16
ARIX
My human lover was hurting, and I did not need to reach out to her mind to know. It was painted on her face for anyone to see.
I had made an enormous mistake by showing the two human males my Karak form. Jo insisted it was fine, but I suspected she only said so to avoid making me feeling guilty.
By showing Max Jones and Liam Jones my Karak form, and speaking directly into their minds, I had caused Jo great distress. And I did not think I could easily fix it. So now I did feel guilty, in spite of Jo's best efforts.
Human emotions were confusing and complex. I struggled to understand how such genetic features could be selected over generations. Another thought for another time.
Jo climbed from bed, and I ached for the touch of her body. She began dressing, avoiding looking at me, and my guilt deepened.
"The first thing I want to do is see where your craft crashed," she said, focusing on her shoelaces. "If it was on my property--which I think it was, based on where I hit you in my truck--then I have cause for complaint against the Jones idiots. Here in America you can't trespass on someone's property and steal what's there, alien or not."
She added a smile to the joke, but I could tell she was masking her pain.
"Jo," I began. Finally she looked over at me, and my heart felt a strange pang. "I'm sorry. I should have remained hidden from them."
She gave me a patient look and said, "It's fine." And interestingly enough, I believed her. She was telling the truth, yet the pain remained.
A strange species indeed.
I finally left the warmth of the bed and got dressed. The morning light threw shadows across the room as I pulled on my boots, and when I finished and stood to embrace Jo she moved away from me.
"Let's go look at the crash site."
I followed Jo methodically, my legs feeling unnaturally weighted, even more so than the night I first shifted. It was as if my entire body felt the pain I'd caused Jo, the regret and guilt seeping from my mind like thick poison. I hated the feeling, and it intermingled with my own Karak regrets. The vows and duties I had forsaken.
What am I supposed to do? I wondered as I followed Jo into her truck.
We drove in silence toward the crash site, which was still obvious thanks to the tread marks and footprints. Jo parked on the shoulder and retrieved her shotgun from the bed. She checked it for ammunition and then we trudged through the snow, a dark cloud hanging over us.
I considered apologizing again, but something in my human brain told me not to push it. That Jo would come around, and forgive me, if I gave her time.
I wasn't sure if I believed it.
The trees thinned and we reached the unnatural clearing. Jo paused to examine what remained of a tree, the jagged splinters reaching toward the sky like the glass buildings back on Karak. She swept her gaze around the dirt clearing, devoid of snow, and covered with the downed trees from my crash landing.
"It's not very big."
I tried a smile. "Is that a penis joke?"
But Jo's face remained blank. "Your aircraft. I expected it to be larger."
I didn't know what to say to that. How big did she expect it to be?
"It is large enough for one Karak scout and eighty-three kilograms of recovered material."
That didn't seem to mean anything to Jo. She walked the perimeter of the clearing in slow steps, examining the ground for something. When she returned to the original spot she nodded to herself, then pointed.
"Yep. Looks like two trucks came from over there. Same treads as the Jones' trucks, I bet. They've got your spacecraft for sure." She finally looked at me. "What's it look like?"
I blinked. "What do you mean?"
"Does it have a grey metal exterior? Is it aerodynamic? Are the electronics made with red and blue and green wires?"
"These are oddly specific questions."
She waved a hand in annoyance, and the pain in my chest deepened. "What I'm getting at is whether or not it looks alien. If they showed it to someone, like an engineer, would they immediately know it's something that came from another planet?"
"Oh. Well, yes." I made a shape with my hands. "It's round like your dinner plates, with a jutting cockpit on the front. And the material is a light alloy of the carbon atom. From what I have seen of your earth vehicles, it is far beyond your species' current technological level. And the electronics are all photon-rerouting fiber channels."
Jo's face grew grimmer with each word I spoke. "I figured it was too much to hope it looked like somethin' our Air Force might whip together." She spun 180 degrees. "But more importantly, my property line is over there. All this land belongs to me. They trespassed."
"Good!" I blurted out, seizing on the good news. "So we have recourse through your local law enforcement?"
"I mean, not really." She gave me a look that made me feel like I was stupid, thick with intentional cruelty. "What would we say? Hey, those Jones boys trespassed on our land and took my alien lover's ship. We'd like it back, please and thank you!"
I wanted to say something back just as biting, but all that came out of my human mouth was, "You don't have to be mean. I'm sorry."
