Renegade Runner Page 2

  My stomach dropped. Panic strangled at my lungs like someone was trying to choke me unconscious. I gaped at her, my heart pounding in all my fingertips as I tried to force out words. “Sale for what? Who are they? Why are they doing this?”

  Enola seemed to curl in on herself, wrapping her long, thin arms around her knees as her head bowed to her chest. Locks of her long, iridescent hair fell over her knobby, narrow shoulders. It was beyond bizarre, more like the thin strands of a fiber optic light than actual hair. “It … It depends. Some are meant for experimental purposes—research, usually for illegal inter-species breeding. Others are for labor. And then some are meant for more recreational purposes.”

  I froze, hardly able to feel anything below my neck as that information sank in. These aliens were breeding people? Like for pets?

  Nope. I didn’t like that answer one bit. The more I thought about it, the more the blood drained from my face until my cheeks went numb.

  I curled my hands into fists. “Hell no.” There was no way I was going along with that. Not willingly, anyway.

  “I-I’m afraid we don’t get a say in who buys us or what they intend to use us for.” Enola’s teary-eyed gaze focused on me, her voice still shaking and broken as she tried to explain.

  It took a few seconds of complete and total horror, sitting frozen before her, to come to terms with that. I was going to be sold. Like cattle. Most likely to another freaky-looking alien, and maybe even to be bred like a pedigree dog or something.

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured again, her head bowing lower. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do, Miss Human.”

  “Brinna,” I announced in a hoarse growl as I shambled to my feet and staggered a few steps. My calves tingled and my toes, dammit, they were completely numb. “My name is Brinna Blake.”

  Enola didn’t answer. She looked on in silence while I wobbled around like a newborn giraffe, stomping my feet to try to get some of the feeling back in them. It was no use. My knees shook dangerously, my legs still tingly and numb as I tried taking a few more steps.

  I only managed three or four paces before my ankles buckled. Shit. Catching myself against one of the glass walls, I bit curses under my breath and stared out across the rows of other transparent cells around me. Oh my god. There were hundreds of them, all packed into a massive cylindrical chamber, arranged in an organized helix design that spiraled along the inside of the narrow chamber one right after another. But beyond that? There was no way to know anything about whatever alien-spaceship-thing was carrying us. There were no windows, no way to see where we were or where we might be going.

  “Is this … Are we inside a spaceship?” I had to be sure.

  “Yes,” Enola whispered as she looked out across the other cells, too.

  I swallowed hard against the blinding panic that threatened to send me whirling into a full mental breakdown.

  No. I couldn’t lose it. Not now. I-I had to figure this out. Somehow, I had to find a way off this ship.

  I had to find a way back home.

  3

  THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

  Enola apparently knew a lot more about our situation than I did and, basically, it was bad. Worse than bad. Horrible, really. But it was hard enough to make my body walk the length of my tiny cubic cell, let alone have a full-blown mental breakdown. I had to conserve my energy. I might need it later.

  Right now, I needed to think. I had to figure this out.

  Somehow, I’d been abducted from Earth by these alien beings from the Alzumaris system. How or when that had actually happened, I couldn’t remember, but it didn’t matter. Trivial details compared to the much bigger problem: I was trapped here, probably a few hundred billion miles away from Earth, locked in a glass box aboard a spacecraft headed straight for what sounded like an intergalactic flea market. That was the situation—well, based on Enola’s hushed, terrified descriptions, anyway. It was hard to get more than a few words out of her at a time. She kept her head down and her voice low, almost as though she was afraid someone might overhear us.

  “How do you know all of this?” I asked as I sat against the wall opposite of her, my gaze drawn out across the other cells around us. None of the other alien beings caged inside had even tried to communicate with us. Some seemed unconscious or sleeping, while others were pacing like caged lions, growling, mumbling, and never making eye contact. Could they even talk? Or were we the only ones?

