“You see? That thing got scared and crawled out of your head.”

Laila’s eyes sought out the source of those cryptic words. She was in a cold, cavernous place far removed from the warmth of the room in which she’d been about to bed down to sleep. A strange metallic scent clung to the air. She tasted salt on the tip of her tongue. Glowing blue and red moss crept along the ground. Pointy stalagmites poked their heads up around her.

She heard trickling water, nearby but it wasn’t close enough that she could see. In the distance was the rumble that she’d come to recognize as massive waves crashing against jagged cliffs.

“Are you listening?”

It came from above. That voice. That voice!? A sick feeling rolled into Laila’s gut. That voice was her own. Unmistakably. However inconceivably.

Her eyes zeroed in on the source. A dark Body stood rooted to the slick stone ceiling, defying the gravity of planet Bentokal. For the first few moments, Laila could only stare dumbly at the figure. Her eyes traced the sharp contours of the indigo face, the tiny jewels embedded below the right eye, the scar below the cleft of her chin. Inky dots nestled in the silver sclera of red-rimmed eyes. Even her boots were still muddy from Laila’s foray to the boundaries of the habited zone.

Everything was the same. Everything!

Laila became unhinged, somehow staring up at her own body but the thing inside that body wasn’t her. The person frowning down at her, arms akimbo wasn’t her. That thing, whatever it was. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t her!

Panic set in.

“Nnnh?!”

The sound that came out of her wasn’t words. She couldn’t make her mouth move the way it should. The breath hissed out of her. Her heart was beating so fast it fluttered and made a humming, almost musical sound.

The thing that was but was not Laila spoke again. “Use your head, stupid. Your head!”

She tried to move but her arms and legs wouldn’t obey. It was as if they weren’t even there. Then, she saw reflected in those angry black irises, dorsal wings and the sleek body of a birdlike creature with a blunt, lizard-like head. This body was blue, sleek and wet. A creature that was not Laila. This creature was teruun, a prized denizen of the planet Bentokal. Coveted possessions across the universe. Here was Laila, trapped inside its body, not knowing how she’d gotten that way.

The body-thief nodded, tongue darting out, flicking at the lips then clicking against the teeth. It bared those pearly whites at Laila.

“I know why you’re here,” It drawled in a mockingly sing-song voice. The stolen countenance hardened. “Silver starchaser.”

Had it zeroed in on Laila’s reason for coming to Bentokal, that she was here now for Hegira’s sake, for Hegira’s future pilot’s sake?

“Yes,” there was another knowing little smile. “What’s a pitiful creature to do? Laila. The sad one. The mad one. The one who will never be chosen.”

Laila knew. She knew that she would never be chosen to be Hegira’s pilot. Hegira, prized jewel of the galaxies, was once all Laila knew. The only home that she had ever known. Yet, she would never be chosen. She knew she would never be chosen.

Laila knew she wasn’t the golden progeny of the starchasers. Sumida was. Sumida was everything Laila wasn’t. Sumida was graceful, smart and devoid of scars. Both had been bred and raised for the same purpose but while Sumida had been treated kindly, Laila had not.

Sure, Laila had her Lloran fosters. They’d treated her kindly enough and Bex and Winny loved Laila with all their might but it hadn’t been enough to fill the void left by Brother’s cruelty. It could never have been nearly enough.

Sumida must’ve had fosters too. Fosters who loved her with all their might. But she didn’t have a Brother. She didn’t have Brother to torture, to chew her up, spit her out and leave her with nothing but a broken body and her battered pride.

Sumida knew this. Yet, Sumida loved Laila unconditionally, loved her scars and all. Though Laila was barely civilized, living almost purely on instinct. Though she was like a wild and wounded animal. Though she may as well be a beast clinging to the cracks in some forgotten cavern. But who was this thieving piece of alien vermin to decide?

“You think about it all wrong,” The body thief’s tongue darted out and back in. “You see? Teruun are partners, not thieves.”

GET OUT OF MY HEAD!

“No shouting!” Her silent retort was met with a violent shudder, “sad little girl.”

What did that even matter? Laila was still struggling to grab hold of calmness, to make sense of her predicament. This was all wrong, so very, very wrong.

“Right!” The thing in Laila’s body chortled. “Wrong is right. It’s all upside down, yeah?”

While Laila regarded it, nonplussed, the body thief seemed to be waiting expectantly for something. A few more moments passed. Laila knew the body thief was waiting for something, but what? She had no clue.

WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!

The body thief merely opened its mouth. The ear-splitting sound that came out made the walls of the cavern quake. In the next instant, Laila was back in the warmth of the domicile and back inside her own body. Her knees buckled, and she crumpled to the ground.

On the space where the wall met the ground, a dark-bodied millipede was coiled up into a circle. The attendant who’d introduced it to Laila’s body when she first came to this world had called it a cirq. Forefinger and thumb pinched together, she picked it up and set it gently into to palm of her other hand. She brought it up to her right ear, wondering how to go about coaxing the trembling thing back inside.

“Go on. Get back inside,” she urged in a low voice. “Do it!”

The millipede’s head probed at the opening of her ear canal, and then it pushed its head inside. It writhed and wriggled until it was completely burrowed inside.

Wracked by the pain of having her body invaded again, Laila was still shuddering and sweating for a while after it was done. She sat, back against the wall of hewn stone, head bowed between her knees as she fought off wave after wave of nausea. It would be a while before that water-logged, unsteady feeling would dissipate.

The domicile was a massive habitat built into the right incline of the cleft between two massive hills. Rooms had been carved into the stone. Knotted rope ladders led to the plateau above. The Bentokal Principality’s headquarters sprawled out from the center of the plateau just shy of the edges overhanging the domicile.

