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Section 1
### Chapter 1: Chapter 1
Please note that this story deals with some distressing themes from the outset involving physical violation, violence, child abuse, child separation and intense emotional distress.
Mature | mature | Adult themes | Sci Fi | Romance | Sarah is an ordinary young mother from Lancashire, England, living a quiet life with her husband, baby daughter, and dog, when an evening walk ends in darkness. She wakes strapped to a metal table in a windowless room, stripped, drugged, and watched by creatures that cannot possibly exist. Humanity has never reached beyond the Moon. Aliens are fiction. Yet Sarah soon discovers she has been taken far from Earth, imprisoned aboard a hidden vessel with two frightened children and no way home. After weeks of fear, hunger, and brutal experimentation, an alarm tears through the ship. In the chaos, Sarah fights back. She is found by a strange alien man with black eyes, green-black skin, and a quiet, unsettling intensity. His name is Sonn, and though he is not human, he seems to understand her terror better than anyone. Rescued into a wider galaxy Earth was never told existed, Sarah must face unbearable truths. As Sarah struggles to survive grief, displacement, and the mysteries of alien civilisation, Sonn remains a constant, enigmatic presence — blunt, watchful, sometimes harsh, but never indifferent. And whatever binds him to her may be far stranger than rescue.
Complete Chapters 24 Rating 4.7 ( 15 reviews ) Age Rating mature {"language":"en","storyId":1742467,"genres":[{"name":"Scifi","path":"/genres/scifi"},{"name":"Romance","path":"/genres/romance"}],"authorName":"Jane_Doe_Stories","authorPath":"/Jane_Doe_Stories","status":"complete","lastUpdatedAt":1785049855,"chaptersCount":24,"rating":4.666666666666667,"reviewsCount":15,"ageRating":"mature"} Chapter 1: Sarah Sarah woke to white light.
For a few seconds, that was all there was. Light. Hard, white, artificial light pressing through her eyelids and turning the inside of her skull red. She blinked against it, once, twice, her lashes dragging as if she had been sleeping too deeply or for too long.
The ceiling above her was not a ceiling she knew. It was metal. Smooth, grey, faintly reflective, broken only by a long strip of fluorescent light that hummed overhead. The sound was thin and constant, almost insect-like in the quiet.
Sarah tried to lift a hand to shield her eyes. Her wrist did not move. For one foolish second, she thought her sleeve had caught on something.
Something tightened around her wrist. She looked down.
Empty in the way a room goes silent when a glass smashes.
She was lying flat on a metal table. Her arms were fixed at her sides, wrists bound by dark restraints. Her ankles were strapped down too. She jerked one foot, then the other, and the restraints bit immediately into her skin.
She pulled harder. Her body reacted before her mind could catch up. Shoulders twisting, spine arching, fingers clawing at the empty air. The table beneath her was narrow and cold. Her skin stuck slightly to it where the hospital gown had ridden up around her thighs.
Her sweatshirt was gone. So were her leggings. Her trainers. Her socks. Her underwear.
The panic rose so fast she could not breathe around it. Someone had taken her clothes off. Someone had touched her while she was unconscious. Someone had put her here, strapped her here, left her here under this terrible white light.
She tried to sit up and could not. Tried to turn onto her side and could not. Tried to tear one arm free and only made the restraint cut deeper into the soft inside of her wrist.
The room came to her in pieces. Metal walls. Steel floor. Crates stacked against one side. Other tables arranged in a line around her.
A new horror opened inside her.
She had been walking. That was the last thing she remembered. She had put Isobel down just after seven, kissed the warm curve of her cheek, smoothed the dark little wisp of hair from her forehead. Isobel had been born with so much hair. Everyone commented on it in those first few weeks. But now there was only little whisps left. Sarah hated it and loved it.
Lewis had been in the kitchen loading the dishwasher badly, because he always loaded it badly, and Sarah had laughed and told him she was taking Twiglet out before it got properly dark.
A stupid, precious, ordinary evening.
The path had been dry beneath her trainers. Gravel and stone crunching underfoot. Fields on either side, wheat whispering in the summer air. Twiglet had trotted a little way ahead on the extendable lead, ears bouncing, nose down, small wire-haired body full of importance. Sarah had held her water bottle in one hand and the lead in the other.
She began to fight properly then. Not carefully. Not sensibly. She thrashed against the restraints until the table shuddered beneath her.
A sound broke out of her, half grunt, half sob. Tears gathered but did not fall. The panic was too physical for tears yet. It lived in her ribs, her throat, her wrists, the frantic animal need to get up, get out, get away.
The sound ripped at her throat.
The room swallowed her voice. The light above her flickered. Sarah froze. For a moment there was only the electric hum and her own breathing, ragged and ugly in the sealed room. No windows. No clock. No voices. No clue where she was.
The air smelled of metal and antiseptic and something dry and filtered, as if it had been cooled and cleaned too many times. Tiny specks of dust hung motionless in the fluorescent light above her. Nothing stirred them except her breath.
She swallowed. Her throat hurt.
Not the kind of thirst that came after a summer walk.
Her tongue felt thick. Her lips felt dry. The realisation moved slowly through her, colder than the table beneath her. She must have been here for hours.
Then another sensation pushed through the panic. An ache. Deep, hot, insistent. Sarah went still. For a moment she could not place it. There was too much fear, too much cold, too much wrongness. Then the ache sharpened across her chest, heavy and swollen and horribly familiar.
She looked down as far as the restraints allowed. The front of the hospital gown was damp. For one confused second, she did not understand. Then she did.
The sound that came out of her was worse than a sob. Her breasts were full. Painfully full. The skin felt tight and tender beneath the thin gown, her body strained past comfort, past routine, demanding relief. A slow, warm leak had spread into the fabric.
