___
S ARAH GAVE UP ON sleeping around 5 a.m. after waking every half hour from dreams of meteors mixed with half-remembered scenes from science fiction movies. It was still dark, and the thermometer outside the window read just above freezing. She dressed quickly and went down the stairs on stealthy sock feet to avoid waking her dad. When she grabbed one of last night's biscuits from the lidded tin on the countertop, she realized guiltily that she'd forgotten to offer any food to Rei last night.
What did aliens eat? She didn't want to poison him. For all she knew, his people were like pandas or koala bears, and only ate a single type of plant that grew on his home planet. Or maybe, as space travelers, they could no longer survive on regular food at all; perhaps he needed an intravenous nutrient formula or something like that.
But he seemed so much like a human. He had teeth like human teeth, not a beak or a specialized apparatus for consuming pollen. It was possible that everything on Earth would be poisonous to him or that he had extreme food taboos, but if he stayed on Earth for awhile, he'd have to eat the local food or he was going to starve to death.
She loaded a plate with samples of every different kind of food she could find in the kitchen: a biscuit, sliced ham, leftover bacon, an orange and an apple from the fruit bowl, saltine crackers, a carrot, a cup of yogurt, a few half-stale shortbread cookies from Grandma Metzger's last Christmas care package, some slices of cheddar cheese, and a handful of pepperoni. There should be something here he could eat.
Sarah examined her handiwork, and then another thought occurred to her. She hurried to the living room and pulled books off the shelves until she found the one she wanted. Then she stamped into her boots in the kitchen. The sheepskin coat was still damp, so she put on an oversized denim jacket of her dad's instead, and opened the door with her elbow.
She loved this time of night, the crisp final hours before dawn crawled up the sky. Clouds had rolled in to blot out the stars, and the predawn darkness was nearly absolute. The air felt sharp as a knife blade when she sucked it in through her nose, breathing out through her mouth in curls of steam.
She knocked lightly before opening the barn door, wondering if Rei even knew what knocking meant. The interior of the barn was dark and perfectly silent except for the sleepy murmuring of the chickens. Sarah took a careful step inside. If he was asleep, she'd leave the plate and go start her morning chores—
"Sairah," said a soft voice at her elbow. She stifled a gasp and nearly dropped the plate.
"Jeez! You're so quiet!" She could just see the glimmer of his eyes and the silver tracery on his skin. "I'm gonna turn the light on, okay? Light?"
"Light," he said quietly. "Goodnight, Sairah."
She shut the door and flicked the light on. He was still wearing her dad's shirt over the gray coverall, and his hair was tousled, with straw in it. His eyes sparkled at her; he looked amused. The swelling and bruising around his black eye was noticeably less than it had been yesterday.
"Oh, yes, very funny, scaring me out of a year's growth, and as my dad would say, I don't have a lot of growth to lose. Are you hungry?" She set the plate on top of a barrel. "Food? Eat?"
She picked up a piece of ham and took a bite to demonstrate. His eyes tracked her movements, with a certain desperation in them; the spots on his skin blanched almost white.
"Eat," she said, pushing the plate toward him.
"Eat," he repeated softly. He picked up the ham and ate it rapidly in small, quick bites, flashing very white teeth. She was about to demonstrate the same process on another piece of food, to show him he could eat anything on the plate, but he'd already grabbed the biscuit, so apparently he was figuring it out. And from the look of things, he was ravenous. Didn't they feed him on his spaceship?
Maybe he's a refugee. He might have traveled for a long time to get here.
Frustration at the language barrier nearly strangled her. How could they communicate? She wanted so desperately to ask him questions.
I wish universal translators weren't just science fiction ...
She felt like she should give him privacy to eat, but instead, she couldn't help watching him. With his head bent over the plate, he ate like a ... like a hunted animal, she thought. His eyes darted around, and he looked at her often, as if he feared she might tell him to stop.
Her gaze drifted to the silver collar around his neck. Did he escape from captivity? Perhaps someone had been abusing him.
They probably hadn't made a habit of starving him, though. She didn't think you got that kind of muscle and those smooth, athletic movements from being malnourished.
