___
I N THE DARK OF the night, as rain fell from the pitch-black sky, Rei hunched in a borrowed coat and stood out of the way while Sarah and Garymetzger—no, Gary, just Gary—hitched the trailer to their ground vehicle.
The entire evening was a whirl of impressions and thoughts he hadn't had time to process yet. He was clean and warm, with borrowed clothing brushing his skin—strangely soft, this fabric, yet not adhering in the way of Galatean smartcloth. He stood with his feet shoved into ill-fitting, borrowed boots and buried in a planet's dirt, with water falling from the sky; he'd almost forgotten about rain before this planetary excursion. And these two aliens were helping him retrieve his sunken battlepod.
He didn't know how he could ever repay them.
Lyr used to say his people believed in something called amora, which meant that you couldn't pay back someone for their kindness, so instead you helped others in turn. You couldn't repay your parents for raising you; all you could do was be a good parent to your own children. You couldn't repay someone for saving your life, but maybe you could save someone else.
Rei flexed his hands. Rainwater glistened on his dark skin like blood in the truck's headlights.
And does it work the other way, my friend? he asked the silence in his skull where Lyr used to dwell. If you kill others, what then? Do you deserve to have violence visited upon you? Does it trail in your wake?
Did it matter if you'd never wanted to do it in the first place? The dead were still just as dead.
He kept catching himself in the act of touching his bare neck, where the collar used to be.
"Rei, come on!" Sarah called softly. "We're ready to go."
He climbed into the truck and sat between Sarah and her dad on the padded bench seat. Gary pulled in his crutches and slammed the door.
"Maybe Rei on the outside should sit," Sarah said. He was now catching most of her words, though he could tell he sometimes lost the nuances of her grammar.
Gary shook his head. "Easier to hide him if we run into cops." He shoved a floppy-brimmed hat at Rei. "Here, put this on."
"Yeah, that's totally inconspicuous," Sarah said dryly as Rei pulled the hat down over his ears. She flashed him a sideways smile, her face lit up in the glow of the truck's instrument lights.
His shoulder was pressed to hers. Every time she spoke, he felt the gentle vibration of her voice.
Gary was right, it would've been easier to sit on the outside. Mostly because it would've saved him from driving to the lake while trying to hide a hard-on.
He hadn't been able to stop thinking of Sarah the entire time he was washing in the bathing room. Alien she might be, but she was also as human as his people—more so, even, since it didn't look like Sarah's particular fork in the tree of galactic humanity had been meddled with quite as much, lacking wolf DNA or his people's artificially designed, extra-efficient hemoglobin that gave their skin the blue tint.
She also lacked the perfectly symmetrical beauty of many galactics, the telltale signs that either her DNA had been modified at some point in her ancestral line, or her body had been modded after her birth. But those little imperfections made her more beautiful to Rei's eyes: the slight crookedness of her teeth, the way her nose was a little off center and her jawline slanted one way just a bit more than the other. Those were the details that made her Sarah.
It wasn't beauty that drew him to her, anyway. It didn't matter in the slightest what her face looked like. She was beautiful to him (would have been beautiful, no matter what) because of what was inside her, not the other way around.
She'd helped him when no one in their right mind would have. She'd sheltered him and fed him and—to the best of her people's limited ability—tended his wounds. And now she and her father were taking him out to retrieve his ship, risking imprisonment or worse. Considering how hard she'd been working to hide him, the punishment for harboring fugitives must be severe on this world.
Her shoulder flexed against his as she yanked the lever attached to the truck's steering apparatus. The vehicle lurched forward, the trailer rattling behind them as they got underway.
"I don't know how to thank either of you," Rei said, hunching forward. With the glow of the instruments affecting his night vision, it was utterly dark outside the truck, difficult even for his sharp eyes to penetrate. Through the rain, an occasional watery flash of lights indicated other houses along the road. "You don't have to do this."
"Sure we do," Gary said. He gave Rei a smile that was reminiscent of his daughter's, warm and friendly as his face creased around it.
Rei had assumed, at first, that Gary was quite old, but now he thought the old man was probably not very far past middle age. Living on a planet, in the sun and the wind, aged a person's skin faster than shipboard life.
My aunt might look that old, too. I wonder if she's still alive?
Until Sarah had asked, he hadn't thought about his people in years. It was easier not to. In the normal course of events, his servitude to the Galatean Empire would have lasted for another ten years. Afterwards, he could have gone home if he survived, but with most of his septmates dead, he didn't see any point in looking forward to it.
