Henry stood at the front of his small ship, watching the stars streak by. They were moving quickly, but he didn’t know to where. He was simply plotting a course and then changing it every few hours, unable to decide on a plan.

Henry. He had begun to think of himself like that. A lifetime of not having a name, and now he was Henry. It made him feel… something. He didn’t know what. His quick mind was working fast, but it was coming up with nothing. He couldn’t focus. He just kept coming back to Henry.

He opened his mouth, slightly, his thin, blue lips pulling away from one another. He dared to speak. He had a tongue, he had a mouth, he could speak, he was sure of that, and the Aeon’s knew that at one point their ancestors had indeed used their mouths to speak, but eventually they had evolved, and the speaking could be done brain to brain, and their oral cavities were used for nothing but eating. Sustenance. Was that enough for a mouth?

Henry listened to Sarah speak. It was beautiful. In your head, everyone sounded the same. They felt different, you could tell who was speaking, but it was the same. No tone, no rises and falls of inflection, no passion, no emotion. Sarah was different. He could read her mind if he had wanted, but she preferred to speak to him, and slowly he had come to prefer it as well.

“Hen-ry,” the alien said, and then he slapped his mouth shut and felt... a twinge. Shame? Excitement? Maybe both twisted up together.

He turned away from the viewport, the swirling stars suddenly making him nauseous. What was he going to do? The proper thing to do would be to turn his prisoners in to his people. No. Sarah was not a prisoner. He must not think like that. The other one, the Zaytarian, she was. But he was taking care of her, wasn’t he? He would get something from her. He had a bot torturing her. He would get information. Information he couldn’t get with his mind. Most military Zaytarian’s had been coached on how to resist mind probes. If he used his mind, he may miss something. The bot would miss nothing. She would scream and scream and then she would talk.

If he got something from her, maybe he could save himself and Sarah. Maybe his people would let them go. That’s what he wanted, wasn’t it? To leave? This war, all of it, meant nothing to him. He had found something with Sarah, and she had found it, too. She had been poisoned against him. It wasn’t fair. Of course, he could do just what she said he could. He could walk right into the room and have her naked and willing to serve him in a second.

The thought of it made him grow hard, but he pushed it from his mind. That was not what he would do. He cared for the Earthling. He would not force her.

But she had been right, hadn’t she? Earlier? He had forced her, in the beginning, hadn't he?

No. He hadn’t. He couldn't have. She loved him. She had fallen in love with him as quickly as he had with her. He wanted to believe that, but he couldn’t. He had forced her.

Rage built up in Henry and he left the cockpit, leaving the flying to the ship itself, as he had the whole time they had been in space.

He went toward the back of the ship and hesitated outside Sarah’s room. He turned then, and entered the room where he was holding the Zaytarian.

She was nude and strapped to a table, which had been tilted forward. Her body was covered in welts and burns. The bot was hovering off to the side, waiting. The Zaytarian had passed out. Henry waved his hand and the bot left. And then he sat on the edge of another table, this one built into the wall, and waited for his enemy to wake.

When she saw him, she spat. “Kill me now and be done with it,” she said in her own language, but of course Henry could understand her. He could understand anyone, learning their language from their mind as soon as they began to speak it.

“I do not want to kill you,” Henry said, right into the Zaytarian’s brain. “What is your name?”

“I won’t tell you,” Fib said, but she thought of her name, just for a second, and Henry had it.

“Fib. Your friends call you that.”

“You are not my friend.”

“Sarah is. She is my friend, too. She named me Henry. I did not have a name before, but I do now. I like it. Do you?”

“I don’t want to speak with you. I won’t tell you anything. I don’t know anything. Kill me, or let me go. Let Sarah go, too. Is she alive?”

“Of course. I love her. We will be together,” Henry said.

“She does not love you. She never did. You forced that upon her.”

The Zaytarian was trying to get a rise out of Henry, but he would not let her. He closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them. His eyes traveled over the nude form of the Zaytarian. She was strong but feminine. It was pleasing, but he would not let himself be sidetracked.

“My people will want you. I’m taking you there now. You destroyed our home. You killed billions.”

“Good,” Fib said, spitting again.

“It is not good. Not for you. Our home is gone. Our weapon is gone, there are fewer of us, but that does not help you. It helps your people, but not you.”

“I did it to help my people. Sarah did it to help. She threw it into the damned volcano. She killed your people. Do you understand that?”

Henry could feel himself getting angry then. He closed his eyes again, trying to clamp down on the anger, to keep it from bubbling to the surface.

“You have brainwashed her. You all have. She is no killer. She would not have done that if you had not forced her.”

“She wanted you dead. All of you. She knows that you are wrong. She knows what evil looks like.”

Henry knew he should just leave the room. The dirty Zaytarian was trying to bait him, to get a rise out of him, and she was succeeding. It was strange, how little the Zaytarian’s always seemed to value their own safety. Henry and his species was not the same. He would do almost anything to escape pain, or worse. This filthy female thing was trying to make him angry, and to what end? Did she want to be killed? That was the next step, he would simply have the bot kill her. She had to know that.

Everything she was saying was wrong at any rate, Henry knew that. If she had been the one to throw the crystal into the weapon, she had been coerced to do it. Henry shut his eyes again. He wasn’t being truthful to himself. The crystal had bonded with Sarah. No one else could have done the job and got the same result. The utter destruction of his planet; which was still ongoing, massive eruptions across the whole abandoned globe proved that Sarah had been the one to do it, but still, his other point still stood. Somehow, they had brainwashed her. She was kind, and gentle, and soft, though in a good way. She would not have willingly killed so many. Women and children, they had all died. Sarah could not have done that through her own free will.

“I do not know what you did to her,” Henry said to the female Zaytarian’s brain, “but I will save her from you.”

Fib laughed and spat once more. “No,” she said. “I saved her from your lot once. I will do so again.”

“We shall see,” Henry said. He turned away from the dirty Zaytarian and left the room. The silver bot was floating just outside the door, and the Aeon waved it back inside.