Meila's Story - From the Beginning

Dear reader,

When I was in the midst of writing Meila's story, I developed complications related to my pregnancy which prevented me from writing. It's been so long since I worked on this story, I no longer remember many key elements of the plot. I've decided to take a break from this story to work on my newest piece of interactive fiction. I might return to Meila's story some day, but I cannot be sure right now. If you'd like, feel free to read the first four installments. I hope you enjoy them.

Meila's Story - Segments #1-4

There’s something to be said for the sleep of the righteous. Slipping into dreams within seconds of closing your eyes, floating along as image after lovely, fanciful image carries you gently down the path from tired to rested so that you might awake refreshed and ready for the next day.

This was not the sleep of Meila Vex.

Meila tossed from her left side to her right, seeking in slumber the comfort she tried so hard to pretend she didn’t need when awake. She turned from back to stomach, her unconscious body’s attempt to hide from the nightmares that plagued her. And still, in sleep, she suffered.

Dreams have a way of reminding the flawed of their mistakes, and regret is not a thing so easily loosed when the damaged close their eyes.

When Meila woke, it was on a gasp of pure terror, her heart believing fully the vision that had shot her from sleep to wake. For a moment, she just lay there, feeling the galloping of an organ that seemed not to be made for such furious movement. On nights like this, she wondered how long her heart could sustain such speed before it simply gave out.

When images of the dream continued to haunt her even as her body calmed, she sat and pressed her fingertips to her forehead. At the movement, a vicious headache roared behind her eyes, and her heart rate spiked again, and the dream reared forth with its ugly message of blame.

“Not your fault,” she whispered. “Not your fault.”

Of course, saying was different than believing.

The black of the room suggested the ultra-dark of predawn hours, when the moon had fallen away but the sun had yet to rise. She didn’t have to get up for a while yet, but there was no way she’d be getting back to sleep. Groaning against the hangover, she reached for the nightstand to check the time on her phone.

Only, the nightstand wasn’t there.

Meila stilled, frowned. Wondered if she’d somehow gotten turned around so that she’d slept with her head at the foot of the bed. But as she moved her hand in that direction, it smacked into something hard, sending a sharp spear of pain running up her arm.

“What the hell?”

Oddly, it was the confusion in her voice more so than the rap of her hand against an object that should not have been there that caused unease to ripple along her spine. Cautious in the lack of light – and with the motion-induced headache, she reached her fingers out slowly, slowly, jumping slightly when they made contact with something solid, even though she now knew it was there. And when she ran those fingers over that long, straight, and unyielding mystery, she realized it was a wall.

But her bed was supposed to be in the center of the room.

She stood on legs that weren’t quite steady, with a stomach that turned in protest, only to find cold, hard floor under her feet where her rug should have been. Careful, inching steps forward on that floor with arms stretched out before her brought her quickly – too quickly – to the opposite wall. A wall that was perfectly flat, without pictures or even empty picture hooks.

She’d taken down all the pictures of Alec, but there should be more, shouldn’t there? She’d left some of her family, hadn’t she?

She frowned again, tried to remember the details of the previous night’s drunken purge through the fog of a hangover that seemed stronger than it should have been. She remembered yanking Alec’s pictures off the walls, emboldened by the courage of tequila, but she didn’t remember moving the furniture. She sure as hell didn’t remember spackling the walls smooth again.

As her unease deepened, she searched for the light switch. Instead, she found what felt like acres of silken wall, unmarred by windows or shelves, unblocked by furniture. Until she found the panel.

Just a small, slightly raised piece of…something. Metal? With two round buttons on it, one above the other, each the size of a poker chip. That was the moment she knew – the moment she understood that pretense was the antithesis of self-preservation. No matter how much she wished to make sense of what was happening in a way that would not terrify, there was only one possible explanation.

She was not at home.

With shaking hands, she pressed the top button on the panel. At once, a searing white light flooded the room. She cried out as the bright of it scorched her eyes and then put a hand over her mouth to stifle the sound. In the time it took her vision to adjust, a dozen possibilities skittered through her mind as to what she might find here, each of them worse than the last. But slowly, the room revealed itself to her, and she could see that it was nothing she’d imagined.

Just a small, simple space, with walls and floor of black glass. A bed against the opposite wall, no windows, no decorations. Nothing else, in fact, save for the panel with the two buttons.

And the big metal door that boasted no handle of any sort.

Breath beginning to come in shudders that shook her whole body, Meila looked slowly back at the panel. She tried frantically to think of all the options available to her, but she could see only one that was viable in any way. She wiped suddenly damp palms on the pants she’d fallen asleep in the night before, and then she pressed the second button. That giant door slid slowly open, one solid hunk of metal that grated against the floor, sending a cloud of pulverized glass to puff gently at her feet.

And then Meila saw what lay beyond that door, and her heart lurched once at the sight.

It was a room, large, sterile, unfamiliar. But not empty. There were people, not ten feet from where she stood. At least fifteen strangers that she could see, each sitting on utilitarian furniture in utter silence. They were all facing the same direction – something to Meila’s right. She glanced over automatically, but she saw only a stretch of wall marked with three steel, handleless doors. A chill rose up her spine as she looked back at those people, with their inhuman stillness and their lack of noise. She got the inexplicable and undeniable sense that they were waiting for something, and then she had a horrifying thought.

Perhaps they were waiting for her.

She braced, sure they would turn toward her, but they didn’t. They just sat there, staring at that wall in that strange, mindless way that made her stomach clench. She started to back up, into the room that a moment before had felt like a prison and now beckoned with the promise of sanctuary, but she stopped herself. Something about their stillness suggested that any movement, no matter how slight, might attract their attention. The fact that the door hadn’t already distracted them seemed a miracle, and not one to be wasted. So she stood as still as they, willed her heart to stop racing in her chest, and tried to figure out where she was.

