by Lauren Esker
"Now how many times did I tell you, sugar," her dad began in an exasperated tone, just as Sarah noticed the side door to the barn standing open.
"I'm sorry," she said, quickly hurrying to close it. "I was in a rush." She peeked quickly into the barn as she shut it, seeing no sign of Rei. He was good at vanishing into the shadows when he wanted to.
"If Princess gets into the Haverfords' hayfield again, you're the one gets to catch her. You know she can open the latch on that stall."
"I know. I'm sorry, Dad." She reached out a hand for the beat-up metal toolbox as he got it out from behind the truck seat. "How 'bout I go put this in the wheelbarrow and meet you over at the mill?"
Her dad shook his head, and the creases in his weatherbeaten face deepened in a smile. "You got homework for your college classes? I don't want to keep you away from that."
"My homework will keep. I'd love to see how the mill project is coming along. You can tell me all about it."
And if it keeps you away from the barn, that'd be fantastic ...
***
Although Sarah and the other native soon left for other parts of the farm, Rei spent the afternoon in the loft anyway, feeling safer up there than down in the main part of the barn. Rain pattered gently on the roof of the barn while he spread out the items he'd retrieved from the battlepod and went through them carefully, cataloguing his assets.
He'd managed to retrieve most of the instrument panel, along with assorted pieces of the battlepod that had broken off in the crash. His heart sank as he looked at the motley collection of metal and plastic junk. He didn't even know what half this stuff was. He wasn't a mechanic; he was a pilot. Maybe Skara or Thorn could have looked at his salvaged finds and all the stuff down in the main part of the barn, put it together, and built a functional spaceship out of it. Maybe he could have even done if he could've used his bracelets to hook up to the galactic 'net and found instructions somewhere.
Well, Skara and Thorn are dead, and my bracelets don't work, so I guess I'm just gonna have to deal with what I've got.
The best find by far, and probably the only thing of actual value, was the emergency repair kit. It was designed to float, and he'd found it just below the surface of the water. Most of the pod had sunk in the deeper part of the lake. Hopefully that would keep it out of the hands of the natives, at least for now, until he could figure out a way to retrieve it and, through some miracle, make it flightworthy again.
It really would take a miracle, with his limited repair skills.
But he couldn't think that way. It was like surviving a battle. You had to just keep moving, focus on the immediate task at hand, and not think about the sheer impossibility of the whole thing. Otherwise you'd lie down and never get up again.
The kit contained equipment for repairing simple malfunctions in the pod and in Rei himself. Along with a basic array of tools, a portable power cell, and that kind of thing, there was an injector with a case of medications. Rei flipped the case open. Stimulants, painkillers ... and, yes. A backup translator chip.
It was possible their communication issues were because his chip had been fried in the same surge that had knocked out his collar and cuffs, but he thought it was just as likely that Sarah had never been fitted with a chip of her own. He hadn't had one himself until he was taken by the Galateans at age nine. If his chip was working and her language was in its database, he ought to be able to understand her even if she couldn't understand him, but it was no surprise if her planet was too primitive to have been properly catalogued yet.
All he had to do was think of a way to convince her to let him inject something into her head while sharing no common language. That sounded like fun.
He reached for the book Sarah had brought him, the one with maps. She hadn't taken it back to the house, so he had brought it up to the loft with him. The Galatean Empire was mostly paperless, but Rei had enough experience with different planets' versions of books to know what it was. Most of it was useless to him, since it was all text and charts in a script he couldn't read, but it contained an insert with a bunch of maps and pictures in the middle.
When she'd first showed it to him, it had taken him a moment to figure out that all those irregular shapes of many colors represented maps. The large blue areas had tipped him off; he vaguely remembered seeing a lot of ocean as he was struggling to guide the damaged pod through the atmosphere. So the crowded, multicolored sections, dense with unfamiliar letters, must be continents.
Sarah's world.
He flipped the book's pages, skipping the words and looking at pictures of streets and cities and people. Sarah's people came in a variety of colors, like his own people, but in a different set of hues. His people were blue or purple or brown; hers were various shades of brown and bronze and pink. He saw no one in the pictures with mods of any sort. No animal ears, no wings or centaur bodies, no gills or flippers.
He turned back to the map section. He might not be able to read the words, but he understood that the lines dividing the continents into blocks of different colors must represent political divisions. This world was vast, with many regions and provinces. The shapes of its continents corresponded to no world he'd ever studied.
Where was he?
Laughter and voices from below caught his attention. He leaned forward to look out of the loft, down into the pasture, where Sarah and the older native were dragging a hose across the field and chatting happily with each other in their incomprehensible language. The man pushed the end of the hose into a big metal tub and started filling it, while Sarah vanished briefly from sight—Rei heard rustling downstairs—and came back pushing a little cart with a bale of hay on it. Various animals wandered out of the trees and from under the overhanging edge of the barn roof to snuffle around her. Some were large with short fur, others short and round with thick curly wool.
