It's Settling
AURORA
The spaceship that brought me here was a blot on the stars. I saw it from the transport’s window, a cruel, dark shape against the swirling nebula we passed. I never wanted to come to school in space. The thought was a frantic, trapped bird in my chest. But the Alien King made me. I didn’t say it. I just pressed my forehead to the cool glass and watched the alien city scroll by—spires like shards of crystal, streets pulsing with light, beings that looked like walking dreams or nightmares.
My transport, a black, silent pod with his jagged crest on the hood, slid to a halt before a structure that made my breath catch. The Academy of Xylos. It wasn’t a building; it was a living, breathing hive of gleaming bioluminescent stone, with spiraling towers and floating pathways where students—real students, alien students—drifted or skittered or floated.
This was my first day. My first day anywhere, since the Taking.
The driver, Krog, a Glythian with skin like fractured granite, didn’t even turn around. His voice was a grindstone from the front seat. “Out.”
I flinched. The cold, flat command after hours of silence was a shock. I fumbled with the unfamiliar clasp of my safety harness. My fingers, clad in the stupid, silken gray fabric of the “inform”—the standard-issue student uniform he’d thrown at me this morning—felt thick and clumsy.
“I’m going,” I whispered, more to myself than to him.
He twisted in his seat, his four dark eyes pinning me. “Now. I do not have the solar cycle to waste on a human’s sluggishness.”
A hot spike of anger, sharp and surprising, cut through the fog of my fear. I wasn’t just scared. I was furious. Kidnapped from my home, marked like property, and now yelled at by a chauffeur.
“I’m moving as fast as I can,” I said, my voice tighter. “The clasp is strange.”
“Your everything is strange,” he grunted. “Out. The King has inter-planetary politics to attend to. My duty is to him, not to his… pet.”
That word. Pet. It lit a fuse in me. The harness finally gave way. I shoved the door open, the alien atmosphere, smelling of ozone and something sweetly metallic, washing over me.
“I am not his pet,” I hissed, turning on the threshold.
Krog let out a sound like grating stones. A laugh. “You wear his mark. You go where he says. You live by his grace. What is that, if not a pet? Now, go. Or I will deposit you on the steps myself.”
Tears of pure, hot humiliation burned behind my eyes. I wouldn’t let them fall. Not here. Not in front of him. I swallowed the acid in my throat and the worse words that wanted to follow.
“Just go,” I spat, the curse feeling pathetic. “Go drive your precious King.”
I slammed the pod door harder than I needed to. The sound was swallowed by the vast, humming life of the academy grounds. The pod glided away without a sound, leaving me utterly alone at the bottom of a thousand glittering steps.
I stood there, a single, pale human girl in a sea of gray, feeling the weight of a thousand eyes. They weren’t all on me yet, but they would be. I tugged at the high collar of my inform, trying to make it cover the mark on the side of my neck. It was useless.
Climbing the steps was an ordeal. Beings with too many legs, or no legs at all, with feathers, with scales, with bodies of shimmering light, flowed past me. I was a rock in a stream, causing ripples of sideways glances, of subtle shifts in conversation. A whisper reached me, clear as a bell, from a group of willowy, iridescent-skinned girls floating a few steps above.
“…the human? Is that it?”
“So plain. Look at its skin. No bioluminescence at all.”
“I heard the King found it on some backwater mud-ball. Pathetic.”
“Why is it here? In our academy?”
I kept my head down, my heart hammering against my ribs. But their words… I shouldn’t have been able to hear them from that distance, over the general noise. Yet I did. Every syllable. Since the King had marked me, my senses had sharpened painfully. Sounds were clearer, lights brighter, smells more intense. It was a cruel gift. A constant reminder.
I reached the top of the stairs, a vast plaza buzzing with students reuniting after a break. The gaze of the crowd was a physical pressure. I felt like a specimen, pinned and displayed. My skin crawled. I needed to get away. Now.
Spotting a quieter archway leading to a secondary terrace, I ducked toward it, moving with a speed born of panic. I slipped through the arch and found myself on a narrow, secluded balcony overlooking a strange, singing forest of crystalline plants. The noise of the plaza muted to a distant murmur.
I was alone.
Breathing out a shuddering gasp, I slumped against the cool, organic-feeling wall. The fear and anger of the drop-off, the stares, the whispers—it all crashed down on me at once. My hands were trembling.
And then, I felt it. A sudden, fierce itch on the side of my neck, right over the mark.
I couldn’t ignore it. It was a deep, insistent throb, as if the thing was alive beneath my skin. Glancing around to ensure I was truly alone, I lifted my hand and pressed my fingertips to the spot through the fabric of my collar.
It was warm. Warmer than the rest of my skin. The shape of it, even through the cloth, was unmistakable—a complex, spiraling sigil that seemed to shift and change when you weren't looking directly at it. The King’s brand. His claim.
I pushed the collar down, just an inch. The air of this place felt strange on the exposed mark. I traced the edges of it with a finger. It didn’t feel like a scar or a tattoo. It felt like something else. A piece of another world, embedded in me.
“Itching means it’s settling,” a cool, male voice said behind me.
I whirled around, yanking my collar up so fast I almost choked myself.