by Lauren Esker
"The collar was the same." Loathing filled his voice at the mention of it. "But unlike the cuffs, it was not useful. It had only one function, to keep me prisoner by limiting my ability to move freely about the ship and punishing me for disobedience." He stopped, and Sarah wasn't sure what to say. She put her hand on his arm, and after a moment he went on more calmly.
"Only slaves wear collars. But everyone in the Galatean Empire wears cuffs, because that's how you interact with most Galatean technology. Silver for non-citizens such as slaves or foreigners, and gold for citizens. I used to use my cuffs to fly the pod."
"Oh, but doesn't that mean you can't leave unless you fix them?"
"I can also fly the pod manually. But it's much harder, and most of the advanced functions are inaccessible to me, such as weapons."
"It has weapons?" She looked up at the curving side of the pod in surprise. "You didn't mention those earlier."
"I don't need to get the weapons working in order to leave your planet."
"No, I guess not." She tucked her phone away and looked down at the glimmer of the Vrik coil rather than at his face. "So ... best-case scenario, if you can get everything working, how long do you think it'll take until you're ready to leave?"
"It's hard to say. Perhaps a few days."
Sarah swallowed her disappointment, pushing it down to her core. She was used to the bitterness of giving up her dreams, and she reminded herself that even if Rei was gone in a week, she would always have the memory of that week to hold to her heart for the rest of her life. And it was always possible there was some equivalent of space email. Maybe they could write to each other. Maybe he'd even come back to visit. Long-distance relationships were a pain in the ass no matter what; did it really matter if one of the parties had moved to Ann Arbor or Alpha Centauri?
"So, I'll just go make some lunch, I guess—" she began, and stopped, frowning at his face. "Are you all right?"
"I think so," he said slowly. His face had gone gray under his dark blue coloring. The tsinde spots had paled to nearly white.
"You don't look okay. Do you need to sit down?"
Rei shook his head. "I need to go outside. Stay here."
With that he pushed away from her and strode briskly toward the door of the barn. Like hell she was staying behind; Sarah broke into a trot and then a jog to keep up with his longer legs. Had he heard something? Smelled something? Was danger even now bearing down on them? She didn't hear helicopters, but maybe Rei's keener senses had alerted him to something she couldn't hear.
He vanished through the half-open side door. Sarah rushed after him, looked around, and discovered him just a few feet away, leaning on the side of the barn, doubled over so he could throw up.
"Oh my God, Rei, what's wrong?"
He shuddered through the last few spasms, tried to straighten up, and doubled over again, one arm wrapped around his stomach. "It's all right," he gasped. "Go back inside."
"It's not all right. You're sick. Rei ..." She put a hand hesitantly on his back. He flinched, and she could feel that his muscles were knotted hard as iron.
It was more than just being sick to his stomach. She could feel him shivering, feel the rapid rise and fall of his ribs as he gasped for air. He started to pull away when she took his wrist to feel his pulse, but then yielded and let her press her fingers to his inner arm just above the bracelet. His heartbeat was racing, light and fast and fluttering.
"Is it the candy?" she asked anxiously. "Have you eaten anything else today? It shouldn't have made you this sick. You've been eating our food just fine—"
... Oh. Oh, shit.
"Rei." Now her heart was hammering, too. "The, the whatever they're called, the Founders, the people who made you, used some wolf DNA, right? Do you think something that poisons wolves would poison you too?"
"I don't know," Rei ground out, his head hanging down. "Why?"
"Because chocolate doesn't hurt humans, but it's poisonous to dogs. Oh God, Rei, I didn't think. I'm so sorry!"
All she knew about medicine was what she'd learned from helping take care of her parents and from doctoring farm animals. He'd ingested poison, so they needed to get it out of his body (looked like he was taking care of that already) and ... and he needed to take activated charcoal, that was the other thing, to absorb what remained of it. She was pretty sure there was some in the medicine cabinet.
"Dad!" she shouted into the barn. "Come help Rei! He's sick, I think it's the chocolate, like dogs—I can't explain, I'm sorry, I'll be right back. Just stay with him, okay?"