Rei was intrigued by the older man, who was petting some of the little curly-furred animals. He walked with a pair of sticks. Old age? A war injury? Those crude crutches were something Rei remembered from his childhood, but hadn't seen among the Galateans at all, with their prosthetic implants and external mech parts. Another sign of the primitive state of technology on this planet.
The older man was pink like Sarah. Rei felt a sharp twinge, which he tried to suppress, at the thought that this man might be her mate or spouse. But given the visible age difference, it was more likely the older male was her parent.
Sarah vanished beneath the overhanging roof again and reappeared leading the gray animal that looked like the bottom half of a Hnee plus the top half of something entirely different. She gave the animal a friendly slap on its haunches, and it trotted a few steps before lowering its head to nibble at the close-cropped grass.
Now that Rei saw this animal next to the other ones in the pasture, the kinship was obvious. He wasn't familiar with all the animals he saw out there, but they were all built along similar lines, with four legs and hooves and fur.
They were all Birthworld animals.
Actually, he hadn't seen a single animal on this planet so far that wasn't an obvious Birthworld species. Even the birds at the lake had gray and brown barred wings, like Rook and Kite.
Was it possible ...?
He shook his head to brush away the thought. No one knew the location of Birthworld; at least that was what Rei had been taught. All anyone knew was that the now-vanished alien species called the Founders had taken samples of many different kinds of Birthworld life and had seeded them across the galaxy, many tens of thousands of years ago, using entire worlds as their laboratories. The Founders were gone, and for all anyone knew, Birthworld itself was gone too, but the many laboratory worlds lived on, including Rei's homeworld and Galatea and many others.
That's all this is, just another world where the Founders put some modified Birthworld stock. Maybe they transplanted a whole Birthworld ecosystem here. They did that in some places.
Which he knew from listening to Rook talk about it. Rei wasn't that interested in
long-ago times and places, but Rook could never stop babbling about all the theories involving the Founders and their projects. He'd have loved this world so much—
Rei's chest clenched. For an instant, the soft rain falling outside the loft dissolved into the sparkling trail of Rook's destroyed ship, glimmering against the stars. Glittering embers, the stink of burnt flesh—no, that was wrong, he hadn't been close enough to smell anything, and anyway, you couldn't in space. That was from another place and time, when Haiva had died, shot in front of him—
He was sitting up, leaning forward, his heart racing out of control and his hands fisted in the hay. He blinked and blinked, erasing the sparks from his vision; or trying to—they still shimmered around the edges. Slow breaths. Calm down. He'd clutched two fistfuls of hay, and when he opened his aching fingers, he found that his fingers had shifted partway into claws, drawing blue drops of blood from his palms.
Lyr used to calm him at these times. But now the place in his head where Lyr used to dwell was empty. All he could do was try to calm himself.
When he could breathe properly again and his heart was no longer trying to tear its way out of his chest, he reached for the tools and scraps he'd salvaged. He couldn't stay on this planet, with its rain and its forests and its ... Sarah. He had to find out if Lyr had survived the battle.
Lyr was all he had left.
***
Sarah came back near dusk, bringing a plate of food: meat, bread, boiled vegetables, a gooey pastry with a red fruit filling, and some more of those hard little cookie things. Rei reached for one of those first, munching on it; they reminded him of Galatean ration bars. This time Sarah had put a small flat implement on the side of the plate, with three pointy bits at one end, but he had no idea what it was for or how to use it, so he went on eating with his hands as politely as possible.
Etiquette lessons had been part of his training after the Galateans took him from Polara. He could still sometimes feel the sting of corrective shocks from the collar, or smacks from the long training rod that some of his teachers had used. The collar was more likely to be used on the battle-training ground or during formal affairs, and the rod at the regular dining table, where they'd whack the back of his hand or the top of his head when he tried to sop up gravy with his bread or reach across the table to serve himself rather than waiting for the serving dish to come around—perfectly acceptable behavior on Polara, not so much on Galatea.
The idea of Sarah correcting his table manners by hitting him made him smile slightly.
"Thank you," he told her in his own language, not yet knowing how to say it in hers.
Sarah smiled and said something that contained no words he knew. She reached into a bag she'd brought with her and pulled out some more books. She opened one of them to show him some pictures of forests and deserts, and then put them on a shelf and patted them.
"Thank you," he said again, and was privately delighted when it made her smile. She had a lovely smile; it lit up her whole face.
Rei finished the last bite from the plate and wiped his hands on a twist of straw. They had to get past the language barrier, and there was only one way to do that, at least if they didn't want to spend the next year learning each other's languages.
"Wait," he told her, holding up his hand as she started to pick up the plate and utensil. "Don't go yet."
He wasn't sure if she understood, but she was still in the barn, petting the cat, when he came back down from the loft with the toolkit.
Rei set the toolkit on top of the barrel they'd been using as a table and opened it. Sarah looked on with wide-eyed fascination, her gaze skipping from one item in the kit to another. She reached out, fingers almost touching a laser cutter as she asked a short question in her own language. Probably something like "May I?"
Letting the alien native play with a laser cutting tool didn't seem like the best idea, so Rei tapped the multiwrench next to it. She picked it up with exquisite care and examined it for a moment, before she was distracted by Rei snapping open the translator chip's holder and fitting it to the tip of the injector.
