by Lauren Esker
"It's a weapon?"
"You didn't know?"
"No," she said weakly. "No, I didn't know." Suddenly all of his defensive hand gestures made so much more sense. If his bracelets had been working, would he have accidentally fried her back at the lake, or that first time he woke up in the truck?
"I told you I was a soldier. You didn't think me unarmed, did you?"
"I just ... I guess I thought you must have left your gun behind or didn't have it in the pod, or ... something ..."
Of course weapons in a society with faster-than-light travel and cyborg augmentation wouldn't look like guns. And she knew he was trained to fight. She knew he'd been in war.
It was just ... he was so fast, and—when he'd leaped into combat position next to her a moment ago, that had been a deadly weapon on the end of his arm, not a fist.
She hadn't known.
That was all: she hadn't known.
He was looking at her with uncertainty, and her confusing mix of emotions began to ebb away. This was still her Rei, of the gentle hands and the shy, warm smile.
So she let out a breath, and tried to let it go. "If you're happy, I'm happy," she said, and held out a hand.
Rei looked at her hand for a long moment. He didn't take it.
"Sarah—"
"I'm not afraid of you," she said. "I was just surprised." And she took his hand in hers, closing her fingers around it.
"You should be afraid." His voice was solemn, his eyes gleaming in the moonlight.
"Yeah, well, too bad, because I'm not." She pulled on his arm, tugging him close to her side. "Come on. Let's go see about something to eat."
***
It was easier to let go of her lingering sense of unease in the kitchen, warm and familiar and bright, full of appetizing smells.
"I opened some cans of stew," her dad said, turning around from the sink. "Thought it might go down easy for Rei, maybe with a little toast."
In the brighter light of the kitchen, Sarah could see that Rei was still grayish and exhausted-looking. "Do you think you can eat?" she asked him. "Dad made something he thinks —oh wait, I keep forgetting you can understand him just fine."
"Perhaps later," he said politely. "I'd like to lie down for a while first."
"You can take a nap in my room. It'll be quieter up there where our voices and the TV won't bother you."
Rei nodded and went off without speaking. He was still feeling pretty bad, she thought, and guilt twisted in her stomach.
"Not your fault, kid," her dad said. He handed her a plate of toast and ladled a scoop of stew into a large mug, then stuck in a spoon. "Go on up there and take care of your boy. I'll have the rest on the table when you come down."
Sarah kissed his cheek and took it upstairs. The toilet flushed in the bathroom, and Rei came out, leaning on the wall. He straightened when he saw her; she could see him pulling himself together, forcing down the weakness to put on a show of strength.
"Still feel pretty bad, huh?" she asked softly. "I brought you some dinner in case you're hungry later."
"I'm just tired." He gave her a rueful smile and flexed his fingers. "In retrospect, draining some of my body's energy to power the cuffs wasn't the best idea in my current condition."
"Is there any other way to charge them?" she asked, following him through the doorway into her bedroom. "Could we hook them to an outlet or something?"
"Sunlight can also do it, but we don't have any of that at the moment." He sat on the edge of the bed. "You don't need to stay."
"I'm going down to eat in a minute. —Oh, right!" She'd completely forgotten about her shopping trip until the bags on her floor reminded her. "I got you some clothes, like we talked about, and something else too. I saw how you liked to draw, so I thought you might like to do some more of that."
Despite his evident exhaustion, Rei's eyes lit up when he saw the box of pencils with all its colors. "These are pigment sticks for drawing, correct?"
"Yep, that's right." She opened the box and shook out a few of the pre-sharpened pencils. "Have fun," she told him, kissing him on the forehead, and left him with the bedside lamp turned on and the pad of paper in his lap.
She and her dad ate in the living room while watching the news on TV. There was nothing about the crash at the lake; it might be big news in Sidonie, but it looked like it had already dropped out of the statewide news cycle.
The picture on the TV flickered as a helicopter thumped by overhead, reminding her that the world outside Sidonie might have forgotten about it, but the government sure hadn't.
"Do you think they'll come here looking for Rei?" she asked. "What are we going to tell them if they do?"
