Alyssa

My eyes sting as I stare at the three moons, so enormous and so close to me that I feel like an ant. They shine white gold with a brown tinge around their craters—like a breathtaking menace against the dark orange expanse of the sky—with a full moon like a god and two crescents like two goddesses. It’s as light as a summer evening.

I’m dreaming. I’m certain I am. Yet I feel the sand beneath my naked feet burning my skin. The hot air scented with herbs is burning my lungs.

Panic races through my heart and it threatens to break out of my rib cage.

I woke up about two minutes ago. I’d been lying on the sand. The heat of it had woken me.

The pain from my feet urges me to move. I rise on my tiptoes.

“God, help me wake up,” I shriek.

My throat feels dry. My eyes feel dry.

I’m a flower drying out, dying, except I’m a student.

I studied family law last night, and I went to bed around midnight as usual.

I should have woken up in my bed in the flat I share with Lisa, my best friend. I should have woken up on Earth where I live.

Except I didn’t.

I woke up below those three fucking moons. In a desert.

I sniffle and pull forward. Shakiness invades my blood like a poison. My vest and shorts cling to my body. Sweat beads my forehead. The thin streams of salty moisture trickle down my temples and prick my eyes.

I start panting.

The horizon blurs, glitters, shines like a mirror as the brown expanse of the hostile land threatens to swallow me, kill me, and make me insane.

Then I see them—a group of people emerging from the shimmery wall of the horizon as though they’re ghosts. They’re dressed in black—long tunics, scarves covering their heads and faces, but their eyes are as cold as glaciers, as blue as the air in the high mountains.

“Help me,” I rasp. “Please, help me.”

“Straniera,” one of them growls with a deep female voice.

I know this word. It’s Italian and means ‘alien’, ‘foreigner’. Relief washes over me and my knees bend.

I’m on Earth.

I’m just hallucinating.

Too much coffee.

They’re doctors who are going to help me. They’ll deal with the caffeine overdose and I’ll start seeing them as doctors, not people from some alien desert.

I’m American, but I was accepted to the Italian University six months ago. I have just started my first year of Law.

My mom dreamed of going to university in Italy—the country where her mom comes from. She never went to university so I decided to study in Italy for her. She’s so happy now, so fulfilled.

The people surround me and I freeze. They’re tall. I’m like a dwarf compared to them. Two of them leap at me and grip my arms, tumbling me down to the sand so I lie on my back. I manage only a sigh.

Two hands fold my legs, causing me pain and they spread my knees. Those hands rip my shorts off me.

My heart stops beating as two fingers touch my pussy lips and a hot breath puffs on my inner thigh. I wiggle but too many hands are immobilising me. A sense of ultimate humiliation blazes inside me and burns a memory into my brain.

“A virgin,” a raspy male voice says.

It’s English, but rough and distorted. Dreadful.

The hands tumble me over on my stomach as the sand invades my eyes and mouth. My wrists are bunched together and they’re tied with a piece of string behind my back. I’m lifted like I’m a feather.

As my feet find support against the ground, one of the people throws a cape over me, covering my head. A hand shoves me forward. Another hand slaps my ass.

A thought wavers in my head.

I’m in hell.

I can’t see anything as these wild dangerous people race me like I’m a horse. My feet burn, hurt and numb, then hurt even more as the uneven surface of the desert damages my soles. I fall to my knees. The hand gripping my arm urges me to stand up.

Then a hand shoves me into a smelly environment. The stench makes me retch—human sweat and urine. The sounds of human breaths surround me.

A hand pulls the cape away from my face and my eyes meet a female’s glance. She looks my age, nineteen to be precise, her face dirty in the streak of light filtering through the window in the wooden ceiling just above my head. It’s secured with metal bars.

“Straniera,” the girl says as sadness pervades the emerald ocean of her eyes. Her irises have yellow flickers like those of wolves. She wears a kind of tunic that’s too tight and exposes her small breasts. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

I feel stunned at the breathy mix of Italian and English that has just come out of her cracked mouth.

“What is this place?” I gasp. “Where am I? Please, help me. What’s going on?”

“I don’t understand if you speak so fast,” the girl says.

My eyes roam over my surroundings, and I see three other girls. Their eyes shine emerald with yellow flickers too. I’m in a cramped wooden shed, five feet high and six feet wide.

“Lanee,” the girl says. “My name is Lanee. My mother was Straniera too.”

“I don’t understand,” I say as the shed moves forward and I fall back.

My head bumps against the wall as the sound of an animal drifts to my ears. It resembles a horse’s neighing. I must be inside some kind of wagon.

“Neither did my mother,” Lanee says as she helps me sit. “She came from the land called Earth. Our gods brought her here so she could give my planet more daughters.”

A shooting pain courses through my heart. “No.”

Then my mind clears, detaches. A thought wavers in my head. I was abducted. Abducted by some fucking aliens and thrown into this abyss of hell.

“You can speak my language,” I say.

