by Lauren Esker
I think it broke you too, Sarah thought, but didn't say. Instead she said, "What about the last one? That's only six."
"Oh, right. That'd be Thorn."
He began sketching again. This time the figure was a strikingly unusual one, a human male in basic outline, but colored like a patchwork quilt. One side of his face was silver, the other violet, bisected by a line down the middle.
"Is he a robot?" Actually Frankenstein's monster was the first thing she thought of, but she wasn't about to say that to his grieving adopted sibling.
"Chimera," Rei said. "He's made of organic parts—well, mostly. But he's a lab experiment." He paused, tapping the pencil against the page. "Out of all of us, I think Thorn might still be alive. Lyr couldn't contact him, but he always had trouble making contact with Thorn anyway. And Skara's people-finding ability didn't work on him either."
"What do you mean, Lyr couldn't contact him? I don't understand."
"Lyr's a telepath. He could talk to us all, as long as we were near enough."
"Oh," she breathed. "Can you talk to him now?"
"No. He's too far away. Or ..."
He left the thought unfinished, face turned away from her, carefully adding details to the picture. Hints of gold scales on Lyr, drawn with a yellow pencil; an elaborate bracelet on Kite's upper arm, left bare by her gray coverall; more details of Thorn's patchwork skin. Finally he laid the pencils aside and held the drawing out at arm's length.
With the figures all lined up in a row, facing the viewer with no background, it looked like a kid's drawing. But that was basically what it was, Sarah thought, a drawing of Rei's family, like a schoolchild might make.
"Do you mind if I put this on the wall?" she asked.
"On the wall?" he repeated, looking puzzled.
"Yeah, like this." She took down a framed 4H certificate that had been up there since she was in middle school, gathering dust. Rei gave her the drawing when she held out her hand for it, and watched curiously as she slipped it behind the glass in the frame and hung it where the certificate had been, at the foot of her bed.
There was a picture of her mom hanging next to it. Somehow that seemed appropriate.
"Like that," she said. "Do you like that?"
"I like that." His voice was barely more than a whisper.
She started to lie down beside Rei on the bed, got stabbed with a pencil, and sat up with a startled curse. Both of them laughed as they collected the pencils back into their box. Rei's laugh was so soft she could barely hear it, but it was there. He seemed lighter somehow, as if just talking about his family had lifted a weight off him.
"That's my mom there." She pulled the quilt at the foot of the bed up over both of them, and snuggled into the crook of Rei's arm. "On the wall next to your family. The pretty lady holding the goat."
It was a ridiculous picture and she'd always loved it. Her mom was young, about the age Sarah was now, with her hair pulled back in a sloppy ponytail and a baby goat in her arms, its knobby legs dangling. She was not, objectively, a beautiful woman, with a snub-nosed, farm-girl's face, a spatter of freckles over her cheeks, and a perpetual sunburn. But in every photo Sarah had of her, there was warmth and delight shining from her eyes and her smile, making her gorgeous. And it was vividly on display in that picture, as if the sun had lit her up from within.
"You miss her very much," Rei said, stroking Sarah's hair.
"I do. I can't believe it's been almost ten years since she died. I was so young. She was so young." She blinked her eyes fiercely, pushing back tears. "And then Dad has his accident—"
"That's why he walks with the sticks?"
"Yeah, the tractor rolled on him. After Mom died he got kind of ... reckless, I guess. Started drinking a lot and doing stupid things." She huffed a sigh against Rei's neck. "It could have been so much worse. If things had gone a little differently that day, I'd have ended up burying two parents within a year and a half, instead of just one. I'm not going to say that getting his back broken was a good thing, for Dad or for the family. It was a stupid, terrible thing. But it did make him start paying attention to the world again. It made him realize he didn't want to leave me alone."
Just like she couldn't leave him alone. There was no point in fantasizing about going to space. Her life was here, would always be here.
"What about your parents?" she asked to distract herself. "I know you haven't seen them in a long time, but what were they like?"
"I don't know. I'm an orphan." His chest hitched with a small, silent laugh. "My people might pass it off as an honor, but still, they don't send wanted children to the slavers."
"Oh, Rei." She turned her face into his neck, pressed her lips to his skin.
"It was a long time ago, like you said," he said quietly. "I did have an aunt who raised me. She was very angry when the village council selected me for the tax, even though they paid her a small stipend to compensate her for taking me away." Another small hitch of a laugh. "Especially because they paid her, I think. They had to put her in our village jail on the day I was taken, because she bit two of the men who came to take me, so I didn't get to say goodbye."
"Did they let you write to her?"
She felt him shake his head, a swish of his hair against the top of her head. "They didn't try to stop me, but I couldn't. Very few people in my village were literate. I wasn't, at that time, and she wasn't either. She's probably forgotten me by now."
"I bet she hasn't," Sarah said, her gazed drifting back to her mother, meeting the vivid gaze looking out of the past. Time didn't kill love, not if it was really love in the first place. "I bet she still misses you a lot. Maybe you'll get to see her again one day."