She gave Rei's arm a comforting squeeze and with that, she was off, running toward the house.
Stupid! Stupid! What was she doing, going around feeding Earth junk food to an alien? Just because he'd been able to eat everything they'd eaten so far—but he'd said he was human, he should be able to eat anything a human could eat—
But even humans had food allergies, gluten sensitivity, that sort of thing, and even if he was mostly human on a genetic level, his people had been separated from hers for tens of thousands of years. They were probably lucky they hadn't sent him into anaphylactic shock already.
She ransacked the medicine cabinet, throwing bottles into the sink until she found the activated charcoal behind a collection of ten-year-old painkillers and expired prescription meds.
I had an alien boyfriend and I killed him by feeding him chocolate!
He was going to be fine, she reassured herself. Chocolate wasn't necessarily fatal to dogs, only in large amounts, and he was bigger than most dogs and hadn't eaten a whole lot of it. He'd probably just be sick for awhile and then be fine.
She stirred a dose of charcoal into a glass of water in the kitchen, snatched her sheepskin coat off its hook, and dashed outside again.
Back at the barn, her dad had gotten Rei to sit down just inside the door on an overturned crate. He was no longer throwing up, but he looked terrible, grayish and out of it, his hair sweat-plastered to his forehead.
"Here," Sarah said, kneeling beside him. "Drink this."
"I'd really rather not," Rei mumbled. He was leaning on her dad, and when she put her hand on his chest, she could feel his racing heart.
"It's just charcoal. It'll help absorb the toxins."
He hesitated and then took the glass with a shaking hand and tossed back the black liquid in a couple of gulps. "Ugh," he muttered, handing it back to her, and swallowed heavily.
Sarah set the glass aside and draped the coat over his shoulders. "Can you walk? We should get you to the house so you can lie down."
"Just give me a minute." He closed his eyes briefly, took a deep breath, then gently removed Sarah's hand from his arm and stood up. "We can go back to work. I'll be all right."
"No way!" Sarah burst out, as her father said firmly, "Sit back down, son."
"I've done more difficult things than this while feeling worse than this." He grimaced, started to hunch over as a spasm of pain went through him, then straightened again.
"That doesn't mean you have to!" Sarah protested, trying to push him back down onto the crate again. "It's okay to take some time off when you're sick. It's okay to be sick. Dad, can't you talk to him?"
Gary stopped Rei with a gnarled hand on his arm. Rei sighed and looked at him with exasperated patience.
"Still can't understand a word out of your mouth," Gary told him, "but the meaning comes through loud and clear. Look, boy, I get you. Hell, docs told me loud and clear I shouldn't be doing half the things I'm doing. But Sarah's right. Don't take this wrong, but you look like the Devil himself stomped on your grave. Just lay down for awhile. I can get the rest of the replacement hull plates cut out on my own."
"You are both so stubborn." Rei's words came out on a sigh as he sagged against Sarah, making her realize how much effort he was putting into keeping himself upright.
"Would you rather stay here than go in the house?" Sarah asked. "We can make a bed with hay and animal blankets. Then you can tell us what to
do, and we can keep working on the ship."
Rei hesitated, then nodded.
He sat on the end of the trailer, head in his hands, while she threw down hay and piled it with old blankets and towels from the ragged collection they used for sick or calving livestock. When Sarah slid an arm around him, he looked up at her wearily. "Come on," she said, helping him to his feet. "It won't be the most comfortable bed you've ever had, but you can nap while we fix the ship. Rei, I am so sorry I accidentally poisoned you."
"It's all right," he said, and laughed softly. "If you don't mind, I am very thirsty."
"Yes, of course. Hang on."
Under the old hand pump behind the barn, she rinsed the glass she'd mixed the charcoal in, and filled a clean jug. The pump drew on the same well they used for water in the house, so it would be perfectly clean; no sense in walking back over when she didn't have to. She left the glass and jug beside Rei on the barn floor and kissed his damp forehead. "Just tell us if there's anything else you need, okay?"
