Page 20 of Marked

“Good. That would be best,” the middle one replied.

He may have attitude, but he wasn’t the worst of the three.

Clearly. He swiped his badge in front of my cage, and it clicked open.

He stepped back and beckoned for me to come out, which I did begrudgingly.

He cocked his single eyebrow at me with even more attitude, and I decided that was what I was going to name him.

Attitude. I’d call the one with the needle Needle. Simple.

“I still think we should muzzle her. Humans are known to bite,” the third one said, but Attitude shook his head.

“You’re going to come with me, human female, and you aren’t going to make a fuss, are you?” Attitude asked me expectantly.

“I’ll come without a fight,” I said, watching the other two warily.

Needle took a step toward me, and I moved closer to Attitude instead. He seemed to be the only one not wanting to cause me a great deal of pain, so I was going to stick with him. I mean, beggars can’t be choosers, right?

“Good. Give me your wrists,” he instructed.

Without any other options, I did what he wanted.

He took my hands in his, and I noticed that he only had four fingers.

He took a button from his pocket and when he pressed it against my forearm, it popped open and a thick band of silver metal wound around both wrists.

Then a long lead appeared from the center of it, and he took it in his hand.

I’d been cuffed and leashed. Like a dog. Perfect.

He jerked the flexible metal lead, and I lurched forward.

I got the message really quickly and began to follow him.

The three Ghengrills led me out of the storage container and into a starkly different world.

The door to the cargo hold slid shut behind me, and I blinked as I took in the pristine white of the hallway we’d entered.

A smooth white stone floor of some kind stretched the entire length of the hall.

Big windows lined one side and bright sunlight shone through them.

Outside was a landscape like I’d never seen before.

“Welcome to Ghengra. I’m taking you off the ship and into my lab now,” Attitude said, and I was at least a little grateful for the explanation.

Needle huffed with annoyance and the one I hadn’t thought of a name for yet rolled his three bulging eyes, which was quite possibly the oddest thing I’d ever seen.

So. I’d traveled to another planet.

Fucking fantastic.

I had the worst goddamn luck.

The sky was orange. Not the soft, golden hue of a sunset, but a deep, unnatural orange—the vivid, overripe shade of a fruit left too long in the sun.

It stretched endlessly above me, thick with the strange, swirling haze of clouds that weren’t white, but shades of deep crimson and violet, as though bruised by the weight of the atmosphere.

They hung in concentric rings, layered and dense, giving the sky an almost surreal, painted quality.

And then there were the suns. Two of them.

One burned a bright, almost blinding yellow—familiar, yet somehow wrong, its light sharper and harsher than Earth’s.

The other was blue, a cold, eerie sphere that seemed to sap the warmth from the first, casting strange, shifting shadows across the landscape.

Together, they filled the sky with an unsettling contrast of warmth and chill, their combined light painting the world in unnatural hues.

The land beneath them was even more desolate. A vast, empty expanse of white, stretching as far as I could see—more dust than sand, shifting in whispering waves with every breath of wind. No trees. No rivers. No signs of life. Just an unbroken, barren desert, untouched and endless.

Pretty bleak-looking, if you asked me. Like a place the universe had long since forgotten.

It looked like there was a compound of some kind at the edges of my view.

The structures were low and angular, their surfaces gleaming faintly beneath the eerie glow of the twin suns.

The material looked like neither metal nor stone, but something else entirely: smooth, almost organic, like the exoskeleton of some massive, long-dead creature.

Tall, spire-like towers jutted from the main structure, pulsing faintly with dim, shifting lights, as if the entire facility was alive, breathing even.

A perimeter wall, dark and imposing, encircled the compound, broken only by a single wide entrance flanked by strange, spindly constructs that might have been weapons—or sentries.

Beyond it, the desert stretched on, featureless and empty, the wind whispering over the sand like a distant warning. Whatever was inside that compound, it was the only thing breaking the monotony of this barren world.

And something told me it wasn’t friendly.

I didn’t have time to study it for very long, though, because Attitude jerked me forward again. Apparently, he’d grown impatient with my gawking.

“Is this your ship?” I asked, all while glaring back at Attitude with a look that could kill.

“Yes. You were brought to Ghengra, and we’ve come to retrieve you.

We’ve been expecting your delivery for some time now,” Attitude explained.

At least he was helping me understand what was happening.

I had to give him credit for that, even though my wrists were starting to ache from his jerking of the cuffs.

“How long has it been since your kind took me?” I asked, furrowing my brow.

“I think in your Earth time, it’s been something like three months. At least I think that’s what it is. You use some eccentric system to count the time. What was it? Seconds. Days. Hours. Months. It’s been a while since I studied planetary time scales across space,” Attitude replied.

The one I hadn’t named yet mumbled something about my lack of intelligence, and I finally decided to just start calling him Bastard. It seemed to fit the judgmental twat.

Attitude, Needle, and Bastard. Quite the security detail if you asked me.

With them leading me wherever they were taking me, things were not looking good. How the hell was I going to figure out how to escape the Ghengrills, steal a spaceship, and somehow navigate it back to Earth? Yeah. Fat chance.

