Chapter One
Mya
My name is Mya Wilder.
I’m a human. And I’m about to be matched to an alien, whether I like it or not.
Fate, they called it. Destiny that I and my sister ended up here at the Celestial Mates Dating Agency.
They said we were saved, that now we’d find our happily ever after since we’d escaped the confines of Earth. I didn’t dare get my hopes up. Why did I deserve wedded bliss, when so many before me had lost it all? I’d seen too much death and sadness to hope for a happy ending of my own.
It was at times like these that I thought of my family, my friends.
Everything had changed.
I sighed, squeezing my nose with two fingers, a headache brewing between my eyes. I tried to listen to the lecturer up front, but I had trouble focusing. Instead, I found myself caught up in memories of the past.
Ten years ago, my mother had torn my sister and me away from Earth. That’s when the Vakarrans came. We’d lost our home. Our livelihood. Everything gone.
The Vakarrans were known far and wide as ruthless invaders. They were conquerors. They took what they wanted, when they wanted. Their strength and technological prowess destroyed the entirety of the human empire in an impossibly short amount of time.
No longer were humans at the top of the food chain.
The Vakarrans were.
They were our predators and we were the prey.
We were lucky. We had money. My family was able to get away before the aliens came for Earth. Before they claimed the men as their slaves. Before they took the fertile females for breeders. Before they started looking for us.
Our escape had been in place for weeks before the aliens came. We said goodbye to friends, family, and our home. Everything was seemingly going according to plan.
Then, my entire world had fallen apart.
I hadn’t known about my father’s illness. None of us had.
He’d been dead within a week. Terminal. Glioblastoma. The diagnosis had been quick and his prognosis extremely grim. Too far developed for any sort of medical technology to be of help. They’d given him only days to live.
It had come out of nowhere.
There had been no time to grieve. His death had occurred on the day before our trip, and it suddenly became only me, my sister, and my mother. We became our own sisterhood. We survived together.
We were able to get out before the Vakarrans arrived on Earth. Days after we left, they attacked. The invasion was swift, brutal, and utterly decisive. The entire thing was publicized on the space-wide news station. Reporters sent satellite drones in to video the carnage.
Earth hadn’t stood a chance.
The Vakarrans were a strange race. They were exclusively male. Their species did not biologically conceive females, so they needed to find, conquer, and enslave compatible races in order to fulfill their need for genetically compatible females.
Money had been our escape. The Celestial Mates Dating Agency had been our salvation.
After we’d arrived, my mother had been quickly matched and sent away. Biological scans indicated that she still had a few fertile years left, so she’d risen to the top of the match list out of immediate necessity. I hadn’t seen or heard from her since.
I was next on the match list. I’d turned twenty-one last year, but there had been others that had to be matched before me. I’m not sure how they decided on the match order, but I’d been in no rush to be sent away to some alien planet I didn’t understand, so I never asked. Now that it was my turn, I waited nervously, knowing that any day could be my last here at the dating agency.
My sister Lea, though, was more than excited enough for the two of us. She was young when the Vakarran invasion happened and I had tried my best to keep her from watching the news reports of the violence and death. I kept her sheltered because that’s what older sisters did. It was my duty. She still believed in hope, love, and fated mates, unlike me.
I didn’t believe in any of that. But I didn’t stop her from hoping for her happy ever after either.
Right now, they had me sitting in a lecture discussing all the merits of their match system; how they use brain scans, DNA analysis, in combination with assessments of daily behavior in order to match us to an alien somewhere in space that’s our perfect one and only love. It all sounded like complete and utter bullshit to me.
The woman up front was rattling off about something involving the computer and how it processed genetic, epigenetic, and environmental behaviors in order to best make a match, but I was hardly listening. I didn’t really care how it happened. All I knew was that their system was running all my data right now.