by Lauren Esker
"His name's Rei, Dad!"
Her father grunted and turned back to the computer.
With relief, she hurried into the kitchen and washed her hands at the sink. It was easy to wash away the evidence, but not nearly so easy to ignore the slick feeling between her thighs and the hot lassitude in her limbs that was one part post-orgasmic relaxation and one part heightened lust, tingling through her whenever she thought of Rei toweling himself off upstairs.
To distract herself, she retrieved her phone from the bowl of rice where it had been drying out on the counter, with its charging cord trailing incongruously from the rice to the nearest outlet. She braced for disappointment and pressed the power button.
Victory! The screen came on right away. It had a few scuffs that hadn't been there before, but she'd happily take it. No need to go to the Verizon store the next time she was in town.
She dropped the phone in her pocket, and got busy dishing up the chili into three bowls and setting out garlic bread that her dad had been keeping warm in the oven.
When she turned around, Rei was standing in the kitchen doorway.
He was wearing an old sweatshirt of her dad's, the biggest thing she'd been able to find for him; though Rei wasn't enormous, his broader shoulders had strained at the seams of her dad's work shirt. His hands were shoved in the pockets, and his thick dark hair was wet and tousled.
He looked young, and cute, and vulnerable, like a freshly showered college kid instead of an intergalactic cyborg assassin or whatever he was.
After a moment of mutual staring, Sarah managed to boot up the less shallow part of her brain. "Hey!" she said brightly. "Dinner's ready. I don't know if they have chili in space—oh, what am I saying, of course they don't, but I bet there's something similar. It's beans, er, legumes, and meat and spices. And there's bread."
"It smells good," he said quietly, sitting down.
The translator, she was beginning to understand, did best with short, simple sentences. And Rei had been trying to speak that way, probably because he knew how the technology worked and was trying to make it easy for it.
There was something else different about him. It didn't click until she went to put the chili pan in the sink and turned around. Rei was turned away from her, reaching for the garlic bread and exposing the long line of his neck, wet black hair curling at the indigo nape above a slightly paler streak across the skin—
"Your collar's gone!"
Rei looked over at her. "Garymetzger helped me cut it off."
"Dad? His name's just Gary." She sat down across from him and picked up a piece of garlic bread to give her fingers something to do and stop them from twitching to touch the exposed soft skin above the sweatshirt's collar. "Metzger is our last name. Surname. Uh, family name. Do your people have those? A name that everyone in your family has?" Do you?
"Me? Just one name, Reian."
"Rei ... An?"
His smile glimmered; the dimple appeared briefly. "Reian. One name. Rei is a short name. Long name and short name. My people hrsaka keth. But not a ... family name."
"Oh, like a nickname? We have those. I mean, I don't, personally. Sarah is short enough as it is. But my mother's name was Margaret, and everyone called her Maggie."
"Maggie May," her father said quietly from the doorway.
He limped inside, using one cane and his hand on the wall for extra balance. "Maggie May. Like the Rod Stewart song. Her middle name wasn't May, of course."
"No," Sarah said softly. "I know that part. I'm named after her."
Gary nodded. "Margaret Sarah was her name ... but Maggie May was what I called her." He glanced at Rei, who was watching both of them, amber eyes flicking back and forth between, and forced a smile. "But we're being rude, talking about people our guest doesn't know."
Which meant stop talking about your mother. Sarah dropped her eyes and reached for her spoon. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Rei studying what she did, and then carefully picking up his spoon in a clumsy approximation of her grip.
As they began eating in silence, she thought about how long there had been an invisible third person at their table: the ghost of her mother.
Now there really was a third person, a man from beyond the stars. And still the ghost was there, eating with them, following them around, a silent presence in their lives.
What does it take to move on? Sarah wondered, forcing down a mouthful of the chili that tasted like sawdust to her now. How did you learn to move beyond that, when you'd lost the person you'd loved most? It had been ten years since her mother died, and yet sometimes, for both her father and herself, it seemed as if it was only yesterday.
She raised her eyes to watch Rei eating quietly, looking at neither of them. The paler stripe across his neck was visible when he moved, appearing and disappearing above the neck of the sweatshirt. Sometimes his empty hand drifted up toward his neck, apparently without his conscious will, only to be jerked back down when his fingers touched his bare skin.
She still wanted to touch him, but less for her own sake than for his. She couldn't help wondering how many people he'd lost, and what kind of tragedies were hidden behind his golden gaze.
9
___
I N THE DARK OF the night, as rain fell from the pitch-black sky, Rei hunched in a borrowed coat and stood out of the way while Sarah and Garymetzger—no, Gary, just Gary—hitched the trailer to their ground vehicle.
The entire evening was a whirl of impressions and thoughts he hadn't had time to process yet. He was clean and warm, with borrowed clothing brushing his skin—strangely soft, this fabric, yet not adhering in the way of Galatean smartcloth. He stood with his feet shoved into ill-fitting, borrowed boots and buried in a planet's dirt, with water falling from the sky; he'd almost forgotten about rain before this planetary excursion. And these two aliens were helping him retrieve his sunken battlepod.