The thought did not arrive gently. It tore through her.
Sarah had fed her before putting her down, but not enough to last all night. Not yet. Isobel was still too small, still waking hungry, still rooting blindly against Sarah’s chest with those tiny furious sounds that broke Sarah’s heart even when she was exhausted. If Sarah was this full, then Isobel would have woken. She would have cried. Lewis would have tried to settle her. He would have tried a bottle, if there was any expressed milk left, if he could find it, if Isobel would even take it from him while frightened and hungry and wanting her mother.
The thought was panicked and absolute. She needed to sit up. She needed to go home. She needed Isobel’s warm weight against her, the soft pull of her mouth, the little hand that always pressed against Sarah’s skin as if holding her there.
Instead she was strapped to a metal table, leaking through a hospital gown while strangers had done God knew what to her body.
“Please,” she pleaded, though there was no one there to listen.
Her voice broke on the last word. She forced herself to breathe.
She had to think. She had to know what had been done to her.
The question steadied her because it was practical. It gave her something to do besides scream.
Sarah shut her eyes for one second and worked her way through her own body.
She tensed, released, tensed again.
Thighs. Hips. Her stomach clenched.
Nothing her panicked body could identify, unless shock was hiding it from her.
She kept going. Hands. Fingers. Arms.
She opened her eyes again and looked down as best she could. The gown was white except for the damp spread across her chest.
Her bare shins looked ordinary beneath the fluorescent light. Pale skin. A few old bruises she recognised from real life. A faint line of stubble along her shins.
The thought was so absurd, so viciously normal, that for half a second she almost laughed.
Not loudly at first. Just a hot spill at the corners of her eyes, sliding into her hairline because she could not lift a hand to wipe them away. She stared down at herself, forcing her gaze over every visible inch.
There was a mark in the crook of her left elbow. Small. Red. Precise. A faint bruise had begun to form around it. Sarah stared at it.
The small amount of control she had clawed together broke apart.
Someone had put something into her. Or taken something out. Drugged her. Sedated her. Drawn blood. She did not know. She had no way of knowing.
She looked wildly to either side, expecting a drip, a monitor, wires attached to her chest, anything that might explain what had been done.
No machines. No bags of fluid. No electrodes. No heart monitor beeping steadily beside her. She was simply strapped down in a windowless metal room.
Sarah went still so fast it hurt.
It was set into the wall to her right, so smooth she had not even noticed the seam. It slid open with a high, pressurised hiss that made every muscle in her body tighten.
At first, her mind refused them.
It did not try to name them. It did not try to understand. It simply stopped, as if whatever part of her knew how to recognise the world had come up against something it could not process.
They were roughly human-sized, no taller than an average man, the same height as Lewis, perhaps, but broader through the body. Dense. Sturdy. Their clothing — if it was clothing — was fitted close to them, grey and black and faintly shiny, like rubber or wet stone.
But it was their faces that trapped the scream inside her. Four eyes. Black, glossy, arranged in pairs across the upper face. No whites. No pupils she could see. Just blackness reflecting the fluorescent lights. Where a nose should have been, there were two narrow slits set high and flat. Their mouths were too wide.
That was the detail that made her stomach turn.
Too wide, too long, stretching across the lower face in a line that might have been expressionless or might have been smiling. She could not tell.
Their skin was grey-brown and patchy, thick in some places, folded in others, leathery like an old turtle’s neck.
The word came whole and ridiculous.
There were no aliens. There couldn’t be. Humanity had barely gone farther than the moon. If aliens existed, if contact had happened, it would be on every screen, every phone, every news channel in the world.
The sound was low enough to vibrate somewhere beneath her ribs. Long, drawn-out tones, not like words so much as pressure given shape. The other answered in the same language.
Sarah could not scream. She could not beg. For several seconds, she could only stare at them while her body lay rigid on the table, every part of her waiting to be hurt.
The one nearest the door looked at her. All four eyes fixed on her face. Then it moved closer.
“No,” she gasped. “No, please. Please don’t. Please.”
She twisted violently against the restraints, but there was nowhere to go. The creature stood beside the table and reached for the hem of her gown. Sarah shook her head.
“No. Don’t. Don’t touch me. Please don’t touch me.”
Cold air moved over her thighs, her hips, her stomach.
The fabric slid up and bunched beneath her ribs. She tried to clamp her knees together, but the restraints held her legs apart just enough that she could not protect herself, could not curl inward, could not make herself small.
A sound came out of her then. Thin. Broken. Not quite a scream.
The creature did not touch her at first. Somehow that made it worse. It only looked. At her legs. Her stomach. Between her legs. Her breasts.
The inspection was slow and methodical and empty of anything Sarah understood.
Not curiosity in any human sense.
Nothing she could appeal to. She was not a woman to them.
Not a person who had been walking her dog through a field at dusk.
Then the creature paused. All four of its eyes fixed on her chest. Sarah followed its gaze and understood, with a sickening rush of humiliation and fear, what it had seen.
The milk had soaked through the gown. Another bead had gathered where the fabric had shifted, warm and exposed beneath the cold light.
One long finger pressed against the leaking bead at her chest. Sarah made a broken sound and tried to wrench herself away, but the straps held her down. Pain flashed through both wrists.
The creature did not seem to notice. It drew its hand back and held it up, studying the thin white sheen on its fingertip. Then it rubbed the liquid slowly between two fingers. Sarah stared in horror.
The creature tapped its fingers together once. Twice. Testing the texture, perhaps. Measuring it. She had no idea. Then it made one of those low, drawn-out sounds to the other creature. The second stepped closer and looked too.
“No,” Sarah pleaded, the word useless in her mouth. “Please. I have a baby. I need to feed my baby.”
