___
“W
HERE ARE YOU going?"
Sarah paused in the doorway, clean clothes bundled in her arms. She hadn't meant to wake Rei, but she also hadn't expected him to sleep through her quietly slipping out of bed, into the bathroom for a shower, and back to the bedroom to collect a sweater and jeans from her closet.
He was normally so cautious, so alert. But it was she who had wakened a dozen times during the night, startled by the presence of another body pressed warm against hers in the narrow bed. Every time, Rei had been deeply asleep, limp and heavy, not even stirring when she propped herself up on an elbow to watch his lax face as he breathed softly and steadily in the gentle green glow of her lightning-bug-shaped nightlight.
As if he hadn't truly slept in days—weeks—months; as if all it took was having her beside him in the bed to relax him.
"I'm going to class," she whispered, closing the door. Her father was still asleep; she didn't want to wake him. She began pulling on her jeans in the dark bedroom.
Rei sat up in bed. The light coming in around the door from the hallway, and the gray light of dawn through the lace curtain over her bedroom window, gave just enough light that she could see him shake his head.
"To class? I don't understand."
"Class? School? College? That's where I went on Monday, er, the other day, you know, when I was gone all day."
He nodded. "I remember that. I couldn't understand most of what you were saying then. It's a kind of training that you're going to?"
"Sort of. I'm studying astrophysics. That's a type of science, about stars and planets and gravitation."
"Science training?" He smiled, a flash of white teeth in the dark. "That's impressive. I didn't know you were a scientist."
"Just a rookie scientist who's still learning. And based on what I've seen so far of you and your spaceship, I now know that almost everything I'm learning is wrong." She pulled her sweater over her head and ran a hand through her damp curls. "But still, I paid for those classes, so I need to not flunk out. I won't be gone for long. Just a few hours. You can sleep for a while longer."
"I'm not sleepy," he began, and interrupted himself with a yawn.
"I can see that. Oh!" She looked up from tying her shoes. "I just had a thought. I'm going to be in the city today. It's not a big city, but much bigger than our little town here, with better stores. While I'm there, I can buy you some clothes so you don't have to keep wearing Dad's. Do you know what—oh, what am I saying, of course you wouldn't know what your sizes are. I need to measure your waist and leg length so I can buy you some pants."
"You don't need to obtain clothing for me," he protested as she rummaged in her sewing drawer for a tape measure. "What I already have is fine."
"Move over and let me get this around your waist."
This turned out to be hard to do: he was so close, and so naked, and the skin above his hipbones was so soft, and now he was nibbling on her neck as she bowed her head over the tape measure. She turned her head to catch his next kiss on her lips, and he slid a hand into her hair, pulling her in closer—
—until she surfaced with a little gasp. "I have to go, Rei, seriously. I've got to drive all the way to the city, I'm going to be late for my class ... Come on, let me get your measurements written down, I'm not even going to have time for breakfast at this rate—"
He followed her downstairs with her dad's sweatpants sliding off his hips and a too-tight-in-the-shoulders shirt dangling its tails across his thighs. She was going to have to buy him better-fitting clothes for her own ability to concentrate, if nothing else.
"When did you say you'll be back?" he asked as she got out a loaf of bread and a package of sliced ham to make a quick sandwich to eat in the car.
"Early afternoon. I'm going to unload all my work shifts this week if I can. I wouldn't even go to class today, but there's a quiz." She shook her head and snatched the grocery shopping list off the fridge, where it was stuck on with a banana magnet so she and her dad could add items as needed. "And then I'll do some shopping and get back here. Is there anything you need me to pick up for fixing your ship?"
"Nothing that can be obtained on your planet."
"Oh well. Clothes shopping it is, then." She stuffed the sandwich into her bag and gave him a long, lingering kiss before she dashed out the door to the truck.
***
On Monday, going to class had felt like stepping back into the real world, with the farm and all its attendant weirdness receding like a dream.
Somehow, between then and now, everything had flipped. Now it was the university campus that felt unreal. Sarah drifted through it in a haze, unable to concentrate, all too aware of how young most of the other students were—sometimes the difference between nineteen and twenty-six felt like a thousand years—and how distant and unrelatable their concerns had become. Discussion about boyfriends and girlfriends, about politics and sports washed over her. She forgot she hadn't studied for the quiz until the paper landed on her desk, and then she just guessed at the answers she didn't know. It hardly seemed to matter; what point was there to a freshman physics class when she had an actual alien spaceship in the barn?
