SMART GIRLS DON’T KISS ALIENS

Chapter 1

Kimmie

“Um, okay, so none of this”—I pointed at the guy with horns, the angry pregnant woman in front of me, and the barbarian alien landscape—“is going to work for me.”

“The alien slave ship carrying you and your friends crash-landed on this planet. You have to stay here forever and ever; there’s no way home,” the pregnant woman insisted as she rubbed her belly. “You’re going to bond with a mate and have babies to help repopulate the tribe. Our clan is in desperate need of women.”

The large half-naked horned alien smiled and waved awkwardly to me.

“I’m not repopulating anything,” Erin said loudly. “My people didn’t overcome centuries of oppression so that I can waste my three PhDs on a planet that doesn’t even have indoor plumbing, let alone anything as civilized as a mall. I can’t be trapped on this planet. I have a manicure on Monday. She does Ariana Grande’s nails, and there is a wait list. I’m going to lose my spot.”

“It’s already lost. You all have been in the stasis pods for the last two years,” the pregnant woman said triumphantly.

I tried to focus on how obnoxious the constant belly touching was so I didn’t completely lose it. Two years. Two freaking years?

Mel started sobbing, and I hugged her.

“Poor Bert,” she cried against my shoulder.

“I’m sure someone adopted him,” I consoled her.

“Is that your child?” the pregnant woman asked, mouth softening.

“Bert’s her corgi,” Ellen explained. “She’s a dog mom.”

The pregnant woman rolled her eyes like a twelve-year-old. “Ugh.”

“Hey!” I put my fists on my hips. “We all have jobs and lives, you know. We work for an aerospace engineering company. The US military and NASA rely on us. My cat may or may not miss me, but my plants are for sure all dead.”

“Your plants are dead because you are a horrible plant mom and forget to water them, not because you were abducted by aliens,” Angie hissed at me.

“I have six Birkin bags that need me,” Erin said defiantly.

“Well, you can’t get off this planet,” the pregnant woman snapped. “You will find a male here and fall in love. You will forget your lives as working girls and embrace your place as women of this tribe. You will learn to be happy here just like I am. I fell in love with the chief and now am blessed to be carrying his seed.”

I shuddered.

The chieftain’s mate glared at me. “You will garden, have babies, and cook over an open fire.”

“Kimmie almost burnt her condo down by boiling an egg,” Angie said. “She shouldn’t be cooking anything.”

“Also,” I added, “I am certainly not the medical doctor of the group, but it seems to me that birthing giant-headed alien babies on a dirt floor might be why your tribe is suffering from a lack of women, but hey, I only have PhDs in chemical and aerospace engineering, so what do I know?”

“Your PhDs are no good here,” the chieftain’s mate said, rubbing her belly furiously.

“They could be,” I offered. “We have fifteen PhDs between the six of us.” I pointed at my friends. “I bet we could get that spaceship up and running and rescue all of us from this planet.”

The alien next to her seemed alarmed.

“No one is leaving this planet!” the woman shrieked. “That ship will be destroyed so that the slavers don’t seek it out and ruin our way of life.”

“Not much to ruin,” I muttered. The alien village consisted of several caves, a few smoky fires, and sad baskets of whatever food they were able to forage.

“Premodern peoples have very delicate social structures,” Lana lectured, slipping into her anthropologist mode. “There is a certain level of ingenuity required for a hunter-gatherer group to thrive in a harsh climate like this one. Remember, they’re preindustrial, not stupid.”

The pregnant woman wrapped two hands under her belly and beamed at Lana.

“Exactly. You all need to adopt the attitude of your friend here,” she lectured us. “You all can be very happy here if you accept your fate. There is no way back to Earth. Now Cassius will show you to your new home.”

Still cradling her belly, she stalked off, nose in the air.

Erin started humming the tune of Garfunkel and Oates’s “Pregnant Women Are Smug.”

I elbowed her.

We followed the large alien male to a cave at the edge of the encampment. He was wearing a loincloth, and his tail whipped back and forth like a cat’s as he walked through the hot sand that reflected the sun. Around us, hungry-looking children were scampering around. In the center of the settlement—I hesitated to even call it a village—several women appeared to be roasting what looked like a giant slug.

How is this happening to me?

I had always been obsessed with space as a little girl. All I wanted to do was build rockets. But actual real live aliens on an honest-to-goodness alien planet? My brain was about to explode.

