___
B Y THE TIME THE EARLY October darkness came down, Rei was awake again, looking a little less gray and wan. He'd left the barn a few times to use the bathroom, and then lay on the pile of hay and blankets under a bright shop light, working on his bracelets with some of the small screwdrivers and other tools that Sarah's dad used to work on electronics.
Sarah had been helping her father cut sheet metal and install it on the damaged sections of the ship all afternoon. Her shoulders ached, and her fingers and forearms stung from small cuts and burns, despite the heavy leather gloves she was wearing.
"Think it's about time to throw in the towel for the night," Gary remarked, wiping the back of his forearm across his face and setting the welding torch aside. "Animals need fed, and I can hear Bonnie callin' out in the pasture for her evening milking. I could sure eat, too."
"Why don't you go put supper on," Sarah suggested. Since her father's injury, domestic duties around the farm had all but reversed; he did most of the less taxing housework, while she handled the heavy lifting of the farm chores. "I'll get the chores done and bring Rei over to the house."
Gary patted her shoulder and clumped off, weariness making him lean more heavily on his canes than usual. Sarah watched anxiously until he was out of sight. One of these days he was going to overdo it, have a fall, and set himself right back to where he'd been after the accident, but she knew from long experience that there was no use in trying to make him be more careful and use the walker when he was tired.
"Think you could eat something yet?" she asked Rei as she sat down beside him on the hay.
He grimaced. "Perhaps later."
One of the bracelets lay partly disassembled on a sheet of butcher paper. The bracelets looked seamless from the outside, like pieces of hammered silver jewelry, and she hadn't realized they opened up. She was used to seeing electrical components from old engines, fuse boxes, and disassembled kids' electronic games as part of her dad's various projects, but this looked like nothing she'd ever seen before. Like a smaller version of the electronics in the ship, it was mostly hair-fine glassy fibers embedded with colorful dots that made her think of the pearls in fancy body scrubs.
"Do you think you can get them to work again?"
"I'm not sure." He sealed up the bracelet's outer surface with quick strokes of his fingertips—Sarah couldn't even see what he did, but it appeared seamless again. With another deft twist of his fingers, he parted it at one side and then sealed it around his wrist, where it looked as if it had been welded in place there. "As with the ship's engines, this is far beyond my technical knowledge or the tools I have, and I drained its residual charge earlier while searching for my battlepod. But I think I've restored its ability to charge from my body, if my internal nanites are not too badly damaged to do so. It will need a little while to recover its charge, and then we'll see."
"You charge it with your body? Rei, your technology never stops amazing me."
Rei flashed her one of his quick grins. He looked much better than earlier. "I haven't shown you anything wondrous yet. These are nothing but everyday technology, like that communication device in your pocket. I should show you true wonders, like the great clan ships of the dragons, containing entire cities, or the winged warriors of the Tybor who joust with lances made of pure light. The Hanging Nebula on the edge of Iustran space, or the great gladiatorial arenas of the Hnee ..."
"I would love to see all of that," Sarah said wistfully.
The longing and sorrow in her voice stopped him in his litany of alien wonders. "But," he said in quieter tones, "there is only room in my pod for one."
Sarah nodded. "But I still want to hear about it, even if I can't ever see it. Let me just quickly do the chores, and then you can tell me all about it over dinner."
"I will help you with your chores."
She wanted to refuse; he looked much better than earlier, but he was still shaky and shivering under the sheepskin coat draped over his bare shoulders. She didn't want to hurt his pride, though, so she said, "Sure. I'll just divide up the jobs and tell you what to do."
She gave him the easier jobs—gathering eggs from the hens and herding the old horse, Princess, into her stall for the night—while Sarah refilled the water troughs, fed the livestock in the field, and milked the cow. It was very pleasant, working in quiet partnership in the cool October night. After a dreary, gray day, the clouds had finally parted, letting through a silvery film of moonlight and the sharp pinpricks of the stars.
Sarah was standing at the last trough, gazing up at the stars while silver ripples spread outward from the hose, when Rei emerged from the moonlit shadows and came quietly to join her. "You like looking at the sky," he said.
