I awoke gently from where I’d sat with Alice on a particularly soft but visually indistinct spot in the cave we’d taken over. At first I’d felt relaxed, the pain from the stab wounds on my shoulders mostly gone. Then I started remembering the source of those stab wounds and my mood came crashing down.

  I took some solace in reminding myself that I’d reunited with two of the three people I’d been forced to run away with after I’d foolishly made them split up, which led to me noticing that one of them had fallen asleep right beside me and in her sleep, had grabbed me in a tight hug.

  I guess that goes some way towards explaining why I woke up so relaxed.

  Alice’s unconscious form lying next to and leaning on me looked so serene it was almost as though she had a calming aura about her. Of course, that was only until I woke up enough to acknowledge the dark mottled green skin, the thick coat of goop of unknown origin, and the additional limbs that made the hug that she was giving me simply way more hug than any single person should be able to give at a time.

  I lay there, for a second, thinking about my actions before passing out.

  Making yet more promises I didn’t know if I could keep.

  Telling them exactly what they’d want to hear.

  I felt like utter shit for treating people I cared about like that.

  Some Captain I am…

  Fuck it, what’s done is done, I can apologise once we’re out of here. Besides, they need this… or something like this anyway.

  I reassured myself, thinking about how our interactions could have gone as I started the process of carefully extricating myself from the tangle of limbs featuring an uncomfortable number of sharp points I’d found myself in. Thinking about it, it might have been borderline miraculous I’d got them to listen to me in the face of what might very well be mind control.

  After more time than I’d care to admit, I finally managed to remove myself from my spot without waking Alice –which was the real miracle here– and turned to the mouth of the cave, where Sarah had been watching me since about halfway through my struggles.

  “How long was I out for?” I asked her as I reached the opening and sat beside her.

  “Like two hours, give or take.” She answered, having turned her eyes to the view of the expansive cavern dotted with columns and creatures moving up, down and between them, and not meeting my eyes.

  “Ah. Sorry.” I apologised for having her take a much longer watch than she was supposed to. Se didn’t answer, continuing to look outwards with an unfocused gaze.

  After a few seconds, I asked what I would imagine would be on her mind.

  “Still no sign of Curt?”

  “Nope.” She answered sullenly, popping the ‘p’ for added effect.

  It was well past the time we all should have reconvened, and if he had showed up at the spot where we’d split up, he would have been visible from where we now sat. This led to the conclusion that something had happened to hold him up or worse. I felt I should do something, and I didn’t doubt for a second that Sarah felt the same, the question was what. We couldn’t just go look for him since then he might show up at the meeting spot and find no one, and we couldn’t split up agai-

  “I’m going out to find him.” Said Sarah, standing up and interrupting my thoughts.

  “No you’re not.” I told her.

  “Yes I am.” She said, and this conversation was going nowhere.

  “And split us up again? That’s the whole reason we’re in this situation.” I told her, trying to get her to see reason, but she just wasn’t having it.

  “Look, I’ll be fine, I’m one of them, remember?” She pointed down at herself, and her words worried me.

  “You’re one of us, Sarah.” I affirmed, making sure to emphasize the last two words as I hopped back into the excessively reassuring, borderline manipulative mindset I’d used to defuse two separate panic attacks within the span of thirty minutes.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know.” She deflected me immediately. “Point is, they think I’m one of them. I can move around among them and they won’t bat an eye. I can promise I’ll be right back, and I’ll stay within sight of this balcony, but right now, I’m going.” She finished resolutely while I was still processing that the mouth of this cave was apparently a balcony in her eyes.

  Eventually I just nodded. It was clear her mind was made up and if she could move around unimpeded then her plan might have merit.

  “Great! Keep an eye on Alice, please! Maybe don’t let her see those…” She said, pointing to the two dead pillslugs that I still couldn’t decide what to do with. How the hell they hadn’t started to smell, I had no idea. “See you soon!” Sarah said before disappearing deeper into the cave to presumably use whatever means the pillslugs had to move up and down the columns from within. Sure enough, I soon saw her emerge from the base of our column and move out among the sea of pillslugs to find our scout and her partner. She moved completely unimpeded, the locals paying her no mind and even moving out of her way, slowly as they were.

