CARRALIS

We were in a room that was filled with junk, and strange alien artefacts that I'm not even sure Rennis would've been able to understand. One of the artefacts had been a 'maths textbook', Lilah called it, which was filled with so many strange, headache-inducing symbols that I never wanted to look at it again.

Other than that, Lilah was particularly interested in the books. She was reading through one at the moment. Curious, I waded through the junk on four legs, stepping between piles of trinkets, careful not to disturb anything.

I pushed my head close to hers, trying to get a peek of what she was reading. I couldn't read it, but I still marvelled at the tiny scrawl marked across the mesh-thin surface.

All of a sudden, Lilah jolted with a cry. Her book clattered onto the floor.

"What's wrong!?" I cried, tripping backwards in my own surprise and knocking over a junk pile with a clatter.

Lilah held a hand to her chest and tried to steady her breathing. "Nothing… nothing, you just surprised me – that's all," she reassured me.

"Are you sure?" I asked, confused. "That was a little intense."

"Well, it's just, ah, you see Carra," she stuttered and placed her book on her lap. "You look a bit scary to me, that's all."

I caught my reflection in a mirror to my side and the glitter of my own eyes stared back, lining my dorsal and clustering symmetrically on my head. I never thought I looked ugly, let alone scary.

"I've never been called scary before," I admitted, uncomfortably reminded of the time when Lilah first saw me. "Am I…?"

Lilah nodded shyly. "Just when I don't expect you to be there. You're a bit like a shadow, kind of hard to see until the light hits you right, and then you catch me off guard. Plus, that's a lot of eyes. Can you really see out of all of them?"

"Wh-what? Yes…?" I stuttered at the unexpected question. "My vision's better around my head, though," I felt compelled to add.

"Huh, cool. I guess that's another alien that I'll never be able to get the jump on," she commented, a hint of mischief reflected in her eyes.

I didn't really understand what she meant, but I nodded anyway. I'd have to remember not to approach Lilah from behind - at least not without saying anything - again.

Taking a breath, Lilah picked up the book she'd dropped and neatly placed it away on a pile. She spotted a round hatch in the side of the wall, cautiously placed a hand on it, then pulled it back. It slid to the side, and a glass porthole was exposed.

Bright light shone into the room. Lilah gasped. At what, I had no clue, as I had to close my eyes before it blinded me.

"Z-Space," Lilah announced quietly. "Words don't really do it justice," she commented.

"Words would be helpful right now, as I can't see." I added.

Lilah shuffled and paused for a beat. "It's too bright for you?"

I nodded and she closed the hatch. Cautiously, I opened my eyes. "Z-Space? What's Z-Space?"

"Oh, it's like an alternate dimension that spaceships can move into and use to take shortcuts through space for long trips. Otherwise it'd take way too long to get between planets."

"Ah. We call it something else," I explained. "So. We're in space."

"Yeah." Lilah nodded. "I guess if the Skrit picked you up from your planet, they've moved on now. God knows where we are now."

Like that, I realised I wasn't on my own planet any more. And for the first time ever, I felt homesick. It made me wonder how long Lilah had been on this ship before me. Did she feel homesick too? I wasn't sure if I wanted to ask, and the conversation fell silent for a while after that.

Lilah broke the silence. "You know... your ability to learn English just keeps freaking me out. It would take a human years to get as good as you are now. Are you sure you're normal for your species and not like… some kind of prodigy?"

"Prodigy?"

"Someone who's naturally really good at something."

I shook my head. "I'm normal. Maybe Kelbrids are better at learning than humans?" I suggested.

She seemed offended at that.

"At language," I added. "There's a lot of Kelbrid languages. So we need to be able to learn quickly."

Then she asked me another question out of nowhere.

"So… have you ever heard of Yeerks?"

It was sometimes astonishing how quickly she could change subjects.

"Yeerks? Are those some kind of Earth animal?"

"Well, no. They're another kind of alien. They tried to invade Earth once."

She stopped explaining. Did she want me to ask her a question?

