Chapter One—Part Three: The Infiltrator

When I heard the knock at my bedroom door the following evening, I didn’t expect to see Blanche Ingram when I threw it wide. She was dressed in jeans, a tee shirt, and a leather jacket, not at all what I would have expected from the great beauty. Her blond hair was pulled into a high ponytail, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup.

“Hi,” she ventured, probably noting the dubious expression on my face, “do you mind if I come in for a second?”

“Sure,” I said, taking a few steps back so she could make her way into the room. I closed the door behind her and wished I’d taken a moment to make my bed, which was mussed with the previous night’s love-making escapades. Blanche didn’t seem to notice as she crossed toward the window, her arms hugged tight around her rib cage. I didn’t know what to say—Sorry for stealing your man? No hard feelings?—so I didn’t say anything at all, which resulted in an odd, silent lull in the air between us.

“I thought a lot about whether or not I should come to you with this,” Blanche said, her tone low and soft, not at all the frivolous soprano she’d been using up to this point. “But I think maybe I haven’t got a choice.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked the back of her head. She was staring out at the view of endless desert, and I wished that she would turn around so I could get a good look at the expression on her face.

“There’s…” she hesitated, and I heard her sigh as she shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans. The morning light lit her hair, and she looked like an angel in the frame of the window; I wondered how Kaz could have possibly turned his head away from her and toward me. There was nothing about me that glowed. Finally, she spun around and locked her eyes on me, and there was an urgency in them that I found startling. “What do you think about the occupation of our planet, Jane?” she asked. “I mean, what do you really think?”

“Um,” I muttered, scratching at the back of my neck, “I admit that at first I was…shocked, I mean, who wouldn’t be? And I didn’t know what to make of it—I guess I still don’t…” Her eyebrows were arched high over her limpid blue eyes as she waited for me to go on. “But as I’ve gotten to know the Ivaldans, as I’ve come to understand why they came, and what they want from us…” I shrugged. “I guess I think it’s not all bad.”

Blanche deflated a little as though I’d pricked her with a pin and let the air out. “A lot of people feel that way.”

“And you?”

She was shaking her head. “I think they came here and basically drugged the entire population of the planet so that they could set themselves up as the ruling class, and the rest of us are slaves.” She locked her eyes on me, and I was startled by the intensity of it all.

“We aren’t slaves,” I countered meekly. “We…we’re paid, we have jobs. We have lives. No one was hurt—”

“Weren’t they?” she asked. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a few folded pieces of paper, approaching me as she unfolded them. They’d been well hidden, folded and torn, but the images on them were clear enough: grainy printed images in black and white from what looked like a security camera or CCTV feed. The image was of a pair of Ivaldans and a small coterie of human men and women. The Ivaldans were standing over the humans, who were laying on the ground, their heads spun around so that it was clear their necks had been broken. There was a collection of weaponry at their feet: guns, baseball bats. It was a gruesome image. I had to look away.

“Why are you showing me this?” I asked in hushed tones.

“Because you need to know the truth.”

“Those men aren’t Kaz—those men—”

“Does it matter?” She was starting to look desperate as she folded the pages up and stuck them back in her pockets. She shifted her weight uneasily from one foot to the other, and finally moved forward and gripped one of my hands in both of hers. “Listen to me: there is a resistance. We are doing what we can underground to take our planet back.”

“What?”

“And you have gotten in the way of one of the points of our plan. But I think maybe you can help us.”

I blinked; my head was spinning. “Got in the way?” I asked. “How?”

“By getting Kaz to fall in love with you,” she said, and she sounded exasperated. She wasn’t a devastated spurned lover—she was a woman with a plan who never thought of me as an obstacle. And why should she?

“You never wanted Kaz for yourself,” I said lamely.

“No,” she said, “at least not in the way he expected.”

I jerked my hand away then, my brow furrowing with concern. “So all this time, you were plotting against him. Against the boys.”

“We just want to put ourselves in a position to influence the most powerful Ivaldans, and Kazimir Kain is one of them.”

