Becca had been working on the machine for over a week. Someone at work had managed to break the hidden message within thirty-six hours of the whole office working on it. Tom had been excited, and Becca had been careful to appear just as excited. The office gathered in the satellite room as Tom bounced a message back, but a reply had never come back. After a week, the mood in the office had soured.
Meanwhile, Becca had been making headway on the device she needed to build. If she was being honest with herself, she didn’t quite understand how it would work. It was very advanced. It seemed as if it would broadcast some sort of signal, and she supposed that would create a stronger wormhole, but the nitty gritty of the whole thing was lost on her. Wherever Key had come from, they were advanced.
Still, she could follow the schematics, and it just became a process of getting the materials that she needed. She had to take some from work, tense each time she shoved something into her purse, and thankful that the device was going to be rather small; about the size of a watermelon. That meant she could fit most of the components into a handbag. She kept Key up to date as she worked, and the days went on.
She was sitting in her room, working on the device one evening when her cell rang. Without looking at who was calling she grabbed the phone, slid her finger across the screen, and held it to her ear.
“Hello?”
“Honey. My love. It’s me.”
Chad. Ugh! She hadn’t even thought of him, lately. Certainly not in the couple of weeks since she had made contact with Key.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I’ve given you time; space. I thought that’s what you wanted.”
“It was,” she said. “But way more, like all of the time and space. All of it. I have nothing to say to you.”
“You aren’t coming back to me?”
“No,” she said, and she hung up. He called again, and texted, keeping it up all night, but Becca ignored him. She couldn’t even think about a relationship right now, even with a man better than Chad. Her feelings for her boss were long gone too. She was focused on Key and the machine, and nothing else.
That night, she was done. The chrome machine sat heavily on her bed. It had a battery pack, which Key said would keep it charged for only three or so minutes. That was long enough to get him to her, but only if he was prepared.
“That’s it?” Gia asked, after Becca had called her in.
“Yes,” Becca said with a nod.
“He’s coming tonight?”
“I ... think so,” Becca said. She had almost said hope, and changed it to think, after a short pause. “I have to send him a message.”
She went to her laptop and did so, typing quickly.
I AM READY
She waited, sitting on the edge of her bed, with Gia beside her. They leaned towards the screen, neither young woman speaking. Soon, letters began to appear as the alien replied.
I AM AS WELL TURN IT ON NOW
Becca set the laptop aside and stood. She took the machinery in her hands and moved it to her nightstand. Gia got up and went to the doorway. She was biting her lip.
“Is this safe?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Becca said truthfully. “I hope so.”
Gia took a deep breath. “Do it,” she said. Becca nodded and pressed a button on the machine.
For a moment, nothing happened, and then a loud whine filled the air, causing both women to slap their hands over their ears. Becca backed up to stand with Gia, as the machine continued to scream. A light appeared, not on the machine but in the center of the room, where the triangular end of the machine pointed. The light pulsed for several minutes; the whine grew more high-pitched and louder.
“Something’s coming!” Gia screamed so she could be heard over the whine. She pointed, and Becca looked. She could see a dark shape in the center of the light.
Without warning the whine ended, and the light pulsed once more and then vanished. The machine on the table began to smoke, but neither girl noticed. They were too busy looking at what stood in the center of the room: Key.
He was tall, at least six-foot-two, and his skin was a soft-blue color. His hair was as black as tar and his eyes yellow. Not just his pupils, but all of his eye. He looked more or less like a man, strong and broad-shouldered, standing on two legs, and with two muscular arms, but there were some differences. The most noticeable were the ridges on his head, just above each eye, and the pointed ends of his ears, sticking out through his shoulder length hair.
The alien being wore a silver suit; it looked something like a flight jumpsuit, not a separate shirt and pants but all in one piece. The color of the suit seemed to shimmer, always silvery but with a different secondary color every few seconds, blue, pink, green and then back to blue. His large feet wore heavy boots made of the same silver material. Key looked at the girls, raised his hand in greeting, and then pitched forward. Becca rushed forward to help the alien, but Gia stayed back.
“Are you okay?” Becca asked, falling to her knees next to the alien and hesitantly placing her hands on his back.