  I settled down to track her with one eye while keeping a lookout for Curt with the other, all while trying to keep an eye out for when Alice woke up or if anything snuck up on us through the mysterious entrance at the back of the cave.

  I’m gonna need more eyes…

  I walked nearly aimlessly through the packed streets of the unnamed town, trying to look through a sea of people to find the shortest guy I knew, all while staying within sight of the apartment the captain had taken over.

  The thought of that apartment and its former inhabitants was still a source of concern, even if I knew that they weren’t what I saw them as. The information we’d been provided after our first briefing on our mission here had been clear, the pillslugs did not have the brain or analogue structures that, as far as humanity and every member species of the Galactic Federation had been able to tell, were hard requirements for any biological creature to achieve sentience. And yet, here I was, strolling among a sea of people, asking for directions, and thinking about those lifeless eyes…

  I shook those thoughts off, reminding myself that things weren’t what they appeared to be and I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure how much my mind was being messed with, all while making a conscious effort to focus my mind on the task at hand.

  After a few more minutes, I was rewarded for my efforts by the sound of a voice that could barely be heard above the din of hundreds of conversations taking place in this packed street.

  “Look sir, I’m sorry about what happened to you, but there really isn’t much else I can do in this situation.” Said a voice I recognized instantly and quickly followed to find Curt trying to appease an irate man with a grey goatee while simultaneously fixing up a veggie stand?

  “But my cabbages! Those ruffians must pay for ruining them! You must find them!” The man screamed his lungs out while hope gradually but steadily drained from Curt’s face.

  I almost didn’t feel like going in to save him, and if I’d had popcorn on hand I definitely wouldn’t have. Sadly, we had important things to do and people waiting for us, so I had to intervene.

  “He’s got a point, you know? This wanton destruction of cabbage cannot stand.” I said with a smile, stepping to where he could see.

  Curt, for his part, immediately dropped the wheel he had been about to affix to the merchant’s wreck of a cart, causing the whole thing to come crashing down with a wave of spilled greenery, while he just gave me his best ‘starved man in a desert’ expression.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been more glad to see you.” He said with reverence, which made me chuckle.

  “Right, well, why don’t we go find those ruffians who would destroy this poor man’s livelihood?” I asked, looking for a quick and easy way to get us away from the angry old man Curt had been forced to deal with.

  We were worrying and this is what he’s been up to for three hours?

  The thought was so ridiculous I didn’t know whether to laugh or groan in annoyance.

  “Hmph! See that you do!” The old tradesman harrumphed and then went to tend to his broken cart by his lonesome.

  I offered Curt a hand, which he took to get up and then we got out of there as fast as we possibly could without making it seem like we were completely ditching the old man, which, to be fair, we were.

  “So…” I started, holding back a laugh. “Is this what you’ve been doing for the last three hours?” I asked him, unable to resist after having run away from that surreal situation.

  “Ugh, no!” He groaned. “I ran into these weird creatures that were running around making a mess of things so I chased them away into this weird, goop filled tunnel. I got most of them but some got away and I couldn’t find them after the fact, so I went around trying to clean up the mess until it was time to regroup. Speaking of, how long do we have until… Why are you making that face?”

  I was beyond stunned.

  “Say that again.” I told him.

  “Ugh, no?” He questioned with the beginnings of a cheeky grin.

  “What do you mean no?!” I demanded.

  “It was the first thing I said!” He defended himself, his nascent grin abandoned.

  “Then after that?” I egged him on.

  “I saw some weird creatures?” He continued.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Making a mess?”

  “Uh-huh”

  “I chased them down and got most of them.”

  I didn’t answer that one.

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  “And then I went about helping the people that’d been affected.” He finished like that last point even mattered to me.