Neither of them reacted. The first creature spoke again, still rubbing its fingers together. The other answered. Their voices moved back and forth over her exposed body, over the damp gown, over the thing her body had made because Isobel needed her.
They were discussing her. Or the milk. Or whatever they thought she was.
The word came to her with such cold clarity that she almost stopped breathing.
“No,” she pleaded again. “Please. She needs me. My baby needs me.”
After a while, they seemed to reach some kind of agreement.
The first creature released the gown. Not down. Just released it. The fabric remained rucked around her ribs, leaving her exposed beneath the light. Then they turned and left. The door hissed shut behind them.
For several seconds Sarah could not move at all.
Then she started shaking so hard the table vibrated beneath her.
She worked her fingers desperately, catching at the edge of the gown where it had bunched near her side.
It took three attempts before she managed to pinch the fabric between two fingers and drag it down an inch.
Not nearly enough. But enough to cover part of herself. Enough to feel fractionally less exposed.
Lewis would be looking for her. Isobel would be crying. Twiglet might be dead somewhere in a field.
The thought came so suddenly that she made a sound like she had been struck.
He had to have run home. Someone had to have found him. Lewis would know something was wrong. He would have called the police. He would have called her mum. His mum. Everyone.
The ache in her breasts pulsed again, hot and insistent beneath the damp gown.
Her body did not understand terror. It did not understand impossible rooms or black-eyed creatures or metal tables. It only knew that too much time had passed and her baby needed feeding.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, though she did not know whether she was speaking to Isobel or Lewis or herself.
“I’m so sorry. Please help me. Please someone help me.”
Before she could unravel completely, the door opened again. The same two figures entered. This time, one of them carried a needle.
Sarah’s body began fighting before her mind formed the thought. She pulled so hard at the restraints that pain flashed through both wrists.
“No,” she cried. “No, please. Please, no.”
“No. No, I have a baby. You saw — you saw, I have a baby. I need to feed her. Please .”
The one with the needle took her arm. Its grip was firm and impersonal. Gloved, maybe, or perhaps that was its skin. She could not tell.
It turned her elbow outward with practised ease.
“No, please. Please. She needs me. I have to go home. ”
For one second, there was pain, sharp and cold.
Then the white light above her stretched.
When Sarah woke again, she remembered before she understood.
White light. Metal ceiling. Cold air.
She came up with a gasp, one hand already clawing at her chest, the other grabbing at the hem of the hospital gown. For one wild second she expected the straps to bite into her wrists again, expected her arms to jerk uselessly against the table.
Her arms. Her wrists. Her face. Her ears. Her throat. Her stomach. Her legs.
She ran her hands over herself with frantic, shaking urgency, checking for pain, blood, missing pieces, anything that might tell her what had been done while she was gone.
Not safe. Not untouched. But whole.
Only then did she realise she was no longer strapped down.
The restraints were gone, but the marks remained. Deep red bands circled both wrists, raw and angry where she had fought against them. Her ankles were the same. Bruised. Tender. Proof that the first room had been real.
Sarah scrambled backward until her spine hit a wall. The shock of cold metal through the thin gown made her gasp. She looked around, breathing too quickly.
The room was still metal. Still silver-grey and hard-edged, still lit by that same merciless white light. Crates were stacked against one side in uneven towers. The floor beneath her was smooth steel, cold enough to ache through her bare feet.
But there were no surgical tables.
For a moment, she did not move. A window meant outside. A window meant direction, place, something beyond the sealed metal and humming lights.
Her bare feet slapped against the floor. She reached the glass — if it was glass — and pressed both hands to it.
Not the black of a dark field. Not the black of a room with the lights switched off. A deeper black. A vast, depthless black filled with points of light so sharp they looked almost artificial. Silver, blue-white, faint red, some steady, some flickering.
For one stupid, hopeful second, she thought: night sky.
Then she understood what was wrong.
No clouds passing over the stars.
No orange smear of a town in the distance. No farmhouse light. No road. No moonlit field. Nothing that belonged to Earth as she knew it.
Just blackness and stars, spread out in every direction she could see.
Sarah backed away from the window.
The word fogged the surface in front of her.
She leaned in again, because there had to be an explanation. There had to be.
Perhaps it was a screen. Some kind of projection. A trick. A plane at night. A military aircraft. Something high enough that the ground had disappeared beneath cloud.
She turned her head, trying to see along the side of whatever she was inside.
The side of the vessel — vessel , the word came before she could stop it — seemed flat and dark, vanishing beyond the edge of the window.
The dread moved slowly this time. Not a strike of panic, not the bright animal terror of waking strapped down, but something colder. It seeped into her bones, into the hollow places behind her ribs, into the pit of her stomach.
The thought had nowhere to go. It kept returning, blunt and absurd and monstrous.
She and Lewis had watched documentary after documentary on the sofa. And then in bed when they got a tax rebate and treated themselves to a bedroom TV.
More so after Isobel was born. 4am, Twiglet snoring, the volume low while the baby fed until she fell asleep against Sarah’s chest. Sarah would pause every ten minutes to tell him something she had just remembered, or something the narrator had skipped over, or some fact about quasars or neutron stars or black holes that Lewis pretended to understand because he tolerated it, and secretly liked watching her get excited.
A couple of birthdays ago, he had bought her a telescope. Not top of the range, but expensive enough that she had squealed when she opened it.
He had set it up wrong, and the automatic tracking never quite worked, so she had to sit in the garden with the little remote nudging it every few minutes.
One freezing night in January she had found Saturn.
Small and pale and miraculous through the lens, its rings tilted like something too delicate to be real. She had run upstairs and dragged Lewis out of bed in his dressing gown, Sarah laughing while he complained about the cold, then stood beside him grinning as he bent to look.
