Her tone is lightly sarcastic, but she’s not wrong.
“What do you think, Ellie?” Nevada asks.
I hesitate. There are more of us than there are of them, unless they had a bunch of aliens staying put on the ship while their friends bought us. But this is a pretty small ship. The problem? They’re armed.
I chew my lip and shrug. “The weapons are an issue.”
Another woman snorts. “That’s putting it lightly.”
Of all of us, this woman is the one who stands out. She was wearing red lingerie when she was taken, and she has the body of a Victoria’s Secret model. She stood on that stage as if she was bored, rolling her eyes while she was auctioned.
Lingerie’s face was pale, and her hands shook, but you have to admire someone who can bullshit their way through life with that kind of confidence.
Another woman shifts, raising her hand, and blushes at Lingerie’s snort. Tinker Bell sends Lingerie a look and nods at the hand raiser.
She shivers in her thin T-shirt, and I finger my flannel. I’ve never been happier to sleep in completely unsexy flannel pajamas. While I’m cold, I’m not shivering as much as some of the other women.
“Do any of you have any kind of training?” Hand-Raiser asks. “Do you think we could take them down?”
Nevada nods. “I’m a marine. I’m willing to give it a try.”
I raise my eyebrows. That explains the muscles and the attitude. For the first time, I feel a spark of hope.
“Anyone else?” I ask.
“I’m a firefighter with a black belt in karate,” one of the women says, and Nevada smiles.
“Excellent.” Nevada glances at the rest of us, and we all shake our heads. There are eight of us, and only two have any experience with combat.
I sigh. For a split second, I got my hopes up. My talents lie elsewhere. I can comfort a crying six-year-old or convince a child that putting their pencil up their nose isn’t a good idea, but I’m not tough or strong. And the thought of taking on one of those aliens…
But what other choice do we have? Wherever they’re taking us next is guaranteed to be even worse than where we are now. The kind of people who buy other people aren’t likely to treat us well. We could end up anywhere, and I bet the Arcav don’t even know we’ve been taken yet.
“Okay,” Tinker Bell says. “Let’s see how many of them they send in here at once. If it’s just one, maybe we can all attack if they open the cage door.”
We all nod, and determination hits me. We’re not going down without a fight.
The ship shudders, and I grab onto the bars of our cage as it jolts and lurches.
“What the fuck’s happening now?” Hand-Raiser shrieks.
The shuddering suddenly stops, and we’re all panting and pale as we look at each other, wide-eyed.
What’s worse than being abducted and trapped on an alien spaceship? Being abducted and trapped on an alien spaceship that looks like it’s seen better days. If this ship falls apart, we’re instantly dead.
“What did I do to end up here? What could I have done differently?”
Nevada sends me a sympathetic look, and I realize I’m mumbling aloud.
“Sometimes,” she says, “we do everything right, and life just plain sucks anyway.”
We try to get a few hours’ sleep, shivering and huddling together. There’s not much else to say. All of us are freezing and starving, and our alien captors don’t seem too concerned about giving us food or water.
Maybe that means that we’ll soon be wherever they’re taking us.
That’s not necessarily a good thing. But I’m so thirsty that when I manage to briefly fall asleep, I dream of streams and ponds, rivers and oceans. I almost cry when I wake up with a dry mouth and chapped lips. We’re all so dehydrated that none of us have needed to use the bucket in the corner of our cage yet.
A shriek leaves my throat as the ship shudders again. This time, it’s jolting from side to side violently, and I see stars as my head cracks against the bars of our cage. The woman who was kicked in the ribs screams in pain as she flies across the cage, hitting the wall.
An alarm begins to wail, a red light flashing as we all cover our ears at the piercing sound. I wish there was a window in here so I could see outside. Then again, if we’re all about to die, maybe it’s better not to know.
We’re left completely alone. None of the purple aliens come to check on us, but I can hear footsteps thumping above us. We cling together, a group of women who were strangers yesterday but may die together today.
The shrieking gets louder, and I huddle lower, pressing my hands harder against my ears as screams sound over the alarm.
And then everything goes black.
Chapter Two
Ellie
I cough, my mouth a desert as I suck in air, coughing on smoke. I’m trapped under something warm.
Someone warm. I crack my eyes open and manage to roll the firefighter off me, relief hitting me at her groan. At least one other woman is alive.
I sit up, hissing as I put pressure on my elbow. It’s either sprained or broken, and I cradle it as I take in our cage.
Tinker Bell’s lying against the back wall, not moving, her head covered in blood. Nevada is crouched over her, holding a piece of what used to be a T-shirt to her head.
I lean over and shake the firefighter, who opens her eyes, groaning again as she does so.
“Everyone alive?” Nevada asks.
A woman who introduced herself as Beth hisses as she sits up, clutching her side, and the firefighter groans again.
“Fuck,” she says. “This is the girls’ trip from hell.”
I snort at that, and suddenly we’re all laughing, most of us hysterically. She’s not wrong. I wipe away tears of laughter as Tinker Bell finally sits up, and we all stare at each other in shock.
Our situation has gone from bad to worse.
I hear no movement above us, but our cage door is still locked. Unless we can get it open, we’re destined to starve to death in here.
It’s a bad way to go.
We all freeze as something moves above us, and then we’re once again huddled together like frightened sheep. We’re all silent as we eye the stairs, listening as someone walks down them.
It’s a species of alien I’ve never seen before. And he looks as surprised to see us as we are to see him.
He’s about Lingerie’s height, with pale yellow skin similar to my grandmother’s when she had jaundice. He smiles at us, and I shudder at his teeth. They remind me of my roommate’s cat’s, perfectly ready to puncture the skin of his prey.
He calls up the stairs, and more of his friends appear, all wearing thin loincloths and not much else. His friends are all as shocked as him, but they instantly smile at us as he moves forward.
“My name is Karok,” he says. “We will find the key to your cage and take you back to our tribe for food and medical care.”
We all blow out sighs of relief, and he grins at us as he gestures at one of the other aliens, who nods and clomps his way back upstairs.
“How did you get here?”
Beth sniffs. “We were stolen from our beds and sold on a strange planet. Where are we now?”
Karok’s mouth drops open, his eyes wide. I guess you don’t hear stories like that every day.