Radon (Inmate Space Mates Book 1) Read online

  “I see that I’ve got your attention. Good. It’s no great secret that ours is a dying race. It’s not because of any illness, not because of any failing strength in our ranks. We have no more information on why our babies can no longer be carried to term. All we know is that they aren’t, and they haven’t been. All we know is that, without fertile hosts, we will rapidly descend into nothing. The people of Earth have struck a deal with the Masters. Their fertile women in exchange for our protection.”

  “When? When will they come? Who will they lie with?”

  These questions came flying from every corner of the room, many of the young men looking eager and ready to do their part. I, for one, could not have been less interested. It sounded like a terrible idea. It sounded like the Masters trying to play god, and when had that ever worked well for anyone?

  “We are being sent fourteen young women, all of whom have been tested and found to be fertile. Fourteen women requires fourteen young men, our virile young fighters to help populate our ranks. They have been chosen, and their names read out now.”

  It was with the most acute feeling of unreality that I heard my name called. I hadn’t heard a thing afterwards. I hadn’t bothered to stick around to hear anything. I had pushed my way through the throngs of bodies between me and the door and burst outside, practically running the whole way back to my hut. That was where Petering had followed me, and where he sat with me still. He couldn’t understand my fury over being chosen as one of the fourteen. Because he was scrawny and had always been sickly, Petering had not been chosen. I was sure that for one so enthralled by the Masters’ plan that was a difficult pill to swallow, but he didn’t complain. It just made it impossible for him to understand my rage, and I wasn’t able to give him any insight. Self-reflection had never been my strong suit.

  Because we could not find a way to understand each other, we lapsed into silence. We sat that way for a long, long time, until the suns in the sky made their way to their slumber and the quiet of night fell around the village. Petering slumped into sleep, as I was sure many of the citizens had, and still I sat and looked out my window. I felt like I was looking for something. I had no idea what that something was, but only that I was looking. I sat that was deep into the night, so late until I, too, felt the heaviness of fatigue begin to take me. I was almost ready to call it a night and let myself sleep when something caught my eye. A streak of white light falling through the sky, hitting the earth with a thud. It was a dull sound, an anticlimactic sound, something that made me wonder whether or not I had seen that light at all. My fingers were gripping the sill of my window so tightly the gray knuckles began to turn white as I peered out into the black night for some sign that what I had seen was real. When I caught a glimpse of two pink figures in the distance moving quickly towards the place where the light had come to land, I got my answer. It was real. I had no idea what “it” was, but now I knew I wasn’t the only one who had seen it. I looked behind me at Petering, saw that he was still sound asleep, and left my hut quickly. I needed to know. Whatever was out there, I needed to see it for myself.

  ***

  “Please! Please, don’t do this. We don’t mean any harm, ok? Please let us go. You’re hurting me!”

  “Get the fuck off of me! We didn’t do shit to you, got it? Whatever the hell you are, we didn’t do a damn thing!”

  I had heard the voices before I saw anything and slowed my body, moving stealthily through the underbrush of the desert that surrounded our village. I was acutely aware of the fact that we had not had a rain in some time and that one wrong step in the dry vegetation would immediately give away my location. That was something I definitely didn’t want to do, at least not until I knew what the devil was going on.

  “But you did,” a voice I recognized as Shaley’s hissed, “you did do something, whether you did it by choice or not. That’s the trouble with meddling in things you don’t understand. You get yourself into trouble.”

  “But we didn’t meddle! We just got into the shuttle like we were told! We didn’t even know where we were going!”

  “Even worse,” Shaley spat out in a hateful voice I had never heard coming from her before, “not even clever enough to look after yourselves. Surely this isn’t what father intended. This can’t be what he thought of as a proper solution. He would be so embarrassed to see what a failure his plan was. Better to ensure that he never see it. Better to allow him to believe the people of Earth never followed through on their end of the bargain.”

  In the faint light coming off of the earth shuttle, I saw Shaley raise her arm up quickly. Clasped in her hand was a dagger, one I recognized as having belonged to her older brother, a great warrior who had perished in battle. For a minute, I was too stunned to act at all, a delay that almost got the two terrified looking women kneeling on the ground before Shaley and her friend killed. Shaley meant to kill them. She was going to kill them, despite the show of support she had given her father during the meeting. I wasn’t even a fan of the plan the Masters had laid out, but I wasn’t going to let this happen. I lunged forward, grabbing Shaley by the wrist just as she began to drive her arm, and the dagger with it, down in a deadly arc. She let out a yelp of surprise and rage, and her friend (a girl I had seen probably hundreds of times but whose name I still could not remember) took off running back towards the village.

  “NO! Stop it, Radon! You’ve got to let me! This isn’t what’s supposed to happen! They shouldn’t BE here!”

  Shaley writhed and twisted in my grasp with a surprising amount of strength, but she was still no match for me. Just when I began to think that she would never give up the fight, her body went limp. It was such a sudden and dramatic change that I almost let her drop to the desert floor. I had to scramble to keep her upright, shaking her lightly to get that dazed look out of her eyes.