"I always have. That's why I was at the lake, did I ever tell you that? I was watching a meteor shower when one of the meteors almost landed on top of me." She felt a brief pang for her lost telescope. It was probably gone for good, buried deep in the lake's thick silt for future generations of archaeologists to dig up, millennia from now.
"I'm glad I didn't hurt you."
"Well, of all the lakes on all the continents on this planet, I'm glad you crashed into mine."
Rei's fingers laced through hers. Normally he was slightly warm to the touch, but even with her hands chilled from handling the cold, damp hoses, his fingers felt like ice. She gave him a critical look, but it was impossible to see much in the poor light, other than the faint luminescence of his eyes, reflecting gold in the yard light, and the glimmer of the silver traceries on his skin.
"Do your people name the stars?" he asked, turning his softly luminous eyes to the sky.
"We do." She pointed. "That's the North Star. Our planet's axis points to it, so it doesn't appear to move. Sailors and travelers used to navigate by it, long ago. It's a saying for us, to be someone's pole star, their true north. What the compass of their heart points to."
"I like that," he murmured, his fingers tangling more tightly in hers. "Of course, when you travel long distances through space, the stars always change; only their official designations stay the same. But my people named the stars, too. We used to see pictures in the sky and tell stories about them."
"Us, too." She turned, looking above the horizon through the pale wisps of moonlit clouds, and pointed when she found what she was looking for. "That bright band of stars is the belt of Orion, the hunter. He has a hunting dog at his heels—that's Sirius, the Dog Star there, the brightest star in our night sky. We sometimes talk about the dog days of summer, when that star rises in the sky."
"Dog star. Appropriate." His quick smile flickered. "Dogs are your domestic wolves, right?"
"Right." She craned her neck, looking for other constellations he might enjoy. "That curving string of stars is Draco, the dragon. See the head there, that triangle of stars? I don't know any stories about it, but our scientists have found some planets among Draco's stars. We don't have the technology yet to tell if they're inhabited, but maybe some of them are even planets you might—oh!"
Cold water spilled over the edge of the trough onto her legs. She sprang back, releasing Rei's hand, only to realize he'd tensed into a combat position, one of his hands raised with the fingers lightly curled into a loose fist.
"It's okay. No worries. I just got myself wet." She picked up the hose off the muddy ground and looped it over the hook on the edge of the trough. "Come on, let's get inside. I bet Dad's done making dinner by now—Rei?"
He was still holding his hand out, the fingers now spread. Was it only the moonlight that made them seem to glimmer faintly?
Rei looked up and met her baffled gaze with a wide, brilliant smile. "It works," he said.
"What does?" Then a subtle gleam licked down the band around his wrist. "Oh, your cuff thing? You got it working!"
"It works, yes. It wasn't so badly damaged after all. It just needed to charge." He let out a long sigh and straightened up, looking more relaxed than she'd seen him in awhile. "I need to test it. Stay where you are."
"Test—?" she began, but fell silent as he pointed his hand at a clump of grazed-down brush beside the trough. Before Sarah could ask what he was going to do, an eye-searing bar of blue-white light stabbed from his fingers and neatly zapped off a branch. The wood was too wet to burn, but it glowed cherry-red for a moment, and a tentative tendril of flame curled up from the bark before fizzling out in the damp. The acrid smell of woodsmoke reached Sarah a moment later.
Rei laughed aloud, with a harsh edge to it. "Let them come. I'm not helpless any longer." Then realization seemed to dawn on him that she was still staring, rather than sharing his delight. "Sarah? What's wrong?"
"It's a weapon?"
"You didn't know?"
"No," she said weakly. "No, I didn't know." Suddenly all of his defensive hand gestures made so much more sense. If his bracelets had been working, would he have accidentally fried her back at the lake, or that first time he woke up in the truck?
"I told you I was a soldier. You didn't think me unarmed, did you?"
"I just ... I guess I thought you must have left your gun behind or didn't have it in the pod, or ... something ..."
Of course weapons in a society with faster-than-light travel and cyborg augmentation wouldn't look like guns. And she knew he was trained to fight. She knew he'd been in war.
It was just ... he was so fast, and—when he'd leaped into combat position next to her a moment ago, that had been a deadly weapon on the end of his arm, not a fist.
She hadn't known.
That was all: she hadn't known.