  “Look, if this is about me losing track of time, I’m-” He started defending himself, but I interrupted him since he clearly was missing the point, and I didn’t know if I could even blame him.

  “And what did you do with the… tunnel?” I asked him, picking my words carefully, making sure to refer to it the same way he had.

  “Huh?” He asked, looking extremely confused.

  “You said you chased them to a goop filled tunnel. What happened to it?” I clarified, hoping for one answer, but was left disappointed.

  “I torched it, obviously. Can’t have vermin running around making nests around the city!” He said it like everything was right with the world.

  “Oh, shit.” Were the only words that could come out of my mouth.

  There’s a lot to unpack here.

  “Now that you mentioned the city,” I started after a while, hoping to begin the process of letting him see what was truly going on and how it was different from what our eyes were telling us. “Do you happen to know its name?”

  “Yeah, Skyhaven V.” He answered as though stating the obvious, dashing my hopes yet again.

  “What?”

  “Skyhaven V. The fifth of seven cities in this Skyshelter we managed to launch into the heavens. Hence, Skyhaven.” He explained.

  “Again, what?”

  “Well, it’s a bit of a clever play on words on-” He started going on a tangent that I quickly cut off.

  “No, I mean… How do you know this, exactly?” I asked him, holding back a groan.

  “Doesn’t everybody?” He answered my question with another question, and it became clear to me that I would need some help with him.

  Sarah had been acting weird, which left me feeling conflicted. I was still glad to both have her with me and to have something harmless to talk about after that debacle with the Guardians but it had started to get worrying. Right when I resolved to ask her about it the next time she asked about something along the lines of the color of the sky, she dropped the subject and bid me follow her to an apartment she’d found.

  I didn’t know she’d wanted to move here, or even if this was the right time, we still had a job to do and friends to find, after all, but went with her all the same. It was clear that there was something on her mind that she didn’t want to talk about right then and there, so I resolved to just offer her my silent support until she was ready to talk.

  We walked along the streets of Skyhaven V –or just Five, for short, given that all the towns up here had almost the same name– in somewhat awkward silence. I held her hand in mine and she gave me a smile but still refused to tell me what was bothering her. The people around us, meanwhile, were as friendly as ever, many greeting us as we walked and street sellers peddling their wares often tried to give us free samples, which we politely declined every time since we apparently had somewhere to be.

  Only when we had reached the building that had caught her eye and were in the middle of an elevator ride, did she finally open up.

  “So, this is gonna sound weird, but please bear with me, okay?” She started hesitantly.

  “Okay?”

  “So, don’t you think it’s weird that there’s suddenly a town full of people even though we were sent to explore an alien planet?” She asked me, for some reason.

  “Not really, this is just the most recent megastructure we’ve launched into space and we’re cleaning out the aliens from it. There being both people and aliens here is the whole reason we have a job.” I explained, somewhat incredulously.

  “Right… Well, when was the last time you remember seeing our friends?” She asked, a worried expression on her face that I couldn’t understand the cause for.

  “Well, for Alex, Fae and Mike, it was after we got captured by some aliens and then they split us up. For Chloe and Alice, we escaped the aliens together so I guess it’d be after the captain had her little freakout and sent us each on our way.” I answered her question, still humoring her but with a growing concern. There was clearly something she wasn’t telling me but I wasn’t sure if it was worth pushing her on it.

  While this was all happening the elevator had reached its destination and we walked out into a plain white painted corridor with a tiled floor of a matching color, the walls interspersed with closed wooden doors leading to various apartments.

  She walked past all the closed doors and stopped in front of one that was slightly ajar. Weird. Weirder still was that the furniture inside this apartment that she guided me into featured pictures of an old couple and a family I’d never seen before.

  “And don’t you remember anything weird that happened between Chloe’s freakout and our escape from the aliens?” Sarah continued her line of questioning, though her eyes held an apprehension that the rest of her had tried and was starting to fail to hide.

  “No, why?” I asked her slowly.

