Chapter 15

At some point, I sat down exhausted by the kitchen table, rested my head on the now-clean surface, and fell asleep.

“Get up you lazy calleio!”

The oozing-puss alien’s voice ripped me from my sleep, and instantly brought me back to my reality as a prisoner. It took me a moment to open my eyes—losing a few lashes in the process—since they were clumped together by crud from dried tears, indicating that I must have cried in my sleep.

“What?” I sat up.

“I told you to clean up,” he snarled.

“I did,” I said, looking around the kitchen, which was, if not spotless, at least a lot cleaner than before.

“And what is this?” He smeared one of his six fingers between the counter and stove. The grease that had filled the space in between was so thick that none of the cleaning liquids I had used had managed to get it all out. It hadn’t helped that the stove was too heavy for me to drag out.

“And this.” He pointed at the overflowing trash can.

“I-I didn’t know what to do with it,” I admitted.

He rolled his three eyes, two in opposite directions, making me dizzy. “To the trash incinerator of course, you lazy filth.”

“And where is that?” I asked, refusing to roll my eyes at him in return.

He pointed to the door I entered through last night. I shook my head. “I can’t go outside.” I put my fingers to the collar around my neck.

“You have to stay within five hundred paces, you nitwit.”

Now that he said it, I recalled the instructions again.

“Besides, it will warn you before you get zapped,” he added.

“It will?”

“Get the trash out.”

I wasn’t going to say yes, sir. I simply got up and moved to the trash container and grabbed it without saying anything. My knees shook and my arms and legs felt like jelly, but the prospect of going outside, seeing where I was in the daylight revived me some. Maybe I could figure out a way to escape.

The alien wasn’t going to open the door for me, so I had to put the trash down before I disengaged the locks and opened it. I picked up the trash again and stepped out into the sunlit alley that didn’t look any better in the daylight than it had in the shadows of the night.

Barely twenty feet separated the door from the dilapidated, dirty wall on the other side. I looked left and right until I saw an older-model trash incinerator to my right.

A low buzzing sensation by my neck stopped me about five feet from the incinerator. That had to be the warning the alien told me about, and I figured it would be just like him to send me here knowing I was only a few feet short of reaching my target.

I didn’t dare step another foot forward, and I couldn’t reach my arms out far enough to activate the incinerator to open.

“Sucks to be you,” a small voice snickered from behind the incinerator.

“Who’s there?” I asked, ready to bolt.

“Me,” a dirty-looking Pandraxian child poked out from behind the machine. She looked skinny, and her clothes were tattered.

“Can you help me?” I asked.

“That depends, what’s in it?” She pointed at the trash.

“Dirt, spoiled food, rags.” I shrugged, not having investigated what had already been inside before I added more during my cleaning spree.

“Can I have it?”

“You can have it all, just not the trash can,” I promised, wondering how I would stop her if she decided to take it and make a run for it. Would the alien zap me because I lost it?

“You’re staying with Gitgo?” she wanted to know.

“Yes.”

“Is he going to sell you?”

I blinked back tears. “I don’t know.”

“Probably. I’ve never seen something like you before. What are you?”

“A human,” I filled her in.

She shrugged, not caring. An idea formed in my head. “Listen, would you send a message for me? You will be highly rewarded,” I added for good measure.

Distrustfully, she assessed me. “How much?”

“More than you can imagine,” I answered, hoping Daryus would indeed reward her, but I couldn’t imagine he wouldn’t. I had to believe that he wanted me back as much as I wanted to get back to him. We had shared something special, something deep. I had to believe that.

“I can imagine a whole lot.” The girl nodded. “But Gitgo will kill me and credits won’t do me any good if I’m dead.”

She was right about that. “You wouldn’t have to come back here or stay here. You could take your mom or dad away from here,” I tried to lure her.

“Like I would share with that sack of a wasted lifeform,” she spat to the ground, leaving me wondering if she was referring to her mother or father.

“Once I’m away from here, I could find a place for you,” I offered.

“Nah, I think, I’m just gonna—” And with those words, quick as a dart, she snatched the can from my hands and jumped back. “—take your trash. Have a good day, human.”

Defeated, I looked after her as she jumped up on the incinerator with the trash in her little arms and then up over the wall where I couldn’t see her any longer.

I trotted back to Gitgo’s house. The alien sat on the same chair I had sat in before he woke me, staring at me with his three eyes. “Where’s my trash can?”

“A little girl took it,” I said, preparing myself to be zapped by him. The small disc remote sat right in front of his hand.

He cackled. “Serthia? Sneaky little brat. Did she promise to send a message for you if you paid her?”

It hadn’t been quite like that, but close enough, and my stricken expression must have told him because he cackled some more. “You have no friends here, lady,” he pronounced the title like it was something despicable. “You’ll learn that soon enough. Nobody will help you, no matter what you promise, only hard credits or gems count. Nothing else.”

Besides my nightgown, I had nothing. Not on me. Lady Natoi had given me plenty of jewelry, but they were all safe and sound in my bedroom, where I should be.

“Now get moving and clean the other room,” Gitgo commanded, moving to the fridge and pulling out a plate filled with what looked like salami, making my mouth water and stomach grumble despite my brain telling me that this most likely wasn’t salami. Still, my stomach cramped painfully as I walked past him to get to the cleaning bucket, wondering what I would use to pick up all the trash I could see from here in the other room, and what I would do with it once I had collected it.

This time I swore I would just dump it right where I stood in front of the damn incinerator, not giving a damn.