The stale, sun-tan oil stench remained in his nostrils for weeks. That, and the smell of burnt skin, of vomit, and of chemicals being shoved down his esophagus, racing into his stomach. Of sticky sweet perfume coating a wet slab of fur, and of sickeningly thick honey stuck in his throat.

His nightmares were filled with the faces of those who'd hovered over him when he'd woken in the hospital wing. Kera, concerned and confused. The weird girl, mouthing strange enchantments in another language. And a few other students he thought he'd never see again, all come to witness his return from the dead, they'd later called it.

But his nightmares also contained others. Those he'd been unable to save, with their widened eyes and dropping jaws and cheeks reddening then blanching then caving in. Taryn and her doe-eyed but failed seduction tactics. Lorenzo and his brute strength. Several more he'd forgotten the names of, but whose faces would never leave his mind.

Weeks passed, and he still tasted the blood and dirt mix in his mouth, as if it were imprinted on his tongue. He still visualized the dried guts of those who'd been killed before his eyes, the echoes of their screams running rampant in his mind. He still saw flashes of Patrek, the stump of his severed foot bleeding profusely; and Kera, hunched over as she hurled her insides into a bush.

And Mr. Reynolds, stuck behind the sparkly pink wall, yanked up by the skin of his neck and carried off by the monstrous Jessa, with her furry friend Vick at her heels. The imagined vision of Patrek slashing at Taryn's throat; her lying in a puddle of her own blood, dead for having defended a slew of creepy aliens passing themselves as gods.

But Miles was alive. Patrek, Kera, the other students and professors—all alive. The instant Miles and Patrek were well enough to be transported, the entire group took off on the same plane that'd dropped them off, and never looked back. Well, Miles did—he glanced out the window as the plane departed, cursing the alien-gods for their cruelty, and swearing he'd expose them and their atrocities soon. Milla's journal—somehow thrown across the barrier before it solidified—sat in his lap, its pages burning with the desire to be read.

None of them wasted time. The instant they landed in Providence, Miles, Kera, and Patrek got to work.

Most of Patrek's work was from the hospital, as he remained in observation for his foot. The doctors were stumped at the eerily sparkly substance stuck to his skin, and that wouldn't come off. And the permanent damage caused to his heart from the blast of Jessa's power; he now had to wear a pacemaker to breathe properly.

After a day or two on fluids and heavy medication, Kera returned to normal. No more fur, and her bruises and scrapes were healing. Her bones were no longer as visible under her skin, and she regained her spunk, her love for life. She'd make a full recovery with time and insisted on getting back to work. Miles couldn't stop her.

Miles and Kera were able to start pursuing their goal of exposing Paradise Island and its not so paradise-like tendencies.

"First off, you're going to automatically pass Kera in all her classes, for what you've put her through," said Miles, five days prior to coming home, convening in the Dean's office.

The Dean was a cold, curt man, but he harbored none of Mr. Reynolds' darkness, nor did he harbor the same I can do anything I want attitude as him. This man knew he was in the hot seat, and that Miles and Kera had him by the balls. Miles had showed him Milla's journal and warned him that should he try to deliver anyone else to the island, should he deny Kera her scholarship and the education she deserved, he'd send the notebook to the press. "And trust me when I tell you they'll have a field day with it."

The Dean had had no choice but to let Kera back in—but what he didn't know was that she was posing. She had no intention of finishing her classes at Valence and was operating on the down-low to obtain more information to fuck up the government. She was the inside man. With the rage she held within for all that'd been done to her, Miles knew she'd succeed in helping him topple this asinine institution.

And as it turned out, the Dean would have restored Kera, anyway. Her parents were fuming and threatening a hefty lawsuit if he didn't repair the damage he'd done by sending Kera away. Her parents hadn't signed the consent form, apparently. Mr. Reynolds had forged their signature, desperate to produce the correct amount of sacrifices—his contract stated three—for the alien gods. Miles had been his wild card—not fitting the criteria—but Kera still was not supposed to be there.

How right she'd been to keep insisting on that fact.