Laila dragged her boots on and donned a clean jacket over her tunic. She peeled open the vines that served as a door and ducked out of her room, just in time to catch sight of the occupant from six rooms below hastening up the rope-ladder next to the one she was about to climb.

The vrath was a vicious looking thing with big, buggy orbs for eyes, and leathery skin that sagged at the jawline and flapped about as the creature moved. From the mouth grew curly tentacles coated with slime. The vrath had two pairs of arms and legs twice as long as Laila’s, which made it twice as fast. In a flash, it was right beside her.

It was enough to make any self-respecting traveler quake in her boots. This primeval fear was unwarranted, the vrath were insect-eaters, after all. Though Laila knew this, she yelped and clambered up her rope-ladder with the Vrath hot on her heels.

They finished the arduous climb at breakneck speed. Laila felt like her lungs were about to burst but she didn’t stop. She was too stubborn for that. They reached the top at almost the same time. The vrath was over the edge a fraction of a second before Laila. This was their twelfth impromptu half chase-half race and Laila’s eleventh loss.

She sank down on all fours, struggling to catch her breath. The Vrath stood off to the side, waiting for her to recover. She waved him off breathlessly.

“No. You,” She coughed, tasted bile. Yuck. “You go on ahead.”

The Vrath’s head tilted. “You no eat?”

She smiled appreciatively at his use of human-speak for her benefit. “I’ve got to do something first.”

Smiling at a vrath was a risky thing. It was said that they interpreted the baring of teeth as aggression. Laila and done it without thinking but it was just as well. It was always better to know exactly where she stood. Curiously enough though, he reciprocated, snotty tentacles curling back to give a view of two thick and sharp-looking front teeth.

Laila grinned. “I like you!”

“You,” the vrath returned. “I like you.”

He made a rumbling sound in his belly that Laila chose to interpret as a laugh, then he was off in a flash, scampering away in the general direction of the gathering hall.

Laila headed for the medical section, hoping they would answer her questions without asking too many about her. Her first obstacle was the robotic attendant at the entrance of the dome-shaped building. Laila noted apprehensively how it morphed into the general shape of a troll-like being in front of her.

Now that Laila approached, it took on a generally human shape and asked.

“Genus?”

“Er,” Taken aback, Laila offered. “Human.”

She wasn’t technically lying. Some starchasers had been human once. Hell, they’d probably all started out that way.

The attendant didn’t seem to care one whit about her prevarication.

“Place your claw here,” it instructed.

“Hand,” Laila corrected.

The attendant blinked, nonplussed.

“It’s a hand,” Laila explained further. “I just thought you might like to know. For future…”

The attendant’s droll silence suggested that it couldn’t care less.

“All right then,” Laila swallowed gamely and placed her palm on the scanner.

She nervously chewed on her lower lip. What if they found any irregularities? Sesili, Hegira’s current pilot, had been desperately adamant about this one thing. The Principality was not to learn that a starchaser was on Bentokal. No one could know who she was or why she was here.

The attendant looked at the readings and pointed to the left. “You’re assigned to Medical Unit Six,” then promptly began to shape-shift for the benefit of the next patient.

Laila considered herself dismissed.

Medical Unit Six was a sterile facility, seemingly designed for humanoid body types. The attendant who approached Laila had pink skin and inky blue hair that flowed from the center of her head and down her back. At least, Laila thought it was female. It was otherwise impossible to tell; not to mention, she didn’t recognize the species.

She sat down as instructed and waited with some trepidation while the attendant read the scan that had been taken earlier. It didn’t seem there was any need to be nervous, though.

“There doesn’t seem to be anything to worry about,” the attendant said after a while.

“Right,” Laila nodded. “I’m here about my implant.”

“Implant?”

“The cirq,” she hastily specified, referring to the millipede that had crawled out of her head. “Are they known to behave strangely?”

“Define strangely.” The attendant leaned forward, more interested now.

Laila felt a bit stupid asking now but she plunged ahead. “Like speaking to me in dreams or leaving my body while I’m asleep?”

She left it at that. She had to be careful with her questions. She didn’t want to go as far as suggesting that something other than the cirq—namely, teruun had bonded with her before the initiation ceremony. Something told her that was probably another kind of taboo.

The attendant seemed truly confounded. “That is strange. Cirq don’t communicate, they are simply parasites that facilitate communication between you and teruun. As for leaving your body without a reason, this just doesn’t happen.”

“I know what happened to me,” Laila returned anxiously. “This cirq is weird.”

The attendant came over and coaxed the millipede out. She gently laid it on a transparent platform and ran a scan. When she was done, she brought it back to Laila.

“I could find nothing wrong.” Pale pink eyes, brimming with frosty censure bored into Laila’s. “Perhaps the one who is weird, is you.”

Going to Medical Unit Six had been a mistake, after all. Realizing her blunder, Laila clammed up and promptly made herself scarce, hoping that she hadn’t stirred up enough suspicion to warrant the attention of the Principality. The starchaser went back to the domicile. She clambered down the rope to her room, grabbed her gear and climbed back up into the courtyard. The yard was deserted, everyone else likely gathered inside the domed eating area for the morning meal. This was her chance to slip away unnoticed. She needed to do it now. There was no time to hesitate. There was no time to be scared.

Entering areas outside the designated hospitable zone was forbidden, yet this was exactly what Laila needed to do. She’d arrived on Mount Brul three days prior to her encounter with the body thief, under the guise of seeking a teruun partner, but her true purpose lay elsewhere. Laila was on Bentokal to commit a theft, so preposterous that even the principality hadn’t seen fit to safeguard against it. She would enter the forbidden wilds and steal the rarest of snails, a pale snail.