How to explain?
Maybe analogy would do it. Rei laid the injector on top of the kit. As gently as he knew how, he took Sarah's hand.
She drew in a soft breath. Her fingers curled in his before relaxing, letting him guide her as he would.
Rei took the multiwrench from her unresisting fingers and set it aside. Her fingers were callused from farm work, not soft. Rei liked that, even though he knew at the same time that his killer's hands had no right to touch her.
But this was necessary. He guided her hand to his own face and touched her fingers to the skin behind his ear. All the while, Sarah watched his face with her wide eyes. The dim light washed out the blue in her irises and left only gray.
Rei guided her fingers to the small, hard nub of the translator implant under the skin. He was unprepared for his own reaction as her fingertips ghosted over his skin in that sensitive place. He wasn't used to being touched, especially not there. The fine hairs prickled across his entire body, a sweeping wave of electricity washing over him.
Sarah's pink lips were parted, her face very intent. Her eyes flicked back and forth, searching his face as if she could find answers there.
Rei put his own thumb on top of her index finger and pressed against the translator chip. It hurt a little, like pushing on a bone spur. Sarah's sandy brows drew together in a puzzled frown.
He released her hand, but her fingers lingered on his skin a moment longer before she put her hand hesitantly down.
Now he reached to touch her in the same place.
With a quick, reflexive movement, Sarah tilted her head away, then straightened it and held still—eyes rolled to the side, trying to see what he was doing—as he felt behind her ear.
Her skull was shaped like his; he found the same ridge of bone just behind the ear, where his implant had been inserted. Her skin was distractingly soft. Trying to stay focused, Rei ran his fingertip around the underside of her ear, feeling for anything that might interfere with the implant, such as horn buds or other protrusions.
She didn't seem to have anything like that. Unmodified Birthworld human, like he'd thought, at least to all outward appearances.
Sarah was very still, except for her chest under her soft-looking sweater, rising and falling with quick, shallow breaths.
Rei took his hand away. "Sarah," he said, and she jerked, her gaze seeming to snap back to reality from somewhere else. "I need to do this so we can talk to each other." He picked up the injector. It was a simple one, shaped to fit in the hand, with a one-touch trigger to deploy its load. Rei held it between them, noticing with interest how she flinched slightly back from it, in a way she hadn't reacted to the cuffs. Did she recognize what it was, or did her people use handheld weapons? Perhaps she thought it was something dangerous.
"Talk," Rei said. He touched his mouth, then touched behind his ear again. Reaching out, he laid his fingertips across her parted lips (soft, so soft) for the barest instant before he touched the place behind her ear.
"Talk?" she whispered, her strange accent making the word sound odd, nearly incomprehensible.
"Talk," he agreed, and mimed pointing the injector behind his own ear. Sarah sucked in a quick breath.
Afraid of a common medical tool. Not afraid of energy bracelets that could fry her brain. What an odd woman; what an odd world.
There was no better way he could explain. He touched behind her ear again, then touched his lips, and held up the injector.
Sarah breathed in slowly, and tilted her head to the side, exposing the soft patch of skin behind her ear. With one hand, she held back her hair.
His heart flipped over at the vulnerability of that pose.
She was still watching him out of the corner of her eyes. He could see in her expression that she was scared as he touched the injector to her skin. It beeped softly as it found the right location. Sarah jerked, but stilled herself.
He pulled the trigger.
The injector made a tiny hiss, and Sarah flinched hard, jerking away. Her sharp "Ow! Fuck!" needed no translation.
"Ow, ow, ow!" Sarah yelped, stumbling away from him. She felt behind her ear, then tilted her head to the side and shook it like she had water in her ears.
Rei watched helplessly, wanting to calm her, but knowing he couldn't. He knew what she would be feeling now, the unpleasant pinched-nerve tingling as the translator extruded its wires and began to read information from her neurons. In a few hours, it would have finished forming its connections and would begin to engage with the language center of her brain.
"Ow!" Straightening up, she glared at him and babbled a long string of words in her language.
"I'm sorry," Rei said. "It won't hurt for very long. At least, mine didn't."
Sarah said something huffy. She touched her ear again, smacked it lightly with a palm, and snapped her fingers in front of one ear, then the other.
"It doesn't make you deaf," Rei told her. "It doesn't affect your hearing at all. At least, if I did it right."
The injector was supposed to make it foolproof, but she belonged to an unknown variant of humanity. What if he'd damaged her? Struck a nerve where other types of humans didn't have one?
There's nothing you can do about it, he told himself, stinging with guilt. What's done is done.
Sarah let out another long string of angry-sounding words, picked up the plate, and marched out of the barn.
Well ... he'd either given her the ability to understand him (eventually, when the translator synced) or he'd given his only ally on this planet brain damage.
He'd know by morning.
7
___
M ORNING MEANT MONDAY, and Monday, for Sarah, meant driving an hour to Eau Claire for classes and her half-day shift working as a custodian on campus. It also meant leaving Rei alone all day to do God only knows what.
After he'd already done God knows what to her ear.