“What happened?”
“Ribomax,” I explained, crossing my arms in front of my chest, even as I saw my father descending the staircase to join us.
“Danovan?” he questioned, eyes wide. “What are you doing here?”
“He has brought an injured woman,” my mother said. “A Ribomax, you say?”
I gave a sharp nod of my head. “The paralytic ate through the fabric of her pants and burned her flesh. She’s been unconscious since the attack.”
“When was this?” my mother asked, hugging her silk floral robe tight around her and tying it at the waist before moving past me to the communications system by the door. It was a small touchscreen, but it connected this house to all of the others in the town, one great web of support and supplies.
“This morning,” I said, and she looked at me, shocked. “I drove all day to get here.”
“I don’t understand. What about the ship?”
“It’s a long story.”
I watched my mother’s fingers fly across the communication device, and I watched her set the message in red, a high alert. It would only be a matter of minutes before other healers burst through the door with their supplies.
“Olander, take Danovan. I will need my space with the girl,” my mother said, ever in command. I didn’t hesitate to do as she bid, trusting her implicitly.
“One question,” she said, one finger held aloft. “What is the girl’s name?”
“Araceli,” I said, her name catching in my throat. “Dr. Araceli Cross. I… I call her Ara.”
My mother nodded, and bent over Ara, cooing gently in her ear before my father caught me by the elbow to lead me into another room.
***
Ours was a manor house, old and proud, with fine detailing carved into the wood, the likes of which could not be found elsewhere on the planet or, for that fact, in the universe. The facade was a slate-grey stone with windows edged in Quaridium Drolide, oxidized to a beautiful, rosy gold. The door was made of Cendran wood, a single slab, etched and sanded into a beautiful carving that told the story of the Goddess of the Hearth. The bannisters were webbed Cendran bannisters, and I remember that I had gotten my head stuck in them once when I was a child. I couldn’t help but smile at the thought of it.
The house was a pleasant mixture of the modern and the antiquated. The furniture was all real woods and natural fibers, and all exquisitely rendered by hand by local craftsman. But we would not be disconnected from the greater web of our community, both locally in Hiropass, and regionally in Pyrathas. Pyrathas was the heart that pumped blood to the outer villages like ours. Though we were self-sustaining, we never wanted to feel cut off.
The comm system in the house was new in the last decade or so, as my mother was prone to being rather traditionalist in nature. But my father insisted on keeping with the times, and after he had secretly installed a newsfeed in his office, she finally gave in.
Sitting in that selfsame office with him now, I switched on the newsfeed, scanning the headlines for anything that could shed some light on our situation.
“Son,” he said quietly, putting his hand on my arm. I didn’t shrug him off, but I wanted to. I wanted to know what was going on, to feel like I had any semblance of control over things. But I didn’t. Not at all. I heaved a sigh, and dropped down onto a plush down cushion, nearly twice my size, and hoped that I might vanish into it. “What is going on?”
I laughed a dark, wry laugh. “I wish to the gods that I knew,” I said, my tone full of spite and acid.
My father was a handsome man, from whom I had inherited the brushed-nickel tone of my skin. But his brow was not so pronounced as mine, and he had ridges on either side of his mouth that had deepened with age. His eyes were a peridot green so fine they almost glowed, and they were slanted like a lizard’s. It was a regional thing. My mother’s eyes were blue, like Ara’s; her skin was pearl white, also like Ara’s. And she had only recently begun to develop smile lines around her eyes and the gentle curve of her mouth. My mother was a beauty by Galatean standards, but she likely would have been by human standards, too, when she was young. Her brow ridge was subtle in the front, and pronounced at the back, making it look like she had short-cropped white hair that was always perfectly styled into a little point at the back of her head. Her form was lithe and lean, and my father always called her his ‘precious opal.’ She’d born two children, she ran a clinic, and she had the run of my father, that was for sure. I loved them dearly.