He also didn't wolf his food. He wasn't taking big enough bites to choke on. He was just eating very, very fast. Like he'd had manners drilled into him so thoroughly that he couldn't eat rudely even when he was desperately hungry.
He looked up again, met her eyes with a quick flash of his amber ones, and stopped in midbite. After swallowing, he pushed the plate toward her. "Sarah?"
"Oh, no, that food is for you."
But he showed no signs of resuming, even though he flicked a still-hungry gaze at the plate. There were crumbs on his bottom lip; she had an odd, quick urge to reach out with her thumb and brush them away.
"Okay," she said with a smile, wrenching her gaze away from his mouth, and picked up the apple. She pushed the plate back in his direction.
He didn't need any encouragement to finish the rest of it. The yogurt cup made him pause. At least he didn't try to bite through it; he knew it was packaging, just not how to open it.
"Here," Sarah said, opening it for him before realizing she hadn't brought a spoon. This didn't seem to faze him. He just dipped his fingers into it. Maybe they didn't have spoons on his homeworld.
And, okay, watching him lick yogurt off his fingers was unexpectedly distracting.
Sarah ate one of the shortbread cookies and grimaced. Dry as sawdust and just as tasty. Grandma Metzger always gave Sarah and her dad a big tin of them every Christmas. Maybe they tasted better if you'd grown up in the Depression.
Rei didn't seem to mind. He ate everything on the plate, including the orange, which he ate like an apple, biting through the peel. Sarah started to tell him to stop, but decided it didn't make enough difference to be worth trying to explain. After all, it was normal to eat an apple skin and all; why not an orange?
She wandered over to feed her apple core to Princess. The old dapple-gray mare was lying down in her stall, but put her head over the half-door to take the treat from Sarah's palm with her soft lips.
"So what do you think about having an alien in your barn, old girl?" Sarah asked, scratching the mare's forehead.
Princess blew out her lips and snuffled around Sarah's hand for more apples. She had a tremendous taste for them. If Sarah and her dad would let her, she'd scavenge windfalls at this time of year until she gave herself colic.
"Sorry, no more. Gotta get back to my guest, old gal."
In her absence, Rei had finished everything down to the crumbs. "Good?" Sarah asked.
"Good?" he repeated.
"Yep." She looked critically at the side of his head. He didn't appear to have used the first aid supplies she'd left him—they were still sitting on the floor—but he seemed to have cleaned himself up a bit. At least he wasn't leaving blood everywhere anymore. And his bruises looked like they'd faded noticeably overnight, though it was hard to tell with dark blue-purple bruising against blue skin.
"Hey, Rei," she said to get his attention, and moved the plate out of the way so she could open the book she'd brought, a world almanac from her high school days. She flipped through it until she found the world map. Rei looked on with interest as she pointed to Wisconsin.
"Sarah," she said. "Rei. Here. Sarah and Rei."
Rei said something in his own language, frowning in concentration as he examined the map. He touched the blue part of the map that represented the Atlantic Ocean, and then the blue splash of Lake Michigan, and looked up at her. "Rei-ket Sarah?"
"Yes, this is where we are."
Rei tapped Lake Michigan emphatically, and the thought dawned on her that, if he'd already grasped blue was for water, he might think the enormous lake was the lake he'd crashed in. "No," she said, shaking her head. "No, that's a different lake. Uh, the world is ... big?" She touched the map and spread her arms out wide. "Big!"
Rei looked baffled, then pensive. He looked around and pointed to the light bulb. "Light," he said, his musical, lilting accent making the word sound foreign. He held his fist above the map. "Light." His fist moved down in an arc to thunk against Lake Michigan. "Rei."
"No," Sarah said firmly. She turned the page to the U.S. map, and taking his hand, she tapped his fist to the map a hair westward from the lake, in the blank space that made up most of Wisconsin. The map was much too large-scale to pinpoint Sidonie's location in anything other than the broadest terms, somewhere vaguely in the central-western part of the state. "Rei." She turned back to the world map and then back to the U.S. map, pointing to the same place, trying to demonstrated the equivalence between them.