Jo rolled her eyes. "Well I'm just being blunt. You seem so intent on getting off this planet, so I didn't want to hold you up any further with useless endeavors."
There's something there. The root of Jo's pain was in those words, more raw than anything else she'd said to me. She'd given me a glimpse into her mind, the hint I needed to figure out what was truly wrong.
Before I could say anything, there was a noise at the far edge of the clearing. A head appeared in view from behind a tree. Jo raised the shotgun to her shoulder.
"Stay right there," she commanded in a voice as firm as the carbon alloy of my missing ship.
But the figure stepped out from behind the tree, with his hands in the air. Max Jones, I remembered, stiffening with alarm.
"Where's your brother?" Jo asked.
I reached out with my Karak consciousness and sensed him three trees deep to the right. I pointed. "He is there."
Liam revealed himself, taking careful steps into the clearing with his hands also in the air. "Howdy," he said, voice quivering. I could feel the fear in his gaze from across the space.
Jo looked sideways at me. "How'd you let them sneak up on us, mister telepathic alien?"
"You requested that I never touch your consciousness without your permission. To accomplish that, I pushed it deep down so I would not do so inadvertently. Like closing my eyes to avoid seeing a Christmas present being wrapped."
"We need to teach you some better metaphors," she muttered, then turned back to the Jones brothers. "What are you two doin' out here?"
A smirk spread on Max's face. "We know what he is. You can't hide him from us."
"I dunno what you're talkin' about," Jo said carefully. "But whatever you think he is, I suspect your word don't mean much."
I noticed the subtext of the conversation with fresh ears. Max knew what I was. Jo knew what I was. Yet Jo refused to acknowledge it out loud, and was playing a hypothetical game with how the men would proceed.
I smiled to myself. Perhaps human verbal communication had a deeper context than I originally thought.
But Max's sneer deepened. His brother stepped forward, equal smugness on his face. "Nobody needs to trust our word."
Jo kept the shotgun trained on him. "The fuck's that supposed to mean?"
"Let's just say your alien boy toy made a mistake doing his morphing routine in front of us," Liam said. "In front of our truck."
Max chuckled.
I didn't know what they meant by that, but Jo must have, because a scowl fell across her face. "You have a dash cam?"
Dash cam. Referring to the dashboard cameras commonly used by motorists to protect themselves from automotive liability. The definition came to my mind, a paragraph I'd scanned while using Jo's computer.
"Maybe so," Liam said, words dripping with meaning. "Maybe not. We'll see." He lowered his hand to point at me, then thrust it back in the air. "Point is, your fella there is in a world of trouble. We've already made some calls. It will go easier for him if he surrenders to us."
"Surrender?" I said, at the same time Jo snapped, "Hell no!"
"We're gunna get him one way or another," Max insisted. "If you turn him over peacefully, we will say he took you against your will. Appealed to your feminine wiles."
"Fuck you," Jo said, spitting on the ground. "Here's what's gunna happen, so listen very carefully. All four of us are gunna get in my truck, and take a drive back to your place. You give me every copy of whatever footage you have. And then we borrow your tow truck to bring his craft back here. And after that you leave us alone."
Max barked a laugh. "Why in the hell would we do that?"
"Because," Jo said, words heavy with promise, "if you don't, I'm going to shoot you both right here in this clearing."
The last syllable hung in the air, and then there was a silence between the four of us.
She was threatening to murder them. For me. She cared about me so deeply, so completely, that she would commit a heinous human crime to keep me safe. Or, at the very least, threaten such an action out loud.
Before I could stop myself, I reached out with my mind to hers.
And I almost recoiled from what I felt.
She didn't want to kill them, and loathed the idea of murder. She'd broken down at such a thought earlier in Leslie's office, literally weeping at the idea of almost shooting them.
But stronger than that, overwhelming everything else in her mind, I felt her love for me. It was as resolute as anything I'd ever experienced, as warm and intense as the fireplace in her cabin. She would do anything to protect me, including killing these two men in cold blood right now. I could feel her consciousness focusing on the trigger, her finger pressing against it with barely restrained intent.
A lump crawled into my throat in the nanosecond I experienced all of this. I had hurt her, was still hurting her based on the deeper regret and pain I could feel inside her, and yet she still felt the overwhelming need to keep me safe.
The instinct was so alien I almost didn't believe it.
