___
T HEY LEFT SARAH'S DAD to deal with Agent Rhodes, who was still shaky from the stun. Sarah walked close beside Rei as he carried Pradhan with the injured agent's head tucked against his chest. She kept wanting to put her hand on his arm, just to touch him, to reassure herself that he was all right—that both of them were all right. She felt strange, dazed and shaky, as if the entire world had an unreal edge to it. The night seemed like some bizarre dream.
And the air in the pasture smelled ominously of smoke. "Rei, did you set something on fire out here?"
"It's a crashed skimmer. I shot it down. I'm surprised you didn't hear it in the house."
"If it happened while they were trying to kill us, I think we had other things on our minds." She could see a dull glow up the hill now, like a banked campfire. "That's not going to start a brush fire, is it?"
"Don't worry," Rei said. "It's too wet out here to burn."
Sarah hoped he was right about that, but he'd already reached the ship. No sneaking around this time; he opened a door in the side—she didn't see how; it seemed to just flow open in front of him—and they entered the cargo bay just in front of the stasis pods. The big Galatean in the leather coat (Jeren, Rei had called him) was just getting done tucking their other prisoner into a pod.
"He's still nice and healthy, just like you like 'em," he remarked, standing back and crossing his arms as Rei and Sarah carefully loaded Pradhan into one of the empty pods. She looked tiny in a pod meant for someone much larger.
"Can you try not being an asshole for five seconds?" Rei asked as the lid of the pod hissed shut. He touched a few buttons; a panel of lights turned pale blue. The Galatean equivalent of green lights? Sarah wondered.
Jeren shrugged and strolled off down the cargo bay. "Guess I'll take care of the dead guys upstairs," he said over his shoulder. "Since you're too busy canoodling with your local piece of tail."
Rei visibly bristled. Sarah squeezed his hand. "It's okay. Is that the guy who was in the stasis pod?"
"Regrettably, yes." He sighed and leaned against her. "I figured, under the circumstances, any backup was better than no backup. I hope we don't regret that."
"Uh ... how dangerous is he?"
"I wish I knew, but I don't want to spring an ambush on him and try to shove him back in the pod unless I'm sure I can take him. Maybe I'll stun him while he's asleep."
This made her smile slightly, as he'd no doubt intended. "What about the ship?" she asked. "Was it damaged in the fight?"
"Only cosmetic damage." He smiled down at her. "Want a tour?"
Her heart leaped ... then sank. "Yes. More than anything. But I need to get back to the house. I can't leave Dad alone with Agent Rhodes, there's no telling what he'll do—and, um, there's a ... dead lady in our living room."
"Right. I'll deal with that. You shouldn't have to."
And somehow that was what did it, the reminder of the body in their living room. Sarah discovered that her hands were starting to shake, her teeth to chatter.
"Sarah?" Rei's voice seemed to come from very far away.
"I don't know what's wrong with me," she managed to say.
"I do." Rei's voice was infinitely gentle. "Sarah. Sit down."
He guided her to the floor; it was more of a controlled fall. She leaned into the circle of his arms, shaking as if her body wanted to fly apart.
"They tried to kill us."
"I know," he murmured, stroking her hair.
"We killed them."
"We had to," he whispered. "We killed as few of them as we could."
"I—I know. I thought—I thought you—I was afraid—"
"Shhh. Sarah, it's over."
"Is it?" she asked fiercely into his shoulder, her cheek pressed against the black T-shirt that was all he'd been wearing under the sweater. He smelled like smoke and sweat. "How can it be? You—they—"
The enormity of it choked her. This was what he'd been dealing with. All of this. The danger, the fear—the way Agent Pradhan had just fallen down, the smell of her burnt skin and clothes—
"Sarah, listen to me." Rei was still talking, had been talking, she felt, for some time. "I know what you're feeling right now. But it does get better. We were acting in self-defense. We had to. Your father told me he was in a war—"
"Vietnam," she whispered.
"And he came back from it. And he was all right again, eventually. Right?"
