I cannot believe you have done this, Actian!"

"And I cannot believe your ingratitude. Any other flight-brother would crawl to me on his knees for the chance at a prize like this. The bidding on the others starts at over a million credits."

"You know I support you, Actian, but this—"

"And you should be doubly grateful! I chose this one especially for you. Look! It's the one you've been mooning over for months."

Amber groaned. She was lying on a cool floor, her head spinning. She blinked as she struggled to focus her vision. The voices that had woken her were still talking, accompanied by a strange, constant rustling like the wind through leaves.

"Please, send her back," one of them begged. "Quickly, before she wakes. I can't be a part of this."

"It's too late, brother. She's already sitting up."

Amber pushed herself up on her hands, bringing one to her aching head. A riot of colors swam before her eyes, slowly resolving into two figures. Men, she thought, wearing cloaks. One in brown and orange, the other in bright pale green. And makeup, too. Costumes? Except something was wrong with their eyes. The one in the dark cloak turned toward her as she moved, reached for her. She saw the cloak tremble strangely and then open, spreading. Not a cloak, but wings. She wailed, a sharp, sudden sound of animal fear, and threw herself backward. The strange creature withdrew, flinching, its wings closing behind it quickly.

"You must get over your squeamishness, Atropos," the creature in green said, shaking it's head. "This is the way of the flight now. I'll leave you and your pet to get acquainted."

It turned in a sweep of its massive wings and, parting a set of heavy curtains behind it, took off.

Slowly, Amber became aware of her surroundings. The room she was in was circular, the floor something close to white marble. Behind her, the circle flattened into a wall, the material plaster or perhaps some kind of matte plastic and detailed with white-on-white arabesques and patterns reminiscent of French baroque and yet distinctly alien.

A curtain covered the rest of the walls, thick and velvet like a theater curtain, such a dark red it was nearly black. Where the departing creature had left the curtain open, she could see not a doorway or a wall but a low, decorative railing, white and as elaborately detailed as the walls. There was no furniture in the room, nothing but her and the creature with the dark brown wings. They were splashed in places with orange and gold.

As they turned to watch the other leave, she saw a pattern in gold and tan on the back of his wings. The shape was abstract but easily recognizable as a skull. She pressed herself to the far wall, shaking, as it turned to face her again.

"Please, do not be afraid," the creature said, taking a slow step closer to her. "I'm not going to hurt you."

Amber flattened herself harder against the wall, wide-eyed, a terrified sob escaping her as fearful tears ran down her cheeks.

"Everything will be all right," the creature pleaded with her, slowly kneeling in front of her. "I will find a way to fix this, I promise. Please, don't cry."

It was far larger than she'd realized at first. As it moved closer to her, she realized it was taller and broader than any human she'd ever met. Its broad chest was wider than two of her standing side by side. It could have covered her face entirely with one hand. Amber's heart strained in her chest, racing faster than she'd ever felt. The creature reached for her, and in response, she shrieked, slapped the hand away, and darted past him toward the open curtain.

The creature shouted for her to stop but she was barely thinking in her panic. She hit the railing at waist height and flew over it and into the open air.

She screamed, grabbing the bars just in time to catch herself as she realized the 'room' she'd been in was in fact a balcony, one of thousands which now surrounded her, jutting out into an open, spherical space. The balconies, many of them with curtains similar to this one, all dripped with greenery. Vines and flowers climbed and cascaded from every surface. The building, if that was what it was, was massive, larger than any she'd ever been in.

She could hardly comprehend it, at least not while she was dangling from a balcony railing over a drop easily the length of multiple football fields. The source of the rushing noise was immediately apparent. The air was full of creatures like the two she'd seen before, gliding gracefully between the balconies. They were every shade of the rainbow and then some. Vibrant scarlet and black, bright cobalt edged in gold. Deep forest browns and jewel greens.

Though their bodies seemed mostly humanoid, their coloration, skin, and hair followed the patterns of their vast, beautiful wings. She watched them swoop and glide and flutter past one another, dancing and spinning and falling. Her balcony was near what she assumed was the top of the dome, but near its center point, she saw the creatures performing a delicate fluttering maneuver to right themselves as the gravity appeared to invert.

Amber's head swam and for a moment, she was afraid she would faint and fall. Then a hand closed around her wrist and pulled her up.

She looked up as the creature with the death's head wings lifted her easily back over the railing and into its arms. Its eyes were large and black and somehow familiar.

"Please, be careful," it said, gently setting her back on her feet. "You would not survive a fall like that."

She stared at the creature warily, unable to believe she wasn't in danger despite its words.

"What's going on?" she blurted out, her voice shaking. "Where am I?"

"I don't think you really want to know that," it said, its expression concerned. "It would only upset you. I'm going to fix this and you'll be home before you know it."

"No, I want to know!" Amber clenched her hands at her sides as she demanded the truth, afraid she would set the thing off and make it attack her. "Where am I? Who are you?"

The creature looked at her sadly for a moment.

"You know who I am," he said. "You know me. You heard Actian say my name."

"You're lying," Amber said at once, shaking her head. "There's no way you're him! Tell me the truth!"