She escaped from campus as quickly as possible and hit the big box stores to pick up the items on her list. This was no less surreal, as she pushed her cart around harried-looking shoppers whose biggest concerns were which brand of cereal to buy. The garish displays of Halloween candy and decorations reminded her that the holiday was only a few days away, so she tossed a couple bags of mini chocolate bars into her cart just in case they got trick-or-treaters. Some years the local farm kids were more dedicated than others. She'd have to make sure Rei stayed in the barn, just in case ...
Wait a minute.
Sarah turned to the racks of costumes and thoughtfully fingered a witch's hat. Halloween ... the one time of year when no one would bat an eye if they saw a blue-skinned man running around town. She began to grin.
She could take Rei out in public. She could show him her world.
They could go on a date.
Laughing aloud in delight, she picked out a long pink wig and a set of fairy wings for herself. Rei would draw less attention if he was with someone else in costume. She didn't know what they could tell people he was supposed to be. One of the characters from X-Men, maybe? It hardly mattered. They could make something up.
For one day out of the year, he wouldn't have to hide.
And this might be his only chance. Sarah sobered as she pushed the cart toward the grocery aisles. If all went well, Rei wasn't even going to be here next Halloween. He'd get his ship fixed and go back to space.
That thought shouldn't hurt as much as it did. Rei didn't belong here. What kind of a life could he have, hiding indoors, unable to talk to anyone or go anywhere? And the authorities were actively hunting him. The faster they got his ship fixed, the better.
Sarah locked down fast on the next idea that came along: going with him.
She couldn't. No way. For one thing, she could see there wasn't room for two people in that cramped little pod. And what would her father do? He depended on her. She couldn't just run off to outer space.
But ... oh ... now that the idea had taken root in her brain, she couldn't stop thinking about it.
Space. With actual spaceships, real aliens, other worlds ... She could walk beneath alien skies, breathe the air of alien worlds, meet other people like Rei and these Galateans he kept talking about—
You mean the slave-keeping alien empire that's trying to find him so they can turn him back into a slave?
Okay, maybe not the Galateans. But there was so much else to explore, a whole enormous galaxy full of aliens and habitable worlds, with spaceships to take her between them ...
... and none of it was hers, not a single bit of it.
She couldn't let that dream get rooted in her head, she couldn't. It was never going to happen. There was no way Rei could take more than one person to space in his pod, and even if it was possible, she couldn't leave Dad. She would only break her heart if she kept fantasizing about this.
She carefully visualized pushing all of it into a little box in her head, closing the box, and locking it, the same way she'd locked up all her dreams since Mom died and Dad had his accident.
And if she had to blink away tears as she went through the everyday routine of shopping, she was only grieving for a dream that she never should have allowed herself in the first place.
***
On the way back to the farm, she gave in to the urge to check on the progress of the hunt for Rei and drove past the lake. They had no reason to associate her truck with anything suspicious, she reminded herself. She was just another curious local, out for a bit of rubbernecking.
But she couldn't even get close. There were roadblocks everywhere, and they were no longer staffed by local sheriff's deputies, but instead by ominous-looking strangers in suits and ties. Sarah had planned to chat with the local cops and find out what they knew, but she wasn't about to let any of these new guys get a look at her face.
Instead she turned around and drove into downtown Sidonie. Someone must know something. The town's local paper had gone out of business years ago, but the gossip network was more well-informed anyway. Sarah stopped into Duckworth's Food Mart to see if Bev Duckworth was working today. Bev knew everything and everybody.
No Bev, but her niece Britt was on the register, and Sarah had gone to school with her, which made her a good potential source of information. Sarah waved and looked around for something at random to give herself a pretext for being in the store. A display of school supplies caught her eye; she grabbed a pad of paper and a box of colored pencils. Maybe Rei would appreciate having something to draw with other than a carpenter pencil.
"So what the heck is going on out at the lake?" she asked as Britt rang her up.
"Totally cray, huh? They said something on the radio about a plane crash out there the other night, but I don't know. First it's a weather balloon, then it's a plane, and now the whole town is crawling with feds."