Sarah nodded, dimly aware that Rei's words weren't just for her. He was speaking to himself, too. And that was what allowed her to claw her way back out of her own head, reminding herself that neither of them had to go through this alone. Comforting her helped comfort him. And if she could just make herself say it, not just to herself but to him—
"It wasn't our fault," she said quietly.
"No. It wasn't."
"And it'll get better."
"It will."
"We're going to be okay."
"Yeah," Rei said quietly, and pressed a kiss to her hair. "Yes. We will be."
***
A little while later, Sarah looked around the kitchen table at the odd, mixed group who had gathered there, holding cups of coffee while her dad thawed leftovers even though no one had shown any interest in eating. It always made him feel better to have something useful to do.
But what a strange, mixed bunch they were. Jeren and Rei had come in from dealing with the bodies (Rei hadn't told her what they'd done with them; she hadn't been able to work up the nerve to ask) and now the group around the table consisted of Sarah and her dad, one human federal agent, one blue alien (currently with his arm around her) and one enormous feline alien who dwarfed the chair he was sitting in.
"So you said they're leaving and taking Anita with them?" asked Rhodes. He was hunched in his chair with both hands wrapped around a cup of coffee. Sarah had given him some Tylenol from the upstairs bathroom cabinet; Rei had told her that being stunned could give you a hell of a hangover, and he still seemed to be a little out of it.
"Yes," Sarah said. She was serving as an interpreter since she was the only one of the humans present who could understand the aliens. "As soon as we—as they finish cleaning up here, they're going to be out of your hair forever."
And out of my life.
She felt Rei's arm tighten around her, as if he'd picked up her thought out of the air. Maybe he was having similar thoughts of his own.
Rhodes looked skeptical, as well as hung over. "I've got a job to do here. You know that, right?"
"Listen, Agent Rhodes," Sarah said. "They didn't tell me to say this, but we both know they could just throw you in one of those pods like they did with Agent Pradhan. I mean, if this guy here decided to do that, do you really think we could stop him?"
Jeren looked up from trimming his nails with one of her dad's kitchen knives. He smiled wide enough to show a flash of teeth that were much pointier than human normal. Rei had basically human teeth, but Galateans had fangs.
Rhodes blanched. "Can they understand what we're saying?"
"More or less, as long as an English-speaker with a translator in their head is nearby. Anyway," Sarah said, "we want to let you go. But we can't do that if you're just going to come back to my dad's farm with a dozen more agents and arrest him for hiding illegal aliens or whatever."
Reluctantly, the corner of Rhodes' mouth quirked up in a tiny smile. "I don't think there's a law to cover this. But even if you're willing to take my word on faith, I don't have a whole lot of control over what my bosses will do when they find out Anita's missing."
"That depends on what you tell them about where she went," Rei said, and Sarah translated.
"And how much control do you have over your people sending more ships to find out what happened to the last one?" Rhodes asked pointedly. "I've got a whole country to worry about. Hell, a whole planet."
"We can't promise they won't send more ships," Rei said. "Any more than you can promise your people won't send more men. We're going to try to stop them, but ..." He leaned forward, his amber eyes sharp as broken glass. "You have to give us a reason to want to help your planet. Locking up Sarah and her father won't do that."
Sarah sighed and translated.
"Or we could just stick you in stasis," Jeren said, flipping the knife from hand to hand. "Or kill you. I don't know why you two are trying so hard to negotiate with this native when there's nothing he can do for you."
"We could also stick you in stasis," Sarah told him.
"You want to try it, little girl?"
Rei made a growling noise deep in his throat.
"Sounds like negotiations are going well," Gary remarked. He set the tin of shortbread cookies in the middle of the table. "Sarah hon, I know you're busy here, but I hear Bonnie raising a fuss out there. We're way overdue on the evening chores. You want to take a walk with me, kiddo?"
***
There was a wet, clinging cold in the air, and Sarah pulled her hands inside the sleeves of her jacket as she and her dad walked through the damp grass to the barn. The next clear night would probably frost.
