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Laurel dropped the black packet onto Grav’s bed.

“What’s that?”

“Cleansing wipes. For personal hygiene.” The prepper had left a plastic tub of biodegradable wipes, which she had been using when she didn’t feel like hauling water from the creek.

Four days had passed since she’d dragged the albatross to the cave and a couple of days since her first hot shower in a year. She’d been washing up with a cleansing cloth and fantasizing about her next hot shower when it occurred to her that she’d failed to provide for her prisoner’s hygiene. She assumed the Progg cleaned themselves in some way.

“Don’t want him to start to stink. I have to live with him—at least for a little while longer,” she’d muttered.

Now, he opened the package and sniffed. “No scent!” He looked pleased.

“That’s good?”

“We have a sensitive sense of smell. The odors on Earth are overpowering.”

Maybe you shouldn’t have invaded, then. “The wipes are used by campers and hunters who don’t want perfumes. Put the dirty ones in the commode.” She averted her gaze from the gratitude in his arresting blue-blue eyes.

Most creatures have eyes. Predators have eyes. Does the gazelle think, ‘Gee, that lioness intending to have me for dinner sure has pretty eyes’?

But eyes as blue as his appeared innocent, and, when filled with gratitude or humor, made him seem deceptively harmless. She had to keep reminding herself who he was, what he’d done—what his people had done. He’d claimed to not have killed anyone, but did that matter? She had to blame somebody—why not him? He may not have done it himself, but he’d aided and abetted it.

“You can clean up while I get breakfast.” She stomped out of the chamber. A prisoner wasn’t entitled to privacy; however, the prospect of catching a glimpse of alien junk disgusted her.

Mostly.

She’d gone into nursing because she wished to help people in a meaningful, personal way. The schooling was affordable, the career portable, and employment prospects excellent, but if she’d indulged her curiosity and secret whim, she would have become a medical researcher.

So, she couldn’t help wondering how his plumbing differed from human. Thus far, the only differences she’d noted between him and her people were the two thumbs on each hand, hair like a porcupine, and silver skin that grayed when he was ill.

And the odd smile. It had taken her a while to realize what was “off” about it. He had no canines! Given the aliens’ predatory nature, she would have expected sharp, lethal fangs, but he had a mouthful of blunt teeth. Having learned he was a plant eater, the lack of canines suddenly made sense.

His teeth were meant for cutting and grinding plant material, in contrast to omnivore humans who had teeth for cutting, grinding, and slashing meat.

The murderous aliens who had decimated an entire race of beings were vegans who wouldn’t harm a hair on a hare’s head. Go figure.

“Check your assumptions at the door, girl.” She rifled through the tubs of packaged survival rations and the shelf of canned goods, trying to find something edible for him. Yesterday, she’d fed him oatmeal with freeze-dried strawberries. Unless she gave him the same today or more power bars, she had few options. Typical meatless breakfast foods still contained animal proteins from eggs, milk, or cheese.

“Well, duh. Why do I assume he has to have breakfast ?” There was no reason other than culture to reserve certain foods for a specific time of day. “Besides, he should be happy I feed him at all.” She emptied a survival packet of chili beans sans meat into a pan, added water, and set it on the two-burner alcohol stove.

While it heated, she whipped up some reconstituted eggs, added powdered cheese and dehydrated mushrooms for an omelet. She fixed a cup of instant coffee for herself and then loaded all the items on a tray and carried it in.

He’s getting room service now.

“Here.” She slapped down his bowl of chili, pissed that she’d become his personal maid, mad at herself for creating the problem, and angry at him for having cleaned up and looking almost attractive because of it. All traces of the dried blood were gone, leaving his skin even more luminescent. Or maybe what infuriated her was his stupid, appreciative, vegan smile.

How dare he be thankful! The asshole!

Without another word, she stomped to her side of the room. No longer hungry, she ate for the nourishment while glowering at him.

She analyzed her anger. Why did his gratitude piss her off? Would she prefer him to be ungrateful and rude? Unless she starved him, which she didn’t have the stomach to do, she had to feed him. It would be insult to injury if he acted like everything she offered was his due.

Gratitude humbles him. Humility made him likable and weakened her hatred.

Or maybe that’s the game plan—act sweet and nonthreatening, so I’ll trust him and release him.

Fat chance!

Releasing him would make her life easier—but only in the short run. Cutting him loose could spring back to bite her in the ass later. While she believed he wouldn’t hurt her if she let him go, she couldn’t risk the long-term, unpleasant repercussions. He could encounter another Progg and tell him where he’d been.