He nodded and closed his eyes.
Sarah took his pulse again. It had slowed somewhat from earlier and no longer had that frantic, fluttery quality that had so worried her. He really hadn't ingested that much, she told herself in forced reassurance, and went to help her father wrestle sheet metal around.
12
___
B Y THE TIME THE EARLY October darkness came down, Rei was awake again, looking a little less gray and wan. He'd left the barn a few times to use the bathroom, and then lay on the pile of hay and blankets under a bright shop light, working on his bracelets with some of the small screwdrivers and other tools that Sarah's dad used to work on electronics.
Sarah had been helping her father cut sheet metal and install it on the damaged sections of the ship all afternoon. Her shoulders ached, and her fingers and forearms stung from small cuts and burns, despite the heavy leather gloves she was wearing.
"Think it's about time to throw in the towel for the night," Gary remarked, wiping the back of his forearm across his face and setting the welding torch aside. "Animals need fed, and I can hear Bonnie callin' out in the pasture for her evening milking. I could sure eat, too."
"Why don't you go put supper on," Sarah suggested. Since her father's injury, domestic duties around the farm had all but reversed; he did most of the less taxing housework, while she handled the heavy lifting of the farm chores. "I'll get the chores done and bring Rei over to the house."
Gary patted her shoulder and clumped off, weariness making him lean more heavily on his canes than usual. Sarah watched anxiously until he was out of sight. One of these days he was going to overdo it, have a fall, and set himself right back to where he'd been after the accident, but she knew from long experience that there was no use in trying to make him be more careful and use the walker when he was tired.
"Think you could eat something yet?" she asked Rei as she sat down beside him on the hay.
He grimaced. "Perhaps later."
One of the bracelets lay partly disassembled on a sheet of butcher paper. The bracelets looked seamless from the outside, like pieces of hammered silver jewelry, and she hadn't realized they opened up. She was used to seeing electrical components from old engines, fuse boxes, and disassembled kids' electronic games as part of her dad's various projects, but this looked like nothing she'd ever seen before. Like a smaller version of the electronics in the ship, it was mostly hair-fine glassy fibers embedded with colorful dots that made her think of the pearls in fancy body scrubs.
"Do you think you can get them to work again?"
"I'm not sure." He sealed up the bracelet's outer surface with quick strokes of his fingertips—Sarah couldn't even see what he did, but it appeared seamless again. With another deft twist of his fingers, he parted it at one side and then sealed it around his wrist, where it looked as if it had been welded in place there. "As with the ship's engines, this is far beyond my technical knowledge or the tools I have, and I drained its residual charge earlier while searching for my battlepod. But I think I've restored its ability to charge from my body, if my internal nanites are not too badly damaged to do so. It will need a little while to recover its charge, and then we'll see."
"You charge it with your body? Rei, your technology never stops amazing me."
Rei flashed her one of his quick grins. He looked much better than earlier. "I haven't shown you anything wondrous yet. These are nothing but everyday technology, like that communication device in your pocket. I should show you true wonders, like the great clan ships of the dragons, containing entire cities, or the winged warriors of the Tybor who joust with lances made of pure light. The Hanging Nebula on the edge of Iustran space, or the great gladiatorial arenas of the Hnee ..."
"I would love to see all of that," Sarah said wistfully.
The longing and sorrow in her voice stopped him in his litany of alien wonders. "But," he said in quieter tones, "there is only room in my pod for one."
Sarah nodded. "But I still want to hear about it, even if I can't ever see it. Let me just quickly do the chores, and then you can tell me all about it over dinner."
"I will help you with your chores."
She wanted to refuse; he looked much better than earlier, but he was still shaky and shivering under the sheepskin coat draped over his bare shoulders. She didn't want to hurt his pride, though, so she said, "Sure. I'll just divide up the jobs and tell you what to do."
