Princess for the Alien Commander by Tammy Walsh

Sofia

The sightof the mysterious two men at my mother’s funeral played on my mind the entire way home.

It must have played on Camila’s too as she couldn’t keep her hands straight and kept running her palms over the length of her itchy black dress.

Where she was usually calm and withdrawn, going through life and her duties with little to no emotion, now her eyes shifted as restlessly as her hands, peering out the window every few seconds, surprised not to find who she was looking for.

“Camila?” I said.

She near leaped out of her skin and banged her head on the ceiling of the taxi pod we were taking home.

She pressed a hand to the lump that must be forming on the top of her head.

It took a moment for her eyes to find mine, and then another for her smile to join them.

She placed a hand on my back and ran her palm over me reassuringly before focusing once more on the window and the outside world.

“Yes, Sofia. I’m fine.”

Her eyes returned to the outside world.

She might say she was fine but something was clearly on her mind.

It wasn’t hard to figure out what.

“Camila?” I said, softer this time.

“Hm?” Camila said, attention glued to a pair of walkers who, from our angle, appeared to be wearing the same style of uniform as the two men from the funeral.

Our taxi passed them, revealing them to be a different pair of kauah.

“Who were those two men at the funeral earlier?” I asked.

Camila’s eyes snapped toward me before glancing away again.

She gulped.

“Which two men?”

Worst.

Liar.

Ever.

I might have written the two men off as nothing more than a vague interest, but how could I now when they had this effect on her?

“The ones standing opposite us at the funeral,” I said. “One dropped the white flower in the grave.”

“I… I don’t remember them,” Camila said.

“Sure you do,” I said around a smile. “One was quite handsome…”

When she shot me a look of disgust, I immediately regretted playing with her.

Her face was drawn and she seemed even paler than when she’d first laid eyes on the two men.

“Camila, what is it?” I said. “Should I be worried about them?”

Sweat glistened on Camila’s hairy top lip but she didn’t wipe it off.

The fact she was hesitating about how to respond to my question was all the answer I needed.

I straightened up and turned more serious.

“Are they dangerous?”

I’d taken their strict expressions as a sign they were professional soldiers, possibly officers, but now I reconsidered that line of thinking.

Who was to say they were real soldiers at all?

There was something in their eyes that promised danger, I thought, as if they wouldn’t let anything get in the way of their mission.

“They’re not… bad people,” Camila said. “But it’s best to avoid them if we can.”

I leaned in closer.

“Who are they? Where did they come from? What do they have to do with us?”

Camila didn’t want to answer but the situation had forced her hand.

She bent her spindly body over and wrapped her hands about her grey hair.

“Oh, Sofia. I never wanted to be the one to tell you…”

“Tell me what?”

“I always thought you should know. I always thought you should… But your mother… She was adamant you shouldn’t.”

“Shouldn’t know what?”

Camila’s eyes flicked between mine, from one pupil to the other as if searching for something she couldn’t find.

And then it hit me.

What was the one thing I’d wanted to know the answer to more than any other?

What was the one thing Mom would never share with me, no matter how many times I asked?

“This has something to do with what happened fifteen years ago, doesn’t it?” I said. “When Mom ran from father and came to this place.”

Camila whimpered.

I’d hit the bull’s eye.

Nine years of begging for answers to questions that never came.

Suddenly, they were here.

Ready to be unleashed.

For me to know the truth.

I wiped my sweaty palms on my skirt.

For the first time since I could recall, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answers.

Mom didn’t want me to know.

Even Camila was in two minds.

I sensed this was a watershed moment, a dividing line between the past and the future.

Was I ready to learn whatever my mom was desperate to keep from me?

Camila shredded a ratty tissue between her hands and looked on the verge of tears.

I placed a comforting hand on her arm.

“Camila, Mother’s gone. It’s just you and me now. We have to do what’s best for us, do what we must to survive.”

Camila wet her parched lips with her tongue and took courage in my words.

She nodded.

“Help me pack our things. We’ll get somewhere safe and I’ll tell you everything. You can’t be kept in the dark forever… No matter how much your mother wishes you can be.”

The taxi pod pulled over and we handed over the last of our money.

Somewhere safe had to be somewhere nearby, I thought. We couldn’t afford anywhere else.

I supported Camila as we hustled across the street to our building.

We lived on the second floor of a dilapidated house bent over almost double, its lower level floor wrapped about its foundations as if clutching its stomach in pain.

Its wooden facade was splintered and dark and had spat splinters in me more times than I cared to count.

But it’d been shelter against the siege and the raging storms that’d ravaged the planet on a near-weekly basis.

The door stuck and I had to dislodge it with a well-placed kick.

I moved to shut it behind us but Camila shook her head.

“Leave it open. We’ll be out of here faster.”

Mother would never allow us to leave the front door wide open like that.

It wasn’t a dangerous neighborhood but she’d always been fearful strangers might wander in.

