by Amanda Milo
“Here we go,” Aurora sighs—yet she doesn’t sound exasperated. She almost sounds amused. “What is it this time?”
“I can’t help but notice you’re leaving a fluid-like substance in your wake.”
Aurora stops walking and gawks at me. “What are you talking about?”
Tightly, I nod. “You look concerned and baffled. I’m concerned too.” I hold up my wrist for her inspection. “See where you touched me? It’s damp.” I peer at her, then my eyes widen. “Oh my. You’re glistening on your forehead.” My eyes move over her face. “And your upper lip.” Moisture is collecting to such a degree that a droplet rolls off her nose, right in front of me. “AHH!” I just barely check the urge to leap back.
Aurora slaps her damp fingers over her sticky-looking face. “Simmi… I’m sweating.”
I frown. “Perspiration?” I look her over. “Perspiration to an unusual degree, as in, diaphoresis?”
Aurora gasps, dropping her hand, eyes pinning me. “It’s not to an unusual degree!”
I point to the fluid-mark she left on my wrist. Then I point my finger at her nose. “You’re dripping.”
Aurora snorts, breaking into an unwilling-looking smile. “Sweating, Simmi, sweating!”
When I make a disagreeable murmur, she flicks my arm, stunning me and leaving yet another mark. “You’re sticky,” I complain, my tone dark even though strangely… I’m not entirely put off by the thought of an alien—this alien— secreting castoff fluids from her skin.
How… peculiar.
“We need to find water,” Aurora comments.
“Thank you,” I say.
Aurora looks up at me. “Why are you thanking me?”
I hold up my much-marked wrist again. “I would appreciate the opportunity to wash. Your desire is thoughtful.”
More nictating on the part of Aurora. Lots of flicks of her thin-skinned eyelids. I’ve noticed she does it in fits like this quite often. “You’re a trip. Has anyone ever told you that the universe doesn't revolve around you?”
I frown at her. “Scientists still argue if the universe revolves at all. If anything, most believe that planets revolve. Around each other, around moons, or suns, or—”
Aurora scratches at her yellowish hair that has darkened to golden. It looks darker because it’s damp… with her sweat secretions. I should be screaming. Instead, I’m watching her intently as she gazes up at me and says, “Suffice it to say, we could both use water, Simmi.”
“Oh,” I say. “Very good.” I take in her clothing once more. “Erreck shared with me that his Skynan liked to bathe frequently also. She also liked to wash her outer-skin garments.”
Aurora’s lips press together in a way I’ve come to understand means she’s near to smiling. And although her fits of smiles happen at odd times, I find I quite appreciate seeing them.
***
When we finally come upon water, Aurora is wild for it. It’s large, flowing—white-frothing in places, but fresh looking. Still, I would never do as she does: she almost runs into the body of liquid, careless of all dangers.
Thankfully, she stops a few steps from the riverbank, dropping down to bury her arms in the chilly-looking water, drinking, then bringing handfuls out to scrub her skin and her garment.
I’ve grown thirsty myself, so much so that I’m nearly willing to drink it straight from the source. Of course I don’t want to be quite that desperate, but that I’m tempted is quite something. “Do you by chance have a tincture of iodine on your person? Skynan carried all manner of surprises in her sloughable back pouch.” I eye the sleek line of Aurora’s humpless back, knowing I should be dismayed, but inexplicably enjoying the view.
Smirking, snorting, Aurora says, “Nooo. Sorry, Simmi—I must have left them in my other dress.”
I can tell this alien is teasing me. I sniff. “Malisons. I suppose your other dress also had your water canteen and boiling pot?”
“Why yes—yes, I believe it did—wouldn’t you know it? They were right with my satellite phone, transporter keys, and our rescue team,” she claims, laughing.
Shocking us both—most of all me—I laugh too. Resigned, I trudge to the riverbank, kneel beside her on tall, wild grasses (teeming with all manner of insects, no doubt) and with her shoulder brushing my ribs, we drink together.