Back then, space had been wonder.
It was the knowledge that beyond this thin barrier there was nowhere to run, nowhere to breathe, nowhere to stand. No road leading home. No police searching the fields. No neighbour seeing her through a lit window and calling for help.
She might as well have been millions of miles away.
She might as well have been dead.
The name opened something in her.
Sarah pressed both hands over her mouth, but the sound came anyway.
It tore out of her, raw and low and nothing like ordinary crying. It was a wail. An animal sound. The kind of sound she would have been embarrassed to make if any part of her were still capable of embarrassment.
Isobel would wake and cry for her.
Isobel would root against Lewis’s shoulder, furious and hungry and confused, searching for a body that was not there.
Sarah bent forward, arms wrapped around herself.
“No,” she whispered into her hands. “No, no, no.”
She barely made it to the corner.
She dropped beside one of the crates and vomited onto the metal floor.
There was almost nothing in her stomach.
Her body retched anyway, again and again, trying to empty itself of a terror that had nowhere to go.
When it was over, she stayed on her hands and knees, spitting, shaking, eyes streaming.
She wiped her mouth on the back of her arm and sat back against the wall.
That was when she remembered her breasts.
The gown was still damp at the chest, but the terrible pressure had eased. Her breasts no longer felt stretched and hot and painfully full. They felt soft. Tender. Drained.
For half a second, some exhausted part of her almost recognised relief.
She had not fed Isobel. She had not pumped. She had not done anything.
Sarah’s stomach turned again, though there was nothing left to bring up. She clutched the gown closed over her chest, fingers digging into the thin fabric.
The memory returned with cruel clarity: the creature’s finger at her chest, the way it had rubbed her milk between two fingers, the low sound it had made to the other.
There was another red mark above the first injection site.
She rubbed at it with her thumb, hard, as if friction could erase the fact of it. As if she could scrub away the needle, the missing time, the impossible relief in her breasts. Her skin only reddened beneath her fingers.
Sarah slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor.
The metal was cold beneath her thighs. She pulled the gown over her knees as far as it would go and folded herself around it, trying to make herself smaller, warmer, less visible.
For Twiglet, who might be lying hurt somewhere in the dark, still attached to the stupid extendable lead.
She put both hands over her face and let herself break.
A sound came from behind the crates.
Then a small face appeared in the gap between two metal crates.
He could not have been more than eight. Pale, thin, filthy in the way children became when no one had washed them properly for days. His brown hair had separated into greasy strands across his forehead. His eyes were wide and white-rimmed with fear. His lips were pressed together so tightly it looked as if he were physically holding back tears.
Sarah was on her feet before thought caught up with her.
The boy flinched and retreated.
She lowered herself slowly into a crouch and held up both hands, palms out.
His fingers crept toward his mouth. He began chewing at the skin around his nails.
“My name's Sarah,” she said softly. “What’s your name?”
His eyes flicked behind the crate.
Blonde hair, tangled and dull. Round cheeks gone pale with fear. Not more than five, Sarah thought. Maybe younger. She clung to the edge of the crate with both hands, peeking out from behind it.
Sarah’s heart broke so suddenly she almost made a sound.
They were wearing the same white gowns as her. The boy’s hung too large from his narrow shoulders. The little girl’s was marked with grey smudges at the hem and sleeve. Sarah saw red dots along the boy’s arm, small injection sites like her own.
“It’s all right. I’m not going to come any closer.”
The boy kept chewing his fingers.
The little boy only looked at her a moment. Then, slowly, he nodded.
Sarah sat back on her heels, making herself lower than him, smaller than him, though everything inside her wanted to grab both children and pull them close to her.
Sarah glanced at the little girl.
The boy looked back at her and shook his head.
Different families who were losing their minds somewhere on Earth.
Sarah had to close her eyes for one second.
When she opened them, the children were still watching her.
The smallest breath of relief left her.
“Good,” she whispered. “That’s good.”
She wanted to collapse again. She wanted to put her face in her hands and scream until the room disappeared. But she could feel the shift happening inside her, terrible and necessary.
Now there were children watching to see whether she was safe.
The little girl stepped out from behind the crate. She came to stand beside the boy, one hand gripping the loose fabric of his gown.
For a moment, she only looked at Sarah.
Her voice was very small and sweet, with a soft Northern Irish accent. She spoke with a faint lisp that made the question almost unbearable.
Milk had begun to leak again, a fresh dampness spreading through the front of the gown.
She pressed the fabric against herself, trying to blot it dry with as much dignity as she could manage.
“For my baby,” Sarah added softly. “I’m a mummy. My baby drinks milk from me.”
She seemed to think about that.
She fought it with everything she had. Every fibre. Every last piece of herself. She could not break in front of them. Not now.
“Oh,” the little girl said again.
Sarah thought of Isobel’s dark hair. Her soft round cheeks. Her tiny, chubby hands opening and closing against Sarah’s skin. The little rolls on her thighs. The milky smell of her breath. The way she frowned in her sleep, as if dreams were very serious business.
A memory came so sharply it was almost cruel.
Isobel at three days old, red-faced and furious in the middle of the night. Sarah lifting her from the next-to-me cot, still sore and exhausted and half afraid she was doing everything wrong. Holding her close. Whispering against her tiny head.
Mummy’s here. I’ve got you. I’ll always come when you need me.
The tears fell before she could stop them.
The boy and girl watched her in silence.
Then the boy took one careful step forward.
He came close enough to touch her and lifted one small hand. Awkwardly, almost formally, he patted her shoulder.
The gesture was so small. So useless against the enormity of what was happening.
A laugh broke through her tears, sharp and cracked. She smiled at him because he needed her to.
“Don’t worry,” she said, though her voice shook. “I’m okay. I just miss my baby.”