A few days after Kera resumed classes, Miles quit Valance. He cut ties with his parents and gained access to a trust fund they'd been holding away from him. In truth, they'd never thought to give him any of it, since they'd sent him off to Paradise Island to his potential death. To avoid getting lawyers involved, his father brokered a deal with him—he gave him every penny in his trust fund, and Miles wouldn't incorporate them in the sick schemes they were a part of.

"I can't believe you donated money to this fucked up cause," Miles had said, packing his bags and readying to move into his new apartment near the Valance campus.

His father had remained quiet, his head bowed. What was there to say? "Yes, son, we gave money to a government project overseen by aliens, and we wanted you to be entertainment for those aliens. Sorry."

Miles wouldn't have accepted their apology, anyway.

The flat he bought was halfway between Valence and the small community college he'd enrolled in. Halfway, because Kera moved in with him, and needed to be close to Valence to continue her mission. They had a spare room that they'd decided they'd give to Patrek, once he got out of the hospital. He had much rehabilitation left for his severed foot.

Miles changed his major, and started working part-time at a non-government owned laboratory that specialized in analyzing proof and samples of all things alien. Meaning he'd opted to change his specialty, too; no more studying diseases and genes and medical stuff. He'd elected to study aliens in depth. Space, the frontier beyond earth: he was finally doing what he was passionate about, not his parents.

Every night, when he and Kera went to bed, he'd tell her all the crazy things he'd seen in the lab. All the photographs and DNA samples and strange substances he got to examine, all the theories he got to toss around with his co-workers. He wouldn't reveal to them any of Milla's notes yet. But soon, when the time was right, he'd abandon the notebook where someone at the lab might find it and leave it to them to go bananas looking into all its claims.

"We'll burn that goddamn island down," he said, holding Kera in his arms as she nestled against his chest. Neither had said what they were—friends with benefits, a couple, something in between—but they did know they were each other's comfort, and that was all that mattered for now.

"And get Mr. Reynolds back," said Kera, her words muffled as she'd pressed her mouth into Miles' skin. "As a mangled corpse or a living monster, I don't care. He hasn't paid the price for what he did to us, and I'm not going to rest until he does."

"And Vick," added Miles, trying not to shudder at the last image of his best friend—a fur-clad freak with fangs and claws, and acting as Jessa-the-ruler's lap dog. "And Taryn and Lorenzo, if they're still alive."

"What about Jessa?" Kera looked up, her eyes like silver in the moonlight pouring in from their window.

Miles winced. Jessa was no longer Jessa, and he had no idea if the ruler would ever release her. "One step at a time," he said, kissing her forehead and pulling her tighter against his torso. "First, we expose this shit, then we can talk about rescue missions. Jessa might be too far gone... but if we can save her, we will."

He still didn't know what to think of Jessa, and if she'd even bothered fighting her possessor. She'd complained at first, about being the one chosen by the ruler. But had she gotten used to it in the long run? Had she welcomed the purple-veined being into her willingly, or had she given up?

I don't think I'll ever know.

***

Vick had been fun, she'd admit. Youthful, somewhat skilled—though he boasted more than he was able to produce—and entertaining. Handsome, larger than she'd anticipated. No dull moments.

But Mr. Reynolds? Oh, he was experienced. Adept. His tongue was willing and able to detect the sweetest of spots in her private parts and titillate them until she exploded. They exploded. The ruler and Jessa, in tandem.

More often than not, though, the ruler and Jessa weren't in tandem. They bickered, disagreed on how to approach things; Jessa with a softer hand, the ruler only wanting blood and guts to spill.

The ruler had wanted to assassinate Mr. Reynolds almost immediately. It was Jessa who'd whispered, "but what if he's useful?" and now she regretted it. She hadn't meant useful as in to use as a plaything; she'd meant useful to moving the alien-gods' plots beyond the island.

Beyond the island—liberating Jessa from her restraints, allowing her to leave, at last.

Jessa had thought of Mr. Reynolds as a distraction, but now the ruler wouldn't leave him alone. With Vick transformed into a monster—and the ruler against bestiality, though she was disgusting about everything else—she had no use for him except as a guard dog. Mr. Reynolds was her new pastime, and she drank in every inch of him, to Jessa's dismay.