Presuming she found a solution to the Grav problem, then what? Could she stand spending the rest of her life alone in a cave? Did she dare move into her parents’ house? She’d have more physical comforts there, but could she bear living with the memories? Plus, the house could be seen from the road. The light and generator noise would be a beacon.

The interactions with Grav had exposed the depth of her loneliness. She’d gotten so desperate for company she was willing to converse with a Progg.

She couldn’t spend the rest of her life in solitary confinement. She had to reconnect with other people. Venturing out would mean taking risks, but it had to be done. She could start with Big Creek. The town had looked deserted, but people could be hiding in any of the buildings or living nearby and scurrying to town for supplies. Somebody had shot Grav. But would hooking up with others make her more vulnerable? A group provided a bigger target than a lone individual.

Since the invasion, she’d only been living day to day. Taking Grav prisoner had caused her to think about the future again.

“The food is good,” he said.

She didn’t answer.

“You’re angry.”

“You think?”

“I do think that, but I don’t know why.”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Not if you don’t tell me,” he said.

“Don’t be so reasonable!” she snapped.

“How would you like me to be?”

Unlikable. She needed to despise him. She would never forgive the Progg, but her hatred toward this one was dissipating.

“I’m mad because I’m stuck with you!” she snapped. Why did that sound petulant rather than righteous? She had a right to be angry—the Progg deserved every ounce of opprobrium.

“You could let me go,” he suggested.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Not gonna happen.” She paused. “Just out of curiosity, what would you do if I released you?”

“Try to find my people.”

That’s what she was afraid of. “And then you’d lead them here.”

“No. I only wish to go home.” He sounded defeated.

She cocked her head. “You can’t leave until the invasion is over, I take it.”

He didn’t answer but scraped out the last of his chili in the bowl.

He’s hiding something.

Well, duh. Of course, the enemy is hiding something.

Given his luxurious accommodations and service at the Laurel Cave Hilton, he had no incentive to volunteer any useful information unless she tortured it out of him—and that wasn’t an option. Having a conscience sucks sometimes.

She tried a different tactic. “Tell me about yourself, your life on your home world.”

He looked wary. “What do you want to know?”

“How old are you?” She started with something innocuous.

“Our planet takes longer to revolve around our star than yours does, but on my world, I’m thirty-three years old.”

“Do you have siblings? What do your parents do?”

“I have at least one sibling. A brother.”

At least? How could he not be sure of how many siblings he had?

“My parents both served in the military, but I don’t know if they still do,” he added.

“Why not?”

“I was a child the last time I saw them. I haven’t seen them in twenty-seven years.”

“You haven’t seen them in over a quarter century?”

“Children aren’t reared by their biological parents but the ministry.”

“Ministry, like a religious order?”

“No, the ministry is what we call our government. Children stay with their parents until age six when they are sent to ministry education centers.”

Indoctrination camps explained a lot. The Progg never had any chance to develop empathy. “And you never saw your parents? You didn’t go home? They didn’t come to see you?”

“There are annual visits. But my parents never came.”

She gaped, appalled. “Never?”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t the only one without visitors. My parents had fulfilled their duty. I was still at the MEC when my younger brother arrived.” His mouth twisted. “He was much tougher than I had been at his age.”

What did he mean by tougher? She sensed a deeper story there.

He continued. “Then I graduated at sixteen and entered the required military service, and I never saw him again either.”

“Sixteen? That’s hardly more than a child.” Of everything he said, that should shock her the least. In the United States, a person could join the military at seventeen with parental consent or eighteen without. Generally, however, enlisted recruits were in their early twenties.

“We are adults at sixteen. We’re required to serve for ten years,” he said.

“But you stayed.”

He nodded. “When my ten-year required enlistment ended, I didn’t know what else to do. Early on, I got lucky to be assigned as an assistant to Admiral Drek’s aide. When the aide left the military, I got promoted. To be an admiral’s aide is a favored and favorable position. I never had to fight, and being so close to the admiral, many perks came my way.”

“A cushy job.”

He winced. “If you choose to see it that way.”

“How do you see it?” she countered.

“I suppose you’re right.”

“With Admiral Drek dead, where does that leave you?”

“With an uncertain future.”

“Wouldn’t they reassign you?”

“Well, they can’t while I’m here.”

She recognized the evasiveness of the joke. “You said you’d gotten separated from your unit,” she reminded him. “Why haven’t you been reunited yet?” The story didn’t add up. She found it hard to believe a militarized society controlling every aspect of an individual’s life would lose track of an admiral’s aide because said admiral had passed away. While she had no military experience, she couldn’t fathom waging an annihilation campaign without excellent communication—especially since they had deployed ground troops. They had to be in communication to know everyone’s location to avoid vaporizing their own people, didn’t they?

