Tempted by Celestial Bodies

3

From all the data he collected while she lay in stasis, he expected fear would feed her passion, but instead she gets angry. She awakens strong, spirited, full of unexpected defiance, forcing him to recalibrate swiftly.

He assigns an aspect more compatible with her chemistry, with promising results. Her pheromone levels tick up. She stops yelling at him and waits to find out more.

But as the small truths she asked for take hold, she staggers where she stands. A flush painted her cheeks when she looked at the form he chose, but the color drains away now, leaving her skin pale. Even her lips lose their color.

She sinks like he’s cut her legs out from under her. On her knees, head bowed, she braces herself against his surface with hands icy as the void outside. He registers a precipitous drop in her electrodermal activity.

The human-bodied individual rushes to her side. Specialized in both form and function, this one performs a particular role in service to the colony’s reproductive imperative: a gonozooid, defined by his adaptive ability to protect his mate, comfort her, provide for her, and please her. Meanwhile, the collective’s core neural network races through the human medical databases acquired in orbit around her world.

Her home, the one by her side murmurs. We took her from her home.

Lowered skin conductivity can indicate an onset of negative mood states, reduced capacity for pleasure, even loss of personality coherence. The data doesn’t offer any certainty— how do humans live with such imprecise understanding of their own biology? —but it doesn’t allay their collective concern, either.

His chosen mate cannot fear him in this moment, but she can still experience despair.

You told her too much, too fast.

She asked. The individual gonozooid’s response has a strangely frantic edge of emotion, as though human feeling somehow follows human form. She left me no room to prevaricate. It would have made her angrier.

The warning throws the colony into an unfamiliar state of conflict. Yet every part of him knows that this moment, this meeting, is essential. It must go well, or they— he will lose his last chance to fulfill his mission.

He could offer her euphoria, but she already accused him of drugging her. He’s studied the language enough to understand the connotations, and he will not steal her autonomy.

All his focus turns to her chambers, to the two individuals at the edge of the small circle of light. The gonozooid kneels before her, reaching out with tentative tentillae— fingers— to move aside the matted tangle of keratinous filaments— her hair— that’s fallen across her face. He needs to see her.

She looks up with dull eyes, uncomprehending, but she doesn’t shy away. She lets him brush her hair back with a gentle hand.

We’ve already broken her.

I’m not so sure . The one at her side offers a surprisingly vehement counter. She’s already proven more resilient than expected.

“You’re an alien,”

she whispers.

He sits back, considering this. “I suppose I am, to you.”

“This isn’t a dream. Or a lie. Or a trick.”

“No, Kaitlyn,”

he says softly. “You asked me for the truth.”

“I...”

She clears her throat, wiping a wrist across her face. “I don’t even know your name.”

He hardly knows how to answer her. I am many. I am one. I am eternal. An exile. Alone and yet legion. But he was not always alone. When he had a pilot, a mate, a companion, she had called him by many different names. Dear. Darling. Love. My everything. But there were others, too, the ones that came later. Parasite. Wretch. Bore. Destroyer. Brute. Life-ruiner. Tyrant.

Monster.

If this is what we’ve become, his love said, leaving him, if you refuse to change your ways, you will always be alone.

I never had a choice, he’d cried out, but she was too far gone by then to hear him. This is what I am. I can’t be anything else.

“You must have a name,”

Kaitlyn says now, his tearstained mate, his only hope, his fate, his likely doom. “Even aliens need names.”

Of course, humans love names. They require them, a precursor to any intimacy. He should have thought of that.

He casts his seeking mind through databases, encyclopedias, still tasting her salt-sweet tang in the back of his avatar’s throat like a promise. Finds something that seems fitting, or close enough.

“You may call me Cassiel,”

he says, choosing a name from a human mythos that resonates, a watchful entity of solitude and grief. Archangel. A curious sort of creature, one he can find no biological reference for, other than beings of their wide salt seas: angel fish, angel shark, sea angels, anglerfish…It seems oddly appropriate. Their oceans contain creatures not entirely unlike him. Besides, she wouldn’t find polymorphic colony as comforting.

“Cassiel.”

She draws the sounds out on her tongue, hard and sibilant becoming almost musical at the end. Something shifts inside him, settles into place. Her head comes up, her eyes glazed and shining. “You haven’t told me why. If you are…what you say you are—why abduct me?”

“We— I needed you. If I could have done it differently—but I had no choice.”

“You needed me. For what? Am I…a research subject, or a hostage?”

Fluid leaks from her glittering eyes, dampening the epidermal membrane beneath her. “Or am I prey ?”

The vessel’s membrane drinks up the droplet of her immediately. It’s a small gift and he’s hungry for whatever she offers him, anything to help him know her better, map a way forward.

For such a tiny sample, the lachrymal secretion offers a complex, distracting wealth of new information: saline, enzymes, limbic hormones, trace minerals, electrolytes, opioid peptides... Tears. The rich flavor races through his distributed awareness with intoxicating intensity, near-erotic in its force. For a moment he loses himself in it, chasing a dream or half-forgotten genetic memory of his species’ ancient prehistory, before they left the oceans of their Mother World and evolved to live among the stars.

She tastes like a home he’s never known, and he wants more of her. He wants to sample all of her, in every mood.

“No! Not like that.”

His avatar stammers, off-balance in the tide of his desire. She isn’t prey, but there are more pleasurable ways to taste her, for them both. “I have no wish to harm you. Quite the opposite.”