Her father was right. She couldn't stop Rei from going back to space. She couldn't even bring herself to nurture a hope that he would be unable to fix his ship and would have to stay. He'd have to live out his life on Earth as an exile, always wondering about his family, never able to see them again.
We come from different worlds ... literally. We were never meant to be together. At least we have these few days; it's more than a lot of people get.
She draped an arm over Rei's chest and pressed her body against his, as if she could somehow memorize the imprint of his skin, the shape of his chest and the way his arm fit so perfectly around her.
As if she could make a bulwark of memory against the lonely days ahead.
Time didn't kill love. Not if love was real. And she knew as well as anyone that a picture on the wall was no substitute for the real thing.
But he had to leave. She had to stay. There was no way around it.
13
___
T HE BATTLEPOD WAS never going to fly.
Rei's suspicions solidified into certainty over the next few days. He didn't say anything, as if admitting it would make it real. He and Gary, with inexpert but enthusiastic assistance from Sarah, spent most of the daylight hours and some of the night ones working on it.
But now that he had the cuffs working again, even if they weren't at full efficiency, he was able to use their diagnostic tools to get a better idea of the pod's condition, and it wasn't good.
He and Gary could fix the basic mechanical issues. This world already had the technical knowledge to construct crude pods capable of taking humans into space; there were pictures of them in Sarah's books. But, as he'd told Sarah, the engines and jump drive were beyond this world's technology or his own capability to fix, and he didn't think either one of those things were ever going to work again, at least not as long as he was trying to repair them in a barn with primitive tools.
Even if they jury-rigged a crude engine capable of boosting the ship out of this planet's atmosphere—he could think of a couple of ideas, and Gary probably had more—there was still the jump drive to fix, and without that, he was going nowhere.
But would that really be so bad?
If he had to get stuck on a low-tech world outside the galactic mainstream, there were worse options. The
climate was nice, the ecosystem compatible with his own biology (give or take a few local plant foods; he was now scrupulous about avoiding that bitter-tasting "chocolate" substance), and the world's overall level of technology was high enough to provide comforts such as long-distance communications and indoor plumbing.
And there was Sarah, of course.
It made him wonder why he wanted to get off this world at all. What was out there for him? There was Lyr, but he didn't even know if Lyr was still alive. As for the rest of his sept ...
Are you sure they're all dead?
Yes, he answered silently. Yes, they were dead. For a slave, hope was poison. He'd learned that long ago.
He could return to his homeworld and see if any of his family was still alive. But there, he'd be a fugitive. Not that he wasn't also a fugitive here, but according to Sarah, her world didn't have the capability to contact the Galateans. Her people didn't know what he was. The Polarans would know. Many of them might be sympathetic, but could he really expect them to shelter him knowingly, risking the wrath of the Galatean Empire? Much easier to just return the escaped slave and collect the reward. He wouldn't blame them.
If he was going to be a fugitive anyway, he might as well be a fugitive in a place where no one knew he was an escaped slave. Sarah's people were still looking for him, but even if they managed to find him, he could slip away into the woods and live as a wolf for awhile.
Why didn't he just make a new life here? He asked himself that multiple times a day, as he listened to Sarah and her father playfully bantering over the dinner table, as he helped Sarah feed her family's domestic fowl, as he lay in bed with her at night and stroked her sandy curls, more relaxed than he had been since those long-ago days when he used to sleep with his entire sept around him.
And yet he kept working on the pod, trying to make it spaceworthy again.
He didn't know what he wanted. He wished he didn't have to choose.
He hoped fate would make the decision for him.
If the pod couldn't fly, then he'd have no choice but to stay. And if he'd done his best on it, then no one (Lyr) could blame him for not trying harder.
And he'd live out his life on this world Sarah called Earth, never knowing if Lyr still lived, never knowing what had happened to anyone else in his sept.
So what? I don't owe them—
But he couldn't lie to himself, even in the privacy of his own head. They had been his everything: his pack, his family, his world. Polarans couldn't survive alone. His sept were the reason why he was still alive and still sane.
He couldn't abandon them.
But the longer he spent with Sarah, the more the mere idea of abandoning her felt like having his guts ripped out.
His future was in space. His future was on Earth.
He could only choose one.
"I can hear you thinking over there," Gary said, and Rei sighed and straightened up from examining, for the two hundredth time, the pod's nonfunctional Vrik coils.
The older man came over, leaning heavily on his canes, and sat down with a grunt on an overturned crate beside the ship. "You can understand me, right?" he asked, eyes sharp on Rei. "Even without Sarah around."
Rei nodded. By now his implant had added English to its library of languages, though he still occasionally missed words when Sarah wasn't in the room. Without her brain to translate, he had to rely on the vocabulary and grammar it had already picked up.
"Good. There was somethin' I wanted to talk to you about."
Rei touched his own lips and gestured with a smile.
"Yeah, I know you can't talk back. You can just listen."
Rei smiled again and dragged over a barrel to sit on. He gestured to indicate "go ahead."
