Young Writers Society

The tubai flew back, knocking against the countertop on the other side of the aisle with a loud crack. Ellipse burst from the stall doorway and thanked herself for wearing boots all the time. She would probably slip on the tiles trying to run around in any other shoes.

She made it all of four steps before burning, porcelain fingers wrapped around her wrist and tugged her backwards. Thrown off balance, Ellipse barely managed to bend forward so her butt hit the floor first.

“Ow,” she bit out. Out of habit, she checked her trumpet for damage first, and then realized that this was probably not the time to be worrying about a hunk of curly brass tubes.

A steel-toed boot stepped in front of her path, and Ellipse looked up to see the man, still swinging one of his empty handcuffs.

“You know running makes you seem guilty, right?” the man said. His voice was too smooth. He sounded the way Ellipse felt when she was eating hard candy and swallowed too soon. Suddenly, she missed the way Tejal’s voice had broke when they first met. It had been far less intimidating.

“I have a life,” Ellipse spat, “and as certain as I am that I could turn this into a kidnapping case, I would rather not lose five months of work.”

The tubai gripping her wrist stepped forward, and Ellipse winced at the way her shoulder twisted. The man came in close, kneeling to get a better look at her face, and Ellipse wondered if she could get a decent chomp on his nose. He reached out, took her chin in one hand, and swung her face to one side.

“Similar eye shape,” he mused, “though you would have to ask a gato to be sure.” The man tilted her chin up next, and Ellipse’s eyeballs ached from trying to glare at him from the corners of her eyes. “It would be interesting to see you with the old haircut.”

Clearly glaring was not enough. Ellipse stilled in the tubai’s grasp and allowed herself to sink, forcing the man to bend over further to continue examining her. Slowly, she twisted sideways, until her hips were perpendicular to the ground and her arm no longer felt like it might pop out of its socket. She clutched her trumpet close to her chest and waited.

“I have to wonder though, why your jaw is so different. I heard rumors that Andra’s birth gen-

Ellipse swung her leg out and caught the man’s ankle. He toppled, dragging her face with him, and she yelped when the tubai twisted her arm in retaliation.

“Stop that,” the other tubai ordered, squatting to help up the earthling. Ellipse jerked forward to try and escape while her opponents were down, but her aching shoulder kept her in place.

Surely she could get out of this. Ellipse kicked out again, and her heel struck the tubai’s side. She managed to make them tip sideways, but the tubai’s only reaction was to take hold of her foot. Heck. Now, unless she dropped the trumpet, she was down to one limb.

Gritting her teeth, Ellipse watched as the man began to stand, and decided that planning out her moves was worthless. She set her trumpet on the ground, slid it towards the door, and thrashed. Somewhere in the tangle of arms and legs, she managed to snag a deep breath, and then she screamed too, as high and loud as she could.

The earthling man reached up to cover his ears, and the tubai holding Ellipse’s leg loosened their grip. Immediately, she pulled her feet to the ground. The moment she had a semblance of footing, she threw herself forward and up, and the tubai holding her arm jerked off balance. Two steps later, Ellipse had shaken them off, and she raced for the exit. As she pushed through the door, she swooped down and picked up her trumpet, almost as an afterthought.

She burst into the main hallway like a bullet, legs pounding so hard on the glass floor that Ellipse had a fleeting thought about falling into the vacuum of space. With her free hand, she shoved passersby out of her way, and every time she called out a ‘sorry’ over her shoulder, she checked for the bounty hunters. The day-tubai she could spot easily; their white, skeletal figures stood out among the crowds of night-tubai, and their height put them above pretty much every other species around. The earthling she had a little more trouble finding.

Ellipse passed back into the shipping sector and searched for a place to lay low. She only had so much endurance, and the bounty hunters could probably outlast her.

Up ahead, a line of steel-blue crates slid off the central conveyor belt. Colorful saur pushed the crates away, towards a ship about the size of the Conics, and their multicolored swarms made it difficult to pinpoint anything happening right behind them.

As she passed the saur, she swerved left and jumped, landing smack in the middle of the conveyor belt heading in the opposite direction. She looked around to see if anyone was watching, and then leapt to the belt rolling in her original direction and ducked behind a crate. Tentatively, she poked her head above the top of the box and searched the hall for the bounty hunters.

The two tubai tromped towards her through a forest of hydrogen floaters, all of whom flashed in indignation as the bounty hunters pushed them out of the way. The earthling was close behind them, fists tight around the chain of those handcuffs. His face was red with anger, and he kept jumping up and down, trying to see what his partners could.

