by Lauren Esker
"A what?" She looked at him blankly.
"Translator?" He touched behind his ear, feeling the long-healed nub of the translator implant he'd worn for most of his life. "It's injected into the bony ridge behind the ear. Did the bounty hunters do that?"
Claudia frantically groped at her ear. "What? Did they? When?!"
"You should have noticed." He frowned at her. "Normally they give you headaches when they're first put in."
"I had headaches," she snapped. "Right after I had sex with you. Did you put something in me?" She paused. It was too dark under the trees now for him to get a clear look at her expression, but her body language radiated embarrassment. "I mean. Other than—okay, you know what? I think we need to have a good long talk about consent, buddy."
"You seemed to be consenting very actively," he couldn't help saying.
"Not the sex! I mean—the sex was—oh God." She buried her face in her hands. "Can we talk about this later?" she asked, muffled. "It's getting really dark out here, and I would love to get us back to your ship if I only knew how. I want food, and water, and a shower, and a nice dry place where there are no bugs and no alligators."
"Okay, listen." He laid a hand on her arm again. This time, she didn't pull away. "You should be able to portal to any location you can clearly visualize. The place where your captors were holding you is near where I parked my ship. Can you remember that place well enough to get back to it?"
"I—I don't know. I was unconscious most of the time, and then I was pretty freaked out."
Skara squeezed her arm gently. Those bastards ... but he could deal with them later. "Don't think about them. Think about the location. Anything you can remember about it. Especially physical, tangible details. That's why it's so much easier to go somewhere you know well."
"What about my apartment?" she asked. "I did that once already. Could I take us there instead?"
"Uh ... yeah. Yeah, that'll work great." He should have thought of that before. He wouldn't have his own meds there, but he could get by without them for a little while. He wasn't hurting too badly, just dizzy and aching so far.
And he tried not to think about what the fact that she'd already started using the symbiont meant for him. With luck, it wouldn't have bonded too closely with her yet, and could still be removed. If not ...
If not, we'll deal with that later, when I'm not half-naked in a swamp.
Claudia made a frustrated little whimper. It was nearly pitch dark now. He could hardly see her at all, but he could feel her arm, warm and solid under his hand. "I can't. It's not working."
"Don't just think about what it looks like. Think about what it feels like. The way it smells. The feeling of the floor under your feet. The sounds you normally hear. The feeling you get when you go there."
He'd narrowed his focus so completely to Claudia that her tiny flinch was his first indication that something had happened. Then he looked up and saw the electric shimmer in the air.
It hurt, seeing her do it and knowing that it wasn't him. He tried to keep that out of his voice.
"That's right. Keep thinking about it. Pretend you're there, in your favorite place, doing whatever you like to do there."
"Reading," Claudia murmured. "I'm on the couch, curled up with a book. I—look!"
The gap in the air was widening and deepening steadily. Through the vibrating outline sketched in the air around it, Skara could see late afternoon sunshine painting a wall; this place was in a different part of her world, an earlier time zone. Claudia's housekeeping made his own look tidy. There was furniture upturned, items scattered on a carpeted floor.
"Those assholes! They tossed my place!"
The rip in the air wavered, the soft glow starting to fade.
"Calm down. Keep your focus. Now that you can see it, concentrate on what it looks like now. Try to see it more clearly."
Skara rubbed her arm gently, realizing he was doing it only as the view of sunlit walls and messy floor sharpened again. It was a grounding technique that had been used on him when—well. It hadn't been for making portals. But it had worked then, and it worked for her now. The portal grew and widened until it was large enough to step through. A hole in the air, she'd called it, and that was what it looked like, casting a gentle glow into their darkened glade.
"Stand up slowly," Skara murmured. "Don't lose your focus."
He took her hand and helped her to her feet. In the light cast by the portal, her face was a gorgeous picture of fascination and delight.
"I did that," she whispered.
"You did." He grinned at her, unable to avoid catching her infectious joy. "Now let's go there, and get out of this swamp."
