by Lauren Esker
He was desperately, achingly tired, but he still wandered around a bit more before settling down. Sarah hadn't brought him any food or water, but he found a tub of clean-looking water in the hoofed animal's pen and drank it from his cupped hands. Water that had already been sampled by the animal-body half of a Hnee didn't bother him; he'd had worse. When his thirst was slaked, he dipped palmfuls of water and washed some of the blood off his face and arms.
The animal watched him from large, liquid eyes. Its ears swiveled forward when Rei thanked it quietly for the water. He doubted whether it was intelligent enough to understand conversation, and it wouldn't know his language anyway, but he felt that it never hurt to be polite.
He was too tired to be hungry yet, though he knew he'd be ravenous in the morning, after his body's healing factor had worked all night. Maybe he could eat some of the animals' feed. If he really got desperate, he could eat one of the fluffy domestic fowl, but that seemed like a rude way to repay Sarah for helping him.
But right now, sleep was the biggest priority. He could have suppressed his body's need for a couple of days, but he'd also learned that it was a good idea to take advantage of any opportunity for sleep when possible. And it would help him heal.
He took the blanket up to the loft, feeling safer on high ground, and curled up in a pile of hay in front of the loft's open end.
It had been a long time since he'd slept anywhere but a bunk on a spaceship or station. The only times he'd spent any amount of time on planets in the last fifteen years was during infantry combat operations, and as a pilot, he hadn't done very many of those.
He'd forgotten how quiet planets could be, how steady they were underfoot. There were always sounds on a ship, always the hum and vibration of the engines, always distant voices and the clanging and banging of mechanics elsewhere on the ship.
He kept feeling as if the pile of hay under him was swaying. Knowing it was only his own inner ear trying to cope with the lack of motion didn't help much.
Sleep, he ordered himself, closing his eyes, but that didn't help any more than the other hundred thousand times he'd done it throughout his life. Some of his septmates, the other boys and girls he'd gone through training with, had the enviable ability to fall asleep instantly, anytime, anywhere. Rei couldn't. Even as exhausted as he was, his mind kept spinning, his gritty eyes coming open whenever he closed them.
He gazed out at the stars, but that didn't help. It only made him wonder about the battle going on around one or another of those tiny pinpricks of light, where Rook's ashes were scattered in a glowing orbital trail, and perhaps Lyr's as well.
He didn't recognize the prickling in his eyes and the tightness in his throat, at first, for what it was. It had been a long time since he'd cried: his septmate Haiva's death, to be exact.
Lyr and Rook had held him, that time. They'd all wept together in the privacy of their quarters, the last three survivors of their sept.
Who would hold him now?
The stars blurred and swam in front of him. He swallowed the sobs, forcing himself to be silent with the habits of a lifetime. In silence, he cried for his dead brothers and sisters.
Once there had been seven besides him. They had been his lifeline, his courage, his heart. Three sisters, four brothers. Lyr, Haiva, Skara, Rook, Kite, Selinn, and Thorn.
Now he was the only one left.
Something jostled his ankle. Rei flinched away from it, though it had been too soft and tentative to set off his combat reflexes. He sniffed and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, wincing as his hand brushed across the healing scrapes and bruises.
The light touch came again, and then small paws pressed into his leg as the gray and white cat stepped on him, climbing into his lap.
"Well, hi there," he murmured. He didn't know how to pet a cat, but he remembered that Haiva used to like having her ears rubbed, and Galateans were made from cat and human DNA. When he rubbed the cat's ears, she arched into his hand, vibrating softly.
He was glad she didn't have Haiva's pattern of leopard spots. That would have been too much to bear.
Yet somehow it felt a little like having his dead sister back. As if she was trying to comfort him from beyond the grave.
With the cat purring gently in his lap, he closed his eyes, and was finally able to sink beneath the tidal wave of sleep.
