#telestrian

“Here we are!” I sauntered over and stuck the katana carelessly into one of the elven gangers, then started typing on the little phone-computer’s keyboard with my bloody, sticky thumbs. It took me longer than normal.

“Enough,” my aunt Jessica said. I never thought I’d be happy to hear her voice again.

“What is that thing?” I gasped, jerking out of her grasp and backing up until the cold stone wall chilled my spine.

“This is one of my children,” Jessica said. “You will understand in time. Now please stop this childish running around and go with Val.”

One of the UB badges stood by, not one of the original two that I’d escaped. This guy was at least as big as those two put together, and twice as ugly. He had a scar over his right eye, thinning, black hair cut military high and tight, and a crooked mouth that gave him a permanent sneer.

“Come, Ms. Telestrian,” he muttered, stepping forward to grab my arm. His huge hand could have wrapped my bicep twice.

“Isn’t Val a girl’s name?” I asked as I tried to pull away.

“She is my niece,” Jessica said with a warning tone in her voice. “I don’t want her damaged.”

Big and Ugly grunted something that sounded like “yes, high priest,” and hauled me along the hallway. I tried to call to Jessica over my shoulder, but my new jailer tightened his grip and yanked upward so that I was more dragging than walking. Pain lanced up my arm, and I blinked back hot tears, my bravado dying a weak death.

I stumbled along in a haze of misery, trying to count the turns and the doors we went through and having no luck at all. Ugly Val used his badge and a code to enter a door I hadn’t even noticed, pinning me to the wall with one hand wrapped around my neck in a way that made it clear he was willing to explain an “accident” to Jessica.

Beyond that door, the whole place changed. The walls were still stone, but no longer cinderblock. Instead, they were natural stone that had been bored out or maybe carved by some kind of industrial acid. The air carried an odd, metallic tang that had the tiny hairs on my neck and arms standing at attention. I dug my feet into the stone floor. I was pretty sure that my situation had not improved.

“Look, pixie, I don’t wanna hurt you,” Val said in the same grunting tone he’d used before.

Pixie? Really? As a racial slur went, it was pretty tame. I guessed that Dandelion Eater would be too much of a mouthful for him. I managed not to say that aloud. Go me.

Footsteps killed whatever equally biffy thing I might have said. A thin human male in gold robes approached, with another buggy man at his side. This bug guy had wings coming up over his shoulders and his arms didn’t quite fit into the loose robe he wore, with weird double-joints poking out. It looked like someone had stuffed a grasshopper into a bathrobe.

“We shall take the future queen from here, Val,” the human man said.

“Suits me,” Val muttered and turned around, punching in the code for the door.

I, being brilliant, tried to duck under Val’s monster arm and get through the door in front of him. He swatted me to the weirdly smooth stone floor and left without even looking back.

“Please, Ms. Telestrian,” the human guy said as he offered me his hand. “There is no need for this.”

He was probably a decade older than my cousin Lynne, but his face had a smooth, ageless quality that some people get, and his blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail. It was his even, white smile that disturbed me. I kept expecting the whole façade of normal humanness to crack apart. I got the impression that if I looked too closely at his body under the loose robe, I’d see something more like what his silent, buggy companion had going on.

“Okay. You win. Let’s go.” I wasn’t giving up. Just using the better part of valor. I refused to take his hand, worried I’d peel his skin off like a glove and reveal something icky, and shoved myself to my feet.

If the last place had been confusing, this place was actually a maze. Fortunately, we passed no more of the weird bug men. Unfortunately, I started to understand where they might have come from. Rooms like little pods opened off the main corridor. Ripped clothing and piles of shit crowded some of these rooms. The stench of rotting flesh and old blood grew stronger the deeper we traveled, and I started to hate my elven senses. I fixed my eyes on the gold robe of the human and kept my hand over my nose. Te’ch.

