“I’ll be here when you wake up.”
Cassie could hear those words in her ears, a long forgotten memory replaying over and over again as she fought back from the darkness that had swallowed her so long ago.
“I’ll be here when you wake up.”
Was she waking up? That didn’t seem right. She had only just fallen asleep a little while ago. Surely they hadn’t found a cure yet.
“She’s stabilizing,” a strange voice said, a voice that sounded almost animal. Like a cat purring. “I think she’s coming around.”
Cassandra was waking up. They had found a cure at last and she could go home, she could be normal again. It must have happened so quickly. Her parents probably hadn’t even changed the sheets on her bed yet.
“The abnormal growths have been completely removed,” the feline voice said again, putting Cassandra in mind of the old Batman series. Part of her wanted to giggle at the idea of standing in her recovery room. “All organ systems seem to be at optimal functionality.”
“No traces of the cryo drugs?” a male voice asked.
“No, sir,” the female voice responded again. “There should be no residual effects.”
“Good.” Dimly Cassandra could hear beeping and clicking as she struggled to open her eyes. “What year was she put into stasis?”
“The early twenty first, sir.”
Cassandra finally found the strength to open her eyes and immediately groaned. There was too much light and she was so stiff.
“Not too fast,” the female voice said comfortingly, the soft hiss to her s not lost on Cassie’s ears. “You need to adjust.”
“My parents,” Cassie managed to mumble. She could barely speak, her throat producing an almost acidic flavor in her mouth. “Are they here?”
“Don’t worry about that now,” the woman answered. “You’re okay now.”
Cassie put her hand over her eyes and forced them to open slowly and methodically. She blinked several times, adjusting to the light that inched through the spaces between her fingers first. It felt as if her head was splitting open, the throb increasing with each passing instant.
Finally, she managed to pull her hand away and stare up at the ceiling above her. It looked so odd, like the motherboard out of a computer but with lights running along the pathways. She blinked a few more times, looking to her right and seeing a row of strange looking machines and scanners that produced three dimensional charts and images of her body. She was momentarily amazed at how expensive that equipment must have been. Until she caught a subtle reflection in the metallic surface of one of those particular machines.
Behind her stood a strange looking creature, something out of a nightmare. It looked female, maybe part human, but there were definitive feline features that seemed to peer out of that unclear image. Sharp ears, whiskers, fur. Fur. Fur that was so black it looked like liquid. And in the middle of all of that, two huge orange eyes seemed to meet hers in the reflection and Cassie almost felt her heart stop.
She turned, seeing the creature next to her, her hand extended with a glass of water.
“Here, child. This will help with the acid like…”
Cassandra cut her off with a scream as she struggled to move her muscles and back away. Whatever that thing was, she didn’t want it near her.
“Nissa,” a man said, moving closer. Like the cat, he had on a long leather jacket, but his clothing was different underneath. Normal. And he was normal. “She may not know what you are.”
The cat stared at Cassie then nodded, slinking backward slowly to show she was no threat.
“Nissa meant you no harm,” he said, smiling. “She’s quite maternal.”
“What are you people?” Cassie looked around, seeing that this was no hospital. “Where am I?”
“You’re onboard a ship.” He smiled at her and extended his hands out further. “It’s safe here. I promise.”
“Where are my parents? Where’s my sister?” Rennie would straighten this all out. She always fixed things. Always. That’s what big sisters were for, right?
“Honey, I… I think we need to talk.”
“No we don’t. You need to…”
Cassandra stopped, looking over the man’s shoulder and seeing something beyond the cat-woman, beyond the strange looking walls and ceiling. It was something she would have never imagined before. It was a sea of black with a floating object coming into view in the distance. It appeared to be something like an offshore drilling rig, a metallic housing structure, but it was gigantic. And floating.
“Prepare for docking in four minutes,” a computerized voice said.
“Where am I?”
“I think the appropriate question would be, when are you, dear,” the man answered.