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  “And if you aren’t a virgin, she’ll sell you. Or worse, kill you.”

  She moved back up his body so they were face to face, his hard, twitching cock pressed between them. “If that’s the case, I’d rather die. Please, William,” she said with tears in her eyes.

  He thought about that, his hands gripping her hips. He lifted her up, and then with one mighty thrust, sheathed himself deep within her. Snow arched her back and screamed as he penetrated her maidenhead and a spike of agony ripped through her body from bottom to top.

  He waited while she acclimated herself to the pain and stretching, waited until she trembled and returned to lying still atop him. He looked like he wanted to cry. She said, “Thank you,” and leaned down to kiss him softly on the lips. Despite the pain, she liked the way he felt there.

  He tried to shift her off of him, to give her time to recover, but she gripped him tight with her inner muscles. “Don’t,” she said. “Not yet.”

  “Snow, please…”

  “Make love to me, William. It’s our last time.” Surely he would not deny her?

  It took him a moment to gather himself, then he started moving again, holding her while moving in and out of her, slowly but deliberately. She moaned and rocked her hips, meeting each of his thrusts with a thrust of her own while his hands traveled over her white, fragrant body and cupped and milked her lush, ripe breasts. Her milk flowed freely down over his hands and her inner wetness poured over his balls. He thrust up and up inside her, finally hitting her sweet spot so she thrashed her head and cried out in release as they came together, as one.

  After the last tremors left their bodies, Snow curled into his side and said, “Promise me you’ll come with me to Sirius. That you’ll find a way.”

  “I promise,” he said, kissing her gently. He reached for the sleek, silver syringe in the pocket of his lab coat lying on the floor and pressed it into the crook of her arms. She was asleep in seconds. Then he kissed her goodbye. “I’m so sorry, Snow, but sometimes promises have to be broken.”

  * * *

  The following morning, he was called down to the lab as he had expected he would be. The other medics had already worked over Snow’s body for over an hour, without luck. She was as still as the dead, and yet her heart beat. He quickly went about the task of preparing her body to be shipped back to earth, including filling out the required paperwork and setting up the containment capsule. But while several of the nurses went to fetch Snow’s body from the examination room, William used his tablet to reprogram the capsule.

  While the nurses set her body inside the capsule, William thought how very much like a coffin it looked, with its sleek, silver torpedo shape. There was even room for him, should he want to join her, he realized. But he could not.

  “Is everything ready?” the navigator asked over the intercom system in the room.

  “Yes, I think so,” William said, looking over the capsule sitting in the launch cradle. All he had to do was close the capsule; the rest of the system was automatic. The capsule, with Snow’s unconscious body, would be launched into space, toward the jump star. The only difference was, once the capsule reached the star, its slingshot trajectory would be altered to send it onto Sirius instead of back to earth.

  He looked at Snow’s serene face, realizing this was the last time he would ever see this creature— Subject BL-009-8123—the woman he loved. Resigned, he started closing the capsule latch. That’s when he heard the commotion in the hallway outside the launch room. Someone was arguing with the guardsman, there was a muffled blast as if from a sonic handgun, and the door was forcibly irised open.

  The agent was another of Helix’s genetic triumphs—or mistakes, depending on how you wanted to look at things. It was at least nine feet tall, and seemingly mixed with shark DNA. Its skin was mottled grey, its flesh bulged with artificial muscle, and its head tapered into a sleek hammerhead shape. Although William knew the shark to be a creature once native of earth, the bizarre commingling of genetic material made the monster look grotesquely alien. Its open mouth was full of jumbled, yellow teeth. Its dead, mechanical black eyes centered on William, and it shambled forward, dressed in the scarlet uniform of the Helix Agency, the company that took care of troubleshooting for Helix Laboratories.

  It roared and raised both hands, taking aim at him with a pair of sonic handguns like some kind of ancient gunfighter. William dropped to the floor as the sonic signals arched overhead, knocking out the communications system in the ceiling of the launch room. The wiring sparked and spat, and the acrid scent of ozone filled the small, egg-shaped room.