5
___
S ARAH GAVE UP ON sleeping around 5 a.m. after waking every half hour from dreams of meteors mixed with half-remembered scenes from science fiction movies. It was still dark, and the thermometer outside the window read just above freezing. She dressed quickly and went down the stairs on stealthy sock feet to avoid waking her dad. When she grabbed one of last night's biscuits from the lidded tin on the countertop, she realized guiltily that she'd forgotten to offer any food to Rei last night.
What did aliens eat? She didn't want to poison him. For all she knew, his people were like pandas or koala bears, and only ate a single type of plant that grew on his home planet. Or maybe, as space travelers, they could no longer survive on regular food at all; perhaps he needed an intravenous nutrient formula or something like that.
But he seemed so much like a human. He had teeth like human teeth, not a beak or a specialized apparatus for consuming pollen. It was possible that everything on Earth would be poisonous to him or that he had extreme food taboos, but if he stayed on Earth for awhile, he'd have to eat the local food or he was going to starve to death.
She loaded a plate with samples of every different kind of food she could find in the kitchen: a biscuit, sliced ham, leftover bacon, an orange and an apple from the fruit bowl, saltine crackers, a carrot, a cup of yogurt, a few half-stale shortbread cookies from Grandma Metzger's last Christmas care package, some slices of cheddar cheese, and a handful of pepperoni. There should be something here he could eat.
Sarah examined her handiwork, and then another thought occurred to her. She hurried to the living room and pulled books off the shelves until she found the one she wanted. Then she stamped into her boots in the kitchen. The sheepskin coat was still damp, so she put on an oversized denim jacket of her dad's instead, and opened the door with her elbow.
She loved this time of night, the crisp final hours before dawn crawled up the sky. Clouds had rolled in to blot out the stars, and the predawn darkness was nearly absolute. The air felt sharp as a knife blade when she sucked it in through her nose, breathing out through her mouth in curls of steam.
She knocked lightly before opening the barn door, wondering if Rei even knew what knocking meant. The interior of the barn was dark and perfectly silent except for the sleepy murmuring of the chickens. Sarah took a careful step inside. If he was asleep, she'd leave the plate and go start her morning chores—
"Sairah," said a soft voice at her elbow. She stifled a gasp and nearly dropped the plate.
"Jeez! You're so quiet!" She could just see the glimmer of his eyes and the silver tracery on his skin. "I'm gonna turn the light on, okay? Light?"
"Light," he said quietly. "Goodnight, Sairah."
She shut the door and flicked the light on. He was still wearing her dad's shirt over the gray coverall, and his hair was tousled, with straw in it. His eyes sparkled at her; he looked amused. The swelling and bruising around his black eye was noticeably less than it had been yesterday.
"Oh, yes, very funny, scaring me out of a year's growth, and as my dad would say, I don't have a lot of growth to lose. Are you hungry?" She set the plate on top of a barrel. "Food? Eat?"
She picked up a piece of ham and took a bite to demonstrate. His eyes tracked her movements, with a certain desperation in them; the spots on his skin blanched almost white.
"Eat," she said, pushing the plate toward him.
"Eat," he repeated softly. He picked up the ham and ate it rapidly in small, quick bites, flashing very white teeth. She was about to demonstrate the same process on another piece of food, to show him he could eat anything on the plate, but he
'd already grabbed the biscuit, so apparently he was figuring it out. And from the look of things, he was ravenous. Didn't they feed him on his spaceship?
Maybe he's a refugee. He might have traveled for a long time to get here.
Frustration at the language barrier nearly strangled her. How could they communicate? She wanted so desperately to ask him questions.
I wish universal translators weren't just science fiction ...
She felt like she should give him privacy to eat, but instead, she couldn't help watching him. With his head bent over the plate, he ate like a ... like a hunted animal, she thought. His eyes darted around, and he looked at her often, as if he feared she might tell him to stop.
Her gaze drifted to the silver collar around his neck. Did he escape from captivity? Perhaps someone had been abusing him.
They probably hadn't made a habit of starving him, though. She didn't think you got that kind of muscle and those smooth, athletic movements from being malnourished.
He also didn't wolf his food. He wasn't taking big enough bites to choke on. He was just eating very, very fast. Like he'd had manners drilled into him so thoroughly that he couldn't eat rudely even when he was desperately hungry.