Cassius smiled in what he probably thought was a friendly manner but still displayed all his sharp teeth.

“Food?” He offered us a basket filled with dried gray mushrooms. “Eat.”

None of us touched it.

He put the basket down on the packed sandy dirt slowly and backed away.

“Your eyes,” I said, staring at him.

He tilted his head.

“You have eyes like the Pacific Ocean.” A sob caught in my voice as I spoke.

Cassius gave me one more long look with those blue-gray eyes then ducked his head and darted out.

I was suddenly, horribly homesick.

“I’m never going to see the ocean again,” I said, sobbing.

Mel punched me in the arm.

“Get it together,” she said, going into her ex-navy-fighter-pilot mode. “Eat. Rest. Then we’re going to strategize. I’m not staying here any longer than I have to.”

“Me neither,” Erin declared. “If the alien slavers had stasis pods, there’s bound to be some tech on that spaceship that we can use to escape this planet.”

“We need your rocket shipshape, though, Kimmie.” Mel smirked. “You’re the one who knows how to make rocket fuel and not blow everyone to the Dark Ages. Well, not that you can go much lower than this.”

I wiped my eyes and nodded.

Lana held up one of the dried pieces of fungus.

“Angie, are these poisonous?” she asked, frowning.

Angie shrugged and picked up her own mushroom.

“Lots of mushrooms are poisonous. They usually result in an agonizing death, but on the plus side, you can float to the pearly gates high as a kite.”

“I hope I see George Washington before I go,” Erin said, taking a bite of the gray food.

The mushroom was chewy and tasted like wood chips. I gnawed on it and leaned back against the rough walls of the cave.

“Mel’s right,” I said to my friends. “No matter what, we’re leaving this planet. I’m going home. If these mushrooms don’t kill us, we’re stealing that spaceship.”

Chapter 2

Cassius

“She said I had eyes like Pacific Ocean,” I told my friends smugly. They were gathered by a rock near the Earth women’s cave.

“What’s a Pacific Ocean?” Callahan asked, tilting his head.

“I don’t know,” I admitted, “but I bet it’s tasty.”

“Did they like the arihd?” Khazhred asked, tail whipping back and forth behind him. “I picked out the best ones.”

I looked over my shoulder back at the Earth women’s cave. Had they liked the food? The other Earth women who had been released from the egg pods in seasons past had all seemed upset with the food here. They asked for a MacDonald and then laughed and cried when I had offered to grow one for them.

But the Kimmie hadn’t cried. She had remarked on my eyes. It must be a sign. None of the other Earth women had said anything about my physical being. It was decided. The Kimmie and I would be bonded.

“The one called Kimmie will be my mate,” I growled and beat my chest. “Stay clear.”

“Your mate?” Nimiar scoffed. “She’s going to go for Vidanric just like all the other Earth women.”

The large male glowered from his spot in the shade, blinked his red eyes, and bared his teeth. “I will never take one of those women into my bed.”

“You have to admit,” Branaric drawled, “it has been pretty fucking convenient to have all the Earth women running around. Otherwise, our tribe would have met an untimely demise.”

Vidanric snarled. Branaric was obsessed by Earth culture. He used the same slang that the Earth women did and had taken to their swear words.

Branaric picked up Meeg, one of the young feral boys. Branaric was right in one respect. Life on the planet of Famirch was treacherous. Meeg’s mother hadn’t survived her battle in the birthing cave. Because men were so easy to come by and females scarce, no one wanted to take Meeg in as another mouth to feed when he would never contribute to growing the tribe. After his weaning, the kit bounced around from cave to cave. My friends and I always saved him extra food or kept a place for him to sleep.

Meeg lunged at me, growling.

I laughed and scooped him up.

“I will grow her a warad. The Kimmie will be impressed. Branaric, you said Earth women like plants.”

“They like flowers,” Branaric corrected and flopped back on the hot rock.

“You can’t eat a flower,” Khazhred remarked. “Warad is better.”

“It’s because you can’t eat a flower that Earth women love them,” Branaric said sagely.

“Every day they further ruin our way of life,” Vidanric snarled. He punched the rock next to him.

“It’s positively shocking that he still has Earth women falling all over themselves to have him,” Branaric said, throwing an arm over his eyes.

“Hut, hut!” Zeldes called. “The women say the welcome feast is almost ready.”

“Let me guess,” Branaric said, leaping off the rock. “Is it wyrm and arihd?”