“My stomach,” the alien said, speaking perfect English, without a hint of an accent. Becca helped him roll over, and she found a zipper at the neck of his flight suit. She pulled it slowly down.
“What are you doing?” Gia asked from the doorway.
“He’s hurt,” Becca said, and then she gasped, for as the zipper went down to his waist she could see a wound in the flesh of his stomach. He had tried to bandage it himself. The material was similar to gauze but somehow different, made up of smaller strands of material which had bonded together. Dried dark-blue liquid caked the bandage, and Becca took this to be blood.
“I can clean this,” she said, looking to the alien’s face, sure that he was looking directly at her even though he had no irises or pupils. He nodded softly, and Becca turned to look at Gia.
“Can you grab the basket under the bathroom sink? It should have alcohol in there, and bandages.”
“Uh, yeah,” Gia said, and she turned and rushed for the bathroom. Becca was lucky, her mother was a nurse and had imposed the importance of keeping a fully-stocked med kit at home (and in the car, and at the office), so Becca was sure she would have what she needed to clean and redress the alien’s wound.
It hadn’t hit her yet, that she was touching a being from space. The idea was there, somewhere in her mind, of course, his blue skin and all yellow eyes were hard to overlook, but she felt as though she was in a crisis. The alien may have reached her just in time. His wound was severe and he hardly had the energy to sit up, or so it seemed. While she knew he was an alien, she didn’t focus on that. She just focused on keeping him alive.
Gia had returned, holding a wicker basket, which she set on the floor some distance away from her friend and the alien, and then pushed forward with her foot.
“For shit’s sake Gia,” Becca said, rolling her eyes as she glanced at her friend. “He’s hurt. He isn’t going to shoot us with a phaser or anything.”
Gia didn’t reply, she just retreated to the doorway, turning and watching as her friend began to peel the bloodied bandages from the alien’s stomach.
“Oh God,” Becca said when the bandages had been removed. The wound was even worse than she had feared, a deep gash with ragged edges and blue blood still seeping. “I have to clean this out,” she told the alien. He nodded at her. She wanted to ask how he knew to nod; if he had learned that when he had learned English, however he had done that, but just then wasn’t the time. “It’s going to hurt,” she added.
She took a brown bottle of medical alcohol from the basket and unscrewed the white lid. “Gia, can you get me a towel? A little one?”
Gia left and returned quickly, passing over a towel meant for drying hands. Becca tipped the bottle over, holding the opening against the towel, and wet a corner of the cloth in alcohol. “Okay,” she said, as a warning, and then she pressed the towel against Key’s wound.
The alien groaned and his body tensed under her touch, but she took her time and cleaned his wound carefully. When she was done the wound looked better, still ragged and deep, but with no blood or gunk any more.
“Can you sit up?” Becca asked, and the alien nodded, allowing her to help him into a sitting position. The she pulled his arms out of the sleeves of his jumpsuit, and rolled the material down, leaving him completely bare to his hips. She had a moment where she realized how solidly built the alien was, and she felt a stirring in her loins. He was rock-hard, in terms of his abs and muscular arms, and her fingertips couldn’t help but brush his hot flesh. She shoved any sexual thoughts from her head quickly, and got to work.
There was a roll of gauze in her basket and she pulled it free, unspooling some and then working to wrap it around Key’s torso. She worked slowly and carefully, and when she was done the alien was happy to lie back down again.
“Thank you,” he said, and again Becca noted how perfectly he spoke, with no accent whatsoever. She didn’t know what an accent from outer-space would sound like, but she had expected him to have one. His speech was stilted and he spoke slowly, but he really did speak perfectly.
“How did you learn to speak English?” she asked, not backing away from the being, and keeping one hand on his stomach, over the bandages. He reached down and took her hand, and Becca felt a jolt of … something flash through her body. Surprise? Glee? Desire? She wasn’t sure. She glanced at Gia, who still stood in the doorway, and her roommate frowned, but still Becca did not pull her hand away.