He was looking at her with uncertainty, and her confusing mix of emotions began to ebb away. This was still her Rei, of the gentle hands and the shy, warm smile.
So she let out a breath, and tried to let it go. "If you're happy, I'm happy," she said, and held out a hand.
Rei looked at her hand for a long moment. He didn't take it.
"Sarah—"
"I'm not afraid of you," she said. "I was just surprised." And she took his hand in hers, closing her fingers around it.
"You should be afraid." His voice was solemn, his eyes gleaming in the moonlight.
"Yeah, well, too bad, because I'm not." She pulled on his arm, tugging him close to her side. "Come on. Let's go see about something to eat."
***
It was easier to let go of her lingering sense of unease in the kitchen, warm and familiar and bright, full of appetizing smells.
"I opened some cans of stew," her dad said, turning around from the sink. "Thought it might go down easy for Rei, maybe with a little toast."
In the brighter light of the kitchen, Sarah could see that Rei was still grayish and exhausted-looking. "Do you think you can eat?" she asked him. "Dad made something he thinks —oh wait, I keep forgetting you can understand him just fine."
"Perhaps later," he said politely. "I'd like to lie down for a while first."
"You can take a nap in my room. It'll be quieter up there where our voices and the TV won't bother you."
Rei nodded and went off without speaking. He was still feeling pretty bad, she thought, and guilt twisted in her stomach.
"Not your fault, kid," her dad said. He handed her a plate of toast and ladled a scoop of stew into a large mug, then stuck in a spoon. "Go on up there and take care of your boy. I'll have the rest on the table when you come down."
Sarah kissed his cheek and took it upstairs. The toilet flushed in the bathroom, and Rei came out, leaning on the wall. He straightened when he saw her; she could see him pulling himself together, forcing down the weakness to put on a show of strength.
"Still feel pretty bad, huh?" she asked softly. "I brought you some dinner in case you're hungry later."
"I'm just tired." He gave her a rueful smile and flexed his fingers. "In retrospect, draining some of my body's energy to power the cuffs wasn't the best idea in my current condition."
"Is there any other way to charge them?" she asked, following him through the doorway into her bedroom. "Could we hook them to an outlet or something?"
"Sunlight can also do it, but we don't have any of that at the moment." He sat on the edge of the bed. "You don't need to stay."
"I'm going down to eat in a minute. —Oh, right!" She'd completely forgotten about her shopping trip until the bags on her floor reminded her. "I got you some clothes, like we talked about, and something else too. I saw how you liked to draw, so I thought you might like to do some more of that."
Despite his evident exhaustion, Rei's eyes lit up when he saw the box of pencils with all its colors. "These are pigment sticks for drawing, correct?"
"Yep, that's right." She opened the box and shook out a few of the pre-sharpened pencils. "Have fun," she told him, kissing him on the forehead, and left him with the bedside lamp turned on and the pad of paper in his lap.
She and her dad ate in the living room while watching the news on TV. There was nothing about the crash at the lake; it might be big news in Sidonie, but it looked like it had already dropped out of the statewide news cycle.
The picture on the TV flickered as a helicopter thumped by overhead, reminding her that the world outside Sidonie might have forgotten about it, but the government sure hadn't.
"Do you think they'll come here looking for Rei?" she asked. "What are we going to tell them if they do?"
"Tell 'em they need a warrant if they want to go searching my farm," Gary said, switching away from the news to a sports channel.
"It's the feds, Dad."
"They still need a warrant. Or do we live in North Korea now?"
"They might not even ask. They might just go look. We should start locking the barn. Hiding Rei will be a lot easier than hiding his ship."
"Things go according to plan, neither one of 'em is gonna be here in a week or two."
"I know." She looked down at the bowl in her lap and concentrated on swiping up the last of the stew with her bread.
"Honey." Her dad reached out to pat her arm awkwardly. "You know this is temporary, right? Rei can't stay here on Earth. This is no place for him. He belongs out there with his friends and his people."
"We could find a way," she said obstinately, refusing to acknowledge the tears prickling the back of her throat. "Dad, you don't know some of the things he's told me. I don't know if he has anything to go back to. His people sold him into slavery, and out there in space, he'd be hunted by people who want to put him back in chains."
"And here?" Her father's voice was gentle. Sympathetic. "What kind of life can he have, always having to hide?"