Zeldes shoved him. “We should all be grateful to Cassius and Vidanric for a fortuitous hunt.”

“I’m not thanking them. I’m sure we’ll hear all about it.”

I followed my friends back to the center of the camp where the tribe gathered.

When the slave ship had originally crashed several rocks away, I, like many in our tribe, had been apprehensive. But when the chief had brought back a mate from the mysterious spaceship, all sorts of wondrous new possibilities emerged. We might be able to branch out and form a new neighboring tribe once our numbers increased. Now the final Earth women had been freed and were about to be welcomed into the tribe.

The six new Earth women were sitting or crouching on rocks near the great firepit. My stomach rumbled. I had gone with Vidanric to hunt and catch the wyrm. He had landed the killing blow. I had assisted in carrying it the several suns back to the tribe in anticipation of the arrival of the final Earth women.

Usually, the newly welcomed Earth women were wide-eyed, apprehensive, and afraid their first day in the tribe. But the Kimmie was not. Her eyes swept the landscape around her, reminding me of Vidanric right before a hunt. She had a certain stillness about her as she assessed the camp. Her gaze landed on me, and she gave me a small smile then turned back to the fire as the chief and his mate addressed the clan.

It was difficult to pay attention as he greeted the newcomers and thanked Vidanric for the successful hunt. I could only think about the Kimmie. Would she take me to her cave tonight? If she took any other male, I would kill him.

“The hell is wrong with you?” Branaric hissed as I gouged my claws through the dirt.

“The Kimmie is mine.”

“Ancestors. You and Nimiar—lovesick kits you are.”

“He’s not joining the Kimmie’s bedroll if all he can manage to do is stand there and drool,” Callahan stated.

“I will do more than drool.”

“And they call us barbarians.” Branaric shook his head.

I adjusted my loincloth and strode over to the Kimmie. She had lined up with her friends to receive a bowl of the spit-roasted wyrm.

“Make sure you eat some of the skin,” I told her. “It’s nice when it’s crispy.”

She wrinkled her nose at the blubbery gray mass in the bowl and poked it with a finger.

“Rip it,” I said, demonstrating with my own bowl, “then sip the juice.”

The Kimmie did not seem like she enjoyed the wyrm as she took a bite and swallowed.

“Water,” she rasped.

“We don’t have water here,” I chuckled. “Only when the ancestors are merciful. They haven’t sent us water in many suns.”

“Yeah, I think I’m done with this planet,” she said, handing me the bowl of uneaten meat. “You can have my share.”

“Ah, the smell of wyrm and failure!” Nimiar declared, throwing an arm around my shoulder and grabbing me by the horns playfully. “At least you have the wyrm to keep you company.”

“I thought she desired me,” I said with a frown, watching her whisper to her friends.

“Maybe the fire dance will do it,” Branaric said with a smirk.

Even after I won by dancing in the hot fire the longest, the Kimmie did not seem all that impressed. She and her friends were deep in conversation. They were pointing and drawing something in the sand. The Kimmie swept the marks aside when the chieftain’s bonded came to berate them.

“At least you’re not bonded to that,” Callahan muttered to me under his breath.

Vidanric kicked him. “Show some respect.”

“There’s more wyrm,” Khazhred offered. “You and Vidanric found a large one.”

“I wish we had an alcohol,” Branaric said.

“You don’t even know what that is,” Vidanric snapped at him. “There is nothing of value on Earth. You need to forget about it, and so do they.” He jerked his head to the six Earth women.

But the Kimmie and her friends were gone.

I peered into the dark, my eyes adjusting to the low light levels until I could make out the pattern of their heat in the darkness.

“They’re going back to the ship,” Callahan remarked. Often, unable to accept that they were stuck on Famirch, the Earth women would try to return to the ship. The males would trail them and make sure they weren’t eaten by a wyrm, not that there were any this close to the camp. Once the Earth women accepted they truly had no way home, they settled into life in the tribe.

I grabbed a spear and headed off in their direction, my six friends trailing me silently through the warm sand that radiated the day’s heat.

While many of the Earth women had wandered in circles in the dark, the Kimmie and her friends walked in a straight line, with an evident sense of purpose.

“Are they hunting?” Vidanric asked in a low rumble.

I wasn’t sure what they were doing.

When the Earth women reached the ship perched in the sand, we settled by a large rock to wait for them to realize that they could not get back to their home planet.