“The situation got…a little chaotic after the admiral died.”

“One person’s death threw everything into chaos?” Didn’t he have a second-in-command who could step in?

Nobody should be that important or indispensable. Not even the very top person. The president of the United States had a veep waiting in the wings. And if the VP died with the prez, then the speaker of the House of Representatives stepped in. If he died, then president pro tempore of the Senate took over. If she was gone, then the president’s cabinet members in predetermined order assumed the position.

Of course, the constitutional line of succession had been rendered moot since all elected officials had perished, and few citizens remained to govern anyway.

Short of an apocalypse, there should be somebody who could pick up the reins. But far be it from her to tell him so. Rule of thumb: When the enemy fucks up—don’t stand in his way.

Let the aliens put themselves at risk. Sooner or later, somebody would take them down. Eventually, they’d encounter someone more powerful, maybe someone with a secret weapon.

“I said a little chaos—not that everything was in chaos,” he said.

“A little chaos is an oxymoron.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It means either the situation is chaotic or it’s not.”

“I don’t want to talk anymore.” He pressed his lips together.

Getting close to the truth, am I? “Fine.” She collected the dirty plates and left the chamber.

* * * *

Laurel marched away, leaving him to stew in painful memories and uncomfortable emotions. Grav hadn’t thought about the MEC in years. Once he’d adjusted to the homesickness, the strict regimen, and the harsh discipline, he’d done all right, but he never liked to revisit the past.

When his mother had deposited him at the ministry education center, he’d cried. The ignominious display of emotion had landed him in solitary confinement. He had no recollection of how long he’d been locked up, but it probably had been days. It had taken him a while to figure out that as long as he continued to sob, they wouldn’t let him out.

The first Annual Visit Day, he’d waited for his parents, certain they would come. They hadn’t. He’d almost broken down into tears but managed to keep it together. The next year, he waited again. Another no-show. That’s when he realized they were never going to come. Having fulfilled their duty to the ministry, they were finished with him.

He was eleven years old when his brother, who’d been a baby the last time he’d seen him, arrived at the MEC. He’d been prepared to ease Rok’s transition, guide him, protect him, but his brother hadn’t needed him. At six years old, Rok was already everything the MEC sought to develop and that Grav wasn’t—stoic, tough, emotionless.

He thanked Zok every day he’d been assigned to a support position rather than combat, where his weakness would have been exposed. He didn’t have a stomach for killing people, not even vastly different beings. He supposed it was easier from a spaceship, when all you had to do was lock onto a city and open fire. Poof! Mass annihilation. Clean and simple. You never had to see the people you’d killed. It would be like they’d never existed.

But to march house to house and kill the stragglers face-to-face would make him sick.

Grav had never fired his weapon in the line of duty. He’d practiced at the MEC range as required, but that was the last time he’d drawn his weapon.

Which made the prospect of repatriation terrifying. With Drek dead, he’d become a nobody and could be assigned to combat. If he faltered on the battlefield, he’d be executed by his own comrades. Weakness jeopardized the entire unit.

He was a disgrace—he needed no further confirmation than the sharp pangs of guilt he felt for not telling her the invasion had been aborted, and the major danger had passed. He shouldn’t feel any guilt for the omission. He owed his loyalty to the empire, not some human woman.

But it bothered him to withhold information that would ease her mind, allow her to regain some semblance of a normal life.

However, if she connected with others of her race and told them, the situation could be perilous for him and his fellow Progg. If the surviving humans regrouped, they could stage an ambush. A gun was no match for a vaporizer, but as long as the Progg didn’t see the shot coming, the humans would prevail.

Whoever had attacked him had taken his weapon and comm device. His assailant wouldn’t be able to use either—both were programmed to him—but it left Grav with no means to receive communiques from the GM.

Not that there had been any in the preceding months. But the crisis had to be settled by now, didn’t it? Without his device, his only hope of getting off Earth was to reconnect with another Progg.

As soon as she left again, he’d get to work on the chains.

Meanwhile, he’d enjoy her company. When she wasn’t probing painful emotional wounds, he looked forward to the time spent with her. Her appearance fascinated, her voice entranced—even when she was angry, which was quite often—and her scent beguiled. Earth was a cesspool of noxious odors, but Laurel wasn’t one of them. He felt inebriated by her scent.

Intensely curious, he wished to learn more about her parents, her siblings, her life before the invasion. The next time they spoke, he would steer the conversation in that direction. Besides, getting her to talk about herself would prevent her from probing into his life.

He realized he would recall his captivity with great fondness.