Dead or Abducted?

Oryole Whitmen carried three things when she slipped out of her uncle’s house at 3:17 a.m. on the coldest night Richton, Mississippi, had seen in twelve years:

A worn Polaroid of her grandmother Brandy smiling beside a birthday cake shaped like a horseshoe crab, a notebook filled with seventeen years of dreams she’d been told were delusions, and seventeen dollars in crumpled ones she’d saved from mowing lawns.

She didn’t take a suitcase. Suitcases were for people who knew where they were going.

The note she left on the kitchen table was three sentences long:

Uncle Link, I’m not crazy, and she’s not dead. I’m going to prove it. Don’t look for me until I bring her home.

She walked the eleven miles to the old Wesson rail yard because that was where the dreams always started—rusted boxcars, moonlight on bent tracks, and the low metallic hum that felt like a lullaby no human throat could sing.

That was where Blayr found her.

Not walking up the tracks. Not driving in on some dusty pickup. She simply was there, sitting cross-legged on top of a derelict Southern Pacific car, eating an apple with deliberate slowness. Black hair that moved like spilled ink, even though there was no wind. Eyes the color of fresh bruises. And a smile that said she had already seen the next three minutes of Oryole’s life and found them mildly amusing.

“You’re very loud when you’re trying to be quiet,” Blayr said without looking up. “Your heartbeat sounds like a washing machine full of quarters.”

Oryole froze. The switchblade she’d taken from her uncle’s tackle box suddenly felt very small in her fist.

“I’m not afraid of you,” she lied.

“You should be,” Blayr answered, finally meeting her eyes. “But not tonight. Tonight I’m bored. And hungry people who smell like purpose are interesting.”

She tossed the apple core. It arced perfectly and disappeared into the darkness without a sound.

“I know what happened to your grandmother,” Blayr said. “Not the story the doctors fed you. The real one.”

Oryole’s knees almost gave out.

“Prove it.”

Blayr hopped down from the boxcar. When her boots touched gravel, the stones didn’t crunch—they sang, a low harmonic that made Oryole’s back teeth ache.

“I’ll do better,” Blayr said. “I’ll take you to the people who took her. But first—” She gestured at Oryole’s shivering frame. “—we’re getting you something to eat that didn’t come from a dumpster behind the Dollar General.”

That was how Oryole Whitmen, nineteen-year-old certified lunatic of Perry County, ended up eating pancakes at 4:42 a.m. in a Waffle House thirty miles from home across from a woman who claimed to be the walking reincarnation of a goddess whose job description was “ending things with appropriate drama.”

Blayr ate six pancakes without syrup. She said syrup was “an insult to maple trees.”

Halfway through the seventh one, she spoke again.

“The ones who took Brandy were the Kheltari. Nocturnal. Collector caste. They don’t kill unless the specimen is boring. Your grandmother,” she licked powdered sugar from her thumb, “was apparently very interesting.”

Oryole’s fork trembled. “How do you know her name?”

“Because I’ve been listening to you scream it in your sleep across four different states for the last two years.” Blayr leaned forward. “Also, I broke into the cloud storage where your uncle keeps your therapy recordings. You really should tell that doctor his breathing is disgusting.”

Oryole stared. Then she laughed—a cracked, ugly sound.

“You’re insane.”

“Says the girl who’s spent seven years drawing the same ship in every notebook she owns.” Blayr tapped the table twice. “Tri-lobed hull. Phase-shifted running lights. Dorsal collection array resembling cathedral ribs. Ring any bells?”

Oryole felt the world tilt.

“That’s… that’s the ship from the dreams.”

“Yes. Because it was there. And it took her. And it left a trace signature that’s still burning a faint ultraviolet line across this hemisphere. We can follow it. If you want.”

Oryole looked down at her half-eaten pecan waffle. She thought about the locked ward at Pine Grove. The way the nurses would whisper “poor thing” when they thought she couldn’t hear. The way Uncle Link’s eyes had slowly stopped hoping.