The ship was large—the silver metal gleamed in the light from the night sun and blocked out the stars. Two large wings extended on either side. I did not like the spaceship. Cold and too smooth, it was unnatural. I turned my back to it, as did my friends. None of us wanted to be near it. It felt evil.

“I feel bad for you,” Nimiar stated, clasping me on the shoulder. “The Pippa has already accepted her place in the tribe. I don’t have to worry about her wishing she could fly away.”

“No, you just have to worry about her having no clue who you are,” Branaric said, his forked tongue sliding out of his mouth.

We laughed softly, just in case the sound might wake the spaceship.

“Spaceship! Spaceship!” a small voice shrieked in the night.

“Meeg!”

“Ancestors,” Branaric swore as the small kit scampered faster than he had a right to across the sand.

“Did he follow us here?” I hissed.

We all jumped up to run after him. But the kit was faster, and he climbed up into the maw of the spaceship before we could catch him. 

“The spaceship ate Meeg,” Zeldes declared, hefting his spear and charging after the kit.

Vidanric and I exchanged apprehensive glances. I had never been inside the spaceship. Only the chief had. What horrors awaited us there?

But we could not leave Meeg or our friends to face the terrors alone.

“Stay silent,” Vidanric ordered. “You’ll wake it up.”

We slowly approached the ship, gliding across the sand. What if Meeg had already awoken the silver beast?

I kept to Vidanric’s flank as we slowly climbed into the beast through a wound in the belly. Inside the bowels, the spaceship was warm.

“Maybe it is alive,” Callahan whispered.

We were on high alert as we slowly made our way through the belly, searching for Meeg. On the too-smooth walls, strange symbols glowed, pulsing on and off. The egg pods that had brought the Earth girls were lined up against the edge of a cavern we walked through in search of the kit.

Every so often, the spaceship would rumble or jerk. My heart pounded. I so desperately wanted to leave, but I could not abandon Meeg.

“It must have eaten him, and it’s digesting him,” Branaric said in a bare whisper.

Vidanric made a slicing motion. Branaric needed to stay quiet.

“Boo!”

Callahan hissed, and I jumped while Khazhred ended up upside down on one of the large metal racks. Meeg shrieked with laughter at our reactions.

“Boo!” the kit yelled again and hopped up and down. He grabbed his tail, giggling.

“No!” Vidanric barked at him.

Meeg immediately started crying. Nimiar scooped him up and nuzzled his nose.

“We must leave immediately,” he stated.

I nodded.

We hurried through the bowels of the spaceship to the wound through which we had entered. But the wound had been healed.

I dropped my spear and scraped my claws around the edges of it, trying to tear it open.

“We are trapped.”

My friends attacked the side of the beast with spears. The beast made an evil sound and jerked.

“It is alive!” Branaric whispered, fear in his eyes. Then the spaceship roared and sat up. We were thrown back, tumbling over one another. Nimiar cradled Meeg, protecting the kit with his body, and Vidanric dragged us to a small cave.

I clung to a handhold then bit back a scream...

Because then the spaceship flew.

Chapter 3

Kimmie

“The lack of moisture on the planet seems to have kept the ship in good condition,” I observed as Erin and I walked around the spaceship. We had been abducted right as we were getting out of the car to go for a hike. I was thankful to be wearing my heavy boots and cargo shorts. Unlike Los Angeles, this barbarian planet didn’t seem to get cold at night.

“Probably why all those guys are running around in a tiny scrap of fabric,” I murmured. 

Erin clapped her hands in front of my face. “You need to be thinking about chemistry, not men.”

“Right, yes. Science is better than hot males.” I surveyed the boosters on the spaceship. They seemed similar to yet different from the high-powered rockets I designed on Earth. I used a broom-like object I had scavenged from the spaceship to sweep out the sand from the rocket engine.

“Oh my god!” Erin exclaimed. She fell to her knees in front of one of the rockets and raised her hands.

“Blessed praise to the ion booster.”

“What? No way.” I was skeptical. Erin had done one of her PhDs about ion thrusters and their applicability in deep space travel. Sure, they worked on small satellites already in space. But to get them up there, you needed one of my specialties: my own special blend of liquid hydrogen and oxygen shaken, not stirred, into a highly calibrated bomb.

“I don’t care how much particle physics you spout at me,” I told Erin, “I am not banking my escape to Earth on an ion thruster.”

“Nooo,” Erin said, hugging the rocket engine. “My baby is for deep space travel. That’s how we made it all the way here. Wherever here is.”

