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Chapter Nineteen

MAYA

“T hese red plants are markers,” Volan points to a red-colored plant growing on a wall. Sure enough, beneath the tiny succulent-like leaves, there are marks etched into the rock wall. At first, I thought it was just part of the rock itself, but now that I inspect them it’s clear that tools have been used. Of course, I don’t recognize the writing at all.

“Any time you see the plant, it means there is something of interest here; a room that grows food, or a bathing pool, that sort of thing. If you travel for a while without seeing any, backtrack. It means you are no longer in the patrolled areas.”

Oh. We must be near his home. He did mention that it was near my destination. A strong desire to see where this male grew up, to meet his friends and family, suddenly hits me. I push it aside. It’s not like we’re a couple. We just had some good sex, and he’s just helping me out. That’s all. Still, for a moment, I squeeze his hand just a bit tighter. I came to this planet wanting a fresh start, and despite my relationship with James, I never truly lost that naive, childish goal. I want a home. I want to feel like I belong, and more importantly, I want that person who will return my love and loyalty—someone who puts me first.

“Let’s go inside and feed you. You do need your strength, after all,” Volan says, wiggling his eyebrows at me. Despite myself, despite the somber quest that I am on, I laugh. Being around him makes me... happy. And that’s dangerous because happiness leads to mistaken emotions, such as love. I can’t fall in love with the alien. As much as I want to, a little voice inside whispers.

We emerge into a large cavern, dotted with plenty of bioluminescent plants that bathe the entire area in a soft blue glow. A channel of water has been carved in a near-perfect line from one rock wall to another—though I have no idea how they managed to figure out that sort of plumbing down here, especially given that I haven’t exactly seen evidence of any advanced mining equipment around.

Unlike the other caverns we’ve passed, the ceiling is low. From almost every inch of the ceiling, vines dangle down in clusters.

I step further into the room, my curiosity driving me forward. I’m safe here. I know, almost without a doubt, that Volan won’t let anything happen to me.

I trust him, implicitly.

I shake away the thoughts, the implications, as I stare at the gourd-like fruit that hangs heavily, weighing down the fleshy vines.

I shudder, my mind immediately associating these vines with bug eggs.

“This is sobra fruit,” Volan explains, stepping past me to pluck a few of the potato-sized balls from their stems. He presents them to me, and it takes all my considerable willpower not to recoil as he thrusts them at my face.

Their fruit’s skin is green, and not in a pleasant way. Eggs. If these are alien insect eggs.

“Oh, please tell me the scampers didn’t make these,” I beg him. My stomach fights between hunger and nausea, and I’m not entirely sure which one will win. I’m pretty sure I want to draw the line at eating bug eggs though. Chickens and birds are fine, but bugs? Yuck.

“It’s fruit. It grows from the plant,” Volan says slowly, as if I’m a child that needs the basic concepts taught to them. I glare at him when I notice the teasing glint in his eye and the tiny curve of his lips.

“It thrives in these caves. The flesh of the fruit is quite nutritious.”

He deftly slices open one of the fruits, revealing yellow flesh. It has a strange cross-like section of flesh, interspersed with what looks like seeds deep inside. And the flesh is slick, slimy even.

“Eat the flesh. The skin is quite bitter,” he instructs. He pops one in his mouth, not at all disturbed. Then he has the freaking audacity to moan!

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” I say, turning up my lip as I stare down at the object he’s placed in the palm of my hand. It’s cool to the touch, and really, really doesn’t look appetizing in the least.

In the end, hunger wins out. I need to keep up my strength, I rationalize, as I force myself to take a bite out of the potential alien insect bug fruit.

My eyes widen as the fruit hits my tongue. It’s not gross. It’s actually delicious. A bit like a lychee in texture, the flesh sweet rather than whatever I had been imagining. The seeds inside pop, delicious juice exploding, just like eating a pomegranate. The ugliest fruit in the universe somehow tastes amazing.

“Dispose of the skins there,” Volan points to a hole dug into the rock floor near the corner of the room. “One of the farmers routinely comes and disposes of it properly.”

As we sit down to eat our fill of the fruit, me devouring them as fast as I can peel them, I glance around the room. The area looks primitive—all carved rock walls, not even tiles. Yet, clearly they’ve used advanced machinery to carve out the plumbing. Volan’s people even know about diseases and bacteria, and the way he talks is of someone far more intelligent than I admit I’ve been giving him credit for. He’s not some barbarian alien simply running around swinging a sword every opportunity he gets.

My breath gushes out of me when I meet his gaze. He picks at his food, savoring each bite, while I rush mine. He’s slow, methodical and carefree. I’m all rushed, desperate, and twisted out of shape.

“You do not need to tell me, if you do not wish to,” Volan states, voice soft. It doesn’t hold any of his usual taunting, or even his warm humor. The male sitting before me is calm, and appears entirely ready to listen to whatever tale I am about to unfold.

Am I seriously going to tell him? I haven’t spoken to anyone about this, not even my friends. All this time, they’ve thought me some brilliant scientist, some genius capable of coding high-end programs and inventing miraculous things. Little do they realize that I’m a complete and utter fraud.

I open my mouth, and then close it again.

“I have no idea where to start,” I whisper. The enormity of my history spans out before me. Chapters of events, years of my life, all tangled up with different people and different circumstances. Everything that’s led me to this moment.

“You said your device was not a gift,” Volan prompts.

It’s a good enough place to start, I realize. I don’t have time to share every memory with him, even if I want to tell him my life story, and hear his in return.