She gave him the easier jobs—gathering eggs from the hens and herding the old horse, Princess, into her stall for the night—while Sarah refilled the water troughs, fed the livestock in the field, and milked the cow. It was very pleasant, working in quiet partnership in the cool October night. After a dreary, gray day, the clouds had finally parted, letting through a silvery film of moonlight and the sharp pinpricks of the stars.
Sarah was standing at the last trough, gazing up at the stars while silver ripples spread outward from the hose, when Rei emerged from the moonlit shadows and came quietly to join her. "You like looking at the sky," he said.
"I always have. That's why I was at the lake, did I ever tell you that? I was watching a meteor shower when one of the meteors almost landed on top of me." She felt a brief pang for her lost telescope. It was probably gone for good, buried deep in the lake's thick silt for future generations of archaeologists to dig up, millennia from now.
"I'm glad I didn't hurt you."
"Well, of all the lakes on all the continents on this planet, I'm glad you crashed into mine."
Rei's fingers laced through hers. Normally he was slightly warm to the touch, but even with her hands chilled from handling the cold, damp hoses, his fingers felt like ice. She gave him a critical look, but it was impossible to see much in the poor light, other than the faint luminescence of his eyes, reflecting gold in the yard light, and the glimmer of the silver traceries on his skin.
"Do your people name the stars?" he asked, turning his softly luminous eyes to the sky.
"We do." She pointed. "That's the North Star. Our planet's axis points to it, so it doesn't appear to move. Sailors and travelers used to navigate by it, long ago. It's a saying for us, to be someone's pole star, their true north. What the compass of their heart points to."
"I like that," he murmured, his fingers tangling more tightly in hers. "Of course, when you travel long distances through space, the stars always change; only their official designations stay the same. But my people named the stars, too. We used to see pictures in the sky and tell stories about them."
"Us, too." She turned, looking above the horizon through the pale wisps of moonlit clouds, and pointed when she found what she was looking for. "That bright band of stars is the belt of Orion, the hunter. He has a hunting dog at his heels—that's Sirius, the Dog Star there, the brightest star in our night sky. We sometimes talk about the dog days of summer, when that star rises in the sky."
"Dog star. Appropriate." His quick smile flickered. "Dogs are your domestic wolves, right?"
"Right." She craned her neck, looking for other constellations he might enjoy. "That curving string of stars is Draco, the dragon. See the head there, that triangle of stars? I don't know any stories about it, but our scientists have found some planets among Draco's stars. We don't have the technology yet to tell if they're inhabited, but maybe some of them are even planets you might—oh!"
Cold water spilled over the edge of the trough onto her legs. She sprang back, releasing Rei's hand, only to realize he'd tensed into a combat position, one of his hands raised with the fingers lightly curled into a loose fist.
"It's okay. No worries. I just got myself wet." She picked up the hose off the muddy ground and looped it over the hook on the edge of the trough. "Come on, let's get inside. I bet Dad's done making dinner by now—Rei?"
He was still holding his hand out, the fingers now spread. Was it only the moonlight that made them seem to glimmer faintly?
Rei looked up and met her baffled gaze with a wide, brilliant smile. "It works," he said.
"What does?" Then a subtle gleam licked down the band around his wrist. "Oh, your cuff thing? You got it working!"
"It works, yes. It wasn't so badly damaged after all. It just needed to charge." He let out a long sigh and straightened up, looking more relaxed than she'd seen him in awhile. "I need to test it. Stay where you are."
"Test—?" she began, but fell silent as he pointed his hand at a clump of grazed-down brush beside the trough. Before Sarah could ask what he was going to do, an eye-searing bar of blue-white light stabbed from his fingers and neatly zapped off a branch. The wood was too wet to burn, but it glowed cherry-red for a moment, and a tentative tendril of flame curled up from the bark before fizzling out in the damp. The acrid smell of woodsmoke reached Sarah a moment later.
Rei laughed aloud, with a harsh edge to it. "Let them come. I'm not helpless any longer." Then realization seemed to dawn on him that she was still staring, rather than sharing his delight. "Sarah? What's wrong?"
"It's a weapon?"
