I’m too tired to be afraid. My body’s senses are dull, as if the heat has enveloped me and overheated my brain. I look up at the person staring down at me, squinting against the sunlight slicing in between petals of the rhohedron. With the light behind them, it makes it difficult to see their face. I want to stand but I can’t seem to find the energy. My head buzzes ceaselessly but not sharply the way it had in the containment room. It has returned to a purr almost below my consciousness.
“Hello,” I say. What else can be said?
The person doesn’t respond. They shift their weight from one bare leg to another; a massive brown leg as spotted as the arms and neck. The person is more difficult to see now than a moment ago. Is it the light in my eyes? I blink and refocus, but I can’t make out the legs anymore, the arms.
I realize slowly that it’s not a trick of the light. The person’s skin has changed from the smooth brown that made them so visible a moment before to a vibrant red. In my dazed state I think that perhaps they somehow slipped on a skinsuit like mine between the slow blinks of my eyes. But it can’t be. In places on the red skin I can still make out the spots, also red but a slightly different shade. My head continues to buzz.
“Your skin changed,” I say.
The person’s teeth are a flash of brilliant white, and then the face with the teeth comes closer, the red body kneeling down to look at me. The person is tall: I still have to tilt my head far back to see them. But this close I can make out their features. Broad face. Unusually large eyes, wide set. No nose to speak of, just a slightly raised area at the center of the face. No ears that I can see. But the face is not unfamiliar. Cheekbones, lips, defined eye sockets.
“You’re Faloii,” I say, not surprised, really, but at this point in my state of mind I’m only capable of making observations. Another observation floats to the surface of my mind, its origins unclear: the Faloii person is female.
“Yes,” she says.
“Do you understand me?” I ask slowly, not for her benefit but for my own. My tongue feels thick and sluggish.
“Yes implies this, yes?”
“Yes.”
We study each other. Her lips are parted a little, showing just a glimpse of her teeth. A moment later she stands again.
“Come.”
She pushes through the heavy red petals of the rhohedron and disappears out into the sun. I swallow, gather my strength, and drag myself up from the ground. My legs tingle uncomfortably. I wiggle my toes inside my shoes where they’re asleep, take a deep breath, and follow the Faloii woman out through the petals.
She’s already almost brown again when I join her. She stands in the sweltering sun, the vibrant red disappearing from her skin like ink sinking out of sight into deep water. I stare at her. I can’t help it. From her massive legs to her large feet that resemble paws, to her long muscular arms with hands also like paws, she is like no person I’ve ever seen. She wears what looks like a head wrap, also brown, that hangs down over the back of her head, covering the nape of her long, sloping neck. I feel tiny next to her: my head barely reaches her chest. She’s studying me too. She doesn’t have eyebrows like mine; rather, a pattern of darker brown, almost black, spots spread up her throat to her face, arranging around her eyes like dotted fingerprints. They fan out onto her forehead as well; and, staring at them, I realize they’re moving. At first I think it’s my eyes—that I stood up too quickly, came into the sunlight too fast. But no: the spots around her eyes and on her forehead shift as she inspects me. They form a pattern that gives her face an expression of curiosity, arching slightly, one side of the pattern peaked above the other.
“What’s your name?” I ask. My head buzzes—with questions or exhaustion, I can’t tell.
The spots shift again, spreading a little way apart, fanning out into a pleasant pattern.
“This is a question you can answer for yourself,” she says in her smooth voice. Hearing it, I have an impression of wood: polished wood, deeply brown and shining. That’s what her voice evokes. But I don’t understand what she means. We’ve never met before. How can I answer for myself when I don’t know her? I open my mouth to ask, but she interrupts.
“Listen,” she says in the smooth, wooden voice.
Something in my mind shifts as she says the word. I almost start to speak again, but the something is tugging at me in my head, an unseen hand pulling gently at an inner ear. Inside, my mind’s eye looks toward the pulling sensation, and it’s as if a tunnel opens slowly before me, widening, allowing a hazy light to seep through. And there it is: a word. A word I’ve never known or heard or shaped in my mouth, but I find myself speaking it slowly, lilting at the end to form a question.
“Rasimbukar?”
“Yes,” she says, showing her teeth again, the spots on her forehead fanning out, wide like a bird’s wings. “Good.”
I can’t think of what to say next. My body is heavy and tired. Out in the sun, outside the protective camp of the rhohedron’s petals, I’m exposed and I remember, as if from a dream, the monster.
“The dirixi,” I say.
“The beast is gone,” Rasimbukar says, the spots on her forehead settling low, closer to her eyes.