"Did you fight them?" I asked, then realised my mistake. "Oh! You must have done, since you're here."

Lilah smiled. "Y'know, for a member of a spooky alien race, you're pretty absent-minded," she stated. "Anyway - a group of six teenagers, about my age, fought them off with some alien technology. They were pretty famous, they wrote a few books documenting it and everything."

My cerata unfolded in shock. "Is it normal for human teenagers to fight invaders?" I asked, aware of how young they were compared to my own species.

"No, not at all. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The only ones who knew about the invasion and had the ability to fight it off," she grinned awkwardly. "This'll probably sound kind of unbelievable but… an Andalite gave them the technology as a sort of last-ditch effort."

Lilah was also an adolescent, biologically the same age as I was, but I liked to imagine her as a mentor. She seemed to enjoy explaining things.

"It meant they ended up trying to save Earth all by themselves though. They almost lost because of it. Sometimes I wonder if they would've been better off getting other people involved.

"You know, we can't escape. But I've been thinking about a way we might be able to get free. We'd have to find the control room though."

"Won't that be full of Skrit-Na?" I asked.

"Nope." She smiled, clearly trying to hold back the grin that was tugging on her lips. "Their lunch break is probably now," she said with a tap to the time-keeping device strapped on her wrist. "Didn't you notice how they never give us food right about this time? I mean, that's my theory. It can't hurt to sneak in and check it out, right?"

I nodded slowly.

For so-called professional kidnappers, Skrit-Na were always terrible at having designated feeding times. I was sure they only did it whenever they remembered to. But why had Lilah been tracking Skrit-Na routines? What could we do while still trapped in Z-Space?

Lilah noticed me staring at her.

She smiled. "Don't worry Carra, we'll probably be fine. Just leave it to me." She held her hand up so that two of the first fingers formed a 'v' shape. It apparently meant victory, and she had a habit of doing it whenever we successfully sneaked past a Skrit-Na or found a new room with interesting things inside.

"No," I couldn't help but disagree. "What if they catch us?"

"We won't let them catch us," she rebutted and started wading back through the junk, towards the door of the room's exit. I stared at her as she went. If she thought I was going to follow her like a nestling…

Then she was completely right.

I trundled back through the path I'd knocked over earlier.

"Okay, so I guess this is what we're doing now," I muttered to the both of us as Lilah opened the door, checked both ways, and stepped out into the metal corridor.

Skrit-Na ships, as we'd learned, were arranged into concentric circles of corridors that made them look like flattened spheres on the outside, or 'saucers' as Lilah called them.

She led me through the corridors, accessing each door that led to the next innermost corridor. It was a long process. The Skrit-Na ship was large, after all. It had to be, to carry so much cargo in its hold.

Our trip through the corridors was carried out in complete silence. My cerata told me through the small vibrations we made that the corridors were empty, but we never chanced it. If Skrit-Na ever found us escaped, they'd put a sturdier lock on the cages and we'd be stuck.

I stopped.

"Lilah," I whispered. "I sense a disturbance."

She snorted. Was something wrong with what I said?

Still, she stopped walking and peered behind us, equally perplexed as to what I must've heard.

Then, the disturbance made itself known. It was a muddy-brown, many-legged creature. It travelled down the corridor as if nothing could've stopped it. It, like all the other sapient aliens I had seen, was ugly.

I turned to face it, cerata flat, ready to fight. It was only one.

Lilah clearly sensed my intent and shouted. "Carra, don't!" I felt a tug on my arm as she tried to dissuade me.

"I can take it," I hissed, determined. "I can kill it."

"Oh my God, Carra. Calm down! Don't hurt it. It won't do anything."

I turned to her questioningly. And like she said, the creature approached us, gave us a cursory inspection, then continued as if everything was in order.

I watched it as it left. "Why didn't it do anything? It isn't going to inform the Skrit-Na?"

She shook her head knowingly. "No... It's a Skrit-Na child. It's not much more intelligent than an animal and it can't speak."