But now, possibilities began to open up in front of him. If he could fix the battlepod ... if he could get off this planet ... maybe he could go back to his homeworld. The smart thing would be to get as far away from the Galatean Empire as possible, but there was nowhere else he wanted to go.
To see Polara again, his chilly homeworld with its snow-capped mountains and tall trees and the three moons in the sky ...
Except that his people would never truly accept him if they knew that he'd run away. Polara gave the Galatean army a certain number of its young people every year so they would be left alone. A fugitive coming back to their world, bringing Galatean hunters behind him ... no, they would never hide him, not like Sarah and Gary had done.
Anyway, first he had to find out if Lyr was still alive.
And all of this meant leaving Sarah too. He didn't want to think about that.
He realized that he'd been softly flexing his claws where his hand rested on his thigh, popping them in and out of his fingertips with a light prickle through the fabric of his borrowed trousers, and made himself stop.
"Turn off here," Gary said suddenly.
"Really?" Sarah slowed the truck to a crawl. The headlights illuminated the edge of a field of tall grass, smeared through the streaks of rain on the truck's windshield. "I was going to turn at the county road and then go through the Gruenings' woodlot and pastures to the Muller place."
"Nah, there's an old logging road here. Takes you through the Kenner woods and comes out behind Will Hardesty's barn, almost all the way to the county line. Then turn left and you'll hit the Muller spread. It's shorter and a lot less likely to run into anybody."
"No kidding," Sarah murmured, maneuvering the truck onto two muddy ruts with trees on either side. The sides of the truck scraped against brush. "I didn't even know this was here. I thought it was just part of the Kenners' private farm road."
"Well, technically we are on Kenner land," her dad said. "I dated Kelly Kenner before I married your mom, you know."
"I know, Dad," Sarah sighed. "That was the girl whose braids you tied to a fence post when you were a kid, right?"
"No, that was Tammy Wazlowski. Ah, Tammy. Girl had a good right hook on her."
Rei let the banter wash over him, his translation implant soaking it up. He knew what they were doing; he could hear the tightness in Sarah's voice. Idle talk eased nervousness. How many times had he and his septmates done this before a battle? Or during one?
Lyr, Rook, Skara ... He pushed those thoughts away and tried to focus on mapping their route in his head—and not falling asleep. He'd barely slept at all for the last two nights, and now the truck's vents were blasting warm air at him, its growling engine and rocking progress easing him halfway to drowsiness—
The seat abruptly dropped under him, jolting him wide awake. He flung out a hand and clawed at the dashboard. For an instant, he'd been back in his battlepod, his stomach dropping as the pod changed trajectory with the dazzling light of plasma fire flaring on the screens—
"Whoa, sorry," Sarah said, glancing at him sideways. "Pothole."
Rei nodded, not trusting his voice. At least she was too busy driving to look at his face, but Gary gave him a lingering, curious glance.
A few minutes later, Sarah stopped and got out to open a gate in the rain. There were a few more instances of this as they drove through a succession of fields. At last she slowed the truck to a crawl and turned onto a smoother road. There were no other headlights in the darkness.
"This is the lake road," Sarah told Rei. "We're almost to the beach where I met you. I'm not completely sure we won't find any cops down there, just to let you know."
The translation chip gave him slang for Galatean military police. He merely nodded, wishing he understood more about her world's political structure and their relationship with Galatea. It was hard to believe her people had no connection to the Empire at all. If he was caught, would he be handed over to the Galateans immediately? Used as a political bargaining chip? Not that he was much of one. There was nothing special about him; he was merely a fugitive slave-soldier. He had pilot skills, but those were nothing special either.
If they caught him, they'd probably just kill him, or leave him to rot in a cell on this planet. Speaking of which ...
"What's your world's name?"
"Earth," Sarah said, with a brief smile.
Earth. He tasted the word carefully on his tongue. His implant gave him connotations of soil and a meaning that was simply "the world." Well, that was understandable; many planets' names meant something like that. Polara meant a great forest in one of his world's old tongues, but it was the same thing. His people were hunters; hers were farmers, with their fields and settled towns. So of course her people thought of the world as a lot of dirt, while his kind thought of theirs as a huge hunting ground.
He'd never heard of a planet called Earth, but that didn't mean much. There were many inhabited planets in the galaxy. And the Galateans might call it something different than the natives anyway.