She had to resist the temptation to go to the spaceship instead of the barn. She wanted to look at it so badly, try to figure out how it worked, ask Rei to tell her all about it ...
But she could ask a thousand questions and it would never be enough to satisfy her curiosity. The ship was going to be gone soon, and Rei along with it. And somehow she would have to go on with her ordinary life and pretend that her heart hadn't been ripped out of her chest.
"We can get this done quickly if we only do the most important chores," she told her dad, using long practice to stop her heart from breaking by focusing on the small details of the here and now. "You can get the eggs while I milk Bonnie and round up the sheep if they aren't halfway to the county line by now—"
"Sarah," her father said gently. "Go with him."
Sarah stopped in the act of ticking off chores on her fingers. "What?"
"Honey, I remember standing with you in Walmart when you were nine years old and telling you that you could pick out a poster from that whole rack of 'em to put on your bedroom wall. And I remember how you flipped past the unicorns and ponies and fancy-pants big-hair singers to the posters of outer space. You begged me to please get you two instead, because you couldn't decide between the one with all the planets in the solar system, and the one of that comet or whatever it was—"
"Nebula," she whispered. "The Orion Nebula." She still had it.
Gary turned to face her. It was almost dark in the shadow of the barn; she couldn't make out his expression, but she could see the glimmer of the whites of his eyes.
"Sarah, sweetheart, I know what you put aside because of your mother and me. I know what it cost you. Punkin, you can't spend your whole life looking after me, giving up everything. Not when a chance like this comes along."
"But ..." She couldn't believe in it. Couldn't let herself believe in it. "What will you do? How will you ..."
"I'll manage. I'm getting around well enough to do everything that needs doing around the farm, and if there's something I can't do, I can get Bill Haverford or one of the Muller boys to come over. I can drive fine now too."
"But we need the money from my part-time job—"
"We've still got my disability checks. If that's not enough, I can pick up some cash fixing engines for folks, same as I did back when your mother was still—back when Maggie—" He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice had softened until she could barely hear it. "Thing is, with you so good-natured about doing what needs done around the farm, it's been too damn easy to do less than I can. Awful easy to sit around the house working on my projects, feeling like there's nothing that really needs doing, not worth getting up on these wobbly pins of mine. Tell you the truth, honey, I think you going out there and living your life is gonna be the kick in the pants that I need to start living mine again."
Somewhere deep in her chest, something fluttered, an emotion as delicate as a butterfly's wings. "Daddy, you know this might mean leaving really soon, right? Maybe even tonight, or tomorrow morning? I've got—I've got my job, my classes—and I'd be leaving you to deal with whoever the government sends, maybe even an actual alien invasion when they realize their ship's gone missing. I can't just ..."
"Sarah," her father said, and Sarah fell silent. "Do you want to go?"
She had to swallow a few times before she could get the word out. "Yes." Oh yes, yes. More than anything.
"There's a lot I haven't been able to give you. But I can give you this. You've been doing a lot of things around here you should never have had to. Trust the old man to clean up any messes that are left behind—oof!"
Sarah threw her arms around him and buried her face in his shoulder, like she used to do when she was a little girl. She was shaking again, she realized dimly, but for a different reason this time. It still didn't feel real: not the spaceship sitting in the pasture less than a hundred yards away, let alone the idea that she might be on it soon, with an entire galaxy full of stars, quasars, and nebulae spread out in front of her.
"You could come," she said into his shoulder. "If they can fix Agent Pradhan, they can probably fix your back."
She could feel him shaking his head. "Honey, if you find a miracle cure, you come right back here and tell me about it. I'll get on that ship tomorrow and go to whatever outer-space hospital you found. And then I'm gonna get on that ship and come back here. My life is here. But I don't think yours is. It never has been."
She was crying now, full-on sobbing, a pent-up flood of unshed tears.
"Hey. There, there." Gary patted her back. "Hey, kid. It's okay. It's gonna be okay." He kissed her hair. "What d'ya say we go milk that poor cow before she ends up with mastitis, okay?"
Sarah wiped her eyes and sniffled, and smiled through her tears. "It's a plan."