Hand twined in hand, they stepped through the portal together.
Eight
Claudia didn't quite believe it until her foot came down on carpet instead of mud and moss. She looked over her shoulder and saw the portal already shrinking, giving her a final glimpse of the dark forest before it winked out.
"I did it!" She threw her arms around Skara and caught him in a triumphant hug. "I did it!"
He picked her up and gave her a single twirl that ended in both of them stumbling into her overturned couch. Claudia flung out an arm to catch herself. Skara dropped her back onto her feet, and she untangled herself, laughing helplessly in a weird mix of triumph and a growing "you gotta laugh or cry" feeling as she took in the state of her apartment.
"Are you okay?" Skara asked, leaning a hip against the wall.
"No!" she said with another half-hysterical laugh. "And you're no picture yourself, you know. Oh, I'm so hungry. I'm going to get us something to eat and then ... deal with ... everything."
She started to kick off her muddy shoes, hardly caring where they went in the mess, and then realized she was going to need them to avoid stepping on broken glass in the kitchen. The canned goods were largely unmolested, so she grabbed every can of stew she could find, opened all of them into a plastic bowl, and stuck it in the microwave. It looked like dog food all mixed together like that, but right now she would willingly eat that too, if she had some.
"I hope you can eat human food."
"I can eat anything you can eat. I'm human too."
"You're what? No, you know what? I don't want to even talk about this until I get some food in me." She found half a loaf of bread under an overturned chair, its plastic bag sticky with jam from a smashed jar. The door of the refrigerator was standing open, and she shut it. "I'm glad you crashed their ship. Assholes. Why would they even do this?"
"Looking for information about you, I expect."
"Everything they could want to know is in my purse. Stupid aliens. Speaking of my purse ... do you see it in there?"
"I don't know what I'm looking for."
"Never mind," she sighed. "Let's just eat, and then I'll see if I can find my phone and call my sister and my boss."
While the food heated, she went to check the state of the door. It had been shoved carelessly back onto its hinges and would probably pass inspection from the hallway, as long as nobody looked too closely at the splintered doorframe. If no one tried to open the door, her disappearance and the state of the apartment probably could have gone unnoticed for at least a couple of days.
These guys were thorough and professional. She tried not to shudder, and set the chain lock on the door for all the good that'd do when it was half off its hinges.
"You don't have to be afraid," Skara said quietly. "If they come back, you can portal out. And I'll protect you."
Claudia gave him a thoroughly skeptical look. He was still mostly naked except for the clinging rags of his clothes—she was almost starting to get used to it—and while she was in the kitchen, he'd been quietly and without comment starting to pick things up. The couch had been turned over, the bookcase set upright. "You'll protect me. Okay. Sure. You know, you're the whole reason why I'm in this mess in the first place."
"Not on purpose!" he protested as the microwave began to beep.
"Jus
t ... sit down and eat." He started to sit on the couch. "No, no. Cushions first. Those. They go on it."
She came back from the kitchen with the loaf of bread in its hastily rinsed bag tucked under her arm, a steaming bowl of stew in one hand and the only other clean and undamaged thing she could find—an old plastic cottage cheese container—in the other. "You can get a blanket from the bedroom if you want to wrap up in something. I don't know if any of my clothes will fit you."
"Why?" His smile was flirtatious, but she didn't think it was her imagination that it also looked slightly wan. "Am I distracting you?"
"You look cold and I don't want you passing out on my couch. Actually," she added, plopping herself down on the couch, "get one for me too."
They ate sitting on opposite ends of the couch, each wrapped in a blanket. Claudia was scraping up the last of her stew with a piece of bread when she heard her phone start vibrating somewhere underneath the books that had been swiped out of the bookcase.
"Aha!" She set down the bowl and dived for it. By the time she found it, the call had gone to voice mail. It was showing a missed call from Naomi and several new voice mails.
"That's a communication device, right?" Skara said.
"Yes, and it's full of communications, probably from work, where I didn't show up today because someone got me abducted by aliens."