"Not always." She shoved the last piece of bread into her mouth, swallowing it past the lump in her throat. "I was thinking we could maybe go out in town for Halloween. Pretend he's wearing a costume."
"You think that's a good idea if the feds are looking for him?"
"But they can't possibly know what he looks like, how could they? And everyone else is just going to see a guy in face paint. Anyway, it doesn't have to be here. We can drive over to Eau Claire. I just feel like he deserves to see a little of Earth. He's hardly ever had fun in his entire life. I'd like to take him on an actual, you know. A date."
"He's got to go back to space, honey."
"Not right away." She straightened abruptly and began gathering their dishes.
"Didn't mean to upset you, honey. I like Rei too. But you know it's true."
She couldn't look at him. "I'm going upstairs to see how Rei's doing."
She expected to find him sleeping, but instead he was lying propped up on her pillows with the other cuff disassembled in his lap. He'd changed into the clothes she had bought for him, black jeans and a dark red sweater. The dark red color was, as she'd suspected, incredibly flattering on him, setting off the indigo of his skin. His feet were bare, his hair tousled as he bent his head over his work in the pool of warm lamplight.
She didn't think she'd made any noise, but he looked up and saw her, and flashed her a quick smile. Taking it as an invitation, she came over and sat on the edge of the bed. Half the piece of toast was gone, she noticed, though the stew didn't appear to have been touched.
"Fixing the other one?" she asked.
Rei nodded. He snapped it back onto his wrist and shook his arm to seat it into place.
Sarah told herself firmly not to be nervous about them. He could control those things just fine; it was no different from a cop or a soldier wearing a sidearm.
"Thank you for the garments," Rei said. "They're nice." He touched the sweater. "It's very soft."
"Well, maybe I just want to cuddle up to it," she said, running a light hand across the fuzzy sleeve.
He smiled and pushed himself a little higher on the pillows. "I would like that. But first I want to draw something for you."
"Oh, really?" She pulled up her feet under her as he reached for the pad of paper on the nightstand. "I'd love that. Nobody's ever drawn anything for me before."
Rei opened the pad of paper and dumped out the pencils on the bed. "You asked me about dragons earlier. I didn't want to talk about it then, because ... it hurt. My friend Lyr was—is a dragon. But I think I'd like to tell you about him now, if you don't mind."
"I would love to hear about your friend."
"You have time?"
"Always," she said firmly.
"Then ... let me show you Lyr."
He selected a pencil. Hands in her lap, Sarah sat raptly and watched him draw. Under his deft strokes, a human figure took shape. Humanoid, she amended, as Rei added spines to the head, forearms, and back. It was wearing a coverall that left the arms and feet bare, like the one Rei had been wearing when Sarah first met him. There was a collar around its neck, and a bracelet on each wrist. The face was nearly blank, just a sketchy suggestion of a penciled nose and eyes.
"This is Lyr," Rei said. "The head of my sept."
"What's a sept?"
"The Galateans divide the smaller children into groups and give each of them someone older to mentor them and look out for them. When they took me from my homeworld, I was put in a group of other children who were all about my age except for Lyr. He was an older teenager, maybe a young adult; hard to say because I was so young myself then. But he was like a big brother to the whole sept."
"How many of you were there in this sept?"
"Seven." He shaded Lyr's skin with a gold pencil, then added shadows of other colors—violet, green, brown, bringing to Sarah's mind the interplay of colors in a peacock's tail. Lyr's medium-length hair was delineated in careful spikes, folded down against his neck and colored in shades of dark blue. Sarah wondered if it was hair, or something else: feathers or scales.
Lyr's face remained blank, whether because Rei couldn't remember Lyr's features well enough to draw them, or if he just didn't want to picture them closely. Sarah wasn't going to ask.
Rei glanced up and saw her rapt interest, bringing a trace of a wistful smile to his face. "Would you like me to draw them all for you?"
"Sure. I'd love to see them."
"Since Lyr was the oldest of us, I guess age is as good an order as any." Rei began sketching a slightly shorter figure beside Lyr; its head came up to his chin. This one was recognizably female, in a similar form-fitting coverall, with erect catlike ears and a short, thick mane of hair. Rei colored her skin light yellow-brown, her hair dark red, and added small clusters of brown spots to her face and arms, carefully working around the pale slashes of the collar and wristlets. Sarah thought at first that the spots were freckles, then realized they looked more like leopard spots.