One thing he did know for certain, though. He had no intention of bringing danger to this two Earthers who'd helped him, not if he could help it.
Sarah turned off the road and jolted down the narrow track that he knew led to the beach.
"Stop," he said.
Sarah slammed on the brakes so suddenly that Rei had to throw out his hand to avoid being flung into the dashboard. "What? Did you see something?"
"No. Let me out. I'll walk from here."
"The heck you will. It's pouring rain." She put the truck back in gear and crept forward.
"If there are 'cops' on the beach, they mustn't find me in your vehicle."
Gary gave a rough snort. "I think that ship has sailed, kid."
"I don't understand."
"What Dad means is that nobody's going to believe we're innocent at this point, Rei." Sarah took one hand off the steering wheel and started to rest it on his thigh, changing it at the last minute to a quick pat on his arm before she jerked it away. "We've got a truck and a trailer and a winch, and we're driving down to the beach at midnight in the rain. It's pretty obvious that we're not hanging out here for our health."
He wasn't sure he understood every word, but he got the gist. "You'll be in danger."
Another snort came from Gary. "Fine time to worry about that, kid."
"Dad!"
"What?"
"I didn't mean to cause danger to either of you," Rei said, feeling wretched. She was right. They were both right. Every moment he spent with them, he was risking their imprisonment and, perhaps, death. He should have just left that first night.
But it was easy to second-guess himself when he had clean, dry clothes and a full belly. Self-preservation was a powerful instinct.
Still, he vowed one thing to himself. He'd die before letting Sarah and Gary get hurt.
"Here we are," Sarah said softly. She killed the headlights and then the engine. The only sounds were the drumming of rain on the roof of the truck and the soft pings of the cooling engine. A few distant lights glimmered smearily in the rain, across the water, but there was no sign of anyone closer.
"No one's here," Rei said.
"You sure about that?" Gary asked, reminding him of something he'd noticed about Sarah earlier. Their unenhanced vision couldn't pierce the dark as well as his could. To them, the night was pitch black.
"I'm sure."
Sarah opened her door and leaned out. "I'm thinking we back the trailer down to the edge of the water. We have a winch on the back of the truck to haul your ship out, Rei."
"Trick's gonna be whether this engine is up to the job." Gary patted the dashboard. "If she can't do it, we might have to bring a tow truck down, or even rent a bulldozer, and that's gonna be a damn sight harder to arrange. How big is your ship, son?"
Rei's implant translated their word "ship" as "water vessel," but he understood by now that they meant the battlepod. "Not too large. And not very heavy. Your truck is heavier." He still couldn't get over how solidly constructed everything was here, made out of metal and wood and dense, primitive plastics.
"We'll have to take your word for it," Sarah said. "You're going to have to do the hard part, though. Someone has to dive underwater and find the ship and hook the winch cable to it. I could probably help—"
"The hell you will," Gary said promptly. "That water's probably forty-five degrees at this time of year. You sure the kid can swim in it without killing himself?"
"He can," Sarah said. "He did before. And I wish you'd stop calling him a kid, Dad. He's no more a kid than I am—"
She broke off as Rei started to remove his borrowed shirt. He stopped in the act of pulling it off, remembering that these people had a strong nudity taboo.
"... Anyway," Sarah said, and though the night was dim even to Rei's enhanced eyes, he could tell that she was blushing. "Let's just get the truck backed down to the water, and then you can—er—take things off in here, while Dad and I get the winch cable ready."
Their nudity taboo must make their sex lives difficult, Rei thought. He would very much have liked to see Sarah naked. In fact, he was thinking about it now, which was going to make disrobing somewhat awkward.
Especially in the close confines of the truck's cab, with her body so near to his. He'd almost ceased noticing it on the drive over. Now, with his interest freshly awakened, he couldn't stop noticing.
Sarah didn't look at him and, once the truck was turned around with the trailer pointed at the water, she departed the cab at a great rate of speed. As soon as she was gone, Rei stripped quickly, despite the awkwardness of doing it in the truck when undressing on the beach would have been so much easier. No wonder she had acted so strange about it earlier, given how strong their nudity taboo seemed to be. There was no way to retrieve the pod without getting naked to go into the water, but he hoped it didn't offend Sarah and her father too badly. He tucked the floppy-brimmed hat behind the seat where it wouldn't get crushed, and then found the door handle after some fumbling, and stepped down to the sand.
