Page 94 of My Wild Pet
I nod. “Yeah. All of them. All of this.” I motion around the room.
He exhales softly. “I don’t know. Maybe. I would like to believe that if they knew they would try to warn people against alien abduction or do something...”
“It’s strange. In the last ten years, people can easily make videos and pictures with their phones and share them with the world in real time. And there are so many UFO videos online, but no one believes them. It makes me think there’s a conspiracy to keep all of this hidden and the best way to do that is to tell everyone else that the person with the UFO story is crazy.”
His hand brushes against mine. “And if we went back? If we somehow made it back to Earth, what do you think they’d say if we told them about our lives here?”
I laugh bitterly. “They’d call us crazy for sure.”
I close my eyes, letting my imagination run wild with that thought. Going back to Earth and telling people about Aefre, Kaelin, the collars, the tail, the sex, the Grand Championships, everything. “They’d say we were making it all up for money. A bad sex story. A really terrible one.”
“Yeah,” Gabriel says with a faint smile. “Human pets in a galactic competition. Doesn’t exactly screambelievable.No one in France would ever believe that.”
“And even if they believed us, what then? What could either of our governments do? Send an unarmed rocket up and demand their people back?” I ask rhetorically.
Gabriel doesn’t answer me, so I continue.
“You know, I always used to hear things. Retired military guys, conspiracy theorists, even that Israeli space guy—what’s his name? Eshed?—talking about aliens.”
Gabriel raises an eyebrow. “And what did you think?”
“I mean, I was curious,” I admit. “But then Eshed said Trump knew about aliens, and I no longer believed him.”
He lets out a low laugh. “Pourquoi? Pourquoi Trump?”
“Because there’s no way Trump could keep a secret that big. Not a chance. He’d want to get in there and try to negotiate some kind of deal.”
“Touché,” he says. “But why would Trump know? Alien real estate?”
“Oh you don’t know. He was President of the United States. Maybe he is again. I was taken before the election.”
Gabriel smiles. “It’s still true then, anyone can be anything in the US.”
“Except be believed if you talk about aliens. Ironic that isn’t it?”
Gabriel’s goes quiet with his own thoughts.
“Anyway, I never quite believed anything I heard about aliens. So it makes me wonder…why?”
“And now?” Gabriel asks, his voice quieter, his amber eyes fixed on mine.
“Now, I wish I’d listened more,” I whisper.
We are silent just looking into each other’s eyes. I don’t know what’s worse—that Earth might not know about us, or that they might know and simply not care.
Gabriel’s hand brushes mine again, this time more deliberately. “Maybe it’s better this way. If they did know, then people might be living in fear all the time. But then, not to warn people is disingenuous. I’m not an educated man, but surely there’s someone on Earth, some group that could build somekind of defense or at least provide people with a tracker so the police would know where someone went.”
My heart is breaking for him. I can’t imagine the pain his parents must have suffered looking for him after his disappearance.
“You’re right though, regular people wouldn’t believe us even if we tried to warn them. It might just make our lives even worse, to return and to be called liars. Even though, it’s such a strange thing to lie about,” Gabriel says, almost to himself. “But we know it’s real. We’ve lived it.”
“That’s enough, right? We don’t owe Earth a warning?” I say wanting to clear my conscience.
His gaze meets mine, his expression softening. “It’s enough. If we get a chance to do anything it won’t be wasted on a message back to Earth. Our chance will be spent on trying to escape.”
“With Gael?”
“Yes, or someone else like him. He can’t be the only one. But he’s the one here now.”