"Feds, really? FBI? Military? Department of Agriculture?"
"If you figure it out, tell me," Britt said, shaking out a plastic bag. "They're not even staying in town. They've got some kind of command center set up. Like I said, totally cray."
They both paused and looked up as a helicopter thumped its way over the town. In the small parking lot outside the store's front window, a little girl clinging to her mother's hand pointed up at the sky in fascinated interest.
"It's like they're looking for something," Britt said. "Like terrorists or Russians."
"I don't think there are any terrorists in Sidonie," Sarah said as calmly as possible, collecting her change. She tried to think how the old Sarah would have handled this. Laughed it off, perhaps? "Hey, maybe they'll find the homeless guy that Royce Muller claims is sleeping in his barn."
Britt laughed, so Sarah decided she'd chosen the right tactic. "He's working on that himself, you know. Got a game camera set up out there now." Something must have changed on Sarah's face, because Britt asked, "You okay?"
"Yeah, fine. I just realized I forgot to take the chicken thighs out to thaw before I went to class this morning."
She walked out to the truck thinking, Shit, shit, shit. Was that game camera angled so it'd pick up the shortcut across the Mullers' pasture? And would the Mullers tell anyone?
Most game cameras took very low-quality images. And it was night, and raining, which would have hidden the truck's color and most of its details. Even if the feds got hold of that image, they still wouldn't have much more to go on than they already had from the look they'd gotten at the truck by the lake.
Still, it might give them an idea of which way the truck had gone. And the shortcut across the Mullers' pasture was definitely off limits now.
Damn it, damn it.
But she saw no signs of trouble on the drive back to the farm. Everything was just as she'd left it, serene and calm. The sound of power tools and clanging metal came from the barn, and she hurried through putting the groceries away, eager to find out how the work on Rei's spaceship was coming along. She left the rest of her purchases in her room to give to Rei later, stomped into her farm boots instead of her town shoes, and grabbed a bag of Halloween candy before heading over to the barn.
It was hard to say whether things had progressed since she'd last seen the work area. Scrap metal and dismantled sections of the ship were scattered around in different arrangements, and it looked like more of the ship's paneling had been taken off. Rei was inside it, working on the wiring, while her dad was sitting on the end of the trailer with the cutting torch, trimming sheet metal to fit the damaged sections of the ship.
"Hey there, wrecking crew," Sarah called. "Just to let you know, everybody needs to stay away from the Mullers' pasture. They've got a game camera out there now."
Her dad pushed the welding mask up on his forehead. "Any trouble?"
"Not so far. Britt Duckworth told me about it. I don't think anyone knows we're involved, at least not yet." Sarah tore the bag of chocolate open and tossed a mini Snickers bar to her dad. "Anything I can do to help?"
"I don't even know what I'm doing," her father said, catching it. "Just pretty much whatever he tells me to do."
"Does that mean you can talk to each other now?"
"We can talk fine." Rei swung his legs out of the ship and smiled at her, sitting on the edge of the seat. "Hello. How were your studies?"
He was stripped to the waist, sweaty and smudged with grease; Sarah's train of thought temporarily derailed. She leaned down for a kiss and gave a happy little yelp when Rei put an arm around her waist and pulled her against him. Her dad snorted and turned to adjust the tank dials for the cutting torch.
I have a boyfriend. A space boyfriend. Who cares if the town is crawling with feds? My life is amazing.
"Do you like candy?" she asked when she came up from the kiss. "Chocolate?"
"I don't know. That's an Earth food?" He took one of the colorfully wrapped mini chocolate bars and turned it over in his hand.
"Yeah, candy. Sweets. These are my favorites," Sarah told him, holding up a Mars bar. She tore the wrapper off and took a bite before feeding him the other half.
He chewed. Swallowed. "Hmm. Interesting."
"Just interesting? It's chocolate. Most humans love it. Earth humans, I mean. Are you telling me you don't have chocolate in space?"
"I've never had it before." He smiled at her. "It's a very intriguing mix of flavors. May I try another?"
"You can have as much as you want. Uh, well, don't eat too much. It's got a lot of sugar in it and eating a bunch of them isn't good for you."
She left him tearing the wrapper off a Snickers bar and went around to the other side of the ship, where more of the paneling had been pulled off to expose its complicated guts. Since she'd last seen the ship, they had cleaned most of the muck out of it, although she could still smell the rank, muddy lake-bottom stink.