She’d never seen the room before; that much was certain. She’d have remembered a room like this, although it seemed oddly designed for the opposite. There was nothing remarkable about this room other than its sterility. The walls were blank, the furniture so plain as to be indescribable and perfectly symmetric, so that a person wouldn’t know what end of the room they stood on if they’d entered the room a hundred times. There were no windows, no outside view to provide a sense of direction or location. And everything was colorless. Not white, not grey, not beige, but a strange no-color that refused to be labeled. Even the people seemed colorless, their pale skin almost blending in with their drab clothing, so that in their motionlessness, they were almost perfectly camouflaged with the rest of the room.

The only exception to this no-color was the fireplace. It rose up from the center of the room, a great, shining monstrosity that seemed to be made of the same black glass that walled the room she still occupied. It blocked the sight of whatever lay beyond it, but she suspected that, where she to somehow see through it, she would see only more of the same.

She wondered briefly if Alec’s family had something to do with this, but she rejected the idea almost immediately. They hated her, of that there was no question. But theirs was a passionate hate, a red hate, the kind that came at you head-on and left no doubt as to who drove the attack. There was no room for such fury in this colorless room.

But there was certainly danger. She had to find a way out – preferably without all of these strange automatons noticing she was ever here in the first place.

But even as she had the thought, a low pitched tone rang out behind her. She jumped and turned before she could stop herself, but even if she’d kept perfectly still, it wouldn’t have mattered. The tone rang again, and then the door, that massive steel thing which had moved so laboriously before, swung quickly shut, pushing her out into the room.

The second her bare foot hit the cold, colorless floor, each person in the room turned their heads toward her with one eerily singular movement.

Instinctively, she tried to step back, but of course, there was only steel behind her.

The strangers stood, perfectly synchronized, as if they were not several individuals but one person occupying several bodies. They took one step toward her, each of them moving without hesitation, some of them having to step onto furniture to perpetuate the forward motion.

The movement seemed designed to terrify. Telling herself she was done with that – no way she was going to let these people intimidate her – Meila straightened her back, fisted her hands at her sides.

You are not a victim, she told herself. You will never be a victim again.

And she asked, her tone hard and unyielding, “Where am I?”

They took another step, silent, staring at her as intently as they’d previously stared at the wall. And they took another step, and another.

“Hey! HEY!” She yelled it, loud and sharp as she could, and they stopped. For a second, she thought she saw something flicker in the eyes of some of them, but it was gone before she could even be sure it was there.

Still, it gave her the impression that she’d gained their attention. “Where am I?” she repeated.

This time, they answered. They spoke in a chorus, their movements identical even down to the rise and fall of their tongues.

“The Joining Room.”

She frowned, chilled for reasons beyond what she could consciously process. “The joining room? What-”

“Join Us.”

They took another step. She glanced around the room, searching for a way out, even as her hands ran over the wall next to the door at her back. She found what she was looking for: a panel with one raised button. She hoped like hell that it did what she thought it would.

“Who are you?” she asked, her finger poised over the button.

“We are The Collective. Come join Us.” And they moved forward again, stretching their arms toward her as if they meant to caress her – or to grab her.

She pressed the button under her fingers, and she heard with sweeping relief the sound of the door opening slowly behind her. She pressed her back against it, trying to hurry it along, willing it to move faster. The moment it was open enough for her to slip through the crack, she did so – even as a part of her wondered why they didn’t seem concerned about her escape.

As soon as she was through the door, she bodily pushed it shut, not bothering to find the button on this side of the wall. Then, for a moment, she just stood there, eyes closed, heart racing, forehead against the cool metal, and wondered what the hell she would do now. Of course, the obvious answer was that she needed a weapon. And the only thing in this room that might provide that was the bed. If she could somehow take it apart…

A shuffle sounded behind her, a low, widespread whisper of movement like the sound of a tarp being spread across grass. She stiffened, suddenly sure of what she would find when she turned around, even though her fears were impossible. She opened her eyes, and she turned.

And she was back where she started.

She was in the sterile room, the Joining Room. The strangers were there, watching her as if mildly curious to see what she would do next, their arms still outstretched. Their faces, their clothing, everything about them was so similar, so nondescript, that she couldn’t tell if these were the same people she’d just escaped.

But it didn’t matter, because she hadn’t actually escaped.

Her back to the door, she found the button beside it again, her fingers moving with an instinctive sort of terror that the rest of her wanted desperately to ignore. But the button wouldn’t help. Much as she wished to believe otherwise, she didn’t have the time for such self-indulgence. What seemed impossible had happened. She’d stepped through the door but gone nowhere.

A horrible sense of whiteness descended on her. Not the no-color of the room, but a blank, pristine, frozen sense of inevitability. For a moment, as she watched those people watch her, she could actually feel the rest of the world slipping away. Her home, melting, and she thought that if she stayed her long enough, she wouldn’t even remember it anymore. Alec’s family, the bridge, the bloodied rug that she’d burned the moment she was allowed – all gone. Even the room she’d left minutes before, the glass-walled room with the bed. None of it existed, and there was only this room. These horrible, bloodless strangers with their mysterious purpose.

The Collective.

They moved toward her again, and she almost couldn’t run. But suddenly, a bright, hot panic flooded her, burning away the white, and her limbs broke their paralysis. She didn’t try to return to the glass room – she understood that to do so would be futile. This time she moved to the right. There were doors on each wall, three of them. Though her heart didn’t believe they’d take her anywhere but exactly where she didn’t want to be, she had to try.

One of the strangers grazed her arm with their fingers as she passed, but she shook off the hand, not bothering to see if it belonged to a man or a woman. She whimpered in the back of her throat, a sound of disgust more than fear, and her legs pumped furiously.

She opened the middle door. It had a button, just like the others, and when she pressed it, the door slid slowly away from her. Just like the other had. But this time, she didn’t step through. The strangers were moving toward her now, with their slow, eerie steps and their grasping, outstretched hands, but she wasn’t about to run into something unknown. Not again.