  Smoke quickly filling the room and made William cough into his lab coat sleeve, but it didn’t stop the agent at all. He lunged forward and grabbed William by the collar of his coat. He lifted the man up easily, as if he were as light as a rag doll, and when William was eye to eye with the agent, the drooling, teeth-filled mouth dropped open and an electronic voice came out: “Dr. William Hunt, you are under arrest for conspiracy to commit a crime against your employer, Helix Laboratories…”

  “Sorry, I quit…” William answered and raised his knee and sank it deep into the agent’s testes. The creature croaked and dropped him. He tried to shift away, but it roared in rage and pain and kicked him, bunting him back into the far wall. More sparks filled the confined space, and emergency sirens began to wail as the room turned a lurid shade of red, though William had a feeling no one would come to his aid.

  The creature lumbered forward, snarling through its misshapen mouth.

  William had to think fast. He turned and jammed his elbow into the nearest computer panel, and it gave an angry hiss as he damaged several circuits. The creature was almost upon him, ready to pummel him into the floor, when he reached for a cable as large as a cobra, hissing and spitting sparks. He grabbed it by its insulated outer barrier and jammed it against the creature falling upon him.

  The agent screeched like a machine before part of it exploded into fire and flotsam. The room quickly filled with the stink of burning fish, flesh and circuitry. He dodged away as the creature toppled like a mythical Goliath and lay lifeless and sizzling on the floor of the launch room.

  At first, he thought about running for the door, but surely more Helix agents would be waiting for him. He realized there was really only one option left to him. His cover had long since been blown, which meant that both he and Snow were fugitives already. He moved to the side of the capsule and climbed inside, triggering the hatch from inside the compartment.

  The launch automatically initiated and the computer told him to prepare for stasis. He lay down, clutching Snow’s body in the dark, and wondered what it was he had started, what war was to come, and if he and Snow would ever be safe. Then the stasis gas hit him and all went black.

  * * *

  He woke to the hum of the computer. A slight breeze ruffled Snow’s hair against his cheek.

  He sat up on the moon of Sirius and looked up at a vast violet sky full of scudding clouds. He wondered if this was how the skies of earth looked before war and pollution had turned them into a miasma of black, poisonous gasses through which the earth sun could no longer penetrate.

  Sitting up, he saw long, lush, rolling gold grasses and small but sturdy trees. Small insects with multi-colored wings flitted past his face. Far off came smoke from a cooking fire down in one of the many lawless colonies that dotted the moon. He felt his heart lift at the sight. He and Snow could hide there, change their names, never be found—maybe.

  He looked down at her, sleeping so soundly. “Snow,” he said. And then again. “Snow.”

  He leaned down on impulse and laid a wet, consuming kiss on her lips. Her eyes fluttered open and she looked up at him from under heavy, drowsy eyes. “William,” she said with excitement, sitting up. “William, are we there?”

  “We’re there,” he said, climbing from the capsule and helping an unsteady Snow down to the springy grass. A small repto-mammal darted past them and disappeared i
nto the tall grass.

  She looked around at the various wildflowers and creature with wonder in her eyes, and he realized this was the first time she was seeing real, living things—not just the images of datawaves. “Oh, they’re beautiful,” she told them. “They’re perfect.”

  But when she finally turned to him, she saw the worry in his eyes. “William, what is it?”

  “They know what we did.”

  “I see.”

  He looked off into the distance, shielding his eyes against twin suns. “Now we’ll never be safe.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The information about the machines that Helix has tampered with…all the things they’ve done…that was on your tablet, yes?”

  “Yes,” he said uncertainly. He still had the tablet with him.

  She offered him a clever smile. “While I was sleeping, I was also reading datawaves, and sending a few of my own. I sent that information to the largest media companies on earth. They’ll all soon know exactly what Helix has been doing with the sex toys. Will that keep them from hunting us?”

