Chapter 5

5

- Maeve -

"Away from your friends that are shooting at us," Arelion growls with his deep voice.

As my eyes slowly adjust to the sudden dark, I notice the tips of his wings glow in an eerie blue. It gives me just about enough light to see by.

"They're not my friends at all," I tell him as I try to adjust my clothing. "They wanted to sell me."

"I'm truly amazed at your efforts to get yourself into trouble. Every time I turn around, someone's kidnapped you. Or you're committing capital offenses."

"I'm not trying to get into trouble," I protest. "It's just that this station you brought me to is full of crazy abductors. But thank you for helping me. Again, I guess."

Arelion walks further along the corridor. "It was the very last time, I assure you."

"Sure," I mutter to myself. I'm still shaky from the encounter with those last aliens. They weren't kidding — they ganged up on me and dragged me to that jail area, and they were about to put me in a cell when Arelion appeared. I have no idea what happened to Bari. She took off the moment trouble started to brew.

I follow Arelion's blue aura. We should probably get away from here before they open the door and come to get us. Or shoot us.

Telescoping the fighting stick back into a small tube that fits in my hand, I have to jog to catch up. Arelion must be eight feet tall, and he walks very fast even though it looks like he's just sauntering along. Now I know he can move even faster, to the point where he's just a blur. He totally shocked those bandits back there with his moves.

He shocked me, too. Before I knew it I was hanging from his shoulder, being quickly carried away while bullets were whizzing past us. He definitely risked his life getting me out of there, and that's despite my last words to him before being of the not-too-friendly variety.

But of course, we're not out of this yet. Not at all. So I better stay close to him.

I catch up with Arelion and jog beside him. "Do you know where this is leading?"

"If you have a map of the station, please show it to me," he growls. "If not, be so kind as to not ask pointless questions."

"Sorry. But you took us to this station. For all I know, you could have been born and raised here."

"I was not. And it is the general rule when moving in hostile territory like this to be quiet and not alert the enemy to one's presence."

I shut up and jog along. The corridor must have been out of use for a while. I keep stumbling over trash and debris, and the air feels stuffy and hard to breathe. I'm fully aware that on a space station, being separated from the empty space outside is not a given. If the bandits want to kill us, they may simply have to open a hatch or a door or something and flush us out into space.

Arelion stops at a door that looks like glass. "Can you read that?"

I can't, so I get out my tiny little flashlight and turn it on. The white beam sweeps across bright yellow signs with black writing on them. "No, but it looks dangerous. Like warnings."

"That was my impression, too," he grunts.

"There may not be air on the other side of this door," I point out. "That could be the danger."

Arelion stiffens and whips around, listening.

I hear it too — the faint sound of the alarm, as well as many footsteps and voices that have an unpleasant crackle in them, like the alien bandits. They must have opened the door, and now they're coming for us.

"There is danger in both directions," Arelion points out. "We will pick this one. If there is only vacuum on the other side, at least we will take them with us, too." He hits a panel beside the door, but nothing happens. "No power. Can I see that stick for a moment?"

I don't want to give it up, but I put the fighting stick in his hand. I'd do anything to not be caught by those gangsters and put in a cell to be sold at some kind of terrible auction. "I'll need it back."

Arelion winds up and slams the end of the stick into the glass. It shatters with a loud bang.

I half expect the air to be sucked out of the corridor with the force of a hurricane, but nothing like that happens.

Arelion slams the stick into the door again and again, making a hole big enough for him to pass through. When he's satisfied, he stands back and lets me climb through the opening before he follows right after.

"Here's your stick." He holds it out to me with a theatrical flourish, balancing it on its end on the flat of his palm.

I grab it. "Thanks."

"Notice that I am trustworthy, too. Now we have to go." He grabs my wrist and drags me with him.

"I never said you weren't," I protest as I try to keep my balance. I can't help but wonder where all these twisted metal parts come from. "The talk about sneakiness was all you ." Behind us, I hear excited voices and hard bangs as the gangsters shoot at us.

I turn the flashlight off so they have a harder time aiming. The shooting stops, but I keep worrying about them coming after us. They must know this station much better than we do. So this may be just postponing the fight to the death.