Only, when the door opened, she realized that it wasn’t unknown. At least, not in the way that she’d expected.

The door opened from the Joining Room – to the Joining room.

She saw, on the other side of the threshold, the room she stood in now. The symmetrical furnishings were there, the huge fireplace, the colorless people. They faced away from her in that room, toward the opposite wall. She couldn’t see what they stared at; the fireplace was in the way. But she knew, suddenly she knew with a horrible finality exactly what they saw.

They saw her, standing in front of an open door, staring at the same scene she watched now.

She could see it as if she stood above the room, an entity with the curse of omniscience. It was almost like a room lined with mirrors. The kind that made it so that when you looked at one wall, all you saw was a repeated reflection of the room itself, so that it seemed to stretch forward into infinity.

Only with this, nothing reflected back at her. If she stepped through this door, she would end up behind herself. She could, theoretically, run forward forever, from this door to the one opposite it, and never go anywhere at all.

The thought reminded her of her dream. Of Alec, falling away from her into unending darkness, but never, somehow, getting any further from her than just out of her reach.

Oddly, the memory comforted even as it twisted her heart. It anchored her, reminded her that there was a still world beyond this room. The insanity of the last few minutes was not the true reality of her life, and these people, this impossible situation – none of it could really make the rest of the world melt away. The knowledge of that, the relief of it, gave her the strength to turn, to confront the group that watched her still.

And when they attacked, it gave her the strength to fight back.

They rushed forward with shocking speed, so fast that it took her a moment to realize only the four people in front had moved. For the first time, the Collective was not moving entirely as one.

The four, two men and two women, came at her with the flat, expressionless faces of the dead. One of the men reached her first. He swung the blade of his hand at her neck with vicious force, and he almost made contact before her training kicked in.

She ducked the blow, and on her way up, she rammed her fist into his solar plexus. As the breath wooshed out of his lungs, she kicked his instep with the heel of her bare foot and then thrust her elbow up against his nose. Finally, she brought one knee up, hard, into his groin.

He dropped, a wheezing, bleeding mess, suddenly completely separate from the hive. And she thought, Thank God for self-defense classes.

The other three came at her then, and she found herself acting on instinct she hadn’t even known she’d possessed. She’d taken a few kickboxing classes, some krav maga, one lonely, long-ago karate class when she was twelve. And, of course, the barrage of therapist recommended self-defense classes for women. SING, hard-goes-to-bone, anything is a weapon. Don’t lose your head. The litany of advice she’d gleaned from those once resented nighttime classes seemed now to pull together every bit of training – however meager – that she’d ever had. She was able to call it forth now in one cohesive, although admittedly less than graceful, form of attack that at least kept these robots from doing any real damage.

As she fought, time lost all meaning, so that when the onslaught suddenly stopped, she couldn’t quite get her bearings at first. Four of them – four!! – lay on the floor around her, incapacitated in one way or another.

And she was still standing. Bleeding, hurting, but miraculously still standing.

She looked out at the others, that now smaller group of strangers who still watched her, expressionless. She had no sense from the looks on their faces whether or not they’d anticipated her successful defense. There was nothing in them to indicate what they intended to do now: no intent, no surprise.

Except…

There. A man near the fireplace. Standing with the others, but slack-jawed. Staring at her not with flat nothingness, but with disbelief. When she met his eyes, she felt a jolt, as if some part of her recognized him. She later realized that what she recognized was another sentient being.

Another non-member of this savagely apathetic Collective.

As four more members of the group broke away and began to make their way toward her, the man glanced at them and then back at her. He seemed to consider for a moment, and then, as the new four took another step toward her, he nodded once, a sharp, decisive movement.

He said, “This way!”

And he slid, feet first, toward the fireplace.

She watched, stunned, as his feet disappeared into the black hole at the bottom of that four-sided pillar.

And then his legs.

And then his torso.

And then his head, and he was gone.

She’d expected him to come flying out the other side, to slide through the thing instead of somehow into it, just as she’d done with the door. But he didn’t. And she realized that it wasn’t a fireplace at all, but a portal of some sort, an entrance, a doorway.

The only one that mattered in this room.

Some of the people who’d stood near him seemed momentarily distracted by his break-from-the-group movements, but the moment he’d disappeared down the fireplace, they turned back to her. She was reminded of how they hadn’t noticed her at all until the moment her feet had touched this floor, and she wondered if their odd and singular attention was limited to only the contents of this room. And in almost the same moment, she realized that she didn’t care.

He’d shown her how to escape, and she was damn well going to follow him.

There was a lamp in each corner of the room, colorless, somehow shapeless, sitting on utterly interchangeable side tables. She dove for the nearest one, reaching it just as the new four changed direction toward her. She swung the thing into her new attackers, relishing in the crack! of metal on flesh, cherishing the sing of the impact up her arms.

The blow was enough to knock the first two down, but she’d lost the momentum with the second two. She switched the lamp around in her hands, so that the heavy glass base would make contact next, and then she jabbed it into the stomach of the nearest attacker, and then up into his jaw. He crumpled into the legs of the fourth man, and she seized the moment of his distraction.

With every ounce of strength she had, she dug her feet into the ground, propelled herself with strong thighs and stronger will through the thinning throng.

And she slid into the fireplace.

*          *          *

He’d thought it would be like sliding into first. The quick, bright whip of pain as the body slammed into the ground, the friction of hip-thigh-calf against dirt, the rush of satisfaction as you slip past the ball and pop up, safe and ready for action.

Instead, it was the shocking agony of an  ice bath, breaking the delirium of a fever you hadn’t even known had you in its grip.