The alien-gods had come, and Jessa trembled inside herself at the memory of them. They were blurry beings with human-like bodies, able to levitate over the earth. Genderless, powerful. When they'd showed up, landing on the beach, coming down from laser-like beams in the sky, they screamed at her—at the ruler. They berated her for failing to keep three weakened vagrant humans in place.

"You let them escape," they'd said, all speaking as one, voices morphed together. "You let their dismantling of the barrier block you, disarm you, and you weren't fast enough to prevent this catastrophe from happening. We're in danger now; danger of exposure."

"Did we choose the wrong vessel for you?" another said, its eyes alight with purple flames. "This Jessa girl—we'd had our eye on her, but was she not strong enough?"

On the inside, Jessa curled up into a ball, hiding in the confines of her own mind.

"If they expose us, if they get to the government and turn them against us, all bets are off. All accords are off. They'll declare war. We'll win that war." This alien-god leaned closer to Jessa, breathing its putrid breath all over her face. "But in doing so, we'll have to decimate this planet. And it's a pretty planet. We like it. We want it. We'd rather not have to wipe it out of the universe. Finding another one like it will take years, decades, centuries, even. Is that what you want?"

"No," said the ruler, dipping her chin. Jessa had never felt the being getting scared, but that day, she was. Shivers reverberated up and down her spine, and her fingers fidgeted, curling and uncurling with nerves.

"We can't trespass outside of this forest, for now," the first god-alien had said. "We have no means to interfere out there, but we have ideas. We have plans. Are you worthy enough for us to let you in on those?"

It had taken hours of debating before they'd decided to give the ruler some insight on what they were up to. They'd been scheming for decades, knowing humans would rebel, that the government would soon experience guilt over what it'd been doing. So they were working on other means to make the American government submit to them, and those means had nothing to do with a pandemic, this time. These means would be bigger, scarier, and would force all humans into compliance.

"We're going to test this solution out soon," the aliens had stated, before taking refuge in the cave by the beach. "And you'll be an important part of it. All we can say is that man you captured will have a role to play."

To soothe her wounded soul, the ruler had stormed up to the cliff-side camp, snatched Mr. Reynolds by the wrist, and shoved him onto her bed. She'd been keeping him hostage in Jessa's cabin, and though he'd been terrified at first, he'd soon grown to enjoy himself, too. When he pleasured Jessa, Jessa pleasured him in recompense.

Not too bad of a deal, eh?

But today, she needed him to do all the work. He was ever-obedient, more than happy to engage in a round of sensual foreplay to keep Jessa assuaged and relaxed.

Jessa had disliked the man at first, for all his involvement with the government's sordid plans. But with the ruler's insight, with a new perspective, she was starting to accept this man's arrival into her life. More so since he kept the ruler's mood stable. When she lashed out and got angry, it hurt Jessa on the inside, taking dents into her soul, into her. The calmer the ruler was, the better Jessa's chances were at one day, maybe, somehow, expelling her from her body.

So that made Mr. Reynolds essential. The ruler liked him. A mature man, an adult; compared to Vick, he was much, much more in tune with his body and knew what to do.

The gods liked Mr. Reynolds, too. Or so that was how Jessa had interpreted their plans.

They wanted more folk like him; more adults. The ruler had shared her theories with Jessa, after the meeting with the alien-gods.

"They'll be fixing the barrier to only accept adults over twenty-one now, I promise you," the ruler had said out loud, using Jessa's voice to communicate with Jessa, stuck on the inside. "It would make sense. Adults have more rage, more violence in them. Longer years of brewing revenge plots and experiencing things younger adults have not."

"So they'll renegotiate with the government, you think?" Jessa heard herself as frail, nothing but a slither of the woman she once was. "They'll change the terms, but what will that do?"

"They will change the terms, yes. What will it do? Well, for starters, I guarantee our gods won't honor all parts of the contract. They'll want adults, yes, but I don't think they'll wait for them to trespass. They'll take all the adults brought to the island. And once we get them, how delicious will it be to feast on them as this planet over-consumes itself into madness because of disappearing men and women? There will be chaos. There will be blood. My dear Jessa," the ruler smiled, "do you know how entertaining maddened humans are?"