by Lauren Esker
He put the last book on a shelf (he'd been stacking them on the basis of color, mostly), and then went to her window and looked out. Darkness had fallen while they had cleaned the room and themselves, and the afternoon sunshine had been replaced by a soft evening mist. Her room was on the second floor, above a paved street on which ground vehicles whisked past with their lights gleaming on the damp pavement. Something round bobbed past; it wasn't until its holder furled it at a streetcorner that he realized it was a pedestrian carrying something to keep rain off.
It felt strange to be on a planet somewhere quiet, somewhere contemplative. Usually when he went to planets, it was the nightclubs and markets and underworld hangouts that he looked for. He went for entertainment and diversion, or he went for business, to buy or sell something illicit.
Just standing here at the window, looking down on this planet's people going about their normal lives ... it wasn't something he did much. Especially wearing his true face.
"This must seem awfully boring to you compared to your normal life."
He looked around as Claudia arrived at his elbow. She passed him a steaming mug with a string hanging down the side.
"I used to dream about a life of glamour and adventure, you know," she said quietly, wrapping her hands around her mug. "My sister and I would play at being pirates and Ghostbusters and explorers. And today I found out what it's really like, and I ..."
She turned away quickly, but he was horrified to see her eyes swimming with tears.
Damn it, damn it, damn it. His hand moved as if of its own accord, started to reach for her shoulder, then fell away. What comfort could he offer? He was the one who had gotten her into this.
It was supposed to be a one-night stand, damn it. A little harmless fun for both of them. He hadn't meant to draw her into danger, any more than he'd meant to see her again.
And yet here he was.
Here they both were.
Claudia straightened her shoulders and took a deep breath. "Come sit down. I think it's time for you to tell me what's happened to me."
Not What you've done to me, which he thought was more than charitable. "All right," he said. "I'm not sure where to begin."
Claudia sat on the couch and curled her legs under her. "Oh, I don't know—maybe we could start with how I can walk through a hole in the air from Seattle to Louisiana and back again. That's not possible. Why can I do it now? What's this symbiont everyone keeps talking about?"
Here we go, he thought. He could tell her the truth or spin her a lie—or somewhere in between.
He had never been good at truths. Even the skin he wore was frequently a lie. But he sat on her couch in his true skin, and the way she looked at him made him want to give her truths he had shared rarely, or never at all.
"It's an artificial organism," he said. "It was made by, or perhaps found by, a race of people called the Rhuadhi, on a planet far away from here. It's an energy creature that draws a small amount of energy from you in order to do what it does. That's why you keep getting so hungry."
"An organism." She looked baffled. "Like an ... animal?"
"Sort of. Not like the animals you know. But it is alive."
"Where is it?"
Skara hesitated. Then he raised a hand and held it out. He touched a finger to her chest.
Claudia stared at him.
"Inside you," he said.
Nine
"Inside me?!"
The panic that she'd almost mastered rose in her chest again, threatening to overwhelm her.
"Calm down," Skara said quickly. "Calm down. Look. I'll show you."
He set the cup of tea aside, untouched, and held out his hands together with the palms up. A soft glow began to materialize over his cupped hands.
"What is that?" Claudia demanded, pulling away from him. "Where is that coming from?"
"It's coming from my cuffs." He banished the glow with a wave of his hand and turned his hands over to display the wide gold bands at his wrists. "I don't think your people have them. They're energy weapons, communication devices, and a lot more. I drained mine earlier today shielding us, but they've recharged enough from my body that I can show you a few things. Look."
He cupped his hands again. Above them, the glow coalesced into a small human figure. The spine was glowing brightly.
"Okay, that's cool," Claudia said, "but what am I supposed to be seeing here?"
"I'm showing you where the symbiont lives." He rotated the figure and zoomed in on the spine, enlarging it to show a tracery of finer lines underneath the surface. "It's in your nervous system. That's probably why you can understand me now. You don't have a translator. The symbiont is translating for you."
Claudia stared at the hologram. If ever there was a time to lose her mind in epic panic, this was probably it. And yet, it was almost more of a relief. She knew what was happening to her now. Yes, it was completely bonkers; it violated everything she'd ever thought was true of the world. But she wasn't nuts. There was an explanation for what was happening to her, however bizarre.
"Where did it come from?" she asked. "Did you do this to me?"
"Er ... sort of? Apparently?" He actually looked sheepish. "I assumed you took it from me on purpose. But clearly that's not true, since you didn't even know what it was."
"Of course I didn't take it! Why would I take it! Why would I think you had some kind of alien thing in you? Why would I want it?!"
She was starting to hyperventilate. Skara banished the hologram and rested his hands gently on her upper arms. "Calm down. Claudia. Breathe. You'll spill your tea."
She had forgotten she still had the full mug in her hands. And she hadn't taken the tea bag out. "Excuse me," she said, and hopped up and marched into the kitchen. She dropped the tea bag in the trash and then stood with her hands on the edge of the sink for a moment.
"Claudia ..." Skara said from behind her.
"How do you get it out?" she demanded, turning around and holding her hands out to him. "I want it out!"
"Um ... that's kind of the ..."