  William felt his heart catch in his throat. He pulled Snow close amidst their new wonderland and kissed the hair atop her heard. He couldn’t say for certain that another Helix agent would never come looking for them, but he knew that Home Office would be facing much larger issues in the near future.

  He was about to tell Snow how wonderful and smart she was, but then he spotted something a few meters away. “Look, Snow,” he said. He released her to walk to the foot of one of the small, dwarf trees. It had strange, bluish foliage, but what grew on its branches was familiar to him. He plucked what looked like a bright red apple and gave it to his life-mate.

  * * *

  RUMPELSTILTSKIN

  By Alex Crossman

  I was sixteen years old before I realized my beloved father was a gangster. I mean, the signs were definitely there—the days and sometimes weeks he spent away from home, the ridiculous luxury of our home on the Gold Coast, the legions of shifty men who visited us at all hours of the day and night. But this was the man who had raised me singlehandedly after my mom had died just after my birth, the man who took me to school in his limo, who taught me to throw a baseball, who took me to the zoo and shopping for my first bra. When I was thirteen, he held a huge birthday party for me in the garden, complete with a performing clown and a monkey, and he let me have as many friends over from school as I wanted. He was the best father a girl without a mother could possibly have.

  But yes, he was a gangster, though I didn’t understand that, or just didn’t want to accept it, until I was sixteen and my life changed forever. It was the day of my birthday, my Sweet Sixteen, and my daddy had offered to take me on a vacation down to Mexico, but I had asked if I could just have some friends over. My dad’s wealth—and his propensity for spending it on me—often embarrassed me. That day, my friends gathered around the patio table on the veranda and we had cake and ice cream and talked about all the boys we liked. I was happy to spend the day with my friends, though sad my dad had had to go out of town unexpectedly.

  “Connor is totally into you,” my best friend Juanita said, and I laughed at that because Connor was the first boy I had ever crushed on, and just thinking about him made my ears burn.

  “Oh, Sierra’s blushing!” my other best friend Fern said. “Sweet Sixteen and never been kissed!”

  (That was me—never having been kissed.)

  About that time, my dad’s assistant Alejandro stepped out onto the veranda and said, “Sierra, florecita, I must speak to you privately.”

  I rolled my eyes at him. Whenever my dad went out of town on business, he left Alejandro to look after me, and he always insisted on calling me florecita, which in Spanish means “little flower”. I stepped inside my father’s study and Alejandro closed the door and asked me to sit down. He made me my first drink, and I knew then that the news wasn’t good.

  My father, my daddy, was dead. Alejandro did not sugarcoat it. He’d been shot during a meeting with another businessman and had died en route to the hospital.

  I took a trembling sip of my dad’s bourbon, then said the one thing that bothered me more than anything else. “Daddy did bad things, didn’t he, Alejandro?”

  “What do you mean, florecita?” Alejandro said, coming up behind the wicker settee where I sat and resting his big hand comfortingly on my small shoulder.

  “I mean he was like…Al Capone. He was a mob boss, wasn’t he?”

  Alejandro weighed my question a moment before answering, “Yes, Sierra. He was what you would call a mob boss, though we call it Le eMe and your father was El Padre to us. He did some bad things in his life but he was not a bad man, and you must never remember him that way. He was a good man who died unfairly and before his time, but he knew this day would come, and he asked that I look after his beloved nina when he did.”

  He came around the settee to kneel down before me and dry my tears with his handkerchief. He let me cry on his shoulder for a good long time before easing me back. Then he showed me the carefully wrapped birthday gift that my daddy had been planning to give me for my Sweet Sixteen.

  When I opened the small jewelry box, I discovered a platinum, heart-shaped locket with a picture of my mother on one side and a picture of my dad on the other. A handwritten note accompanied the locket and read, Let this locket guide you to your treasure, my daughter. I love you always, Daddy.