Rei frowned thoughtfully and then crouched on the barn floor, stretching one of his legs out to the side as if bending the knee hurt him. Sarah sat down, curious, and watched him draw with his finger in the dirt. She could still feel the texture of his skin under her fingers when she'd gripped his fist, not thinking about it until after; it almost felt as if his hand, soft yet ridged with calluses along the edge, had left a warm imprint on her skin.
Rei drew an irregular blob in the dirt. What was that supposed to be—a sun, a world, a continent? Not like she could ask. Anyway, he was drawing something else above it, something round, with stubby fins ... and she sucked in her breath when she recognized the intact version of the craft she had glimpsed floating on the waves before it was sucked under. It was round and fat-bodied, with short wings-like things sticking off. For something sketched in the dirt with his fingertip, it was actually a really good drawing, easily recognizable even though she had only had a brief look at the craft, badly damaged, in the dark
"You're a good artist," she told him. Rei flicked a glance at her—Damn it, she told herself, you know he can't understand you! Turning back to his drawing, he sketched a gently curved line arcing down from the craft to the odd-shaped blob, which she now realized must be the lake. Not only that, but she realized from her astronomy studies that he'd connected them with a parabola. Rei was not only an artist but understood basic orbital mechanics too.
"Hey," she said, and Rei looked up again. "I have a better idea than drawing in the dirt. Hold on, let me get something."
There were some carpenter's pencils with the rest of the hand tools in the workshop part of the barn. She couldn't find any paper, so she flipped the almanac to the title page, which had some blank space on it. "Here," she said, holding out the pencil. When Rei merely looked at it, Sarah made a mark on the paper and then pointed at the drawing in the dirt.
Rei's face went ... bright. That was the only word for it. He lit up, and Sarah's breath caught in her throat. She hadn't even realized he could look like that, animated and genuinely happy.
He pulled the almanac toward himself and made a quick copy of his earlier drawing: lake-blob, ship, parabolic arc. With the pencil and paper, his movements were quick and sure. On a blank space near the lake, he drew a recognizable though weirdly distorted version of her truck, and a couple of squarish buildings complete with perspective.
"Is that our farm?"
The tip of the pencil traced a pale line from the farm to the lake. Rei pointed to himself, to her, and to the wall of the barn. He touched the truck drawing with the pencil and pointed to her again.
"You want me to take you back to the lake," she guessed. "Oh, no. That is not a good idea. No. Bad idea." She shook her head vigorously, hoping he understood that gesture.
Rei's face went blank. He tapped the drawing of his ship with the pencil tip. Pointed to the sketch-truck. To her. To the drawing of the lake. To the ship. And the lake again.
"You ... want to get your ship?" Okay, that made sense. If she were stuck on an alien planet, she'd want to fix her spaceship and get home as soon as possible. Except ... "Rei, it sank in the lake. What are you going to do, dive down to it?"
Uncomprehending stare. He pointed to the lake, truck, her—
"I get it! I know what you want! That's not the problem." She crossed her arms. "Rei, maybe you don't remember, but it's at the bottom of the lake. We'd need divers and a really big winch to get it out. Anyway, there's probably cops and scientists and God only knows what else out there now."
Rei tapped the pencil on the paper to get her attention. He pointed to the sketch-farm and to the lake. Then he pointed to the wall of the barn.
Sarah stared blankly as he turned in place, finger pointing to each wall of the barn, one by one. He gave her an impatient look, tapped the pencil on the lake, and continued pointing to different walls until she figured out what he wanted.
"Oh. The lake is that way." She pointed in the approximate direction. "But—how are you going to get there? No, no. How can I make you understand 'no'? This is a bad idea."
Rei laid the pencil down on the book. He smiled at her, touched the empty plate, and smiled again with a brief flicker of his dimple. Then he turned and walked—limped, rather—toward the door.
Sarah hesitated for the barest instant before she sprang to her feet and dashed after him. She got in front of him and blocked his forward progress, planting her hands against his chest. He was very heavy and solid. She knew he could have pushed her aside if he wanted to, but he didn't try; instead he gave her a quizzical look from his odd, gold eyes.
