SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

She woke in her own bed. Serishee sat next to her, holding her hand. Tears streamed down her face.

Nilafay was certain her bedroom and the housefille were a dream and that she was actually still in the cage back in Rhine’s horror chamber. Her body shook. Terror and fatigue wracked through her.

“You’re safe,” Serishee whispered, squeezing her hand.

It was the first time the girl had ever touched Nilafay. Under different circumstances, the presumptuousness of such a thing would have upset her, but she was so desperate, so broken, that she reached for the girl with her other hand and sobbed.

Serishee came to sit on the bed next to her and wrapped her arms around Nilafay’s shoulders, pulling her into her lap.

She fell back asleep, warm and finally home.

When she woke again, Serishee was gone. Nilafay sat up and searched for her in the darkened room but found her mother instead.

Mother stood at the other side of Nilafay’s room, hands clasped together in front of her. “Your father would like to speak with you if you’re feeling up to it.”

No embrace. No welcoming home. No show of concern.

Her mother showed no emotion as she watched Nilafay struggle to sit up. She simply nodded and left her daughter alone to dress.

Standing took considerable more effort than Nilafay had expected. The dehydration, hunger, and the crushing gravity of the time she’d spent above ground had affected her body in ways she couldn’t compensate for. She stumbled across her room, falling to the ground in a heap, but the impact of the floor against her knees and hands almost felt good. Solid. It placed her in the physical world instead of feeling like she floated through air, never to land again.

Her father waited in the family chamber of the house, and she followed him to his office. Despite her weakness, she sat across from him and recounted everything that had happened—almost everything, at least. The day she met Dr. Rhine, his promise to show her the world above the sea, and the tortures inflicted on her. Her father’s scowl as she recounted her coastal adventure on the day she was abducted sliced through her more brutally than anything Rhine had done.

“That’s everything?” he asked.

She nodded, biting her tongue to keep from telling him about the Sualwet she left behind as she made her escape. Guilt ate at her from the inside out, clawing to burst free so she could be absolved. But she knew there was no absolution for what she had done, and only someone who had endured the captivity and horror she had—like the abandoned Sualwet in Rhine’s lab—could ever understand the decision to leave.

“You will show me where they held you. We’ll make for the shore tomorrow.”

“So soon?” her mother spoke from the corner of the room. She’d been there the whole time, and Nilafay hadn’t even noticed her.

Father narrowed his eyes first at Nilafay and then at her mother. “War waits for no one.”

“War?” Nilafay asked. She had no taste for war after what she’d just been through. War was what justified cruelty. What would it inspire men like her father to do?

“Yes. War. We have been at war for generations, but the enemy has never resorted to something as vile as this.” Her father gestured at her and frowned. “I won’t have others endure what you’ve been subjected too. Would you?”

“No, Father.” She bowed her head. She didn’t dare ask the words sitting on the tip of her tongue. Her parents would think her foolish and selfish to be asking after a boy when war loomed on the shore, but she couldn’t stop wondering where Adaltan was. Why hadn’t he come to see her?

“Leave now. You need your rest, and I have business to attend to.” Her father turned in his chair back to his desk, the screen display of his compdisc already glowing.

Nilafay left the office without saying goodbye. Her mother followed and closed the doors on the stark room silently.

“Mother, may I ask you something?”

Her mother faced her but didn’t meet her eyes. “What is it?”

“Will Adaltan be visiting? Will the wedding take place soon?”

Mother shifted to her other foot, an unconscious display of discomfort Nilafay had never seen before. “There will be time to discuss that later.”

“Yes, Mother.” Nilafay barely got the words out before her mother swept away down the hall, leaving an exhausted girl behind to climb the stairs back to her room alone.

Back in her room she collapsed on her bed and cried. Loud shaky sobs ripped through her and bent her into a ball where she could hold herself tight like a fry yet to hatch. Gods knew if she didn’t do it, no one else would. And for a sickening moment, she missed Vaughn.

Nilafay’s swim to shore with her father proved fruitless. She couldn’t quite remember the route back to where she had been held, and to make matters worse, as soon as she stepped on solid ground, her entire body shook from fear and panic. Her father’s men had to pull her home on a makeshift sled usually used only for those injured in battle.

She remained in her room for weeks afterward, refusing to leave to eat or speak with her parents. Shame and fear warred within her. She’d been unable to help the man she’d left behind, not once but twice. She’d left him there, and when given the chance to absolve herself by rescuing him, she’d failed. Her emotions made her weak, so she shut them off and shut everyone out.

Her parents did not speak to her, and Serishee brought her meals to her room but quickly left.

She hurt. Her legs ached, and her chest contracted tightly around her heart. Every movement felt like a great undertaking, and all she wanted to do was sleep. When she could muster the energy, she would cry.

Since no one visited her, no one noticed her body was changing. Her breasts had swelled, and her hips were gradually widening. Her distended middle now pressed against her clothing, distorting her figure.

Despite the impossibility of it, she knew she had become pregnant.

It was a monstrous thing. Not a clutch of fertilized eggs but a parasite, an invasion of her body. Rhine had done this somehow. Despite his anger over his experiments being failures, he managed to accomplish the thing he’d been willing to kill for. And he’d never know.

Part of her was thrilled to have stolen this success from him. Another smaller part knew the conception of what grew within her may have been due to Rhine’s experiments and drugs, but it wasn’t his success. Like all life, it had grown out of two bodies finding each other.

This child’s father was Vaughn.

Nilafay bent over herself, bile rising in her throat at the reality of what she had done. She had lain with an Erdlander, and not under duress. In other circumstances she wouldn’t have done it, but Vaughn hadn’t forced her. This child’s beginnings were her own choice, her own body. Its creation had meant her freedom.

Pride and love gripped her. This child was hers and no one else’s. She would die before allowing it to be used by Rhine or Vaughn. And so she hid in her room, staying covered so no one would see the changes happening to her body.

As time passed, her belly grew larger, faster than she had expected, but who knew what passed for a Sualwet pregnancy? Within her grew something never before seen, a mixture of two races never meant to be joined.

One day, her mother came to her room. “The physician is here to examine you, Nilafay.”

“Why?” she mumbled from her place under the heavy blankets Serishee had given her.

“To evaluate your health, why else?” The annoyance in Mother’s voice almost upset Nilafay, but after so long with no contact, no affection, no Adal, she just didn’t care.