Tethered

Chapter 1: Aliens suck and you can quote me on that

Fourth day of weird being on Earth, I found him at a coffee shop in Queens. He was easy to find seeing as he was the only one with a blue string through the ceiling. It was a big string to—a big connection. This wasn't a guy who was here to stay. He had something important to get back to.

He was tall, with dark hair and a beard that only looked a few days old. He also looked about my age: but on alien planets, looking 20 and being 20 were two very different things. I didn't like him on principle. Aliens suck.

So far, he didn't have anything on Earth but small connections. One tie to the barista who was shooting him a very flirtatious glance. Alright, Jessica, stay in your place. The alien flashed her a grin, and I nipped the connection off of them both. Clean slate, they now feel nothing for each other.

The alien looked around, confused, while Jessica went back to cleaning mugs. I didn't like his awareness of my power. I didn't like this scene at all, actually.

A stranger approached from the side, and I could feel the waspy tendril sneak out of his body and rush towards mine. I could see in his eyes what he thought would happen. Hell, I could see my reflection in his eyes: all dark hair and green eyes and clean lines. I was passably attractive in a city of models. As Lou, my brother, used to say: we were Midwest 10's, New York 6's. Too bad we were native New Yorkers, unwilling to go anywhere else.

I snapped the connection, fizzed it out and watched the stranger's slow turn as he went back about his day. That was for the best.

When my attention focused back on the alien man, I found him staring right at me. That was typically a bad sign when it came to aliens, but this time, it worked in my favor. Alien guy and I needed to be friends. Well, he needed to think we were friends. And six months without talking to anybody really didn't leave me too adept at making friends, so his staring was good. He could stare away.

His eyes narrowed and I regretted that thought. He could stare away so long as it was in a positive "she's pretty and I should be friends with her" sort of way.

I narrowed my eyes back and raised my cup of coffee: the New Yorker way of asking someone out. He took a slow sip out a pink mug. It looked a little too small in his hand and his eyes seemed to stare through me. I hesitated to poke more around his connections, even as I could see the barista reaching back out again. We held eye contact while I subtly poked around the few small connections I could see. They were faint, stranger connections. Easy enough to get rid of.

I broke the ones that were old, days old and starting to fade anyway. He narrowed his eyes again. I broke the newer ones, probably made today. He put his mug on the table in front of him and leaned across the table, watching me. I forced a casual smile, took a sip of my coffee, and cleared out the final five connections. Easy. Jennifer the barista reached out again and I zinged her, pushing her tendrils back into her far enough that she looked taken aback and grabbed at her stomach. I winced a little. That did hurt sometimes. At least, the reviews were not positive on the tendril snappy thing. I did it once to—

That doesn't matter. A connection poking out of my back reached towards something, someone, and I pulled it back in. The less I thought about others, the easier it was to keep the connections at bay. Any connections that reattached could remember what happened in the initial connection. I made the mistake of dreaming about someone and when I woke, there they were, flying over me with a bright connection in their chest, trying to figure out where I'd been for the past three weeks. It's hard to get a superhero to forget you. They're stubborn.

The new alien hadn't taken his eyes off of me the entire time which I found disconcerting. Especially since there was no connection. I was connected to the ground, him to the sky. Nothing else. Even as we stared at each other, nothing reached out of me to connect to him. I tried pushing out a tendril, forcing it across the room. It stopped and retreated back. I frowned and pushed it out again, but it would go no further than three feet towards the stranger.