Gary hesitated, tapping his work-roughened fingers on top of the crate. "I don't know much about where you come from," he said abruptly. "Just what Sarah tells me, and she's not one for telling tales out of school. But I can tell you've been through some things. That right?"
Rei nodded.
"We had a war here, awhile back." Gary gazed off into the distance, not looking at Rei. "In a place called Vietnam. At that time, every young man in the country, when he turned eighteen, had to sign up for the draft. If you didn't have a good reason why not, they'd put a gun in your hand and send you off to fight. Sound kinda familiar, huh?"
Rei nodded again. He hadn't known they had things like that here. Sarah's world seemed so peaceful. He'd thought perhaps they had somehow found a way to live in peace, without wars. But perhaps there was no such thing, anywhere there were people.
"It's not like what happened to you, I guess. But it took me awhile to come back from that. Some guys, they never did. Came back broken in more ways than one." He smiled briefly and ruefully, and touched the top of the canes. "Not me, not like this, in case you were wondering. This is from a dumb accident on the farm."
Rei nodded, unable to answer any other way.
"Anyway," Gary said, looking straight at him now, "I guess the point is, I know what it's like to be taken away from your home and family when you don't want to go, and sent off to fight in somebody else's war. I know what it's like when the dreams wake you up at night. I guess what I'm saying is, you're not the only one around here who's been in that particular hell. I guess it doesn't do much good to say 'if you ever want to talk about it,' at least not unless you two find another of those things to put in my head, which, pardon my French, but hell no. But you ever want to have a drink and swap war stories—" He stopped, gave a short laugh, and shook his head. "Okay, can't really do that either. But I got a good bottle of Scotch in the house, and you ever want to pour one out for the friends we both lost and have a drink for old time's sake, one old soldier to another, you just let me know."
All Rei could do was nod, his throat tight. For the first time in years, he thought of the adults who had trained and raised him. Not all of them had been cruel. In particular, he wondered what had happened to Tamir, the old tiger-type Galatean who had been in charge of their sept when they were little, the closest thing to a father that most of them had ever known. Gary reminded him of Tamir a lot, now that he thought about it. He wondered if that old man was still alive, or was even so old as he'd seemed when Rei was small.
The language barrier hadn't been so frustrating since his early days with Sarah. He wanted to reply, but anything he said would be gibberish to Gary.
But he didn't have to be entirely mute, he realized. There were a few words of English he knew.
"Thankyew," he said. "Thankyew, Gary."
Gary looked startled and then smiled. "That's right. Guess you can talk a little after all."
Rei shrugged, and then Gary grinned at him, and Rei grinned back, and the language barrier didn't seem to matter at all.
***
Sarah could tell something was bothering Rei. This felt different from his prickly reserve after she'd first brought him back to the farm. Then, he'd held himself apart because he didn't trust them. But now he alternated between warm friendliness and pensive quiet. She figured it had to do with leaving, and she wished he'd just talk about it. It would make it easier, a little bit, if she knew that he shared her mixed feelings about his departure. Was he looking forward to getting back to space, shaking the dust of Earth off his feet, or did he want to stay as badly as she wanted him to?
But as long as she could make herself focus on the "now" instead of the future, she had never been happier. The world outside the farm hardly seemed to matter. Her classes were nothing but a distraction; merely leaving the farm for a few hours was torment.
She'd gone from feeling trapped and stifled on the farm to feeling as if her entire life was here.
What more could she want? What purpose in dreaming of moving away when the entire universe's wonder and magic was right here? Rei was the universe; through his stories, he brought all the galaxy right here to the kitchen of her family's farmhouse. Sarah hung on his every word as he told her about the other worlds he'
d been to, carefully glossing over why he'd been there (though they both knew: See new places, meet new people, and kill them, Sarah thought, paraphrasing from a war movie she'd once seen). He'd begun to open up about his dead friends, and he had her in stitches with stories of Skara's pranks or his portal-making friend Selinn's mishaps as she learned to control her powers.
She wrapped up every one of these glorious fall days in her heart like a pile of parcels, to comfort her if Rei did leave, if she never saw him again.
And secretly, quietly, in her heart of hearts, she let her dreams begin to expand, just a little, from the tiny, ordinary, safe dreams that were all she'd allowed herself, to start to encompass all the possibilities that had opened up to her.
What if she did go into space with Rei? Was there a way she could make that happen?
What if Rei couldn't go to space and stayed on the farm with them? Could they hide him? Get fake paperwork for him, maybe? She'd read books in which characters obtained fake birth certificates. She didn't have a clue how to go about it in a rural farm town, but the internet would probably help. They could use greasepaint to make him look human enough to go to town occasionally, once the government people got tired of looking and went away.
It felt so daring, so huge just to allow herself permission to daydream about it.
Especially going to space. She knew it wouldn't work. She couldn't leave Dad, and she wouldn't fit in the pod anyway ...
But what if she could? Maybe they could tear out some of the internal cushioning to fit two people. It would be cramped, but she didn't mind being in close quarters with Rei. And it wouldn't be for very long. The pods were not meant to live in. They didn't even seem to have a bathroom. Just a few hours of discomfort, and then she'd be ...