The cold rippled along his body from toe to scalp, a rush of frost that left him shivering even as he dropped into the warmth of a summer day. It was so pervasive, that cold, that it took him a moment to realize that the source of it was nowhere in sight. Even then, it didn’t fully register until he saw the woman begin to materialize above him. Out of thin air, four feet above his head, she emerged: Toes, feet, pajama-clad legs, slim torso, a pair of truly excellent breasts – he was lost, bewildered, and completely freaked out, but he wasn’t dead – and then her face.

And then he realized she was going to land right on top of him, and he rolled over just in time.

Of course, that meant that she landed hard on her side next to him, and judging by the whoosh of air that pushed toward him, got the breath knocked out of her for her efforts.

He winced in sympathy, mentally called himself an idiot – although, if he was fair, there probably wasn’t any way for him to have caught her without injuring both of them – and crawled over to her.

“It’s ok,” he said softly, not entirely sure that they were alone. “You’re going to be ok.”

Her hair was in her face, strands of it stuck to blood that was still flowing freely, and when she didn’t move in response to his voice, he wondered if she was unconscious. Concerned, he gently moved her hair to check her pupils – only to find her eyes open on his.

And then, before he could smile reassuringly, her fist shot out and caught him in the balls.

“What the-” His voice petered out on a wheeze before he could finish the question, and he bowled over as she jumped up on bare feet, ready – he was sure – to kick him while he was down. He held up a hand in defense, the other still cupped protectively around his sac, and watched with a mix of relief and supreme irritation as her polish-free toes backed slowly out of his view.

For a moment, he just hunched there, willing the grey at the edges of his vision to recede. When he was finally able to stand, he did so slowly, cautiously, one hand still guarding his balls. But she was already several feet away, her back to him, studying their surroundings as she moved in what seemed to be a steadily growing circle. He realized he could just barely see her underwear through her pajamas, but any male interest that might have arisen from such a sight had been firmly squashed – he winced at the poor choice of words – by one well-placed punch.

“You know I’m on your side, right?”

Meila didn’t jump at the question, but it was close. Her whole body seemed to twitch constantly, the jittery aftermath of a fight that had caught her by surprise combined with her body’s inability to understand if it had won. By the looks of what she saw, it hadn’t. Not yet.

“Did you hear me? I just saved your ass back there.”

She turned and waited for the irritation in his voice to spike her nerves. When it didn’t, when she found her shoulders straightening instead under that brilliantly green – and clearly angry – stare, she allowed herself one small breath of relief.

“First of all,” she said, “no, you didn’t. I saved my own ass. Second, I don’t know that you’re on my side. You were with them. For all I know, this is just part of their creepy little plan to lure me to who-the-hell-knows-what. Third, I barely touched you. I could have done much worse. Fourth…”

She trailed off for a moment. Reason was starting to kick in, and with it, an analysis of the events of the past few minutes that reminded her that he had indeed saved her ass. It was a miracle that she’d taken out eight people with the meager level of amateur training she had. There was no way she’d have been able to battle the entire room.

And even if she had, would she have figured out how to escape?

“It was instinct. If you weren’t trying to hurt me,” she added grudgingly, “I owe you an apology.”

He just stared at her in silence, uncharacteristic annoyance still simmering inside him. When she began to squirm under that stare, he said, “You owe me an apology.”

She opened her mouth to argue – actually, to say that she’d just apologized – and then she realized how petty that would be. She let out a sigh of frustration, shook her head at herself, and said, “I’m sorry. It really was instinct. I didn’t even recognize you; I just reacted.”

The honesty didn’t cost her as much as she’d expected. Remembering that it used to simply be her way, she decided that it could be again. Resolute, she thrust out her hand and walked toward him. “I’m Meila. And I’m scared shitless right now.”

She surprised a snort out of him, and he found himself taking her hand with less reluctance than he might have expected. “Aden. And believe it or not, I’m a hell of a lot less scared than I was before I saw you kick ass back there. Where did you learn all that stuff?”

Instead of answering his question, she asked, “What was that place?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t you hear them? It’s the Joining Room. Jesus.” He rubbed a hand over his hair, shook his head. “I never saw it before I woke up there, and I didn’t see anything else until I slipped down the garbage chute.”

He frowned and looked around. They were in a small clearing, he saw now, in the middle of a forest that grew so high and thick he could barely see the pale, cloudless blue of the sky through the trees.

And there wasn’t a soul – dead or alive – in sight.

“Come to think of it,” he said, almost to himself, “where are all the bodies?”

“Bodies?” Meila grabbed his arm as he started to turn away from her. “Why would there be bodies?”

Before he could explain, they heard the sound of an engine thrumming in the distance. It was a strange sound, somehow eerily familiar, with a ONE-two-three-ONE-two-three-ONE…ONE-two-three sound that was accompanied by a rhythmic swish of air and displaced leaves.

He realized that the source of that almost recognizable sound was getting closer, and he suddenly understood why there were no bodies here.

“Shit. We have to go.” He grabbed her arm and began to pull her toward the trees.

Meila’s heart lurched in time with the touch of his hand, and she found herself rooted to the ground, staring at those wide, blunt-tipped fingers wrapped so easily around the thin flesh of her forearm. She wondered when she’d last allowed a man who wasn’t family to touch her, but of course she immediately knew the answer: before Alec. Any touch from a man other than family was pre-Alec – other than the assholes who’d tried to hurt her minutes ago.

And the old, sick fear trickled in like venom, winding its way through the sensitive skin near her elbow. She imagined it slithering into her veins, coursing through her body, until she was paralyzed with it. The pride she’d felt at staring down an angry man dissipated, and she wondered if she would ever really be herself again.

Then he said, “Lady, come on! Meila!”

And the paralysis broke, and she was running with him into the strange deep green of the forest.

But only seconds after they started to run, a shrill, ear-splitting tone rang out, like a siren or an alarm. Meila prepared to bolt, suddenly finding reserves of strength she hadn’t known she possessed, when Aden yanked her down to the ground. She looked up at him in shock, terrified that she’d been wrong to trust him. He put a finger over his lips to signal silence and then gestured with his head back toward the clearing.