I nodded. "Sorry," I apologised. "Let's keep going," I said to her, not wanting to hang around in Skrit-Na corridors any more. The whole place was making me uneasy. She nodded and continued.

We eventually came to a door that was different. It was thicker, heavier, and adorned with more alien symbols than I'd cared to ever notice. Some of them appeared to be different languages tacked on top of the others.

Lilah tried to jiggle the door open and failed.

"Keep out," she said, eyes glued to one of the signs. It must've been in English. "Fitting, for what we're about to not do."

She grinned and nodded to me, then stepped aside to allow me access.

Okay. Clearly, she wanted me to open it. I approached the door, lowered my head, and bashed it against the metal.

THUD.

The door broke from its hinges and fell over forwards, landing with a ringing thud.

Lilah only stared at me, shock written all over her face.

"Do you hate doors or something?" she asked me.

"That wasn't what you wanted me to do, was it?" The metal noise reverberated through the ship's hull, punctuating my question.

She shook her head. "I might have actually wanted you to pick the lock," she said, waggling a finger at me.

I looked at the fallen door. It had a keyhole, exactly like the locks that hanged off our cages.

"Oh. I didn't see that."

A moment of silence passed.

"I'm sure the Skrit-Na have a spare door somewhere," I said.

Stepping past, we peered into the room ahead.

It was completely circular, bathed in darkness. And all around its edges were consoles, full of buttons and keys and switches and levers that glowed more colours than I'd ever seen in one place.

And above those consoles? Huge windows. Windows that provided a complete 360 degree view. The expanse of Z-Space was all around us, filtered by a screen this time, thankfully.

"Woah," Lilah voiced as she stepped over the door and approached a console. Her hand brushed the controls but didn't activate them. "So many switches. Wonder which ones open the comms."

"You know how to control spaceships?" I asked her as I followed behind, still too afraid to even step forward and confront the controls and passing Z-Space scenery.

Lilah smiled at me. "I know some things about spaceships," she said cryptically. "I had family friends teach me about them before I was kidnapped. Played a few sims, too, you know..."

Through all our lessons and time spent together, I noticed that I'd never actually asked her how she'd been kidnapped.

I asked her about it and she obliged an answer.

"It wasn't a super-interesting event." She paused to glance up towards the ceiling for a few split moments. "I was just coming home from school when the stupid aliens beamed me up. I didn't even know what was happening until I was on the ship," she said, sounding genuinely frustrated. "I mean, why did it have to be me, of everyone?"

"At least it wasn't someone less capable than you," I voiced. "When I think, I appreciate that the Skrit-Na caught me instead of a younger Kelbrid. They'd be terrified."

"That's a sweet way to think about it," said Lilah.

"Things would've been a lot easier if they'd taken an adult instead of me, though," I added.

"Hmm? How so?"

I hesitated. How would I explain? "I'm not sure I know how to explain. What did you bring us here to do?" I asked her, the ominous feeling of having trespassed hanging over us like storm clouds.

"Keep your pants on, then," she said, then started fiddling with some of the controls.

I half-splayed my cerata. "Pants? I'm not wearing pants," I said.

"I really hope this is the comms console. Otherwise we'll be shooting laser-fire in Z-Space or setting a course for the centre of the sun," Lilah muttered to herself.

I eyed her with concern. "You knowwhat you're doing?" I asked.

"I don't, but the console sort of looks similar to a Bug fighter, so I'm crossing our fingers."

I had no clue what that was or what it meant for her understanding of Skrit-Na spaceships, but I let her carry on in silence. I wasn't sure we'd do anything useful, but Lilah was the only one who could do anything at all.

"See, I think this is the transponder. So if I can get an open channel, we might be able to request a rescue. It's pretty illegal for Skrit-Na to smuggle sapient cargo, no matter whose space they're in. I mean, as long as we're not already in their own space. I hope." She gave me a nod, aware of what I'd told her about our strict policies. We didn't tolerate aliens entering our subspace without permission, probably because of aliens like the Skrit-Na.