He didn't know how he could ever repay them.
Lyr used to say his people believed in something called amora, which meant that you couldn't pay back someone for their kindness, so instead you helped others in turn. You couldn't repay your parents for raising you; all you could do was be a good parent to your own children. You couldn't repay someone for saving your life, but maybe you could save someone else.
Rei flexed his hands. Rainwater glistened on his dark skin like blood in the truck's headlights.
And does it work the other way, my friend? he asked the silence in his skull where Lyr used to dwell. If you kill others, what then? Do you deserve to have violence visited upon you? Does it trail in your wake?
Did it matter if you'd never wanted to do it in the first place? The dead were still just as dead.
He kept catching himself in the act of touching his bare neck, where the collar used to be.
"Rei, come on!" Sarah called softly. "We're ready to go."
He climbed into the truck and sat between Sarah and her dad on the padded bench seat. Gary pulled in his crutches and slammed the door.
"Maybe Rei on the outside should sit," Sarah said. He was now catching most of her words, though he could tell he sometimes lost the nuances of her grammar.
Gary shook his head. "Easier to hide him if we run into cops." He shoved a floppy-brimmed hat at Rei. "Here, put this on."
"Yeah, that's totally inconspicuous," Sarah said dryly as Rei pulled the hat down over his ears. She flashed him a sideways smile, her face lit up in the glow of the truck's instrument lights.
His shoulder was pressed to hers. Every time she spoke, he felt the gentle vibration of her voice.
Gary was right, it would've been easier to sit on the outside. Mostly because it would've saved him from driving to the lake while trying to hide a hard-on.
He hadn't been able to stop thinking of Sarah the entire time he was washing in the bathing room. Alien she might be, but she was also as human as his people—more so, even, since it didn't look like Sarah's particular fork in the tree of galactic humanity had been meddl
ed with quite as much, lacking wolf DNA or his people's artificially designed, extra-efficient hemoglobin that gave their skin the blue tint.
She also lacked the perfectly symmetrical beauty of many galactics, the telltale signs that either her DNA had been modified at some point in her ancestral line, or her body had been modded after her birth. But those little imperfections made her more beautiful to Rei's eyes: the slight crookedness of her teeth, the way her nose was a little off center and her jawline slanted one way just a bit more than the other. Those were the details that made her Sarah.
It wasn't beauty that drew him to her, anyway. It didn't matter in the slightest what her face looked like. She was beautiful to him (would have been beautiful, no matter what) because of what was inside her, not the other way around.
She'd helped him when no one in their right mind would have. She'd sheltered him and fed him and—to the best of her people's limited ability—tended his wounds. And now she and her father were taking him out to retrieve his ship, risking imprisonment or worse. Considering how hard she'd been working to hide him, the punishment for harboring fugitives must be severe on this world.
Her shoulder flexed against his as she yanked the lever attached to the truck's steering apparatus. The vehicle lurched forward, the trailer rattling behind them as they got underway.
"I don't know how to thank either of you," Rei said, hunching forward. With the glow of the instruments affecting his night vision, it was utterly dark outside the truck, difficult even for his sharp eyes to penetrate. Through the rain, an occasional watery flash of lights indicated other houses along the road. "You don't have to do this."
"Sure we do," Gary said. He gave Rei a smile that was reminiscent of his daughter's, warm and friendly as his face creased around it.
Rei had assumed, at first, that Gary was quite old, but now he thought the old man was probably not very far past middle age. Living on a planet, in the sun and the wind, aged a person's skin faster than shipboard life.
My aunt might look that old, too. I wonder if she's still alive?
Until Sarah had asked, he hadn't thought about his people in years. It was easier not to. In the normal course of events, his servitude to the Galatean Empire would have lasted for another ten years. Afterwards, he could have gone home if he survived, but with most of his septmates dead, he didn't see any point in looking forward to it.
But now, possibilities began to open up in front of him. If he could fix the battlepod ... if he could get off this planet ... maybe he could go back to his homeworld. The smart thing would be to get as far away from the Galatean Empire as possible, but there was nowhere else he wanted to go.
To see Polara again, his chilly homeworld with its snow-capped mountains and tall trees and the three moons in the sky ...
Except that his people would never truly accept him if they knew that he'd run away. Polara gave the Galatean army a certain number of its young people every year so they would be left alone. A fugitive coming back to their world, bringing Galatean hunters behind him ... no, they would never hide him, not like Sarah and Gary had done.
Anyway, first he had to find out if Lyr was still alive.
And all of this meant leaving Sarah too. He didn't want to think about that.
He realized that he'd been softly flexing his claws where his hand rested on his thigh, popping them in and out of his fingertips with a light prickle through the fabric of his borrowed trousers, and made himself stop.
"Turn off here," Gary said suddenly.
"Really?" Sarah slowed the truck to a crawl. The headlights illuminated the edge of a field of tall grass, smeared through the streaks of rain on the truck's windshield. "I was going to turn at the county road and then go through the Gruenings' woodlot and pastures to the Muller place."
"Nah, there's an old logging road here. Takes you through the Kenner woods and comes out behind Will Hardesty's barn, almost all the way to the county line. Then turn left and you'll hit the Muller spread. It's shorter and a lot less likely to run into anybody."
