“AVA!” Zed bawls my name again, but I’m midway through the crowd now, and he can’t see me. Even if he could, he couldn’t get to me. I slip through the various aliens and burst out onto the street which is only slightly less crowded. There’s a shuttle passing by. I grab hold of the railing as it slows to let something off and slide on.
Zed’s outside the building now, glaring at me. How’s he going to catch up with me now? It’s going to take some doing for an alien beast who has been sitting on the couch almost nonstop for the last month at least.
Loser moon is a chaotic place, so we’re still not drawing any kind of attention as far as I can tell. The shuttle I’m on has at least four aliens fucking, or maybe fighting. It’s hard to tell with aliens sometimes. Their appendages and their orifices can be in indistinct configurations. It’s really easy to offend someone, or please them inadvertently if you’re not careful.
“Ticket?” The conductor has come back through the multicolor, multipronged orgy.
I have a pass, but I quickly realize that it is in my other pants.
“Uh,” I say, moments before leaping from the shuttle. The controller falls beneath the wheels and is immediately crushed. That is the least of my worries. Riding without a pass or a ticket is grounds for prosecution on loser moon and frankly I don’t need the attention. Zed and I are pretty well hidden here but coming up on charges still wouldn’t be a good thing.
A siren goes off. Are you fucking kidding me? The conductor alerted the authorities over something as simple as a ticket skip? That’s fucking ridiculous. I am still trying to hide in the crowd, but suddenly the crowd is sort of melting away from me, leaving me open and visible to the sky drones which patrol the moon. It also allows Zed to reach me. He’s panting from the full speed run he’s been doing to keep up with the shuttle.
He grabs me off my feet and swings me around. I can smell his shirt. Not him inside the shirt, like his sweat and stuff, but the actual biology of the shirt. That’s how gross he’s gotten.
“Why!?” Zed gives me a shake. He’s furious. I guess he has a right to be. From his perspective I just fucked everything up for no reason. I am guessing that he won’t work out the reason for my actions until it is all far too late. I hope I can work out what they are. They might make this feel less pointlessly insane. I know this is stupid. I know anybody watching me, knowing what has happened and what I’ve gone through, will think I’m the dumbest girl in the universe. But I’m not.
You see, I’m starting to remember.
I’m remembering that the conductor doesn’t matter.
The drones don’t matter.
Hiding doesn’t matter.
Because it is coming.
And not only is it coming, but it is not coming for the first time. It has come before. Many times. It has taken us, digested us, and spat us back out again over and over again.
This revelation hits me like a proverbial ton of bricks far too late for me to explain it to Zed, who is still very, very fucking angry for reasons I completely understand. He thinks that I just made a huge mistake that has led to us being caught by our enemies. But I didn’t. What I just did… what just happened… it couldn’t have happened any other way. Because this has happened many times before, and it will happen many times again. We are trapped in these events, in this relationship, forever playing out a nightmare of our own making.
Like many revelations, this one comes far too late to be of any use, or to change anything. The collective screaming of several billion alien throats alerts Zed to the fact that something is very wrong. A tentacle is reaching across the sky. A big, terrifying, familiar tentacle which wraps around the moon, suckers making buildings crumble beneath their grasping wrath. The thing’s beak opens wide as the squid begins to chew.
We are being swallowed.
Again.
LOOP TWO
CHAPTER 7
Zed
The troll planet is probably my least favorite destination, but I come here because I have to. Trolls destroy absolutely everything, which means there’s endless scrap and treasure to be had if you’re brave enough to check out what’s managed to make its way into their orbit.
Today I heard an explosion followed by screaming. That’s always very promising. The trolls are off at a run. I let them get there first. The secret to surviving troll planets is not to get in the way of trolls. You let them do what they need to do, and you let them subsequently lose interest. Any other approach will inevitably end in being torn to pieces. I know this because I am part troll on my father’s side. It’s what gives me my skin color and tendency to rip things up.