  “Shaley! What the devil were you thinking? Do you understand what you were trying to do? What you almost did?”

  “Yes,” she replied in a hollow voice, her vacant looking eyes fixated on the two cowering earth women in front of us, “I do. I almost took care of the problem. I was going to take care of it, so that everything could go back to being the same. So that it could all go back to being what it’s supposed to be.”

  “And what if your father found out? What if he learns of what you almost did?”

  “What of it?”

  “I don’t care if he’s your father. He’s also the head of the Masters. If the people of Valmore found out that you went against his direct wishes this way, tried to thwart his plan? He’d have no choice, Shaley. He’d have to lock you away, just to save face. Don’t you understand that?”

  Her eyes finally left the women in front of us and trained themselves on mine. I could see immediately that she didn’t understand that at all. She didn’t understand anything aside from whatever misguided rage and misplaced jealousy had seized her heart. I shook her again, harder this time, waiting to see her face clear. I had never cared for her the way she wanted me to, but that didn’t mean I wanted to see her completely lose her mind. It didn’t mean I wanted to see her punished. That being said, I didn’t have time for this, and neither did she. I was sure it was only a matter of time before other people approached the earth shuttle’s crash site. There was no way the three of us were the only ones who had seen its descent.

  “Go. Go home, do you hear me? Get out of here. Get out of here before I take you to the Authority myself.”

  “You wouldn’t” she whispered, but her voice sounded dead in my ears. Whoever she was normally, that girl wasn’t there in front of me. This was someone else, someone I didn’t care to know.

  “Don’t you think for a second that I wouldn’t. I’m letting you go because we have history. You should take the opportunity before I change my mind.”

  Her face took on an expression of stunned, deep hurt, and I thought there was a very good chance she would go after her targets again. But then she turned and started off quickly in the oppos
ite direction, following in the footsteps of her frightened friend. That left me alone with two strange women from a planet I hardly knew a thing about. Their faces were white with fear, looking at me with a mixture of gratitude and suspicion. Suddenly, the weight of what I had just done began to hit me. Here I was, less than zero interest in having anything to do with the plan to breed with the earthlings, and now I had gone and put myself in the position of their protectors. Wonderful. Just fantastic.

  Chapter Seven

  Becca Cross

  “Please. Don’t hurt us. Whatever it is we’ve done wrong, we didn’t mean to.”

  “She’s right,” Alecia chimed in quickly, “we didn’t mean to do shit. I don’t know if you noticed, but we aren’t exactly from around here.”

  I turned and stared at Alecia, feeling slightly stunned that she could be making jokes at a time like this. She shrugged her shoulders at me, a look on her face that told me she couldn’t help it. Not that I actually minded it. It was oddly comforting, to have someone act like everything was normal even though I knew it was the opposite. I looked back towards the man who had come to our rescuer, except that when I looked closely I saw that he wasn’t a man at all. His form looked exactly like a man’s, the same build and everything. The thing that made him different was the color of his skin. It was an opaque gray, skin that glowed softly in the night. The other major difference I saw was that he had a set of scales that covered his entire body. When he had first appeared out of the dark, they had been everywhere, the most prominent thing about him as they stuck straight out. They had looked to me like a plate of armor, or maybe some kind of natural weapon. As I watched, however, they gradually began to flatten themselves until it was almost impossible to tell that they had ever been there to begin with. Some kind of flight or fight reaction maybe? Something that happened when they were enraged?

  “Something you want to ask me?”

  “What?”

  The sound of his voice, rich and full in a way that sounded to me like music, startled me out of my thoughts. When I looked at his face, I saw that his eyes were peering down at me, an expression in them that I couldn’t even hope to read. Those eyes were beautiful, so beautiful it was difficult for me to maintain eye contact. They were a bright blue, so blue they glowed just like his skin, and full of feeling. It was just that it was feeling I couldn’t put my finger on, which made it difficult not to be afraid.

  “Was there something you wanted to ask me about? The way you were looking at my skin, I thought maybe there was.”

  “She was looking at the scale thingies. Not trying to be rude or anything, but we’ve never seen anything like that before. Come to think of it, there’s a lot about you we’ve never seen anything like before.”

  “On earth. That’s right, isn’t it? You two are from the planet earth?”

  “We are. And where...where is it that we are now?”

  “The planet of Valmore. It’s far, quite far from your home. Or so I’ve been told. It’s not something I’ve given much thought to. I’ve not thought about it since I was a boy. And then today, after hearing of your impending arrival.”

  I nodded my head like I understood, although his words were all jumbled up and confused inside of my head. It felt impossible to wrap my head around the fact that I had gone to sleep on one planet and had woken up on another. Alecia, on the other hand, honestly seemed to be taking everything in stride, and she got to her feet, ignoring the quick step backwards he took when she did so.

  “Alright, so we’re far away. I kind of figured that. Now, do you mind telling me why that bitch was trying to kill us? Because as far as I can tell, we didn’t do a thing to her. You know, aside from being sent rocketing through space to a place we never even heard of.”