I had to remember how to get out of here, but keeping track of where we were going was impossible. Frag that drek. Bile burned my throat. I was going to be bug food if I couldn’t figure something out. Some of the rooms had weird devices, technology like I’d never seen before. Nothing that looked even remotely like a comm or a display. I debated grabbing a thingamabob or two, but threw that thought out quick as it came. What was the point? I didn’t know how to use it, and there was no way I could overpower both these guys, even if the more human-looking one was actually just a human. He was still bigger than me.  My thoughts spiraled around in despair as I warred with my stomach to keep down what little I’d eaten today.

The robed human led me to a room that had a single stone bench with a folded up blanket on it and a single electric lantern on the floor. This room actually had a door, which he locked behind him, leaving me alone.

I poked and prodded at the keypad for a moment, but it stayed a dumb chunk of tech with an evil red light shining at me. The door was solidly fixed into the stone, no hinges on this side and no good edges to grip. Kicking it just made my feet hurt more. I gave up and the noise boomed for another long moment, then the echoes died away.

Shivering, I sank down onto the bench and wrapped my arms around my knees. Bug food. My short life had come to this. Maybe someone would rescue me. It could happen. Somebody had probably noticed I was gone by now. Or Lynne, traitor that she sorta was, might have asked Jessica where I was. I thought about the look in my cousin’s eyes whenever she had looked at Jessica, and despaired a little more. She would believe whatever Jessica told her.

I thought about the myriad corridors and passages and locked doors that I had been taken down. If I couldn’t even find me, how was anyone else supposed to? The cavalry was not coming. I was bug food.

An hour or a year might have gone by before I stopped feeling sorry for myself long enough to notice that relatively fresh air was flowing down over me. I looked up and saw a metal vent crudely attached to the wall with an overabundance of rubbery cement material.

The vent pried free easily enough, leaving a hole in the wall above my stone bench a little wider than my head. Lucky for me, I’m not much wider than my head. Standing on tiptoes, I reached into the vent, feeling along it for a bend. Nothing as far as my arms could reach to either side. I shoved away visions of razor-sharp, elf-slicing fan blades and went and got the lamp.

To the left, from what my keen eyes and the badly angled lamp light could discern, the vent passage went up. If it had been carved by normal means, I might have never been able to tell, but the passage sloped more than turned at a less than ninety-degree angle. I didn’t know if I’d be able to fit inside, or if I could get up that passage.

One thing was for sure though: staying here made me bug food. Suffocating or being crushed to death by killer fan blades wasn’t exactly my second choice of ways to die, but doing something—anything—felt better than waiting for a sure thing. All I had to do was close my eyes, and my fragging brain fed me the images of popped and exploded bodies I’d encountered on my way to my prison cell. No thanks. Anything was better than that.

I set the lamp down on the bench and pulled my belt out of my jeans. I didn’t want to have anything on that could get caught on stuff. I tossed the belt into the narrow ventilation shaft. It could still come in handy, after all.

Outside the door, I heard loud footfalls and the sound of someone or maybe multiple someone’s yelling. I hesitated. Rescue? I could wish.

Unfortunately for my aunt—and for my poor head—whatever drek she’d drugged me with apparently wore off quicker in elves than she’d estimated. I came to while the badges were still carrying me to whatever dungeon I was doomed for.

My brain felt like it was coated in snot and being used as a snare drum in a punk rock solo. I kept my eyes closed for a moment, hoping the rolling sensation would pass. I was draped one of the big human’s shoulders like a sack of meat, and half the rolling feeling was him walking. The guard’s uniform smelled like bleach. Not helping.

I opened my eyes to find that I wasn’t exactly in Kansas anymore. The comfortable woo-woo corporate environment of the UB complex, with its golds, oranges, and earthy tones, was gone. The hallway the two guards walked down was constructed of flat, gray cinderblock. I saw into one room as we passed it, some kind of militaristic dormitory with bunks.

I seriously needed to get out of here. The badge carrying me hadn’t woke to the fact that I was conscious, but I figured I could change that quick enough. Nice thing about being an elf? I’m tall, even for my age, with long, slender limbs. Long, slender limbs that come with bony as frag knees and elbows.

I introduced one elbow to the nape of his neck and then my knee to his groin as he bent over with a yell. Lucky for me these corp guys weren’t wearing real body armor. Tricks like that wouldn’t have worked on Telestrian elites.