He watched her for a moment with his solemn gaze, then touched a strange opaline spot on his left wrist. There was a ripple of iridescent scales like those on his wings, passing over him like a wave and leaving a human man in their wake.

Atropos looked back at her, just as handsome and familiar as he'd ever been.

"This was the lie, Amber." He gestured down at himself with a frown. "This is the truth."

In another flicker of scales, he was a monster again.

"What are you?" Amber asked, her voice a bare whisper of shock.

"This is why I could not spend the night with you," he said. "I am not human. I am not even from Earth. This is my ship."

"I've been abducted by aliens," Amber said quietly and very slowly sat down on the floor. She put her head in her hands and after a moment, began sobbing.

"Please, don't cry," Atropos begged. "I'm going to find a way to send you home, I promise. This was never meant to happen."

"And what was meant to happen?" Amber asked, her voice thick with emotion as she scrubbed tears from her cheeks. "What were you even doing on Earth? Does anyone else know you're here?"

"It's . . . complicated," Atropos said with a frown. "But no, you are the only human who knows of us."

"What about the government?" she asked. "Area 51 and the SETI program?"

Atropos actually laughed, brief and heavy with anxiety.

"Your government cannot even keep your president's personal scandals secret," he said. "If any of them had actually had contact with us, you would know. And someone would presumably be making a profit from it."

Amber, overwhelmed, groaned and put her face in her hands. She flinched as she felt him put a hand on her shoulder. He'd knelt in front of her again. He moved back as soon as she jerked away from him, but he offered her a hand up.

"Please," he said. "Allow me to explain."

Amber eyed the hand mistrustfully.

"You're not planning to dissect me or anything, right?" she asked.

"Of course not," he said at once and, still wary but unsure what else she could do, she took his hand. He helped her to her feet and led her to the bare wall.

"Garden level, please," he said to the air, and at once, a door appeared in the wall, opening seamlessly on what looked very much like an elevator.

"We generally fly between all the locations on the ship," he said. "But I think you would find that unnecessarily distressing. And I'm not sure I'm ready for the rest of the flight to know you're here just yet. Speaking of which . . ."

He spoke to the air again, a rapid-fire shorthand which Amber barely recognized as including her measurements. At once, a garment shimmered into existence in his hand. Unlike the loose, dark clothing he wore under his wings, this was thick and stiff.

She realized it was a cloak as he draped it around her shoulders. Its colors were shades of pale brown, like a dusty moth. It gathered to a thick feathery ruff similar to the collar of black fur that hid Atropos's throat and the tops of his wings where they met his back.

"It's a bit plain," he said apologetically as he fastened it at her neck. "But it's better if you don't attract attention right now."

"Why not?" Amber asked. "What exactly is going on?"

"I'll explain everything," Atropos said, urging her into the elevator. "Please be patient."

Amber bit her lip, fighting the urge to demand answers now. She was only barely holding it together. She wasn't sure if this creature, this alien acting like the man she'd had been falling for, was helping or making it worse. He followed her into the elevator and she held her breath as it began to descend. The front of the elevator was glass and she watched with undisguised awe as they descended through the maze of balconies.

The plant life that grew rampant across the structures was even more lush and strange than she'd first thought. The flowers that grew everywhere were beautiful and alien, the size of dinner plates and in colors and shapes she'd never even imagined. The only things more spectacular were the aliens that flew among them, a dozen times more vibrant and wonderful.

"The gravity switch may be a bit disorienting," Atropos warned her as they neared the center of the sphere. "Just hold onto the handles."

He gestured to a shape like a door lever projecting from the wall. She took hold of it with a nervous frown, not a minute too soon.

It wasn't as abrupt as she'd feared it would be, the elevator slowing to make it less jarring. But it was still startling to suddenly feel her feet leave the floor. The handle swung slowly under grip, turning her upside down in the suddenly absent gravity. She couldn't help a laugh of confused delight as her hair floated in front of her face. Atropos moved with natural grace and ease in the air, turning to face what had been the floor as gravity slowly began to reassert itself, pulling them down toward what had been the ceiling. Amber shook her head in confusion as up became down, stumbling as her feet landed on the new floor.

"Holy cow," she muttered, head spinning.

"It can take some adjustment," Atropos said kindly. "Take your time."

"I just never thought I'd ever get to feel zero gravity," she said, more than a little awed. Atropos smiled.

"Then I think you are really going to like what I am going to show you next."

* * *

The doors of the elevator opened onto a lush indoor garden. Amber followed Atropos, wide-eyed and mystified as they stepped out into what appeared to be the bottom of the sphere. Balconies still rose all around them, but the bottom sliver of the sphere had been flattened into a circular space where the greenery that filled the entire ship congregated around a massive fountain. Abstract sculptures in white marble were scattered among the massive flowers. As Atropos led her toward them, Amber realized the statues were engraved with elaborate scenes of alien life.

"My people are called Lepidopterix," he explained. "Our home world is very, very far away from here. I have seen it only once."

"Why?" Amber asked, startled by the thought of being so far and so disconnected from Earth. Atropos gestured to one of the reliefs carved into the statue, which depicted a large alien pointing ahead, a thousand ships going forward from his wings.