I was not as familiar with the stars as Ellen, but even I could tell that this was not the night sky over Kansas.

“How’s my engine coming?” Mel asked, poking her head down through the hatch we had used to enter the spaceship. “Are they going to get us off the planet or blow us to smithereens?”

I shrugged. “Coin toss?”

Erin rolled her eyes. I climbed up the ladder behind Mel, then followed her to the room with the fuel tanks. They were all labeled in that strange alien script that glowed on the walls. Lana, who liked to learn new languages in her spare time, was happily scrawling on a clipboard she had found.

“This alien language is very similar to Sanskrit,” she said excitedly. “I have a little chart for you upstairs on the flight deck,” she told Mel. “Should be enough to let you fly the spaceship at least, and Ellen found a map in the computer system. Not super sure what all the planet names are, but Ellen said leave it to her. Wow, this language is amazing. It’s very simple once you get the hang of it. I wish I had more time to study it. And this planet’s language is very similar to Khoisan languages—isn’t linguistics fascinating?”

“Rocket fuel.” I pointed at one of the canisters.

Lana made an exasperated noise. “We are here in a literal alien culture, and all you want to do is make a bomb.”

“A rocket,” I corrected.

“Well, don’t use that one,” Lana said, comparing the notes on her notepad to the sign on the large two-story-tall tank. “This one is some sort of nutritional slurry used for the stasis pods, most likely.”

“Then why is it with the rest of the rocket fuel?” I complained.

“When you design your own alien slaver ship, you can put the tanks where you want them.”

I stuck my tongue out at her.

“This one and this one”—Lana tapped the tanks—“are what you need. There were notes on the flight deck, and there is a setting I found in the computer system that seems like it creates some sort of mix. If I had a few more days, I’d get more comfortable with the language and be able to tell you more.”

“We don’t have a few days,” I murmured, totally engrossed in my rockets.

The tanks led to a chamber that fed fuel to the powerful engines Erin and I had been examining outside.

Lana handed me my tools. Erin was already half inside one of the chambers that led to the ion thruster.

“I’ll see you in a few hours.”

It didn’t take me that long to inspect the engine. It was beautiful, a work of art—efficient and powerful. It was every rocket engineer’s wet dream. It had survived the crash mostly intact, though there were some loose cables, and several valves needed to be replaced.

When I finally crawled out covered in grease, Erin was already wiping off her hands.

“I could live in that ion thruster.” She sighed, and we headed up to the flight deck.

“I know, right?” Erin and I giggled as we talked about the engines.

On the flight deck, Mel was familiarizing herself with the control panel while Ellen panned through the maps, frowning. I knew she was memorizing them all, so I left her to it.

“Give me some juice, baby! I want to get wet!” I said.

“Rocket engineers are the worst,” Angie declared as Mel slowly pushed up on a lever. The spaceship jerked.

“Now do the ion thrusters!” Erin clapped her hands.

Mel waved her fingers over the blinking control panel with the glowing alien script.

“There,” Lana said, making more notes.

Mel pressed a button, and the spaceship purred.

“Music to my ears.” Erin swooned.

“Okay, cut it.”

Erin and I traipsed back down to the hull, listened for rattling in the engines, and then went outside to see if anything had blown off.

“It’s a work of art.” Erin blew the engines a kiss.

“Let’s do this!” I whooped.

“Wait, wait!” a woman yelled, running toward us through the sand, wearing one of the tattered bleached leather skins that served as clothing on this planet. “Wait! I want to go to Trader Joe’s!” She face-planted in the sand, landing with a puff of dust.

“Oh my god!” Erin and I rushed to help her up.

“Thank goodness you haven’t left yet!” the girl said as we brushed her off. “My name is Pippa, and I want to go to Target and shave my legs and eat an overpriced dinner served by a snooty hipster waiter,” she begged. “Please take me with you!”

Erin looked at me.

“Sure.” I shrugged. “You don’t weigh that much.”

“Oh my god,” Pippa said, half collapsing against me as I led her to the hatch. Erin helped her up the ladder.

“You don’t know what it’s like living in a cave,” Pippa said as she helped us pull the ladder up behind us. We all closed then triple locked the hatch, making it air- and pressure tight.

“I can imagine.” I looked Pippa up and down. “What are you, one twenty?”

“No, I’m only twenty-three,” she said, confused.