She played back the messages, skipping each one as they all turned out to be as expected: her workplace trying several times to reach her. The last was from Naomi. "Hey, sis, you're not answering my texts and your boss tried to call me to find out if I know where you are. You better just be sick on the couch, but if you don't call me back I'm gonna swing by your place on the way home from work, okay?"
"Who's that?" Skara asked.
"My sister. Who's coming here! Shit!" She looked wildly around the trashed apartment. "How am I going to explain this? Especially the half-naked purple alien on my couch!"
"I can disguise myself," Skara said in a mild tone.
She had actually forgotten in the heat of the moment that he was a sort of super-chameleon. "Okay, fine, but I'm going to try to stop her." She started a text, deleted it, started typing again. "I don't even know what to say. I'm just going to tell her I'm sick. She already thinks that anyway. Damn it, I hate lying to Naomi."
She texted: Food poisoning. Sorry to worry you. I'm already feeling a lot better but trust me, you don't want to come by here.
Naomi's text came back a moment later: Sucks. You want me to bring you anything?
No thanks, I'm good. Let you know if I need anything.
Get better then, and stop eating questionable leftovers.
"Well, that's one down," Claudia muttered. "Now let's see if I still have a job." She glanced at the time on the phone. "Or maybe not right now. They're closed. Damn it. I hope they'll believe the food poisoning story too."
She popped off a quick email to work, then called the downstairs front desk. When she got the after-hours message, she dialed through to the security desk.
"Security, Barney speaking."
Oh, thank God. It sounded like him, no weird overtones to his voice or anything. Tears sprang to her eyes and she blinked them back. "Barney, hi. It's Claudia Webb from the design firm on the fourth floor. Did you, uh—were you on duty last night? I, uh ... came down to the desk but you weren't there."
"I clocked out halfway through the night." He sounded sheepish. "Came in to work, then I guess I got sick. It's just kind of a blur. I, er ... guess I mighta took a nap in the back for awhile, at least I woke up there, don't really remember falling asleep. Finally gave up and clocked out and went home."
"Gosh," Claudia said, thinking of those flashes of green light, the way she'd just gone out as soon as the shapeshifting lady pointed a hand at her. "Are you feeling all right today?"
"Feel pretty fine, thanks. Just a bit of a headache. Everything okay? You leave something here?"
"I'm out sick too," she said. "Maybe something's going around. Look ... Barney ..."
But she couldn't think how to explain. Don't talk to strangers, they could be alien shapeshifters. Yeah, no. Be careful? Better, but still weird.
She finally settled on a sheepish, "See you later," and hung up. Then she turned a glare on Skara.
"Business attended to?" Skara asked.
"Not really! What am I supposed to do, just go in to work tomorrow with alien bounty hunters after me, and get my whole office caught in the crossfire? What am I supposed to tell people?"
"I am really sorry about this."
"I don't care if you're sorry. My life is a wreck because of you."
"I know. And I don't know if you believe me or not," Skara said gently. "But I never meant to cause trouble for you."
The sad thing was, she really did believe him. His eyes were green, she noticed, startling against the purple skin. "How about we get ourselves cleaned up and changed into something that's not covered with mud and bugs, and you can put some pants on if we can find any that fit you, and then you'll tell me what the hell is going on, okay?"
The controls in Claudia's shower were not dissimilar from the sort Skara was used to, enough that he could figure it out without having to ask her. She had showered first, emerging wrapped in a drying cloth and surrounded by a cloud of sweet-smelling steam. "Your turn," she said, whisking past him before he even had time to enjoy the flash of her gorgeous long legs under the rough edge of fabric.
He cleaned himself under the water spray, standing up at first, but then sitting down when the aching exhaustion got to be too much. The food had helped a little, but not enough. His hands were shaking, his muscles corded ropes of pain. It was not only getting worse, but getting worse fast.
