Everything Leanne had always dreamed about was about to happen. She had to pinch herself to make sure she was awake.

Her friend Hannah had schedule an outing to the Denoli convention.

Denoli was her favorite television show. She had watched the science fiction series with her dad since the premiere. Ever since he had died two years ago, Leanne felt closer to him every time she watched it.

Three days of dressing up and geeking out with other fans was going to be heaven. 

Her group eagerly shuffled into the queue and soon became immersed in a alien world. Leanne felt like she didn’t know where to turn.

“Take a look at this. They have all the tchotchkes you could ever want.”

Leanne reluctantly looked away from a stand holding authentic, licensed models of the guns used in the TV series. She squealed in delight as Hannah gestured her over to a stall selling Denoli quotes on key chains and fridge magnets.

Olivia was also eyeing the magnets, but Georgia and Wendy had disappeared into the excitable throng together. Leanne glanced at the clock and couldn’t believe that it had already been three hours since the doors opened.

A couple of shrieks from the entrance made Leanne, Hannah and Olivia look up. They pushed their way through the rest of the crowd to see what was causing the disturbance at the doors. Maybe someone who didn’t have a ticket was trying to force their way in. Leanne wouldn’t have blamed them.

A small group of topless, fit men cut swiftly through the crowd. Leanne grinned in delight. The actors, dressed as Wescra, stormed into the venue, looking and acting just like the bad guys on Denoli. They even groped at a few women along the way for good measure.

Leanne couldn’t help but admire the convention organizers’ choices in casting. All the actors were smoking hot. She’d never done well for herself in the romance department. Looking at the toned bodies made her wish she wasn’t afraid to make the first move.

Wendy gasped. “Someone’s forgetting the difference between fantasy and reality.” One of the Wescra knocked a stand flying. The owner of the booth jumped up and started yelling.

The Wescra actor promptly hit him in the face.

Everyone stopped talking around the conflict. Acting like an alien was one thing, but the actors could get sued for that kind of behavior.

A single word broke the silence.

“Her!”

A Wescra pointed directly at Leanne. She couldn’t tell if it was the one who had just thrown a punch. They all looked the same to her.

Leanne felt like there was a spotlight on her. Usually she didn’t mind playing along, but these guys were making her uncomfortable. She put up a hand and shook her head. It wasn’t the time for role-playing.

One of the actors marched toward her, grabbed her wrist, and twisted her arm around her back.

“What are you doing?” Her muscles wrenched in pain. Leanne struggled to free herself, but the Wescra was too strong for her. “Let me go! You’re hurting me!”

One of the other convention-goers stepped in to help. “Hey, man, leave her alone. You’re not supposed to be touching anyone.” When the actor holding Leanne ignored the friendly stranger, he grabbed the actor’s arm, trying to pry him away.

The actor pulled out a weapon. Before Leanne could say a single word, the man who had tried to help her was on the ground. He wasn’t moving. A pool of blood spread around his head.

Something was very wrong.

Leanne couldn’t stop screaming as event security rushed to the scene. In front of her, she could see other actors restraining Olivia and Hannah. Olivia was fighting so forcefully that it took three Wescra to hold her.

At least they weren’t shooting at her.

The Wescra holding them cut a path through the crowd leading back to the entrance. No one stood in their way - they weren’t willing to be shot. Bullets from security started flying through the air. Even though the shots from the security detail were deadly accurate, white ovals flashed around the Wescra right before they hit. The aliens were unharmed.

Leanne realized the actors appeared to have shields. But that technology didn’t exist in real life. It was a fantasy made for television.

The formerly joyful scene had turned to one of terror. Leanne tried desperately to twist away, but that only made her captor hold onto her more tightly. She screamed again and kicked him, but he hardly seemed to notice it. The doors loomed in front of her, and in an instant they passed through them. Another group of Wescra joined them, pulling some other women along, but Leanne was too scared to realize who they were.

Despair filled her heart. This wasn’t good. Every step they took was making it harder for the police to find them.

She wondered where they were taking her. Maybe her final destination was a black van with tinted windows. At least that would give her another chance to escape.