She fiddled with the switches a couple more times, then made a noise of frustration.

"Screw it, open broadcast it is. I think I can set it to loop until the Skrit-Na find it and turn it off. But they'll know someone's tampered here."

She turned to me.

"All right Carra, we're going to be live. I think it'll be a good idea for both of us to talk, since then we'll have twice the chance of being rescued by someone. I'll be speaking in English since I don't know Galard. Damn… if only Oskel were here. At least things would be a bit more fun."

I nodded, aware that this was the best chance we had to free ourselves and go home.

Lilah flipped a switch and spoke into the microphone first.

"Hello to anyone hearing this," she started awkwardly. "My name is Delilah Lacey, a human. I'm also a fifteen-year old who would really like to go home." She fiddled with the edge of her shirt. "I've been abducted by the Skrit-Na for some reason. They're currently travelling through Z-Space." She glanced up at the glaring white windows.

"I'm here with a friend, who's also been kidnapped. He's an alien so he's going to talk in his own language next." She looked to me and I tensed.

I stepped towards the microphone. I would not be speaking English, but Universal Kelbrid.

"I am Carralis in my 4th half-cycle, of the 7007th generation. To any who can understand me, I request that the Skrit-Na ship is intercepted and its crew arrested or destroyed. Skrit-Na have kidnapped me and an… alien friend." I hesitated. There was no word for Lilah's species in our language. "There are also many animals from Brazion on board. Respond as soon as you can."

Lilah ended the transmission when she was sure I'd finished.

"God, a human could never speak whatever that is. It's just clicks and growls," she mentioned just as she finished adjusting the controls.

I only nodded, still reeling with anxiety at the transmission. Would anyone hear us? Who would rescue us? Would the Skrit-Na figure out what we'd done? That we'd been the ones who'd broken into the control room and sent a distress signal?

When we left the control room, we made sure to carefully step over the broken door.

I woke up to Lilah shaking me.

"What's wrong?" I asked her as I raised my head, still fighting the tiredness that threatened to smother me and send me straight back to sleep.

She stared at me nervously. "Something's wrong, Carra," she whispered, still knelt next to my lying form. Sleeping on the floor hadn't been comfortable, but we were well used to it by now. "I heard a blast hit the shields."

Now that woke me up. I glanced at the walls nervously.

As if Lilah read my mind, she went straight into explanation mode. "I'm not one-hundred percent sure," she stated. "But I think there's a good chance someone heard us and they're trying to stop the ship now."

"Let's hope so," I grumbled, still sat down in our cage. I didn't go back to sleep though. There were too many things to think about. Were we even being rescued? If so, would our rescuers be Kelbrid, or human? Maybe even another species?

Some part of me was curious what it'd be like being rescued by humans. This was likely my only chance to meet more aliens before going home.

"Hey," said Lilah, "do you think we should take anything before we're rescued? Food, water, entertainment? Maybe valuables?"

"That's not a bad idea," I commented, still feeling drowsy from being woken up. "Our rescuers might not have the right type of food for both of us."

Lilah gave me another one of her looks.

"Yes?"

"What do you even eat, anyway? They always put me in another room," she said. She tried to sound like she was only passingly interested, but I saw her fiddle with her sleeve, an action I'd come to know as a display of nervousness. Was she really nervous about what I ate?

"Human corpses," I said, my voice flat with seriousness.

"What!?" She cried, then realised that I wasn't serious. "Carra, your sense of humour sucks." She took a breath and asked. "What do you really eat?"

I paused before I replied. I knew exactly what it was in my own tongue, but how would I explain the substance to Lilah? She was normally the one that explained things to me.

"I don't know what it's called in English," I admitted. "It's a strong smelling liquid that burns. It makes up the ocean on my planet," I explained, hoping that Lilah would be able to figure out the English word for whatever it could be.

Lilah shook her head. "A burning liquid? Is that even…? I have no idea." She rolled her eyes. "Huh. Aliens only get weirder and weirder."