Meila turned slowly, carefully, as sure now as she’d been in the Joining Room that the slightest movement might call attention to her. But she needn’t have worried.

One glance at the thing that hovered in the clearing, and she knew there was nothing living inside of it.

It was round, about seven feet in diameter, and translucent. The skin of the thing – for she could think of no word that better described the material of the hull than skin – glowed a thin, bluish-white light that pulsed brighter in time with the sound of the engine.

Only, she could see through the thing, clear to the trees on the other side, and there was no engine visible.

Just bodies.

Five of them, as far as she could tell, stacked in a layered pattern with their feet toward the circumference of the vessel so that their heads were staggered atop one another in a grotesque pattern that reminded her, horribly, of shoe laces. The pristine blue-white glow of the vessel was marred where the bodies rested by blood and other fluids she preferred never to identify.

The thing let out that alarm-sound again, and then, through no mechanism that she could see, the bodies within it rose until they appeared to be floating inside the container. The bottom of the thing opened, and the sound grew exponentially louder: ONE-two-three-ONE-two-three-ONE, with accompanying gusts of air that, on the down beat, actually fluttered Meila’s hair from her face.

And with that small, seemingly inconsequential push of air, dread filled her. It wasn’t the dread of the unknown, or even of the possibility of danger.

This was the fear of a threat both imminent and horribly familiar.

When Aden’s grip tightened on her arm, she knew without looking at him that he felt it, too. She shuddered, and neither of them moved until long after the vessel flew away.

*          *          *

They decided to walk in the direction the vessel had seemed to go. When they first heard the thing, Aden had intended to run in the opposite direction – and to stop only when salvation was found. After that chilling surge of familiarity, he’d known that simply running away wasn’t an option.

He had the feeling – which only grew the farther they walked – that salvation would have to be taken, not found.

Meila ignored the roots that bruised her feet, the pine needles that dug in and stung. There was no point in wishing for shoes. Even if the guy – Aden – had chivalrously tried to give her his, they wouldn’t have fit. He had to be over six feet tall. No way that was meshing with her five-three.

And that was yet another small victory. Her therapist would have been thrilled. After all, when was the last time she’d stood this close to a man that big and not had to fight the urge to shrink away? Of course, she knew the answer right away. It was always the same.

Still. Kudos to her for not being such a damn pansy.

She sighed and slid a glance at him. She needed to find out what he knew, if she was going to have any chance of getting out of this. But he obviously wasn’t up for talking. The moment they’d felt that sense of familiarity – and she knew he’d felt it, too – he’d gone ashen. He’d gotten all still and quiet, and the impression he’d given before that he wanted to understand this as much as she had simply disappeared. She had to snap him out of it.

“Please tell me that wasn’t a flying saucer.”

It took a moment for her words to sink in, and then he just stopped and stared at her. At first, she thought it wouldn’t work. But then he threw back his head and laughed, and she felt a trickle of relief.

“God, I hope not.”

He started walking again, but now his gait was different. Looser, and a little more natural. She took it as a sign that he was ready to talk.

“How did you know there would be bodies?”

He looked down and over at her at the question. She was pretty, in a petite, delicate sort of way, even with her jaw swelling and darkening on one side and the tree of blood drying on her face like a macabre tattoo. Her build was small and slim, her features gentle – almost fragile. Except for her eyes. She had these dark, exotic, and somehow haunted eyes that hinted at depths the surface denied. He imagined that if he’d met her anywhere else, he wouldn’t have taken the time to look into those eyes. The rest of the package would have fooled him, and he would have lost interest immediately. He would have assumed her weak, someone who needed to be taken care of. He wondered if that was how others saw her.

Out in the real world.

“Before you got there, I saw them kill three people. Each time, they threw them down the chute. Or…not down, I guess. There was no hole. They’d just slide them along the floor there, under that thing that looked like a fireplace, and the people would disappear.”

“Why didn’t you go through it before?”

He shrugged. “For all I knew, it sent them to an incinerator.”

“So you sent me down there?”

He held up a hand and took a deep breath. “Maybe I’d better start from the beginning. If my guess is accurate, four nights ago I fell asleep on my cousin’s couch. Next morning, I woke up in one of those rooms.”

“Four nights ago.” Meila shuddered. “Jesus.”

“Yeah. Two other people got there same time as me: a man and a woman. They touched the woman first. Just walked toward her, all creepy like they did you, and touched her arm. And she changed instantly. It was like flipping a switch. One second she looked totally freaked, ready to make a run for it. The next second, she was flat. Eyes glazed over, face blank, body all stiff and slow. And when they turned toward the man, she did, too. They didn’t have to tell her what to do, explain anything. She was just…one of them.

“The guy started to panic. Yelling, demanding to be told what was happening, eyes bugging out like you wouldn’t believe. You could see the sweat pop out on his forehead, all at once, like a…” Guilt reared up at the unflattering analogy that sprang to mind. Shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, he told himself. Shaking his head, he continued. “Anyway, when they touched him, I thought he would change, too. But instead, he just…flipped out. Pushed them, started screaming. Spit flying everywhere. He tried to force his way through the crowd, and one of them hit him in the back of the skull. Right there.”

He turned his head away and gestured toward the spot where the spine met the brain stem. When he turned back to her, his eyes were haunted. “That was it. He died, right then. One guy brought him down with one hit. I did what you did: tried to run back the way I’d come. You know how that worked out. And that’s when I knew. I wasn’t getting out of there. So when the touched me, and I didn’t feel any different, I decided to pretend.”

“For three days. How did you keep them from seeing that you were still…you?”

