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I wanted to kick and flail, but I couldn’t make my arms and legs do more than flop.
The mechanical arms flew me out of the pod chamber and down a hall with yellow lights flashing on both sides.
Behind me, the other women were woken as well.
“Fuckin’ A,” someone shouted. “What’s going on?”
Another one whimpered.
Others bellowed, and I heard what sounded like an arm or a leg smacking against the wall.
“Talia? Talia!”
“What’s happening, Maggie?” The latter voice quavered, and I made my head move, peering back to see two women with long black hair, one with a braid coiled on top of her head, straining their arms out to reach for each other. They had the same facial bone structure and deep brown eyes. Sisters?
The redhead glared at the arms and thrashed her legs.
A woman at the end of the line with curly blonde hair remained slumped in the mechanical arms’ grip, her head lolling.
Wake up,I wanted to shout, but I couldn’t make my mouth form the words.Something horrible is happening to us and you need to see.
“Maggie . . .” Talia cried, big fat tears etching down her face. “I’m scared.”
“It’s going to be okay. I promise.”
Did she truly think she could keep a vow like that? I had no clue what was happening, but whatever it was, it wasbad, and we had absolutely no control.
The mechanical arms jerked me around a corner, and I noted a track overhead. They appeared to be carrying us through a spaceship, but this couldn’t be real. I must be dreaming. I’d finished my shift, gone home, had a nice glass of wine, and I was asleep on the sofa—the usual for me lately.
The track split at the end of a hall, and each of us was channeled into our own path that ended at a door that swept open before we reached it. Inside, I was deposited inside another cylinder. The arms retracted, and a glass lid slid into place above me. Before I could yelp or try to break free, the wall by my feet exploded outward, revealing an endless night scattered with stars and constellations different than any I’d seen before.
The cylinder plunged down a chute like I was part of a bobsled ride to hell, shooting me out into the darkness. On either side of me, other cylinders like mine, each holding a panic-stricken woman, burst from the silver ship. They flew swiftly in a line behind me toward a planet made up of blue, purple, and splatters of red. I’d taken astronomy as an elective, but nothing in the textbook I’d pored through each night gave me a clue of where I could be.
Terror shot through me. Why couldn’t I move? What was happening to me?
Where am I?
Lights flashed as the tube holding me plunged through the planet’s outer atmosphere and shot toward the surface. A jerk of my head, the only part of me I could move, showed the other cylinders coasting behind and beside mine.
It was night here, and the stars and two slivery moons—two!—shone down on the planet’s surface.
Iwasdreaming. None of this could be happening. No, it wasn’t a dream but a nightmare. My scream echoed around me, and breaking free from whatever had restrained me, I clawed at the glass surface overhead, trying to scrape a way through.
Before the pod could smack into the ground, it leveled off, skimming along twenty feet or so about the surface. The other pods holding women split away from mine, heading en masse in another direction. All except one. That one soared somewhere else.
Mountains loomed ahead, and my cylinder flew up over strange, spiky purple trees and dipped down into small valleys covered with tall, stiff golden grasses that barely shifted from the air this pod must be creating.
Its speed slowed as it coasted above stubby trees speckling the slope of a tall mountain. With a screeching whir, it bumped down onto the ground, taking out a few trees that shattered like glass as the pod skimmed along before coming to a jarring stop.
My body kept going, scrunching me into the bottom of the pod.
I screamed again; my voice too shrill for my ears.
The whirring sound ended. Silence echoed with only my ragged breathing and the heavy thud of my heart sounding in my ears.
A hiss rang out, and the top of the pod slid back. Cool air rushed in, making me shiver in the skimpy gown.
At least my body worked. I sat up, clutching the sides and took in a mountain range coated with trees in varying shades of purple. The peaks were golden, a gold similar to what covered the ground around me.
