Authors: Emma Taylor
A thought occurred to her. “Where would we go?” Then, with more excitement: “Could I go home?”
Elion’s face tightened, and then, after an
almost
imperceptible moment, relaxed. “Yes,” he said, his voice level, suddenly emotionless. “I could take you home, if you like.”
Rosy wondered at his sudden reticence, but not for too long. Soon Elion was talking about the route they would take. They would cut through the corn fields (he gave them a different name Rosy couldn’t even
try
and pronounce) and head straight for the station. Once there, they would steal Raben’s personal vessel and leave this planet and this household forever. “I have waited far too long,” Elion said. “I should have done this a long time ago. But I am also glad I waited. If I hadn’t waited, I would not have met you. It is strange, isn’t it, how one can hold two opposing ideas in one’s mind at once?”
“It’s called being human,” Rosy said.
***
Three days later, the guests started arriving at the Ka’la’tek household. Rosy was sitting in her room when she heard Raben’s wife, a woman she had started to see as a victim like herself, began hauling big vats of
g’luf
into the main meeting area. Rosy’s heart was pounding when someone opened her door, but it was Elion, and he looked excited.
“Are you ready?” he said.
Rosy nodded.
*****
Rosy rose from the bed and went to Elion, her alien lover. He stood eight foot tall over her, looking down at her with his version of a smile: a slight uplift of his red-skinned lips. He touched her shoulder with the back of his hand. “I have already laced the
g’luf
with the soporific. Soon they shall be asleep, and we shall be free.”
Rosy couldn’t believe that poisoning the family’s drink would really work, that it would truly free her from this slave prison. But she reached out to Elion and clasped his hands. She would savor this moment even if it
didn’t
work, because that was what she needed to do. She needed to believe that something could happen, that it would all be okay. She closed her eyes and leaned her face into Elion’s hard, muscled chest. She could hear his heart beating, quick, just like her own, as though the two were synchronized.
“What do we do until then?” Rosy asked.
“We wait,” he said, and then kissed the top of her head.
Do you love this man-alien?
an inner-voice said.
Do you really love him? Is that what’s happening right now, Rosy? Are you that far down the rabbit hole? Have you enjoyed the Kool-Aid? Has life become so desperate that you have to find solace in the arms of this alien? Is that how it is?
She ignored the chiding voice and focused instead on Elion’s heartbeat.
After a few minutes they went and sat on the bed, side by side, listening to the sound of the party outside. Elion had told Rosy that in his culture even the children partook of
g’luf
in small quantities. When Rosy asked what would happen if his father drank too much of the drug-laced
g’luf
, Elion shrugged and said: “He may never wake.”
Rosy lay with her head in his lap for what felt like five minutes, but when she opened her eyes the room was darker and Elion was standing over her. “Come on,” he whispered. “It’s time for us to go.”
Rosy picked up the gloves and goggles that let her read books and watch movies from Earth, and then followed Elion out of her bedroom. It felt odd being out of the bedroom in the middle of the night. Normally, she was only out of her bedroom in the daytime; in the nighttime she and Elion met inside. Now, she was walking the familiar gray walls in a darkness that made them look dark blue or pitch-black. Elion led her towards the entrance, past the huge guest hall.
Snoring bodies lay strewn across the floor. Raben, Elion’s father, lay with his head bowed in the corner of the room, snoring lightly. Rosy had to resist an urge to scream at him.
Who’s the degraded one now? Who’s the embarrassed and humiliated one now?
But of course that would have done nothing except ruin their plan. So she followed Elion to the front door, and walked out into the night.
*****
In the house they had walked barefoot. Now Elion took out two pairs of shoes and told Rosy to put on a pair. They were like running shoes, except without laces, and they seemed to mold to her feet the moment she put them on. She was glad. Bare feet weren’t exactly conductive to a quick getaway. Elion looked around the miles and miles of corn-like plants. It all looked the same to Rosy. She had tried to break her disorientation when outside the house before. She had tried to work out in which direction she would need to run to escape. But she was on a different planet and everything was the same to her.
Elion nodded towards a patch of corn and then began to jog. Rosy took a deep breath and then jogged beside him. They ran into the corn and then Elion told her to hold the back of his robe, lest they get separated. Rosy held onto the back of the robe like it was a life raft and the corn-like stuff was a tempestuous sea. The plants brushed her arms and legs, tickling and irritating. But the irritation was minor compared with the irritation Raben had been causing her on a daily basis.
She couldn’t help but love Elion as he led her through this wilderness. She trusted in him completely. Perhaps it was because she trusted him that she began to doubt him. Quietly, whispers sounded in the back of her mind.
What if he is leading you to someplace even worse? What if he is going to kill you? What if he is working with his father, and they are playing a trick on you?
These thoughts came between frantic breaths, and before she knew it, they were out of the corn-like plants and standing in a red-grass field that rose to a hill and the horizon.
Elion breathed heavily, leaning on his legs, and then stretching his back. Rosy panted, watched him as he tracked the horizon, and was sure he wasn’t betraying her. The certainty came as quick as the doubt had, but the certainty was solid, immovable. Love was immovable. Love was immutable and never changed. She knew it was a lie and yet she believed it.
“We need to head towards the hills,” Elion said. “We’ll be closer to the station that way. I am tempted to give us a rest, but we need to put as much distance between us and the house as possible before they wake up.” He put his hand on her shoulder, a hand that seemed infused with strength and stoicism. “Can you continue?”
She nodded. “Yes, I think so.”