“The Leviathan was attacked,” I said at length to my father, who sat down on the edge of his desk with the shock of the news, pressing his fingertips to his mouth as he did so. “It fell… just… straight out of the sky.”
“No.”
“I saw it.” I sighed and made myself look at the newsfeed, reporting only small local tragedies, nothing on the carnage Ara and I had witnessed. “And when we went to the GenOriens base…” All I could do then was shake my head.
“What happened?” my father urged.
“Carnage,” was the only word I could manage. “Someone is trying to get rid of GenOriens, and all of their research. And they are coming very close to succeeding.”
“You will stay here, then,” my father said, coming around to clap me on the shoulder. “It will be good to have you.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I can’t do that. I have to help.”
“Help?” my father echoed, his brow furrowed. “But what will you do?”
I looked back into the room we’d just left, where my mother was bent over Araceli, who remained unconscious. “Everything I can,” I said.
And with that, my father’s expression changed. It warmed, softened, and he gave me a knowing nod. “Ah,” he said. “You are in love.”
“Yeah—” I paused, snapping around to look at him. He had a smug look on his face, and I steeled myself against it. “No, she’s just a friend.”
“Is that so?”
“It is so—she’s engaged to my boss.”
“Who died in the crash of the great ship?”
“Well. It hasn’t been concluded definitively.” I itched absently at the back of my neck. “I should go check on Ara.”
“Leave your mother to her work.”
“I’d feel better if I were sitting by her side.”
“Because you love her.” My father was relentless. He was getting on in years, and I knew he wanted to see me settle down with the right girl. But I had to admit, even I was slightly surprised that he was so accepting and excited about the prospect of my mating with a human. Such unions were not necessarily openly discouraged, but they were rare.
It hadn’t even occurred to me up until that very moment that anyone would have anything in particular to say about a relationship between Araceli and myself—but plenty of people would have much to say, I was sure. I frowned.
“Come,” my father said at last, switching off the newsfeed. “We will find no answers here. But perhaps we will find them in a cup of bull rose tea.”
We passed through the foyer and into the sitting room where my mother was working, a bowl of herbs in her hand that she was crushing into a paste. I paused to watch her for a moment, swallowing hard as I tried to get a grip on the errant emotions that were roiling through my body. I found myself casting silent prayers to heedless gods in an empty heaven, as my mother’s deft fingers went to work smearing the paste across Araceli’s forehead.
I drew in a deep breath, willing her with every ounce of force I possessed to open her eyes. Just open your eyes, open your eyes…
Jaelle cal’Darian, my mother, and the most powerful healer Hiropass had ever seen, began to chant quietly just below a register I could easily discern. There was an element of the magical to her work, but when pressed, she would admit that it was the science of it that saved her patients. “But faith,” she would amend, “is not to be discounted.”
My mother’s low hum came to an end, and I was
just about to join my father in the kitchen for that cup of promised tea, when my entire universe whittled down to one focal point: Araceli had opened her eyes.
Part 3: The Quickening
Chapter 10:
Dr. Araceli Cross
I drifted up from the darkness, following the scent of fresh-mown grass or wet earth or crushed lavender. I felt cool hands on the hot skin of my forehead, and I heard the sounds of soothing whispers coaxing me up out of unconsciousness and into the glow of low lamplight. The only things I could move at first were my eyelids, heavy from the paralytic, but I was breathing and the air was sweet, and I had a circle of smiling faces peering down over me.
“Ara,” I heard Danovan say, and fixed my eyes on his face. He looked like an angel hovering there, skin smooth as polished silver, and concern shining in eyes the color of chrome and flecked with twinkling stars of blue and purple. Those eyes, those extraordinary eyes, were the center of my universe as I willed myself not to panic when I couldn’t lift my hand to brush my fingers over the chiseled line of his jaw.
My own eyes must have registered my panic because the woman standing next to Danovan leaned in closer and ran the backs of her knuckles ever so gently over the curve of my cheek. She murmured something unintelligible in Galatean and I glanced between her and Danovan in an attempt to indicate that I hadn’t the faintest notion as to what was transpiring.