CHAPTER 8
Hunger aches around the pool of cold water in my stomach, and no doubt Aurora is experiencing the same because she’s clutching at her soft-skinned belly like it pains her too.
Or—and this is an equally likely scenario—whatever bacterium breeds in the water is fast-acting enough that we’re feeling the beginning pangs of gastrointestinal agony before we perish from dysentery.
We’ve followed the river, staying close enough to it to drink again if we get the urge, though thankfully my thirst feels quite quenched for now, thanks to the ache.
Aurora’s looking across the river, lost in thought, I think, when her eyes grow wide. “Simmi! Do you see that?”
My cardiac rhythm kicks up. “Where? What is it? Does it have teeth?”
She smacks my arm. “Quit freaking out. It’s an apple tree!”
“Oh.” I rub my arm—not that it hurts. It’s just a reaction, I suppose. Until I was taken captive, no one’s ever taken to striking me as their personal hobby. I daresay it may be Aurora’s hobby. She’s flicked me, pinched my nares, and now this.
Strange pleasure socks me harder than Aurora’s playful swipe when she reaches up, and rubs at the spot where she struck me.
For a moment, nothing hurts on me, anywhere.
“Ah…” I try to assemble my suddenly scattered thoughts. “What’s an apple tree, and why are we supposed to be excited about it?”
She gazes up at me as if she’s not sure if I’m being serious.
I decide to confirm my stance for her. “I’m being completely serious—I’m always serious. What is an apple tree and why is it important?”
She nictates. “Simmi, an apple tree is a safe tree, and that tree,” she points past me, “Is full of fruit that can feed us.” Her eyes narrow. “Stop looking at me like that. It’s fruit, not poison.”
“Perhaps to you. We don’t know if apples will poison me,” I point out.
“Simmi. Come on. Apples don’t poison anybody unless you’re Snow White.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. Look, we have to cross the river to get to the bank on the other side. Can you swim?”
I drag us both back from the edge of the water, I rear up so fast.
“Simmi,” Aurora growls.
“There must be a safer place to cross,” I argue. “Perhaps these beneficial trees we see are actually situated on a small peninsula, and we merely need to find the optimal area to cross. I strenuously urge you to continue searching.”
“We’ve walked how far following this already and there hasn’t been anything.” Aurora points to the clear rushing water. “Look under the surface. Can you see the rocks? Someone’s made a bridge with them. If we’re careful and don’t fall in, we can walk across.”
A wheezing starts in the back of my throat.
It’s panic, but Aurora’s eyes narrow and she talks over the sound. “I don’t know when the last time was that they fed you, but it’s been a while for me, and I won’t be able to go on much longer if I don’t get some food.”
I pause, staring at her as new horrors occur to me. “Our captors fed me while I was unconscious?!”
Aurora smacks herself in the face.
I rationally begin to point out my concerns. “How did they manage this? Did you recognize the food? What if it didn’t agree with me? I have a very sensitive system, I—”
“Simmi, if you start making the scary noises again, I’m going to hit you.” She yanks on our knitted hands, nearly jerking me off balance enough that I could have slipped on the bank and landed in the water. I mean, I don’t lose my balance, but I could have. She has a startling lack of concern for safety. I
can hear the water, smell the water—wild water, unfiltered water, bubbling in eddies and whorls.
Fingers flick me on my forearm plates, and I flinch. “Ow!”
One of Aurora’s brows rises. “Did it hurt? Are you physically fine? Are you paying attention to a single thing that I’m saying? This is important.” Aurora’s voice is so patient and rational it’s difficult to believe she just flicked me.
When I rub my chitin with injured dignity, she sighs, and begins rubbing it with me, our fingers brushing. After a moment, her patient gaze turns pointed, so I know whatever she’s about to lecture, she believes it’s meaningful. “I can’t swim, so if I drown, pull me out, and you have my permission to perform CPR.”
“Drown!!! Ah—no, no, no! W-what’s ‘CPR’? Please don’t do this, Aurora. You can’t rely on me, oh galaxies above! I’m begging you—”
Aurora is unmoved. “Yeah, ‘drown.’” She widens her eyes at me. “If you fish me out of the water because it looks like I’m sleeping, that’s bad.”