Leanne wasn’t expecting to see a spaceship. She had no idea why she and her screaming friends were being pulled toward it. What were the actors doing? A fake spaceship didn’t offer a chance at getting away. In fact, it would be a death trap.

She wondered if they were planning to ask for ransom money. If so, they had grabbed the wrong girl. Leanne and her mother weren’t particularly close, but she knew mom would do whatever it took to help her. On the other hand, she hoped these guys had an accurate idea of her family’s net worth.

Leanne was vaguely aware of other girls screaming around her. Her hands were restrained, not with handcuffs, but with futuristic-looking devices. Did they even do anything? What was the point in keeping up with the act? They were far away from the convention by now.

Clearly these people were crazy. Maybe they really believed they were from the TV show. She wasn’t sure if the notion made her situation better or worse.

The stupid spaceship model was so accurate that it even had a simulated start routine. Leanne felt the deck hum beneath her feet before it shifted…and the spaceship lifted off into the air.

The sudden acceleration forced Leanne back against the wall and made her wrists yanking painfully against the restraints.

How could a mockup of a spacecraft fly through the sky?

A sickening feeling settled in Leanne’s stomach as she took a closer look at the actors. They weren’t talking to each other. Instead, they surrounded the ship’s controls. Everyone had a job to do and was completely focused on their task.

This couldn’t be happening, could it?

Leanne wondered if she had been drugged. She wracked her brain, trying to think of a time she had left her food or drink unattended. How long did rohypnol take to wear off? It couldn’t stay in her system for longer than a few hours. Had it been enough time since they left the convention for her body to cleanse itself?

She would rather have been drugged than kidnapped by aliens.

“It’s not real,” she muttered to herself. “It can’t be.”

Wendy appeared in front of her, spitting obscenities at the Wescra and trying her best to bite or kick the closest one. One of them hit her head with the back of his gun. She collapsed onto the deck with a crunch.

Leanne thought the sight would have been terrifying if it was really happening to her.

The ship started to stabilize and stopped shuddering. Leanne wondered if it had cleared the atmosphere. If they were on the TV show, once the ship entered hyperspace, it would be on the other side of the galaxy in seconds.

Of course, Leanne was really passed out somewhere on Earth, with someone doing questionable things to her unconscious body. She didn’t want to think about the other option, because that would mean she had completely lost her mind.

There was no history of mental illness in her family, but people couldn’t simply go crazy without any prior warning, right? The drugs would wear off, and she’d have nothing more to worry about than hunting down some aspirin.

Leanne looked around her for the first time. Wendy and Olivia were bound on either side of her. Hannah and Georgia were sobbing next to Olivia. When Leanne saw who was with her, she knew she was just having a trippy dream. There was no way she would be abducted with all her closed friends. It would be too much of a coincidence.

“It’s going to be ok.” Leanne didn’t know if she was talking to herself or to her friends. Perhaps trying to have a conversation with her hallucinations was the first sign of madness, but she couldn’t help trying to comfort them. “We’ll all wake up soon and the spaceship will be gone.”

They looked at her like she had lost her mind.

Leanne smiled at the thought of telling everyone about her crazy dream when she woke up. With the possibility of telling a good story on her mind, she lay down and drifted off to sleep.

A scuffle to her left woke Leanne at some point, though she couldn’t tell if she’d been asleep for hours or merely minutes.

“Hey!”

She tried to reach for Olivia as the Wescra started to drag her away, but the cuffs on her wrists yanked harshly against her already tender skin.

“Leave her alone!”

She may as well not have spoken for all the attention the Wescra paid to her. Panic flared up in her again. Was she really drugged? Surely it should have worn off by now. Maybe she was going crazy.

Or maybe… maybe this was real.

“Not possible,” Leanne muttered aloud. Still, she couldn’t get over the fact that drugs should be wearing off. Maybe this was better. At least she wouldn’t wake up in some shady guy’s apartment full of drugs. She’d wake up nice and safe in a mental institution. If they could just get to the waking her up bit now, that would be great.