"Do you know if this is going to fly again?" she asked, lightly prodding at a clear tube that looked like glass but flexed under her fingertip. She knew how to do basic maintenance around the farm, but she was a physics major, not an engineer. Still, if even her dad was out of her depth with this stuff, she didn't feel too bad about having no idea what she was looking at.
"All we can do is try." Rei came around the curve of the ship, nibbling idly on another piece of chocolate and giving Sarah an eyeful of distraction with his bare blue chest. "It is not easy. I wish I had paid more attention to this part of my studies."
"You're still way beyond where I am, or any of my professors either. You probably know more about physics and engineering than anyone on our entire planet."
He smiled briefly. "Right now I wish that wasn't true, because what my pod really needs is a skilled technician and a properly equipped work station. Gary and I are doing our best, but this might be beyond our ability to repair."
Sarah tried to squash the little flutter of hope in her chest. It wasn't fair to ask him to stay—and it wasn't safe. Not with the Men in Black looking for him. "What needs to be fixed? Can you tell me what I'm looking at?"
"Well ... there are four main components of the battlepod's systems that need to be functional for me to go to space in it. Life support, shielding, propulsion, and the jump drive." He patted the gray paneling of the ship's side. "Shielding's pretty easy. We just have to replace the damaged sections with something that can stand up to the stress of lift-off without coming apart. Your dad's been helpful at that. And life support isn't too hard either. These pods aren't meant to live in long-term. As long as it won't leak oxygen and I can breathe for a few hours, that's enough to get me somewhere."
"What about the other things you said?"
"Yeah. That's where my knowledge starts to run out. Without engines, I won't be able to get off the ground, and without a functional jump drive, I can't go anywhere outside your solar system. I'll just orbit your planet 'til I run out of air."
"Yeah, we definitely don't want that." She slipped her fingers into his and gave them a squeeze. What she really wanted to do was lean into him and put her arms around him, bury her face in his shoulder and enjoy his spicy male scent ... but maybe not with her dad right on the other side of the ship.
"Yes, suffocating in space is to be avoided," he agreed solemnly, though dry humor sparkled in his eyes. "But those first two are relatively easy. Your dad showed me some pictures of your world's space technology, and it looks like your people have solved those problems already, with relatively simple materials. The drives, though ... I don't know how I can possibly fix them with the knowledge I have and the technology you have." He brushed his thumb over the back of her hand and leaned down to point out something where the paneling had been pulled off the back of the ship. "That's a Vrik coil. I'm guessing your people don't have those."
"Not that I've ever heard of."
Rei tapped one of his silver bracelets. "I need to get the cuffs back to full operation. They won't replace a proper diagnostics rig, let alone a technician who knows what they're doing, but at least they'll allow me to scan the more delicate components for damage. A damaged coil or microscopically cracked heat plate might shatter under use, and strand me in space with no way to repair it."
Sarah shuddered. There were so many worst-case scenarios; she didn't want to think about any of them. Instead she brushed her fingertips across the silver metal on his wrist, warm from his skin. "Is that what these are for? It's a computer?"
"A computer? Is that what this is?" He touched the band of her wristwatch. "You and your father both wear them."
"What, this? No, that's a watch. It just tells time. It doesn't do anything else." She took her phone out of her pocket, unlocked it, and showed it to him. "This is a phone. Most of us have one. It's a communication device and it also takes pictures and plays games and, uh, other stuff, like you can have a calculator on there, or a flashlight app."
His face lit up. "Yes! My cuffs are very much like that. I didn't know your people had anything this advanced." He took the phone from her and examined the screen.
"You touch the icons to run the programs," Sarah explained. She tapped the flashlight icon. "See, this makes a light."
"Your father showed me a different tool for that, a small rod held in the hand." He tilted the light to illuminate what he'd called a Vrik coil. Sarah glimpsed colored reflections chasing each other through the flexible tubes she'd been poking at earlier.
"Yeah, that'd be a real flashlight. Because my dad is a Luddite!" she called, and heard a hoarse bark of laughter from the other side of the ship. "But seriously, the batteries on the phone don't last long enough to use it as a flashlight all the time. It's a good multi-purpose tool, but it's not always the best tool for the job. It's just a nice portable one we can carry around with us."