“I have been studying your planet for years. My species, we came from a planet called Zion, or at least that’s close enough in your tongue. We called it - ” and here the alien spoke, but his lips did not move. He was speaking, but only with his throat, a strange guttural sound that Becca could never hope to replicate. “But it roughly translates to Zion. Our planet was dying, and we found yours. We could survive here, but we wanted to learn about Earth. We didn’t want to just appear; we knew it could be seen as a sign of force. We thought we had millennia. I worked on a small station, using the wormhole technology to keep an eye on your people. To learn. There were five of us.”
“But your planet died?” Becca asked.
“Yes, but not on its own, not as we had thought. Another species found us, and they wiped us out. Evil things. They called themselves the Aeon. My planet was killed, and my fellow Zionist’s were hunted down. They wiped us from the galaxy. They found my team and me, and they attacked. I got away, the others did not.”
Becca blinked and felt the hot sting of salty tears. Key really was the only being left, of his species. The idea frightened her, and she couldn’t imagine how he felt.
“Why are you called Key?” Gia asked from the doorway, and the alien looked to her. If he was surprised that someone else had been there when he arrived, he had yet to show it.
“My name is - ” and again he spoke with his throat, but the first syllable was clearly recognizable as Key, and the two Earth woman understood why he had shortened it.
Gia nodded, and opened her mouth to speak, but Becca spoke first.
“What are you going to do?”
“I do not know,” Key said truthfully. “There must be someone I can speak with; someone in charge who can help me. I require nothing other than somewhere to exist. My people are gone. I am not a threat. They can help me, your leaders.”
Becca thought of the man in the dark suit who had been speaking to Tom two weeks previous. She wondered if what Key was saying was true. Would her leaders help him? Or would they cut into him in an effort to learn about aliens.
“I don’t know,” Becca said. “I don’t want anyone to hurt you. You can stay here, and let me check things out.”
“Becca, could I speak to you please?” Gia asked, and Becca sighed and stood. They went out into the living room, leaving Key to close his yellow eyes and lie on the floor in Becca’s bedroom.
“Are you serious? You need to call someone, and you need to get the alien out of our house!” Gia started as soon as they were out of the alien’s earshot.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Becca said. “I don’t know that they would help him. The government, they may take him to do tests. They may kill him!”
“You don’t know that,” Gia said.
“No, but I can’t know that they won’t.”
“He can’t stay here! He’s an alien! He’s blue!”
“He’s hurt. I have to take care of him, at least while I figure out what the best option is. I want to keep him safe.”
Gia sighed, but she was a good-hearted person, and soon she was nodding. “Yeah,” she said. “This is crazy.”
Becca grinned. She was finally letting what had happened sink in. “It’s so nuts,” she said.
Gia let a playful smirk spread across her lips. “He’s kind of hot, right? Like, for a blue guy.”
Becca laughed. “Are you seriously thinking about that right now?”
“Come on, he grabbed your hand and you liked it. Don’t lie to me!”
Becca didn’t have anything to say to that. “I have to go check on him,” she said, and she turned and hurried back to her room.
Key was just where she had left him. His eyes were closed, but she could tell he was not sleeping. She knelt down beside him and he opened his eyes. She placed her hand on his bare chest. “Are you okay?”
He nodded softly.
“Can I ask you a question?”
Again, the alien nodded.
“How do you know to nod?” Becca asked. “Is it something you learned from studying Earth?”
Key laughed, wincing as his body shook with mirth. “No, some things are universal I suppose,” he said.
“That’s ... interesting,” Becca said.
“Yes. There is a lot for you to learn,” Key said.
“Okay, well, I was speaking with my roommate, the other girl. Her name is Gia, and she thinks you should stay here for a bit. I think we should focus on getting you healthy, and then we can work out our next step.”
“I’ll stay here?” the alien asked.
Becca nodded. “It’s for the best.”
“Okay,” Key said, trusting in her judgement. “I have a request.”
“Yes?”
“Can I sleep? I’m sure you have hundreds of questions, but I was hoping I could just sleep, right now, and answer them in the morning.”
Becca smiled and nodded. “Sure,” she said. She helped the muscular alien to his feet, and he took two steps to the bed and lay down. Becca covered him and left the room. She would sleep on the couch tonight.