I stood outside for several long minutes after Rex departed, just reveling in the way his palm had felt against my cheek and the husky way he’d said he always wanted to be around me. I’d been trying to ignore the tumultuous emotions I’d been feeling toward him which had been progressively growing stronger since he’d first brought me to his parents’ house. However, the look in his eyes and the intimacy in his voice had finally made me come to terms with myself.

I was falling in love with him.

When we’d first met, he’d been very commanding and authoritative. That was natural, I suppose, given I was a strange being who had suddenly appeared in his world. I hadn’t known it at the time, but he was also a Tribe Elder, and that meant he had a responsibility to his tribe to keep them safe. He hadn’t known if I was a danger to them.

As time had gone on, though, he’d changed. I’d seen him loosen up and become more naturally casual in his interactions with me. He had seemed genuinely interested in learning about me as a person, not just as a human, and he’d appeared to take great pleasure in showing me his life—or, at least, what I could learn about his life being confined to the house. We still slept together every night, and there had been more than one time that I’d woken up out of a deep sleep to find some part of him pressing against me. Once, I’d thought I’d felt him stroke my back, but I hadn’t been sure if it had just been a dream, and I’d never gathered up the courage to ask.

I wasn’t just falling in love with Rex, though. I was falling in love with everything. His parents, once they got used to me and stopped thinking I was going to attack them at any moment, turned out to be utterly delightful. His mother reminded me very much of my grandmother in her ways of taking care of her home and family and her willingness to pass on the little gems of tradition. His father was disarmingly sweet behind his gruffness, and, though he attempted to be businesslike and emotionally distant from me, he had become very protective of me and my safety.

Albaterra, or what I had seen of it, was a dream. I never tired of looking at the scenery around me. When Rex went for an afternoon hunt, I often sat in the tall, consuming grass and just stared at the sky around me. That was something I couldn’t get used to but delighted in. The Albaterran sky wasn’t above as it was on Earth; it was around, all-consuming. I felt as though I sat inside the sky like a little plastic snowman inside a snow globe. The turquoise and lavender heavens of the day, punctured by those incredible white stars, swallowed me whole and burrowed deep inside of me, while the cobalt sky of the eve pulled me into itself and wrapped around me like a blanket. The wheat-colored plains stretching for miles in every direction were inviting and threatening at the same time; I found the contradiction invigorating.

I finally moved from my spot at the end of the walk when Igno ran up to me and placed a finished peg into my hand. I studied it carefully, rolling it between my fingers, and I was surprised to find it was crafted as perfectly as if Rex had done it himself.

“This is wonderful, Igno!” I exclaimed, smiling at the little blue boy.

“Yours,” he said with a nod.

“Thank you,” I replied earnestly. I bent at the waist to plant a kiss of appreciation on his head, and he beamed.

I took him inside and showed the peg to Beni, who raved over it just as I had. Igno bounced away, thrilled with himself, to make more pegs, but I sat down at the table again with Beni and picked up the fur I’d been working on sewing.

“You seem to like it here,” Beni said after a long quiet.

I looked up at her in surprise, accidentally pricking my finger with the bone needle. I stuck my finger in my mouth and lapped at the puncture with my tongue, but Beni shook her head and pulled my hand away from my lips by the wrist. She got to her feet and retrieved a little clay pot, which she brought back to the table and opened it. Inside there was a thick, grayish gunk. She took my finger and dabbed a very small amount of the gunk on the wound.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Boiled vigibrach bark and hicorn dung,” she replied. I looked down at my finger with mild disgust, but she seemed unfazed as she returned the pot to its shelf by the rustic fireplace. “It will heal by tomorrow.”

As she sat back down, she trained her eyes on me again. “Are you happy here?”

“Yes,” I answered honestly.

“Do you wish to stay?” She probed.

I thought about the question. I wasn’t sure if she was asking if I wanted to stay on Albaterra or if I wanted to stay at her house, but the answer was the same either way. “Yes, I would like to, but I don’t know what will happen.”

“Rex will do what makes you happy,” she said. She hadn’t picked up her fur yet, and I could tell she wanted to have this conversation for a while.

Biting my lip, I averted my eyes from hers and stared fixedly at the table. “How do you know?”

“A mother knows.” I looked back up at her again, expecting her to have a telling smile on her face, but she looked matter-of-fact.

“My staying may not be what’s best, though,” I said, finally voicing a fear which had been building inside of me all of this time. Hearing the words spoken aloud sent a shiver of worry through me.

“Best for whom?” She asked intently.

“For everyone,” I answered. “Him, me, all A’li-uud.”

She leaned forward over the furs and peered at me with unexpected intensity as she said, “It is not up to me what is best for the A’li-uud, and I cannot tell you what is best for you. But I don’t think you need to fear that your staying is anything other than best for Rex.”