Wet, cold wind blew past his naked body, eliminating the last traces of his hard-on; in fact, it felt like his genitals were trying to crawl up inside his body. He focused on using the nanites to raise his body temperature a degree or two. His shivering eased, and the wind grew more comfortable. With wet sand and pebbles squishing between his toes, he walked to the water's edge.
"Rei?" Sarah called. She sounded slightly choked, and he didn't want to look around at her, to see her expression of disgust at his nakedness. "Rei, uh, we've got a flashlight in the truck. I don't know how well it'll work underwater—"
"It's all right," Rei told her. He didn't recognize the word she'd used, but whatever it was, it would probably be unnecessary to the pod's retrieval. "I'll dive first to find the battlepod, then again to hook your hauling line onto it."
He waded in, step by step. The water climbed his calves and crept above his thighs, making him stagger against its pressure. He pushed his metabolism up another notch or two, and took several deep breaths, oxygen-loading his tissues. With the nanites at full capacity, he was capable of holding his breath for several minutes. They were barely working at half capacity right now, based on the slow speed of his healing—he was still limping on his injured leg, and his arm twinged a warning when he moved it, when it should have been strong enough for normal use by now. So he'd better not count on their usual level of assistance. Still, he should be able to easily stay under for a couple of minutes at a time.
And he had another asset that he didn't want his hosts to know about.
Two of them, actually.
He dove forward into the water, slicing cleanly through it. His inert cuffs glinted under the water's surface. Rei kicked himself beneath the surface, and as he sliced deeper into the black water, he shifted.
Suddenly it was no longer a human figure kicking through the water, but a huge, lean wolf with a shaggy, blue-gray pelt.
The cold of the water was suddenly much less acute, though it dragged at his fur more than his bare skin. With water clogging his ears and nose, he didn't notice the sharpening of his senses as he normally did. His night vision was about the same in either form.
But oh, it felt good to stretch his legs as a wolf again.
He'd been allowed to shift occasionally during his time as a Galatean slave. It was known, or at least believed, that Polarans had to shift regularly to maintain their sanity, and if it wasn't true, Polara certainly wasn't disabusing outsiders of the notion. But the tightness of the collar made it impossible for him to shift at will. His wolf neck was thicker than his human neck, so he needed to have the collar unlocked for every authorized shift.
Now he could shift whenever he wanted.
But he had to be careful. He didn't know if this world had shifters or not. They were rare among the human worlds. He knew of only a few shapeshifting races, including his people and his dead septmate Skara's, as well as rumors of shifters among the Galateans themselves. And of course there were Lyr's people, the dragons, but they weren't even remotely human. They had evolved independently rather than coming from Birthworld stock.
Like all Birthworld shifters, Rei was restricted by his human mass. His wolf was exactly the mass of his human body, no more, no less. Dragons had no such limitations.
It still made him a big wolf, two hundred pounds at least.
His implants ached as always; they made the shift with him, but never quite seemed to settle into his wolf body the way they did when he was human. But he didn't care. It was a small discomfort that he pushed aside, glorying in the strong grace of his lupine body.
Running would have been better. He could have stretched out along the shore and run; oh, he could have run. The wolf was less well suited to swimming. But its endurance and natural cold resistance made up for it.
Even so, his lungs began to ache. How far had he come? Not far enough; he kicked deeper. The lake bed dropped off steeply here, and his battlepod was down there somewhere in that blackness. As man or wolf, his night vision, however acute, couldn't penetrate the gloom when there was no light at all.
But he had another way.
Staying up late last night hadn't been in vain, because with the tools from the kit, he'd managed to get one of the damaged cuffs back online. It still didn't have most of its functions; he couldn't yet use it to produce weapons or shields. But the cuffs had a homing function. In the absence of other data, they defaulted to the battlepod they had last been linked to.
His internal nanites might be damaged, but they were still capable of utilizing the cuff linkage, giving him a rough sense of the battlepod's location. With the cuffs fully functional, he could have built a three-dimensional map of the surrounding area, delivered directly into his brain for unerring navigation. This was much more limited, but it could still do what he needed it to do.
He blew the air out of his lungs to force himself deeper. Silver bubbles streamed surfaceward, dimly glimpsed in the faint light coming down from above. Beneath him was only blackness.
And then his paws brushed something that was not lake bottom. Victory!
