* * *
I was alonewhen I woke up, the house perfectly still around me. I shuddered at the feeling of being alone, my feelings unreasonably hurt at the fact that Thane had left me after the night we’d shared.
Getting out of bed, I wandered to the window. It was a dreary day, so cloudy that it looked later than it actually was. With my stomach rumbling, I pulled on the only pair of sweats in my closet and wandered downstairs, and through the rooms on my way to the kitchen.
I searched for a sign of Thane or of Corrin but they weren’t around. I finally made it to the kitchen, also deserted. Opening the fridge, the first thing I noticed was the bowl of blueberries. It had only been a few days since I fell in a pile of blueberries, getting choked by Thane. My how things had changed. Maybe something was wrong with me? I’d adjusted so quickly to everything...had even slept with two of them after being terrorized by them for weeks. Thane had literally choked me right outside this kitchen. And here I was, casually eating breakfast instead of trying to get away like any normal girl. Was I so desperate for affection of any kind that I had latched on to the first sign of it? This was literally the species that I believed was responsible for my parent’s disappearance.
My appetite had disappeared with my morose thoughts, so I closed the refrigerator and wandered into the other rooms in the house. I decided to explore the house a bit more to get my mind off things. I could wonder if I was sick in the head at some other point. After yesterday I needed a day off.
I walked through the rooms, stopping to admire the expensive artwork on the walls. I’d been in a hurry to find an exit the last time I had explored the house and I hadn’t had time to admire the fact that there was a movie theater and workout room that was the size of the gym that I attended near home.
I was strolling through the library filled with more books than I had ever seen in one place, and was about to leave, when I noticed a section of the wall that looked like it stuck out farther than everywhere else.
Walking over I realized that the wall seemed to be sticking out farther because it was some kind of disguised door, and it had been left open. Peeking through the crack I spied a steep staircase leading to an open area. I opened the door a little wider and listened for a moment, trying to see if I could hear any voices coming from down below. I couldn’t hear anything. Ignoring the voice in my head that said I should leave it alone; I opened the door wider and started to descend. I paused every couple of steps to see if I could hear anything, and then would continue on when everything remained silent. I had been searching for a reason for their arrival, so maybe I’d finally stumbled across the answer. Excitement tangled in my gut, layered with fear over getting caught.
When I reached the bottom of the steps, I stared around in amazement. Out of everything that I had seen related to the Vepar, this room was the most “out of this world” yet. Sleek, silver tables were set up with hologram images projecting out of them. There was one table that displayed what looked like about 100 different screens showing different parts of the world. Another table had a hologram screen with thousands of numbers scrolling down. I examined the 100 plus images for a moment trying to see if there was anything familiar looking, but I couldn’t recognize anything.
Skipping the numbers for now I walked over to the left wall which was made up of an enclosed glass bookcase showcasing various specimens in every chamber. I gasped in amazement at some of the creatures that must have been from their planet. A black, spider with twelve legs instead of eight. It was easily three times the size of a tarantula, and I shivered as I watched it eat a mouse whole. There was some kind of purple creature with four eyes, reminding me of the embodiment of the Furby toy that had been popular when I was a child.
There were also things that were recognizable and left me shivering. In one chamber sat a human heart… Still beating. In another one was an organ that I was pretty sure were female ovaries. And in another one was a human embryo.
Sickness rose through me, so I finally backed away and headed over to the hologram with all the numbers. There were thousands of digits on the screen, but only two columns fully caught my attention. One said Vepar Female and one said Human Female. The numbers were changing rapidly on the human column. What was it counting? Deaths? Or women attending gyms. I almost laughed at how stupid that sounded. What if it was somehow tracking every birth and death? The Vepar column was barely changing with almost no deaths and no births at all.
I tried to think what they would need such information for. Looking through the other columns I found no columns for males.
“What are you doing in here?” barked an angry sounding Corran from behind me.
My heart skipped in my chest, and I twirled around to see him at the base of the stairs, a red tinge to his very handsome cheeks.
“I was just exploring the house and the door was open,” I tried to explain, my voice shaking.
“You shouldn’t be down here,” he snapped. “Did you touch anything?”
“No, I just looked,” I answered, my hands trembling at how angry he sounded. Corran had always only sounded interested or mild-mannered. I hardly recognized the seething Vepar in front of me.
“I’m sorry,” I started to say, but he was already pointing to the stairs.
“Get out of here,” he yelled, and I didn’t waste a second more trying to apologize. I flew up the stairs with tears in my eyes.
I ran into Thane at the top of the stairs. “What were you doing down there?” he demanded.
“I’ve already been yelled at enough; I don’t need you to chime in. I’d almost forgotten I was a prisoner in this place, but I won’t be forgetting again,” I told him, flying by before he could grab my arm. I ran to my bedroom and slammed the door, wishing there was a way to lock the door from the inside.
Ten minutes ticked by as I pouted on the bed, my mind racing with what had been in that room and the look in Corran’s eyes when he’d seen me down there. Why didn’t they want me to see whatever those things were measuring?
A knock sounded on my door, startling me from my musings since I hadn’t heard anyone climbing the stairs. “Can I come in?” asked Corran through the door.
“No,” I belligerently said, knowing that I was acting like a two-year-old even as I said it. He opened the door anyway. I didn’t expect anything less because from the beginning the Vepar had done whatever they wanted.
“I’m pretty sure I told you not to come in,” I said as he stood at the foot of my bed. I was pleased to see he looked a bit scared of me...and slightly ashamed.
“I came to apologize,” he said, fiddling with the bottom of his shirt in a decidedly human gesture.
I continued my childish behavior by not saying anything and just staring at him stonily.
“I’m sort of a rarity on Vepar,” he continued, when he saw that I wasn’t going to say anything. “Our scientists have for the most part been able to eradicate any abnormalities or disorders that used to be present in the Vepar genetic line. My parents were Vepar that were a part of the last nomadic clan though, so they hadn’t been subject to any of the genetic cleansing like the rest of the population. I have a disorder most similar to your human Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. When I saw you down there, all I could think about was that you had touched something, and it was out of the order I kept it in.” He took a deep breath and looked at me beseechingly, “I had no intention of scaring you, Ella.”
Sorrow flooded his gaze as he stood there, and my anger ebbed. I remembered a classmate in high school who’d suffered from OCD. He couldn’t walk out of a room without tapping the side of the door three times and he had to walk three steps behind someone at all times if he was walking in the hallway. He’d been the nicest guy, and I remember how much it bothered him to have all these things to do to stay sane. If Corran’s mental issues were anything similar to that, I wasn’t surprised he grew so mad when he found me down there.