  “Ugh, screw this.” She started furiously with a groan, apparently having run out of patience to get to the point she’d been building towards. “Look, this all-???” She started but cut herself off strangely.

  “What was that?” I asked her. Her face looked dismayed at my question but she quickly rallied.

  “I said-” This time, it was I who cut her off, as I heard some concerning sounds coming from deeper in the apartment. It sounded vaguely like words mixed with the same chewing and sloughing that I’d come to dread since getting on this space tree.

  I turned a corner to find my dreams realized in the worst way possible, as I saw a Guardian that had Alice pinned to the ground, its claws, fangs and tentacle spikes all poised to finish off her prone form. There were no thoughts in my head as I lunged to try to get the thing off my friend as fast as humanly possible before the unthinkable could happen. In the back of my mind, I barely registered Sarah try to hold me back but I wasn’t about to stop right then.

  Darting at a speed I had impressed myself with hours before, I threw myself at the creature with the hopes that it would be of the kind I could handle, as opposed to the ones that had taken us prisoner just yesterday and started this whole mess. It was all I could do in this situation since I had not even a second to spare.

  My hopes were dashed, however, as just as I was about to reach it, the thing hit me in the jaw with a frankly beautifully executed backhand that knocked me just enough off course that I sailed past it rather than into it. Intellectually, I could tell that this thing was not as much of a monster as the one that had thrown me around a while ago, but I found myself not caring since I hadn’t been able to track that hit at all, and they both hurt just as badly.

  I gathered my senses and stood back up to find Alice held hostage by that abominable creature by the back of her neck, its fangs poised to dig into the flesh of her shoulder.

  “Wait! Stooo-!” She yelled, but was interrupted by the monster tossing her bodily in my direction.

  I caught her as best I could, and started harrying the thing with blows and feints that it blocked or avoided. During that, I’d focused on avoiding any of its hits since its various stabbing appendages would naturally be more dangerous than my bare fists, but that also meant I couldn’t commit to putting the bastard down and the slippery shit avoided me at every turn. Soon, I came to understand why.

  In my rush to save Alice and subsequent hit to the face, I had flown past the thing from my starting spot near the entrance to the apartment. It had then thrown Alice at me, whom I’d caught and placed behind me so I could push the monster back. Towards the doors of the apartment. Where Sarah hadn’t moved from.

  With a wicked glint in its pitch black eyes, the creature turned its back on me and moved to where Sarah stood stunned still with a speed it had only shown when it reacted to my first lunge. Before I could even do anything about it, the thing was behind her and baring its fangs to her exposed neck.

  “Stop!” She cried, but it was pointless, the thing wouldn’t listen and now that it was aware of me, I would never make it in time. I closed my eyes just before the countless needle-like teeth broke her skin.

  “Curt! Stop it!” I heard Sarah’s voice again, urging me to help her. Confused, I opened my eyes only to be greeted with the same scene once again. That monster holding Sarah from behind as it prepared to dig its fangs into her. I averted my eyes.

  “What’s wrong with you, Curt?” I heard Alice say before seeing her shuffling past me and towards the Guardian that still held Sarah hostage. The second she was in range, the monster proceeded to claw her face-

  Opening my eyes again, the bastard now had two hostages and was making a show of preparing to-

  Okay, what the fuck is going on?!

  I watched from my vantage spot as Sarah combed the valleys between columns in search of our missing team member. She moved this way and that, navigating the mess of small moving bodies with almost unsettling ease and an uncanny grace, before making a turn to the left and dipping behind a column, out of sight.

  I heard movement behind me.

  Quickly whipping my head around to meet the possible danger, I saw Alice stir from where she lay and groggily open her almost fully dark eyes. Her pupils were still her normal brown, but they were almost lost in the sea that had become her pitch black sclera that made it hard to track what she was looking at. She got up, stretched and flinched when she saw me, then nearly jumped when she noticed the two dead pillslugs laying some distance away.

  “Wow, that… Really happened, huh?” She asked me, and I was equal parts glad that she wasn’t reacting more violently to what she was seeing, and sad at what she must be going through.