Rei kicked upward. There was a ringing in his ears now, and his chest burned with a rapidly growing urgency to inhale that would soon, and fatally, overwhelm his self-control.
His snout broke the surface. He opened his jaws wide, gasping as he dog-paddled.
He was far enough out that he didn't think Sarah and Gary would be able to see him. He gulped air in great, greedy heaves before he risked shifting and swam more slowly toward the shore.
Sarah came running to meet him as he stumbled out of the water. "You were down there for so long! Are you okay?"
Rei nodded wordlessly. He was still panting. His nanites were more damaged than he'd thought. He had guessed they were at fifty percent efficiency, but now he revised his estimate downward to thirty or even twenty percent.
"Here." Before he could stop her, Sarah shrugged out of her heavy fur-lined coat and put it around his shoulders. She seemed to have a habit of doing that, he thought dazedly as she led him, stumbling, through the sand to sit on the end of the trailer.
His shivering began to ease as he hunched into the coat. Rain was still falling on his head, but he was so wet that he hardly noticed it. Sarah's sweater was soaking through as she stood beside him, one hand on his shoulder. He wanted to tell her she should get out of the rain, but with the shivering and the way his teeth were chattering, he couldn't seem to get enough air to speak properly yet.
He really had come within a hairsbreadth of staying down too long. He wasn't used to having his nanites so badly damaged.
"You shouldn't go down again," Sarah was saying anxiously. "You should at least warm up first. We don't have to do this tonight. We can find another way."
"She's right, son," Gary said, coming up on his other side. "We could go out in a boat tomorrow. Got a neighbor with a nice Grumman and a fishfinder. We can borrow it."
Rei shook his head, wet hair slapping against his ears. "I found the battlepod," he finally managed to say. "I can dive again to take your line down with me. Show me how it works."
Sarah and her father exchanged a look, a whole wordless conversation passing between them, before Sarah brought him the end of the cable. It looked strong, he was pleased to see, made of braided metal strands with a sturdy hook on the end.
"You need to find something on your ship that won't break off and wrap this around it," Gary explained. "Set the hook and come back up."
Rei nodded impatiently. As if he couldn't understand how a simple rope worked!
"Are you sure?" Sarah asked. "We could wait for a while. You can warm up in the truck."
Rei started to answer, but fell silent as he became aware of something else, a low thrumming vibrating in his chest.
"Helicopter," Gary said softly.
The word was unfamiliar, but they were both looking up, so Rei did too. Through the thick mist and clouds, he couldn't see what it looked like, but fog-dimmed lights passed over them and across the lake. The chop-chop-chop of the vehicle changed pitch. It was circling somewhere over there.
"We've got to get this show on the road," Gary said softly. "There's no telling what they have up there. Infrared cameras, sonar, who knows. They might've already spotted us."
Rei nodded. He took off Sarah's coat and handed it back to her with an apologetic grimace.
"Please be careful," she said. There was the briefest hesitation, as if she wanted to say something else, do something else, but all she did was reach out to give his hand a quick squeeze.
He could still feel the warm pressure of her fingers on his cold ones as he walked back into the water, the cable unspooling behind him.
***
Sarah watched anxiously until Rei disappeared under the water.
"How can he stay down there so long?" she asked her father as she put the coat back on. She was shivering, and tucked her fingers into her damp sleeves for what little warmth they had to offer.
"Get in the truck, hon. Warm yourself up while we wait."
Sarah shook her head. She looked anxiously across the lake, where the helicopter could still be heard but not seen, and then out at the ruffled gray waves. "I need to be here in case something goes wrong."
"Nothing you can do for him if it does," Gary said gently. "You dive in there, you'll be a popsicle in minutes."
"I pulled him out of the water on Saturday night."
"Really?" He gave her a long, searching look. "You know, there's still a whole lot you haven't told me about how this alien kid ended up in our barn."
"It's not that much of a story," Sarah said as the memory of Rei, limp in her arms, flitted through her mind. "He crashed in the lake, I fished him out and took him home."
"How long was it gonna take you to tell me if I hadn't found him on my own?"
"I ... don't know," Sarah confessed quietly. "I just didn't know how to tell you, or what you'd say if I did. 'Dad, there's an alien in our barn' isn't an easy conversation to have."
Gary patted her shoulder. "Punkin, you know I always tried to make sure you could bring your problems to me, but this sure is a new one."