The little girl came closer too, standing on Sarah’s other side.
“Can’t her daddy look after her?” she asked.
Sarah wiped her cheeks with the heel of her hand.
And he could. Lewis was good. Lewis was gentle. Lewis knew where the nappies were and how to warm a bottle and which stupid song made Isobel stop crying when nothing else worked.
The children were still looking at her. Frightened. Dirty. Hungry, probably. Alone.
And somehow, impossibly, they had comforted her.
She was twenty seven years old. A wife. A mother. An adult by every reasonable measure. But in that moment she felt like a child herself. She wanted someone bigger and calmer to walk in and gather her up and tell her what to do.
“Can I sit with you?” she asked.
The little girl looked at the boy.
After a moment, the girl reached out and took Sarah’s hand.
Her fingers were small and cold.
Sarah let herself be led behind the crates.
There was a narrow space there, hidden from the middle of the room. Not safe. Not really. But sheltered enough that the children must have made it their place. A corner of metal and shadow and the faint warmth of two small bodies.
Sarah sat down with her back to the wall.
The children came to her almost immediately.
Not all at once. Not trustingly, exactly. But with the exhausted instinct of children who had been afraid for too long and had found an adult who spoke softly.
The boy sat on one side. The girl sat on the other.
Sarah lifted her arms slowly, giving them time to pull away.
So she put one arm around each of them and drew them close.
A deep, violent tenderness moved through her.
If those things came back and tried to touch these children, if they tried to take them, hurt them, lay one finger on their small bodies, Sarah would tear those creatures apart with her bare hands. She would gouge out all four of their black eyes. She would do anything.
She had no weapon. No shoes. No plan. No strength beyond her own terrified body.
Mine , some ancient part of her said.
Because they were someone's. They were someone's babies who couldn't be there to protect them themselves. Someone who would be crying for them.
They were someone's Isobel. And someone had to claim them.
“What are your names?” she asked softly.
For a moment, neither child answered.
His voice was so quiet she barely heard it.
His accent was not like hers. English, yes, like her. But southern. Polished. A little posh, even through fear. Whatever had taken them had not only taken from one place.
“My name is Suzie,” she said, around the thumb she had begun to push into her mouth.
Sarah smiled as gently as she could.
Suzie leaned more heavily against her side.
“Do you know where your mummies and daddies are?”
Both children shook their heads.
Elliot stared at the crate opposite them. His face had gone very still.
The words hit her harder than she expected. Hunger was so ordinary. So fixable. So impossible.
She looked around the hidden space as if food might have appeared because a child needed it. There was nothing. No bottle. No packet. No crumb. No water.
“When did you last eat?” she asked.
Elliot shrugged without looking at her.
Helplessness rose in her again, hot and choking.
“I’ll try to find something,” she said.
The promise felt dangerous the moment she made it, because she had no idea how to keep it. But she could not say nothing.
Elliot’s eyes moved toward the open room.
“The monsters come,” he whispered.
Sarah’s arm tightened around him.
The creatures were not a fever dream. Not a hallucination. Not something the drugs had made in her head.
Her voice was steadier than she felt.
Suzie pressed closer, thumb in her mouth, eyes round.
“I won’t let them hurt you,” she said.
She could not stop those creatures. She could not even stop them from putting a needle in her arm. But Elliot needed the lie. Suzie needed it. And maybe, if she said it firmly enough, some piece of herself might begin to believe in the woman who would try.
“I won’t let them near you,” she said again.
For the first time, something in his face loosened.
Sarah stroked his hair, then Suzie’s, smoothing gently over the tangled strands.
“You should sleep for a little while.”
“Then I’ll wake you,” Sarah said. “And I’ll be right here.”
Suzie’s eyes were already heavy.
Elliot fought it longer, staring out at the room as if keeping watch were his duty. But he was eight, or close to it, and exhausted beyond endurance. After a few minutes, his head tipped against Sarah’s arm.
Suzie curled into her other side.
Sarah held them both on the hard metal floor, her back against the cold wall, the damp gown clinging to her chest, her wrists burning, her throat raw.
Beyond the crates, the room hummed.
Beyond the window, space waited.
She looked down at the two children tucked against her and tried to think.
There had to be rules to this place, routines, patterns. The creatures came and went. They brought needles. They took samples. They moved her from one room to another. That meant they had reasons. Systems. Mistakes they might make.
Sarah pressed her cheek against Elliot’s hair and shut her eyes.
Not while there were children sleeping against her.
Not while Isobel was somewhere beneath all that blackness, needing her mother.
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### Chapter 2: Chapter 2
She kept her back pressed to the cold metal wall, one arm around Elliot, the other around Suzie, staring out past the crates into the empty room.
Her wrists burned. Her throat ached. The damp fabric of the gown clung unpleasantly to her chest.
Every few minutes, she forced herself to look towards the window, towards the blackness beyond it, as if repeated exposure might make it less impossible.
She tried to be the thing the children needed her to be.
But grief, terror, and pain had a way of emptying the body. They took and took until there was nothing left to brace with.
Eventually, despite herself, sleep dragged her under.
When she woke, she woke with a start.
For one dreadful second, she did not know where she was. Her body jerked as if expecting restraints. Her hands flew to the children.
Elliot was still tucked against her left side.
Suzie was curled against her right.
Or as safe as anyone could be in a metal room surrounded by stars.
Sarah let out a breath so shaky it almost became a sob.
She had no idea how long she had slept. Five minutes. Five hours. There was no way to know. The window gave her nothing but the same endless dark, the same cold scatter of light. No morning. No evening. No clouds moving over a moon. No birdsong. No neighbour’s car yowling in the street. None of the ordinary little signals that told a person time was still moving as it should.