The guy dropped me and I ducked between him and his partner, running back down the hall. My thinking was that the way out had to be the way they had come. My thinking was stupid, again.

The hallway opened into another hallway and I chose a direction that didn’t have shouting coming from it. The whole place was like a fragging warren of military-industrial sameness. It was more confusing than the hallways at school, which is saying a lot. It had taken me almost a year to stop getting lost on the way to classes.

The first three doors I tried were locked. I wish I’d had the brains to grab one of the guard’s key-cards during my daring escape, but that hadn’t been my focus. I was never great at multitasking. The scent of soy sauce and the faint ring of metal on metal drew me onward down a right fork in the next gray cinderblock hallway.

A kitchen. That was a good thing. Kitchens needed supplies. Supplies came from outside. That meant a door to the outside.

With that beautiful logic train whistling through my head to the sound of my heart pounding in my ears, I raced down the corridor. I bowled over a short, fat human male wearing a stained apron as he opened a door at the far end. I tucked and rolled like we’d been told to do a million times in gym, and came up to my feet. I almost face-planted into a large steel bowl of noodles, regretting the choice of heeled boots. They had looked good with my jeans, though.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” a man said, coming around a steaming industrial stove. He had a large knife in one hand and a sour expression on his ugly, sweaty face.

I didn’t argue. Shoving the bowl of noodles at him, I ducked past him, eyes desperately searching for the nearest door. To my left, past the bank of ranges and gawking cooks, I spotted a door that looked like it led somewhere other than a pantry. ’Cause that would have been mega embarrassing.

I flailed my arms, screaming like a crazy person to keep the surprised humans away from me. No one made a move for me, not even knife-guy, as I dove for the door, yanked on the handle, and charged through it, slamming it behind me.

I had prayed for salty, polluted Seattle air. Instead I got another hallway, this one more dimly lit but just as dull and cinderblocky as all the others.

“She went through there!” someone shouted behind me.

Well, she certainly wasn’t going back through there. I took off running again, because there wasn’t much else to do other than wait for recapture, and I really didn’t feel like making it that easy. I’d read somewhere that if you are in a maze, you should only turn left, so I did that. I took every left turn I could while avoiding any sounds of pursuit, trying the doors I could find, though each looked exactly the same. After about five turns, I was pretty sure from the soy sauce scent of the air that I had just gone in a crazy circle.

One of the doors opened in front of me and I shoved on the man coming out, pushing us both inside, which turned out to be an almost empty room with only a single metal chair in the middle. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any creepier—

“Hey, hi, sorry,” I said to the guy I’d shoved half on his face. I reached to help him up and then recoiled.

He looked up at me with insect eyes, faceted and ruby-red, like fresh blood. His mouth opened too wide for his thin, almost still human face, and shiny black mandibles protruded, clicking and chittering. This guy was no exotic, he was super bugged-out. Nothing remotely human looked at me through those eyes.

I pretty much screamed like a little girl.

The bug man lurched to his feet and grabbed at me with hands that were human in shape but tipped with hard, chitinous claws. I kicked at him. My boot connected with his abdomen but met what felt like a metal plate. The blow shoved me off balance and I stumbled back, into the door.

The Universal Brotherhood complex was aces. They had dormitories, meditation rooms complete with sand you could rake into shapes and pretty rocks and fountains, exercise facilities, classrooms—which were kind of lame, ’cause who wants to grow up and go to school—multiple dining rooms which all seemed to serve some delicious-smelling stuff, and basically anything someone could want. Everyone we passed was all smiles and nods. I guessed my aunt Jessica was pretty top shelf around here, and Lynne, too. People certainly seemed to recognize both of them. No one made any comments about us being elves, either, despite pretty much everyone else I saw being a human.

Eventually, however, the fun tour ended. We were back in a different room that was just as warm and comfortable as the first one, sipping tea. It was official, my father was a jerk. A tiny part of me felt it was unfair to only listen to one side of things, but he’d blown his chance when he’d lied to me about Hakeem. It seemed like everything had been said, but somehow I sensed that Jessica wanted to tell me more.