But I was shaking my head. “Are you going to…murder them?”

Her hesitation was too long for me to believe what came out of her mouth next: “That isn’t our intention, no.”

“But you will, if it comes to it.”

“We don’t want it to come to that.”

I moved toward the door. “I think you should leave,” I asserted.

“You can help us, Jane,” she said, and her tone was pleading. “You can help us to make sure that we don’t hurt anyone. We just want to take our planet back, that’s all. This is our home, Jane. We can’t just let an entire alien species come in and take it for themselves.”

“They don’t want to take it; they want to share it!” But even as I shouted that at Blanche, I wasn’t sure if it was true. Was she right? Did they want to relegate human beings to the labor class? Was this just a way to make us complacent, give us the illusion of choice?

“Here, take this,” she said, and pressed a small SD card into my hand. “This has all of the information you will need to contact the resistance if you decide to help us. And I really hope you will.”

“I should tell Kaz you’re working for them,” I muttered, shaking my head. “In fact, I think I will tell him.”

“Do what you feel you must.” She took my face in her hands then and stared down into my eyes. “But please: don’t betray your people.” Her eyes were glassy and wet, like she was trying not to cry. “I know this is a lot to take in, but please think about it.”

“You’d better leave now,” I said. “I’ll give you an hour’s head start.” She dropped her hands, and headed toward the door, casting a sad glance my way before slipping quietly out.

I closed the door behind her and pressed my back against it, squeezing my eyes shut as I attempted to make sense of everything Blanche had just said to me: she was never interested in Kaz at all, never wanted to marry him, was never invested in it whatsoever, other than seeing it as a means to a greater end. And she wasn’t upset that I had taken her place, only that I was a sudden obstruction to a much larger goal. What had she planned to do, once she’d married Kaz? Feed information on him and his children to his enemies? Or worse?

I chewed contemplatively at my lower lip and took a seat on the velvet divan in the corner of the room. Was it possible? Had Blanche Ingram set the fire that had nearly snuffed out Kazimir Kain’s life? I shook my head to clear it of the thought: no, it was an accident. Wasn’t it?

And what would I do? I had the SD card gripped in the palm of my hand, and I had no notion as to what I would do with it, or the information it potentially contained. If I joined them, could I break Kaz’s heart, and mine? If I told Kaz about Blanche and her connection to the resistance, was I a traitor to my species? And was it really possible for me to do nothing at all?

Another knock on the door drew me violently from my reverie, and I sprang to my feet, my heart a jack hammering in my chest. I opened the door a crack, and saw Kaz smiling there, and I could do nothing but smile back.

“I’ve come to discuss some plans with you,” he said taking the liberty of pushing his way past me and into the room. I still had that damned SD card in my hand. I gripped it so that it was pressed painfully into the flesh of my palm, even as Kaz pressed a kiss to the top of my head.

“Plans?” I echoed, only half paying attention.

“For our wedding, yes,” he said, tossing the blanket back and sitting on the edge of the bed. “Why hasn’t the housekeeper come to straighten up this room yet?” He remarked, looking around at the mess, “Surely enough of the morning has passed.”

“Did you see Blanche before she left?” I asked suddenly, and he placed his hands in his lap and considered me levelly.

“I was not aware that she had,” he replied.

“Just now, I think.”

“Ah.” A pause; then: “No.” I nodded my head, focusing my eyes on the floor as I moved to sit near him on the bed. He placed his hand over mine once I’d gotten settled and proffered a warm smile. “You’re feeling badly,” he said. “But you shouldn’t.”

“Shouldn’t I?”

“Not in the slightest. Anything Ms. Ingram might be feeling…” He hesitated, heaving a sigh through flared nostrils. “The blame can be laid solely at my feet.”

“It’s not that…” I looked at him and he stared back at me, with those eyes like aquamarines, and my breath caught in my throat. I was about to tell him everything I knew, but something stopped me. Some greater sense of loyalty, perhaps. Or maybe something much less noble than that: maybe I just was not ready to have all of my deepest fears confirmed. What if I threw in my lot with the Ivaldans and everything Blanche was afraid of came to pass? I would lose my freedom on top of my heart, and then I would have nothing left at all.