Gorgeous eyes. Cat's eyes, amber threaded with green and gold and subtle hints of violet ...
She had to tear her gaze away. "No!" she said to his lips—which wasn't any better; this close, she could see how the blue continued all the way inside his mouth, not like grease-paint alien makeup, but a million subtle shades of blue and purple, just like human skin. "No, it'll be light soon, and people will see you. And it's miles to the lake, with houses and farms and roads. I know all you can see from our farm is trees, but it's not all like that."
Rei quirked a brow quizzically. He took her by the shoulders and carefully, but effortlessly, moved her out of the way. She'd been right about how strong he was.
"No!" she protested. "You'll get caught!"
He was fumbling with the door latch. Sarah closed her hand over his, and was arrested once again by the contrast of her small, square pink fingers against his blue ones. She blinked and looked up into those serious, intelligent cat's eyes.
"I'll take you," she sighed.
***
Rei seemed to understand readily enough what she wanted, even when she threw a pile of empty feed sacks into the passenger side of the truck and gestured him down to the floor before putting a couple of the old sacks on top of him. Heck, she hadn't gotten this much comprehension out of her high-school boyfriends even though they both spoke the same language.
He pushed himself up far enough to look out the window as she turned out of the driveway. It was still very early, brightening from night into a cool gray dawn. Sarah didn't blame him for wanting to look around, not that there was much to see out here. But maybe for an alien, a road lined with trees and farms was as exotic as his spaceship seemed to her.
Whenever headlights approached on the farm road, she murmured "Down" and gave him a push below the level of the windows. After the first time, he understood what "Down" meant, ducking and covering up whenever she said it.
Well, he's brighter than most of the dogs in town, she thought, and tried not to laugh.
She avoided the town and cut over to the lake by the back roads. So far she'd encountered few other cars, just the usual handful of farm vehicles or people driving to early jobs in town, but flashing lights on the lake road caught her attention. There was a sheriff's car parked sideways across the road up ahead.
"Oh no, I knew it," she whispered. "There's a police barricade."
She slammed on her brakes. It was light enough now that she could see a deputy in a wide-brimmed hat next to the cop car, smoking a cigarette and looking in her direction. If she turned the truck around and hightailed it out of there, all she'd do was make them suspicious and maybe get in her very first police chase.
"Down, down!" she hissed at Rei, covering him with more feed sacks. "Be quiet. Quiet!"
Although she knew he couldn't understand, the heap of feed sacks was utterly still and silent as Sarah pulled up to the police car and rolled down her window. "What's going on?" she asked with her best and most innocent smile.
"You live around here, ma'am?" the deputy asked. He glanced into the truck, his eyes passing over the cluttered interior without much curiosity.
"Sure. My dad and I have a farm over on the other side of town." Don't look at Rei. Eyes forward, Sarah. You can do this.
A drop of sweat trickled down her back. As a teenager, she'd hated being in trouble with the school authorities. She'd never been arrested. She'd never even smoked pot!
"License and registration, please?"
She dug it out of the glove box, reaching across the heap of feed sacks. Her arm brushed against Rei's shoulder, warm and solid under the camouflage.
"See anything weird last night, Miss Metzger?" the deputy asked as he examined her license.
"Weird like what?" Sarah asked brightly, and then tried not to wince at the realization that the whole town had probably seen Rei's spaceship crash. Indeed, the deputy was giving her a puzzled look now. "We go to bed and get up early out at the farm," she explained. "If anything happened after dark, I wouldn't know about it. Were those stupid town kids causing trouble again?"
After another long look at her, and a second glance into the truck, the deputy asked, "What's your business out at the lake this morning?"
At least she had a decent excuse for this. "I lost my phone out here yesterday. I wanted to look for it."
"How'd you do that?"
"We were boating, and either it fell in the water or got lost on the beach. I wanted to walk around and look for it." Inwardly, she patted herself on the back. For a person who rarely lied, that was a pretty good one if she did say so herself.
"Late in the year for boating, with the weather gettin' so cold."