“Dr. Espada. My friends . . .” I take a few steps toward the jungle but pause. I can’t remember where I entered the meadow. The jungle around the field of rhohedron looks uniform in its green intensity, the trees rising on all sides like mountains. I might as well be an insect, separated from the hive and easily squashed. Somewhere in the jungle my friends are hiding in a tree. Or maybe the dirixi had found them. I have no way of knowing, and no idea how to find them. I would consider crying if I weren’t so thirsty: the idea of even a single drop of water leaving my body is enough to make me hold back my tears.
“Dr. Espada is safe,” Rasimbukar says. Her spots cluster close to the center of her forehead. “I am not sure about the others.”
“They climbed a tree.”
“It is likely that they are also safe. Dirixi travel alone. This one followed you here and then continued toward the sun, not back.”
I stand apart from her, trying to decide how to take these words. She might be lying. I know nothing about her or the Faloii. I take a step backward, ready to run.
“You do not need to fear me,” Rasimbukar says, the spots still low but spreading into a wider, looser pattern.
“How can I be sure? How do I know you’re not going to hurt me? Kill me?” My conversation with Yaya in the exam room yesterday vibrates in my mind. Rasimbukar doesn’t seem dangerous but what if . . .
“You ask more questions that you could find answers to yourself.”
I stay silent this time. The tunnel in my mind that had opened when I found her name has not closed: I look at it again, find the answers floating there. Not words this time but impressions. Feelings. Her gentleness emanates from the tunnel’s mouth, and I can read its colors and shadows the way I would text. I feel lost, like I’m floating in the vast space of the galaxy.
“What is happening to me?” I say softly. One tear slips from my eye and I swipe at it hastily before it leads to more.
“You are listening,” Rasimbukar says. The smooth woodenness of her voice is quieter now, her spots arranged along the outside of her eyes. Their position reminds me of my mother, when she’s giving me “the look.”
“To what?” I whisper.
“To Faloiv.”
I stare at her, trying to learn something else from her wide-set eyes. They’re slanting and dark, and although I can’t distinguish an iris or a pupil, there are layers and shades of black so unfathomable it’s like looking into deep space. She stares back, and I find myself watching the spots on her face as well, waiting for them to move, to tell me anything about what she might be thinking or feeling. But something else is moving instead, on her head. What I thought was a head wrap is shifting, rising, straightening. I hold my breath. Is this an attack? I know, somehow, that she doesn’t mean me harm, but her strangeness leaves me on guard. Any bit of moisture that remains on my tongue evaporates as the material on her head rises, separates into two, and fans out to either side.
Ears. What I thought was a head wrap is actually two large, curving ears that until now have lain flat, backward over the crown of her head, hanging down loose like braids from her neck. They are brown like her, but thin and membraneous: the late-day sun shines through them, giving them a glowing quality. She was tall before, but the large ears give her another six inches and a fearsome quality as well.
“Do you . . . do you hear something?” I ask, trying to be polite. I try not to stare at the ears, but they demand attention.
The spots on her forehead seem to vibrate, rising and spreading. She shows her teeth.
“No,” Rasimbukar says. “I am hot, and my bones are harvesting energy.”
“Your bones,” I say, tilting my head. I can’t make my brain understand what she means. Instead I focus on her ears. “Your ears . . . they keep you cool? Like the maigno?”
“Yes,” she says. The spots settle into the wide pattern. It’s like a smile, I decide. A gentle smile. “Although their hearing abilities have lessened some through generations. We hear in other ways. The way you are beginning to,” she adds.
It’s as if there are pieces of a puzzle floating around in my head, just out of my grasp. Some of them have connected to form something I’m starting to see, but I can’t figure out the shape of it.
“But . . . but why?” I ask.
“That is a question for your mother.”
“My mother?”
“Yes. Now”—the spots settle low over her eyes in an even line—“you need to drink.”
Rasimbukar turns and disappears inside another rhohedron blossom. I almost follow her but decide that if she wanted me to, she would have said so. I stand there alone in the sun. I wonder if Dr. Espada and the finders are looking for me or if they’ve all given up, returned to the compound, and left me to my fate in the jungle the way they did my grandmother years ago.
Rasimbukar emerges from the red petals again, her skin a mottled pattern of brown and red as the coloring from the rhohedron fades.
“Does your skin do that with other colors too?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “Now drink.”
She holds a long, thin object above me. It’s red too, with a bright yellow bulb at one end, dangling near my face. A stamen from inside the blossom.
“Are you ready?” she says.
“Sure,” I shrug, my eyes half-closed.
She gently pulls off the yellow bulb of the stamen and liquid immediately flows forth. It pours first onto my face: in my state of exhaustion and dehydration I haven’t quite realized that the plant she’s brought to me is what I’m supposed to be drinking. But when some of it gets onto my lips, soaking pleasantly into the thirsty skin, I open my mouth. The liquid is almost as thin as water but with an underlying vegetable taste, tinged with soil. It’s not pleasant, but I drink it greedily. It’s different from water in more ways than texture: as I drink, it courses through my body. With every swallow, my throat seems to light up. I can almost feel it flowing into my stomach and then finding its way into my bloodstream, filling me with its red energy.