But his eyes…I gave a shake of my head and gripped his hand in mine. “It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

“Good,” he said with a smile, “because we have much to discuss. Now, for the wedding, I’m thinking…One month. That’s enough time to plan it all, isn’t it?”

I blanched. “Is it?”

“Plenty of time,” he said. “Trust me.”

~ * ~

At dinner that evening, I pushed my food around my plate instead of eating it, full as I was of misgivings that sat heavy in the pit of my stomach. Kaz and the boys were chatting contentedly with Ms. Fairfax and Ms. Reed, and I was just sort of sitting there, trying to make myself inconspicuous. But when you are the bride and everyone is excited about planning a wedding, it’s pretty difficult to make yourself invisible.

“We could festoon the dining room with flowers,” Sarah was saying, and Alice was nodding along. “Until it’s positively bursting with color.”

“Oh, that would be splendid,” Alice said. “And we could have the ceremony by the pool, at dusk, with everything aglow with underwater light.”

“Yes, lovely!”

“And we could serve finger foods in the foyer—we could get that same quartet—”

“They were wonderful.”

“Weren’t they?”

“Just wonderful.”

“And we could have a sit-down supper, and a cake—”

“We must have a cake.”

“And maybe a little extravagance, like a chocolate fountain or…”

“Or a photo booth!”

“Yes!”

“What do you think, Jane?”

“How do we get the news?” I asked, and everyone sort of turned to look at me with the same questioning expression. “I haven’t actually seen any televisions, except for in the boys’ room, so I was just wondering: how do we get the news?”

There was an uncomfortable lull when Alice and Sarah glanced between one another with distinctly exasperated expressions. For his part, Kaz simply blinked. “There are news feeds that you can set up to come through the datapad,” he offered. “But—”

“I mean, is there a news channel? Does that even exist anymore?” I let my gaze land on each face, one at a time, in search of answers.

“Oh,” Pim said, “there’s the weather channel.”

“Yes,” echoed Tox. “We watch the weather channel each morning.”

“Did you know,” said Pim, “that the coldest inhabited place in the world is a remote village in Russia called Oymyakon which has an average temperature of negative 58 degrees Fahrenheit?”

“And,” Tox continued, “that it is 2-days travel from the nearest city, which is Yatsuk, the coldest city on the planet?”

The weather channel. Of course that would be their primary concern: global temperatures. They’d put all of the world leaders to sleep, so politics wasn’t a concern. They were likely policing the humans they’d awakened, so there wasn’t much crime, if any at all. What would a human news channel have to report on? Global warming? If so, the Ivaldans would welcome the news with open arms.

“Where is this coming from, Jane?” Kaz asked, having wiped his mouth with his linen napkin before tossing it onto what remained on his plate.

Me, I just sort of shrugged. “I’m curious about what it’s like in the rest of the world.” Alice and Sarah weren’t looking at me or at anyone else, and I couldn’t help but wonder if they knew something I didn’t. Was this subject taboo? Would there be repercussions for this line of questioning? “We live in a bubble here, Kaz. It’s a beautiful bubble, but it is a bubble all the same. And I just want to know: what is happening to the rest of the world? What has happened to the other humans, and how are the Ivaldans getting along with them? I just want to know what’s going on.”

“I’d be happy to share the reports I receive with you,” Kaz said, “if that’s what—”

“I don’t want to read Ivaldan reports, Kaz,” I shot back without thinking, “I want to hear it from someone else, someone like me. A human being. I want to know what’s going on out there.”

“And that’s completely understandable,” he said, his tone level, but cold. “But you have to understand that we haven’t awakened everyone yet. The awakenings are still being rolled out, so many of the people who would do such jobs as…run a news station or be a cameraman or be a news anchor…many of those people are still asleep.”

“But not all of them. Surely not all of them.”