Not almost home. Not trying to get home. Home.
She had been on the sofa with Isobel against her chest, warm and heavy and real. Lewis had been beside her, one hand on the baby’s back, the other holding hers. Twiglet had been asleep on the rug with his ridiculous wiry beard pressed flat against the floor. Sarah had known, in the dream, that she had escaped. That someone had come for her and the children. That the whole impossible nightmare was over.
She had held Isobel tighter and thought, I’m awake. This is real. This is real.
Then she had opened her eyes to metal walls.
For a moment, the pain of that was worse than waking the first time. The first time, she had woken into horror. This time, she had woken out of hope.
Tears slipped down her face before she could stop them.
She held her breath, afraid of waking Elliot and Suzie. Her chest trembled with the effort of staying quiet. The crying came anyway, silent and hot, running down into the corners of her mouth.
Sarah pressed her lips together and stared up at the ceiling until the worst of it passed.
Her mind went back to her, because of course it did. It would always go back to her.
Her mum was only five minutes away. He would have called her first. Then the police. Then everyone. Her mum and dad would come over. They would help with Isobel. They could buy formula. There might still be some frozen breast milk in the freezer, though not much. Sarah had always meant to build up a better stash but never quite managed it. But they would figure something out. They would have to.
He knew how to change her. He knew the silly song she liked. He knew she needed the white-noise machine and the little sleeping bag with the ducks on it. He knew where the bottles were. He knew Sarah’s mum would help.
Sarah repeated it silently, over and over.
She did not know if it was logic or prayer or a lie kind enough to keep her breathing. Perhaps it did not matter. She needed somewhere to put the thought of Isobel, somewhere it could still hurt without destroying her completely.
Folded carefully and pushed to the back of her mind, like something too sharp to hold bare handed.
Because if Sarah was going to get home to her baby, she could not spend every minute breaking.
She looked down at Elliot and Suzie.
Sarah wiped her face with the back of her hand and forced herself to look at the room again. Not as a prison. Not as a nightmare. As a problem.
A room had weaknesses, even if she could not see them yet.
Monsters , Elliot had called them.
They had examined her. They had touched her. Harvested her milk, most likely. Drawn blood. Injected her. Sedated her. Moved her from one room to another while she was unconscious.
They had not killed Elliot or Suzie either.
Not yet, whispered the treacherous part of her mind.
She could not follow that thought.
They were alive. That was the fact. Whatever else was true, whatever these things intended, they had kept their captives alive for some reason. Alive meant requirements. Food. Water. Air. Warmth, though apparently not enough of it.
If the creatures needed them alive, then they had to mean to sustain them.
Unless they did not understand how.
The thought made her stomach twist.
No. They knew enough to take blood. To inject. To restrain. To move bodies. To notice milk leaking from a breast and understand, at least, that it mattered enough to discuss.
Which meant, eventually, they would come back.
Sarah looked toward the hidden seam of the room, though she still did not know where the door was.
Yeah, sure. Just ask the monsters for food and water. Ask the black-eyed things that had strapped her to a table and put a needle in her arm. Ask politely, as if this were a delayed train and she wanted to know when the buffet trolley would arrive.
And yet, what else could she do?
The word arrived with a desperate little flare of hope.
Maybe her disappearance was already national news. Maybe international. A spacecraft — if this was a spacecraft, if she was not losing her mind — could not just enter Earth’s atmosphere, take a woman and two children, and leave without anyone noticing. Could it?
There were satellites. Radar. Air traffic control. Aerospace defence. CCTV on roads, doorbells, farmyards, petrol stations. Someone had to have seen something. Some camera had to have caught her walking out with Twiglet and never coming back.
Maybe, if she could get a message out—
And how exactly was she going to do that?
The idea was so ridiculous that a dry, humourless sound escaped her before she could stop it. This was not a film. She was not some action heroine wriggling silently through conveniently human-sized ductwork with a pistol tucked into the back of her trousers. She was barefoot, freezing, hungry, wearing a damp hospital gown, and currently responsible for two sleeping children. Even if there were vents, they would be too small, too hot, too cold, full of machinery, or open to the vacuum of space.
She pictured herself popping out into some alien control room like a deranged Jack-In-The-Box.
Except she did not know where the door was.
All the wall panels looked the same: smooth, grey, faintly textured metal, fitted so neatly together that she could barely distinguish one seam from another.
And even if she found the door, and even if she somehow opened it, what then?
She would have to get herself and two children through a ship she did not understand, past creatures she could not fight, through doors she could not unlock, avoiding cameras or sensors or whatever else they had.
Sarah looked up at the ceiling and almost laughed again.
She was not an alien navigator. She was not an engineer. She was not a cyber-security expert. She was a financial analyst for a bank.
What was she going to do if she found their control system? Audit it? Evaluate their economic data? Provide valuable financial insight to incorporate into their human trafficking business plan?
And even if that was the answer, which of course, it was not, she was a bit out of practice. She'd been on maternity leave for the past four months, and if she was being honest, emotionally on leave for at least six.
The thought was stupid enough to steady her.
A small, ordinary thought from the ordinary life she still belonged to, however far away it was.
A weapon, if she could find one.
There were many of them, stacked in uneven rows along the side of the room. Smooth metal, darker than the walls, marked with symbols she could not read. She had no idea whether they were storage containers, machinery, furniture, or something else entirely.
Would the creatures be stupid enough to leave anything dangerous in a room with captives?
But perhaps dangerous to her did not look dangerous to them.
Perhaps a panel could come loose.
Perhaps there was a sharp edge somewhere.
Something small enough to hide in her hand.
Something better than nails, teeth, and rage.
She scanned the room carefully.
But that meant very little. Their technology could be hidden. Invisible. Built into the walls. Watching from every surface. For all she knew, the room itself was watching her.
