Everything was still very sore and very blurry when Natalie came to, lying once again on the floor of the cell. With a groan, she tried to get up, and fell back to the ground as her legs gave out under her. Something felt off. She couldn’t tell what the alien procedure had done to her, but there was something different. The problem was, she had no idea what.
The alien spoke in a monotone to the monitors on the wall. Natalie didn’t understand what it was saying, but she guessed it was informing the other alien what had happened. She propped herself up against the wall and tried to think. The alien obviously wasn’t done with her. What fresh torture was he going to come up with? She didn’t want to think about it.
There was a rumbling sound, and something made the entire warehouse shake. The alien turned off the monitors and ejected what looked like a black hard drive, which he tucked under a tentacle. With his other tentacles he picked up what looked like a gas canister. This he proceeded to hook up to a tube in the wall, then he pressed a button next to it. With a hiss blue gases filled the sealed cell. Natalie put both hands over her mouth and held her breath, but eventually she needed to breathe and gulped in some of the gas. Instead of knocking her out, as she expected, she felt reenergized, and the pain in her arms and legs subsided. Shakily, she got to her feet, then discovered she wasn’t even shaky anymore.
A door in the back of the warehouse opened as the gas dispersed, and Natalie saw more tentacled aliens enter. Two of them stopped in front of her cell and opened the door. She was dragged roughly by the arms towards the door, slimy tentacles gripping her arms like iron shackles. She didn’t have time to think, just attempt to keep her footing as the aliens removed her from the warehouse and up the ramp of a huge red spaceship. Why no one had noticed it, Natalie didn’t know. It wasn’t making any kind of effort to hide itself. The aliens brought her inside the ship and down a long corridor, lit harshly like a hospital room. The entire interior was white and impeccably clean. Natalie was dragged to a door at the end of the corridor and pushed inside. She fell to the ground in what looked like an arena of sorts. A booth in the wall above her appeared to have glass in it, but she couldn’t see anything behind it. One way glass, she realized bitterly. Now I really feel like a lab rat.
On the other side of the arena, a door opened and a boy stumbled in. A metal rod was tossed in after him, then the door slammed shut.
“Fight,” boomed an alien voice from a speaker near the booth.
“Say what?” Natalie backed away from the boy, not that she was close to him to begin with.
The boy slowly picked up the rod and positioned it in front of him in a defensive stance. Natalie waved her hands at him, wondering if he spoke English. “I don’t want to fight you.”
He looked up at the booth. “If we fake it well enough, they might let us leave.”
Natalie studied him, considering her options. He obviously knew how to fight, unlike her. She didn’t think volleyball skills would help her out here. “Come at me, then,” she said.
He took a step forward, then stopped. “You want to do this for real.”
“I can’t fight. It’d be obvious we weren’t fighting seriously.”
For a moment, Natalie thought he was going to refuse, then he nodded and took a run at her. Natalie dodged the first swing, but the second knocked her sideways onto the floor. The boy swung the rod over his head as though he was going to hit her in the head. Instinctively Natalie raised her arms to shield herself, then orange flames erupted from her hands, sending them both flying towards the walls. Natalie got to her feet and looked at her hands. “What the-“ She raised her head to see the boy steading himself, panting.
“What was that?” he yelled. “Are you some alien too?”
Horrified, Natalie shook her head. “No, I-“ She didn’t have time to say anything more as the boy launched himself at her. She pointed both palms at him and balls of flame shot out once again. He slid across the floor, giving her a moment to wonder how he’d managed to propel himself all the way across the room with nothing but the muscles in his legs. He got up and swung blindly at her. She decided not to hit him again, just duck and weave until she could figure out how to stop him. It wasn’t hard. He wasn’t the focused, calculating fighter that had first attacked her. She wasn’t sure he was even thinking at all. Finally she found her opening. She grabbed the rod with both hands and ripped it away from him, swinging it into his stomach. He crumpled to the ground, coughing.
“Stop,” she told him. “This is getting us nowhere.”
He punched the floor, his hand leaving a circular dent in material Natalie could tell wasn’t made to be easily broken. The boy knew this as well, as he pulled his hand away and stared at it, his fingers shaking.
“I guess we’re both freaks,” said Natalie.
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