"I see." He handed it back to her. "Yes, my cuffs are similar, but more advanced. Rather than selecting pictures to access its functions, I use my mind. The cuffs are connected to my nervous system."
"Oh, wow." She looked at them with new respect.
"The collar was the same." Loathing filled his voice at the mention of it. "But unlike the cuffs, it was not useful. It had only one function, to keep me prisoner by limiting my ability to move freely about the ship and punishing me for disobedience." He stopped, and Sarah wasn't sure what to say. She put her hand on his arm, and after a moment he went on more calmly.
"Only slaves wear collars. But everyone in the Galatean Empire wears cuffs, because that's how you interact with most Galatean technology. Silver for non-citizens such as slaves or foreigners, and gold for citizens. I used to use my cuffs to fly the pod."
"Oh, but doesn't that mean you can't leave unless you fix them?"
"I can also fly the pod manually. But it's much harder, and most of the advanced functions are inaccessible to me, such as weapons."
"It has weapons?" She looked up at the curving side of the pod in surprise. "You didn't mention those earlier."
"I don't need to get the weapons working in order to leave your planet."
"No, I guess not." She tucked her phone away and looked down at the glimmer of the Vrik coil rather than at his face. "So ... best-case scenario, if you can get everything working, how long do you think it'll take until you're ready to leave?"
"It's hard to say. Perhaps a few days."
Sarah swallowed her disappointment, pushing it down to her core. She was used to the bitterness of giving up her dreams, and she reminded herself that even if Rei was gone in a week, she would always have the memory of that week to hold to her heart for the rest of her life. And it was always possible there was some equivalent of space email. Maybe they could write to each other. Maybe he'd even come back to visit. Long-distance relationships were a pain in the ass no matter what; did it really matter if one of the parties had moved to Ann Arbor or Alpha Centauri?
"So, I'll just go make some lunch, I guess—" she began, and stopped, frowning at his face. "Are you all right?"
"I think so," he said slowly. His face had gone gray under his dark blue coloring. The tsinde spots had paled to nearly white.
"You don't look okay. Do you need to sit down?"
Rei shook his head. "I need to go outside. Stay here."
With that he pushed away from her and strode briskly toward the door of the barn. Like hell she was staying behind; Sarah broke into a trot and then a jog to keep up with his longer legs. Had he heard something? Smelled something? Was danger even now bearing down on them? She didn't hear helicopters, but maybe Rei's keener senses had alerted him to something she couldn't hear.
He vanished through the half-open side door. Sarah rushed after him, looked around, and discovered him just a few feet away, leaning on the side of the barn, doubled over so he could throw up.
"Oh my God, Rei, what's wrong?"
He shuddered through the last few spasms, tried to straighten up, and doubled over again, one arm wrapped around his stomach. "It's all right," he gasped. "Go back inside."
"It's not all right. You're sick. Rei ..." She put a hand hesitantly on his back. He flinched, and she could feel that his muscles were knotted hard as iron.
It was more than just being sick to his stomach. She could feel him shivering, feel the rapid rise and fall of his ribs as he gasped for air. He started to pull away when she took his wrist to feel his pulse, but then yielded and let her press her fingers to his inner arm just above the bracelet. His heartbeat was racing, light and fast and fluttering.
"Is it the candy?" she asked anxiously. "Have you eaten anything else today? It shouldn't have made you this sick. You've been eating our food just fine—"
... Oh. Oh, shit.
"Rei." Now her heart was hammering, too. "The, the whatever they're called, the Founders, the people who made you, used some wolf DNA, right? Do you think something that poisons wolves would poison you too?"
"I don't know," Rei ground out, his head hanging down. "Why?"
"Because chocolate doesn't hurt humans, but it's poisonous to dogs. Oh God, Rei, I didn't think. I'm so sorry!"
All she knew about medicine was what she'd learned from helping take care of her parents and from doctoring farm animals. He'd ingested poison, so they needed to get it out of his body (looked like he was taking care of that already) and ... and he needed to take activated charcoal, that was the other thing, to absorb what remained of it. She was pretty sure there was some in the medicine cabinet.
"Dad!" she shouted into the barn. "Come help Rei! He's sick, I think it's the chocolate, like dogs—I can't explain, I'm sorry, I'll be right back. Just stay with him, okay?"