"This is Haiva," Rei said, adding darker brown shading to her hair with deft flicks of the pencil. "She was the second oldest after Lyr. She was Galatean."
"I thought Galateans were your, uh—your slave masters." She cringed at having to say it, but Rei didn't even flinch.
"They are, but they also enslave their own people. Haiva was one of those."
The drawing was starting to look uncannily like Cheetara on the old Thundercats cartoons Sarah had watched as a child, but she knew Rei wouldn't get the reference. Instead, she said, "She looks like she's part cat."
"She is." Rei began sketching another figure next to Haiva. "Galateans were made from human and feline DNA, the same way my people were made from humans and wolves. But they don't shift like my people—at least most of them don't; there are rumors that the Sun King and his guard can turn into lions."
Sarah wanted to ask him more about that, but from the curl to his lip, she decided it wasn't a good topic to pursue. Instead she watched two new figures take shape. They were shorter than Haiva, one male, one female. Same gray coveralls, same bracelets and collars. But each of these had—
"Wings," she breathed, as Rei detailed the curve of sweeping wings rising above their shoulders. "Who are they?"
"Rook and Kite. They were twins." Rei reached for a red-violet pencil and began coloring in their skin. "Their people are called the Tybor." He colored gently over the red-violet with a brown pencil, adding darker undertones to their skin. The woman's skin was slightly darker than the man's.
"Can they really fly?"
"Yes," Rei said absently, as he detailed their hair in mottled gray and brown—barred, like a hawk's wings. "Yes, they could fly. And Rook loved reading, especially books about history. He was fascinated by how things were in the past. Kite used to get so impatient with him. She always wanted to be out there doing things."
The woman, Kite, had one hand extended, and Sarah soon saw why, as Rei began sketching a new figure holding her hand. This one was also female, very slender and taller than Kite—though not quite as tall as Lyr, who towered over all the others.
Sarah had thought at first that Rei had drawn Lyr so big because he was the oldest and the rest were children, but it was apparent from the curves of the female bodies and the broadness of Rook's shoulders that these were meant to be adults. Lyr was really that tall.
"This is Selinn," Rei said, coloring the girl's skin brown. "She makes portals. I don't know if all her people can do that. She's the only one of them I ever met."
"Portals?"
"Yes, to jump from place to place, like a ship. Except she could do it without a ship."
He had drawn the girl's opposite hand extended, and now he used bright blue and purple pencils to shade an oval as tall as she was, just beyond the tips of her fingers.
"You mean she could teleport?"
Rei nodded. He switched to a vivid green for Selinn's hair, and carefully detailed green nail polish on the brown fingers wrapped around Kite's dark purple ones.
"They were lovers?" Sarah asked.
"Yes," Rei said quietly. He reached for a purple pencil and added delicate shading around Kite's eyes. "Rook and Kite's people believe in soulmates. I don't know if there is any such thing, but of all the people I've ever met, I could believe it of Kite and Selinn. There was something between them from the time we were all young, as if they'd known each other in a past life and only now found each other again."
Sarah was starting to feel as if she knew these people. It was unbearably sad to think they were all dead—Rei's friends, his family.
Rei was adding vivid silver edges to Selinn's portal. "How could someone like that—" Sarah began, and then stopped herself.
He glanced up from the drawing. "How could what?"
Sarah touched the edge of the portal with her fingertips. "I just don't see how someone like that could be kept prisoner. Could she do that anytime she wanted?"
"Collar," Rei reminded her.
"Oh." Sarah touched her own throat, where the silver collar in the drawing slashed across Selinn's darker skin. "Yes. I see."
"But when they sent her somewhere, it was her attachment to us that kept her coming back. I sometimes wondered—" He broke off abruptly, shook his head, and began sketching a new figure next to Selinn.
"Wondered what?"
"If she could have teleported away from ... No." He answered his own question. "She's dead. If she was alive, we'd know."
"Is there any chance she could be?"
Rei reached for a red pencil and began shading the new figure's hair. "No. Trust me on this. Clinging to that kind of hope will kill you. She's dead. They're dead. End of story."