“Okay,” he said. “Then let’s go.”
With one more greedy breath Rosy jogged beside Elion as they headed for the horizon.
***
They stopped as the sun was beginning to rise, bathing the world in harsh red light. Rosy was glad the ship that had dropped her here had implanted her with all those things: those things that buzzed when the alien sun shone down upon her; those things that made her legs feel heavy in the paper-light atmosphere.
A lone shack – built with what looked like interwoven vine but felt almost wood-like to touch – stood in the seemingly endless fields. Rosy and Elion entered the shack and sat against the wall. It was empty apart from one rickety chair, but neither of them was energetic enough to sit. They had to lie down.
They lay against the walls, their faces towards the door. Rosy kept imagining that Raben and his cronies would be after them, and would soon be smashing through the door. Elion had said that his father would definitely hire Enforcers (which were personal police, as far as Rosy could tell) to track them down and bring them back. “Losing your human slave and your firstborn child is a great dishonor,” Elion said, a wicked smile upon his lips. “Father will be ashamed to show his face, to even stay on the planet if he does not track us down. But he will not. We have a head start, he does not know our plan, and the Enforcers will take a day or so to get here.”
This somewhat comforted Rosy, as she lay in the hut and felt her eyes closing with the promise of unconsciousness. But at the back of her mind she could not help but wonder what Raben was doing right now. Was he awake? Was he calling the Enforcers? There was no way for her to know, and that made it all the more tortuous. There was nothing she could do but let the thoughts whir around and around her mind.
Only Elion’s warm presence beside her assuaged these head-missiles. She squeezed next to him and buried her face in his chest, deep, as though she could shut the world down by throwing herself into hard, warm muscle. They were from two separate species, and yet as Rosy hugged him close, she felt as though they were nothing more than man and woman, stranded, alone, desperate—but together. That was the most important part, and that was the part on which she focused as sleep took her.
She didn’t dream, and when she awoke the sun was still blaring. She knew she had only been asleep for a few hours because of the strong, almost overwhelming urge she felt to close her eyes once again.
Come back to me
, the feeling seemed to say.
Come back to me to the land of Nothing, where you can just dream dreams of nothing.
But Elion touched her face, bringing her fully into reality.
“Are you ready?” he said.
She rose to her feet and stretched her legs, bending them and bouncing up and down, working out the morning stiffness. “Okay,” she said, and walked from the hut. “Let’s go.”
Elion followed her from the hut and they jogged through the fields. At midday they stopped and ate some food and drank some water from the pack Elion had brought. The sun was at its peak and lit the world up as though they were inside a red marble.
Rosy had never seen anything so beautiful.
***
For the rest of that day they jogged through the red-grass fields, panting and stopping at intervals for short breaks. Rosy knew that she needed to keep going, had to keep plodding along, one step at a time, and so she relegated the thoughts pleaded with her to stop to the back of her mind. There was no way she was going to stop, no matter how much she sweated, no matter how hard her heart pounded, no matter how achingly her feet burned. If she stopped that meant Raben and his Enforcers may catch up with them; and then her humiliation, perhaps even her pain, would be boundless.
In one of the intervals, after they had crested a particularly steep hill, Elion sat beside her and put his hand on her leg. “You’re doing well,” he said.
Rosy mumbled her thanks and then a thought occurred to her. “Elion?” she said.
“Yes?”
“Won’t they just fly over us to find us? I mean, they have spaceships, don’t they?”
Elion grinned: a grin that said he hated and was glad of something at the same time. “My father will not let them use a vehicle of any kind. His pride of the Old Way, whatever he thinks that is, will not let him. He will force the Enforcers to follow us on foot, or on an animal.”
Rosy swallowed. “What if he changes his mind?”
Elion shrugged. “In that case, he will catch us. But it’s best not to think about that.”
Rosy couldn’t help but agree. Why think about something that, if it happened, would be dreadful, but may not even happen? She put her hand atop Elion’s and rested her head on his shoulder. “Tell me something,” she said.
“What do you want to know?”
“Tell me something about you. Who are you? What makes you
you
?”
“I do not think I understand,” he said. “Could you be more specific?”
“Tell me a story from your childhood,” Rosy said, a little endeared and a little exasperated.
“I grew up in the Old Way, on the farm you have seen. The Old Way—”
“No,” Rosy said. “Tell me something only about
you
. What did you do for fun when you were a boy? How did you escape Raben?”
“Oh,” Elion said, nodding. “I had an imaginary friend called—I’m not sure there’s a word for it in your language. The translator is stalling. His name meant
quick and strong one
. He was as tall as our farm and he had many guns and lots of rockets and when Father frightened me I would run to him and tell him about it and then he would say
I will deal with it
. But he never did. But I still liked him, even though he never did what he said he’d do. It was just nice having him to talk to. When I was very young, we used to fly together throughout the stars, but then my imagination became more restricted.”
Rosy smiled and kissed his shoulder, feeling affection flood her as she imagined little Elion flying with an imaginary friend. Then she looked down the hill and towards the horizon. There was a cluster of buildings, which from here looked like they had been left alone a long time ago. Bits of the buildings – the skyscraper-sized ones – were falling apart and the structure showed beneath like the ribcage on an emaciated body. Elion turned and faced the direction from which they’d run.
“We’ll hide in the city for a night,” he said. “The Enforcers will catch up with us in a day. We need to hide in the city, and then move on after they overtake us, so we will be running behind them. My hope is that they move past the city without searching it, and then we can keep going in relative safety.”