"Tell 'em they need a warrant if they want to go searching my farm," Gary said, switching away from the news to a sports channel.
"It's the feds, Dad."
"They still need a warrant. Or do we live in North Korea now?"
"They might not even ask. They might just go look. We should start locking the barn. Hiding Rei will be a lot easier than hiding his ship."
"Things go according to plan, neither one of 'em is gonna be here in a week or two."
"I know." She looked down at the bowl in her lap and concentrated on swiping up the last of the stew with her bread.
"Honey." Her dad reached out to pat her arm awkwardly. "You know this is temporary, right? Rei can't stay here on Earth. This is no place for him. He belongs out there with his friends and his people."
"We could find a way," she said obstinately, refusing to acknowledge the tears prickling the back of her throat. "Dad, you don't know some of the things he's told me. I don't know if he has anything to go back to. His people sold him into slavery, and out there in space, he'd be hunted by people who want to put him back in chains."
"And here?" Her father's voice was gentle. Sympathetic. "What kind of life can he have, always having to hide?"
"Not always." She shoved the last piece of bread into her mouth, swallowing it past the lump in her throat. "I was thinking we could maybe go out in town for Halloween. Pretend he's wearing a costume."
"You think that's a good idea if the feds are looking for him?"
"But they can't possibly know what he looks like, how could they? And everyone else is just going to see a guy in face paint. Anyway, it doesn't have to be here. We can drive over to Eau Claire. I just feel like he deserves to see a little of Earth. He's hardly ever had fun in his entire life. I'd like to take him on an actual, you know. A date."
"He's got to go back to space, honey."
"Not right away." She straightened abruptly and began gathering their dishes.
"Didn't mean to upset you, honey. I like Rei too. But you know it's true."
She couldn't look at him. "I'm going upstairs to see how Rei's doing."
She expected to find him sleeping, but instead he was lying propped up on her pillows with the other cuff disassembled in his lap. He'd changed into the clothes she had bought for him, black jeans and a dark red sweater. The dark red color was, as she'd suspected, incredibly flattering on him, setting off the indigo of his skin. His feet were bare, his hair tousled as he bent his head over his work in the pool of warm lamplight.
She didn't think she'd made any noise, but he looked up and saw her, and flashed her a quick smile. Taking it as an invitation, she came over and sat on the edge of the bed. Half the piece of toast was gone, she noticed, though the stew didn't appear to have been touched.
"Fixing the other one?" she asked.
Rei nodded. He snapped it back onto his wrist and shook his arm to seat it into place.
Sarah told herself firmly not to be nervous about them. He could control those things just fine; it was no different from a cop or a soldier wearing a sidearm.
"Thank you for the garments," Rei said. "They're nice." He touched the sweater. "It's very soft."
"Well, maybe I just want to cuddle up to it," she said, running a light hand across the fuzzy sleeve.
He smiled and pushed himself a little higher on the pillows. "I would like that. But first I want to draw something for you."
"Oh, really?" She pulled up her feet under her as he reached for the pad of paper on the nightstand. "I'd love that. Nobody's ever drawn anything for me before."
Rei opened the pad of paper and dumped out the pencils on the bed. "You asked me about dragons earlier. I didn't want to talk about it then, because ... it hurt. My friend Lyr was—is a dragon. But I think I'd like to tell you about him now, if you don't mind."
"I would love to hear about your friend."
"You have time?"
"Always," she said firmly.
"Then ... let me show you Lyr."
He selected a pencil. Hands in her lap, Sarah sat raptly and watched him draw. Under his deft strokes, a human figure took shape. Humanoid, she amended, as Rei added spines to the head, forearms, and back. It was wearing a coverall that left the arms and feet bare, like the one Rei had been wearing when Sarah first met him. There was a collar around its neck, and a bracelet on each wrist. The face was nearly blank, just a sketchy suggestion of a penciled nose and eyes.
"This is Lyr," Rei said. "The head of my sept."
"What's a sept?"
