Beast in the Cage: A Scifi Alien Romance

doesn’t have sex with you. He’s a monk.”
Some of the other girls were too close for my liking.
“Sh!” I said, grabbing Harper’s arm and dragging her to one side. “I don’t want everyone to know.”
“Why not?”
“It might be against the rules or something.”
“Nothing is against the rules. Trust me.”
For the first time since I’d met her, Harper had a look of sadness about her as if she’d experienced something she would rather forget.
“He’s not a monk,” I said.
Although, in all honesty, did I really know that?
Yes. Because he touched me when I showed him my body.
And if he’d taken a vow of celibacy, he never would have chosen me in the first place.
“He’s just taking his time, that’s all.”
I wasn’t worried. I was glad he didn’t jump into me the first chance he got. I mean, it was going to happen eventually anyway, right?
We might not have done it the first time we met, but that didn’t mean we wouldn’t do it the second time.
If there was a second time.
Had I blown it with him already?
I didn’t give him what he wanted, so maybe he was already bored and would choose one of the others next time.
I should have been glad. I didn’t want to have sex with a random alien dude.
But did I want to risk losing him to someone else?
Would being with him have protected me from the other fighters?
Had I made a huge mistake?
“Ivy?”
I turned to find Lily with her hands on her hips.
“You’re wanted upstairs,” she said.
I glanced over her shoulder at the pair of armed guards standing at the doorway behind her.
“Upstairs?”
“The Supervisor,” Lily said, glaring at me as if she knew I’d done something wrong. “He wants to see you. Now.”
The Supervisor’s apartment was located up a winding staircase. With my new ensemble of regular clothing, I didn’t get so much attention from the horny prisoners.
I was taken aback by how large this prison was. I passed the workout station where huge aliens lifted weights. They stared at me as I continued up the stairs while they counted out their bicep curls.
Out a window, the landscape shifted as I scaled each set of stairs. It revealed the true scale of the moon outside.
I’d always been indoors and hadn’t seen the outside world since I arrived.
This world was tinted red like Mars and a white sun blazed with a harsh yellow edge.
It didn’t look like the most hospitable place in the cosmos.
But what did I know? It could have been the Barbados of the galaxy for all I knew.
And they always chose the best locations for prisons, I thought…
Yeah. Right.
The mountains in the distance were sharp and stabbed at the sky unlike anything on Earth. These were not mountains you climbed in your spare time. They were the color of dried blood and the rolling dunes spoke of a place that was never meant to be escaped or journeyed over.
The perfect place to build a prison.
Even if the prisoners escaped, how were they meant to get anywhere and do harm to locals?
They couldn’t. No one lived here.
And if there was no access to a spaceship, you stood no chance of surviving for long.
We came to a large laboratory with shiny white walls and scientists going about their business.
A large window that looked out on the fighting pit. A pair were fighting now. On half a dozen monitors, figures danced around each other armed with vicious weapons. The machines blinked and whirred, taking readings that made no sense to me.
I followed the guards up a final set of stairs to an office that perched above the science lab.
A guard knocked on the door and a voice called out:
“Come.”
The guards stood on either side of the door with their shock rifles clutched to their chests.
“Should I go in?” I said.
Neither guard said a word or motioned for me to enter.
I watched them closely as I pushed the handle down and the door squealed open.
The guards made no move to prevent me from heading inside. I guess it was okay to enter.
Inside, a lone figure wearing a long white jacket bent over a microscope. He raised a hand for me to join him.
“Come look at this.”
Okay… so this wasn’t exactly what I was expecting.
The Supervisor could have passed for human except his limbs were all a little too long as if he’d been put in a torture device and stretched.
I shut the door quietly behind me and crossed the space toward him.
It wasn’t just an office, although the majority of the space was taken up with his large desk and papers perched along its edge.
Here was the living space of a man obsessed with his work.
My father was the same. He was an engineer for an oil company and it was his job to run simulations of the best locations to drill for oil.
When he was given a new job, he was like a man possessed. He wouldn’t come out of his room for days at a time.
Even when he kissed me and my mom on the cheeks in the morning, his mind was somewhere else.
The Supervisor moved aside for me to step in front of him.
“Go on. Have a look.”
I put my eye to the microscope and peered through it.
The focus wasn’t quite right for my eyes, so I turned the little toggle on the side to zoom in a little more.
What I saw was something alive but on a scale so tiny I had no idea what I was looking at.
It showed a bunch of tiny shapes that interacted with each other, then they shivered and returned to their previous position.
Then they would move off in another direction and then shiver and shift back to their original positions.
The strange thing was that when they made their initial move, it was a normal inching process along one axis, but when they moved back… It happened instantly, like teleportation.
“What am I looking at?” I said.
The Supervisor removed his glasses and carefully folded them up.
He massaged the top of