Book excerpt: My alien overlord is huge, all-powerful, and determined to claim me. Every human girl growing up on New Terrhan knows one thing ... that she will be taken by one or several Xalthurian males when she turns twenty-one. The Xalthurians are rough, domineering, and huge all over, but this is the deal our leaders struck so that they would provide our human colony with desperately needed supplies. If the baby born from our taking is a girl, we will be allowed to keep it. If the baby is a boy, it will be taken away, never to be seen again. That is the way it has always been on our small planet and that is the way it will always be. I should accept my fate, but I can't. When they come for my sister's baby boy, I dare to defy the alien, they call "Tel." As it turns out, "Tel" means prince. But rather than killing me for my insolence, the future overlord vows to return to the planet. When I am twenty-one. He's huge, all-powerful, and determined to claim me. Can I stop him? And how will I answer when the question becomes, do I want to?