His skin was so pale, he looked almost as though he were a sun-bleached statue in the halls of a great sculpture gallery; his eyes were uncut aquamarine, and his horns black and slick like onyx. He was beautiful, but cold. “No,” he confirmed again, “not all.”

“So, then why—”

“Would you like me to single-handedly start up the multimedia corporations that run your television news broadcasts, Jane?” he asked, his tone sharp. “I’d be happy to oblige my future bride, if it would make her happy.”

“That’s just…” I was shaking my head; I could feel my cheeks flush red.

“Would you all excuse us, please?” Kaz said, and I could hear chairs being pushed back and feet heading away from the dining room. When I looked up again, we were alone in the space with the domed ceiling, and I felt suddenly quite small. “What is the matter, Jane?”

“Why are you being so cagey about the news?” I demanded.

“Why are you being so persistent?”

“Because!” I pushed back from the table and rose to my feet. “Because I feel that I deserve to know what’s going on in the world I inhabit. Because I feel completely disconnected from my fellow man. And honestly? Because you seem to not want to tell me.”

“I think there’s something else,” he said, canting his head gently to the side as he examined my face. “I think there’s something else going on and you don’t want to ask me.”

“Is that so?”

“I think so, yes,” he pushed away from the table as well and uncoiled to his full height. “You’re positively radiating the question, Jane. I can pluck it out of the air as cleanly as though you had a sign taped to your back.”

I swallowed hard. I’d been careless; he could see into my heart and mind, and I’d projected my thoughts out loud and clear. “So tell me, then. Tell me.”

“Ask the question first, Jane. I want to hear you ask it.”

My heart was pounding in my chest. Part of me feared that if I opened this door, we would never be able to go back again, and I would lose this creature I’d so suddenly come to love. But I couldn’t let the question fester in my gut; it would turn everything sour anyway. So, I asked: “What do you know about the resistance?”

But Kaz just shook his head. “That isn’t the question.”

I shifted my weight uneasily from one foot to the other. “Yes, it is.”

“No, it isn’t, Jane.”

“Yes, it—”

“Don’t bullshit me, Jane!” His tone, and his use of American colloquialism, startled me, and I stood very still, my eyes wide and locked on his face. He looked angry now, and it was an intimidating sight. He stood with his chest puffed out, his arms held just slightly away from his sides. And even though he was wearing a finely tailored suit, I could see the bulking bulge of his biceps through the thin fabric of his dress shirt. His neck was thick, and the veins in his forehead were visible with his strained expression.

He sucked in a deep breath of air through flared nostrils and heaved a sigh. “I’ll ask you one more time,” he said, like a disapproving father, “what is the question you really want to ask me?”

I looked at him and softened. He was right: the images that Blanche had shown me had rooted a question deep inside of me that I hadn’t even allowed myself to fully consider. But I had to ask it. Now that I knew what it really was, I had to ask it. “Did you sanction the murder of human beings to secure the Ivaldan cause?”

He relaxed somewhat as soon as my words hit the air. “No,” he said, plain and clear. “No, I did not. I could not—ever.” He reached his hand across the table to me, and I moved forward to take it.

“Then,” I began, squeezing his fingers in mine, “then what happened?”

I could see Kaz lurch forward, wanting to take me in his arms, but the table was in the way. I thought for a moment of crawling across it to him, but he dropped my hand and moved around the table so that he could tug me into his arms.

“There are outliers,” he said, “on either side. We did what we could to minimize the bloodshed, but we could not eliminate it altogether.”

“And the resistance?”

“A natural uprising against what human beings see as a dictatorship. But that isn’t what we want to be. We don’t want to rule you, we want to run things alongside you.”

I broke away and looked up at him. “But you must see how difficult that is for us to believe, when you came here the way you did, when you put us all to sleep…”

“Can you tell me, truthfully,” Kaz said, taking my face gently in his hands and gazing down at me, “that if the roles were reversed, your leadership would not have laid my people to waste in search of a new home planet?”

I pursed my lips but could do nothing but shake my head. He was right: we would have come in guns blazing until their planet was ours. “But what are you doing,” I asked, “to minimize the damage?”