“I don’t understand.”

How can she? It would break her even more.

“Please don’t cry,”

he says, still kneeling before her. “Are you hungry? Thirsty? You must remain hydrated, and this—”

He waves a hand at her face, glistening from the moisture running from her eyes and now her nose. “It can’t be helping.”

“Yes,”

she hiccups. “No! Please just—leave me alone .”

With that, her strength resurfaces. Relieved, he stands and backs away.

“I’ll leave you now,”

he says, and walks away, faster than is strictly necessary. She makes no move to follow him.

He will always remember the taste of her tears, no matter what happens afterward.

* * *

She cries herself out on that strange warm floor, wrapped in the blanket he gave her. When she finally pulls herself together—scoured, empty, and as he predicted, terribly thirsty—more lights have appeared.

The hanging candelabras come up in a line, like an invitation, still not quite right , organic, alien. They lead to a perfect, ordinary, normal wooden door.

Distrustful, she lays a palm flat against it, then snatches her hand back with a sharp, in-drawn breath as it swings open under her touch. Beyond it waits a lushly furnished suite with a wide canopy bed, an oversized chair, and a standing wardrobe. The blue-black walls curve gently, concave between floor and ceiling, shimmering in the soft light with a faint iridescence.

“You had all this right here,”

she mutters, “and you still woke me up on a lab table like some half-baked alien autopsy video? Here I thought E.T. would be smart .”

Shrugging off the inexplicable impression of unseen attention keenly focused on her, she steps cautiously inside. A crystal carafe waits on a bedside table, with a delicate, subtly asymmetrical glass beside it filled to the brim of blessedly cold water. She gulps down a glassful, then pours another from the jug, starting to feel a little more…human. Further exploration reveals another door, and behind it recognizable bathroom facilities with a huge, sunken tub set in the center of its floor, already full and steaming.

“Ok,”

she mutters. “I could get used to this.”

She still doesn’t want to think about whatever unidentified gunk is drying stiff and tacky on her scalp. Now she can wash it off and hopefully never think of it again.

When she’s finally clean and pleasurably boneless, she emerges from the tub and wraps herself in a huge, plush towel, then stops short. She heard no one come in, noticed no movement, yet her discarded clothes somehow vanished from the floor.

“What the hell?”

The door opens before she can shove at it. She almost stumbles into the larger room, dripping water onto the floor, ready to scream at whatever beautiful, unearthly man or monster waits for her. But no one’s there, just that same watchful feeling—and an envelope lying on the bedside table.

She snatches it up. The paper has a unique aesthetic, thin, flexible, but crackling with a finely ribbed texture, and single sheet inside bears a message in flowing script.

My dear Kaitlyn,

You’ve come a very long way in a very short time. I fear I’ve proven myself a poor host who has failed to adequately consider the needs of your mind or body.

If you allow me, I’ll endeavor to remedy these failures to your satisfaction. Please join me for a meal when you’re ready.

Cassiel.

A quiet creak startles her as the wardrobe door swings open. It doesn’t look big enough to contain everything inside: silky, slinky gowns, billowing princess skirts, shimmery cocktail dresses, a confection of black lace and chenille with a bodice to match.

Running her hand over the soft fabric, she lands on a flowy, leaf-green satin jumpsuit with long sleeves and a plunged neckline. She’s not about to pick something she can’t run in. Nothing here resembles a bra or panties, so she goes without. The sensation of the satin between her thighs, sliding across her bare nipples, sends a shiver up her spine.

She’s trillions of miles from home, in a starship of unknown origin, captive of a man with unknown intent, and yet every new detail she encounters seem to offer a frisson of pleasure, as though charged with latent eroticism. If she ruins this satin romper because he didn’t leave her any underwear and his mothership is unreasonably sexy, that’s his fault, not hers.

For all the room’s luxury, it lacks a mirror. She settles for finger-combing her hair as it dries, twisting the bulk of it into a knot at her neck. Strands fall around her face in messy tendrils, but it will have to do.

Outside, the lights now curve around and somehow up , an unwinding spiral inviting her to an unseen higher level. When she looks down, only thick shadows lie beneath. She doesn’t look down again.

Where the slope levels out, a bone-pale, intricately carved archway rises high above her head, laced with unintelligible patterns. Beyond it, more shadows await. The sense of unseen watchfulness redoubles. Meanwhile, the lights that led her safely to this threshold wink out, all but the last one.

No going back now. She holds her head high and steps through the archway.

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

A breeze from nowhere swirls around her, stirring the loose hair around her face and setting off a flurry of echoes. They build into a storm of far-off whispers, almost musical, then dissonant, like wind in pine boughs or the ghost of an orchestra tuning. The air carries a rich, sweet scent with it, and her mouth waters despite itself.

“ Cassiel? ”

“I’m here.”

He must be closer than she would have guessed, yet that mysterious calm settles over her again. A flood of golden light illuminates him all at once, standing above her on a dais. Behind him waits a long table, laden with a feast.

He, too, dressed for this occasion, in a sweeping, dark red coat embroidered with curls of silver, slim black trousers, a scalloped frill of white shirt escaping from his lapels. For a split second, she catches an odd expression on his handsome face, gone before she can interpret it. His lips curve when his gaze meets hers, like her stunned reaction pleases him.

He’s a stranger. An alien kidnapper. A dangerous unknown.

He’s magnificent , and she’s in so much trouble.