He shook his head, shrugged. “It actually wasn’t that hard. Once they think they have you, they stop looking at you. I just watched them out of the corner of my eye, did what they did. They took my clothes, my watch, gave me these.” He plucked at the colorless garments he word with distaste. “So I even started to look like them. Every once in a while, food would materialize. They eat like robots. Like they don’t taste anything. At night – or what I assumed was night – the lights would shut off. The first night, I thought that was my chance. I was going to try to escape. And then I heard this hissing sound, and suddenly all I wanted to do was lay down. Next thing I knew, it was bright again.”

“They drugged you.”

“Someone…” He remembered the disc in the clearing, and he shook his head. “Something drugged all of us. Every day was the same. People would show up; they’d either change or die. Food would be there when we needed it. At the end of the day, the lights would go out and we’d sleep. The only time I saw anyone leave was when they sent bodies down the chute. By the time you got there, I’d already decided it was my only way out. I was just waiting for a distraction.”

He looked down at her, clearly impressed. “And then you did what you did, and I thought you had a chance to make it. I knew I couldn’t just leave you behind.”

“Thank you.” The moment the words left her lips, she realized how inadequate they were. And how late. “I should have said it right away.”

“Well, you did in your own way.”

His eyes were twinkling, and she realized he was teasing her for hitting him. She laughed, surprising herself with a sound that had somehow become so wholly alien. Then she brushed her hands together, as if dusting them off, and said, “We do what we can.”

He stopped again, and this time the humor faded from his face. Under the force of that gaze, she was struck by how darkly green his eyes were in the shade. “Those people are trapped in there, Meila. And they’re not in control. Something’s got them in there. It’s making them do those horrible things. And I think it’s… collecting people.”

“But why?”

“Hell if I know.”

“How do we-”

They heard it at the same time, that tell-tale rhythmic thrumming, and they both dropped to the ground. The disc flew by them, not ten feet from where they crouched in the undergrowth, sending out its awful light-air push as it passed. This one was different from the one they’d seen before, which they knew only because it was empty and free of the blood that had painted the interior of the other. They watched it disappear into the trees ahead, heard it continue on its path – and then they heard something else.

Something big.

Without a word, they crept forward, dreading what they would find but unable to resist the inescapable and purely human need to know. And then they saw it, and all they could do was stare. It was a wall, probably five stories tall and made of the same stuff that comprised the vessel they’d seen.

And on the other side was a city.

A city of great, shimmering buildings that stretched toward the sky. There was an odd, subtle ripple of movement among them, and after a moment of disbelief, Meila realized what they were seeing. Some of the buildings were hovering in the air. Some of them rose slowly for some unknown purpose; others sank carefully. Still others stayed in place, but they almost seemed to bob gently, as does a boat when the water is lightly disturbed.

Flying discs filled with bodies and other various things zipped between the buildings and all along the interior of the wall, stopping occasionally to retrieve or dispose of cargo. Meila could see no people, no living creatures of any kind, but the city hummed with life nevertheless. Every inch of it pulsed with purpose, vibrated with the energy borne of conscious thought.

She realized that whatever they’d been thrust into, it was far stranger and more complex than she ever would have guessed. And suddenly, she was so very grateful not to be alone.

She didn’t know how long they stayed there, crouched in the undergrowth while disc after disc flew by them and into the wall. Most of them came down the path to their right, some along the wall before them. Each of them seemed to go to the same spot in the wall – although the wall was so uniform in looks that it was nearly impossible to tell – and then they just…pushed their way in. The wall, which otherwise looked solid, became gelatinous with the pressure of the vessels. There must have been some resistance; the vessels slowed upon entrance. But the structural integrity of the wall seemed undisturbed by the process, instantly regaining its former shape and smoothness.

The vessels, they could see through the wall, went on into the city to parts unknown.

Just as Meila was starting to worry that they’d stayed here too long, Aden let out a sigh of resignation. “So, do we go in or stay out here?”

She turned to him in horror. “Go in?”

“Look, I don’t know what you want right now, but my main goal is to get home.” After an odd moment of hesitation, she nodded in agreement. He nodded back. “All right then. What’s the best way to do that? The only option I see right now is to go in and try to look for answers. Maybe we’ll figure out where we are. Meila, maybe we’ll find a way home.”

She looked back at the wall and shuddered. Her first instinct was to say no. Or, rather, hell no. But she realized that was just fear, dictating her actions as she’d sworn she’d never again allow. So she closed her eyes for a moment and tried to think logically.

“If we go in there, we’ll be walking right into the enemy’s home. We still don’t even know who’s really behind this.” She thought about what he’d said on the way here, and she corrected, “Or what. And we have no way to know that we’ll find any answers in there. Aden, we might get in there and never find our way out.”

He frowned at the wall, even as another vessel began its viscous entrance. He sighed and turned back to Meila. “Wherever we do it, our first step should probably be to figure out where we are.”

“Agreed.”

“Can we do that out here?”

She looked around and shrugged. “I think so. We could just pick a direction and start walking.”

“So for right now, we’re avoiding the city?”

“I really think it’s the safest option.”

“Agreed,” he said, mimicking her answer and coaxing a wan smile out of her.

They heard it at the same time, that somehow awful rhythm that signaled the approach of another vessel. Only, this one didn’t run down the path to their right or along the wall before them.

Instead, it headed right for them.

Aden didn’t think; he just acted. He pushed Meila down into the undergrowth and spread out atop her, so that her entire body was covered with his. His back to the vessel, he prayed that the odd, nondescript clothing they’d given him would somehow be undetectable by the thing that even now was slowing down above them.

Below him, Meila didn’t move a muscle. She couldn’t; utter shock had her frozen. She knew he was trying to protect her, knew he was blocking her from being seen by that thing, but she didn’t feel safe. Instead she felt trapped. Entombed.

Helpless.

The old panic started to seep in again, but this time it built quickly. In seconds, the broad chest that pressed against her face seemed designed not to protect, but to suffocate. The firm body seemed not a barrier against harm, but a cage. Her heart began to pound, her breath to thin and quicken. The memories poured in, a barrage of horror that she’d sworn a thousand times she’d forget. She squeezed her eyes shut, but that only made it worse. The visions burned brightly against the backs of her lids, seared her lungs, filled her mind so that she no longer heard the vessel above them, no longer remembered the unknown threat that had put her here in the first place.