  The man who wasn’t really a man regarded my only friends closely, his face cocked to one side quizzically. Was he angry? Was he angry at her for the way she was speaking to him? It seemed to me that it would be good if she could be a little bit more delicate, what with us being on a planet we knew nothing about and everything, but there wasn’t anything I could do to reign her in. I was struggling just to keep up at all. It felt like everything was happening very quickly, like it was just passing me by. I was like a woman underwater and trying desperately to hear a conversation taking place on the land above.

  “Where are the rest of you?”

  “Well that was a fantastic change of subject. Really, first class. We go all the way across the universe and our happy asses on an entirely different planet, and men are still changing the subject when they don’t want to answer a question about some other bitch. Honestly, I don’t know why I’m surprised.”

  “We can speak later on the matter of Shaley and her friend. Right now, I want to know where the rest of you are.”

  “How do you even know there are more of us? For all you know, there ain’t no ‘rest of us.’ Ever think of that?”

  “There were supposed to be fourteen. That’s what we were told. There were supposed to be fourteen of you.”

  “See, there you go,” Alecia spoke with incredible sass, one hand on her hip, “talking about all of the things you know. What about the things we want to know? Why should we be the only ones answering questions?”

  “I could always just leave you here in the dark, if you like,” he answered coldly, the scales on his skin starting to lift again, “if that’s what you would prefer.”

  “They’re gone.”

  I spoke quietly, as I had a habit of doing, but it was enough to stop the bickering between Alecia and the man who had stopped the pink girl, the one he called Shaley. Both of them looked at me quickly, almost as if they had forgotten I was there at all. Alecia’s mouth was half open as if she had been about to say something (something I was sure wouldn’t have been nice at all). Her eyes flashed with anger, clearly not pleased to have me give up the only information we had that this guy wanted. She was probably right. It was probably a terrible idea, but I just didn’t have the energy to keep up this game of verbal cat and mouse.

  “What do you mean, ‘gone’? Where did they go?”

  “Dead. They didn’t go anywhere, at least not their bodies. Those are still in the shuttle. They’re all dead. We’re the only ones who made it. The last of the fourteen.”

  Without a word, he brushed past us and stepped inside of the shuttle. I could hear him rummaging around inside, taking stock of what was there and what was not there. As he did so, Alecia and I remained silent. There was nothing for us to say, at least not yet. The cold desert wind whipped around our bodies, chilling me so completely I was sure I would never feel warm again. It felt like I would die there. It felt like I had dodged a bullet on the shuttle, only to die of exposure out in an alien desert. At last, the man came back out of the shuttle, a somber look on his face.

  “So? What’s the verdict? They still dead?”

  “Alecia!” I exclaimed, shocked by how brazen she was being.

  “Yes,” the man cut in, “they are. What I would like to know is how they wound up that way. Did either one of you have anything to do with it? And if you did, why? What reason could you have? Also, where’s the third girl?”

  “Hey!” Alecia shouted indignantly, “Watch it, buddy! Of course we didn’t have anything to do with it! You saw those bodies. That look like something we could do? We ain’t vampires, ok? It’s not exactly like we could have sucked the life out of them. There’s nothing we could have done to make them look that way. They look like mummies, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Wait, what do you mean by third girl?” I glanced at Alecia, then back at him. She just shrugged and rolled her eyes.

  “There are three empty pods and only two of you.”

  “I don’t know about no other girls or empty pods other than ours. I certainly don’t see your ‘third girl’ running around out here.”

  “Well, it’s possible you overlooked it when you checked. If you checked. Whatever. Just tell me your version of what happened th
en.” He sighed in wary exasperation.

  “We don’t really know what happened, okay? Those pods, they were supposed to keep us safe. They were supposed to keep us from getting older on the journey. Only something went wrong with the other ones. We didn’t plan it, and we don’t understand it. And I didn’t see another empty one other than ours, sorry. Now you know everything we know. Happy?”

  He didn’t answer her. His tolerance for Alecia and her hostile tone seemed to be waning, something I had a feeling had happened to Alecia on more than one occasion in her life. Instead, he was looking directly at me. I was positive nobody had ever looked at me that way before. When this guy looked at me, it felt like he was looking through me, like he was looking at all of the pieces of myself I had always kept hidden away.

  “And what about you? What do you have to say?”

  “Me? Nothing. She said it all already. I can’t think of anything else. Only that I’m cold. It’s so terribly cold here.”

  Something about that last statement seemed to jolt him out of whatever sort of trance he had been in, his trance of morbid curiosity with just a hint of accusation. He moved towards me then, helping to pull me to my feet. I was unsteady, light headed after all that had happened to me, and I swayed dangerously, almost toppling back to the ground. He caught me in his arms, their warmth and strength enfolding me completely. He smelled like cedar, a scent I had loved since I was a child. How long had it been since a man had touched me? It seemed impossible to remember. As strange as my current circumstances were, I felt my heart leap and flutter inside of my chest. This was something I had never expected to feel again. I had been fully prepared to go to my death without ever feeling anything close to a man’s embrace again.