"You wouldn't," Max began, a tremble in his voice.
"Wrong," Jo said simply. "You have five seconds to decide."
I could sense her counting down. She had made her decision, and even though it was an impossible decision for her she'd made it instantly. She was about to kill these two men for me.
But of course that wouldn't end our problems. They had called people. Likely, they had already spread the video evidence on the internet. Killing them would only delay our problem, and likely not for long.
I did this to her.
The guilt I felt returned a thousandfold, crashing into my human brain the way my spacecraft had crashed to earth. I was the cause of all Joanna's problems.
And only I could fix them.
"I am sorry," I said.
Joanna turned her head a degree toward me, but kept her eyes on the men. "For what?"
"For breaking my promise."
I reached into Joanna's consciousness with greater presence, forcing into the parts that controlled motor function. An electric flicker of thought and she dropped her shotgun to the snow. Another pulse and she was on her knees, frozen against the ground. I forced a command to keep her there for ten minutes, and then tied off the thought like a bow.
I left her consciousness, and she whipped her head toward me in alarm. "Arix, no!"
"I am sorry, Joanna from Elijah, Wyoming."
I walked toward the Jones brothers, who slowly lowered their arms. Max took a step back from me, so I raised my palms to him.
"I intend to surrender. But only if you promise to leave Joanna alone. She was under my complete control, as I have demonstrated by disabling her before you now."
Liam glanced at Jo, then bobbed his head as quickly as he could. "Yeah, of course! You bet, buddy. Nothin' will happen to her. We won't say a word."
"Then I will come with you." I continued walking toward them.
"Arix, NO!" Jo screamed. "Don't do this!"
There was fresh pain in her voice, but that only hardened my resolve.
Trust me, I said into her mind. I only intended to surrender for the immediate future; I would accompany them to wherever they took me, then temporarily disable them the way I had done to Jo. That would give me adequate time to inspect my craft, perhaps send a communication out, and then decide what to do from there. With a thought, I sent all of this information to Jo's mind so she would know.
Max lowered his arms and put a hand in his pocket. Liam stepped closer.
"I will follow your instructions," I explained. "I will demonstrate my shifting abilities. I will tell you everything you wish to know about my home planet of Karak, and the Dominion of planets under our control. All of this I will do for you, in exchange for never bothering Jo again."
"Sounds, uhh, like a fair trade," Liam said.
I made myself smile at them. I was only a few feet away now, and could see the eagerness in their eyes. "There is much I can teach you of--"
Max pointed a device at me.
CRACK-HISS.
Pain like white-hot fire lanced through my human body, electricity that arched my back and blinded everything. The ground came up and struck me in the face, and through the static, and the pain, I sensed boots standing over me.
"Do it!" Liam hissed.
"NO!" Jo screamed.
I heard the clicking sound of a dial twisting, and then the pain in my body skyrocketed. And with horror, I felt my human body being pulled apart against my will: the atoms rearranging and shifting, falling away like dust wiped from a table.
They were forcing me to shift back into my Karak form.
Where normal shifting was as simple and painless as blinking, their forced shifting was excruciating. My human body felt every tear and rip in slow agony, my body being torn in half, then quarters, then eighths, again and again as the atoms were pulled apart against their will.
I tried to scream even though I possessed no mouth. Somewhere, in a different world, I heard Jo screaming for me.
The agony lasted an eternity, and then finally I was in my Karak form, condensed photons suspended above the frozen clearing. As the pain subsided I could finally see around me: Max held a device in his hand like a a television remote control, with several buttons and a dial on the face.
"Holy shit! I can't fucken believe it worked!" Liam practically jumped up and down."
Max had a wide smile on his face. "Told ya the photon isolator wasn't internet junk. Worth every penny."
Photon isolator. The object they tried to grab in their truck the other day.
"Come on, then," Max said, and as he turned the device it forced me to move with them. I tried reaching out with my consciousness but I slammed into an invisible barrier. I probed along the surface; it was as if I were in a glass dome, unable to do anything but obey.
"LEAVE HIM ALONE!" Jo shrieked across the clearing. Her voice cracked as she roared and bucked against the invisible bonds holding her in place. The bonds I had put there. "NOOOOO."
I am sorry, Joanna, I tried to say to her, but the words hit the barrier and fell weakly to the snow.
As they led me through the woods to their truck, the only thing I felt was regret.