“I want,” she whispered.

Blayr smiled like a knife being drawn from its sheath.

“Then we need muscle. And better coffee.”

She pulled out a device that looked like a black glass harmonica and tapped three notes against it.

Somewhere in the æther, a god of war answered his phone.

Ares arrived 47 minutes later, wearing a flannel shirt that said "WORLD’S BEST DAD" and carrying two large black coffees. He looked approximately thirty-two, scarred in places that suggested he’d been stabbed by things much larger than knives, and smelled faintly of gunpowder and cedar.

Behind him, a matte-black sphere the size of a basketball floated.

“That’s BB,” Ares said, nodding toward the sphere. “Don’t flirt with him. He gets weird.”

“I do not get weird,” the sphere replied in a voice like crushed velvet. “I become appropriately intense.”

Blayr rolled her eyes. “You two done measuring war crimes?”

Ares handed Oryole one of the coffees. “You’re the granddaughter.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, sir.”

He studied her for a long moment.

“You’ve got her jawline. And her ‘fuck-you’ eyes. Good. You’ll need both.”

They talked until sunrise.

Not about feelings. About vectors. Phase-shifted ion trails. The three primary Kheltari collection zones are in this arm of the galaxy. The fact that the Kheltari never kept specimens longer than eleven years unless they were still producing novel data.

Brandy had been gone for seventeen.

That meant one of three things: She was dead (unlikely—Kheltari didn’t waste interesting corpses). She’d been sold/transferred to another collector. She was still generating data so valuable that they’d broken their own rules.

Oryole listened. She didn’t cry. She didn’t interrupt. She just wrote everything in her notebook with the careful handwriting of someone who’d spent years being told her memories weren’t real.

When the sun finally crawled over the pines, Blayr stood.

“We’re going to need a door.”

Ares raised an eyebrow. “You’re not thinking—”

“I’m always thinking that.”

BB spun once. “Probability of catastrophic reality fracture: 17.4%. Acceptable risk parameters.”

Oryole looked between them. “What door?”

Blayr grinned.

“The one your grandmother left behind.”

They drove north in Ares’ 1971 International Harvester Scout, which smelled of motor oil and old blood. The vehicle had no license plate and no VIN. It also had no problem doing 112 mph on Highway 49 with the engine sounding like distant thunder.

Blayr sat shotgun. Ares drove. Oryole and BB occupied the tiny back seat. The sphere had decided she was “minimally hostile” and therefore allowed minimal contact.

They reached the old Whitmen homeplace just after noon—an abandoned double-wide half-swallowed by kudzu and memory.

Oryole hadn’t been back since she was twelve.

The front door was gone. Someone had spray-painted BELIEVE HER in red across the living room wall.

Oryole touched the letters.

“I did that,” she said quietly. “Night before they took me to Pine Grove the first time.”

Blayr walked past her, straight to the hallway that led to Brandy’s old bedroom.

There, in the corner where the carpet had rotted away, was a perfect circle burned into the subfloor. Not scorched. Not stained. Burned—as though someone had taken a magnifying glass the size of a manhole cover to the wood for exactly seven seconds.

Blayr knelt. Pressed her palm to the center.

The air above the circle shivered.

Then it tore.

Not dramatically. Not with lightning or screaming wind. Just a quiet, surgical parting—like someone unzipping the universe down the middle.

On the other side: black sand under violet sky. Two moons. A distant city that looked carved from obsidian and migraine.

Blayr looked back at Oryole.

“Last chance to go home and take more pills.”

Oryole stepped forward.

“I stopped taking the pills when I was sixteen. They made the dreams quieter. I didn’t want them quiet.”

Ares cracked his knuckles.

BB pulsed once, approving.

They stepped through.

The first thing Oryole noticed was the smell. Not sulfur. Not decay. Cherries. And copper. And something that reminded her of the moment right before a thunderstorm breaks.