An abrupt knock at the door interrupted him. Skara whipped around, holding out his hands in a sort of martial arts defensive position, standing between Claudia and whoever was at the door. A curving sphere of faint green light glimmered in the air in front of them.
"It's the pizza guy. Please don't kill him, or ..." She looked skeptically at his empty hands. "Whatever you were going to do."
The green light vanished. "Careful," Skara said.
Claudia approached the door cautiously. The knock had dislodged it somewhat from its precariously-stuck-in-place position, and she could see the pizza delivery person, a teenage girl in a Seahawks cap, looking at her dubiously through the gap between door and wall. "Lady, your door ..."
"I know. I was burgled." She started trying to pivot the door enough to get the pizza inside without toppling it on herself, then remembered she didn't have her purse and in fact couldn't remember where in the cleaned-up mess she'd left it.
"Excuse me, I need to get your money—" she began, turned around and nearly ran into ... Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, still wearing her Clambake & Hoedown T-shirt and her pleated skirt.
"Get out of here!" she hissed at him, but he smiled at her, a flirty Skara-smile that now looked profoundly strange on a face she no longer associated with him. Then he smiled past her at the astonished-looking pizza girl. Claudia rolled her eyes so hard that they nearly rolled out of her head and went to find her purse.
When she came back, Skara had pivoted the door open enough to admit the pizza and was leaning on the splintered doorframe, smiling at the girl, who looked dazzled. Claudia pushed him unceremoniously out of the way and handed her a wad of bills.
"Is that your boyfriend? Does he speak English?" the girl wanted to know. "Do you know he looks exactly like—"
"No he's not, no he doesn't, yes he does, keep the change," Claudia chanted. She threw her back against the door and started trying to push it shut. Skar
a gripped its edge and helped her swing it back into place.
"Get yourself back to normal!" she whispered fiercely. "What are you doing?"
"Well, I couldn't let her see me as I normally am," Skara said in a reasonable tone.
"You could have stayed out of sight."
"I needed to make sure she wasn't a shapeshifter."
A shudder went through her. "Eat your pizza," she ordered, shoving the box into his hands, and went to get her tea.
When she got back from giving the tea a good spin in the microwave, Skara was on the couch and had shifted back to his natural purple look. It was oddly relieving seeing him that way. He looked up at her with a pizza slice in each hand and a splotch of grease on the front of the clambake T-shirt.
"How are you supposed to eat this?" he complained.
"Just like you are." She dropped a handful of napkins in his lap. "Don't get grease on my couch."
"Your couch was upside down not too long ago." But he mopped at the shirt and his hands, then folded his legs into a sort of half-lotus to confine the spillage to his lap. "How does one avoid burning one's tongue on the molten ... whatever this is?"
"Cheese. It's cheese. And you don't. It's part of the fun."
"Your planet is strange," he muttered, taking another bite.
"And you infected me with sexually transmitted teleportation, so it's not like you can talk."
Skara started to say something and then stopped, staring off into the distance. "That's it," he said to empty air rather than her. "That's why it went over to you. It makes sense now."
"What?"
"You're a baseline, Birthworld human," he explained incomprehensibly. "It's possible that the Rhuadhi invented the symbionts, but no one knows for sure, because they hate talking to outsiders. For all we know, it could have been the Founders themselves. Of course it prefers you."
Claudia gave him a long look. He stuffed the rest of the slice of pizza into his mouth.
"There were words I understood in all of that," she said at last.
Skara swallowed and wiped his hands on a napkin. "A very long time ago, aliens that we call the Founders came to your planet and took humans and animals from your world. They used that original stock to populate hundreds of other worlds throughout the galaxy, and created many new races of people, including my own. With me so far?"
"Uh ... I guess so. Wait." She gave him another critical look. "Are you saying your ancestors came from Earth?"
He spread his hands in a "ta-da!" gesture.
"You're purple! And you can grow wings!"
"Lab modifications. We don't know for sure, because the Founders are gone now, but we think it was all part of a big experiment. On some worlds, they adapted humans to survive among the alien plants and animals that already existed on the planet. My people, the Iustrans, must have been one of those, I suppose; as shapeshifters we can adapt to any world, no matter how harsh. On other worlds, they introduced entire ecosystems from Earth, and placed humans among them."
"You're ... human."
"Mostly," he said. "But you're entirely human. The original genetic stock taken by the Founders was limited, as you might expect. Your world has, what, millions of people? Billions?"
"Billions," she said faintly.
"As opposed to hundreds, or a couple thousand at most, that all humans in the galaxy outside your world are descended from. In fact ..." His eyes widened. Despite her confusion and growing irritation, Claudia couldn't help noticing the many fine gradations of color in his eyes, not just green but subtle gold and blue and purple, as well. "Maybe that's what the symbiont is for. Could it be? The teleporting might just be an incidental side effect to help it protect its host. Its actual purpose might be to help identify genetic diversity in a highly inbred population."
"Are you calling me inbred," Claudia said flatly.