"No kidding," Sarah murmured, maneuvering the truck onto two muddy ruts with trees on either side. The sides of the truck scraped against brush. "I didn't even know this was here. I thought it was just part of the Kenners' private farm road."
"Well, technically we are on Kenner land," her dad said. "I dated Kelly Kenner before I married your mom, you know."
"I know, Dad," Sarah sighed. "That was the girl whose braids you tied to a fence post when you were a kid, right?"
"No, that was Tammy Wazlowski. Ah, Tammy. Girl had a good right hook on her."
Rei let the banter wash over him, his translation implant soaking it up. He knew what they were doing; he could hear the tightness in Sarah's voice. Idle talk eased nervousness. How many times had he and his septmates done this before a battle? Or during one?
Lyr, Rook, Skara ... He pushed those thoughts away and tried to focus on mapping their route in his head—and not falling asleep. He'd barely slept at all for the last two nights, and now the truck's vents were blasting warm air at him, its growling engine and rocking progress easing him halfway to drowsiness—
The seat abruptly dropped under him, jolting him wide awake. He flung out a hand and clawed at the dashboard. For an instant, he'd been back in his battlepod, his stomach dropping as the pod changed trajectory with the dazzling light of plasma fire flaring on the screens—
"Whoa, sorry," Sarah said, glancing at him sideways. "Pothole."
Rei nodded, not trusting his voice. At least she was too busy driving to look at his face, but Gary gave him a lingering, curious glance.
A few minutes later, Sarah stopped and got out to open a gate in the rain. There were a few more instances of this as they drove through a succession of fields. At last she slowed the truck to a crawl and turned onto a smoother road. There were no other headlights in the darkness.
"This is the lake road," Sarah told Rei. "We're almost to the beach where I met you. I'm not completely sure we won't find any cops down there, just to let you know."
The translation chip gave him slang for Galatean military police. He merely nodded, wishing he understood more about her world's political structure and their relationship with Galatea. It was hard to believe her people had no connection to the Empire at all. If he was caught, would he be handed over to the Galateans immediately? Used as a political bargaining chip? Not that he was much of one. There was nothing special about him; he was merely a fugitive slave-soldier. He had pilot skills, but those were nothing special either.
If they caught him, they'd probably just kill him, or leave him to rot in a cell on this planet. Speaking of which ...
"What's your world's name?"
"Earth," Sarah said, with a brief smile.
Earth. He tasted the word carefully on his tongue. His implant gave him connotations of soil and a meaning that was simply "the world." Well, that was understandable; many planets' names meant something like that. Polara meant a great forest in one of his world's old tongues, but it was the same thing. His people were hunters; hers were farmers, with their fields and settled towns. So of course her people thought of the world as a lot of dirt, while his kind thought of theirs as a huge hunting ground.
He'd never heard of a planet called Earth, but that didn't mean much. There were many inhabited planets in the galaxy. And the Galateans might call it something different than the natives anyway.
One thing he did know for certain, though. He had no intention of bringing danger to this two Earthers who'd helped him, not if he could help it.
Sarah turned off the road and jolted down the narrow track that he knew led to the beach.
"Stop," he said.
Sarah slammed on the brakes so suddenly that Rei had to throw out his hand to avoid being flung into the dashboard. "What? Did you see something?"
"No. Let me out. I'll walk from here."
"The heck you will. It's pouring rain." She put the truck back in gear and crept forward.
Gary gave a rough snort. "I think that ship has sailed, kid."
"I don't understand."
"What Dad means is that nobody's going to believe we're innocent at this point, Rei." Sarah took one hand off the steering wheel and started to rest it on his thigh, changing it at the last minute to a quick pat on his arm before she jerked it away. "We've got a truck and a trailer and a winch, and we're driving down to the beach at midnight in the rain. It's pretty obvious that we're not hanging out here for our health."
He wasn't sure he understood every word, but he got the gist. "You'll be in danger."
Another snort came from Gary. "Fine time to worry about that, kid."
"Dad!"
"What?"
"I didn't mean to cause danger to either of you," Rei said, feeling wretched. She was right. They were both right. Every moment he spent with them, he was risking their imprisonment and, perhaps, death. He should have just left that first night.
But it was easy to second-guess himself when he had clean, dry clothes and a full belly. Self-preservation was a powerful instinct.
Still, he vowed one thing to himself. He'd die before letting Sarah and Gary get hurt.
"Here we are," Sarah said softly. She killed the headlights and then the engine. The only sounds were the drumming of rain on the roof of the truck and the soft pings of the cooling engine. A few distant lights glimmered smearily in the rain, across the water, but there was no sign of anyone closer.
"No one's here," Rei said.
"You sure about that?" Gary asked, reminding him of something he'd noticed about Sarah earlier. Their unenhanced vision couldn't pierce the dark as well as his could. To them, the night was pitch black.
"I'm sure."
Sarah opened her door and leaned out. "I'm thinking we back the trailer down to the edge of the water. We have a winch on the back of the truck to haul your ship out, Rei."