"We were out on the lake looking at the fall colors," Sarah explained. "Me and my dad." Don't call and check. Please don't call and check. "Listen, if the lake's closed right now, I can just go home and try to find my phone some other time. But it's my phone, you know? I don't want to have to buy a new one and change my number everywhere if it's just laying on the beach somewhere."
At this point she almost hoped he told her to leave—her nerves were a wreck—but he looked thoughtful and then handed her license back. "Go ahead. If you find anything else, something funny-looking, bring it to the sheriff's department, okay?"
"What sort of funny-looking?" Sarah asked—innocently, she hoped.
"Weather balloon fell in the lake last night, it looks like. Weather service wants it back, that's all. So if you pick up any pieces of metal or anything else that's not supposed to be there, bring them down to the sheriff's office."
"Okay, will do," she promised, and he waved her through.
As the truck got up to speed on the lake road again, the pile of feed sacks lurched. Sarah reached over, groped for the top of Rei's head through the camouflage, and pushed him down. "Stay," she ordered. "There might be cops on the beach. If we're not alone down there, I'm turning right back around, okay?"
She knew he couldn't understand a word, but he stayed where she'd put him as she bumped down the dirt road to her favorite beachside lookout. It was full daylight now, but the light was flat and gray, a heavy cloud cover shrouding the sky. If it had been like this yesterday, she'd never have come out here, never have met Rei, and missed out on the biggest adventure of her life.
There was no one on the beach, so she parked in her usual place, where the woods gave way to sand but before the sand got soft enough to trap her tires. When she opened her truck door and hopped down, she could see that people had been tramping around. There were boot tracks all over the beach, scuffing the sand where waves hadn't smoothed them away. A boat anchor had left a deep divot on the beach. Importantly, though, they weren't here now.
"It's okay. You can come out." She leaned back into the truck through her door and pulled the topmost feed sack off Rei. He sat up, his hair standing up in tousled tufts. "But we can't stay for long, all right? They might come back. And ... why am I still talking, you don't understand any of this."
Rei was already groping at the inside of the passenger door, trying to figure out how the handle worked. "It's—" she began, but he gave up and came out her door instead, sliding gracefully past her. His body brushed hers, and she was reminded all over again that he was a very sexy man.
For someone who was blue. And an alien.
He looked around, and Sarah tucked her hands into her pockets, watching him. The wind off the lake was bitterly cold, late October with a promise of November, and he was still barefoot. Maybe his people didn't wear shoes?
Just as she was wondering how he could possibly be warm enough in nothing but his rumpled silver coverall and her dad's plaid shirt, he shucked off the shirt, dropping it in the sand. Her surprise turned to shock when he began popping open a seam of sticky tabs down the side of his coverall.
"Wait," she squeaked, but he peeled out of it with a quick, smooth motion, leaving it in the sand like a snake's shed skin.
He wasn't wearing anything under it.
He was blue all the way down, she thought dazedly. And he had a pattern of gold dots down his back, a double row on either side of his spine, patterned in gentle whorls like the ones on his face.
Rei looked over his shoulder at her and said something incomprehensible. He gave her one of his quick, sweet smiles ... which had a whole new impact on her entire body, coming from a guy who was stark naked.
"Rei! People are going to see you!" Like me, for example!
Ignoring her, he strode forward, muscles rippling smoothly under his blue skin. He seemed to have no self-consciousness at all about being naked. Sarah didn't mean to stare, but she was entranced by his flexing calf muscles, the tight buttocks, the firm curve of his spine—
He strode into the water and now she was getting alarmed.
"The lake bottom drops off really quickly!" she called. "Be careful!" Like he understood a word of that.
When he was thigh-deep, he dove forward, arcing into the water with a splash. Sarah held her breath until his dark head popped up farther out in the lake, bobbing on the gray surface of the water. He dove again and emerged a little way farther along for a breath before going under once more.
Last night, she had assumed he couldn't swim. Apparently the problem had only been that no one was an especially good swimmer after an emergency crash landing on an alien planet. He swam with the same grace and physical confidence that was evident in every move he made.
