2

- Sophia -

I come to, and at first I feel pretty good. That was a good night's sleep I just had. I'm feeling totally rested. My pillow feels weird, though. Like, all hard and cold ... and what's that smell?

Then I open my eyes and sit bolt upright on a metal floor. Oh fuck. This isn't my dorm room. This isn't like anything I've ever seen.

It's in half-darkness, and the little light there is seems sickly and yellow to me. The floor is bare metal, but I have no idea which metal it is. It feels smoother than iron. And colder.

The walls are made from some different material that reminds me of plastic, but feels rough to the touch. It's probably white, but the light makes it look yellow and dirty. I peer closer and try with a finger. No, the wall I'm sitting beside is absolutely dirty and leaves a nasty brown stain on my finger.

“Yuck!” I try to wipe it on the floor, but it's not too successful and just makes dirty streaks on my finger. Yeah, I'm not going to smell that finger. Ever again, probably.

“Not the cleanest place, looks like,” says someone next to me.

I turn. The blonde hair is dishevelled, but apart from that she looks like herself. “Caroline! They got you, too?”

“I think they got all of us,” she says and points.

And sure enough, all the girls who worked on the translator project are lying or sitting on the floor of what I can now see is a pretty large room with a low ceiling. Beyond them are more people. Probably thirty of them, as far as I can tell. All women, for some reason.

Somehow, having the other girls there makes this a little less bad. Not by much. But still.

“Shit,” I say, because it seems the most appropriate thing right now. “What the hell is going on?”

Caroline sweeps her hair back from her face. She's very pale and looks drawn. “We got kidnapped.”

That matches my own conclusion, but I had to ask so make sure I'm not going crazy. “By aliens,” I add. “In flying saucers. And we're in one right now.”

“That's what I think, too. Sophia, if this is some kind of science experiment you're running and the translator was just a front, then it's not valid anymore. I just called you out on it. Can't experiment on people who know they're being experimented on.”

I shake my head. “If this is an experiment, it's not mine. You think it might be one?”

She sighs. “No. I really don't. That beam ... and the roof being taken off ... shit, Sophia, I think we're in serious trouble.” Her voice is trembling and she sniffles bravely.

I scoot over to her and hug her close. Touching something other than alien metal and plastic feels good. She's a warm, breathing human and I cling to her for a couple of heartbeats, fighting down scared tears of my own.

“We'll get out of this,” I say into her ear. “We'll do whatever it takes.”

I can feel her breath settling down, just a little. “You think?”

“Yeah. We're the smartest chicks on campus. Well, you guys are. I'm not quite there myself, maybe. But I'll do my best.”

I don't know where those words come from. I'm totally convinced we're all dead and that a terrible fate awaits us all. And still I say things that sound almost optimistic. Well, it's not like there's much left to lose. Might as well believe that it will all work out. And maybe I should add a belief in fairies and Santa Claus while we're waiting for the inevitable. I mean, at this point it can't hurt.

We both calm down. “Better let me go,” Caroline whispers. “People are looking at us funny. They'll think we're a couple. Hey, not that I would mind that much, but you know ... I don't want to seem this easy.”

We giggle and I feel a lot better. Hey, maybe our kidnappers are just kind fairies taking us on a cool vacation in their fancy saucer.

I glance around the room. Nope. This isn't a cruise ship. This feels more like a cattle car. For humans. And they did rip the roof off the lab instead of just sending us a nice invitation in the mail.

“Hey, Aurora! Heidi!” I call softly to the other girls and wave them over. I want us all to be together about this. There's strength in numbers, they say. I'm sure we'll include some of the other women in here, too, but right now I want faces I recognize.

The girls stand up and have to bend over to not hit their heads on the low ceiling as they make their way over to us. Then we're together, all seven of us. We hug and sniffle a little and then giggle and joke. It strikes me that these are some cool girls. No one is screaming hysterically or chanting we're gonna die we're gonna die. You could go to war with these chicks. But I hope we won't have to. Just having them close to me makes me feel much better. There's the level-headed Caroline, the social Aurora, the active Heidi, the soft-spoken Emilia, the reserved Alesya and the fiercely bright Delyah.

And me, the stressed-out Sophia who Professor Wilkins picked to assist her with the translator project.

I think back to some movies I've seen with people being stuck in a bad place together. They always have the same kinds of characters, seems like. First there's the leader who makes everything work out in the end and who survives just fine. Then there's the bitchy one who gets killed first, there's the coward who also gets killed, there's the stupid one that everyone likes but who screws up a lot, there's the traitor who betrays them all but is killed himself and then ... who else? I don't want to be any of those.

“We'll be just fine,” I state without believing it. It's more like an automatic reflex. Okay, fine. I decide that my role in this is to be the super cheerful one, the happy-go-lucky chick, the casual girl who believes that everything will work out fine and who sometimes survives the movie and sometimes doesn't. She's usually a little bit of an airhead, too. That suits me fine. Some of the other girls are so smart they sometimes intimidate me without knowing it.

I scratch my head. “So any idea what this is and how to get back?”

As soon as the words are out I clasp my hand to my mouth. Oh no. Big mistake! That's not what the cheerful one would say, that's what the leader would say!

And now all the girls are looking at me with some kind of expectation on their faces.

“Um,” I begin. “I should not have said that. I'm not the leader. I'm the happy-go-lucky one?”

“I think,” Caroline says slowly and looks around, “that we maybe don't need a formal leader, but that you're the closest thing we've got right now. You led the project, after all.”

Ah. She may be the bitch of the story. “I'm not sure I'm even the oldest one,” I try. “Who's that? Alesya?”

The Russian girl shakes her head. “Nyet. In Russia, leader of rebellion usually die very badly. Or become evil dictator. I don't want to be any of them.”