I pull back, despite her trying to stop me. “Is that some sort of twisted human joke?” She clings on to my arm, gripping me as if she intends to keep me in place. I rear back in panic—and so easily drag her with me, that both of our eyes go wide. I stare at her, realizing with shock that I’m strong enough to escape her wily human grip after all.
She shakes the surprise right out of her expression, and kicks off one of her sandals. “Crash course: CPR is where you pinch my nose shut and put your mouth on my mouth and force your air into my lungs to make me start breathing again.” She releases my arm, kicking off her other sandal before she steps into the water.
Now that she’s not trying to hold me in place by the bank’s edge, I can feel how upset I’ve become at the loss of her touch. I reach for her hand. “Aurora, don’t!”
She tries to untangle our fingers and huffs when mine dance frantically to reknit with hers. I stress, “You have to remain safe and continue to act as our expedition leader. Aurora, without you and your superior direction, I’d die out here—”
“No you wouldn’t, Simmi.”
“Yes I would! I would! I’m not courageous like you—”
Aurora’s head snaps up as if she’s surprised.
I continue to rant-wail. “There’s just no telling what I wouldn’t have been able to endure, like that first touch from the mosquito swarm—”
“Simmi!” she squawks, reluctance coating the word even as she starts—inappropriately—chuckling in the face of my panic. “You have to get a grip. You’re an apex predator. You’d be fine without me—”
“An apex predator? You MUST be jesting!”
She lets our connected hands drop. “I’m not. Think of yourself as a giant, dangerous-looking lion.”
Stubbornly, I rear my head back, shaking it. “Willpower alone doesn’t overcome facts. I have no idea what a lion is, but I can tell you that even if I think of myself as a taller—” I cast about for an example we’d both be able to share in our minds, being that we’re beings from completely different planets “—a taller version of a chipmunk all day, it’s still not going to serve to turn me into a fierce and deadly predator,” I point out.
“Well not if you’re thinking of yourself as a chipmunk,” she drawls slowly, before she bursts into one of her fits of laughter.
I stare down at her in consternation.
She only wheezes up at me and laughs harder.
Unfortunately, just as each time she’s been overcome with one of these fits, my attack of panic is diluted. This is a problem because once her laughter dies down and she sees that I’ve relaxed, she wipes at her face with her free hand, shrugs off her satchel’s shoulder strap, and assures, “Whew, you’re really more like a neurotic tomcat than a lion, but,” she pats my wrist, “you’ve got it going on for fierce, Simmi. You’ll be fine.”
“Flattery will not change my stance about this!” I warn her, urging her to stay with me by the power of my strident stare.
She takes another step into the water and manages to break our fingers’ connection. With each shift of her feet, brown clouds billow up under the surface.
“Oh my Creator, you can actually see the bacterial clouds with the naked eye,” I mutter in agitation.
“You’re exaggerating. You can’t see bacteria without a microscope.”
“Not true!” I correct. “We’ve discovered bacterium whose individual cells are visible by the naked eye due to the fact that they grow—”
Aurora steps up on an underwater slime-covered rock, and at the very moment she does, a part of the green, stringy-looking guck chooses to slough off under her foot—and I shriek.
Aurora slips but catches herself, and whirls around. “What!?”
Eyes wide, I reach for her. “You could have fallen—that was ghastly! Here, come back here with haste. Fit your sandals back on and perhaps your feet won’t be entirely contaminated—”
I gasp when she only turns away from me and keeps going. “BAD HUMAN! BAD!” Skynan didn’t listen to my safety advice either—what is it with these impetuous, dauntless aliens? “Are all of you averse to taking simple direction?”
She snorts and starts giggling—and I stop chastising her only because I’m afraid I’ll distract her. With each step, she’s slipping and sliding. She’s perilously unsteady.
Somehow, my stress levels recede slightly at her confidence (or possibly because of her relaxed and amused demeanor) and this is the only reason I don’t hyperventilate on the bank as she continues across the series of large underwater bridge boulders.