He looked up again, met her eyes with a quick flash of his amber ones, and stopped in midbite. After swallowing, he pushed the plate toward her. "Sarah?"
"Oh, no, that food is for you."
But he showed no signs of resuming, even though he flicked a still-hungry gaze at the plate. There were crumbs on his bottom lip; she had an odd, quick urge to reach out with her thumb and brush them away.
"Okay," she said with a smile, wrenching her gaze away from his mouth, and picked up the apple. She pushed the plate back in his direction.
He didn't need any encouragement to finish the rest of it. The yogurt cup made him pause. At least he didn't try to bite through it; he knew it was packaging, just not how to open it.
"Here," Sarah said, opening it for him before realizing she hadn't brought a spoon. This didn't seem to faze him. He just dipped his fingers into it. Maybe they didn't have spoons on his homeworld.
And, okay, watching him lick yogurt off his fingers was unexpectedly distracting.
Sarah ate one of the shortbread cookies and grimaced. Dry as sawdust and just as tasty. Grandma Metzger always gave Sarah and her dad a big tin of them every Christmas. Maybe they tasted better if you'd grown up in the Depression.
Rei didn't seem to mind. He ate everything on the plate, including the orange, which he ate like an apple, biting through the peel. Sarah started to tell him to stop, but decided it didn't make enough difference to be worth trying to explain. After all, it was normal to eat an apple skin and all; why not an orange?
She wandered over to feed her apple core to Princess. The old dapple-gray mare was lying down in her stall, but put her head over the half-door to take the treat from Sarah's palm with her soft lips.
"So what do you think about having an alien in your barn, old girl?" Sarah asked, scratching the mare's forehead.
Princess blew out her lips and snuffled around Sarah's hand for more apples. She had a tremendous taste for them. If Sarah and her dad would let her, she'd scavenge windfalls at this time of year until she gave herself colic.
"Sorry, no more. Gotta get back to my guest, old gal."
In her absence, Rei had finished everything down to the crumbs. "Good?" Sarah asked.
"Good?" he repeated.
"Yep." She looked critically at the side of his head. He didn't appear to have used the first aid supplies she'd left him—they were still sitting on the floor—but he seemed to have cleaned himself up a bit. At least he wasn't leaving blood everywhere anymore. And his bruises looked like they'd faded noticeably overnight, though it was hard to tell with dark blue-purple bruising against blue skin.
"Hey, Rei," she said to get his attention, and moved the plate out of the way so she could open the book she'd brought, a world almanac from her high school days. She flipped through it until she found the world map. Rei looked on with interest as she pointed to Wisconsin.
"Sarah," she said. "Rei. Here. Sarah and Rei."
Rei said something in his own language, frowning in concentration as he examined the map. He touched the blue part of the map that represented the Atlantic Ocean, and then the blue splash of Lake Michigan, and looked up at her. "Rei-ket Sarah?"
"Yes, this is where we are."
Rei tapped Lake Michigan emphatically, and the thought dawned on her that, if he'd already grasped blue was for water, he might think the enormous lake was the lake he'd crashed in. "No," she said, shaking her head. "No, that's a different lake. Uh, the world is ... big?" She touched the map and spread her arms out wide. "Big!"
Rei looked baffled, then pensive. He looked around and pointed to the light bulb. "Light," he said, his musical, lilting accent making the word sound foreign. He held his fist above the map. "Light." His fist moved down in an arc to thunk against Lake Michigan. "Rei."
"No," Sarah said firmly. She turned the page to the U.S. map, and taking his hand, she tapped his fist to the map a hair westward from the lake, in the blank space that made up most of Wisconsin. The map was much too large-scale to pinpoint Sidonie's location in anything other than the broadest terms, somewhere vaguely in the central-western part of the state. "Rei." She turned back to the world map and then back to the U.S. map, pointing to the same place, trying to demonstrated the equivalence between them.