Despite how many times she told herself it wasn’t real, Leanne couldn’t help but react to her friends being dragged away.

They were screaming and crying for help. Leanne tried again to get up, but she was no match for the thick plastic compound that seemed to make up the cuffs binding her.

“Leave them alone!” she yelled.

One of the Wescra came for her, but another held her back. “Not her. She’s the one for the first stage. It’s only a week’s trip. There’s no point putting her in stasis.”

Yet another piece of evidence that this really was a mental breakdown. No way would aliens from another planet just happen to speak English.

Then why did Leanne keep having doubts? Surely, this couldn’t be real. Could it?

Why did it feel so real?

Leanne had always thought crazy people didn’t know they were crazy.

She wished she was still asleep. Or unconscious. Or whatever she had been before. She watched helplessly as her friends were shoved into what looked like human-sized pods. The doors closed, and their screams were silenced.

“Who are you? Why did you take us?”

One of the Wescra glanced back but didn’t answer. Leanne knew he could speak English. Still, she didn’t want to get knocked out, so she remained quiet. There was only so long her body could maintain a constant state of fear and tension. Leanne leaned back against the wall, her mind spinning.

When they fed her, Leanne ate and drank willingly. If this was real, she’d need to keep her strength up. The food tasted disgusting, but at least they were feeding her. They obviously needed her alive.

“Where are we going?”

They ignored her.

“I need to use the bathroom.”

That got a response, which surprised her. The same Wescra who fed her, who seemed to have been assigned to caring for her, did something to the wall, and her handcuffs detached from it, though her hands were still tightly bound together.

“This way.”

Leanne followed them through the ship. It looked exactly like it did in the Denoli TV series. At least she knew how the bathroom worked from watching the show. Doing what she needed to with her hands bound in front of her was decidedly more difficult than she’d hoped, but she managed without any serious mishaps.

“You may as well talk to me, you know,” she said as the Wescra led her back. “You said the journey would take a week. No point in being bored, right? What’s your name?”

He frowned at her. “You are not for me. You are not mine to speak to, or touch.”

Leanne didn’t point out that there was an awful lot of not-so-gentle touching going on when they dragged her out of the convention. His words sent another shard of fear through her. She’d been so focused on hoping this wasn’t real, that she hadn’t really thought past that, to what she knew.

Somehow, one lucky producer had gotten hold of real data and used it to create a sci-fi show. The Wescra looked exactly as they had been portrayed. Leanne stared hard at his arm, but she couldn’t make out any trace of body paint. That wasn’t the worst of it, though.

Wescra fed on human women, sexually, to increase their powers in battle. It helped them conquer the peaceful Greli. Leanne didn’t know why they had her, specifically, but she could guess all too well what they might want with a woman.

Wescra women could feed off the men in turn. It was a pleasurable and beneficial experience for both. Human women didn’t have that same advantage.

Leanne feared her fate would be worse than death. If the show’s depictions of human slaves of the Wescra was accurate, she would rather be locked in an unknown pod with her friends than out here.

She sat down meekly and let her captor lock her back to the wall. The ship seemed to be in steady flight now, though she had no way of knowing which part of the universe they were in. Deciding that the best thing she could do was observe, Leanne sat back quietly to watch.

One of the Wescra was at the controls, presumably monitoring the ship’s flight. The one who had taken her to the bathroom was also there. The rest had disappeared somewhere. Probably their personal chambers within the ship. She hoped the others were safe in those pods. Surely, they must be. If all the Wescra wanted was to kill them, it would have been easy enough to shoot them right there at the convention.

Leanne couldn’t help letting a few tears streaking down her cheeks. She’d never been religious, but right then, she prayed, to anyone who was listening. Please, let her wake up in a mental institution. A nice safe, padded room with doctors taking care of her.

At this point, she’d even take the drug den filled with potential rapists. At least in that situation, all she needed to do was get a few streets away and find a phone to call the police. If this was real? Leanne couldn’t see how she was going to get out of it. She didn’t know how to fly the spaceship. Even if she could somehow overpower and disarm all seven Wescra, she’d be lost in space.

Please, please let this not be real.