At least, I’d always assumed she’d been afraid of strangers coming in.

What if it wasn’t strangers she feared most but the knowledge someone she knew might enter?

Someone like the two men at the funeral.

We ran into my bedroom first.

I pulled a bag out from under my single squeaky bed as Camila opened the top drawer of my hope chest and dug my clothes out.

She knew where I stored my things as well as I did.

Together, we scooped up half of each drawer and jammed the contents in the bag.

Camila frowned at my wrinkled clothes and no doubt would have preferred to properly fold them before jamming them in like that but it showed how frantic she was about leaving quickly that she didn’t say a word.

We moved into her room and repeated the procedure.

Her possessions were so well organized and sparse that she might have been preparing to bolt like this ever since we first arrived in this place.

With our bags tossed over our shoulders, we hastened back toward the front door.

I skidded to a stop and turned to face my mother’s room.

“Leave her things,” Camila hissed. “She doesn’t need them anymore.”

“I want something of hers,” I said softly. “To remember her by.”

A flicker of emotion peeked from behind the iron cloud of Camila’s emotions.

She didn’t even want to give me this much time, but she relented.

“Be quick.”

I unshouldered my bag and pushed the door open.

It creaked.

After Mom passed, Camila stripped the bed of its blankets, leaving only the bedframe’s skeleton.

As empty and bare as mother’s body had been at the end.

Mother had always been a fragile soul.

She’d fostered a cough ever since I could remember, but it’d never gotten worse.

Not until the dras siege five years ago.

Her sickness had taken a disastrous turn for the worst.

It ravaged her body and she’d never fully recovered from it.

Her room had turned dark and sinister as if the disease itself was poisoning not only her angelic frame but the world around her.

I was ashamed to admit I’d been afraid to enter that room.

It no longer smelled of sweet flowers that I associated with her feminine countenance but the fetid stench of sickness and decay, and finally, the blackness of death that finally swallowed her.

Mom had taken the illness the way she handled everything else—with total calm and a refusal to let it get the better of her.

“You must always control your emotions,” she would tell me. “You must make your opponents guess at what is going on inside your head and your heart. Control those two things and you can control anyone anywhere.”

“What about when I fall in love one day?” I said. “Should I control my emotions around them too?”

She looked at me levelly.

“As I said. Control your emotions around all opponents.”

At the very end, she motioned for me to approach.

Her fingers were spidery and thin, nothing like the slender feminine digits I’d always associated with her.

Even when we struggled to find enough food to sustain ourselves, she had the prettiest hands.

And that wasn’t all.

Her eyes were sunken so deeply into their sockets they might have been bottomless pits.

“Come… Come closer…” she croaked.

Inch by inch, I did as she asked, shuffling so close I could barely keep myself from gagging from her stench.

I didn’t want to look at her that way and hid my disgust as best I could.

She latched one hand around my arm, her skin cold as ice.

She gripped hold tight and yanked me toward her with surprising strength.

Face to face with her now, the stink of death was so thick I held my breath.

“You must never… go back to him!” she snarled, wilder than a tiger. “You must… never go back!”

“Go back to who?” I said, the words coming out calmer than I ever thought possible.

“To him! To him! Never!”

Camila was on hand to release me from her grip.

But my mother never took her eyes from mine as I backed out of the room.

Her screams followed me down the hallway as Camila attempted to soothe her.

“Never go back to him!” she shrieked. “Never!”

There was a wild craziness in her expression that I’d never seen before.

It broke my heart to see her that way.

The item I’d come to claim hung from a bedpost.

A silver necklace with a flower etched into the top casing.

A flower with long petals and sprigs of flowers…

It even appeared white when the sunlight glinted off its surface.

I snatched it up and turned to leave the room.

I never wanted to see that bed again, not so long as I lived.

“Hurry, child!” Camila said, reaching to take my arm and lead me toward the door.

We took two steps toward it before Camila pulled up sharp.

“Food!” she said. “We can’t leave without food!”

She turned on her heel and hastened toward the kitchen.

I took a moment to take in the house’s atmosphere, knowing it would be the last time I saw it.

I’d spent fifteen years in this house, and not once had I felt at home.

I knew I would recognize it when I saw it.

It wasn’t this city.

I wagered it was as far from here as it was possible to get.

Camila whelped from the kitchen and dropped something heavy on the floor.

A tin of blitzworms rolled from the kitchen, the dent in its side making it roll in a staggered zigzag, finally coming to a stop on the ragged rug.

“Camila?” I said.

I headed toward the kitchen and came to a halt when I saw the room’s occupants.

The tall man from the funeral clutched Camila in his arms and held her steady.

Camila’s eyes were wide and wild as she struggled feebly to escape.

I barely even registered the creak of the floorboard behind me as the shorter man fell upon me.

“Sit down, if you please,” he said in a voice as stern as iron. “There’s something we must tell you.”