He turned his face up to the hot water and wondered bleakly how he was going to get out of this. Force Claudia to give him back the symbiont, when he knew it meant consigning her to the same fate? I'm an asshole, but not that much of one.
To make himself feel better, he tried her different floral-scented cleaning products, which she had arranged neatly on a shelf at the side of the shower enclosure. When he finally got out from under the water spray, he poked through her scattered collection of what he assumed were Earth-style medicines, but found nothing remotely familiar. The implant didn't give him the ability to read other languages, only to understand them when spoken, so he decided not to play medical roulette with the various-shaped lozenges in the bottles.
There was a sharp tap on the door. "Are you decent?" Claudia called through the door.
"Yes," he called back. "Oh ... I'm naked, though."
"Oh good grief." She opened the door anyway. She was neatly dressed in a soft-looking cream-colored sweater and tight blue leggings, with a clean, blue-and-white scarf tied around her head. Skara straightened his shoulders, put a hand on his hip, and smiled at her; no matter what he felt like, he was confident that he still looked fine. Claudia rolled her eyes, although he noticed her checking out his chest, and his smile widened.
"You are entirely too full of yourself." She thrust a bundle of clothing at him. "I don't have much that'll fit you, but I found a few things."
Skara shook out a short-sleeved tunic with drawings of big-eyed, lozenge-shaped objects and bright blue letters in an incomprehensible Earth script. "What does it say?"
"Bainbury Island Clambake and Hoedown," Claudia said, her voice gloomy. "AKA why letting Naomi pick the weekend's entertainment is a bad idea. Those are supposed to be clams, by the way, and it's an XL, so it should fit you. The other other thing is a skirt, which is, um, normally feminine apparel around here, in case you didn't know that, but none of my pants are your size, so ... enjoy."
With that, and a final glance in the general vicinity of his hips, she made a dignified but speedy retreat.
The shapeless tunic was not his usual preference, but he liked the skirt; patterned in vivid black and gold, it was both stylish and comfortable. Clearly women on this planet had claimed the most choice items of appar
el for themselves. If they were all like Claudia, he could see why no one wanted to argue with them about it.
He came out of the bathroom to find that Claudia had been cleaning. Much of the mess was set to rights, the floor cleared, the furniture all tidy again. Claudia was sweeping the kitchen, scraping together papers, broken glass, and fallen food items.
"Don't walk by the bedroom door," she said without looking up. "There's broken glass where those bozos knocked over a lamp, and you're barefoot. I'm going to vacuum in a minute."
"May I help?"
"You can put the books back on the shelves," she said, pointing.
Without being able to read Earth script, he wasn't sure what order they should go in or even which way was up, but he sat on the floor and stacked the books on the shelves as neatly as possible. Claudia got out some kind of noisy cleaning machine and ran it over the carpet in the living room and bedroom. The machine produced an unholy shrieking punctuated with a lot of clattering and rattling as it sucked up bits of broken glass and pottery.
"It sounds unhappy," he remarked when she turned it off.
"I wish I had a Roomba," was her cryptic response. She emptied the machine's reservoir into a trash bin—much clattering ensued—and then came over to throw herself dramatically on the couch. "At least my apartment no longer looks quite as much like a hurricane hit it. I'm hungry again, if you can believe it. I think I'm going to order pizza and make tea. Can you eat pizza?"
"What is it?"
"Bread, cheese, meat."
"Certainly." He wasn't sure what "cheese" was, but assumed if she could eat it, he probably could too; their people were the same basic genetic stock, after all.
"What about tea?"
"Yes, please."
She clattered about in the kitchen, and he heard her talking on the communication device, using words like "pepperoni" and "deep dish." It was strangely companionable, just having her there, hearing her voice and the little noises she made. Someone else sharing his space, doing their own thing nearby. It made him think—
—of things he didn't want to think about. People he didn't want to think about, a past he wanted to forget. And most particularly, a rendezvous he was going to be late for, if he didn't get his ship back and himself in working order before he came anywhere near the one person who would be able to tell there was something seriously wrong with him.