“Your weight,” I clarified. “Rocket science is a precision art. I need to know our load so I can calculate the minimum amount of fuel we need. We’re going to need to save some for the journey home, and I don’t want to waste any trying to leave the planet’s gravity.”

“Oh, that sounds like science-y stuff,” Pippa said, wide-eyed. “I went to public school, and they killed social studies and science for us so we could focus on standardized testing.”

“Goodness gracious.” I pulled out my notebook to revise my calculations. I had calculated the planet’s gravity factor by dropping a brass ball through the hatch and timing how long it took to hit the ground. I had some volume calculations from the tanks. Now, knowing the weight of all persons on board and the mass of the ship, courtesy of Lana and her linguistics, I could do a pretty good calculation of the fuel.

“Are we going to make it?” Erin asked uncertainly. She had seen the fuel tanks like I had.

“Of course!” I chirped so as not to scare Pippa.

Erin nodded and led the chattering young woman up to the flight deck.

I walked around the fuel tanks again. We had enough, but it was barely enough. I revised my safety factor and redid my math. It was going to be tight, and I had very little margin for error.

“We got this.”

My friends were tense but excited on the flight deck. Lana pointed me to the correct setting to mix the fuels and set the amounts.

“Everyone strapped in?” I took a seat next to Mel.

In the captain’s seat, Mel was all business. She had her hair in a military tight bun and her navy fighter pilot face on, the one that scared all the men. 

“Fuel mix starting,” I said.

Mel flipped a switch. We watched the little counter on the screen flash as the spaceship roared to life.

“Fuel mix is hot.”

I gripped the arm rest. What if I was wrong? “Angle the ship up at 86.7 degrees.”

Mel made adjustments, and the spaceship lurched.

I was pressed backward in my seat as we rotated.

“All right,” I said, “let ’er rip!” I kept time on my watch as Mel flipped a switch, sending the fuel mix rushing into the engines and igniting. Then we were roaring toward space!

I had been to space before on a mission. I knew the drill: the heat, the unbelievable power, that feeling of leaving Earth, leaving gravity, leaving it all behind—the only thing between you and plummeting to your death was the power of the rocket.

Except ours was failing.

“I was wrong,” I whimpered. “I’m not wrong. I’m smart! I’m right. I do math. Oh my god, we’re all going to die!”

“Stay with me,” Mel ordered. “We can correct.” We had seconds to do it.

“Who lied about their weight?” Angie shrieked.

Lana sobbed. “I lied! I’m actually 185, not 140!”

“You need to learn to love the skin you are in. Body positivity, girl!”

“I can’t think!” I shrieked.

“No time,” Mel warned.

“Fuck! How sure are you on your ion thrusters?” I screamed at Erin.

“Positive.”

“Burn it all!” I yelled to Mel.

She froze.

“The blinking blue one!” Lana screeched.

I lunged for it, flipping the switch right as we were at the azimuth of being pulled back down to Famirch. The rockets engaged, the remainder of the fuel rushed to the engines, and then we were out, free from the gravity of the barbarian planet, drifting into the inky black nothingness of deep space.

We sat there for a moment, breathing, waiting for the spaceship to explode, for something to happen. But instead, we drifted in silence.

Mel took a deep breath through her nostrils then let it out in a low whistle.

“Erin?”

With a slightly shaky finger, Lana pointed at the alien script that flowed across the screen.

The ion thrusters engaged.

“We have hardly any fuel,” I warned. “All we have are the ion thrusters. We cannot afford to make any mistakes.”

“So we’re just going to float in space all the way home?” Pippa asked uncertainly. “How long will that take? I didn’t know there was an alien planet near Earth.”

“There’s not,” Ellen said grimly. “We are not even close to the same galaxy as ours.”

“Then how are we getting home?”

“Have you ever heard of a little thing called quantum physics?” Ellen asked her.

“Like time travel?” Pippa wrinkled her forehead.

Lord. 

You can miss me with that time travel shit. I am a simple girl. Fire plus rocket fuel go boom equals me happy.

“This ship travels through wormholes, according to what Lana read. This map”—Ellen pointed—“has them noted.”

“Do you know what the labels mean?” I asked Lana as the little squiggles over the wormholes blinked on the hologram above the flight deck.

“They’re just random letters and numbers,” she explained, chewing her lip.

“We just have to use the wormholes to hopscotch to Earth,” Ellen told us.

I looked at the hologram. It represented our universe, but it all just looked like blinking dots, stars, and galaxies to me. We could be anywhere.

