Sidney
I used to enjoy crashing into Lele’s lab. It was a large purple trailer in the center of the trailer park with yellow stripes along the sides. It was home to innumerous stolen goods and tech.
Lele, myself, and Rebecca had gathered here with Ed so that I could test Ed: test his DNA against our database. Karen’s database of alien creatures we knew about. I needed to know if Tessoul was right.
“Where is Tessoul?” Lele asked, blinking curiously and looking around our makeshift lab as though he might suddenly appear.
“Released,” I said quietly and swallowed hard.
I hadn’t seen him since Baxley let him go, days ago. The conditions for jealous Baxley was that I was not allowed to see Tessoul; I couldn’t watch him go. I agreed, believing Tessoul would never allow it or that he might wait for me and tell Baxley he wouldn’t leave without me—his one true love.
But he did go.
Baxley said he headed to the mountains and my heart hadn’t stopped sinking ever since.
“I see,” Lele said, fiddling with the sample in her hands before setting it down on the table. “Will he be staying with us?”
“I don’t think so,” Rebecca said, her saucer eyes looking sad as she regarded me. It seemed that many of the girls had bonded with Tessoul before he left, Lele included.
“Then…” Lele paused, choosing her words carefully. “I am sorry. He had a kindness to him that was genuine. He seemed good for you, Sidney.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know, because you actually seemed happy?” Rebecca offered with a small, sad laugh. “How many of us get that in this life?”
“And stable,” Lele added. “You seemed very stable with him.”
Rebecca snapped her fingers in agreement. “And he seems a little more in your age bracket.”
“And out of my species,” I mocked.
Rebecca shrugged at that and began to spin in her stool. Balancing herself with the counter, she asked, “Where is he now? What’s the plan? I’m surprised Baxley even let him go.”
“Yeah, well, we can to an understanding. It’s called, ‘Get Karen or you’re dead,’” I mocked.
“Ah,” was all Rebecca said.
“Where is Tessoul now?” Lele asked.
The answer to that unnerved me. If he was really headed toward the mountains, I wondered if he was doing so because he was following his calling, if he were waiting for me, or if he was planning an attack on our camp.
“I don’t know,” I said lamely. “He’s been wandering off to that same spot where I found him. It’s been days.”
“Well,” Rebecca shrugged. “He’s pissed.”
“No, it’s something else,” I said, the worry paramount in my voice.
“Well I don’t blame him if he is pissed,” Rebecca spat and looked to Lele for visual confirmation. “Baxley’s a shit.”
“What does that mean?” I said.
Rebecca’s big eyes seemed glassy then, and she began toying with her hands, which made me nervous. “It means... I feel bad for the guy. It's like you took the blinders off him for the first time in his life, the guy feels this horrible guilt and you're the only solace he finds. Then you just ripped it away from him.”
“Hey,” I said sternly. “I love him, okay?”
“That is touching,” Lele said in a tone that read the exact opposite.
“That is actually amazing,” Rebecca added. “Why are you not together right now?”
“I’m gathering a diagnosis here, okay?” I breathed and pushed myself from the counter, pacing the trailer with mounting worry.
“Yeah, what’s this about anyway?” Rebecca said, tapping her fingers on the counter anxiously as though my impatience was contagious. “Whoa,” she breathed with sudden shock. “Are you carrying an alien baby? Are you a cute little baby-mama now?”
“What?” I laughed, horrified. “No! I brought in a sample, and I’m here to collect it from Lele. Not a pregnancy test, okay?”
As though it were possible for her to forget, Lele blinked in surprise and raced for the sample, watching the results form on the screen. She didn’t have to say anything after that since the answer was obvious.
“It’s a match,” she said.
“No,” I breathed and felt the air leave me; I felt my stomach sink into despair.
“Your sample from… Ed is an exact match for the Kilari,” Lele affirmed officially.
Rebecca had been petting Ed off and on since we all gathered in Lele’s makeshift lab. Her hand flinched away from the creature, and her eyes shot up to mine. With no small amount of panic, she stayed frozen in place, her arm behind her head as she said, “You’d better start talking right now.”
The fact that she was so repulsed by the creature only made me feel worse. It made me sad on some level, even though I knew that were I her, I would have felt exactly the same.
“Tessoul’s been acting really weird lately,” I explained slowly. “And he told me there’s a war coming. And…” I showed my palms to the girls before scraping my fingers down my forehead. “He says the Kilari are coming back to kill the Vithohn. They are arch-rivals or something from the past. They thought they were extinct. He told me Ed was one of them, and he is.”
I said the words like I was a little kid in trouble, spitting out the sentences quick and short until I lost my breath.
Apparently, there was no need for me to explain who the Kilari were or what the longstanding war was about between them and the Vithohn. It seemed like I was the only idiot who’d never heard about it before.
“Then you’re in a quandary,” Lele said so seriously that it made me want to laugh, despite myself.
“How’s that?” I asked.
Rebecca cleared her throat and began, “If you tell Baxley, he's going to say to let them come; let them wipe out the aliens. Then we'll have a chance to reclaim Earth.”
Lele jumped in then. “If you say nothing, then we need a plan as soon as possible because we might have a worse enemy on our hands than the Vithohn. We just learned how to control the Vithohn.”
“Better the devil you know,” I said, but Lele just stared. I waved her off with an exhausted motion, and she suddenly looked saddened. “Right? I mean, we help the Vithohn, right?”
Rebecca slapped my arm, hard, and with wide eyes, she said, “Plus, you love the guy! I’m pretty sure that counts for something, doesn’t it?”
“So what do I do?” I said.
“First off,” Rebecca continued, “apologize your ass off. Because if he leaves us for good then we have even less of a chance to stop these things, whatever they are.”