The second thing she noticed was that gravity here weighed about 82% of Earth's normal. She bounced when she walked. It felt obscene to bounce while looking for your abducted grandmother.

They walked for three hours across the black sand desert.

No one spoke much.

Ares scanned constantly, hand never far from the enormous revolver at his hip. Blayr hummed something in a language that made Oryole’s teeth itch. BB floated ahead, mapping, analyzing, and muttering probability updates.

They found the first collector outpost at dusk (or what passed for dusk under two moons).

It looked like a cathedral turned inside out.

Glass spires curved downward into the sand. Inside each spire: floating specimens. Hundreds. Thousands. Suspended in amber light. Some human. Some not.

Oryole searched every face.

None was Brandy.

Blayr put a hand on her shoulder. Gentle. The gentleness was somehow worse than violence.

“They rotate stock,” she said. “This is just the showroom.”

They kept moving.

The next outpost was underground.

The third was floating above a methane lake.

The fourth—

The fourth outpost had a human woman in her late sixties sitting cross-legged in the center of a containment sphere.

White hair in a loose braid. Faint scar across the left cheekbone from when she was twenty-three and a drunk logger swung a chainsaw at a yellow jacket nest.

She was reading a book.

Not a tablet. A real book. Pages worn thin from years of turning.

Oryole knew that cover.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

She made a sound that wasn’t quite a sob.

Brandy looked up.

A long moment.

Then, very softly:

“Oryole?”

The containment sphere cracked like an eggshell.

Not because Blayr attacked it. Not because Ares shot it.

Because something inside Brandy had been waiting seventeen years to be angry.

And when she finally saw her granddaughter’s face—

The anger became light.

The sphere simply couldn’t hold it anymore.

Brandy stepped out.

She looked at Blayr first.

“You’re the chaos one.”

Blayr dipped her head. “Guilty.”

Then at Ares.

“You’re late.”

Ares shrugged. “Traffic.”

Then Brandy looked at Oryole.

And for the first time in seventeen years, someone looked at Oryole Whitmen like she had never been crazy.

Like every scream in the night had been testimony instead of a symptom.

Brandy opened her arms.

Oryole ran.

The hug lasted so long that the two moons had moved noticeably across the violet sky.

When they finally separated, Brandy touched Oryole’s cheek.

“You grew up beautiful. And stubborn. Just like me.”

Oryole laughed wetly. “Everyone said you were dead.”

“They’re still saying it,” Brandy said. “I’ve been listening to the radio chatter for years. My own obituary is very touching. They used my high school graduation picture.”

She turned to Blayr.

“How much trouble are we in?”

Blayr grinned. “Medium to catastrophic. Depends on how fast we run.”

Ares cracked his neck. “I vote catastrophic.”

BB spun happily. “I have already composed seventeen haiku about our imminent demise.”

Brandy looked at her granddaughter again.

Then she reached into the pocket of her worn flannel shirt—the same shirt she’d been wearing the night she was taken—and pulled out a small, tarnished horseshoe crab keychain.

She pressed it into Oryole’s palm.

“I kept it,” she said. “Every day. So I’d remember which world I was trying to get back to.”

Oryole closed her fingers around it so hard the metal bit into her skin.

“Then let’s go home,” she whispered.

Blayr looked around at the approaching Kheltari security phalanxes—dozens of them, moving like mercury on glass.

She cracked her knuckles.

“Home sounds nice. But first…”

Her eyes flared bruise-purple.

“…let’s remind them what happens when you take things that belong to Mississippi.”

Ares drew his revolver.

BB whistled Dixie.

Brandy picked up a piece of broken containment glass as if it were a kitchen knife.

And Oryole Whitmen—

—who had spent seven years being told she was broken— stood between a goddess of destruction, a god of war, an AI with a death wish, and her grandmother, who had waited seventeen years for this exact moment.

She smiled.

It was not a small smile.

It was the smile of someone who finally understood that crazy and correct are not mutually exclusive.

“Let’s go home,” she said again.

And this time, the universe listened.