Sensing how tightly he was clinging to his self-control, Sarah let it drop. This new member of their little clan was the most colorful yet, with purple skin of a lighter, more vivid shade than Kite and Rook's, and brilliant red hair framing a square-jawed face.
"Who is this?"
"Skara. The little asshole," Rei said fondly. "Skara might have been the one of us they just couldn't break. It didn't matter what our overseers did to him. Locked him in solitary, beat him, starved him. He'd still play practical jokes on them, sabotage their equipment, and mouth off at the slightest opportunity. Looking back on it, I don't know how he managed to survive to adulthood. I think he got away with it because he was just one of those people who gets away with stuff. You know what I mean?"
Sarah nodded with a smile. She could see that Rei had a soft spot a mile wide for this Skara person. "Yeah, I went to school with a few of those. They could be awful, but being their friend was never boring, for sure."
"That was Skara," Rei murmured, touching the drawing lightly with his fingertip. "He was awful. He could be a real sack of dicks, especially when he was getting us all in trouble for some stupid prank. I think there were times when all of us wanted to strangle him, Lyr especially. But you couldn't ask for a more loyal friend. And he's also the reason why I know that Selinn and Kite didn't just portal somewhere. If they weren't dead, Skara would have known."
"How?" Sarah asked.
"Skara's people, the Iustra, are shapeshifters. Like my people, they can't change their mass, but unlike us, they aren't limited to just one kind of shift. They can rearrange their features to masquerade as other species. Any other species. And that's not all they can do." He shaded Skara's hair as he spoke, adding deft strokes of darker red. Like all of the other figures, he'd left Skara's face mostly blank, with just a suggestion of features. "Since an Iustra can look like almost anything or anyone, their people have a unique ability to recognize and find each other, no matter where they are or what they look like on the outside. And it's not just limited to members of their own species. Once he'd imprinted on us, Skara could find any one of us anywhere, even if we were halfway across the galaxy. But ... he couldn't find Kite and Selinn after they died. He said it was like they were just gone, like they'd vanished out of the universe. Lyr felt it too, like they just stopped existing."
The look on his face broke her heart. "If you need to stop—"
"No." He smiled at her, a wistful smile, but a genuine one. "It's good to talk about it. I haven't talked to anyone about them. Once we'd lost so many of them—Kite and Rook, Haiva and Skara—those of us who were left didn't want to talk about them either. Especially Lyr." His fingers slid across the page from Skara to the blue and gold figure at the far left. Lightly he traced the spikes poking up through Lyr's hair; it looked like a caress. "He always felt responsible for the rest of us. And he was there with the lost ones when they died, in a way the rest of us weren't. I think losing so many of us broke him in some way."
I think it broke you too, Sarah thought, but didn't say. Instead she said, "What about the last one? That's only six."
"Oh, right. That'd be Thorn."
He began sketching again. This time the figure was a strikingly unusual one, a human male in basic outline, but colored like a patchwork quilt. One side of his face was silver, the other violet, bisected by a line down the middle.
"Is he a robot?" Actually Frankenstein's monster was the first thing she thought of, but she wasn't about to say that to his grieving adopted sibling.
"Chimera," Rei said. "He's made of organic parts—well, mostly. But he's a lab experiment." He paused, tapping the pencil against the page. "Out of all of us, I think Thorn might still be alive. Lyr couldn't contact him, but he always had trouble making contact with Thorn anyway. And Skara's people-finding ability didn't work on him either."
"What do you mean, Lyr couldn't contact him? I don't understand."
"Lyr's a telepath. He could talk to us all, as long as we were near enough."
"Oh," she breathed. "Can you talk to him now?"
"No. He's too far away. Or ..."
He left the thought unfinished, face turned away from her, carefully adding details to the picture. Hints of gold scales on Lyr, drawn with a yellow pencil; an elaborate bracelet on Kite's upper arm, left bare by her gray coverall; more details of Thorn's patchwork skin. Finally he laid the pencils aside and held the drawing out at arm's length.
With the figures all lined up in a row, facing the viewer with no background, it looked like a kid's drawing. But that was basically what it was, Sarah thought, a drawing of Rei's family, like a schoolchild might make.
