Renegade Runner by Nicole Conway (ebook reader with highlight function .txt) 📗

in my glass cube anymore. Even worse, I was completely alone this time. Enola, the helix of glass cubic cells, and the dredger ship were all gone.

Rolling over onto my side, I coughed and shivered. Whatever that purple mist was, it left me groggy, delirious, and colder than ever. My skin prickled and my body shook as I pushed myself upright.

The room around me was a little larger than my cube had been—maybe six feet wide and fifteen feet long. It had a metal mesh cot in one corner, something that sort of resembled a drinking fountain, and a hole in the floor that I sincerely hoped wasn’t supposed to be a toilet. Not that I didn’t appreciate the option, but it wasn’t even remotely private and that was a pretty significant issue since one entire wall of the room was a massive window.

The broad glass pane looked out over a scene that my exhausted, overstressed, and still mist-addled brain told me wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. Nope.

Shambling the rest of the way up to my feet, I staggered slowly toward it, leaning against the nearest wall to try to steady myself. My feet and hands still felt numb and strange. There was an awful, metallic taste in my mouth. But none of that mattered as I pushed away from the wall and placed my hands against the cool glass of the window.

An alien cityscape sprawled out before, above, and below me for as far as I could see. Aircraft of every shape, size, and design zipped like dragonflies, their shiny hulls painted in vivid colors. They hovered and glided through a sea of other strange floating crafts that buzzed around a twisted mess of towering structures, graceful in a way I’d never seen. Nothing humans had made could ever compare. All our cars, airplanes, and even our spacecraft seemed so stiff, awkward, and downright clumsy next to this.

The towers that rose up all around me like tree trunks in a forest weren’t just one building—they were buildings upon buildings, stacked, connected, intersecting, and arching while those bizarre aircrafts swarmed around them like a jungle of glass and metal. There must have been thousands of them, stretching on in every direction. And mine …

Oooooh no.

One look down sent me staggering back as my heart hit the soles of my bare feet. Big mistake. I clapped a hand over my mouth, my entire body shaking in wild terror.

The towers were so tall I couldn’t see the ground below. Or was there even solid ground anywhere down there at all? What the actual hell was this place? What was I doing here? Was this the alien flea market Enola had told me about?

My pulse raced and my lungs seized in panic as I stared up to where a sky should have been. Only, there was no sky. Instead, far above the peaks of the towers, a ceiling arched overtop of the sprawling cityscape like the inside of a high-tech, pro sports stadium. Only this one dwarfed anything I’d ever dreamed might be possible. It wasn’t covered in metal scaffolding or stadium lights, either. The faux sky was covered by a patchwork of movement from immense curved screens. Various sections displayed flourishes of color, text in bizarre languages, and images of figures holding up objects I couldn’t identify.

My mouth fell open. I forgot how to breathe.

I didn’t want to believe it. I mean, how could anything that enormous be real?

Wait—were those … alien commercials?

I couldn’t resist a single, barking laugh of disbelief. Aliens had commercials, too? For what? Alien bath soap? Alien car—er, spaceship insurance?

Some of the figures depicted on those screens looked sort of human. Or at least, they seemed that way at first. Their features were eerily similar, although a lot sharper and more defined, with raised cheekbones and something unsettlingly cold in their deeply-set turquoise eyes. Their skin was so pale, it almost looked corpse-like, but every feature was perfectly symmetrical. No freckles. No moles. No flaws whatsoever. Like painted dolls produced on an assembly line.

Beyond creepy.

They couldn’t be human, I decided. Another kind of alien, then?

An explosion on a large section of the screens stole my attention immediately. I stared up, my mouth open in awe, as footage of what looked like a trio of small, vibrantly painted hovercrafts zipped, swerved, and dodged through a rugged, rocky canyon landscape. One of the crafts took a turn too late, clipping the side of a large rock formation. It spun end over end until it smashed into another rock and exploded in a fiery spray of metal shrapnel and chunks of rock.

The other two craft continued on, bumping against one another like demolition racers battling for first place. The screen flashed black and then bloomed with a series of strange symbols, probably another language I couldn’t read, wreathed in fire, crackled beneath the rotating image of someone’s face.

I froze. My heartbeat skipped and stalled. I blinked hard just to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.

It was a girl—another human girl.

I mean, she had to be. She wasn’t eerily perfect like those other sort-of-human-looking creatures were. Her jet-black hair was cut in a sharp, angular bob that followed the line of her jaw and she had intensely focused dark eyes; she looked like she might be close to my age. I barely got a glimpse of her before the screen flashed again, showing other alien faces paired with texts in the same sort of arrangement. The pilots of those high-speed ships? That seemed to make sense, but without being able to read the text, I couldn’t be sure.

Still, seeing that girl lit a spark of hope deep in my chest. I wasn’t totally alone here. There were other humans like me, just like Enola had said. Maybe one of them could help me get back home. Or we could help each other. Yes, that could work. I just had to find some way out of this—

A hovering craft glided to an abrupt halt