"We are not sure," he explained. "The knowledge is lost. But some disaster drove us from the shores of our home. So we went out into the universe to find new worlds and new knowledge. But there were . . . difficulties."

He gestured to another carving, where two aliens held one another, heads bowed in sadness. Beneath them, other aliens lifted what looked like a large caterpillar from the body of another creature, vaguely canine in appearance.

"Exposure to stellar radiation rendered many of the colonizing fleet infertile," Atropos explained. "They turned to other means of reproduction to keep their populations viable. They devised a way to host a Lepidopteran zygote in the womb of another compatible species. It was destructive and inefficient at first, but the colonists had precious little other option."

Amber paled, looking at the body of the canine alien and beginning to worry she knew where this was going. Atropos moved on to another statue. The carving this time depicted stars falling toward a planet. The grand figure from before lay covered by his wings.

"We were on the edge of extinction," Atropos went on. "Our methods were too dangerous for the host body, fatal more often than not, and we were running out of livestock too fast. And then we found Earth. Planets bearing complex life are incredibly rare, but yours was flush with it. This was around two million years ago, you understand."

"Two million . . ." Amber's head spun at the implications of that number. "You mean, you've been coming to earth since the birth of my species?"

"Your entire genus, actually," Atropos corrected her. "There were many varieties of homo sapiens in those days, before your species, homo sapiens sapiens, evolved. At that point, you were less intelligent than other species of ape still existent today. We had no idea what you would become."

"Did you . . ." Amber was holding her aching head, distracted entirely from her situation by the revelations Atropos was revealing about her species' past. "Are you saying you made us? You influenced our evolution into an intelligent civilization?"

"Of course not," Atropos said at once. "You were on your way to this regardless. And we made an effort to have as little impact as possible. Our early experiments may have contributed to the decline of a few convergent species of homo sapiens, but in general, we have had as little impact as possible."

"So, what, you kidnapped these early hominids," Amber asked, confused and overwhelmed, "and you, what? Laid your eggs in them?"

"Nothing so crude," Atropos said with a frown. "The early days were messy, yes, but we were always as humane as possible, even on that first encounter. The hosts were sedated upon retrieval and spent the entire incubation asleep. Those who survived were deposited back on Earth exactly where they'd been taken, healthy and unharmed and with no memory of the incident. And with our brood of healthy young, we returned to the home world."

He gestured again to the statue where the planet they had left was shown again, this time bare of any marking but a symbol like a wide, upside-down V.

"Whatever disaster had driven us from the home world had ended," he said. "But there was no life left there. We began the difficult process of rebuilding and soon found our population dwindling once more. We returned to Earth to birth a new generation. And soon, the migratory tradition began to take shape."

He indicated another carving, this one showing a group of triumphant aliens flying between two planets.

"The journey from Earth to our home world and back takes about seventy years," he went on. "Our technology has improved enough that we need only hold the host for a week, and the process is almost never fatal anymore. In many cases, we return the humans in better health than they were when we chose them. The young pupate and mature during the journey. By the time they reach home world, they are old enough to join the next flight out, to pass their genes on to the next generation."

"Wait," Amber said, breathing a little hard as she tried to process all of this. "But the infertility from the radiation should have only affected the first few generations. Why haven't you gone back to traditional procreation?"

Atropos looked slightly uncomfortable, looking away.

"We cannot," he replied. "It has been two million years. Almost 30,000 generations of my people. I cannot say why we did not return to the old way in the beginning. Perhaps we were afraid, or there were other complications. But by now, it has been too long. We have lost the ability to reproduce any other way."

"Lost?" Amber stared at him, baffled. "What do you mean you can't say? What are all these details you don't know? You have this ship, all this advanced technology, but you can't invent an artificial womb? Either you're lying to me or there is something seriously wrong here!"

Atropos looked away, troubled, and his wings fluttered in agitation.

"Let me show you something first," he said. "Please, it's just this way."

Amber, frustrated but not sure what else to do, followed him. She couldn't reconcile this massive creature, calmly—almost proudly!—explaining how his species had been using hers as unwilling surrogates for millions of years, with the kind and gentle man she'd known on Earth.

He led her toward the enormous fountain, and she realized there was a ramp sloping down underneath it. He led her down beneath the garden, and her eyes widened as the entered the bottom curve of the sphere which was, it appeared, entirely made of glass. Or something sturdier, maybe, and crystalline. It's edges were rough and thick, casting iridescent rainbows. And beyond them, space sprawled out, infinite and beautiful.

Below them, the Earth spun, glorious and impossible, a brighter blue than Amber felt she could describe, a marble swirling with streaks of white cloud and shards of green like gold flake on an overpriced dessert. She fell to her knees on the glass, staring down at her home planet spinning like a Christmas ornament below her. The edges of her vision darkened as her heart hammered, her breath coming too quickly.

"I know how much you always wished you could go to space," Atropos said gently. "I know this is not exactly how you imagined it happening, but I hope this might at least make things a little better."

"I think I'm going to throw up," Amber replied, and then fainted instead.