Chapter One
Prologue
Leslie Roberts was an eighteen year old girl who, more than anything, wanted to be just like her big brother.
The Krinar invasion was two years in the past. But the human population remained frightened and deeply humiliated by their fall from supremacy. They had been completely unable to fight the invaders. Especially in wealthy countries, like the United States, they were angry when the Krinar banned large scale meat production, forcing a mostly vegan diet on the human population. They were ashamed hence even more angry, when the Krinar explained that this had been necessary for the well-being of the planet. And finally the invaders mostly ignored humans altogether, with one exception. They apparently enjoyed having sex with us.
What came to be known as Xenophile Clubs or X Clubs were opening outside the ten Krinar Centers. One of these was a day’s drive away from the Robertses home in Albuquerque. Leslie’s brother, Joe, started going there. When Leslie teasingly asked him about it, Joe told her that he wasn’t going there for the sex. Leslie suspected he wasn’t being completely truthful about that. She was his kid sister after all! Those incredible K women she saw on TV would have made the sex pretty hard for a guy to resist. But she knew that what Joe really wanted was to show the Krinar that not all humans were resentful and afraid. He wanted to befriend them and listen to what they would tell him of their lives. He wanted to lessen the tension between the two populations by making friends. His goal was to establish a Friendship Club near the New Mexico Center, a place where people of both species, who were so inclined, could get to know each other. Ultimately, he wanted to see clubs outside all of the K Centers.
Leslie was excited by what her brother was doing. She was very proud to be his sister. When he set up his Friendship Club, she very much wanted to be a part of that.
Joe generally rented a room twenty miles or so from the K Center, which was about as close as human’s lived to it. He stayed there on an eight day schedule. He would come home for two or three day’s at the beginning of every eight day period. He told Leslie that if you wanted to talk to Ks it was best to catch them on their days off.
He had kept that schedule for twenty four days. When he came home next time Joe seemed a little bit off. He had been distracted. Nervous and wanting to get back to the K Center as soon as possible. Her mom, Susan, a social scientist like Joe, knew quite a bit about substance abuse in the communities she studied. She briefly wondered if Joe could be on something. That was so out of character for Joe however that no one seriously considered the possibility.
Two nights after Joe went back to the X Club, her dad got a call from the police. A K had dropped Joe’s body off at the police station, in the town where Joe was staying. The K reminded the police that he was not subject to human law, then left without telling them what had happened. Joe’s neck had been broken.
The weeks that followed took Leslie down an empty gray tunnel of misery, where nothing and no one could reach her. When she finally emerged from that tunnel, when the funeral was over, when her parents packed up Joe’s writing about the Krinar and put it away, Leslie finally found the energy to look at her acceptance letter from New York’s Columbia University. When she applied there, she had planned to major in computer science. She would do that, but she also understood that the world’s big cities were where the major Divisions of the Resistance could be found. She wanted to find them.
Now, Leslie wanted to be nothing like her brother. Her brother would never have wanted revenge.
Chapter Two
Present—Walking back to the Human Compound
Leslie walked slowly through the rugged hills covered in the open semi-arid mixed evergreen forest of the Arizona K Center. She was a tall, smoothly muscled, young woman. Slightly at odds with her overall athletic appearance, she had delicate-looking elfin features, these were set off by short sandy-brown hair, worn in a shaggy, somewhat masculine style. Her light hazel eyes were shadowed, and her face was lined with worry. That shadowing and those lines had faded during the weeks of her captivity. Both, however, were much in evidence today. The counseling session, she had anticipated for so many weeks, had not gone well. Even knowing that Mia wanted to help her. Knowing that Mia had faced down the Krinar Guardians, getting Larkon, their leader at the Arizona K Center, to agree that Leslie have an opportunity to try counseling, before they decided whether or not to subject her to a targeted memory loss. One that would leave her no longer a threat to the Krinar but also no longer quite herself. With all that, she had not been able to set aside her anger at the girl’s betrayal of the Resistance. She hated Mia and she hated her own rigidity.
Sornan, the Krinar Guardian who had made it his business to escort her around the Center, and otherwise spend time with her, usually walked beside her and kept a conversation going. But, for the moment, he was just walking beside her, leaving her alone with her own thoughts. A Krinar male of average height, for one of them, slightly over six feet, he had relatively light, golden skin and glossy black hair. He had light hazel eyes that were almost identical to Leslie's. The whole package was arranged with the perfect symmetry common to his species. His light-grey Guardian’s uniform did little to conceal the packed muscles underneath.
It was a nice morning, making for a pleasant walk through the apparent wilderness. Although it was fairly uncommon to see one of the rounded, oblong Krinar dwellings, colored in muted tones of mostly cream, beige, or ivory, they were quite numerous here. However, they were placed so as not to upset the natural look of the forest. Even in a residential area the Krinar preferred unspoiled nature. Their houses widely spaced, as their very territorial owners preferred. The terrain was somewhat steep and overall at a fairly high elevation. The dry sandy soil was covered in a thin layer of needles from the slightly stunted widely spaced trees.
Neither Leslie nor Sornan were in any hurry to get her back to the Human Compound, the Detention Center, and its dwindling population.
She thought about the good and the bad of her extended stay. Most of the other upper-level Resistance fighters and military officers had already gone through rehabilitation and gone back to “their regular lives.” Not that she, nor they, actually had a “regular life” to return to, Leslie remembered bitterly. She had been shined, had the fucking nanos in her. Jaymira had used those nanos to heal her concussion, broken finger, and other injuries from her fight with Mia. But now the monsters could use those nanos to find her no matter what she did, or where she went. There was no point in finding whatever was left of the Resistance. She would only endanger them. And also… she didn’t want to leave the Compound…
She did a double take at that thought. Would she miss the Compound? She realized that it was true. She would miss Jaymira. And as angry as she sometimes got with Sornan, she felt a painful burning pressure in her chest at the thought of leaving him.
Failing getting Mia’s counseling to work, the price of leaving, as far as she knew, was rehabilitation. She didn't want to be rehabilitated; to have her memory altered.
Her thoughts turned angry. Her eyes burned at the thought of her brother and what those monsters had done to him. If she had to talk to that fucking little traitor every fourth day, to keep those bastards out of her mind, she would. She would never forget her brother. Never!
No, she didn’t want to be rehabilitated. Her mind was the only place her brother still existed.
“Xeno bitch," she muttered out loud.