  “My species is considered ‘borderline’ intelligent, so we know a lot about the workings of other systems within the galaxy,” she admitted, almost as though she were ashamed of it. “I am … um, well, I was an apprentice studying in our Innovative Technologies Academy. I’ve studied extensively in hopes of developing alternative energy sources, specifically those found within planetary cores. A few of our findings attracted interest from the Alzumarians, so I guess you could say we have been researched heavily—interrogated for anything useful and studied because of our physical adaptions.” She rubbed at her dainty, pointed chin as she murmured, “But we still aren’t considered intelligent by their standards, so we don’t have any citizenship rights or protections under their legal system.”

  “Adaptations?” I struggled to keep up with her hushed, precise speech. She certainly sounded educated—way more than I was. Science had never been my thing.

  Okay, so, school in general hadn’t been my thing. I’d made decent grades, but only because I spent hours memorizing notes and rereading every textbook chapter. It seemed like I had to work twice as hard as the rest of the kids in my class to make my mediocre grades. And science? Ha, yeah. I only barely remembered anything about biology. I’d taken it freshman year of high school, and that had been a while ago. Mitochondria were the powerhouse of the cell, that part I remembered.

  “Evolve or die.” She gave a darting, uncertain glance up at me. “We are all here because we survived the environment that produced us. Or, I suppose, in some cases the environment where we were planted.”

  I chewed at the inside of my cheek, still struggling to wrap my mind around it all as I rubbed the tender spot right at the base of my skull. A raised knot of flesh there about the size of a penny seemed to be the source of the crippling pains that came and went like swelling migraines. Every few minutes, I had to stop our conversation, set my jaw, and breathe through one of them. They came and went fast, usually only lasting a minute or two. But every time, it felt like my head might explode.

  “Planted,” I repeated. “You mean by the Alzumarians, right?”

  She nodded slightly, making her strange hair swish over her scaly brow. “It’s no coincidence that we all look essentially the same in build. Upright, bipedal, two arms, two legs, two eyes, one mouth, singular central nervous system—that sort of consistency across so many species is not random chance.”

  My mouth quirked down into an uncomfortable frown. “Nothing is random,” I recalled aloud. Mom liked to say that all the time.

  Enola’s expression brightened a little. “Indeed. Everything about our species was intentionally designed from a molecular level to suit the environment of our homeworlds. We were then left to grow, multiply, and evolve on our own. Sort of like planting a garden and then letting it run wild to see what happens.”

  “So the, um, people from Alzumaris … they don’t look human?” I wasn’t sure the term people was even the right word to use. “Oh, er, I mean like us, that is. Not necessarily human.”

  She gave a small, weak smile. “It’s okay. I understand.” She pursed her lips thoughtfully as she wiggled her four-toed feet. Each toe was wider than mine and the undersides were padded, reminding me a little of a gecko. I wondered if that meant she could climb on slick surfaces like they could.

  “So, um, basically, it’s like this.” She scooted in a little closer until her side was pressed right up against the glass. “None of us look ‘human.’ We all look Alzumarian. They are our common ancestor and we … are their creations. We all came from the very f
irst Alzumarian race, the ancient ones, and were pieced together with altered fragments of their DNA.”

  The more she talked, the more that spot on the back of my head throbbed. All my thoughts tangled like the knotted, useless wad my earbuds always seemed to turn into whenever I pulled them out of my purse. I didn’t want to believe any of it. I wasn’t really here. Just the thought that we, human beings, and all these other strange creatures in their glass boxes around me were descended from the same alien race, genetically farmed and planted like crops, was insane. It couldn’t be true. It was impossible.

  Right?

  Looking at Enola—I mean sure, we had the same basic body build like she’d said. But we were also incredibly different. One glance around at all the other bizarre alien beings caged around us made that idea even more unbelievable. They looked even stranger than she did. Some had fur, while others had horns, four eyes, vibrantly scaled patterns, or even tails. How could we all come from one species?

  And what did that even mean? What did Alzumarian aliens look like?