I looked back at her, and something seemed to swell inside me so rapidly I thought I would burst. I felt both a strong desire to cry and a strong desire to laugh at the same time, but I settled to smile gratefully at her for her candor. She smiled in return and then sat back and picked up her fur.

We worked in silence for a long time until the door opened again and Rex entered. His eyes found me immediately, and I melted into a puddle beneath his gaze. He was shirtless, as usual, and the white sunlight spilling into the doorframe around him gave him an angelic appearance. His lips turned upward in a boyish grin that sent my stomach into the series of flutters I so often felt around him, and I actually giggled. In my peripheral vision, I could see a small smile of amusement spread across Beni’s face.

“You are done with the Forum?” She asked.

“Yes,” he answered, stepping all the way into the room and closing the door behind him. In the absence of the white sun, the room was noticeably dimmer, but it had an air of mystique which only served to heighten my arousal for him. An image of my body beneath his on top of the rubberwood table flashed through my mind, and I felt my cheeks warm with a sudden blush.

He crossed the room to where his mother and I sat, and, as he moved to join me on the bench, his hand casually brushed the nape of my neck. I quivered beneath his touch, noticing that my skin felt the warm imprint of his fingertips even after he had sat down and rested his arms on the table.

“Has something happened?” Beni asked him. She didn’t sound overly concerned; rather, her tone was curious.

“The Council has decided to resume action on the ships in Andromeda,” he said. I looked at him with questions in my eyes, but he only locked gazes with me for a second before looking away.

Beni, however, seemed intent on knowing more, and she didn’t seem at all happy about what she’d just heard. “Why? There is no known threat.”

I realized they were most likely referring to the other ships on the mission including the Paragon. I turned to him for his answer, as well as to ask more questions of my own. Before I could, though, he answered his mother in his clacking A’li-uud language. She spoke back to him with more clacks, and I looked rapidly between them in desperate hopes to understand what they said. I wasn’t sure if they realized they had switched tongues or not, but it seemed unlikely to me they wouldn’t notice they had. Rex was intentionally making sure I didn’t know what he was saying.

It hurt me to realize that.

“Wait,” I interrupted. Both of them looked at me. “Speak in English.”

“It’s nothing for you to worry about,” Rex said dismissively, still keeping his eyes off of me.

I stared at him, trying to wrangle my mixed emotions. A part of me was hurt, but another part was furious he was keeping information about the fate of my human counterparts from me.

“I didn’t say I was worried,” I said in a clipped tone. “I just want to know. I think I have the right.”

Without a word, Rex got to his feet and walked toward the door. I looked to Beni for advice, but the expression on her face told me she was torn between loyalty to her son and her feelings on my right to know. I looked back at Rex.

“What is going to happen to the ships?” I called to his back.

He whipped around suddenly, and I thought I’d crossed a line and had infuriated him. His eyes were dark and angry, and his posture was defensive, as though he was about to engage in a deadly battle. I flinched at the mere sight of the expression on his handsome visage and opened my mouth to apologize for butting into Council business, but he spoke before I could.

“Tabitha, go to the bedroom.”

I blinked numbly; shocked he was actually sending me to my room as punishment for speaking out. When I didn’t move right away, he yelled, “Now!”

“Go,” Beni said in a hushed tone, pushing gently on my arm. “Go.”

I got to my feet in a harried rush, stumbling over the bench in my hurry to stand. Beni stood as well and reached for me to steady me. Then, with one last look at Rex, I strode to the stairs and ran up them two at a time.

“Close the door,” he ordered from the bottom of the staircase. I looked back at him, hoping to see some kind of explanation written on his face or any kind of telltale emotion in his eyes, but he was already walking outside.

I went into the bedroom and closed the door behind me as I’d been bid. Then, I made my way to the window to see where Rex was going. He was moving to the end of the walkway, and, in the distance, I saw the approaching figure of another A’li-uud. My stomach unknotted slightly as I realized his sharpness had been to get me up to the room to protect me, but it tangled up again as I wondered who it was and what they wanted.

As the figure drew nearer, I saw it was a female. She was beautiful, much like Rex but with more femininity, and there was a look of strong determination on her face. She wore skins tightly fitted to her muscular, curvy form, and it struck me just how pale she was compared to Rex and his family. Her skin was very light azure, and her hair was almost white, but she clearly wasn’t an Elderly A’li-uud. In fact, she looked like she was around Rex’s age, perhaps even younger. I watched as she walked up to Rex and stood close enough that there was nothing but a breath between them, and I saw her lift a hand and squeeze his arm affectionately.

My breath caught in my chest. This female wasn’t a mere acquaintance, a simple tribeswoman. As I observed the way she stood with her chest extended out and her hip popped slightly, and as I watched her lean into him to whisper something in his ear, I realized she was something to him. It hit me that this woman—this alien woman—might have been the reason for his sudden distance from me, and I felt like I’d had a sledgehammer thrown into my gut.

When she tilted her face and pressed her lips to his, the first tear fell.