s long history of human trafficking and slavery, right from the first written records of humankind until recent times, when people had started to disappear from the face of the Earth.

Alien abductions were the most serious type of cases the Human Protection Agency dealt with. When people went off-planet, they rarely ever came back. There had been exactly three recorded cases of returned survivors in all of human history—with the exception of the humans rescued by the Kordolian allies, of course.

There was a saying in the HPA. Lost in space, found on ground. It sounded corny, but it essentially meant that once human abductees victims entered space, there was almost no hope of retrieval.

Like Tasha.

God damn it. Alexis nearly choked up. “I was almost one of them,” she said softly, and he went very, very still. “We were on a routine search. In hindsight, it was stupid to go in such a small search party, but we getting a lot of pressure from the higher-ups. We were desperate for a lead, and the riots in nearby Lightside had us stretched for personnel, and we hadn’t really expected to find anything… maybe clues at the most; footprints, personal items dropped by the victims, signs of a struggle…”

“But you did find something.”

“Yeah. An alien… Kordolian ship. We literally stumbled across it. It was cloaked… nearly invisible to us, but we picked up a heat-sig. We decided to retreat and call for backup, but it was too late. They were returning from their hunt with two human captives in tow.” She swore viciously, slipping back in her the creole of her childhood. “We hadn’t had any direct encounters with Kordolians before. We all knew they were dangerous, but…”

She still blamed herself for Del and Thomas’s deaths, even though so many people—superiors, counsellors, colleagues—had told her it wasn’t her fault.

---