If I could, I would've rolled my eyes right back at her. It's an expression used to signify exasperation. Humans are creatures with visible pupils, so the effect is pronounced and amusing, even only having two eyes.

For all the habits I'd learned from Lilah, I couldn't copy them all. It was fair enough: she'd never be able to copy the way my cerata could fold and splay in the dozens of ways they did to convey my feelings. She was still only wrapping her mind around the basic emotions I conveyed with them, but she was good at guessing.

A wave of loneliness washed over me as I thought of my own kind.

I sighed and considered going back to sleep. As much as I appreciated Lilah's status updates and conversations about my diet, I was exhausted.

My eyelids slid shut and I felt the comforting blanket of sleep overcome me. The ship had become surprisingly quiet for the past while.

Then the door to the holding bay came flying off its hinges and into a nearby wall.

Lilah yelped in surprise. My own head shot up in an instant and I stared directly at the smoke veiled form standing in the doorway. We were silent in fear and shock. The figure stepped forwards and my cerata picked up on the vibrations it sent tingling through the room.

Whatever it was, it wasn't a human or a Kelbrid, that I knew for sure. It walked with four steps and its feet sounded hard and brittle.

The figure swatted away the smoke, revealing itself to be a new kind of alien. Blue, furred, with a body configuration I never would've thought possible in my strangest dreams. It was utterly bizarre, so much that I wondered if I'd been drugged and this was all a hallucination. I barely noticed the bladed tail it held at its rear - though the sight quickly snapped me back to reality.

To my surprise, Lilah laughed. It was a type of awkward but relieved type of laughter I'd learned to associate with us barely avoiding Skrit-Na patrols. I tried to relax. Whatever it was, it had to be on our side.

"And I thought you hated doors," she commented wryly from within our barred holding cell.

"Hey," I hissed at her in protest. "You never explained -"

The alien's head - and were those eyestalks? - snapped to us.

/Are you the prisoners?/ He asked us dutifully, reminding me of the way the guard-castes would talk to me back home. I always admired them.

I twitched. I'd heard him but hadn't heard any actual noise. The air was dead. I turned to Lilah. "Did you…?"

She nodded. "Telepathy," she whispered to me. I was familiar with the word, Lilah had told me at one point that some aliens used it.

"But the Andalites call it thought-speak," she added for my benefit. "Don't know why, to be honest."

This was a new opportunity to learn about an entirely different alien species. Andalites, I memorised. Just another word out of a hundred-thousand that I had to recall. All of them important for me, and potentially all of Kelbrid kind if I could ever get back to them.

Though... hadn't I heard that name before?

Lilah decided to take the lead from there. "Yeah, we were the ones that sent the transmission," she admitted. "You're here to rescue us, right?" She glanced at me in concern. "I'm Lilah and this is Carralis."

The Andalite bowed his head. I took it to mean some sort of 'yes' gesture. /As you said in your transmission. My name is Alcazer-Nirrith-Vanger,/ he said. I noticed his eyestalks were pointed at me, staring. I stared back, trying to be brave. He couldn't read my mind, at least.

Then Alcazer approached our cage and with a key, he unlocked the door. For some reason, I expected him to use his tail.

"The Skrit-Na?" Lilah asked Alcazer tentatively as we carefully stepped out from our cage. It felt odd for someone to let us out, considering the dozens of times we'd escaped of our own volition.

/Under custody of the MeadowRunner,/ Alcazer answered brusquely. /Now, would you allow me to escort you off this ship? Under Earth-Andalite laws, we're obligated to take you home, not that we wouldn't do that anyhow./

I noticed his thought-speak sounded tired, somehow. It wasn't a negative kind of tired, though. Instead it radiated a positive feeling. Elation? Relief? Alcazer's eyes were creased upwards: somehow, with no mouth, he was smiling, just like Lilah did.

Smiling – I had to wonder - was this something a lot of alien species did, or was it just a result of human-Andalite interaction?

Lilah nodded with her own smile.

With that, we followed the new alien to the MeadowRunner.