It's still dark, and the glow from Arelion's wingtips isn't enough light to see by. We're moving so fast that I don't know where we're going. I have enough trouble staying on my feet and not stumbling. But I do notice that the air keeps getting more and more stale and smelling worse and worse.

When the floor gives in under Arelion's feet and he falls through it, I try to stay up. But while he has let go of my hand, the floor must have been really weak, because it crumbles under me, too. With a yelp I fall through the floor, frantically trying to grasp at sharp metal edges to stay up.

But nothing is within reach, and I drop to the next level and land on top of Arelion. The landing knocks the wind out of me, but I notice that I'm not dead. That's because his many feathers helped me land softly. Only my elbow is sore.

Arelion gets up and brushes debris off himself. "The whole station is rotting. I must ask: did you have to land on your elbow? It's unusually pointy."

"Sorry," I gasp as I just recover my ability to breathe. "I had no choice."

"Now we have no choice but to get away from here," he says and drags me to my feet. "Before they start?—"

His sentence is broken off by a volley of gunshots from above. Bullets zip around us for a second before Arelion unceremoniously tosses me twenty feet down the hallway and sprints the same distance himself, then drags me further along. "We should be out of sight of them here."

They've stopped shooting. In the flashes from their shots, I was able to make out that this is not a corridor, but a big room that's more like a debris field. There's broken glass and small pieces of metal debris all over the place, as well as sand that on closer inspection is glass that's been ground really small. It smells strongly of mold and exotic chemicals.

I want to stay in one place, afraid to put a foot wrong in the dark and step into something dangerous.

Arelion walks further along the floor, glass cracking under his boots. "Are you going to settle down here?"

"Not if I can help it." I follow, reasoning that if I stay approximately in his footsteps, I can't get injured that bad unless the floor collapses again.

"That's strange," Arelion mutters. "It's as if— void! "

I freeze. His voice seemed to travel upwards…

There's a terrible noise as if from a metal plate being hit by a short, but intense hailstorm. Then there's a hard crash from above. I fumble for the flashlight, but the floor vanishes from under my feet. "Shit!"

I brace for the landing, but there's not much I can do before I land on a firm, warm heap of feathers.

"You and your damned elbow!" Arelion groans under me. I scramble off him, get to my feet, and turn on the flashlight. I don't know what just happened.

The light cone travels along the floor, finding debris and rubble. But now the door is close to the ceiling…

"We fell upwards," Arelion growls as he gets to his feet, holding his side. "The gravity changed."

He's right. We're standing on the ceiling. Above us is the floor, and the door doesn't reach all the way up here.

Now all the debris that was on the floor is stuck to the ceiling, just like we are. That was the terrible noise. This crazy variable gravity was something I was told about, because on space stations, the gravity is all artificial and it can malfunction. But I didn't know it would be as dramatic as this.

It's a weird feeling when my floor is the actual ceiling, and my brain struggles with it. "I landed on you again. Sorry."

"Your elbow should be classified as a lethal weapon," he growls as he gets to his feet. "It's like a hatchet." He stands there unsteadily for a moment, and I wonder if he's badly injured.

Small pieces of trash and rubble start to slide along the ceiling I'm standing on.

"Watch out!" I yell as I start to feel the sideways pull myself, but it's too late. The gravity changes again and we both slide, then fall to the side. It's a shorter fall this time, and we end up in the corner, on one of the walls.

This time I don't land on Arelion, but I wish I had. The wall is hard, and I'm going to get a bunch of bruises if this goes on much longer. Pieces of glass, sand, and trash pummel me.

"It's an experiment gone awry," Arelion growls as he gets up on hands and knees. "Rotating gravity."

I start sliding again, clawing uselessly at the wall that's quickly becoming the ceiling. I look across the room. The other wall is really far away, and while the gravity is not as strong as on Earth, I will still be going really fast when I hit it. "Arelioooon!"

I plummet through the room in a cloud of dust and debris and garbage. The wall rushes up at me, looking really hard.

I close my eyes, knowing I'll break every bone in my body.

