Abducted Read online

  “I didn’t say it was disgusting,” I protested weakly. “I’m just not used to, uh, eating snake sandwiches. That’s all. But…” I cleared my throat. “You said you have two home worlds?”

  He looked suddenly guarded. “I should not have mentioned that. But yes, I am half Vorn and half Eloim.”

  “I, uh, noticed that your sister doesn’t have horns like you do,” I said, busying myself with securing a sticky thought patch to my left temple and hoping I wasn’t overstepping my boundaries. “Is that because she’s a girl and only the men, er, males of your people have them, or…?”

  I left the question hanging, wondering if he would get mad again.

  “The horns are from my Vorn heritage,” he growled. “Sellah doesn’t have them because she’s pureblooded Eloim. Not that it’s any of your Gods’ damned business.”

  “Sorry!” I protested. “I didn’t know it was such a touchy subject.”

  “Well it is. You might not know much about the universe—how could you, living on that uninformed ball of rock you call a planet—but the Vorn are hated and feared throughout our galaxy. They are considered violent, dangerous, and most of all, unpredictable.” He glared at me, as though daring me to say something.

  Okay, I wasn’t touching that one with a ten foot pole.

  “And what are the Eloim known for?” I asked instead, glossing over the whole violent and dangerous thing.

  Sarden took another bite of his sandwich and swallowed before answering.

  “Eloim are highly civilized with an elaborate set of social customs for every occasion. They value art, beauty, and learning above all else.”

  “Wow.” I frowned. “So the Vorn and Eloim are kind of polar opposites, huh?”

  “Something like that,” he agreed guardedly.

  “So how did your parents meet and fall in love, if they’re from such different cultures?” I asked, genuinely interested.

  “They didn’t,” he said briefly.

  “But then how—”

  “Why are you so interested in my heritage, anyway?” he interrupted, frowning at me.

  “I’m just trying to get to know you,” I said. “I’ve never met an alien before. Hell, I didn’t even know there were aliens outside of scifi books and movies until you had Bambi and his minions drag me through that bathroom mirror.”

  “Who is Bambi?” he wanted to know.

  “Oh—that’s what I was calling the head wormy guy—the main Commercian, I mean. He had a voice like a character from a children’s story back on Earth so I sort of started calling him by that character’s name.”

  “That was actually Char’noth and despite his voice and appearance, he’s not a male you want to make angry with you,” Sarden said dryly. “You really seem to enjoy re-naming things and people.”

  “Oh, you mean Al?” I asked. The artificial life-form had gone back to the control area, presumably to run the diagnostic test Sarden had talked about so he wasn’t there to hear us talking about him. “I just thought he needed a name. He seems to like it, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, he does.” Sarden didn’t sound completely happy about it. “I don’t understand you—I’ve owned The Celesta for ten solar cycles and A.L.—Al—has been nothing but a control system for the ship. Then you’re on board for less than a solar hour and suddenly he wants a name.”

  “Maybe it’s because I treated him like a person—not just a thing,” I said pointedly.

  Sarden looked grumpy again. “Are you going to sim yourself some food or not?” he asked, pointedly changing the subject.

  “Yes, I am.” I still didn’t like the idea of eating something made out of green slime but it seemed like the best offer I was going to get. And besides, it was better to keep the big alien talking—asking for help with the whole food-sim process might take another step towards making him think of me as a person, not just a commodity to be traded. Reverse Stockholm, I reminded myself. I had to keep it up.

  I closed my eyes just as I had seen Sarden do and pictured a single piece of sushi. Nothing too fancy or complicated—just a California roll with crab and avocado and cucumber like they make at Origami, my favorite sushi restaurant in Tampa. Leah and Charlotte and I always go there for girl’s night out and then we head up to Ivarones, a little Italian place, and split a piece of their decadent chocolate cherry cheesecake for dessert.

  Just thinking of my two best friends made me want to cry. I wonder if they had gone to the police yet. Probably not—I still hadn’t been gone from Earth for a whole day, even though it felt like years. They wouldn’t be allowed to file a missing persons report until at least twenty-four hours had elapsed. And even then it wouldn’t do them any good. I was gone, on my way to a galaxy far, far away…

  Suddenly I realized I was dangerously close to tears.

  Get a grip on yourself, Zoe! I took a deep breath and redirected my thoughts back to the piece of sushi. I thought about it as hard as I could until I heard the soft chime from the food-sim.

  “All right.” Sarden opened the lid for me and peered inside. “Is that what it’s supposed to look like?”

  I peeped in myself and was surprised to see a perfectly delicious-looking piece of sushi sitting on another one of those clear plates.

  “Oh, look! Just like I imagined!” I clapped my hands in surprised pleasure.

  “So glad we could meet your expectations,” Sarden said dryly, but I thought I saw the ghost of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. He lifted the plate out and handed it to me, waiting to see me eat the results.

  Picking the piece of sushi up, I sniffed it carefully. Well, it certainly smelled like sushi and there was no green slime anywhere on it or near it. Deciding to give it a chance, I popped it into my mouth and began to chew.

  After a moment I was looking for a napkin to spit it into. There wasn’t anything available though, so I had to swallow.

  Sarden must have seen the look on my face.

  “What happened? Did the food-sim get it wrong?”

  “You could say that.” I grimaced. “It looked like sushi but it tasted like something else.”

  “Like what?”

  I frowned. It was hard to place the wrong taste because the sushi the food-sim had made for me had the right shape and color and texture and smell. But the taste…the taste had been completely off. Finally I had it.

  “Chocolate cherry cheesecake!” I exclaimed. “That’s what it tasted like!” Maybe the food-sim had made it taste like that because I was thinking about how I used to share it with Leah and Charlotte after we had sushi.

  “What’s that?” Sarden wanted to know.

  “It’s this kind of cake only not a cake—it’s made from soft cheese flavored with chocolate—”

  “Cheese?” he interrupted me. “Chocolate?”

  At that moment I felt truly sorry for him. He might be a big, tough alien with a super fast spaceship but he was living on snake sandwiches and he’d never had cheese or chocolate which are like, two of the holy trinity of foods as far as I’m concerned. (Wine is the third, in case you’re interested.)

  “Cheese is an Earth food made from milk, which is this white liquid we get from domesticated animals called cows,” I explained.

  “Ah.” He nodded. “We make a similar concoction on Vorn 6 from the bile of the sprag.”

  “Remind me never to go out to eat with you on Vorn 6 then,” I said. “Anyway, there are lots of varieties of cheeses—we use a soft, sweet one to make cheese cake.”

  “And you said it was flavored by shauckolat?”

  “Chocolate,” I corrected him. “It’s made by taking the beans out of these big pods that grow in the jungle and roasting them and grinding them—then mixing them with sugar and more milk—”

  “You certainly eat a lot of this ‘milk’ you’re talking about,” Sarden remarked. “If we ate that much sprag bile we’d be sick.”

  In my personal opinion, any