I’d never been fucked so hard in my life, and that was saying something. Especially after Alaric. My core started to ache again, and I bit my lip in order to keep myself quiet.

Alaric.

Where was he? Had he made it out that night?

Had he survived? Had he fought his way free, or had he been overwhelmed, his body broken in that studio apartment above The Salty Dog?

The thought made my stomach clench, but I shoved it away.

Wishing wouldn’t change reality. For all I knew, he was dead, and if he was, that meant no one was coming for me.

No last-minute rescues. No miracles. If I wanted to get out of this alive, I couldn’t waste time on hope. Hope was a fool’s luxury.

Even if he was alive, how would he be able to save me now that I was on a different freaking planet?

And why should I believe he’d come for me?

He hadn’t promised me anything. No vows, no commitments.

He was a force of nature, a predator that took what he wanted and moved on.

I wasn’t the kind of woman who waited around, praying for someone to save her.

I never had been. I'd survived too much, fought too hard, to start relying on a man now.

I had learned long ago that the only person I could trust was me .

I squared my shoulders, setting my jaw. I wasn’t some helpless thing waiting to be rescued.

I wasn’t fragile. I wasn’t weak. I hadn’t gotten myself into this mess, but I would damn well get myself out.

Maybe I didn’t know how to fly a ship. Maybe I didn’t even understand half the shit happening around me on this godforsaken alien planet.

But I would learn. I’d figure out how to fight, how to navigate, how to survive.

That’s what I did. That’s what I always did.

I wasn’t going to waste another second wondering about him.

Whether he was dead or alive didn’t change what I had to do.

I had to push forward. I had to be smart, ruthless if necessary.

I had to make a plan, and when the opportunity came, take it.

No hesitation. No fear. No waiting. Because if I wanted to live, I wasn’t going to count on a man to save me. I was going to save myself.

Yeah, that all sounded great in my head, but Attitude jerked my leash again, which broke my train of thought. I obediently started walking while screaming obscenities in my head at the three dickheads currently in charge of me.

I followed the three Ghengrills through a series of white hallways because I didn’t really have any other choice.

The more I walked through their ship, the more I realized that Ghengrills had an extreme fascination with an utter lack of color.

I wondered if they were allergic to it, or if they were just obsessed with not having any of it.

God damned weirdos loved the color white like it was going out of style.

We passed a number of other Ghengrills on the way.

Some were dressed similarly to the scientists that had come to retrieve me, and others were dressed like the ones that had come to kidnap me from Earth, like soldiers.

I was a captive in tow, though, as Attitude dragged me along.

He jerked me several times, and I found myself staring at the back of his head, wishing I had my knife so I could shove it in the back of his papery white skull.

Did they even have skulls or were they just made of cartilage?

Finally, the entrance hatch to the ship slid open, and I was taken onto another smaller flying vessel.

There were windows, but they were covered with thick curtains.

I couldn’t even look out onto the new planet I’d been forced to inhabit.

I told myself it was just temporary, but things were looking pretty fucking bleak for me right now.

The little ship sped off and when it finally landed some time later, the door opened to reveal a silver building. It was spherical in shape and the windows were reflective, meaning I couldn’t see inside.

Attitude jerked me forward again, and I dutifully followed. I scowled at myself, ever the meek, obedient little human. I should be fighting back. I should be doing something. But what? What the fuck could I do?

I was on an alien planet, surrounded by creatures that saw me as nothing more than a commodity.

A prisoner. Maybe even a meal if they were feeling particularly barbaric.

I had no weapons, no allies, no idea where I even was .

The air smelled different here, thick and humid, clinging to my skin like a layer of filth.

Everything here screamed not Earth , and I had no idea how to navigate any of it.

Even if I broke free, where the hell would I run?

The landscape beyond the towering structures of this alien city was endless and barren, stretching out into nothingness like a vast desert of white sand.

I’d seen no signs of ships, no vehicles I could steal, no escape route that didn’t lead straight into the jaws of something worse .

There were no authorities to turn to, no benevolent government or police force that would step in to save me.

As far as I could tell, this planet operated on one simple rule: The strong take what they want, and the weak get swallowed whole.

And I was weak here.

For the first time in my life, I was truly powerless.

No knife hidden in my boot. No familiar streets to disappear into.

No way to turn the tables, because the tables weren’t even in the same fucking dimension anymore.

My captors were taller, stronger, faster.

They knew this world. I didn’t. If I tried to run, I wouldn’t make it two steps before they ripped me back.

If I tried to fight, they’d beat me down without breaking a sweat.

If I tried to hide, I’d starve or get dragged out by something worse than them.

There was no escape. No help coming. No reason to hope.

And that was the worst part of all.

Hope was a fragile thing, and right now, I felt it slipping through my fingers like droplets of water.

They led me inside into more pristine white hallways. I stopped paying attention because they all looked the same, until we stopped in front of a large white door.

I suddenly got a very bad feeling that whatever was about to happen to me was going to happen in there.

I wondered if I was about to die.