Authors: Emma Taylor
Rosy could see some problems with this plan, but she kept them to herself. This wasn’t her planet or her culture, after all, and Elion had gotten them this far. “When I was a girl,” Rosy said, the memory suddenly coming to her, “I used to just hold books. I would hold them without really knowing what they were. I remember, or I remember remembering, feeling the pages in my hand and knowing that they held power. I could tell by the way my parents would stare at them for hours on end, flipping through the pages, that they were different to the other objects in our house. I couldn’t wait to start reading. And then I began to go to the library, and whole worlds were open for me to explore. But,” she went on, wistfully, “there was no book that could prepare me for this: for such love, for such terror.”
“We will be away soon,” Elion said. “We will be safe.”
“Will you come back to Earth with me?” Rosy said eagerly.
Elion fidgeted, and then regarded her for a few moments. Her eyes were wide with hope. “Yes,” he mumbled.
Then he jumped to his feet and shouldered his bag. “It is time we began walking toward the city,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Rosy followed him down the hill, the abandoned city steadily growing bigger and bigger on the horizon. They walked hand in hand, and for brief moments Rosy could almost convince herself that she was walking beside a human man. And then she would look up at his eight-foot-tall body and his red-skinned flesh and his white, flaring hair. But she didn’t care, she wasn’t scared, and in fact she loved every part of him. That was the most confusing part to her. How could she love a member of a different species, albeit a humanoid one?
She had had
sex
with a member of a different species. There was no way for her to deny that. And when she thought about it,
really
thought about it, she realized that she didn’t
want
to deny it. It had been amazing sex: the best sex she’d ever had. Why should she question herself?
By the end of that day they were standing amidst the first ramshackle buildings of the abandoned city. Up close, Rosy saw how bad things really were. The buildings were made with the same heat-adapting gray material of Raben’s house, but huge chunks of these buildings had fallen away and now lay crumbling in the street.
“This was a thriving city before the Singularity,” Elion said, “when most people decided to live as machines and live forever. That is the life Father has rejected: the life of immortality and plenty. There are places like this all over the planet, abandoned and crumbling.”
The city was foreboding with its towering buildings, like a schoolteacher towering over you and staring down at you. A chill scampered up Rosy’s back, tickling her spine, and she shivered. A light breeze moved through the holes in the buildings, sometimes whistling.
Elion started forward. Rosy swallowed her concerns and followed.
*****
They moved through the city and Rosy felt like a ghost. She had expected cannibals, raiders, anything. She had read a lot, and had watched a lot of movies; according to them there was always some kind of maniac in these abandoned ruins. But all they had for a companion was the whistling wind.
They found a one-story building nestled into the corner on a crumbling street and climbed through a shattered window. When inside, they found a back room, blocked the door, and sat on the floor. Everything was surprisingly clean. There were no drugs or needles or condoms or beer cans or graffiti or any sign that kids had been here fooling around. This was just a place that had been left one day and never returned to. Plants grew up through the floorboards and through the walls: natural wallpaper.
“I have often dreamed about running from Father,” Elion said. “But before, I never saw the point. Why run? I had no one to run with. Now I have someone. It is hard for me to put this into words you will understand, Rosy, but I love you. More than that, I feel like your…” He trailed off. “If feel like your protector,” he went on, after a pause. “But not just that. I feel like you’re
my
protector, too. Do you understand?”
Rosy nodded. “I think so.”
“How can such emotion come so quickly?”
“That’s just how it is,” Rosy said. “God or whoever wanted us to love each other. That used to mean human-human love. I guess Whoever wanted everyone to love each other.”
“And you love me?”
“Yes,” Rosy said, without having to think.
“Shall we watch something?”
Rosy retrieved the goggles and they sat side by side, each staring down one lens, each only getting half of the picture; but together they got the whole picture, and that was alright.
Later, Rosy read to him from
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, and Elion listened in a reverie. Soon they were sleepy, and lay on the floor in each other’s arms, breathing together.
***
Rosy woke sometime in the night, with a pulsating urge inside of her. She didn’t know where this urge came from. For a moment she entertained the idea that Elion had cast some sort of alien-spell on her, but that was foolishness.
Oh,
that’s
foolish, is it? Whereas the rest of this is perfectly fine?
Rosy ignored the voice and then felt Elion’s body with her hands, moving her hands down, down, towards his cock. She wanted to make him come. She didn’t want anything in return. She just wanted to make him come, badly. Elion opened his eyes. “What’s going on?” he whispered.
“I’m going to suck your cock,” she replied. “And you’re going to come in my mouth.”
Elion didn’t say anything more. Rosy rubbed down his body and felt for his cock. It pressed against his robe. She put her hand under his robe and grabbed it, feeling the hardness, knowing that hardness was for
her
. She kissed his chest and his legs and then she was at his cock, in the dark, working it with her hands.
She pumped it for a while with both her hands: pumped it hard and fast. Then she grabbed the base and sucked the end, sucking harder and harder, and then forcing her head down so his cock hit the back of her throat. She choked and gagged on it, and
loved
it. Usually, she would hate this. But his moans of pleasure made it worth it.
She felt her vagina aching, her clit hot. She brushed her fingers over her clit as she sucked his cock, feeling a twinge
down there
each time Elion moaned. She rubbed her clit harder and harder as she sucked his cock. She felt his hand moving through her hair.
“I like it when you choke on it,” he said.