  After a long, uncomfortable silence, Enola finally looked up to meet my gaze again. “You have to understand, Brinna, they’ve always intended to harvest a few of us for research purposes, so legally speaking, we are all supposed to be protected by the Alzumarian Ethics Code. It says you can’t interfere with our primitive environments without explicit permission from the Alzumarian Interplanetary Council. But the dredger crews, like the people flying this craft, are technically breaking the law by taking us from our worlds for non-scientific or illicit purposes. We’re stolen goods.”

  Once again, I noticed her expression beginning to grow distant, crumpling in on itself like a deflated party balloon. She turned her face away slightly, as though too ashamed to let me see the light die in her eyes.

  I tried to keep my emotions in check. I didn’t know her at all. But in the few, short hours I’d been conscious, she’d been all I’d had, and she seemed younger and completely terrified. Maybe that was because she understood a lot more about our current situation, but I couldn’t deny how seeing that look, like she knew her fate already, sent a fresh pang of fear through my gut like a cold spike. “So, um, what’s your species called, then?” I asked quietly.

  “Ichetharys.” She shifted uncomfortably, drawing her bottom lip into her mouth to nibble at it with those pointed, almost fish-like teeth. “Our world is considered one of the more hostile environments in the galaxy. It’s highly volcanic, with fluctuations in atmosphere and temperature that would doom most other species. But we’ve evolved to endure it. We can survive even in the worst places. We can go for long periods without food or water, and even adapt to breathe different atmospheres. It makes us the ideal workers for places with … inhospitable working conditions.”

  “Oh.” Okay, now I really wished I remembered more about the solar system. What planet could she have come from? Or was she even from the same solar system as me?

  Enola gave a small, defeated sigh as she rubbed at her arms. “So, odds are, I’ll be sold to a deep-core mine because my species is one of the few who can survive in those kinds of conditions while operating the complex Alzumarian mining craft.”

  I had no idea what that really meant. Mining was something I’d heard about all my life. I knew it was a thing, especially for stuff like coal, gold, or precious stones. I’d just never known anyone who actually worked a job like that. But that look on her face and the way her voice cracked and faltered, shaking with fear. It had to be bad.

  “Is there anything we can do? Can’t we break out? Find some way to get back home?” I scooted in closer, trying to sound as hopeful as possible.

  Every last shred of hope in her eerie, huge blue eyes died as she stared straight ahead. “And travel all the way back to our home solar systems? With no money, no ship, and no idea how to fly an Alzumarian spacecraft?”

  Right. Well, she did have a point there.

  “Not to mention, every specimen taken off one of the harvest worlds is tagged and implanted. They would find us easily, even if we did somehow make it off this ship.” She sighed and went back to flexing her toes. “No one ever gets to go back, Brinna. Once we pass through the jump-gate, through the wormhole, it’s over.”

  I bit down hard and looked away. I couldn’t accept that. I wasn’t going to end up as some exotic pet or breeding animal. There had to be a way.

  And I was going to find it.

  4

  THE NEW KID

  The more I thought, the more that stinging pain rose in the back of my head. It throbbed through my brain, strobing with wave after wave of nausea that made my stomach clench like I might start puking again. I leaned forward and put my head in my hands, trying to breathe through it.

  “It’ll pass,” Enola consoled me as she pressed a hand to the glass, as though she understood what I was going through.

  “W-What’s happening to me?” I whimpered.

  “It’s your lingual converter. They call it a ‘ling-con’ for short,” she said. “Aren’t you curious how we can understand one another? I don’t speak the human language and I doubt you speak mine. So how do you think that’s possible?”

  I raised my head shakily, blinking at her in surprise. Unconsciously, one of my hands slipped to that tender knot on the back of my head. My stomach fluttered as my fingertips brushed it. Was … that it? Had they implanted something in my head?