“She says not to worry,” Danovan translated, “that you will make a full recovery, and not to let your fear overtake you.”
I looked back at the woman, and then to the older Galatean man at her side, and watched them as they lifted their faces to chat amongst each other in their native tongue. The words were lost to me, but the cadence was soothing, rhythmic and lyrical. The Romance language of the stars, they called it—I’d always thought it was silly, but listening to them talk then, low and placid, I began to understand how it had earned such a reputation. The language used soft consonant sounds and elongated vowels and would prove very easy to sing, I should think.
After a time, the woman peered back down into my face and spoke. She was beautiful, with alabaster skin as unblemished as porcelain. There was a softness to the ridge of her brow that made her eyes look wide and round.
“She says that she is going to give you something to speed up the process of getting the paralytic out of your system. She says it will not be pleasant, but that the momentary unpleasantness is probably preferable to remaining paralyzed—er, blink once for yes and twice for no?”
I blinked. Anything was better than feeling trapped like this inside my own body. But I was beginning to feel some sensation return to my lips, like a tingling, the type of pins-and-needles feeling that you get when a limb falls asleep. It was strange—numbness has a feeling, and it’s heavy.
Danovan gave a nod to the pale woman and she shooed him, and the older man, away. But Danovan lingered there a moment, furrowing his brow in question as he made his protestation in impassioned, if hushed, Galatean. But the woman shook her head, having none of his arguments, and he finally obeyed her.
She cooed gently to me as she moved in and out of my line of vision, speaking her lovely, lilting language as she readied her supplies. Eventually, she took my chin in her hands, which I registered only as pressure, and opened my mouth. Then, she held a small glass vial in my line of vision so that I could see the ginger-colored viscous liquid therein. That done, she upended the vial’s contents into my mouth: it had the consistency of thick maple syrup but didn’t taste nearly as good. It had a bitter flavor, like cough syrup and coffee, and it burned on my tongue. I coughed involuntarily as I felt the pressure of her hands on my throat, massaging it to help the liquid down my throat. She closed my mouth for me and gently petted my forehead as I choked the medicine down.
Like the first gulp of whiskey, I could feel it travel down my esophagus and settle warmly in the pit of my stomach. And sensation began to return from the point at which it settled, slowly at first, and then all at once, until my nerve endings were lit up and I could feel every inch of myself all at once. It was pleasant at first, warm, awake, like a double shot of espresso. But then it burned, it seared, and I was aflame with sensation. I sat up suddenly, my chest heaving as I tried to catch my breath, but I was subsumed by the pain. I looked down at my body. I felt like it must have been on fire, but it wasn’t. I shot a desperate look to my caretaker before parting my lips and wailing like a banshee. The sound was foreign even to my own ears. Never before had I let out so primal a scream.
The Galatean was holding her hands up and making a downward gesture, obviously trying to get me to calm down, but I couldn’t. I was on fire. My nerve endings were lit up and I could feel everything—the air on my skin from when she exhaled, the fibers of my cotton shirt. And it was all too much. I stood up and tore the clothes from my body layer by layer. And when I was done, I held my arms out to the side so that I wasn’t touching anything but air. But there was no relief: even the bottoms of my feet were burning where they touched the floorboards.
“What is happening to me?” I demanded, but the Galatean woman was just rambling on in a language I didn’t understand. I wanted to tear my skin off. I wanted to dig my nails into my epidermis and shred. Anything, anything to make it stop.
“Araceli,” she said firmly, my name being the only word she knew that I could recognize. She made her calming gesture again and I tried to make myself calm down. She showed me with her hands that she wanted me to take deep breaths, so I took deep breaths. She showed me with her hands that she wanted me to close my eyes, so I closed my eyes. I closed my eyes, and I took deep breaths, and eventually, mercifully, the burning began to fade, pulse by pulse with the beat of my heart, until it was only warmth, until it was completely gone.