Aden is not Alec, she told herself desperately. Aden is not Alec. He’s different.

But the mantra didn’t help, because she suddenly realized that she didn’t know that Aden wasn’t like Alec. She didn’t really know anything about him, except that in this moment, he was holding her down, and she couldn’t move, and she couldn’t see, and she couldn’t breathe.

She couldn’t breathe.

“Get off.” Her voice was muffled against his chest, her arms weak from the panic. She tried to push him off, but he didn’t budge. That only spiked her fear, and her voice grew frantic and shrill. “Get off. Get off!”

She gave another furious shrug, and this one moved him enough that she could wriggle free.

The moment she was out from under him, clarity returned with a snap. The vessel was still above them, hovering there as if, for some reason, it couldn’t quite see Aden but could tell that something was there. Its engine throbbed in time with a pulse of air that blasted her face, and with it came the stench of whatever the vessel had held before this moment.

She turned to Aden in horror only to find him staring at her, the confusion on his face shifting to stunned disbelief at her expression. Then, before either of them could say a word, the vessel opened up and sucked Meila inside.

And then it flew away toward the city wall.

*          *          *

For a moment, Aden could only lay there, shock robbing him of conscious thought. Then another vessel flew by, this one several feet away, and the noise broke him out of his stupor. The reality of his situation slammed into him, and he understood with surprising speed that he now only had two options.

One: follow their original plan. Pick a spot in the distance and just start walking, away from the city, away from the insanity that was the last few days. They couldn’t see him – what had just happened had proven that. He suspected it had something to do with the clothes they’d given him. Perhaps the vessels were trained to recognize the clothing given to the Collective, or perhaps somehow the vessel hadn’t been able to detect the odd color of his clothing. Whatever the reason, he was now reasonably sure he could successfully escape.

Or he could go with option number two.

He could go after Meila.

Why had she pushed away from him? For a moment, he’d thought she had a plan. That maybe she was even trying to get caught. But when she’d looked up at the thing above them, her eyes had been glazed at first. Unseeing. And then they’d focused on the vessel, and the emptiness had been replaced by bone chilling terror.

She hadn’t meant to be caught. And he wondered now if, somehow, she hadn’t even really meant to pull away from him.

He looked out at the forest, at that beckoning promise of escape. He took off his shirt and tied it around his waist so that he wouldn’t lose it. If it did what he thought it did, he’d want it in the near future.

Then he walked over to the path where the vessels flew, and he lay down and waited to be taken.

*          *          *

Meila could barely breathe. It wasn’t the smell; although, despite the emptiness of the vessel, the smell was horrific.

It was fury, pure and simple.

How could she have let that happen? How could she have fallen into the same old fears so quickly? She told herself every day that she wasn’t a victim, swore to herself that she would never again give someone else power over her. And she’d believed it, too…until the moment she hadn’t.

How could she have lost herself so completely, when she’d been fighting so hard to get herself back?

At least Aden had escaped. She’d never have forgiven herself if she’d gotten him captured, too.

She couldn’t tell where she was. The vessel was as opaque from the inside as it had been translucent from the outside. All she could do was try to pay attention to the turns, but even that was disorienting. If she’d been sitting like she would have in a car, it might have been different. But she was laying on her back, and despite there being absolutely nothing on top of her, she couldn’t seem to sit up. There was nothing there, but something was holding her down.

It might have been enough to bring that oh-so-infuriating panic back, but the vessel jerked to a stop before the fear could take hold. Meila had a second to wonder what new hell awaited her, and then the vessel opened beneath her to a room utterly black. For some reason, though she suddenly felt nothing under her, she didn’t fall. Instead, she hovered there with the vessel, wondering how far up she was. She tried to turn over, to see what was below the vessel, but she couldn’t move.

And then the thing let her go, and she began to fall.

There was nothing quite so disorienting as falling in the black, with no idea of how far she had left to go. She thought impassively that perhaps it was a blessing not to see her impending death rise up to meet her, and then she landed gracelessly on something not quite hard, but not quite soft.

As her weight displaced whatever she lay upon, the thing shifted and then split in two. She put a hand out to steady herself, and it landed on something horribly familiar.

A face.

Meila let out a low-pitched, gurgling scream and tried to back away, but then she felt a foot. A leg, a hand, another face.

Bodies. She’d landed on a pile of dead bodies, and she had no idea how far this pool of rot stretched.

She stood to run, but her foot sunk into something. Even as she screamed again, even as an image of a body grabbing her leg and pulling her into the morass or – somehow worse – her foot sinking into the bloated and distended bowels of a corpse flashed before her eyes, she realized her foot had simply slipped between two bodies to sink below the surface.

But even that was intolerable. She fell to her hands and knees to distribute her weight more evenly, mewled in terror and disgust as she scrambled across waves of unseeing eyes, hapless hands, still hearts within unmoving chests. Her own traitorous body began to retch, threatening to add to the ghastly array beneath her, and then…

And then her hand hit open air.

She was moving too fast to stop – and, truth be told, she might have gladly jumped off of a cliff to escape this nightmare. Her head surged over the edge of the dead, and her body quickly followed suit, until she was tumbling down the horribly lumped waterfall of flesh.

She landed hard on something solid and appallingly sticky. With low, keening sound, she scrambled away until her hands touched ground that was dry and faintly gritty. And then she just sat there for a moment and waited for the jarring full-body shivers that were chattering her teeth to subside.

But it seemed that she’d no sooner found dry ground than a glow began to shine overhead. She glanced in that direction and watched as another vessel emerged through the wall. No door opened to let it in – it just sort of…appeared. It was too far away for the glow to reach her, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out the thing’s cargo, so she didn’t even try to hide. She just watched it dully, wondering if the bodies it contained would fall on her.