Ellipse crawled off the conveyor belt and crept alongside her hiding crate. A crew of half-wilted specifus shot her odd looks, but she ignored them and threw another glance over her shoulder. The tubai were closer now, and the man had disappeared into the chaos.

She passed the Conics’s dock about a hundred meters later and sighed in relief when she saw the loading door rolled all the way to the floor. The side door where Focci had kicked her out was still shut, but hopefully enough time had passed that he would let her back in.

To throw off her pursuers, Ellipse kept walking, past three more docks, until she came across a particularly busy section of the hallway. Other earthlings unloaded racks of fabric from a ship called the Mingzhu, and Ellipse made a wide, twisting U-turn by attempting to blend in with the workers. To a day-tubai, she might not look much different from other black-haired earthlings.

Once she had turned around, she craned her neck to see across the hall again. She could not see the tubai now; whether they had given up or outsmarted her, Ellipse had no idea. Still, if she could not see them, the bounty hunters probably could not see her, so she matched pace with a pair of Avians scurrying down the hall and headed back for her ship.

Only, as she slowed down to stop in front of her door, she noticed the earthling man. He stood with his back against the side door, still fidgeting with the handcuffs, and one of the tubai stood at his side, scanning the surroundings for earthling girls holding trumpets. Ellipse gulped down a gasp and pressed herself against the wall.

She could send a message to the boys. They could probably help her, corroborate her story of being plain old Captain Tibot. Taking a deep breath, she looked the other way, towards the earthling ship, and noticed a tall, white figure stalking her way. Hopefully that was not one of the hunters, but Ellipse was not about to take any chances. She brought up her watch and called Tejal’s tablet.

He answered five rings later with a long, suffering sigh. “What’s wrong?”

“Bounty hunters,” Ellipse hissed, “right outside the side door to our dock. I do not know how—no, why—they are there, but-

Tejal’s breath picked up, and he grumbled a very bad word. “You should honestly get a pixie cut or something. You’d never look like Elliott Bei then.”

“Are you going to help me or not?” Ellipse looked out at the hall again and decided that the tubai out by the other earthlings really was after her.

“Hold up. I told Focci. He’s going to open the door in thirty seconds.”

“What?” Ellipse said. “What does that mean? What do I-

“Just play along,” Tejal said. Then he hung up, and Ellipse snarled at the ‘end call’ text on her watch screen.

She made a beeline for the dock and reached the door just as Focci flung it open. The earthling bounty hunter stumbled forward, and he would have taken a few more steps had his tubai partner not held him back.

“Why are you lurking outside my dock?” Focci asked, his voice dark with anger. If Ellipse did not know better, she might have mistaken the new timbre for a drop in octaves.

The day-tubai took a lurching step towards the door. “We are looking for Elliott Bei and believe she is hiding as Ellie Tibot, the captain of your ship.”

“Preposterous,” Focci replied. “We have a bounty hunter in our crew. If Ellipse was secretly a criminal, she would be in jail by now.”

“Maybe your bounty hunter is bad at their job,” the man sang back.

“He is quite competent,” Focci retorted. “You know the crew that brought in the first Independent Titan attackers?”

The man paled, and the day-tubai turned a little purple.

“Mm, that is what I thought. Now, if you would just let my captain past?” Focci shook his gills pompously. “She is standing right behind you both.”

Ellipse tried not to let her smile go wonky when the bounty hunters turned to look at her, but she had a hunch she failed. Her eyebrows felt tight.

The earthling frowned, still suspicious, but gestured for her to walk forward. The day-tubai looked like they might do the same, but as soon as Ellipse passed by, they grabbed her.

“I know what I smell,” they said, clacking their pincers. “You can only pretend for so long.” And then the tubai tossed her through the door.

Ellipse landed on her knees, and she saw in the corner of her eyes when her territory passport landed by her feet. She did not look as Focci bid the hunters goodbye and slammed the door shut. Instead, she stared at the floor until the Tejal’s wheels came into view and Focci’s wide, fin-like hand wrapped around her shoulders.

“Thanks Focci,” she sang, thought it sounded more like a croak. “Thanks Tejal.”

“No problem,” Tejal said. “We should probably get going though. Can’t have those bounty hunters trying anything else.”

Focci said nothing. He just gave Ellipse one more pat on the back and began flopping towards the ship.