- Caroline -

I stare at the girl for a long moment. She’s about my age. But she’s not Sophia. Or Heidi or Delyah or Emilia or Aurora. And certainly not Alesya.

Still, there’s something familiar about her. She has long, straggly, dark hair and dark shadows under her eyes. She’s pale and she looks skinny under her rags that seem to once have been a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. She’s clearly from Earth.

“Hi,” I finally respond. “Who are you?”

“I’m Tamara. You?”

“Caroline.”

“One of those lab coat girls, right?”

I nod slowly. “That’s right.” We were wearing white coats when the Plood abducted us from the linguistics lab at the university. And now I know where I remember her from. “You were abducted too? About ten months ago? I think I remember you. Weren’t you taken by a dactyl?”

She nods jerkily. “I was taken by one of those giant bird things. It dropped me here. Along with a few others.”

The world spins around me. “How many?”

“Twelve. Including me.”

My jaw drops. “Twelve? And you’ve been living here the whole time?”

She shrugs with bony shoulders. She looks like she’s one step away from a nervous breakdown.

“Okay. Do you guys have like a cave or a camp or something?”

“Yes.” She studies me carefully. “That’s not your lab coat.”

I look down myself. That dress might be new and white, but it’s not a lab coat. At all. “That’s right. We’ve made some new clothes here.”

“We haven’t.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Huh.” This is the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had.

“Where do you live?”

“I live in a cave. With five other girls. The lab coat girls. Way over there.” I wave in the general direction of the cave.

“Do you have food and things?”

“Yes. Do you guys need that?”

“We really need it.” She reaches out one thin hand and touches mine and then grabs it, hard. “We really need it,” she says again and breaks down in tears.

I go on closer and embrace her. She’s not too clean, but right now I don’t care. It’s not like I just came out of a shower, either. Her skinny frame shakes with sobs as I hold her.

“It’s okay,” I lie soothingly. “You’ll be fine.”

She calms down and disengages, wiping her eyes. “You have to meet the others. Come on. Do you have any food on you right now?”

I do the classic ‘looking for money’ thing, patting myself down. All I have are the three throwing stars in my chest pocket. “No, not right now. Let me just drink a little more. Is this water safe?”

“I think so. We never got sick from it.”

I drink my fill and then follow Tamara into the woods.

After thirty minutes, we get to a rocky cliff with primitive lean-to huts built next to it. A bunch of girls are sitting huddled around a spluttering little fire.

They stare at me when I enter the clearing behind Tamara.

But nobody says anything. They seem like they’re paralyzed by some kind of apathy.

I walk over to them. “”Hi.”

They look terrible. They’re thin and dirty, and their clothes are probably the same ones they wore when they were abducted. The lucky ones are wearing jeans and old, dirty sweaters, while some of them have tops or skirts that they’ve clearly fashioned from leaves and bark. One of them is in a pink onesie with kitty ears, now unspeakably dirty and with holes for her feet. She must have been taken straight from her dorm room.

“She’s one of the lab coat girls,” Tamara explains.

“Does she have food? Do you have food?” one of them asks, a girl in pajama pants and a tee-shirt. Yeah, we were abducted pretty late at night. Some of them must have been in bed.

“Not on me.” Okay, so I think I’m starting to grasp what the main problem will be here.

Some of them lose interest and go back to staring at the fire. Now I see that they’re roasting something over it. It’s a bunch of roots, of the kind that the girls and I also tried before we found better plants. These ones were too tough and too hard. And they had a bitterness to them that Delyah said wasn’t a good sign.

“Lab coat girl, huh?” the girl in the pajama says. “You’re the reason we’re here in the first place.”

I know what she means, of course. Some of us did try to hijack the flying saucer after we were taken, but it failed, and the aliens executed Alesya as punishment.

“We’re really not the reason we’re here,” I state with as much force as I can muster, which is a whole fucking lot. I’m not in the mood for bullshit. “It was those fucking Plood aliens. But we might have a way to get home. And we have food. Lots of it.”

That gets them interested, and now more girls are sticking their heads out from the huts.

“Where though?” Tamara asks. “We’re trapped here. By that dragon thing.”

I nod, thinking hard. If we’re in that star shape I spotted, then we’re surrounded by Troga’s trench on all sides. Me sliding down one side of the trench and up the other sides is not something we can count on to succeed ever again.

I already know that I don’t want to stay here any longer than necessary. I have to get out. And I have to take these girls with me. I’m clearly in much better shape, having lived the past ten months or so in relative safety, with somewhat decent food and a whole lot of physical activity. Any way I look at it, I’m now responsible for getting them out. And, it occurs to me, I’ve pretty much just promised that I will.

“We have to deal with the dragon,” I state. “And we will.”