“You speak two languages,” Lanee says as she sweeps her golden brown hair away from her olive face. It’s shoulder-length and curly. “That’s what I can sense from you. My genome allows me to speak every language.” She sounds like she’s reciting a paragraph of an essay. “A group of my brain cells can recognise the area of your brain responsible for your ability to speak languages and then my brain will switch the required mode on so I can understand you and speak like you. I don’t know what that means as I’m not very educated, but our gods say so.” She leans towards me. “This planet is not safe for you, Straniera.”

I don’t know whether her abilities frighten me more than her warning.

“Can I go back to Earth?” I ask.

“No,” Lanee says. “And you’d better focus on your survival.”

Silence falls upon me, as cold as snow.

“Alyssa,” I say. “My name is Alyssa.”

Lanee flashes me a pale smile. “A really nice name.” She waves her hand to the others. “They are called Esi, Tmee, and Gria.”

I nod at the girls clinging to one another at the opposite wall.

Lanee sits beside me and wraps her arm around my back. We travel in silence. Seconds seem like hours. The odour of unwashed bodies makes me retch a few times.

“Who are those people who captured me?” I ask.

“Hunters,” Lanee says as her voice trembles. “They’re going to sell us to wealthy, high-born people.”

“Sell?” My heart stops beating.

The vehicle sways and jumps over the bumps of the road as the monotonous rattling from below the floor brings a strange weakness to my body. Or, maybe this is my shock wearing off.

As time goes by, the string begins to dig into my wrists deeper and deeper, causing me a burning pain. I feel pins and needles in my fingertips. Thirst torments me as red flashes dance in front of my eyes.

The vehicle stops as the girls sigh in one voice. But that’s not the sigh of relief. It’s the sigh of fear that makes the hair on my back stand on end. Ice fills my veins even though it’s so hot that sweat trickles down my back.

A creaking sound makes me shudder as the cool air brushes against my cheeks. I smell resins and herbs. A dim light seeps inside the vehicle as a sharp voice urges us to get out. I don’t understand the command, but the message is clear to me.

I crawl off the vehicle behind Lanee. As my naked feet touch the ground, I feel moisture and needle-like vegetation under my soles. It’s cold like I’m in the mountains, and that soothes my first degree burns on my feet. My bottom is naked and my vest barely covers my mound. My eyes roam over my surroundings. The sky has turned silvery grey and the three moons have been replaced by a disc that shimmers like an enormous diamond. I keep scanning this hostile environment—patches of sand mingle with spots of low vegetation and low trees. The colours are eerie, glittering, dreamy. Hills profile in the distance.

“Eat as much as you can,” Lanee says. “They feed us only once a lunar triad.”

My eyes travel to the group of hunters. I count them and there’s ten of them. They remove the scarves from their heads and now I can see their faces—there’s only one woman among them. She looks fifty and a few grey wisps are visible in her golden brown hair that’s styled in a braid as a scar crosses her cheek. She’s as tall as the rest of the hunters.

Dread fills my veins. Those people radiate ruthlessness and evil. They’re calculating monsters.

My body jerks back but Lanee’s hand grips my arm.

“The desert will kill you faster than them,” she says.

I notice more details about my captors’ appearance—daggers at their waist, brown spots like those from the sunlight on their faces, scars.

Eight horses are grazing in the green vegetation around the tree roots and their bodies shine navy. Their eyes glance at me as though they’re humans.

One of the men approaches me and takes the dagger out of the sheath. I groan as he turns me abruptly and cuts the string immobilising my wrists.

Lanee drags me to where the other girls are seated on the ground and we’re offered a loaf of dark bread. Lanee tears a piece off for herself and passes it on to me.

I’m sitting on my heels, the vegetation beneath me scratching my legs and ass. The men’s hungry glances slide over my thighs.

I’m so scared I can’t breathe. Tears prick my eyes. The food sticks in my throat and I almost choke.

“They won’t touch you,” Lanee says. “I heard what they said about you. As a virgin, you’re a very precious asset to them. Untouchable.”

My glance meets hers.

Her face is devoid of emotion, eyes hollow like death.

“Birte, the woman, is their leader,” Lanee continues. “Stay away from her. She’s greedy, but she’s also mad.” She passes a flask on to me.

I tip it up to my lips and take a sip. The liquid has a mint taste. My dry throat pleads for more, but I pass the flask on to Gria. Not to mention that my bladder is screaming for relief.

“I need to pee,” I whisper to Lanee, watching the men who start the fire and sit around it.

They don’t pay attention to us. The desert must be so dangerous that they don’t even bother to supervise us.

“Either in front of them or in the wagon,” Gria says.

Her voice has a melodious tinge like she’s a jazz singer. She looks the oldest of them all. Her eyes are more dead than corpses in a morgue.

I nod and rise to my feet then clamber into the wagon. The smell hits me like a dizzying and nauseating whiplash. I retch and squat down in the corner to relieve myself. The murmur of my urine mingles with my sobs. I’m at the very bottom of humiliation and fear. I piss my feet and cry louder. Then I fall silent.

I hear the men’s sharp voices. They’re commanding something. I can discern three names—Gria, Lanee and Esi.

Tmee clambers into the wagon and her arms extend as though she seeks refuge in mine. I move away from the pond of my urine and sit in the opposite end of the wagon. Tmee clings to me and stiffens.