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About:
Emily has always known there’s something wrong with her.
At least, that’s what everyone keeps telling her.
She feels everything too much—the grief in the news, the tension in a room, the way the world is quietly driving off a cliff. When other people shrug and scroll, Emily takes the impact like shrapnel. Therapists call it anxiety. Her parents call it drama. Emily calls it proof she’s defective—because if she were normal, it wouldn’t hurt this much.
Then the impossible tears through her life.
The sky turns wrong. Something that isn’t human starts paying attention to her in ways that are terrifyingly specific. And the girl everyone agreed was “too sensitive” turns out to be the only one tuned to a signal no one else can hear.
Maybe she isn’t broken.
Maybe she’s been marked for a reason.
Suddenly, the universe is on the table: alien intelligences, buried histories, and a force whispered about in rune cards—Ser’ethra, a kind of love that can burn worlds…or save them. For the first time, Emily feels it: that bone-deep certainty she was born to matter. To change something. Maybe not the whole collapsing human race… but someone.
There’s just one problem.
Amanda—her ordinary, infuriatingly human best friend—is unraveling beside her. While doors crack open to let Emily step out of the wreckage and into something vast, terrifying, and meaningful, Amanda is still on the floor with blood on her hands and no way out.
If Emily goes, she might finally escape the helplessness that’s been eating her alive.
If she stays, she might drown in a world determined to destroy itself…and take them both with it.
ALIEN I AM is a gut-punching, emotional sci-fi thriller about loyalty, survival, and the cost of becoming what the universe needs.
Perfect for readers who love:
- YA alien abduction with heart
- character-driven science fiction
- near-future climate collapse tension
- fierce best-friend bonds, found family, and bittersweet hope
For fans of introspective teen sci-fi where the scariest thing isn’t the spaceship—it’s what you’re willing to risk for the person you love.
READ CHAPTER 2 – Inside the Spaceship
The blue light pulled me through the opening in the ship’s hull. Inside, it was nothing like an airplane. Then I saw them—seven beings reclined in the air, rotating slowly to face me. The walls behind them pulsed with light. The air smelled like a hospital.
I was lowered into warm liquid. My body panicked, thrashing, but the fluid held me suspended. I wasn’t drowning, though. It wasn’t water. It was thicker, slicker, and somehow breathable. My lungs filled, and instead of choking, I felt a strange relief—like the fluid was breathing for me.
Shapes moved around the chamber, tall and indistinct. Their limbs were elongated, heads oblong with two black ovals for eyes. Moisture glistened across their skin, and when one moved closer, I somehow knew she was female, younger like me.
That was when I felt the voice. Not in my ears. Inside my head. Calm, measured, perfectly clear.
<You are to be marked.>
My chest pounded. “Marked? For what?” I thought back at her.
No reply. But the figure lingered near me. She didn’t touch. She didn’t move her mouth. Yet I knew she was the source of the voice.
Another shape hovered at the chamber’s center—a large silver sphere the size of a refrigerator, suspended in air. Electrical sparks crawled across its surface, bright veins pulsing in rhythm with the slight hum that filled the room. I felt the sphere was aware, like it was listening to me breathe.
The figure near me tilted her head, rounded black eyes reflecting the glow of the sphere. I concentrated on her face, yearning for my sketchbook. Then the voice came again, softly, emotionless, inside my head.
<I am Neur. I will not harm you.>
I wanted to speak but my mouth wouldn’t move. I wanted to say please, let me go. Instead, what came out was a thought, not words: “Who are you people?” ◇
No response. Just silence and the hum of the chamber walls.
Then: <You will not understand. Not now. But you will receive a mark on your arm. It cannot be removed.>
Her hand extended, holding a thin rod, and pressed it into my forearm. It burned like a wasp’s sting.
I tensed. The fluid pressed tight against my body, holding me in place. My throat burned. My heart pounded faster until bursts of orange flickered at the edge of my vision. I thought I was passing out when the chamber began to dissolve around me.
When I opened my eyes again, I was in my bed in a fetal position, my pillow wet from sweat. An orange circle glowed on my arm, no bigger than my thumbprint.
The mark. ◇
Copyright © 2025 David Lawrence Markham
Alien I Am – All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 13: 978-0-9907587-6-1
