Authors: Emma Taylor
“Okay,” Elion said. “Let’s return to the village.”
“And then?”
“And then, tomorrow, we go to the stars.”
He grinned at her, and she couldn’t help but grin back. But she was sure there was something behind that grin, some hidden meaning only he knew. For a moment, her dream returned to her, but then it was lost in the abyss of subconscious.
They returned to the village by cover of darkness.
*****
They lay side by side in the building, within the village, looking up at the ceiling. Rosy could not help but feel nervous about tomorrow. Would they be able to sneak in without being detected? But that wasn’t the thing that worried her most. She trusted in Elion, he had brought them this far, and she was sure he would bring her all the way. No, she was worried about something far more difficult to define. It wasn’t her fears about their future on Earth; it was something different. There was something else in the back of her mind, pressing against her conscious but never quite touching it. It was vaguer than a feeling, less defined than a thought. It was more like a breath that moved through her every often. And the breath seemed to contain a whisper:
Temper your expectations, don’t get your hopes up, think, think,
think
!
And she did think, she thought long and hard, but nothing came to her. All she could summon was a hazy presentiment that something was
not quite right
. But then Elion was hugging her and she was brought from her thoughts by the hard touch of his body.
She knew she should be too scared to be thinking about sex, but almost against her will she felt her hands moving over his body. And then he breathed deeply in a way that said:
yes
. And she wanted it, too, wanted to be with him right now, right here, and she would forget her troubles for a time and be only in the sweet realms of pleasure.
“Fuck me,” she said.
She grabbed his cock, rock-hard and ready to fuck. She rubbed it over his robe. Then she went under his robe and rubbed his cock harder and harder. “Do you want to try a new position?” she said. “I want you to fuck me in my favorite position.”
“What’s that?” he breathed.
“Doggy style.”
He had never heard of doggy style, and so after his cock was nice and hard, she got to her knees, pulled her robe around to her torso, and bent over, baring her vagina. He hadn’t touched her and yet she was wet for him, wanted him badly to be inside of her. He put his hands on her ass cheeks, squeezing the flesh, and then pushed his cock inside of her. “Fuck,” he grunted, and then pushed even deeper.
She put her hand back and grabbed his thigh, feeling the muscles pulse as he pushed his cock deep inside of her, pounding her sweet spot, sending pulsations of pleasure throughout her body. She rocked back with his movements, bouncing her vagina up and down on his cock, hungry for the pleasure the
huge
cock brought. She bounced harder and harder, hungry, desperate for the cock.
He grabbed her wrists and pinned them behind her back as he fucked her. She couldn’t stop herself; she came hard, right then, feeling her vagina tighten around his cock. He moaned loudly and fucked her even harder. He kept fucking her, holding her wrists behind her back, pinning them there. She felt helpless in his hold and she loved it. He fucked her harder each second, pounding into her, the sounds of their moans filling the room.
“Come inside me,” she breathed. “Come inside me.”
She wanted his come in her badly: needed to know that he was
that
attracted to her, that this all had a basis in lust as well as love. He grabbed her ass cheeks even harder and pounded into her harder and deeper than she thought was possible. Pain intermingled with pleasure but it was a sweet, dirty kind of pain: the kind of pain that heightened instead of dampened the pleasure.
“I want to finger your asshole,” he said.
“Do it,” Rosy moaned. “Do it, do it.”
He slipped his middle digit into her asshole as he fucked her. She bit down, and pushed back on his finger. There was something about him having his finger there, not so much the physical sensation, but the fact that he was fingering her tight asshole. It made her hornier, and she closed her eyes—and she came again, biting down lest she scream into the night.
“You are so sexy,” Elion said. “Fuck, yes.”
He put his finger deeper into her asshole and fucked her hard over and over again. She fell forward, propping her shoulders against the floor. He held both her wrists in one, strong hand, fingering her with the other hand. She pushed back harder and faster, wanting his come more than ever now. “Come,” she urged. “Come for me.”
There was a pause where everything seemed to go quiet, and then he was moaning and clutching at her ass cheeks. “Yes, yes,” he moaned. “Fuck, yes.”
She closed her eyes tight-shut as he came, gushingly, inside of her, filling her to overflowing. She managed to have a mini-orgasm right at the end, too: a little ripple within her. She fell to the side and Elion fell beside her. “That was amazing,” she said, breathing heavily.
“Yes,” he said, and smiled at her. “It was.”
She knew that soon that strange feeling would return: that feeling that told her that something wasn’t right. But at this moment she was too tired and satisfied to think about anything like that. She just wanted to lie there and fall into nothingness. She closed her eyes and rested her head against his hard, rising and falling chest, listening to the rhythms of his heartbeat as though listening to a distant drumbeat.
Once, she woke in the night to Elion looking down at her. She would have been crept out if anyone else had stared at her in her sleep, but this felt comfortable, like they were too close to freak each other out.
“Is something wrong?” she murmured, already falling back to sleep.
“No,” he said. “Nothing at all. I just like watching you. Do you mind?”
“No.” Rosy yawned and closed her eyes. “Go ahead.”
*****
The next morning they woke, ate breakfast, and then walked around the village for a couple of hours. There was no use in going to the station in the morning when both guards would be there, patrolling. They explored the buildings, which were all uniform, almost identical. But Elion explained to her that this room had been a bedroom, and that room a kitchen, and so on. They were all gray and nondescript in the extreme. Rosy felt as though she were inside a simulation that couldn’t render complex patterns, and then pushed the thought from her mind. If she were inside a simulation, none of this was real. That was fine for Raben and the house in which she had been imprisoned. But that would also mean that Elion wasn’t real, and she couldn’t take that. That was too much.