  “Yeah.” I answered, unable to find any better words to say at that moment. I quickly recentered myself, and set about making sure everyone was as comfortable as I could make them given the situation so we could get out of here as soon as possible. “But we’ll get through this, don’t worry. I’ll make sure-”

  “You don’t have to do that.” She interrupted me, and if I thought I’d centered myself before I was now completely off-balance.

  “Do what?” I asked her.

  “That thing you do where you go all reassuring on us. You don’t have to do it anymore.” She explained, sitting back down while I stayed in my spot in stunned and confused silence at being called out like that. At my baffled expression, she continued: “Don’t get me wrong, it helped. More than you can know, even. But I’m good now, I think.”

  “Right.” I said, short for words again. Alice, meanwhile, came to sit by my side looking out the opening of our cave. A questing tentacle came to crawl over my hand, making me quickly pull it back. This made Alice look hurt, first, and then turn sheepish.

  “Sarah?” She asked after a while.

  “Went out to look for Curt.”

  “And you’re not worried about having us split up agai-?”

  “Yes.” I answered her question before she could even finish it, and we stayed in silence for a while longer.

  This was eventually interrupted by some sounds coming from the back of the cave.

  “Someone’s coming, you think that’s them?” Alice asked me while I was getting up and it took me a second to realise what she was talking about.

  Oh, right, they come and go from somewhere towards the back of the cave and the center of the column. I should ask about that.

  Before I could voice my doubts, however, I saw a gigantic missile of flesh flying at me and it was all I could do to draw a spike from my back and use it to slap away the incoming living projectile before it could barrel into me, using the hit to redirect it just enough that it sailed past me and out the mouth of the cave. I’d thought that was that, but I noticed a clawed hand gripping the edge of the cave, and watched as a giant Guardian, one that would make Alex look like a twig, pulled itself up over the edge with a crazed expression on its face before throwing itself at me once again.

  This thing was ape-like, reminiscent of a gorilla if they were twice as fast, with wicked claws, fangs and a pair of spike-tipped tentacles, topped off with a gaze that radiated malice. While it shared the same mottled green coloration of everything we’d seen in this tree, it was also covered in spots of discoloured red-turned-brown, especially around the tips of its fingers and tentacles, and around its face.

  While I was readying myself to meet its charge, making a plan in my head to jump to the side or do something, anything, to avoid colliding with it head-on, Alice, who hadn’t moved from where she’d sat beside me, suddenly appeared blocking the thing's path, completely catching me off-guard because of how quiet she’d been. Apparently, this also surprised the monster, as it carefully caught her and moved her aside before focusing its attention back on me.

  Having slowed down practically to a stop, the creature no longer had enough distance between us to try another charge, so it started taking swipes at me with its multitude of sharp points that it was all I could do to parry and bat away before they could reach me. I noticed, however, that the thing was cautious. Normally, when the opponent had the size and weight advantage, they would tend to try and use it to bring an end to a fight by using grapples and tackles to immobilise, something I’d done my best to teach Alex to stop doing as it made him predictable. This thing, on the other hand, made no further moves to jump on me after its first two charges failed, instead being content with using its reach advantage to try and corner me. This meant I had more time to react, as its blows had to cover a greater distance to reach me, but it also meant that I didn’t have the range to strike back without doing something stupid like throwing a spike at it and hoping I’d hit some important part of its alien anatomy, which could backfire spectacularly if I missed and then found myself without a weapon.

  I was also keenly aware that as I continued to backpedal away from the incoming assault, I was slowly being cornered against the back of the cave, so I’d have to try something sooner rather than later. Off the corner of my eye I saw Sarah standing behind me with what I thought was a confused expression. When I had an opening, I disengaged from the mad monster trying to tear into me and moved in her direction.

  “Little help?” I asked her. This seemed to shake her out of her stupor, as she moved to place herself between me and my attacker, still not saying a word in the process.