“We’d like you to join us, Marie Louise,” Jessica said after the silence had stretched a bit past comfortable.

“Um, you mean, live here?” I thought about my room at home and my friends at school and how I’d miss them. Even my annoying brother, though he was off doing some project for our family that, of course, I wasn’t a part of. “I…don’t know.”

“We need people like you to spread our mission, to help bring truth and justice to this world. To show that we can all be connected, and part of a greater whole,” Lynne said. She’d been really quiet this whole time, letting Jessica do all the talking. Now she looked at me with an almost crazy passion burning in her eyes.

“Lynne, could you give us a moment alone, please?” Jessica asked.

“I won’t be far,” Lynne said to me. She left the room without protesting being excluded. Her total adoration of my new aunt was kind of weird.

“How would you like to help your friend, Hakeem?” Jessica asked as the door closed behind my cousin.

Her question wiped my brain. I had told her all about Hakeem; about him getting kicked out of school and then beaten half to death on my father’s orders. I got the feeling, just that little pinch of doubt in the back of my mind; she had known all this already. Still, help him? Lame question.

“Of course I want to help him,” I said, smoothing my hands over my jeans. “Why do you think I wanted to know the truth? He’s still my friend.”

“Join us, Marie Louise. Be our queen, and you can.” Jessica’s eyes had a little of the same fire in them now.

“Queen?” I asked, then shut my mouth before I said anything stupider.

“Yes,” Jessica said in the same tone of voice she had used to ask me if I wanted more tea. “We would like you to help usher in this new era, be at the center of things here at UB, for you to take your rightful place at my side as my kin as we show Seattle and beyond how different and beautiful the world really can become.”

I blushed, leaning back into the super soft couch. Queen of the Universal Brotherhood. Had a nice ring to it. Probably was a lot more respect and responsibility than anyone else in my family was offering me. With the resources of the Universal Brotherhood, I could totally help Hakeem, and maybe even prevent people like my father from abusing their wealth and power again.

“I think I want to know more about it. And about you, Aunt Jessica,” I said. It seemed to please her when I called her aunt. “I mean, I’ve had a lot dropped on me today.” This place could be really cool. I wanted to come back here, maybe talk to Lynne some more, learn what I could about the Universal Brotherhood, get to know my aunt better. Hey, and be queen of whatever. I refrained from asking if this meant I got minions. Having lots of minions would be aces, but probably that wasn’t the first thing a queen should think about.

“Of course, dear. You must be tired. I will show you to your rooms.” Jessica rose with the same sweet smile that had been on her face since she’d first met us.

“Rooms?” I asked like a total biff. “I thought…I should probably go home.” I had snuck out to see Lynne. People would be missing me eventually.

Jessica’s expression didn’t change one bit. “I’m afraid I can’t allow that, Marie Louise. You will be our queen. We must protect you here.”

“Allow it? I’m not asking. I am going home.” I started edging toward the door, wondering how far was the “not far” Lynne had meant.

“This has been a pleasant afternoon. Do not make it otherwise,” Jessica said, moving across the carpet toward me with more speed than I would have thought a short human capable.

“Lynne!” I yelled, reaching for the door.

The door opened, but Lynne wasn’t on the other side. Two corp badges came in, looking at Jessica with questions on their faces. I backed away from them. Though they hadn’t drawn weapons yet, the two human men were a lot bigger than me. Then my aunt was behind me, her arm sliding up around my neck as something pinched my arm.

“Shh, Marie Louise,” Jessica said softly.

The ride to meet Cousin Lynne’s friend gave me too much time to think. Tears of rage stung my eyes. How dare my father try to decide who was and wasn’t okay for me to hang with? It was just like him—his high-handedness. I guess it was kind of nice to be protected, though at sixteen I hardly needed it. But this time, someone had gotten hurt. Hakeem was my friend. Now he had a criminal record, couldn’t come back to school, and the fragging cake was he’d never walk again. He was on scholarship. No way he could afford the kind of bio or cyber recon it would take to get out of that wheelchair.

All because of my father. Lynne was right. He was so not who I thought he was.