Still, she could not sit here and wait.
The children shifted against her. Suzie made a small sound in her sleep and pressed closer.
When they woke, she would ask them what they knew. How long they had been here. Whether the creatures came regularly. Whether anyone had brought them food or water. Whether they had seen a door open. Whether any of the crates had been moved.
Not too many questions at once.
Then, if they were brave enough, they could help her look. Not as a game exactly — no, not a game, not with stakes like these — but as something useful. Something to do. Children needed tasks too. They needed to feel less helpless.
Sarah adjusted her arm around Elliot.
His hair smelled stale, unwashed, child-warm beneath the metallic cold of the room.
Her voice sounded thin, but steadier.
A damp chill spread across her chest again.
Milk had started leaking through the gown once more, slower this time, a small wet bloom beneath the harsh white light.
Her body still believed there was a baby nearby.
Her body still believed she could answer when Isobel called.
For a moment, she pressed the heel of her hand to her breast, trying to stem the leak, trying not to think of the creature’s finger there, of the milk rubbed between alien fingers like a sample.
Then she took a breath and dabbed at the fabric as best she could.
Sarah fixed the words in her mind and held them there.
That was how she would survive this.
That was how she would get back to her baby.
His eyes opened slowly beneath the hard white lights. For a few seconds, he only blinked up at them, his face slack with sleep, one hand lifting to rub clumsily at his eye. Then he stretched, small knees drawing up beneath the too-large hospital gown, and for one brief, merciful moment he looked like any little boy waking from a nap somewhere ordinary.
Sarah saw it happen. The soft confusion vanished, and the fear came back in its place, quiet and practised and much too old for him.
It was not a happy smile. She could feel that. Her brow was drawn tight, her eyes still swollen from crying. But she made the smile as gentle as she could, trying to tell him two things at once.
The front of the gown was damp again.
Not as badly as before, but enough. A wet patch had spread across the thin white fabric, cold now where the air touched it.
When Elliot realised she had seen him looking, he turned his face away quickly, cheeks colouring beneath the grime.
“It’s all right,” Sarah said softly.
“You can ask me, if you want. I don’t mind.”
He frowned as if the question required serious courage.
Then, very quietly, he asked, “Do you have lots of milk?”
The innocence of it hurt more than it should have.
“My body makes milk for my baby,” she said. “The more Isobel drinks, the more my body knows to make.”
He did not say it cruelly. He only said it as children said things: plainly, because they were true.
Still, the words went through Sarah like a blade.
Sarah pressed one hand lightly against the damp fabric of the gown, more to cover herself than to stop the leak.
“My body doesn’t understand that yet. It still thinks she’s close. It still thinks I can feed her.”
The words settled between them.
She had almost said, It still thinks the milk is needed.
She swallowed hard and looked away for a moment.
Breastfeeding had not been easy. People spoke about it as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if instinct alone would carry a woman through it.
But it had not felt natural at first.
It had been cracked skin and blistered chest, Isobel screaming because she could not latch properly, multiple trips to see the Infant Feeding Team, breastfeeding support groups, Sarah crying at three in the morning with a pump attached to her body, terrified there would not be enough.
It had been weeks of feeding and pumping and counting ounces.
Weeks of feeling like her body had failed a test no one had properly explained.
And then, slowly, it had changed.
The pain had eased. The fear had eased. Feeding had become something warm and quiet and theirs. A small, private world of soft weight and milk-drunk sighs and Isobel’s tiny hand resting against Sarah’s skin.
And now her milk was leaking into a hospital gown on the floor of some impossible vessel.
Eventually, if she could not feed or pump properly, it would dry up.
The thought was so painful she had to push it away before it split her open.
He was still watching her, solemn and thoughtful.
She glanced down first to make sure Suzie was still asleep. The little girl had curled tighter against Sarah’s side, thumb fallen from her mouth, blonde hair stuck messily to her cheek.
“I need to ask you some questions.”
Elliot shifted until he was sitting cross-legged in front of her. The movement was strangely formal, as if he had been called on in class.
Sarah tried not to let that break her heart too.
“Do you know how long you’ve been here?”
She leaned back against the wall and thought for a moment.
“Can you remember how many times you’ve slept since you got here?”
Then he lifted both hands and began counting on his fingers.
He went past ten and started again, lips moving silently. Then he slowed. His face pinched with concentration. After a while he looked up at her, frustrated and embarrassed.
“That’s okay,” Sarah said quickly. “That’s all right. More than five times?”
He thought again, then shrugged.
Sarah nodded, though the answer made her stomach tighten.
At least ten sleeps. Probably more. But children slept strangely under stress. Little naps. Exhausted collapses. Maybe twice a day. Maybe three times. Maybe he had been sedated too. Maybe sleep had become the only way his body could survive the fear.
Much too long for a child to be trapped here.
She pushed down the horror of that and forced herself to continue.
Relief hit her so fast she almost closed her eyes.
If he had been here days, three was nothing.
“It was horrid,” Elliot added glumly.
Sarah gave a small hum of agreement, as if he had complained about school dinners rather than food given by monsters in a metal room.
He looked briefly reassured by that.
“Was Suzie with you the whole time?”
“No. She came after the third sleep.”
Sarah looked at the sleeping girl.
Another piece of information. Small, jagged, incomplete. But information all the same.
“And before Suzie came, were you alone?”
Elliot’s fingers crept towards his mouth.
Sarah regretted the question at once.
“All right,” she said softly. “You don’t have to talk about that now.”
She wanted to ask what they had done to him. Where they had taken him. Whether he had woken on the table too. Whether the red marks on his arm were all injections, or blood draws, or something worse.
And she could not use him like a witness statement.
Maybe not ever, unless he offered it.