“The thing is, my mum knew she was dying,” I tell him, my voice coming out stronger than I expected. “We tried to save her for years, but her disease… there was no cure. All we could do in the end was make her comfortable.”

It’s the way Volan reaches out, grasping my hand, that makes my eyes prickle. He’s paying attention to me, really listening. I don’t feel judged right now. I feel... safe. Safe enough to finally tell my story.

“All her treatments cost a lot of money,” I explain. “At first, we could afford it. My mother came from a prominent family and was the sole heir to a large fortune. No one even questioned the idea of spending money on her treatments. But over time, she didn’t get better, and the costs started to pile up.”

I sniff, thinking back to all the ways we had started to cut costs elsewhere. It was little things at first, like when my worn school dresses had been altered to fit me, just to squeeze another year out of their value, rather than buy new ones.

“I said my tablet wasn’t a gift, because, well, it wasn’t,” I tell Volan. “When I couldn’t afford to buy the textbooks, my mother encouraged me to get the digital versions. Even if it meant contacting the original author to beg for the files or rent them from the school’s library. She insisted, so much, that I continue my studies. At first I thought she just wanted me to have a normal life after she… When she got really sick though, she told me it was because she wanted me to have the life she never got. To be able to decide what I wanted to do, not to blindly follow other people’s demands.”

The tablet she gave me wasn’t a gift, it was a fail-safe; a way for me to take control of my destiny, the means to establish myself as a working-class individual if the need arose.

She never admitted it, but I strongly suspected that my mother and father had an arranged marriage. If not by the textbook definition, then at least one that was strongly encouraged. She was from a wealthy family, an only child, and he was from an up-and-coming merchant family, making waves among the socialites. Their marriage made sense; with his business experience, he took over my grandfather’s business, and my mother was well-cared for. A merger of two high-ranked families rather than an all-out stock war.

“When my mother finally passed… everything sort of crumbled around me. We could barely afford her funeral. We’d lost nearly everything, and if I’m honest, I didn’t care. Still don’t. If it gave me the chance to be with her, even for a few more days, I’d have given away every dollar without a second thought. But my father… I think over the years he’d kind of gotten over it all. Maybe he’d grieved before she died, knowing what was coming. Maybe he was just trying to salvage what he could after…”

Volan’s hand squeezes mine, and I grip his in return like a lifeline as my fingers tremble. I’m doing my best to breathe normally, but each word feels like it’s being ripped from my soul in a breathless rush. So many memories, so many emotions, and they are all so vivid! Did I repress all of them?

“If we were to keep our tier in society, we needed cash and fast. My father thought it prudent to arrange my future in my stead. Maybe he was looking out for me, but it felt like a means to an end. He took away my choice entirely.”

“What do you mean?” Volan asks. For the first time I’ve started talking, he looks angry. Not at me, but for me.

I blurt out the words, unable to stop them or the flood of anger and misery from escaping. “One day I discovered that he signed me up to the Mating Program. He didn’t ask if I wanted to get married! No, he just went ahead and picked out my alien husband! All that was left was to sign the documents to make it official. He never asked my opinion. He just didn’t care what I wanted.”

Tears burn my eyes. The desire to just curl up and cry nearly overwhelming.

“When I found out what he had planned, I confronted him. There were things I wanted to do in life. I hadn’t spent years in college studying cybersecurity to simply just throw it all away to marry some old guy that I didn’t like. But my father refused to listen to reason,” I say.

For several years my father had become distant, a man I saw but hardly spoke to. I kept telling myself it was because he couldn’t see my mother the way she was; a shell of herself. But then the heated arguments came… I might not have liked my father much but I’d never feared him… until that day. I can still feel the grip he used on me as he dragged me, forcibly, to my bedroom. The sound of the door closing, and the security locks throughout our house being engaged. Meant to keep others out… they kept me in.

“He expected me to just fall in line. He took away all my choice, my freedom, and didn’t care about me at all. I decided then and there that I had enough.”

“What did you do?” Volan asks. His hand wraps around my bicep. I stiffen, the ghost of my father’s grip still holding me tight. But Volan’s hands are warm, and his fingers don’t squeeze but stroke me so very gently. Comforting, not restricting.

“It wasn’t the smartest of moves to be honest,” I reply, “but I made a run for it. I took what I learned in college, and I applied it. For the first time ever, rather than trying to fortify security code, I hacked it. I escaped.”

I escaped my house in the dark of night, sneaking past the electronic and physical security alike. I’d been prepared, having already hacked the transport system to get tickets to a train across the country. And when I ran out of money, I found myself creating a job on board a starship heading out into the universe, no return trip. Because there was no going back for me, nothing to keep me tethered to Earth. I deserved a new life, even if it was all built up on lies and false information inserted into databases.

“I refused to be used by my father for monetary gain,” I sneer. He does not get to sell me like cattle, just to be bred by the highest bidder. I am worth more than that!

I am worth more than that—words that I repeat to myself every single day. They kept me warm on the spaceship to Atraxis when I felt like I had abandoned everything behind. They kept me going when I was matched with a shitty husband, one who refused to even touch me. And they will keep me fighting for the right thing even when everyone else around me falls.

“Yes, Maya,” Volan says softly as he gazes down at me with a look I can’t quite make out, “You are worth everything.”

For the first time since my mother’s death, I cry. Really cry. And through it all, Volan holds me, his hands a comforting caress.

There’s no denying it anymore; I’m in love with Volan.