  “We’re considered much too primitive and under-evolved to get a good handle on all the languages used in Alzumaris, so to compensate and make us more useful, we’re outfitted with ling-cons that tap directly into the portion of the brain that interprets speech. The devices can translate anything we hear in real time, making adjustments for dialectical differences and even names so that we can understand one another’s languages.” She gave another strange, cautious smile as she drew her hand back. “I-I, um, I’m sorry if that’s strange to hear. But at least we can talk to each other, right?”

  I swallowed hard. “Is it safe? To have something like that in our heads?”

  She gave a wide-eyed, puzzled stare and shrugged her bony, frail-looking shoulders. “I don’t know for sure. I’ve never been that good with medical stuff. But based on what I’ve read, you’ll have headaches for a little while your cerebral system adjusts, but then you’ll probably be fine.”

  “Probably?”

  “Well, um, there … there’s a slight chance you’ll die of a massive aneurism.”

  Great. Just freaking perfect.

  “Oh! I-I’m sure you won’t, though! It’s probably fine! Like I said, medical things aren’t my specialty,” she fretted.

  I sank back against the glass wall behind me again, my fingers still tracing that puckered mark right at the hairline at the base of my skull. Poking at it made a dull ache ripple over my brain. What else had they done to me that I didn’t know about?

  “But, you should know, they can use our ling-cons to track us, too. Each one is paired with a unique signifier. So running from them or trying to escape is … sort of pointless.”

  Running. That word struck a chord in my frazzled, alien-modified brain. I straightened a little, letting my thoughts race. Memories danced amidst the throbbing pain, blurred images of a road. The sun warm against my back and shoulders. My feet flying over the pavement, legs pumping and lungs burning. Every movement precise. Honed. Not panicked or desperate. I was in control, monitoring the movement of every muscle as my ponytail swished against my back.

  Running like that felt natural. It felt good.

  It felt like freedom.

  In an instant, the image was gone. A confused, swirling darkness took its place. I couldn’t remember what had happened—how I’d gotten here. Where was Mom? Did she know I’d been taken? Had she been taken, too? More and more questions whirled through my pounding, aching brain like leaves whipped in a windstorm. Why couldn’t I remember anything? Some things stood out, like Mom. I remembered her. I knew my name. I knew I was eighteen. I’
d been working lots of hours at a restaurant, saving up for something. But the rest?

  It was gone. Lost in the tangle.

  Tears welled in my eyes before I could stop them. I crossed my arms, letting my elbows rest on my knees so I could put my head down. I didn’t want Enola or anyone else to see me lose it. My expression skewed and I mashed my mouth tightly, holding in the sobs.

  Why had these aliens chosen to take me? I wasn’t anyone special. At least not that I could remember. What was going to happen now? Would I ever get to see home again?

  Home …

  I tried to focus on that one idea, centering all my concentration on remembering where home actually was. My heart pounded and a cold sweat pearled on my skin as a single image surfaced in my mind’s eye: a little blue house with two ancient live oak trees bent over it like giant guardians. Spanish moss draped from the low branches like brownish living curtains, and strings of colored glass wind chimes sparkled from the front porch. There was an old red Ford F150 parked out front in the gravel driveway. That truck was mine. And the tiny blue car parked next to it was Mom’s. We lived together. It was just the two of us. No—wait. The hugely fat white tomcat snoozing in one of the window boxes, mashing all Mom’s freshly planted pansies with his giant butt, was Sir Marshius the Mallow. Our cat.

  And then it was gone.

  The memory burst like a bubble, dissolving into nothing as the haze rolled back over my mind, choking out everything except a chilling numbness. I shut my eyes tightly and tried to will it back. But it was lost.

  And so was I.

  “I-I can’t remember anything,” I admitted, my voice cracking as I swallowed back sobs. “Did they do something to my memory?”

  Enola’s voice came gently as she held my gaze, blinking owlishly. “It’s probably just a side effect from placing the ling-con. It’ll probably resolve itself. Give it some time. It’ll probably come back. Your brain has been through a lot.”