But Ellen seemed to know exactly where she was. Her eyes were closed, and her long dark braid was thrown over her shoulder as she meditated on the universe, searching through the maps of space she had archived in her head.

“Go there,” she said, pointing at a singular dot in the blinking sea of lights.

Lana typed in the coordinates carefully. We heard a slight rushing noise, then the universe shifted.

I looked out of the curved glass window of the flight deck in wonder. The star pattern was different, but I still didn’t recognize it.

Ellen frowned, studying the new map that had appeared on the hologram.

“Now there.” Ellen pointed at another random dot. The depths of space changed. My friend visibly relaxed and pointed at another dot. “That’s the Andromeda Galaxy. Almost home.”

After drifting for a bit, we made another jump.

“The Milky Way!” I crowed.

Ellen smiled. “There,” she said. Pluto appeared in front of us. “Now the sun.”

I was sweating as Mel navigated us around the white-hot star.

“Bring us around to Earth on the sun side,” Ellen instructed. “The deep space telescopes won’t be able to pick up the ship.”

Mel burned the rest of our fuel as we zipped around Mercury toward the Earth.

“See?” Erin crowed. “I told you a more efficient ion thruster was key to deep space travel. I told you! This one works exactly like I theorized. It’s almost as if I designed it myself.”

Ellen blanched. “I think we might have created a time loop.”

“Yay! A time loop!” Pippa clapped her hands.

“No, that’s a bad thing.”

“Boo, a time loop.”

“I have more important things to think about than the fabric of space-time—like did Bradley give my job to his loser roommate from college? And though my parents are out finding themselves, they will eventually realize I haven’t made my obligatory holiday call and wonder if I’m dead.”

“We’re going to have to come up with a story for why we’ve been gone for years,” Mel said with a sigh.

“We should just say we’ve been abducted by aliens,” Pippa suggested. “And pretend it’s a joke.”

“I vote for a spontaneous meditation retreat to India,” Angie said.

“Ladies,” Ellen said slowly, peering out of the glass window that looked out over the stars. “I don’t think we’re going to have a problem.” She pointed. “See the position of the stars?”

“Sort of but not really.”

She turned to me. “We’ve only been gone two weeks.”

“Quantum physics, girl,” Angie said, shaking her head.

“Oh my god, that means I still have my rent-controlled apartment. Yes!” Pippa pumped a fist.

“I think because of the wormholes, something happened with the passage of time,” Ellen said. “I’m going to have to study it.”

“Not before we all get drinks,” Lana insisted. “I think we’ve earned it!”

“I just want to say,” Pippa remarked as we entered the Earth’s atmosphere, “that I am loving all this positive intelligent female energy, even though I contributed absolutely nothing!”

Mel angled the spacecraft toward Southern California.

I felt tears dripping down my face as we crested over the Rockies and headed into the desert and to the large warehouse where Mel kept several airplanes that she collected.

“We’re home!” Pippa exclaimed when we landed.

“Earth girls rule! Earth girls rule!” she and Erin chanted while Mel taxied the spaceship to the front of the large metal prefab warehouse.

I scrambled out of the spaceship and raced to open the large sliding doors so that we could hide the alien tech away.

As the spaceship cooled, my friends all climbed down the ladder.

“I hope Bert is okay,” Mel said. Now that her job as pilot was over, she was back to being a worried dog mom. “What if the coyotes got him? What if he starved?”

We hurried out through the large sliding doors to where Mel’s SUV was parked, the doors still open just like they were when we were abducted. Had it really been only two weeks?

But it might have been two weeks too long—because there, lying in a heap of fur next to the car, was Bert.

Chapter 4

Cassius

I still clutched the handhold, my knuckles numb in the cold. The spaceship had gone quiet, but I didn’t trust it.

“We need to move,” Vidanric finally said in the dark.

“Yes.” I roused myself and clasped Callahan’s arm to help him upright.

We made our way through the ship. The symbols on the wall glowed blue, green, and purple. The wound in the belly was open again. I led my friends toward it.

“I need to find the Kimmie,” I told them.

“No,” Vidanric growled. “We will not stay in this spaceship any longer.”

“What if it has eaten the Kimmie?” I wondered, concerned, as we climbed out.

“It took us back to its cave,” Callahan said quietly as we all gazed around in wonder. Numerous other spaceships were in the dark cave, big ones and small ones.

“Are there more spaceships on our planet?” Khazhred wondered.