“We are taking perpetrators into custody.”

“And, what, just…holding them?”

“Until everyone is awakened and there has been legislation passed as to how to deal with Ivaldans, then yes, we will just hold them. We do not want to operate outside of human law, we want to be a part of it.”

“Not all of you, it seems.” I stepped back and crossed my arms in front of me, and Kaz let his hands drop to his sides.

“There has been some natural backlash,” Kaz confirmed.

“The Resistance.”

“Yes.”

“What do you know about them?”

“I know that they are primarily interested in targeting Ivaldan leadership. That they want to capture or murder us. That they are convinced that we are looking to enslave the human race, so they decided that the best course of action was for them to enslave us instead.” He hooked one corner of his mouth up in a grin, “They don’t seem to realize how easy it would be if they were better organized. Human beings outnumber Ivaldans five to one. And it doesn’t take some special know-how to awaken the remaining humans from stasis.”

I paused, inclining my head slightly. “Why are you telling me all of this?”

“Because,” he said, “I trust you.” He smiled a little and bent to press a kiss to my forehead. “You project your every thought in an aura around you, Jane. It’s one of the things I love best about you. You are…pure and clear, like fresh water.”

I tried to keep myself from thinking of Blanche, tried to keep the image she’d shown me out of my mind, but I couldn’t. I was worried, still, about what might happen to her. Or what might happen to Kaz.

He drew me yet again into his embrace, rocking me gently back and forth. “I know,” he said. “I know about Blanche. I always knew.”

I started and broke away to look up at him. “From the beginning?”

“From the beginning.” He tucked an errant lock of hair behind my ear. “She doesn’t project her thoughts the way you do. She has them locked tight. But I knew she was part of the resistance. Most of the women they sent to me that day were.”

“Is that why you wanted me?” I asked, looking down. “Because you knew I wasn’t a part of it?”

“No, Jane,” he said, gripping me by the shoulders. “I wanted you because you feel like home. Like I’ve known you for a thousand years. Like I met you in a dream somewhere.”

I couldn’t help but smile a little. “But when you thought I didn’t want you, you chose Blanche,” I said. “Why?”

“I thought, perhaps, if I could win her over, she might report back that we weren’t what she thought we were. I thought if I made her fall in love with me, it might help the cause. But…” he arched his shoulders in a shrug, as though he wanted to lay it all to rest. “What’s important, Jane, is that you trust that I want what is best for your people and mine. Together. And that with you at my side, we can make that happen.”

“But I’ve been so outside of the work of it all,” I said. “If you really wanted that, maybe I could participate in, you know, everything.”

He considered me levelly, before nodding his assent. “You are no politician, but I think a mind like yours could be of monumental value on a number of important projects. So, yes: after we’ve had our wedding, I swear that you will be more a part of things. We’ll find another tutor for the boys, and your job will be…an ambassador, of sorts. How does that sound?”

I smiled and stood up on tiptoe to catch his mouth with mine. “Thank you, Kaz,” I said. “Thank you for listening to me, for taking me seriously.”

“Always,” came his reply. He bent down and kissed me again, with that new hunger that stirred me at my core, and I responded with heightened sensitivity. I parted my lips to let him explore with his tongue and reveled in the sensation of his arms encircling my torso as he drew me ever closer. In one swift movement he turned me around and hoisted me up onto the edge of the table so that I was seated there my legs parted so that he could press closer to me. I heard the clanking of dishes and cups and silverware as we disrupted the abandoned items on the table, and suddenly I broke away.

“Kaz,” I said, breathless, “here?”

But he made no reply, he simply grinned. So I hopped down, turned around, and used my arm to sweep things to the side so as to clear a spot for us on the table. But it wasn’t what I thought it would be; it wasn’t what it looked like in the movie. I just knocked a bunch of stuff over: a glass of wine, a cup of water, a bowl of peas, and made more of a mess than it was when I’d started. “Huh,” I said, and Kaz burst into laughter. I couldn’t help but join him, and when we kissed again, it was on top of our shared laughter.