  I was dumbfounded, for a moment, as I’d meant for her to help me deal with the thing, not to throw herself headfirst into danger, but to my surprise, the monster stopped in its tracks.

  Sarah was then joined by Alice, who walked past the monster with an annoyed body language and settled by her side, confusing me even more in the process.

  Right, 'one of them', she'd said that earlier.

  “Okay, what the fuck is going on?” I asked everyone present.

  “I could ask you the same.” It was Sarah who answered, like this all was my fault, but this wasn’t a situation I could allow to devolve into childish squabbles.

  “Explain.” I ordered.

  “That’s Curt.” She nearly spat, but that didn’t at all explain anything to me.

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “That’s the pipsqueak?” I asked, pointing at the massive mountain of hatred that had attacked me less than a minute before.

  “Yes!” Sarah answered emphatically.

  “Oooh…” I trailed off, it dawning on me that he’d been away from us for far longer than he should have, and who knew what had even happened to him in that time. It was still jarring, the image of our short and reliable scout in my head clashing with the wild behemoth standing before me.

  “That’s the captain.” Sarah said unprompted.

  “What about me?” I asked her.

  “Yes it is.” She continued, ignoring my question, and was followed by Alice muttering “Here we go again…” It was then that I realized they weren’t talking to me, and all those times I’d felt like I caught them mid-conversation suddenly made more sense.

  He thinks I’m one of them. Also, if I wasn’t sure they had some way of talking to each other besides speaking out loud, I am now.

  My mind went back to the last two times I’d had to convince someone that I wasn’t some bloodthirsty monster and the thought immediately made me exhausted. Luckily, this time I had help, and Sarah seemed to be handling most of it if her intense expression and the monster backing away were any indication. No one in this cave made a sound, but it was clear that an intense conversation was still going on.

  “Are we going to have a problem?” I eventually asked, my curiosity at this silent dialogue getting the better of me while also trying to rebuild some semblance of my authority as the leader of this little group. My words made Sarah flinch. Unexpected. Also, probably not a good sign.

  “Well, no…” She said, her gaze turning to me and losing its intensity in the process.

  “I sense a ‘but?” I asked, hoping to be wrong.

  “...But I think he found the rescue party before us… And killed them.” She said, the words coming reluctantly out of her mouth, yet still shocking me and Alice into complete silence. I didn’t have long to process the implications of what was just said, because while Alice and I were frozen, the thing– ‘Curt’– was not, instead letting out a mighty roar that shook the walls of the cavern, and proceeding to claw wildly at the walls around him and even at his own face, his jaws snapping blindly at the air.

  “What’s going on?” I asked anyone who could answer.

  “He’s freaking out!” Said Alice. I could see that.

  “Hey. HEY! It’s alright! It wasn’t your fault!” Sarah tried to get his attention to no effect, being met with another ear-splitting roar for her troubles. “I’m not lying to you!” She continued, starting to inch closer to the man turned beast. “I would never lie to you. You’ll be fine once the cap-”

  I had to hold her back before she could get hurt. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Curt wasn’t thinking clearly, and him accidentally hurting the woman who was best suited to anchoring him in reality might just push him over the edge.

  Unsure of how to handle this strange situation, my eyes turned to examine him one more time. His oversized body was unrecognizable from what it had been. His hands tipped with claws covered in splotches of reddish-brown hinting at being used for a purpose they never should have. Those tentacles emerging from his back, covered in the same vile reddish-brown, flailing and twisting in a visceral representation of his fraying mental state. His mouth, also covered in the same flaking reddish-brown and not having produced a single intelligible word since our reunion. His eyes, with their alien black sclera, yet there was also something more. A light deep inside that refused to be snuffed out. The man he had been, desperately attempting to reach past the alien bits that had been plastered on him to ask for help in a way he no longer could.

  Well, time to do what I do best.

  “Sarah, Alice, stand aside.” I ordered them. “If he won’t believe you, I’ll show him exactly who I am.”

  Chapter 11: Did an Oopsie.