She pushed her head down, hard, and choked on his huge, rock-hard cock. She choked and choked, the darkness filling with her gagging noises. His hand pushed her further on his cock, and she kept it in her mouth, at the back of her mouth, until she couldn’t breathe. She pulled away and breathed heavily. Her clit was burning-hot now. She worked his cock and then rubbed, rubbed—
And her orgasm exploded inside of her. She stopped rubbing his cock for a moment and writhed and moaned, come squirting out of her. Then, when it had passed, she pushed her head down on his cock, holding his thighs for leverage, and began to mouth-fuck him. She pushed her head harder and harder, fucking him with her mouth, his moans getting louder and louder.
“Yes, Rosy,” he said, breathing heavily. “Yes, yes.”
She kept fucking his cock with her mouth, harder and harder, faster and faster, and then he was moaning loudly and grabbing her hair, pushing her down. His cock wilted inside of her and come spilled into her mouth, going down her throat. She swallowed as it shot into her, taking it all. She was surprised that it tasted different to human come. Human come tasted salty and icky; this tasted like a combination of pick-and-mix candy and milk. It was still a strange taste, but not so unpleasant.
After, she lay in his arms. “What did I do to deserve that?” he said.
“You just—are,” she said, knowing it sounded silly but unable to express what she felt in any other terms.
He just
was
, because he was there for her when no one else in the world, the solar system, the galaxy, perhaps even the universe was. He was the one who took an interest in her and he was the one who had arranged for her to escape Raben and his sadistic, degrading tasks. Even if they got caught, and she knew there was a fair chance they would be, this night would be worth it. Everything would be worth it to just lie here, knowing she had satisfied him and herself, and not have to think about morning until it came.
But too soon morning was upon them. They rose from the floor, aching and groggy, and walked into the street. They stayed near their building, poked their heads out to look around, and then walked around the front. As far as they could tell, they hadn’t been visited in the night. She looked to Elion to see if they would continue today or hide out for another night.
He returned to the house and gave her some food and water. “We will stay here one more night,” he said. “And then tomorrow we will continue. The Enforcers are in the city.”
“How do you know?”
He shrugged. “I do not,” he said. “But I have a strong feeling they are, and it makes logical sense. They will search the city tonight and then continue tomorrow. We will leave tomorrow evening, giving them a head-start, but we will take a less obvious route to the station.”
“A detour.”
“Yes,” Elion said. “It is the only way.”
“Okay,” Rosy said.
As they ate and drank, Rosy couldn’t help but think what would happen after they escaped this planet. Elion had said he would come to Earth with her, but would that really work? If she took him to Earth, he would become an experiment, or an exhibition. King Kong came to mind. Then she realized something. She, too, would become an experiment. A woman who has seen an alien planet and then returned? She would be worth millions. Governments would fight over her.
She swallowed, and then pushed those thoughts from her mind. She would live in her little Elion-bubble for now, and worry about the future when she came to it. She had enough problems with Raben and the Enforcers; she didn’t need to add her might-be-problems of the future to the mix.
First they had to get to the station.
*****
It turned out that Elion was right to be wary about the Enforcers. The day after she gave him the blowjob, they awoke in the shack to the echoing sounds of human-like voices. They were speaking Ka, so Rosy could not understand the garbled noises, but Elion translated for her. “They are talking about sport,” Elion said. “In the Lower Districts men capture animals and make them fight. There are two—no, three voices. There may be more, quieter ones.” To Rosy, all the gibberish sounded the same. But she knew that would add nothing to the conversation, and she was already terrified, so she kept quiet.
“They’re getting quieter,” Elion said. “They are angry because last night they lost on a
sure thing
.”
“What do we do?” Rosy whispered.
“We wait,” Elion said. “And we hide.”
“What will happen if they find us?”
“Either they will take us back to Raben and we will resume our lives as before, only now there will be constant surveillance because we tried to run.”
“Or?”
“Or they will kill us and claim that we resisted capture.”
Rosy wished she could shrink into the wall, just fall into it and become invisible. Both options were horrendous, but there was a third option, the option they would take: hide, hide, hide. She sat back against the wall and Elion lay beside her, his hand over her shoulder, his long arms reaching down to her breasts. “Are you scared?” Rosy asked; Elion’s voice had been steady and matter-of-fact since they’d started hearing the voices.
“Yes,” he said. “But not for myself.”
Rosy knew exactly how he felt. She was not so much scared for herself as scared for Elion. She
was
scared for herself, of course, but a large part of her fear came from what would happen to Elion when they returned. She was a slave, a human slave, a prized possession. Elion was just a son; firstborn, sure, but Raben had plenty of children. She rested her head on Elion’s shoulder and listened to the gibberish as it grew louder and then quieter, interpolated every so often with the sound of brick-like solids being crushed and discarded.
“They are searching the houses,” Elion said. “One of them is saying how pesky we are, going through the city. Tracking us here is damn-near impossible, he is saying. It was easier when they could follow our footprints through grass and plants. The others are bemoaning the fact that they do not have tracking beacons and infrared detection.” He smiled at Rosy, perhaps sensing her mounting fear and discomfort: her wish to teleport somewhere, anywhere. “They cannot be allowed advanced equipment like that,” he said. “They would lose their licenses. The only way I acquired the goggles was from the shipmaster, and that was because I paid him extra atop the money Father gave him.”
“Couldn’t they have done that?” Rosy said.
“Yes, but as I understand it, competition between the poor – and bounty hunters are invariably poor and desperate – is so fierce that strict laws are not only passed but enforced, to conform to the demands of the rich who live by the Old Way.”