We sank together down onto the rub beneath the dining table, and I laid my head next to the spot where water and wine and peas had dripped down, and I couldn’t help but smile. Kaz took the necklace from around my neck and pressed my thumb to the back of it so that the nanites trembled and dissolved into a tiny line of pixels that unravelled my clothes where I lay. I was naked in an instant, and Kaz took a moment to clasp the necklace around my neck once more, admiring me in the warm light of the dining room as he used his nanites to undress as well.

He knelt beside me and ran his fingertips over the curves of my body; it tickled and electrified and I felt more awake than I ever had before.

“You don’t regret saying yes to my proposal, do you?” he asked, in a moment of uncharacteristic vulnerability. I furrowed my brow and sat up, for once not really thinking about the fleshy rolls of my stomach when I was sitting cross-legged with my lover.

“Of course not,” I said, scooting closer to him so that I could lift a hand to his face. “Why would you think that?”

He shook his head a little, but I didn’t need him to use words to express where the question had come from. I could sense it, like his thoughts were as open to me as mine were to him. He was unsure of whether or not he had quelled my fears about the violence of the Ivaldan outliers or the potential of retaliation from the Resistance. And though I was still afraid of what was to come, I felt confident in Kaz himself, and I knew that he was not a part of that violence.

“We live in a complicated time,” I murmured, needing to be closer to him. I climbed into his lap and let him hold me gently in his arms. “And things might be difficult for us in the future. But I do not doubt you, Kazimir Kain. I do not doubt you at all, and I can’t wait to be your wife.”

He smiled, and kissed me, shifting me where I sat so that I was facing him straight on with one leg on either side of his hips. He reached between us, his deft fingers stimulating my most sensitive parts so that he elicited a moan that was lost in our kiss. Breaking away, he leaned back and laid himself down on the rug, and I was left on my knees, straddling him. I reached between us and curled my fingers around his hardness, directing it to my entrance. He gave a few gentle thrusts of his hips before I leaned back and took the full length of him inside of me. He gripped me by the flesh of my upper thighs, trying to direct my movements, but I pushed his hands away.

“Let me,” I murmured, and bent forward to kiss him again, even as I began to rock my hips back and forth on top of him. He allowed his eyes to come to a close, his hands at his sides, until I sat up again and directed them to my breasts. He gripped them, squeezed, pinched at my nipples, until I closed my eyes as well and gave myself over to other sensations: the smell of wine, the smell of him; the taste of his mouth; the feeling of his hands on my body, the feel of him inside me where we were joined.

And I thought this is what it means to lose yourself in another person. I stilled the constant racing of my mind and allowed everything to go quiet, until all I heard was the rhythm of our breathing and the beating of our hearts.

I pressed my hands against his chest, and he sank his fingers into the flesh of my hips as I rode him, undulating so that my bottom smacked against his upper thighs. Without warning, he gripped me and threw his weight to the side, and I gave a little yelp as we tumbled until he was on top of me. He hooked one of his arms around one of my knees and held my leg up as he slammed into me, quickening his pace. I reached between us as stimulated my clit with my middle finger, and he peered down, watching me pleasure myself as he slid in and out of me.

I couldn’t last long after that, not under the intensity with which he locked his eyes on mine. Ours was more than mere physical connection; if this were my past life and I were talking to one of my girlfriends about how quickly and completely I had fallen in love with this guy, she would have told me I was totally insane. Hell, if anyone else had been telling me this story, I would have told them they were nuts.

But there I was, completely subsumed by this man, this beautiful creature, who felt like the missing piece that had long ago been carved out of my heart.

I felt the wave of my orgasm crest and break with a crash that drew out a cry that echoed against the dome of the dining room. Kazimir joined me in the release, grunting his final thrust as he came inside of me so that I could feel the pulse of him between my thighs. He collapsed atop me for the span of a few heartbeats, and we breathed together in perfect synchronicity.

And when he kissed my face and told me how glad he was that I was his, it didn’t seem odd to me because I was. And he was mine.