"Not you. Me! As soon as I came in contact with you and we swapped fluids, so to speak—" He waggled his eyebrows at her. Claudia refused to give him the satisfaction of reacting. "—the symbiont recognized you as a superior host. When the symbionts were created, that might have been their actual function, to help identify individuals who were less inbred and more genetically different from the rest of the population. But over time the Rhuadhi got a monopoly on them and their original function has been forgotten. I just didn't know that they can also choose to leave a host if they find a more compatible one."
Claudia decided to skip over every stupid, unlikely, or incomprehensible part of that explanation (which was most of it) and focus on the important part. "So take it back," she said, holding out her hand impatiently.
"I can't."
"Why not? Because it 'chose' me? So talk to it! Get it to un-choose."
"I can't!" Skara said, and his voice cracked, his composure breaking right down the middle and giving her a glimpse of much more genuine emotions underneath—anger, desperation, fear. It caught her off guard, derailing her burgeoning frustration.
"But isn't that the entire reason you're here?" she asked. "Don't tell me you showed up on Earth just because you wanted another booty call. You're here for the same reason those bounty hunters are here, because you want to get the symbiont. So get it and go."
"It's not that simple. I thought it was. But it's not."
He took her hand—almost by accident, it seemed to her, an involuntary move that seemed to surprise him as much as it did her. "Claudia—" he began.
There was a tremendous thump on the roof. Dust and plaster sifted down from the ceiling.
They both looked up. "Is that a thing that normally happens here?" Skara asked.
"No ..."
The ceiling creaked. More plaster dust sifted down.
Claudia scrambled hastily to her feet. Skara held up his hand toward the ceiling and let out a hiss of dismay. "Guess who's here."
"No! No way! What'd they do, land their spaceship on the roof?"
The building's frame creaked louder.
"No way," Claudia repeated. "No fucking way."
Ten
Skara had been hoping they were out of commission for more than a couple of hours. They just had to be competent bounty hunters ... the worst kind.
"I think it's time for another portal—" he began, and then discovered he was talking to empty air. "Hey!"
Rustling and clattering came from the second room, which turned out to be a bedroom—or so he assumed; this one was still a mess, and getting messier as she flung wadded-up clothing into a bag.
"What are you doing? There are bounty hunters on the roof!"
"And this time I'm not leaving without an overnight bag!" she snapped. "Get my makeup kit from the—oh, you know what, never mind. Faster to do it myself."
"You need to make a portal or we are going to die."
"I'm going to make a portal, but first I need clean underwear!"
Skara planted himself between her and the door, and checked the charge on his nearly depleted cuffs. He could raise a shield, but it wouldn't last long. "You know, your priorities need some work. I'm just saying."
"Come back to me and talk about priorities when you've been wearing the same underwear for two days."
"I've done far worse than that," he muttered. There was a clatter of booted feet on the roof. "Portal now, Claudia!"
"I'm ready!" she yelped, shoving another handful of items into her bag. "Where should I go? I don't know where to go!"
"We need to get to my ship." He closed the bedroom door and planted his back against it. That would buy a few extra, all-important moments. "Can you visualize the place you were being held? The outbuilding?"
"I ... I don't know. I had other things on my mind." She flinched and looked up. "What was that?"
Feet on the stairs, he was pretty sure. Skara kept his voice calm with an effort. He hated being trapped. Hated it. "Doesn't matter where. Anywhere that's not here."
Claudia stood with one hand clutching the bag and her other one awkwardly held out in front of her, inde
cision written all over her face. "I—I don't—"
"Anywhere, Claudia!" With the symbiont, he'd gotten used to never having this feeling again: the feeling of being unable to get out.
Claudia kept darting wide-eyed looks at the door. It was clear that she had hit a decision-making freeze point: with too many choices, she could make none. Skara sympathized, but they didn't have time.
"Think of a place in this city," he told her. "A place you often go. A place you know well. Your workplace, perhaps?"
She drew a half-sobbing breath and nodded. Staring so intently at the air in front of her that she nearly went cross-eyed, she moved her hand in a slow half-circle, and before it, the air shimmered and vibrated and began to open.
Skara watched in fascination. Every person, it seemed, had their own way of doing it. Claudia's fingers fluttered in a delicate dance, as if weaving the portal out of nothingness. He wasn't entirely sure she even knew she was doing it. Her eyes were fixed, unblinking, on the slowly widening opening.
There was a tremendous crash from the main room, as of the door being flung off its hinges again. Claudia's concentration broke and she gave a soft cry as the portal winked out.
"Claudia, we need that portal." Skara struggled to keep the panic out of his voice. He raised his shield to seal the bedroom door shut, knowing even as he did so that between the cuffs' low charge and his own physical condition, he couldn't hold them off for long. "You can do it."
Maybe it was the encouragement, maybe it was her own desperation, but Claudia flung her hand out and suddenly the portal was there, shimmering in midair. Skara couldn't see what was on the other side, except that it was dark, but it hardly mattered; it couldn't be worse than what was here.
He hurled himself forward, grabbed Claudia, and threw them both through the portal with his shields around them—just as the bedroom door exploded inward in a blizzard of wood shards. There was a male yell, a furious curse from the female bounty hunter, and then the portal winked out.