In my family, we had a saying: ‘you can’t be silent or hungry, or else you’ll stay silent and hungry.’ To be honest, I had never quite understood the meaning of that peculiar saying, not before I found myself walking on that red thing I could only guess was some kind of moss.

Seeing Jay walk in front of me, his head up but totally absent the whole time, reminded me of the things my mom used to say. However, I was still not feeling comfortable around him. What if he turned back to that...Dark Jay? What had triggered that reaction of him?

Questions span inside my head, but I couldn’t find the strength to ask him. Well, not before I heard Silver laughing two strides behind me. I slowed down and allowed her to get closer to me. She and Zan seemed to have a pleasant chat, but I was more surprised at the fact that Zan was walking on his two feet and not on his four.

When I first saw him before, I thought that his longer limbs and stronger arms indicated his inability to master walking on his two feet, but I was totally wrong. I stumbled upon a strange conversation:

“And so, how old are you?” Silver asked, trying to add more information to her research.

Zan replied using a raucous, seemingly random, choice of words from different languages. Silver laughed at him again. What could he say to her that would make her laugh? She just asked him how old he was. I decided to delve deeper into the matter.

“Hey, Silver. I see you’ve got a new friend.” I smiled, but I didn’t feel the joy reaching my eyes. Jay was still on my mind.

“Oh hello Eladia. Yeah, Zan is superb. He’s intelligent, and funny, and doesn’t munch on his words. He’s a perfect gift. Thank you again, Eladia.”

I suppressed the need to hide behind my palm and decided to take the usual path: “He’s not a pet Silver. I thought we talked about this before.”

For an Android morpher, Silver had an extensive array of expressions; the one she was casting at me now was a blend of bafflement and disappointment. What was with robots and pets? I would never understand them.

“So, what are you talking about? Has he seen any signs of the relic or anything towards it?”

Her holographic face flashed. “Now that you mention it, there was something he said that was weird. According to a story, his ancestors told him, humans didn’t exist until very recently. A surge of growing potential seemed to appear in this part of the world a hundred years ago, right about the time Mr. Jasih appeared.”

Nice. Now she could pronounce his name too. And what was about the honorifics? “That’s really interesting. That’s why other Chroniclers didn’t find anything in other parts of the Primordial Earth. The new species of these mammals must have started their evolution in this section of the world. But, that also means-”

“Yes. The only reports of technology apparently affecting life are that of the Nusae.”

She was right. Oh, my God, she was right. But that meant that Jay must have had something to do with it. I left behind my second thought and raised my pace to get to Jay’s side. I hoped that if I talked to him about it, then something may jog his memory and more information about his previous life would come to the surface. Hell, he may also knew the exact location of the relic.

I got closer to him, but he didn’t slow down. I’m almost sure that he had seen me, but he started walking faster, intentionally. Finally, I caught up to him. “Excuse me! Jay, can you please slow down? I have something I want to ask you!”

For a change, he seemed to hear me; he slowed down, but not nearly enough as I would have expected him to. My ponytail swung furiously, and in my mind, I thought that I must have looked like a crazy person. Well, I didn’t care. He might knew something about the relic.

“What’s with you humans and all these questions? Where are you from? Who are you? What’s your purpose in life? I mean, do you ever stop to think why you wonder so much about useless things?”

He was furious alright, but I couldn’t let his bad mood fester me. “Now that you mention it, you seem to know many things about many species. Have you ever heard the Nusae?” I was now following him, but he suddenly stopped. I pumped into his back and almost fell to the ground. “Hey. A little warning next time?”

“What about the Nusae? How do you know about the Nusae?”

So he did know something about them! It seemed that only the memories of his people, Esuh, were the ones he had forgotten. “For the last time, humans have colonized half the galaxy. We’re right up there with all kinds of species, like--”

He started walking fast again like I had never even talked. We arrived at a type of a crossroad, full of green and purple trees that touched the sky. Their trunks were big enough to compete with the fallen buildings, but the important part was Jay drawing away from me.

I was trying to follow him, but my breath was scorching my lungs. I realized that I had been walking for almost a whole day and that I hadn’t had a single drop of water for hours. But something inside me drew me towards that man. His will to fight, to lead, to infuriate me every waking moment was unbelievable.

Now I was running behind him, but he didn’t stop. Somewhere in the back, Silver and Zan followed us, but I didn’t have time to stop and wait for them.

Again, Jay suddenly stopped and turned to face me. He didn’t talk, not even seem angry; a cold calmness reigned over his face. His nerve! He made me chase him around, and now he looked like he had just met me.

“Hey! Listen...you stupid...alien!” I lacked oxygen, and my vocabulary narrowed down to simple words and phrases. I panted my lungs out, but I didn’t stop. Instead, I found the strength to raise my voice even higher. “You...will...tell me everything...you know about the Nusae!”

“Why should I? Do you think you’re that important to me?” His voice was low, yet menacing. I took a step back. Just a precaution. He didn’t seem to control his change.

“I didn’t say that. But if you tell me everything you know about them, I might help you remember who you are!” I couldn’t lower my voice; my anger had turned to a cacophony of words.

And then it came; the roar.

He opened his mouth, and he just roared at me, like the Lions did way back, when humans still lived here. Still, I was so mad at him that I didn’t want to stop. “Do you think that you can get your memories back without me? How? You didn’t even know the name of your species until now!” I yelled the last word.

Just barely, I sensed Silver behind me. Zan snarled next to her. It was somehow reassuring that I had people behind me—well, a feral human and an android, but it counted as a help, though that didn’t make me feel any safer. After all, he was the man who had killed a pack of those creatures earlier, all by himself.

I expected some kind of reaction, but it never came. On the contrary, he took the same expression he did just before the attack on the spaceship. The attack on the spaceship? That meant…

“Eladia, I think it would be better if you lowered your voice…” Silver told me, but I knew it was too late.

Jay came closer to me, and he told me almost whispering: “you and your loud words. You must have woken up the whole forest.”

“We’re in the middle of this, and now you want to assign blames? Fine then. Your roar didn’t help either.”

Zan shushed us both. We turned and faced him at the same time; he pointed behind us.

“Do...do you hear that?” I muttered. Jay snorted.

At first, it was a muffled sound of tiny feet crowding in front of us, but with every passing moment, the sound became an uproar of countless insects walking.

I couldn’t see anything, so I thought it would be better to know what we were facing. “Silver, give us some light.” And then, we saw them. “Oh...my...what in this world are all these?”

Thousands, no...tens of thousands overgrown insects crawled around us. We thought that they were coming from behind us, but no. They had already surrounded us. Big, disgusting heads, with dark bluish eyes were watching us. Spiders, or something close to a spider, with six long legs and two smaller, all hairy, were moving fast towards us.

“They are of the insectoid family, but I’ve never seen species like these. They seem to be a mix of two different organisms, but I don’t know how to characterize them.”

Silver’s voice was the last thing I could hear. A gentle pinch on my neck started spreading a warm feeling to my head and then to the rest of my body. I wanted to scream, God how much I wanted to let out a big, lengthy scream, but I couldn’t.

I felt tiny legs walk on my skin, inside my shirt. Tears clouded my eyes, and I thought everything was over. Strangely, I already felt lighter, like I was getting carried away by two strong arms. Was that what it felt like when dying? It was a nice feeling. I could get used to it.

My blurry eyes showed me random pictures. I saw Jay’s face, his strong eyes, and hard lines, came closer to mine. For a moment there I thought he would kiss me; and at that moment, I wanted him to.