It could also largely in part be due to the fact that I simply stop breathing altogether. I don’t inhale again until she’s successfully crossed over.
When she’s standing on the opposite bank, waving to me, I nearly collapse from relief and terror. These two emotions make for an uncomfortable combination, with opposing instinct cues and I find I’m feeling unsteady—
“Simmi,” she calls over the rush of the questionably safe water supply, “you’re doing great!”
“Exactly how did your people create their definition of ‘great?’” I shout back, incredulous. “It is an antonym to whatever term you think—”
“Here! Catch!”
Having no coordination and absolutely no practice—sports were never one of my pursuits and I avoided them with aggressive averseness—I’m stunned when I do indeed fumble but catch the fruit that Aurora has risked her life to throw at me.
She plucks one for herself and dusts it off on her chest, which, while I appreciate the sentiment that she’s attempting to brush away microscopic organisms, whatever’s clinging to her clothing is surely no better.
She bites into the fruit.
Reluctantly, I drop my gaze to my own fruit, and eventually, with great reluctance, I bite into mine too.
It’s surprisingly good. I pace along the bank, catching the next two apples that she throws me—much to my shock and much to her cheering—and I begin to hope our captors fed me apples while they transported us. That wouldn’t be so bad. Nutritionally deficient, unless fruit is very different on an outer planet, but at least it tastes of decent quality.
However, this hopeful theory still doesn’t answer the question of precisely how they administered my food whilst I was lying unconscious.
“Simmmmi,” Aurora calls. “We doing okay?”
Confused, I focus on her. “‘We?’ Are you doing okay? I am not. I—”
“Here!”
Already conditioned to mindlessly catch the food she tosses at my person, my tirade is cut off before I can really gain a start on it and I’m opening my hands to capture the apple that sails at me.
“Have another apple,” Aurora says so, so reasonably that I find myself breathing deeper, slower. It helps that she’s smiling so encouragingly at me. “I’m almost done.”
“All right,” I mutter, and bite through the crunchy hull of the thing.
“Ready?” Aurora calls, and my b
ite of chewed food gets stuck in my throat because this time she’s not throwing food projectiles at me—she’s beginning the trek back across the rushing brook.
She’s holding her filled skirt firmly bound up in her hand, the apples making her look as if she has an abdomen full of a good number of heavy, round eggs. She even knots it in place, making a sort of basket to keep them secure.
She looks far too weighted down—and I no more than have this thought when she slips and goes under.
CHAPTER 9
“NOOO! Aurora!!!” Malisons! I can’t swim either! I’ve never been submerged in a body of water of any kind.
Formerly (as in, the last day I recall before my abduction), I’d never have thought I’d risk myself to save anyone. Not dorm neighbors I’ve known since the daycycle I moved in, not coworkers—well, perhaps Erreck. And I suppose yes, Skynan. I’d at least give the idea of rescue a fair thought.
But without so much as a self-risk assessment, without hesitation for my own safety, I leap in after Aurora.
However, instead of getting sucked under the water like Aurora, my body collides with the surface, resulting in a loud, crashing SLAP!
Owwwww... It feels as if I’ve dived onto freshly-laid plascrete. OWWWW.
Stunned, my body floats for a moment before I can get my limbs to cooperate, but when I do, I begin to panic—because I can’t sink under the water! I don’t sink?! This revelation would be welcome in almost every scenario if I were to land in a rushing body of water except for when I desperately need to reach Aurora!
Think, Simmi, Think! It would seem that if I bring my hands together, form an arrow and kick my feet, can I break the surface and shoot under the water rather than just across, oh, why oh why isn’t this working. Don’t panic, don’t panic, Aurora needs you—
Something bobs to the surface. It’s just for a moment, but before I can even determine what it is, or how much bacteria it might have, I lunge for it.
It’s Aurora.
I gasp in relief—and inhale a lungful of water. Idiot! I chastise myself, coughing and knowing we’re both going to die because I’m no rescuer. As I kick with my feet, I barely move—that is, until I whip my tail in agitation.