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“Come on, give me the details!” She pleads, “You never even told me who she is. Do I know her? Is it scandalous?!” Seriously? I give her a look before grabbing a couple bowls of mixed nuts and walk around the tables to swap out with the empty ones. Gina pouts, but doesn’t persist. “Okay, fine! Don’t tell me!” She hollers after me earning her a few looks from our patrons.

I roll my eyes and do the rounds. I set a bowl down at a table with a pair of identical women sitting, but not drinking anything. “Did you want to order something?” I venture. We don’t typically do table service. People just come up to the bar and get their drinks from there, but the two girls look well off, maybe tourists off to see the national parks. The best type of tippers. One of them smiles up at me. She’s beautiful with sun kissed skin and blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her blue eyes sparkle with mischievousness. She shares a look with her twin who smiles more demurely.

“Not particularly.”

The words fill inside my head and then disappear without a trace. I blink and stare at the two women. “What'd you just say?” I ask feeling my defenses turn to high alert. Are they alien? Soldiers? Or had I just imagined the voice in my head?

“No, we don’t need anything yet, but thank you.” She says aloud. She keeps smiling at me. A part of me wants to reach out and dig into the depths of her mind and find out if she is alien or not, but the rational part of my brain tells me to not do anything suspicious, to just turn around and walk out the door. I opt for the latter.

I retreat back to the bar where Gina’s struck up a conversation with one of our regulars about craft beer. “Hey, I’m taking a fifteen.” I tell her without waiting to see if she’ll approve or 

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not. I toss my cleaning towel on the counter and make my way out the back door. My heart feels like it’s in my throat and I can barely catch my breath.

The evening air brushes over my skin as I go outside. I get into my truck and put the keys in the ignition, but I don’t start it. This is wrong. This isn’t how soldiers operate I try to rationalize through my panic. I recall the memory of the night the soldiers first came for me. There hadn’t been warning or beautiful women with teasing smiles. No, it had been a group of men all in uniform with weapons drawn and they had attacked without any provocation. My mother’s aching voice wrings through my head, her last words, just one word: ‘Run!’ as the sword ran her through and she stood there bleeding out, but still keeping the soldiers at bay so that Dad and I could escape.

I blink and try to clear the memory away. I could’ve just imagined the voice in my head, but that doesn’t seem likely. I try to remember what it had felt like talking to Dad through telepathy. It wasn’t usually words that were exchanged. It was thoughts and emotions and memories. I take a deep breath and try to settle my heart back down and quell the instinct to run.

If Dad was here he’d be yelling at me for lingering. Someone might’ve found me and instead of getting the hell out of here I’m sitting here debating about it. Stupid. But they’re not soldiers. Whatever they are, they’re not soldiers. If they were soldiers I’d be dead already.

“Did we scare you?” I nearly jump out of my skin as the voice of the girl startles me out of my thoughts. I look out my truck window and there they are. The talking one smiles brightly, her sister gives a half grin. “Sorry.” She apologizes, “It's not often we come upon our kind by chance.”