  “Now El Padre will never be far from your heart, florecita. And I, Alejandro, will never be far from your side,” my daddy’s right-hand man said, which just made me cry some more.

  Alejandro was as good as his word. In a way, he became like my second father. He saw me through the remainder of my high school years and through college and graduation. He even approved my engagement to Connor McDermott when I was twenty-two years old, though Connor was white and not Mexican. I thought he would oppose me on that, but I think Alejandro realized early on that I was not cut out for mob life. I did not want luxury if it meant bathing in blood money, and I did not want to see after my father’s business dealings—I left that to Alejandro.

  I did not even seek vengeance for my father’s murder. Alejandro taught me that in Le eMe in order for revenge to be extracted on my father’s murder, I would need to initiate it, as his next of kin, but my heart wasn’t in it. I did not want more men to die, even those who had ended my father’s life.

  And besides, I had other ambitions that had nothing to do with mob business. I had graduated with a degree in art and I planned to teach at a local middle school. I was thinking of writing my first illustrated children’s book, and I was getting married in just a few months. For the first time in my life, I was satisfied. Maybe not jumping-through-hoops happy, but satisfied. I loved my life. My crush on Connor had cooled somewhat with time, but he was stable and quiet and unassuming—a good balance to my sometimes fiery Latina temperament.

  I had everything I wanted, everything I needed: Alejandro to protect me, my best friends Juanita and Fern to keep me happy, and sweet Connor to comfort and protect me.

  Then the day of my wedding arrived, and my life changed all over again.

  * * *

  “Everybody halt and get down on the floor on your knees now!” the gruff, no-nonsense voice cut across the vastness of St. Mary’s church, and everyone stopped what they were doing and turned toward the speaker—me, Connor, my bridesmaids Juanita and Fern, and the groomsmen. Even the old padre stopped talking about the holy state of matrimony in order to turn his attention on the intruder. I saw Alejandro, who had given me away only five minutes ago, reach for the gun he had hidden in his armpit holster under his tuxedo jacket.

  The man who had interrupted my wedding ceremony strolled casually down the aisle between pews, brandishing an automatic Desert Eagle in each hand as everyone in the church slowly assumed a kneeling position. He was tall and fitted in his all-black suit, and his black h
air was slicked back away from his handsome, vulpine face, fierce cheekbones, and almost black Latino eyes. He looked every inch the mob boss, even though I estimated his age to be early twenties, close to my own age. But there was a hardness to his model good looks that made me realize this man meant business, that he was dangerous, and that he’d have no qualms about mowing down everyone in the church if they didn’t listen to what he had to say.

  Like everyone else, I struggled to get to my knees in my wedding dress, my white ball gown poofing out around me like a giant marshmallow. Connor gave me a frightened look, but I patted his hand with assurance before turning my attention on our invader.

  Normally, Alejandro would have subdued such a man, but the mob boss was flanked on both sides by a good number of muscular goons, all bearing automatic weapons trained on the people sitting in the pews. Together, the intruders had enough firepower between them to start a South American skirmish, and I could see Alejandro weighing his options before taking his hand off the butt of his gun and getting to his knees like everyone else, though his hand didn’t drift far.

  The intruder stopped halfway down the aisle and glanced at my wedding party, then centered his wolfish attention on me. “A wedding and no one sent me an invitation. I’m truly hurt,” he said, not sounding hurt at all. He glided smoothly down the aisle and came up beside me, and I had a fantasy of the devil in the form of the serpent sidling up close to Eve in the Garden of Eden. “Senorita,” he said. He handed off one of the automatics to a goon and took my hand from Connor’s, kissing the knuckles through the white lace of my glove. His sly, dark, calculating eyes never moved from my face.

  “I don’t know who you are, but I want you to leave here immediately,” I told the intruder as I contemplated using my bouquet of white roses to hit him. Connor made a move to intervene, but the intruder wagged his remaining Desert Eagle at him and tutted and Connor made the wise decision not to interfere with Mexican Mafia politics.