We all look at each other and shrug. Hard to argue with that.

“Delyah?” I try. “You're the smartest one, too.”

Delyah just smiles with blindingly white teeth and shakes her head. “Don't even try, girl. You recruited us to that project. You're it.”

Huh. Two bitches in one movie? No, of course – Delyah is the unassuming genius who no one notices but who saves everyone close to the end.

“Well,” I say, “I absolutely agree with Caroline. We don't need a leader. And if we do, it isn't me. So. Where are we? And what happened, exactly?”

“They took the roof off the building and beamed us aboard,” Heidi says. “Along with a bunch of others. I saw more saucers, too, as far as the eye could see all the way to the horizon. I think they kidnapped hundreds of people. Or thousands. I think I saw them blow up some things too. There were definitely explosions. We might be the lucky ones.”

We're all silent for a moment. I hadn't thought of that. Maybe everyone else is dead and we're the only ones left.

Damn. My family might be dead! The shock hits me in the pit of my stomach and I gasp.

“Well, we don't know that,” Caroline says quickly. “We should probably base everything on the assumption that Earth still exists. If not, this could get pretty hopeless. Whatever this is. I suggest that our goal is to get home.”

We all nod in support. I'm relieved that she seems to be taking on the leadership role and not the bitch role.

I notice other women in the room gathering in little groups, too. I smile and wave at some of them. We're all in this together. And there's a lot of people here. Our kidnappers can't hope to subdue this many women at the same time.

I feel my spirits lift. “So how do we take control of this saucer?”

“Break out of here. Find the control room,” Emilia says. “Knock out the crew. Steer home.”

“Okay. How do we break out of here?” I ask, then realize I'm not being cheerful. “I mean, that's the easy part,” I add quickly. “No problem.”

“This room isn't that big,” Aurora says and looks around with her big, brown eyes. “But I can't see any doors or windows. Feels like a cargo compartment.”

Delyah stretches her neck and scans the room. “A perfectly circular cylinder, forty feet diameter, four and a half feet in height. Metal floor and ceiling. Walls of unknown material. Air with sufficient oxygen to be breathable to humans with no ill effects. Pressure about one atmosphere. Slight smell of sulfur. No visible windows or doors. One possible hatch in ceiling.”

We all turn to where she's looking. And sure enough, in the middle of the ceiling there appears to be a round hatch about the size of a manhole. Or rather, a metal circle that could be a hatch. There are no handles or lock mechanisms on it on this side.

I get to my feet and carefully walk over there, trying to avoid banging my head. I put one hand in the middle of the circle and push. And the circle gives a little, just a fraction of an inch before I have to let it back down. It's heavy. But not impossible to lift.

“Come and give me a hand,” I hiss. Two girls come over and help me push the hatch up.

“It's opening!”

It's heavy going, but we gradually push straight up on the round hatch until we're standing on tiptoe. The opening is big enough that one of us should be able to crawl through.

And now they're all looking at me again. Damn. They have a point. The happy-go-lucky one usually does a lot of dangerous stuff. I should have thought of that.

“Fine,” I say, committing to my role. “This will be a walk in the park.”

Two of the girls get on their hands and knees so that I can climb up on their shoulders. I peer into the crack between the hatch and the frame. It's just as dark there as down here, but the light is less yellow and more blueish. I slide slowly through the narrow opening. I read somewhere that if you can get your hips through somewhere, then all of you can get in. But my hips are pretty wide, and the crack is starting to feel narrow.

I jiggle and wriggle like a worm, and suddenly my hips are through and I can pull my feet up after me.

And then I'm standing on a new floor. I still have to bend over, because the ceiling is just as low here.

It's a much smaller room than the cargo room below, and the floor isn't metal, but that plastic material. It's a junction in a hallway. Six corridors radiate out and end in doors.

“What do you see?” Aurora hisses from the hatch.

I kneel down so I can give my report without raising my voice from a whisper. “It's a junction in a hallway. Six corridors radiate out and end in doors. Can I please have some company up here?”

Soon after, Caroline, Aurora and Emilia have joined me.

“Does anyone have any weapons?” I whisper. “We'll try to find the control room. And I'm not sure we can hijack this thing with our bare hands.”

We rummage through our pockets, and in the end we come up with six ballpoint pens, chewing gum and breath mints of various flavors, lab goggles, eight dollars and thirty cents, two tampons and a bunch of notepaper.

I look at the sad little heap, trying to stay cheerful. “Unless they're extremely allergic to spearmint, I'm not sure this will work. But of course we will succeed. You know, in the end.”

We ask the girls still below to come up with weapons. “Anything,” I hiss to Heidi through the crack. “Nail files. Scissors. String. Forks. I mean, someone has to have pepper spray, at least.”

I can hear the call going around down there. Surely they must be able to conjure up something.

In the end I have a surprising amount of string, but no scissors and no forks. I guess everyone was taken by surprise when they were kidnapped and didn't have time to get anything other than what they had in their pockets.

“Is that it?” I hiss to Heidi. “String?”

“That's what you asked for,” she says indignantly. “Some of the women here took the drawstring out of their sweatpants and now they have to hold them up with their hands. Oh, wait ...”

She disappears and comes up again with something black in her hand. “How about this?”

I take the thing in both hands. It's heavy.

“Oh my fuck ...”

It's a gun. Very black and matte and ugly. And I can't help but notice that it fits my hand perfectly. It's pretty small.

Heidi is talking to someone down there and relaying information to me. “Glock twenty-six,” she says. “Nine millimeter, which I hope is not how far it can shoot ... what? Okay, it's the diameter of the bullet? Sounds kind of small to me. But whatever. You have ten shots.” She peers up at me. “Is that good enough, or do you need more string?”