“Where are the other lab girls?” pajama girl asks.

I don’t like her tone. “I’m sorry, what’s your name? I’m Caroline.”

“Okay. Eleanor. Where are the other lab girls?”

“They’re in a cave we found. We’ve lived there for months. It’s pretty safe and we have food. But it’s on the other side of the dragon’s trench. I’m the only one on this side.”

“Can we get to that cave and the food?”

“I think we can,” I lie. “I just have to think. So you guys were dumped here by the dactyls?”

Some of the girls nod.

“It took me into its claws and just... flew,” onesie girl says. “I was sure I was dead. Those claws were so cold. Then it landed and released me, and I thought it would eat me. But it took off again. And...”

“They dumped all of us here,” Tamara says. “Then we realized that we were separated from the rest of the woods by that river bed or whatever. The glass one. Some of the girls went down into it and wanted to see where it led. We heard screaming right after. They never came back. Then another one tried it. And then...”

“The dragon came and burned her and ate her,” Eleanor says harshly. “We all saw it. The dragon lives in the trench. It doesn’t come out of it. But it tries to get us down there.”

“It will sometimes make sounds,” onesie girl says. “Like, make crying noises, sounding the way one of the girls would if she was down in the trench. It’s terrible.”

“We can’t get past that trench,” Tamara says. “But are things any better on the other side of it?”

I scratch my head and look in the direction of the treehouse. “Sometimes.”

I sit down and start telling them about what’s happened to the girls and me since we got here. I skip some details that don’t seem important, but even so, it takes me a long time to tell our story.

The girls are just listening. I don’t know if it’s from interest or because they don’t have the energy to do anything else.

Their roots seem to be cooked, and they share them equally between all twelve of them. They don’t offer me any, but that doesn’t bother me. I’ve eaten much better than them for months.

When I get to the part about Xark’on and me, I quickly decide to cut it short. “I came across a caveman who was building a trap to kill the dragon. And I helped him. We finished it yesterday. And he said that—”

Then, out of the blue, despite that short, perfunctory version of events, the whole load of emotions comes crashing over me, and I can’t stop a deep, drawn-out sob from working its way up my throat.

And then I’m just bawling my eyes out in front of twelve girls I don’t even know.

How could he do that to me?

Tamara puts a bony arm across my shoulders and keeps it there until I can get a hold of myself.

“Anyway,” I say, wiping tears from my eyes, “there’s a way to kill the dragon. The trap is still there.”

“How would that work?” Tamara asks.

I tell them about the trap, trying to avoid seeing Xark’on in my mind’s eye. But it’s impossible, and I have to concentrate to not break down again.

“So, to get to the trap we have to get across the trench,” Eleanor says. “Did you miss the part where we said that’s impossible?”

I sigh. “I didn’t miss it. But I got across it. It’s hard but not impossible.”

“Yeah, so, we don’t care about killing that dragon. We just want to get across that trench. There are some people there who have helped us.”

I frown. “There are?”

“Huge men with green stripes. They sometimes toss food over to us.”

“Well, one of them did,” Tamara said. “A really big one. Muscles like... well. But then he stopped doing that. About two weeks ago.”

I feel dizzy. Suddenly things are falling into place. That man she’s describing — that has to be Xark’on.

The Treasure Xark’on was talking about. That’s these girls.

They’re his Treasure. That’s how things would get so much better for his tribe. They’d have women.

He would kill the dragon so that the tribe could come and take the girls. Then they would have women. And I’m sure he was planning to take one for himself.

That’s why he didn’t react that much to meeting me. He’d already seen women here on Xren. He was sure he’d get one of them.

And that’s why he didn’t start digging the trap until long after the dragon had come here. He had to discover the women first. That fired him up enough to start working.

So when I came along, of course he would think of me as bait for the trap. After all, with Troga dead, the tribe would have access to twelve women to use as sex toys. One woman in exchange for twelve. The math checks out.

So fucking cold, though. So ice cold and evil to use me like that.

But I’m sure he would get first pick of these girls.

He would give them food, of course. That sounds just like him. Tossing it over the trench with his huge strength. And then he lost interest. About two weeks ago. Because he started spending all his time with me.

I don’t blame him for the things that happened before I came here. He’s a virile, energetic man, vibrantly alive. Of course he wanted a woman. He wouldn’t be real if he didn’t. And these girls needed help.

But using me like that... no. Just no.

“Yeah,” I say at last, with my soul reduced to cold ashes. “I’ve met those guys. But I don’t think they want good things for you. I think they want you to be their slaves.”

Eleanor spits something onto the fire, making it hiss. “Why do you think that?”

I try to blink away more acid tears. “Because they’re some mean, treacherous fuckers.”