There's a rustle of feathers, and something grabs me hard under my arms, halting me in mid-air. The flashlight drops out of its little pocket and is smashed to pieces on the wall three feet in front of my face. Then I'm carried away, feeling like I'm going ‘up'.

Arelion has a good grip on me as he flaps his powerful wings and we hover in the middle of the room. "This room is lethal."

"An insane experiment," I agree, my voice shaking.

The gravity shifts again, and he has to do a quick loop in the air to keep us right side up.

He uses the short moment of weightlessness to adjust his grip on me and bring me up to his chest. "We have to get out of here."

Despite the danger, I can't help noticing his scent filling my nose, dry and fresh and mysterious. His slow heartbeat echoes through me, and all his massive muscles flex with the movement of his wings. I cling to him as he keeps us from slamming into any wall or floor or ceiling. I'm sure I must make it harder for him to fly, but he manages to keep us airborne. And I should try to be useful, as well.

"I think that's another door," I tell him and nod towards the far wall. "It's glass, too. We have to break through it."

Arelion does his best to move with the gravity changes, but I sense him struggling more and more.

"The gravity is getting stronger," he seethes as we fall towards the wall before he can drag us away from it with hard, strong beats of his wings. "We need one cycle of gravity towards that other door, but if it won't open on its own, we may be in serious trouble."

My hair is starting to feel heavy, and my clothing is pulling at my body. In the dim light, I spot my fighting stick falling and slamming into the wall that's quickly becoming the floor. We're falling after it, but Arelion beats his wings mightily and just prevents us from hitting the hard surface. Debris hailstorms on us, and I have to close my eyes to not get them full of glass dust and small pieces of metal.

As the gravity shifts once more, I keep my eyes on the stick and snatch it out of the air when it passes. The normally light metal tube is now so heavy that I have to hold it with both hands.

"We're falling to the door," Arelion hisses, breathing hard. "This is our only chance."

"Can you use this?" I ask, showing him the stick.

He doesn't reply, too busy fighting the insane gravity.

We're falling so fast that the air is whistling past us. Arelion struggles hard to slow us down, his wings beating furiously, but even with all his might, we hit the wall hard.

I let go of him. We're right on top of the glass door, but the gravity is pulling me so hard towards it that I can barely breathe.

Arelion hits the door release pad, but nothing happens. I hold the stick out for him, having to use both hands and gritting my teeth with the effort. "Break it!"

He grabs the stick, and with all his muscles flexing and tendons standing out of his skin, he lifts it over his head and slams it down on the glass. The whole door shatters with a bang like a gunshot and I fall into the room behind, landing on my back.

Arelion falls on top of me, but he takes his own weight on his arms and doesn't crush me flat. For a moment we stay like that, face to face, both of us breathing hard, his yellow eyes boring into me.

I'm hyper conscious of his heat and the touch of his body above me, and I don't dislike it nearly as much as I should. He could pin me down really hard, and I don't think I'd mind.

We stay like that for a moment, and my eyes widen when I feel something hard poke my thigh.

"This should be a better place," he finally growls and rolls off me. "The gravity seems normal."

We get to our feet. My knees are a little wobbly, but I have enough pride to not reach out to steady myself on the alien peacock. "I did wonder if you could fly with those things."

"It's what wings are for," he grunts, checking himself for injuries.

"It's just that on Earth, some creatures with wings can't fly," I explain as I pick up my fighting stick and look around the room. It's a giant hemisphere, and the door we fell through is slightly rounded on this side.

The room appears featureless and extremely bright. The rounded walls are shiny and mirrored, showing distorted reflections of ourselves.

I stand still for a while as my heart rate settles down. "Maybe there's another door."

"If so, it's well hidden," Arelion grunts as he strides along the wall, his reflected image a giant, feathered figure that stretches all the way to the apex of the ceiling.

I can't help letting my eyes follow him. He moves with a light step, his strong legs flexing in a most interesting way. His wings are huge, even when tucked tightly in behind his back. The feathers shine brightly in the white light, and I can't help but wonder what kind of evolutionary pressure got his species to develop them. It's not like he's not perfectly attractive even without those?—

I suddenly lose sight of him. Instead I'm looking at a thin reflection of myself, seen up close.