The stamen is empty and Rasimbukar casts it off into the tall grasses surrounding us.
“I feel . . .” I can’t finish the sentence. I’m awake now, all my limpness gone. But I don’t have a word for this. My body is aglow with liquid light.
“You are not thirsty anymore,” Rasimbukar says.
“No.” But I know wasn’t asking. She brought out a few of the stamens, a small bouquet, and breaks a bulb off another. She drinks it easily in only a few swallows. When she finishes, the spots on her forehead spread into the wide pattern.
“You are healthy,” she says, turning to toss the second stamen into the grass too. When she turns back to look at me, the wide-set starry eyes find mine and hold them in a strong gaze. “And now you will do something for me.”
I’m not sure what I can do for her. The jungle of Faloiv—and whatever lies beyond—is her world. What can I do for her here?
“I can try,” I answer.
Looking her in the eyes, the tunnel in my mind widens quickly, almost painfully. It makes me catch my breath. For all her gentleness, now I feel her terror and, suddenly, her anger, spiking and red. Then out of the mouth of the tunnel rises a flashing succession of images: the jungle, dark, night, Rasimbukar crouching in the underbrush alone, and a group of humans—Manx’s bright white curls—dragging a prone figure through the trees. Long-limbed. Brown. Spots covering his back, arms, and neck. It’s the spotted man. Disappearing down the red dirt path toward the Mammalian Compound. Rasimbukar’s pain echoes through my body, reverberating in my chest. She says nothing, her bottomless eyes tell me nothing, but I feel it, and fight to break away from the images before I speak.
“Your father,” I say, knowing. She has told me without words. I can’t quite shake off the secondhand fear—it clings to me like smoke.
“Yes,” she says.
“We took him.”
“Yes. He was abducted at the start of a one-moon journey, a voyage he takes regularly to survey the planet’s ecosystems. When he does not return, my people will begin to look for him. I have told no one what I have seen. Only you.”
“Me? B-but,” I stammer. “But . . . why?”
The spots on her forehead cluster tightly together.
“To prevent war,” she says. Her wooden voice sounds rougher than before, less polished. “The Faloii will go to war with the star people if they discover what I know. If you can return him to me, violence can be avoided.”
“So you’re protecting us?” I ask slowly.
“No.” The spots remain where they are, a hard cluster. “I am protecting our planet. A war like this one would do irreconcilable harm to much of the life here. Our planet is small. Intricately connected. Violence has grave consequences for Faloiv.”
I try to understand. I can feel my brain blundering through what she’s saying. It’s as if my thoughts lack thumbs, handling a puzzle clumsily and without context. War. Violence has grave consequences. The idea sends a quake through my bones. I don’t know why N’Terra—my father—has taken Rasimbukar’s father prisoner, but surely it’s an act of war. If the consequences are grave for the Faloii, who are indigenous to this planet, then what would they be for us? There’s no power cell for the Vagantur to flee with. End of the line for what Rasimbukar calls the star people. The galaxy we wandered through to come here is closed.
“So if I can return your father to you without your people finding out, then it will be okay? The Faloii won’t . . . kill us?”
“Your people have broken agreements in the past,” she says. “The Faloii have been angry for some time. There are amends that need to be made. But we can keep the bridge from being broken if you return my father to me and if the star people break no other understandings.”
From the back of my mind comes the word “control.” I think of my father, of Dr. Albatur; how, under his leadership, N’Terra has swirled with the grumblings of bitter whitecoats. What have we done?
Rasimbukar looks up at the sun. It’s beginning to sink, bathing the tops of the trees in deep golden light. The spots on her face spread a little but don’t stray far from the center of her forehead.
“I must return you to your people,” she says. Her voice sounds sad, though I’m not sure if what sounds sad to me actually translates as sadness for her. I try to look into the tunnel, but it’s closed tightly, as if she knew I’d be looking and shut herself off. “My people will soon begin to search the jungle for my father, and it is only a matter of time until they arrive at your compounds with questions. If your people lie, the Faloii will know.”
“But how will I find him? How will I get him out? How will I find you?”
She’s reaching out for me, one long brown finger extending toward my face, her eyes wide and dark and staring.
“You will find a way,” she says. “He will need the kawa, so you must help him get it. When you are ready to enter the jungle, I will know.”
And then her finger meets my forehead. There’s an instant of stars. In the moment before the world goes dark, I think of my grandmother once more. I can almost see her stepping out into the trees, as strange and vast as the stars themselves. In a jolt, I imagine what she must have felt: her spreading wonder as the core of this new planet rose up to greet her, a precious center where all things meet. Then a sweet, warm black filled with the smell of ogwe trees surrounds me, carrying me up into their branches.