So she turned her gaze towards the crates.
“Have you looked inside any of those?”
The crates were large. Some were almost chest-high, others larger still, big enough that one of them could have held a car. They were made of the same dark metal as the room, some wrapped in netting, others secured with smooth bands that vanished into their sides. Strange markings had been etched across several of them, lines and curves she could not begin to read.
“Here’s what we’re going to do. When Suzie wakes up, the three of us are going to look at them. Carefully. We’re going to see if anything is loose, or not closed properly, or if there’s anything we can pull off.”
Elliot listened with total seriousness.
“Not loudly,” Sarah added. “And not if it looks dangerous. We don’t know what any of this is. But we need to find anything that might help us.”
The word sounded wrong in his mouth.
“Maybe,” she said. “Or something useful. Something sharp. Something we can tie. Something that tells us how the crates open. Anything.”
For the first time since he had woken, there was a spark of purpose in his face.
Suzie woke a little while later.
It took her longer to surface. She made a soft unhappy sound, turned her face into Sarah’s side, then crawled fully into her lap as if she had known Sarah all her life. Sarah gathered her up without thinking.
Suzie was warm and small and terribly light.
Sarah cradled her, smoothing a hand over the tangled blonde hair.
Somewhere, there was a mother or father or grandmother or aunt who would be tearing the world apart for this little girl. Somewhere there was a bed with too many stuffed animals in it, a toothbrush left by a sink, a little pair of shoes waiting by a door.
She would kill for this child if she had to.
For Suzie. For Elliot. For Isobel.
The thought no longer frightened her.
When Suzie had woken properly, Sarah explained the task in the simplest way she could.
“We’re going to look for useful things,” she said. “Loose things. Broken things. Things we can pull.”
“A little bit like treasure,” she said.
Elliot looked doubtful, but did not contradict her.
They began with the nearest crate.
Sarah moved slowly, keeping one hand available for Suzie, who clung to her fingers and sucked her thumb while they worked. Elliot went ahead with new energy, crouching to inspect corners, running his fingertips along seams, peering behind netting and under bands.
Sarah tested every edge she could reach.
The crates were smooth and cold, their surfaces refusing her. No obvious handles. No hinges. No padlocks. No ordinary weak points. Whatever opened them did not open by force, at least not force she had.
“See here?” she murmured to Suzie, guiding her little hand along a seam. “We’re checking if anything moves.”
Suzie nodded gravely, though Sarah doubted she understood.
“This bit?” Elliot asked from another crate.
He had found a section of netting where one strand had loosened from the others. Not much. Barely a fray.
But Sarah went to him and inspected it as if he had brought her something precious.
His face changed at the praise.
She tugged carefully at the loose strand. It gave a little. Then a little more. Not enough to free the netting, but enough that, with time, she might be able to work more of it loose.
“Good,” she whispered. “That’s good, Elliot.”
After that, he searched harder.
He brought her scraps. A thin strip of netting. A short length of cord-like material that had come away from one crate’s corner. A small, rigid fastening no longer than her thumb. Sarah gathered each piece and tucked them behind one of the lower crates, out of plain sight.
But perhaps the cord could be tied together.
Perhaps the netting could be twisted into something stronger.
Perhaps, if it came to the worst, she could wrap something around one of those thick necks and pull.
If strangulation even worked on them.
If they breathed the way humans did.
If they had throats vulnerable to pressure.
They were halfway around the room when the familiar hiss cut through the air.
For one second she could not find it. Then a seam appeared in the far wall, opening with that same smooth, pressurised sound.
“Behind the crates,” she whispered. “ Now. Both of you. Quickly.”
Suzie’s face crumpled in fear, but she let him pull her back towards their hidden corner.
Sarah followed only as far as the nearest stack.
“Stay there,” she whispered. “Don’t move. Don’t make a sound.”
Then she stepped out in front of them.
Every instinct screamed at her to run behind the crates, to curl around the children, to make herself small and unseen.
Instead, she stood in the open.
Not one of the two from before, she thought, though it was difficult to be certain. This one had the same four black eyes, the same long mouth, the same dense, sturdy frame. But its skin was a different shade, more red-brown than grey-green, with darker folds around the throat and jaw. It wore the same fitted black and grey covering, smooth against its broad body.
Sarah retreated one step before she could stop herself.
Its four eyes moved across the room.
The place where the children had disappeared.
She clutched the front of her gown closed with one hand.
The other curled into a fist at her side.
She was shaking. She could feel it in her knees, her fingers, her jaw. But she stayed where she was, between the creature and the children.
For a long moment they only looked at one another.
Then Sarah forced herself to speak.
Sarah swallowed and tried again, slower this time. She pointed first to her mouth, then mimed drinking from a cup.
“Water,” she said. “We need water.”
Or perhaps it only watched movement.
The creature’s head tilted slightly.
Sarah’s heart gave one hard beat.
“We need food and water,” she said, more firmly now. “All of us. The children too.”
She gestured behind her before she could stop herself.
The creature’s gaze flicked towards the crates.
“No,” she said quickly, stepping sideways to block the line of sight. “No. Me. Look at me.”
She lifted her chin, though everything in her wanted to fold.
“Food,” she repeated. “Water. Every few hours. Do you understand?”
Sarah barely had time to flinch before it was in front of her.
Something black and narrow flashed in its hand.
It pressed against the side of her neck.
There was a sting, sharp and bright.
Her hand flew up, but the creature had already stepped back.
Her knees loosened beneath her. She heard Suzie make a tiny frightened sound from behind the crates, and panic surged through the sudden heaviness dragging through her limbs.
Sarah tried to turn towards the children.
Tried to tell them to stay hidden.
The last thing she saw was the creature’s four black eyes watching her fall.
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