She gave Rei's arm a comforting squeeze and with that, she was off, running toward the house.
Stupid! Stupid! What was she doing, going around feeding Earth junk food to an alien? Just because he'd been able to eat everything they'd eaten so far—but he'd said he was human, he should be able to eat anything a human could eat—
But even humans had food allergies, gluten sensitivity, that sort of thing, and even if he was mostly human on a genetic level, his people had been separated from hers for tens of thousands of years. They were probably lucky they hadn't sent him into anaphylactic shock already.
She ransacked the medicine cabinet, throwing bottles into the sink until she found the activated charcoal behind a collection of ten-year-old painkillers and expired prescription meds.
I had an alien boyfriend and I killed him by feeding him chocolate!
He was going to be fine, she reassured herself. Chocolate wasn't necessarily fatal to dogs, only in large amounts, and he was bigger than most dogs and hadn't eaten a whole lot of it. He'd probably just be sick for awhile and then be fine.
She stirred a dose of charcoal into a glass of water in the kitchen, snatched her sheepskin coat off its hook, and dashed outside again.
Back at the barn, her dad had gotten Rei to sit down just inside the door on an overturned crate. He was no longer throwing up, but he looked terrible, grayish and out of it, his hair sweat-plastered to his forehead.
"Here," Sarah said, kneeling beside him. "Drink this."
"I'd really rather not," Rei mumbled. He was leaning on her dad, and when she put her hand on his chest, she could feel his racing heart.
"It's just charcoal. It'll help absorb the toxins."
He hesitated and then took the glass with a shaking hand and tossed back the black liquid in a couple of gulps. "Ugh," he muttered, handing it back to her, and swallowed heavily.
Sarah set the glass aside and draped the coat over his shoulders. "Can you walk? We should get you to the house so you can lie down."
"Just give me a minute." He closed his eyes briefly, took a deep breath, then gently removed Sarah's hand from his arm and stood up. "We can go back to work. I'll be all right."
"No way!" Sarah burst out, as her father said firmly, "Sit back down, son."
"I've done more difficult things than this while feeling worse than this." He grimaced, started to hunch over as a spasm of pain went through him, then straightened again.
"That doesn't mean you have to!" Sarah protested, trying to push him back down onto the crate again. "It's okay to take some time off when you're sick. It's okay to be sick. Dad, can't you talk to him?"
Gary stopped Rei with a gnarled hand on his arm. Rei sighed and looked at him with exasperated patience.
"Still can't understand a word out of your mouth," Gary told him, "but the meaning comes through loud and clear. Look, boy, I get you. Hell, docs told me loud and clear I shouldn't be doing half the things I'm doing. But Sarah's right. Don't take this wrong, but you look like the Devil himself stomped on your grave. Just lay down for awhile. I can get the rest of the replacement hull plates cut out on my own."
"You are both so stubborn." Rei's words came out on a sigh as he sagged against Sarah, making her realize how much effort he was putting into keeping himself upright.
"Would you rather stay here than go in the house?" Sarah asked. "We can make a bed with hay and animal blankets. Then you can tell us what to do, and we can keep working on the ship."
Rei hesitated, then nodded.
He sat on the end of the trailer, head in his hands, while she threw down hay and piled it with old blankets and towels from the ragged collection they used for sick or calving livestock. When Sarah slid an arm around him, he looked up at her wearily. "Come on," she said, helping him to his feet. "It won't be the most comfortable bed you've ever had, but you can nap while we fix the ship. Rei, I am so sorry I accidentally poisoned you."
"It's all right," he said, and laughed softly. "If you don't mind, I am very thirsty."
"Yes, of course. Hang on."
Under the old hand pump behind the barn, she rinsed the glass she'd mixed the charcoal in, and filled a clean jug. The pump drew on the same well they used for water in the house, so it would be perfectly clean; no sense in walking back over when she didn't have to. She left the glass and jug beside Rei on the barn floor and kissed his damp forehead. "Just tell us if there's anything else you need, okay?"
He nodded and closed his eyes.
Sarah took his pulse again. It had slowed somewhat from earlier and no longer had that frantic, fluttery quality that had so worried her. He really hadn't ingested that much, she told herself in forced reassurance, and went to help her father wrestle sheet metal around.