Chapter 1 | Kara

Chapter 1

Kara

I had this dream every night without fail since it happened, but recently, it had started to fade. Maybe that was thanks to the nice, friendly girl I bunked with at the Ker Sanctuary. Maybe it was just because time healed all wounds, even trauma like a kidnapping. It was inevitable I’d dream about it now, after what I’d just gone through; it was fresh on my mind.

My breathing quickened as I tumbled into the nightmarish recollection of that night. My pulse sped up too, pounding in my chest, but it didn’t wake me—not yet. The dark street as I left the library and headed across campus, the pools of light cast by the streetlights that were placed just a little too far apart. My attention was on my purse as I tried to locate my damn keys.

In the dream, I knew what was about to happen, and I’d find myself screaming in my head to look up, to run, anything. Past me hadn’t had a clue; she didn’t look up until it was too late. The shadows loomed and lengthened, warping into shadowy monsters. I knew that’s not what they looked like, but I never recalled this moment with clarity, not in the nightmare.

The shadows always got me, even when I noticed them, and finally started running. Even when I used the pepper spray on my keychain, it was never enough. And now, it had happened again. With a surge of adrenaline, my eyes flicked open, brushing away the last lingering effects of whatever drug they’d used on me.

The smells hit me first, burning my nostrils with their tangy, acidic strength. My lungs ached, and my eyes were already watering. Confused, I wondered if dream-me had somehow managed to spray herself in the face with that stupid pepper spray. But no—when my eyes adjusted to the light, I knew it was the place that stank.

It was probably a shed, or maybe a storage unit, stuffed to the brim with shelves full of bottles of chemicals. Perhaps they were cleaning supplies, but I felt this was something else. Even in an alien world, there had to be drug labs and drugs. This reminded me a little too much of a shady meth lab to be anything else. Except it wouldn’t be meth but something else freaky, something alien.

I had the worst luck out of anyone I knew, but I hated that kind of thinking. I liked to make my own fate, thank you very much. I’d survived the kidnapping by the shadowy monsters in my dreams and been brought to safety on Ker, even if it meant living on an alien planet and never seeing home again. This was no different.

All that resolve was good, but I was still tied up and lying on a cold stone floor. Count your blessings, I tried to tell myself, there had to be a silver lining somewhere. No rodents, for one, possibly scared off by the pungent smells here. There were no evil kidnappers either; they were probably sitting outside this room where the air was nice. Their mistake. I was terribly good at untangling things, and the rope tying my hands together wasn’t going to be any different.

My crochet skills and experience with tangled yarn weren’t going to help one bit if I couldn’t even feel the knot. My fingers were so numb that I knew circulation had been cut off in a bad way. With a pained grunt, I forced my muscles to obey and pulled myself into an upright sitting position. I was definitely going to take my Sanctuary roomie up on her offer to do Pilates when I saw her next; I needed better abs if this was going to become a habit.

Then I spotted the glass vials in front of me—jars with a purple liquid, several rows of them. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know what was in those jars; they looked like they might be the final product. But a glass shard? That could work... And all it took was a stretch of my leg, and I’d knocked several of them over.

Escape was within my reach, I could feel it. Okay, I couldn’t actually feel it since my fingers were numb, but that was a good thing because I wouldn’t feel it if I cut myself either. There were hazy, purple fumes coming from the liquid I’d spilled—a shocking amount of it. It began to fill the room, but it didn’t sting my eyes any worse. The pain came when the rope suddenly released, the worst kind of pins and needles I’d ever experienced.

Moaning from the agony, I stumbled to my feet and lifted my hands to my face to get a look. My wrists were abraded and red from the rope, and my fingers had several nasty cuts from the glass. Past me, the college student snatched from the library parking lot, would have screamed and wailed at the sight. The me from now, post-abduction? She barely batted an eye.

I was barefoot because this time I’d been snatched as I’d traipsed into the communal kitchen for a midnight snack. It surprised me to realize that I actually missed the Human Compound, the Sanctuary on Ker. I’d made some friends, and I’d started to heal from losing my family. It was also a much more sensible place to return to. It was the only safe place I knew about and could actually attain. Well, maybe. I had no clue where I was, so I didn’t know if I could find my way back, or even how long I’d been out. The last time I’d been kidnapped, I’d been stuck several hundred years in stasis, but I didn’t think that was the case this time.

What I did know was that I had to get out of there before anyone came looking. It was hard to pick my way around the broken shards and spilled liquid, but once I was out of my corner and into the bigger open space of the room, I could see the door. There was a table set up between all the shelves, and on it was definitely some kind of distillation unit. I was so right about this being a drug lab; I knew it.

The room was turning really misty, a purple fog settling over everything and clinging to my skin. I blinked my eyes, pinched my nose shut, and kept walking. There was the door; I just needed to open it, step outside, and everything would be fine. A little voice at the back of my mind warned me that such thinking was stupid—it wasn’t rational—but I was pulled to that door regardless; it was the only way out.

Shouts went up as I opened the door, and at least five big aliens shot to their feet in front of me. The first one charged, a guy who looked vaguely familiar and was definitely a Kertinal, a native of Ker, where my sanctuary was located. The others behind him were less distinct to me, their shapes warping and dancing as my eyes burned.

Then the fog rolled out of the storage/drug-making room behind me. It was fanciful, but it seemed to me like it rolled over us like a big, malicious purple cloud, swallowing those big guys as if they were nothing. It gobbled them up like a huge, cloud-shaped, hungry monster. They collapsed, but it was almost as if they vanished. I kept moving to the next door, then the next. I continued right outside, into the hot, clean air, and walked until my feet ached, my head spun, and I could no longer go on.