Well, not completely. I looked down at the inside of my leg, where the Ribomax venom had splashed and hit me, and I saw the bandages and knew that the burns there were serious. The pain remained, in thick splotches, and it stung down to the muscle. But at least that was relegated to one limb, and not spread out over my entire body.
I let out one final exhale, and smiled up at my caretaker, embarrassed by how I’d comported myself. It wasn’t every day that I stripped naked in front of total strangers, but I had felt compelled. And she seemed unfazed; she simply handed me a soft silk robe in deep purple, and I gratefully donned it before taking a seat and graciously accepting a proffered mug of something warm. She patted me gently on the head as I cradled the mug in my hands and breathed deeply of its scent: flowery and sweet, like green tea with ginger, but strong. It was delicious.
My caretaker had gone to the door and called Danovan and the other man back in, and Danovan came in like a shot, his jaw hanging agape until he saw me sitting up, drinking a cup of what I assume was tea.
“Thank the gods,” he breathed, sitting beside me, “you’re alive.” He enfolded me in a sudden embrace, crushing me to him and squeezing all of the air out of me as he did so. I would have wrapped my arms around him, but he’d pinned them down, so all I could do was let him sway me gently from side to side.
I took in a deep gulp of air when he let me go, trying not to spill my tea over the both of us. “I’m… ah…” he stammered, scratching absently at the back of his neck, “I’m just so relieved.”
“You and me both.” I smiled, though the memory of the searing pain was fresh in my mind, I tried to shake it off. It refused to be shaken. “Thank you.”
“Thank my mother,” he said, and my eyes popped open wide as we both turned our eyes to my caretaker. She was his mother. Of course. This village that wasn’t on our map—he knew it because he’d grown up in it. I stood slowly and extended my hand to the woman who had saved me, and she took it, folding it in both of her warm, deft hands.
“Allow me to introduce Jaelle cal’Darian, the greatest healer in all of Hiropass.”
“Tell her,” I said to Danovan as I squeezed Jaelle’s hand, “that I am very pl
eased to meet her, and profoundly grateful for her assistance.”
Danovan translated my words for his mother, and she smiled a broad, toothy smile at me before letting go of my hand and pressing her palms against my cheeks. She peered up into my eyes, looking very closely, and I could see that Danovan had inherited the blue and purple flecks from her. She whispered something to me, something that sounded like, “Sheeay riagosa du mil.” I hadn’t the slightest notion as to what it meant, but smiled all the same. She chuckled something low and knowing and pressed a kiss to my forehead. Then she let me go and tugged the other Galatean man forward.
“And this,” Danovan said, “is my father. Olander jin’Darian.”
I looked up at Olander and smiled and he took my hand and raised it to his lips so that he might press a kiss to the back of it. “Thank you for having me in your home,” I said, and just as I was about to ask Danovan to translate, Olander made his own reply.
“You are welcome here.” The words were slow and deliberate, and I guessed that he likely only had the most basic conversational English, but I smiled brightly and glanced between him and Danovan. Danovan was the perfect combination of his parents. He had inherited his father’s impressive build and stature, and his mother’s exquisite bone structure; from his father, he had gotten his brushed-nickel skin tone, and from his mother, the subtlety of his brow ridge and the fine line of his jaw. There was no doubt in my mind, based on parentage alone, that Danovan’s sister was a great beauty in her own right as well.
“Please,” Olander went on, and I could see him struggling to find each and every word he spoke. “Be comfort here.”
“Thank you,” came my easy reply.
“But hour is late, we must to sleep.” Olander slid an arm around Jaelle’s waist, and she looked up at him. He muttered something in Galatean and she bobbed her head in a nod before waggling her fingers at me and moving toward Danovan, whom she drew into a tight embrace before covering his face in adoring motherly kisses.
Alien Survivor: (Stranded on Galatea) An Alien SciFi Romance Page 9