Sarah watched for another couple of minutes to make sure he was going to be okay. He was treading water now, far out on the lake, and she remembered all too well how cold the water was. But he seemed to be fine, so she started searching the beach and the edge of the woods for any sign of the things she'd lost.
She couldn't find her telescope, or the camp chair either. The wave had probably dragged them both out into the lake. They'd resurface in front of some vacation cabin's boathouse with the November storms hit. She did find a few twisted pieces of metal and plastic washed into the edge of the trees. She wasn't entirely sure if they came from Rei's ship or if they were just flotsam, but she put them in the truck bed just in case.
And amazingly, wonder of wonders, she found her phone, buried in damp leaves and sand near the base of the tree she'd managed to hang onto. Thank you, patron saint of cell phones! She tried powering it on, and was unsurprised when nothing happened. If you dropped your phone in the toilet, you were supposed to put it in a jar of rice to draw out the moisture, right? She decided to try that when she got home. But cell phone, yay! Good news for once.
Rei splashed suddenly out of the waves in the shallow water near the shore. Sarah looked over, only to be smacked in the eyeballs, not to mention the reptilian hindbrain, by a naked and strapping specimen of blue humanity striding out of the water.
... well, limping, actually. With his clothes off, she could see that his left knee was bruised and swollen. There was also a dark slash across his abdomen, probably where all the blood on his coverall had come from. He looked way better than yesterday, but that was a lot of damage his body was trying to repair.
He dropped a gray plastic case, about the size of a briefcase, in the sand at the water's edge, and turned immediately to dive back in. Sarah slogged through wet, heavy sand down the shoreline and picked up the case. "Do you want me to put this in the truck?" she called after him, but he was already back out in the lake again, visible only as a dark, bobbing spot against the gray waves.
The case was heavier than it looked. Toolbox? Luggage? She might have tried to open it if she could figure out how, but since she couldn't, she put it in the truck bed. By that time Rei had returned to deposit what looked like part of an instrument panel above the reach of the waves. He came back several more times, dropping off pieces of junk made of metal or rugged plastic, trailing wires from their ragged edges. Sarah ferried them all to the truck.
On the last trip he collapsed to his knees in the sand. Sarah hurried down the beach, shrugging out of her denim jacket, and threw it around his shoulders. She wished she had brought the warmer sheepskin.
Rei nodded in acknowledgement and, perhaps, thanks. His teeth were chattering, and he sat in the sand for a minute, head bowed, while Sarah carried the latest piece of junk to the truck.
As she was stowing it under a feed sack in the truck bed, she heard the drone of an engine. There was a motorboat out on the lake, angling toward them across the gray water.
"Whoa, gotta go!" She ran down the beach and tugged on Rei's arm. Seeming to understand her urgency, he stumbled to his feet. Sarah grabbed his clothes and opened the truck door for him when he fumbled with the handle.
The motorboat was close enough now that she could see people in it, including one standing up. And they were looking this way. Cops? Curious residents? She didn't want to be caught by either one, especially with a naked alien in her truck.
"Down!" she told Rei, tossing a feed sack at him, and revved the truck. As she jolted into the trees, she glanced into the rear-view mirror and saw the motorboat closing on the shore.
Well, now she'd really find out if it was possible to identify a truck from its tire tracks. She hoped no one had been able to get her license plate. It was bad enough they'd seen the truck. Luckily, beat-up old Ford farm trucks weren't exactly rare around here.
Rather than going through the police barricade again, she took a back way she doubted if the sheriff's department had bothered to block off, since it went through the Mullers' cow pasture, utilized a couple of old logging roads, and came out behind the Dairy Queen downtown. There were advantages to living in the same small town for her whole life. Just to be on the safe side, she took a roundabout way back to the farm.
"I hope you got what you needed," she told Rei. He'd poked his head up enough to look out, peering with curiosity at bits of outlying Sidonie as it sped past them. "And try not to be seen, okay? We don't have very many blue people around here."
She knew he couldn't understand, but at the sound of her voice, he glanced at her and flashed her a brief grin.