I cocked my head. There were voices. The Kimmie!

We crept along the side of the cave, wary of the other spaceships, lest they, too, came to life. We peered around the large opening in the front of the cave. The landscape outside looked similar to our home planet but also different. There were big plants, bigger than I’d ever seen, and they were green. In the distance, the Kimmie and her friends gathered around a small spaceship that didn’t have wings.

“Pippa?” Nimiar said in shock. “If Pippa is here, then we must still be on our planet, right?”

But I wasn’t sure.

The Earth women were crouched over a heap of fur. Were they hunting?

I tuned my hearing to understand what they were saying.

“Oh no, poor Bert.”

“Give him some water.”

“Breathe,” the Mel was saying to the lump of fur in her arms. The creature roused itself and tried to eat the Mel’s face. I hissed, readying myself to save them. But the Earth women just laughed and made cooing noises.

“I think he just ate himself sick,” the Kimmie said, shaking a box at her friend.

“Poor baby!”

The creature made a barking noise. The Kimmie opened a crinkling object, and water poured out of it. It smelled heavenly. The Earth woman passed around more of the bottles.

“To being home on Earth,” the Kimmie declared, and they all tapped the crinkly objects together.

Earth. We were on Earth?

“No.” Vidanric looked at me in shock and horror.

Nimiar clutched Meeg to his chest.

The furry creature jumped around at the Earth women’s feet.

“Holy shit,” Branaric whispered, tail whipping around him in excitement. “I know what that is—it’s a hamster! We’re on Earth, and we’re seeing a freaking hamster!”

Callahan glared at him. “That’s not a hamster. It’s a parrot.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? It’s clearly a hamster. It can’t be a parrot. Parrots have tails. That thing is golden colored and doesn’t have a tail—that makes it a hamster.”

“I agree with Callahan. It’s a parrot,” Vidanric said, frowning.

“Let’s call a vote,” I said. “Raise a hand if it’s a hamster.” Several of us raised our hands.

“Put Meeg’s hand up too,” Branaric demanded.

“No. Everyone who thinks it’s a parrot, raise their hand,” Vidanric stated. 

“Sorry, Vidanric,” Branaric said, “you lose. It’s a hamster.”

The Earth women were loading up the hamster and themselves into the small spaceship. Were they going to fly away? But the ship stayed low to the ground as they sped off away from the cave.

“Why are they leaving the cave?” Nimiar asked as we wandered outside into the light of the sun.

“The spaceship must have wanted to be with its tribe,” Zeldes said slowly. “And the Earth women helped it.”

“No,” Vidanric said bitterly. “They caught the spaceship and made it submit to their will. Then the Earth women kidnapped us and took us to Earth. We are their captives, doomed to be trapped forever on this cursed planet.”

“Do you think we’ll go to a zoo?” Branaric asked in excitement. He darted around, touching the plants, chewing on another, then spreading his arms wide to marvel at the large cave behind us where the spaceship lived.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Vidanric insisted. “We will find the Earth women and demand that they return us to our tribe.”

“Fuck that!” Branaric announced. “I’m not going back to that wasteland. We’re on Earth. The land of the MacDonald and the Star-Buck. I am going to have the full Earth experience.”

“You can’t run around and draw attention,” Callahan growled, baring his teeth. “There could be predators. Who knows what kind of animals live here?”

“Will the Earth women return to this cave?” I wondered.

“It doesn’t smell like them,” Khazhred remarked. “They must not spend much time here.”

Zeldes sniffed around where the small spaceship and the hamster had been. “I can’t catch their scent. They will be impossible to track.”

“I will go find them,” I decided.

Vidanric grunted.

“Kimmie and I are bonded,” I reminded him. “We are connected by an invisible thread. My heart will find its way to her.”

“When I smell your corpse rotting on the wind, we’ll come collect your remains to take back with us to the tribe,” Vidanric said solemnly.

“I’m going too,” Branaric stated. “It will be an adventure.”

“No!” Callahan and Vidanric roared.

Meeg jumped and screeched.

“We can’t all wander around aimlessly on this barbarian planet,” Vidanric snarled.

The landscape stretched in front of us. Plants dotted the sandy dirt. The environment was both familiar and completely foreign to our home. The sun was setting behind mountains far in the distance. Unlike our home planet at night, a chill was settling into the air.

“We will hunt for food while you find the Earth girls and tell them to take us home,” Vidanric said.

I nodded and set off toward the lights glowing in the distance.