"The Galateans divide the smaller children into groups and give each of them someone older to mentor them and look out for them. When they took me from my homeworld, I was put in a group of other children who were all about my age except for Lyr. He was an older teenager, maybe a young adult; hard to say because I was so young myself then. But he was like a big brother to the whole sept."
"How many of you were there in this sept?"
"Seven." He shaded Lyr's skin with a gold pencil, then added shadows of other colors—violet, green, brown, bringing to Sarah's mind the interplay of colors in a peacock's tail. Lyr's medium-length hair was delineated in careful spikes, folded down against his neck and colored in shades of dark blue. Sarah wondered if it was hair, or something else: feathers or scales.
Lyr's face remained blank, whether because Rei couldn't remember Lyr's features well enough to draw them, or if he just didn't want to picture them closely. Sarah wasn't going to ask.
Rei glanced up and saw her rapt interest, bringing a trace of a wistful smile to his face. "Would you like me to draw them all for you?"
"Sure. I'd love to see them."
"Since Lyr was the oldest of us, I guess age is as good an order as any." Rei began sketching a slightly shorter figure beside Lyr; its head came up to his chin. This one was recognizably female, in a similar form-fitting coverall, with erect catlike ears and a short, thick mane of hair. Rei colored her skin light yellow-brown, her hair dark red, and added small clusters of brown spots to her face and arms, carefully working around the pale slashes of the collar and wristlets. Sarah thought at first that the spots were freckles, then realized they looked more like leopard spots.
"This is Haiva," Rei said, adding darker brown shading to her hair with deft flicks of the pencil. "She was the second oldest after Lyr. She was Galatean."
"I thought Galateans were your, uh—your slave masters." She cringed at having to say it, but Rei didn't even flinch.
"They are, but they also enslave their own people. Haiva was one of those."
The drawing was starting to look uncannily like Cheetara on the old Thundercats cartoons Sarah had watched as a child, but she knew Rei wouldn't get the reference. Instead, she said, "She looks like she's part cat."
"She is." Rei began sketching another figure next to Haiva. "Galateans were made from human and feline DNA, the same way my people were made from humans and wolves. But they don't shift like my people—at least most of them don't; there are rumors that the Sun King and his guard can turn into lions."
Sarah wanted to ask him more about that, but from the curl to his lip, she decided it wasn't a good topic to pursue. Instead she watched two new figures take shape. They were shorter than Haiva, one male, one female. Same gray coveralls, same bracelets and collars. But each of these had—
"Wings," she breathed, as Rei detailed the curve of sweeping wings rising above their shoulders. "Who are they?"
"Rook and Kite. They were twins." Rei reached for a red-violet pencil and began coloring in their skin. "Their people are called the Tybor." He colored gently over the red-violet with a brown pencil, adding darker undertones to their skin. The woman's skin was slightly darker than the man's.
"Can they really fly?"
"Yes," Rei said absently, as he detailed their hair in mottled gray and brown—barred, like a hawk's wings. "Yes, they could fly. And Rook loved reading, especially books about history. He was fascinated by how things were in the past. Kite used to get so impatient with him. She always wanted to be out there doing things."
The woman, Kite, had one hand extended, and Sarah soon saw why, as Rei began sketching a new figure holding her hand. This one was also female, very slender and taller than Kite—though not quite as tall as Lyr, who towered over all the others.
Sarah had thought at first that Rei had drawn Lyr so big because he was the oldest and the rest were children, but it was apparent from the curves of the female bodies and the broadness of Rook's shoulders that these were meant to be adults. Lyr was really that tall.
"This is Selinn," Rei said, coloring the girl's skin brown. "She makes portals. I don't know if all her people can do that. She's the only one of them I ever met."
"Portals?"
"Yes, to jump from place to place, like a ship. Except she could do it without a ship."
He had drawn the girl's opposite hand extended, and now he used bright blue and purple pencils to shade an oval as tall as she was, just beyond the tips of her fingers.
"You mean she could teleport?"
Rei nodded. He switched to a vivid green for Selinn's hair, and carefully detailed green nail polish on the brown fingers wrapped around Kite's dark purple ones.
"They were lovers?" Sarah asked.