Rei frowned thoughtfully and then crouched on the barn floor, stretching one of his legs out to the side as if bending the knee hurt him. Sarah sat down, curious, and watched him draw with his finger in the dirt. She could still feel the texture of his skin under her fingers when she'd gripped his fist, not thinking about it until after; it almost felt as if his hand, soft yet ridged with calluses along the edge, had left a warm imprint on her skin.
Rei drew an irregular blob in the dirt. What was that supposed to be—a sun, a world, a continent? Not like she could ask. Anyway, he was drawing something else above it, something round, with stubby fins ... and she sucked in her breath when she recognized the intact version of the craft she had glimpsed floating on the waves before it was sucked under. It was round and fat-bodied, with short wings-like things sticking off. For something sketched in the dirt with his fingertip, it was actually a really good drawing, easily recognizable even though she had only had a brief look at the craft, badly damaged, in the dark
"You're a good artist," she told him. Rei flicked a glance at her—Damn it, she told herself, you know he can't understand you! Turning back to his drawing, he sketched a gently curved line arcing down from the craft to the odd-shaped blob, which she now realized must be the lake. Not only that, but she realized from her astronomy studies that he'd connected them with a parabola. Rei was not only an artist but understood basic orbital mechanics too.
"Hey," she said, and Rei looked up again. "I have a better idea than drawing in the dirt. Hold on, let me get something."
There were some carpenter's pencils with the rest of the hand tools in the workshop part of the barn. She couldn't find any paper, so she flipped the almanac to the title page, which had some blank space on it. "Here," she said, holding out the pencil. When Rei merely looked at it, Sarah made a mark on the paper and then pointed at the drawing in the dirt.
Rei's face went ... bright. That was the only word for it. He lit up, and Sarah's breath caught in her throat. She hadn't even realized he could look like that, animated and genuinely happy.
He pulled the almanac toward himself and made a quick copy of his earlier drawing: lake-blob, ship, parabolic arc. With the pencil and paper, his movements were quick and sure. On a blank space near the lake, he drew a recognizable though weirdly distorted version of her truck, and a couple of squarish buildings complete with perspective.
"Is that our farm?"
The tip of the pencil traced a pale line from the farm to the lake. Rei pointed to himself, to her, and to t
he wall of the barn. He touched the truck drawing with the pencil and pointed to her again.
"You want me to take you back to the lake," she guessed. "Oh, no. That is not a good idea. No. Bad idea." She shook her head vigorously, hoping he understood that gesture.
Rei's face went blank. He tapped the drawing of his ship with the pencil tip. Pointed to the sketch-truck. To her. To the drawing of the lake. To the ship. And the lake again.
"You ... want to get your ship?" Okay, that made sense. If she were stuck on an alien planet, she'd want to fix her spaceship and get home as soon as possible. Except ... "Rei, it sank in the lake. What are you going to do, dive down to it?"
Uncomprehending stare. He pointed to the lake, truck, her—
"I get it! I know what you want! That's not the problem." She crossed her arms. "Rei, maybe you don't remember, but it's at the bottom of the lake. We'd need divers and a really big winch to get it out. Anyway, there's probably cops and scientists and God only knows what else out there now."
Rei tapped the pencil on the paper to get her attention. He pointed to the sketch-farm and to the lake. Then he pointed to the wall of the barn.
Sarah stared blankly as he turned in place, finger pointing to each wall of the barn, one by one. He gave her an impatient look, tapped the pencil on the lake, and continued pointing to different walls until she figured out what he wanted.
"Oh. The lake is that way." She pointed in the approximate direction. "But—how are you going to get there? No, no. How can I make you understand 'no'? This is a bad idea."
Rei laid the pencil down on the book. He smiled at her, touched the empty plate, and smiled again with a brief flicker of his dimple. Then he turned and walked—limped, rather—toward the door.
Sarah hesitated for the barest instant before she sprang to her feet and dashed after him. She got in front of him and blocked his forward progress, planting her hands against his chest. He was very heavy and solid. She knew he could have pushed her aside if he wanted to, but he didn't try; instead he gave her a quizzical look from his odd, gold eyes.