"Shit!" The sudden change in the room takes me by surprise. I'm surrounded by mirrors, seeing only myself in all kinds of unsightly distortions. In one I'm thin in the middle, in another I'm thick, in one I'm short, and in another I'm comically tall and drawn.

Looking up, I see the same — just my own reflection, dozens of them.

"A hall of mirrors gone mad," I mutter to myself. None of the reflections are flattering. A girl could get a real blow to her self esteem in this place. "Picasso would have loved this."

I reach out to touch the one in front of me. My finger doesn't touch anything, but still it's stopped and prevented from pushing into the image.

"Are you seeing this?" comes a deep call from somewhere. "They're force fields."

That must be why they could appear so suddenly. And why they can move, I realize. The image in front of me is now me seen from behind, with my butt looking laughably flat and bony. But of course that's the way it always looks.

"What do we do?" I yell back to Arelion. "Are we trapped?"

"It's a maze," he tells me. "One that keeps moving. Let's try to find each other first."

"Fine with me," I tell him. "Where are you?"

"I'm here," he calls back. But it sounds like his voice is coming from several different directions, starting to my left and then moving to my right while he speaks.

"Are you moving around?" I ask, just to be sure.

"I'm standing still," Arelion replies. "Are you moving? It sounds like you are."

"I'm standing still, too." Damn. Both light and sound are being badly warped in this unpleasant hall of mirrors.

The mirror in front of me shows me normal size, but is totally exaggerating the size of the pores on my nose, making them look like deep, crusty gorges. Or do I really have those?

"Can we get out of here?"

"They're hard to break," Arelion says to me, sounding as if he's on a fast-moving swing over my head. "I don't know which way to go."

I take a few steps past the mirror in front of me, finding that it is indeed a maze. Everywhere I look I'm confronted by extra ugly versions of myself, even when I look up at the ceiling and down at the floor. I can't escape myself, and that's quickly becoming an absolute nightmare.

I speed up to a fast walk, turning this way and that and constantly crashing softly into the force fields and the images of myself. There's panic tugging at the edge of my mind — what if we're stuck here forever, doomed to wander around this nasty place and always seeing warped and deformed images of ourselves? Or maybe the room is showing Arelion nice images. This should be just the right place for him, with mirrors as far as the eye can see. He can admire himself to his heart's content.

"What do your reflections look like?!" I yell into my own face, one where my teeth are all brown and cratered. "Mine are really ugly!"

"I have looked better," the deep bass comes through the air. "The images seem specially made to ridicule."

That's a small relief, anyway. I'm not the only one getting shown nightmarish pictures of themselves.

"I'm walking through the labyrinth," I tell him. "It keeps changing. What is making these force fields?"

"There must be a generator," Arelion says, sounding like he's ten feet below me, going in a fast circle. "I suspect it's hidden in the ceiling."

"Can you fly up and check?"

"I keep trying."

He doesn't need to tell me that it's really hard. When I look up, there's just as many crazy-looking Maeves up there as down here. Even walking on the force fields here on the floor is super confusing, so I can't imagine what it must be like trying to fly through it and not being sure which way is down and which is up. Especially after the disorienting adventure in the gravity room.

I keep my head down and trudge on. My self image is being eroded pretty effectively by these damn mirrors. And it wasn't that robust to start with. All my imperfections are being exaggerated. Or are they? Maybe this is how I really look, but I just don't see it. Maybe my eyes are that droopy. Maybe my hair is that greasy. Maybe my legs are that uneven in length. Maybe my upper lip is that hairy, and maybe I'm carrying much more of a paunch stomach than I thought.

I give one of the mirrors a good kick right in the weirdly curved, toothpick-thin shins it shows me having. "I don't believe you!"

Fighting back a little feels good, even though the force field isn't damaged in any way. I jump into the air, wanting to stomp my heel into the knee of the image on the floor below me.

A new mirror appears under me, about an inch higher than the old one.

My warped image never gets her knee stomped on because I land on the new mirror.

It gives me an idea.