"Yes," Rei said quietly. He reached for a purple pencil and added delicate shading around Kite's eyes. "Rook and Kite's people believe in soulmates. I don't know if there is any such thing, but of all the people I've ever met, I could believe it of Kite and Selinn. There was something between them from the time we were all young, as if they'd known each other in a past life and only now found each other again."
Sarah was starting to feel as if she knew these people. It was unbearably sad to think they were all dead—Rei's friends, his family.
Rei was adding vivid silver edges to Selinn's portal. "How could someone like that—" Sarah began, and then stopped herself.
He glanced up from the drawing. "How could what?"
Sarah touched the edge of the portal with her fingertips. "I just don't see how someone like that could be kept prisoner. Could she do that anytime she wanted?"
"Collar," Rei reminded her.
"Oh." Sarah touched her own throat, where the silver collar in the drawing slashed across Selinn's darker skin. "Yes. I see."
"But when they sent her somewhere, it was her attachment to us that kept her coming back. I sometimes wondered—" He broke off abruptly, shook his head, and began sketching a new figure next to Selinn.
"Wondered what?"
"If she could have teleported away from ... No." He answered his own question. "She's dead. If she was alive, we'd know."
"Is there any chance she could be?"
Rei reached for a red pencil and began shading the new figure's hair. "No. Trust me on this. Clinging to that kind of hope will kill you. She's dead. They're dead. End of story."
Sensing how tightly he was clinging to his self-control, Sarah let it drop. This new member of their little clan was the most colorful yet, with purple skin of a lighter, more vivid shade than Kite and Rook's, and brilliant red hair framing a square-jawed face.
"Who is this?"
"Skara. The little asshole," Rei said fondly. "Skara might have been the one of us they just couldn't break. It didn't matter what our
overseers did to him. Locked him in solitary, beat him, starved him. He'd still play practical jokes on them, sabotage their equipment, and mouth off at the slightest opportunity. Looking back on it, I don't know how he managed to survive to adulthood. I think he got away with it because he was just one of those people who gets away with stuff. You know what I mean?"
Sarah nodded with a smile. She could see that Rei had a soft spot a mile wide for this Skara person. "Yeah, I went to school with a few of those. They could be awful, but being their friend was never boring, for sure."
"That was Skara," Rei murmured, touching the drawing lightly with his fingertip. "He was awful. He could be a real sack of dicks, especially when he was getting us all in trouble for some stupid prank. I think there were times when all of us wanted to strangle him, Lyr especially. But you couldn't ask for a more loyal friend. And he's also the reason why I know that Selinn and Kite didn't just portal somewhere. If they weren't dead, Skara would have known."
"How?" Sarah asked.
"Skara's people, the Iustra, are shapeshifters. Like my people, they can't change their mass, but unlike us, they aren't limited to just one kind of shift. They can rearrange their features to masquerade as other species. Any other species. And that's not all they can do." He shaded Skara's hair as he spoke, adding deft strokes of darker red. Like all of the other figures, he'd left Skara's face mostly blank, with just a suggestion of features. "Since an Iustra can look like almost anything or anyone, their people have a unique ability to recognize and find each other, no matter where they are or what they look like on the outside. And it's not just limited to members of their own species. Once he'd imprinted on us, Skara could find any one of us anywhere, even if we were halfway across the galaxy. But ... he couldn't find Kite and Selinn after they died. He said it was like they were just gone, like they'd vanished out of the universe. Lyr felt it too, like they just stopped existing."
The look on his face broke her heart. "If you need to stop—"
"No." He smiled at her, a wistful smile, but a genuine one. "It's good to talk about it. I haven't talked to anyone about them. Once we'd lost so many of them—Kite and Rook, Haiva and Skara—those of us who were left didn't want to talk about them either. Especially Lyr." His fingers slid across the page from Skara to the blue and gold figure at the far left. Lightly he traced the spikes poking up through Lyr's hair; it looked like a caress. "He always felt responsible for the rest of us. And he was there with the lost ones when they died, in a way the rest of us weren't. I think losing so many of us broke him in some way."