"Do you mind if I put this on the wall?" she asked.
"On the wall?" he repeated, looking puzzled.
"Yeah, like this." She took down a framed 4H certificate that had been up there since she was in middle school, gathering dust. Rei gave her the drawing when she held out her hand for it, and watched curiously as she slipped it behind the glass in the frame and hung it where the certificate had been, at the foot of her bed.
There was a picture of her mom hanging next to it. Somehow that seemed appropriate.
"Like that," she said. "Do you like that?"
"I like that." His voice was barely more than a whisper.
She started to lie down beside Rei on the bed, got stabbed with a pencil, and sat up with a startled curse. Both of them laughed as they collected the pencils back into their box. Rei's laugh was so soft she could barely hear it, but it was there. He seemed lighter somehow, as if just talking about his family had lifted a weight off him.
"That's my mom there." She pulled the quilt at the foot of the bed up over both of them, and snuggled into the crook of Rei's arm. "On the wall next to your family. The pretty lady holding the goat."
It was a ridiculous picture and she'd always loved it. Her mom was young, about the age Sarah was now, with her hair pulled back in a sloppy ponytail and a baby goat in her arms, its knobby legs dangling. She was not, objectively, a beautiful woman, with a snub-nosed, farm-girl's face, a spatter of freckles over her cheeks, and a perpetual sunburn. But in every photo Sarah had of her, there was warmth and delight shining from her eyes and her smile, making her gorgeous. And it was vividly on display in that picture, as if the sun had lit her up from within.
"You miss her very much," Rei said, stroking Sarah's hair.
"I do. I can't believe it's been almost ten years since she died. I was so young. She was so young." She blinked her eyes fiercely, pushing back tears. "And then Dad has his accident—"
"That's why he walks with the sticks?"
"Yeah, the tractor rolled on him. After Mom died he got kind of ... reckless, I guess. Started drinking a lot and doing stupid things." She huffed a sigh against Rei's neck. "It could have been so much worse. If things had gone a little differently that day, I'd have ended up burying two parents within a year and a half, instead of just one. I'm not going to say that getting his back broken was a good thing, for Dad or for the family. It was a stupid, terrible thing. But it did make him start paying attention to the world again. It made him realize he didn't want to leave me alone."
Just like she couldn't leave him alone. There was no point in fantasizing about going to space. Her life was here, would always be here.
"What about your parents?" she asked to distract herself. "I know you haven't seen them in a long time, but what were they like?"
"I don't know. I'm an orphan." His chest hitched with a small, silent laugh. "My people might pass it off as an honor, but still, they don't send wanted children to the slavers."
"Oh, Rei." She turned her face into his neck, pressed her lips to his skin.
"It was a long time ago, like you said," he said quietly. "I did have an aunt who raised me. She was very angry when the village council selected me for the tax, even though they paid her a small stipend to compensate her for taking me away." Another small hitch of a laugh. "Especially because they paid her, I think. They had to put her in our village jail on the day I was taken, because she bit two of the men who came to take me, so I didn't get to say goodbye."
"Did they let you write to her?"
She felt him shake his head, a swish of his hair against the top of her head. "They didn't try to stop me, but I couldn't. Very few people in my village were literate. I wasn't, at that time, and she wasn't either. She's probably forgotten me by now."
"I bet she hasn't," Sarah said, her gazed drifting back to her mother, meeting the vivid gaze looking out of the past. Time didn't kill love, not if it was really love in the first place. "I bet she still misses you a lot. Maybe you'll get to see her again one day."
Her father was right. She couldn't stop Rei from going back to space. She couldn't even bring herself to nurture a hope that he would be unable to fix his ship and would have to stay. He'd have to live out his life on Earth as an exile, always wondering about his family, never able to see them again.
We come from different worlds ... literally. We were never meant to be together. At least we have these few days; it's more than a lot of people get.
She draped an arm over Rei's chest and pressed her body against his, as if she could somehow memorize the imprint of his skin, the shape of his chest and the way his arm fit so perfectly around her.
As if she could make a bulwark of memory against the lonely days ahead.
Time didn't kill love. Not if love was real. And she knew as well as anyone that a picture on the wall was no substitute for the real thing.
But he had to leave. She had to stay. There was no way around it.