Wondering how the hell she was ever going to get out of here, especially now that she was alone.

And then she saw the lowest body in the vessel move, and her heart lurched and then began to pound.

*          *          *

Aden was on the verge of losing it – he could literally think of no better term to describe the storm building within him – when the vessel simply opened up beneath him. His mind barely registered the sight of black beyond the glow, barely noticed the instinctive gulp of air as yet untainted by the bodies piled atop him, before he was plummeting into the dark.

He knew what he was going to land on, had discerned and then dreaded it from the moment he’d been sucked into a vessel already full of the dead, but knowledge was in no way preparation for the feeling of slamming blind into a pile of rotting corpses. He let out an odd, gurgling cry and scrambled backward, even as four more bodies landed on top of him, searching for a bit of floor that wasn’t ridden with bodies. When his feet slipped over a drop-off, he followed the plunge gladly, thinking even broken bones would be preferable to this. Then an image flashed before him as he fell – or more of a nightmare, really, of the kind where you can’t see all the details but you know them just the same – of himself breaking his leg upon landing and then lying there amidst the dead until the shock took his own life.

And then he was safely on the ground and he heard, after the muffled thump of ass hitting floor, a whispered, “Aden!”

It took him a moment. He had to wipe the horror of the last few minutes from his mind, had to force himself to remember why he was in this hell in the first place, and then it hit him.

“Meila,” he whispered back, though he was reasonably sure no one but her could hear him in this room.

A rustle sounded to his left, and he had to remind himself forcefully that it wasn’t a dead body that moved, but a live one. He called her name again, and she his, and they moved steadily toward the sounds until they met in the middle. The moment he found her, put his hands on her shoulders and felt the warmth of her skin, the rushed push of her pulse, he wanted to grab her to him and never let go. In that moment, she was the most precious thing he’d ever encountered. But he remembered how she’d reacted when he’d covered her body with his, and he managed to hold himself back.

“Are you okay?” he whispered.

“Yes. No. I’m not hurt, but I’m so sorry they took you.”

“You didn’t put me in this situation, Meila; they did. Well,” he reconsidered, feeling much more like himself now that he wasn’t alone in this nightmare, “I guess you put me in this situation. But thinking big picture, I’m pretty sure this wasn’t your fault.”

He felt her take a deep breath, felt the sweet rush of it on his skin. How had he never realized before that exhalation alone could be such wonderful confirmation of life?

“You followed me in here, didn’t you?”

He shrugged, though she couldn’t see him. “I figured we’re better off if we stick together. Now what do you say we stick together away from this graveyard?”

At her fervent agreement, he took her hand and began to feel his way toward a wall.

For the first time in a long time, Meila was grateful for the feel of a large hand grabbing her own. It anchored her, somehow, reminded her that, though she could see no one else, she wasn’t alone. And the calm that came with that knowledge allowed her to begin to think again.

“It doesn’t smell.”

“What?” Distracted by a body strewn across their narrow walkway, Aden tugged Meila’s hand to guide her over it.

“There have to be hundreds of bodies in here. Maybe thousands. But it doesn’t smell. So there’s some sort of ventilation system, right?”

“Yeah, I guess.” He thought about it for a moment. “Are you thinking that might be a way out?”

“Well, if we can find it. Yeah, I think it’s worth a shot.”

He nodded in the dark, thought a little more. Then, “What if it’s the walls?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know how those things just merged into the city wall? What if all the walls in this place are like the outer wall? And things can just kind of slide through them if they find the right spot?”

She paused, and he stopped with her. “Aden, if that’s the case, we’re trapped in here. I saw you come in through that wall. It was way too high for us to reach.”

“Meila,” he said on a sigh, “I hate to say it, but we can build stairs.”

“How – oh.” And then, as the full ramifications of that hit her, “Ew.”

“Yeah.”

*          *          *

It took hours. First they had to wait for another vessel to enter the room so they would know where to build. Then they had to work through their aversion to touching the bodies, something that took longer for Aden – perhaps because he’d been trapped with them on his way here.

But it was the actual stacking that took the longest. Meila wasn’t physically strong enough to pick up the bodies, so she had to roll them on top of one another, which slowed them down considerably. To speed things up, Aden tried to pick up the slack by carrying bodies over for her to stack. It was a gruesome, arduous task for both of them. By the time they’d stacked enough bodies so that they could climb to the entrance, all they wanted was sleep.

But not here. By tacit agreement, they both worked through the exhaustion without complaint to get themselves as far away from this place as possible before they stopped to rest.

Twelve vessels came through the wall while they worked. When they were done, they waited, crouched near the top, for one more to make its way through. Though there didn’t seem to be a pattern to their entrance, they figured their chances of being surprised by one were lower if another had just dropped off its cargo.

At the top, Meila felt her hair flutter around her face, and her heart began to trip again. “There’s definitely air,” she said. “This might work.”

“It has to.” Aden looked behind them, though he could see nothing, and he imagined the horrors that lay there. The thought of spending another minute in this mass grave was suddenly intolerable. He gave Meila the shirt he’d tied around his waist to provide her some camouflage. Then he secured the makeshift rope they’d made out of clothes pillaged from the bodies and tied it around his waist and Meila’s.

“Hang on to me,” he told her. “Whatever happens, we stick together. Okay?”

She took a deep breath and nodded in the dark. “Okay.”

They grabbed onto each other, and then each put a free hand out toward the wall. When Meila touched it, the gentle trickle of air became a cool rush. When she pressed on the wall, it gave way like some sort of porous gel, and she realized that she could push her way through. But even when her fingertips broke the surface on the other side, she could see nothing.

“I think we’re going to have to just look through,” Aden said.

“I was just thinking the same thing.” She took a deep breath. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

They both leaned forward and pushed their faces through the wall.