"Because they haven't taken me or the other pregnant ladies," Ava pointed out. Across from us, in a different cell, three Cryons were herding several women out before they turned to our cell.
Fear spread inside me. I didn't need to be a rocket scientist to have a pretty good idea of what happened to the women when the Cryons came for them alone. I had considered that maybe it would be a good opportunity to escape, but in the end, I had chickened every time and hid in the back.
Ava was right, too. The Cryons didn't pick her or me. Not that day. But not much later, they took all of us from the cell and herded us through seemingly endless corridors.
I froze when we passed a window and probably would have stood there until a Cryon prodded me forward had Ava not nudged me on. But the sight of a deep, red planet—not Mars, I was sure of it—surrounded by two moons and stars was surreal enough to bring the message home: Iwasn't in Kansasor on Earth anymore.
A shuttle took us down, all five hundred and eighty-three people—I counted because evenstatisticsmatter. They took us to the most despairing planet in the universe one could imagine. It was a place straight out of a nightmare. Tall, red mountains surrounded a pitiful, dirty camp filled with alien beings that made the movieDistrict 9look like a Disney production.
We were herded into one of the barracks, past aliens who regarded us with the hungry eyes of predators. Our arms were unbound, and each of us received a metallic collar around our neck that we were told would explode if we wandered away from thecamp. The others were crying, including Ava, but my heart filled with hope. Not only was I unbound, I finally had something I could work with—if I could ever move my arms again. The pain in them was more excruciating than anything I had ever experienced. Quite a few of my fellow prisoners fell into hysterics, only to be hit with an electro-prod and thrown to the ground.
It was eerily disquieting to see my arms, hands, and fingers, but to be unable to move them in any way. My brain screamed at my fingers to bend, but they didn't budge. Had it not been for the pain raging through me, I would have thought they weren't even attached to me any longer.
Several Cryons moved some kind of metallic short stick over our arms, instantly relieving the pain. Then, without further mercy, the Cryons moved us toward a looming crater in the center of the camp. Metallic ladders led down so deep that there was no end in sight, only darkness. Creatures, the likes of which I didn’t have the words to describe, moved up and down those ladders, carrying large containers on their backs.
"This is some kind of mine," one of the men, Tom, observed.
We lined up, and the most backbreaking day in my life began. Down the ladder with the empty container strapped to my back. Fill it with rocks that others working down below pried from the mountains. Climb the ladder under the weight of the load. Empty and repeat. For hours. I lost track of Ava for the rest of the day and only saw her again when we broke for dinner, where we were served the same kind of slop the Cryons had filled the troughs in our cells with.
There were no tables or chairs inside the makeshift mess hall—just a line of workers snaking their way up to a humongous square cauldron. Bowls were stacked right on the dirt. Aliens, also wearing collars, filled the bowls and handed them out.
I held Ava back when I noticed some of the alien prisoners fighting with each other over the bowls of food they had received. A snarling one exposed fangs and claws, and the other, a spiked tail. Blue and green blood sprayed the bystanders who got too close and ruined what little appetite I might have had. Not that appetite mattered. We needed to eat. Ava even more than me.
"What do we do?" she asked.
An especially menacing-looking brute with green skin and four eyes walked up to a human man who had rushed forward to get a bowl of slop. The creature was much taller and more massive than the human. The human didn't offer any resistance when the creature ripped the bowl out of his hands. Still, the alien pushed against the man's face, pushing him back hard enough to break his neck.
"Oh my God," Ava turned into me and clung to my neck. "Oh my God," she repeated.
That wasn’t an isolated incident. Out of the five hundred and eighty-three humans who shared the shuttle with us down to this hellhole, only two hundred and twenty were left alive the next morning, and I knew that, for Ava and me, time was running out.
"There is nowhere to go here," Ava cried when I told her she needed to be ready for our departure today.
"Whatever is out there can't be worse than what's in here," I pointed out. "At least out there, we'd have a chance."
Her expression mirrored my own skepticism. I was talking out of my ass, and we both knew it. Just like we both knew that I was right. We hadn't eaten last night or this morning, and unless we were willing to risk death just to get a swallow of the slop, I didn’t see that we would anytime soon.
"But how? What will you do? And what about these things?" Ava pointed at the collars around our necks.
"I'll create a distraction—a big one," I said in the most confident voice I could muster. I spent the day yesterday observing. There were plenty of tools all around us. The Cryons didn't seem worried about us using them as weapons, and why would they be? They had blasters, and they didn't care about us prisoners. Besides, most prisoners already had plenty of weapons—horns, scales, tails, claws, and God knows what else.
I had also noticed a path—a path leading up to one of the mountains—and a small fissure in the rock through which I could see the other side. Not that I could make out much of what lay there, but desperate times and all that.
I made sure Ava stayed with me during the day. All I needed was a distraction. Long enough for us to make it unnoticed up that pass and into that fissure. All the while praying our damn collars wouldn't go off and kill us. But by my estimation, we climbed over three miles down the ladder into the crater, so it stood to reason that we had three miles out of this valley of death before our heads exploded.
A distraction and time were needed. I already had a tool. One I snatched up yesterday. It looked like a screwdriver, but its head changed circumference and shape. If anything could get the collars open, this was it.Are you willing to bet your and Ava's lives on it, little girl? I threw an uncertain glance at Ava's swollen belly and thought of the baby inside. Did I know if I could pick the lock without blowing us to smithereens? No! Did I know if we would find food and water on the other side? No! Did I have any idea what lay on the other side—possibly predators with acid for blood or terrain that wanted to eat us alive? Absolutely not! What I knew with absolute certainty, though, was that if we stayed here, we would die—all three of us. Maybe not tonight, perhaps not tomorrow, but we would. I didn't have the right to make that decision for Ava. I knew I was pushing the boundaries of the trust she had developed for me, but she knew as well as I did what our choices were. And shewasfollowing me.
A scuffle broke out by the edge of the crater. One of the prisoners—an alien with glistening black skin and six twisted limbs—lashed out, tearing into another with a guttural shriek. The second one collapsed, spraying a thick, oily fluid across the crater floor. It hissed where it hit the dirt, steaming like engine grease on a hotplate.
My breath caught.
That stuff—could it be flammable? Was it greasy enough to conduct heat? My brain fired through possibilities as the guards shouted, distracted. I scanned the crater. There! Half-buried in the dust was a jagged piece of metal stuck up like a broken rib. With the screwdriver I liberated yesterday, this just might work. I didn’t have time to plan or second-guess. Sometimes, you have to grab the opportunity when you see it and act. I moved.
"Alice, what are you doing?" Ava shouted after me, but I didn't pay her any attention.
I rushed to the lip of the crater, heart pounding so hard I thought the collar might go off from the vibration alone. I jammed the screwdriver between the stone and the metal edge, just like I’d lit campfires with flint in the Catskills.
Nobody was paying any attention to me as more scuffling broke out around me. Probablyfriendsof the dead alien.