After they had explored the village, a few hours had passed and they needed to go to the station. They collected their things from the tavern-like building and headed over the hill. “You’re quiet,” Rosy remarked. Elion had hardly said anything since they’d collected their belongings.
Elion shrugged.
Rosy was worried by his silence but didn’t say anything more about the matter. As far as she was concerned, he was simply concentrating on the task ahead. What they were about to do, after all, was akin to stealing an airplane back on Earth: not something the thief would be particularly chatty about beforehand.
Soon they had crested the hill and the station was in view. They sat in their normal positions and watched as the second guard walked away from the station on his way to whatever home existed for him in this seemingly unpopulated place. Elion nodded and rose to his feet. “Okay,” he said. “It is time.”
He said nothing more as he descended the hill. Rosy followed, anxious about his obvious discomfort. Was he having second thoughts? She remembered how it had been in high school when a boy had asked her to the dance and then changed his mind. She had only found out he had changed his mind
after
the dance, and so the whole night had been awkward. In the end she had wished he’d just been upfront about it. Was Elion experiencing the same thing? Was he having second thoughts?
She knew it would be too late soon. She voiced her concern.
He looked at her like she’d just asked if she could punch a baby. “What?” he said, tilting his head. “No, not at all. What would make you think that? I am as sure about this as I’ve been about anything in my life. I have no second thoughts at all. I just…” They were getting closer to the edge of the station now, to the easily-jumpable wall. He lowered his voice. “There is something I have held off telling you.”
They stopped at the wall, leaning their backs against it. Elion stood on his tiptoes, bringing his height to around nine feet, and peeked over the wall. “The guard is in his shack,” he whispered.
“What do you need to tell me?” Rosy said.
A million things whirred through her mind. She saw him telling her that this was all a trick: that Raben was waiting on the other side of the wall. She saw him laughing: saw the whole family laughing. This had all been a trick to show her how imprisoned she really was. There was no escaping for her, ever. She would live on the farm and be a slave to the family until she found a way to end it all. She would be a slave for the rest of her—
Elion put his hands on her shoulder. “How much do you know about time dilation?” he said.
And then it hit her. The dream returned to her. And its meaning seemed to smack her in the chest. “A little,” she said, breathing heavily. “But it hadn’t occurred to me until now.”
His white, flaring eyebrows furrowed. “Then you will know,” Elion said, “that many years have passed since you left Earth. Your journey here took four years, and that was close to the speed of light with the aid of a wormhole. There is a wormhole near your solar system that has scientists going crazy, but the general populace isn’t too bothered. Over one-thousand years have passed since you left Earth, which means—”
“Everyone I know, my life—none of it exists anymore.”
Elion nodded shortly. “The only reason I’m even alive is because Father had us all frozen until your arrival. The cities you saw, the crumbling ones… Many of them were not so desolate before our long sleep.” He shrugged. “I’m sorry, Rosy. I don’t know what to say. I didn’t want to tell you before we were in the ship, in case—”
“In case I panicked and did something silly,” Rosy said, feeling more and more like she was floating above herself, watching the conversation unfold.
“Exactly,” he said. “Now we are here. Do you want to go on?”
Within, Rosy was collapsing, crying, kicking and screaming like a toddler. Within, her vision was blurring and everything was becoming shaky and disjointed. She couldn’t see anything; everything was make-believe. But on the exterior, she was calm, almost cold. “Yes,” she said. “Let’s go.”
He looked at her oddly, seemed about to talk, and then nodded and peeked over the wall. “Let’s do it,” he said.
He vaulted her over the wall. She landed on the other side with a soft
thump
, still feeling as though everything was in a dream-world: none of this was real. Then Elion dropped down next to her and nudged her in the arm. “Let’s go,” he said.
The ships were a few meters from the wall. They crouched over to them, and then Elion retrieved a small ID-like card from his pocket. He found a small two-seater personal ship and swiped the card. He bit his lip, and then the ship beeped twice. “Yes,” Elion said. “Father didn’t even think to block his ship’s access.”
The doors slid open and they climbed inside. Rosy sat back in the seat as Elion interlocked the straps around her, and then he was touching dials, fiddling with knobs, and the display was lighting up. There were no windows, but displays showed the exterior of the ship.
A guard was running right at them.
*****
But the guard didn’t stand a chance as the ship flew from the ground and ascended toward the sky. Rosy watched in the display as he waved his arms up and down, as though hailing them, and then reached to his ear and began speaking frantically. “We’ll be long gone before anything happens,” Elion said, touching a few buttons. The vibration was minimal: offset, Elion told her, by the ship’s software.
Everything was coming back to reality now for Rosy. She saw Elion beside her and felt the ship and everything seemed to be closing in on her, making it real, corporeal,
solid
. She touched the control panel, being careful to avoid the buttons, just to convince herself this was actually happening. “Now what?” she asked.
“Now we go somewhere we can’t be found by my father,” Elion said.
“Where’s that?”
Elion touched a few buttons and then a three-dimensional holographic map of the galaxy expanded before her, covering the front of the ship. Green indicators buzzed above some of the stars and planets; red and yellow above others. Elion explained that the green indicators were locations which could be travelled to automatically; the yellow could be travelled to with a mixture of automatic flight and piloting; and the red could only be travelled to with a pilot.
“There is a Supercharge station on the outskirts of the planet,” he said, as they slowed down after breaking the atmosphere. “Look.” He pointed to a screen and Rosy saw a huge, long ship with a mass of energy buzzing in the middle. “That will send us to any of the green locations.”