Excerpt from The Other, by Marilyn Peake

As he returned to the middle of Razkazeel’s office, two humanoid creatures with green skin, large black eyes and bald heads followed behind him. At first, I thought they were nude. It took me a few seconds to realize they were wearing skintight green bodysuits.

My head exploded in pain and images.

Creatures bending space-time, folding one era onto another, pods skipping from one point to the next. Earth dying over and over again. Rivers drying up. Glaciers melting. Oceans rising into monstrous waves. Tsunamis drowning us, our screams swallowed by the void of death.

I found it difficult to breathe. I drowned in images, began losing my mind, lost the boundaries I had carefully constructed about who I was.

The shorter of the two aliens approached me.

My heart beat against my chest like a trapped bird.

As if in a nightmare, I tried to scream, but couldn’t get my throat to emit noise. It was as though I had become paralyzed. I don’t usually succumb to fear, but this was different than any terrifying situation I’d ever experienced in my entire life. These beings had taken over my brain, hacked into it and planted thoughts and images I couldn’t block. The loss of control over my own mind had stripped away my ability to function.

One of the green creatures bent down close to my face. She gazed into my eyes. I say she because her humanoid facial structure appeared feminine. Her eyes were reflective. I saw myself within the shiny black structures, looking small and petrified.

She reached a hand with long green fingers toward me. Placing her hand on the top of my head, she sang in what sounded like an ancient language.

My headache disappeared and my body relaxed. A sense of peacefulness and utter calm took over.

And then she communicated with me in the way that Crystal and I had communicated so many years before: through telepathy. She told me she was in danger of being captured and unable to ever return home. She was frightened that she would be experimented upon.

Her thoughts were clear and separate from each other, not the earlier chaotic jumble of information that had surpassed my ability to process.

I wondered if Nat was experiencing the same thing.

She communicated: “Being a twin, your mind is more open to this. You’ve had experience with this type of communication before.”

That freaked me out. I did not like her reading my mind. Crystal had been my identical twin. Our communication still held its own kind of privacy. We had split from the same egg. No one from the outside could break into our shared thoughts. Not even my mother who had born our single egg and birthed our tiny separate bodies into the world.

The creature with green skin and mesmerizing black eyes read my discomfort and backed off. She sent me information about herself instead: My name is Paloma.

I thought: Wait. Paloma? That’s an Earth name, a name used today on Earth.

Paloma communicated: Yes, I’m not from another planet. I’m from another time.

Again, I saw the bending of space-time. And this time, maps. There were complex maps and graphs…coordinates, places for crossing over from one space-time location to another.

— 

Buy the book from https://books2read.com/u/49MOeJ