"For you and me both, Dad."
They both looked out at the lake. There was no sign of Rei breaking through the surface. The winch cable had stopped playing out into the water, nearly at its full extent, and hung limply off the end of the trailer.
"Can you understand what he says?" Gary asked. "That up-and-down talking of his."
"Sort of. I can catch most of it now, but sometimes it's too scrambled to figure out what he's trying to say. He says it'll get better as I adjust to the translation thingie."
"Mind if I have a look at where he put that gadget in your head?"
"Sure, be my guest." Keeping one eye on the water, she tilted her head to the side as her father's work-roughened fingers probed around the injection site while he held a flashlight in his other hand. "Ow. Be careful. It's still sore."
"I don't like him putting alien crap in your head."
"Me neither, but things are a lot easier when I can talk to him."
"He tell you anything about himself yet, since he can talk to you so great?"
"I haven't really asked." Deep down, she wondered if she was avoiding the question intentionally. What was Rei, really? An escaped criminal? The advance scout for an invasion? Like revealing his existence to her father, asking him about his true mission on Earth meant opening a can of worms she could never close.
Her father started to say something else, then broke off as the winch cable jerked and went taut. "Ah, there's our cue, kiddo. I'll put 'er in gear. You stay back here, handle the winch an' make sure the cable don't tangle up."
"All right," Sarah said, but she was still scanning the wavetops, hoping to see Rei's dark head in the water. So far there was no sign of him.
Her father was an old hand at towing things with the truck. The winch whined, the cable vibrating over the end of the trailer. As the weight of the unseen ship threatened to drag both truck and trailer toward the lake, the truck's wheels spun and it ground slowly forward instead.
Come on, Rei. Where are you?
Something dark began to breach the ruffled gray waves, sending white foam rolling in all directions. Sarah craned forward, her worry about Rei temporarily subsiding beneath her curiosity about his ship.
This was her first chance to see it when it wasn't either an incandescent fireball crashing on top of her, or glowing wreckage sinking rapidly beneath the lake.
It didn't look big enough to be an actual spaceship. This must be some kind of escape pod, she thought as the truck ground onward and the dark bulk rose, inch by inch, from the lake's depths. It was bubble-shaped, perhaps eight or ten feet in diameter, bristling with projecting fins, antennae, and stubby bumps all over its surface. Most of the longer projections were warped and twisted, though Sarah had no idea if they were meant to look that way or if they'd been damaged in the crash.
Then her attention was drawn from the slowly rising pod to something in front of it, a wet dark shape that looked like it was tangled in the winch cable, rising and falling limply on the waves rolling up the shore.
"Rei," she gasped and ran into the water. It was shockingly cold, soaking through her sneakers and jeans as it climbed up her legs until she was waist deep. Heavier waves rolled over her, wetting her to mid-chest, pushed ahead of the vessel that the truck was now dragging into the shallow water by the beach.
The closer she got, the less it looked like Rei and the more it looked like some kind of trash or flotsam, wrapped around the cable. An old carpet? A shaggy coat like her sheepskin jacket? A ...
A big dog?
She couldn't believe it until she actually dug her hands into the dog's thick fur. It was draped over the cable just in front of the ship, its front legs hanging over the cable and back legs trailing loosely in the water. She couldn't tell if it was alive or dead, but it looked drowned, a mass of sodden fur rolling limply on the waves.
"Rei!" she screamed across the glimmering wake trailing behind the pod. "Rei, where are you?"
Her first thought was that he might be inside the pod, but now that she was closer, she could see how badly damaged it was. Its side had been torn open, and muddy water gushed out as the winch and the truck dragged its bulk inch by inch toward the beach. She kept pace with it, walking backward through the roiling water so it didn't roll over her, still holding absently to the drowned dog.
There was no sign of Rei anywhere.
He couldn't have drowned, not after all of this. That's—that's not right.
The depth of her shock and grief startled her. She'd only known him for two days. But she could finally talk to him. She could hear about the alien planet he came from, and find out what it was like to fly between the stars.
She'd never gotten to comb her hands through his dark hair, or run her nails across his long blue back ...
She'd finally had wonder and magic at her fingertips, all the exotic adventure she had craved for her entire life, and it had vanished forever into the dark, cold waters of the lake.
"Rei!" she screamed again.
As if in response to her cry, the dog jerked suddenly under her hand and gave a wet cough. It was by far the biggest dog she'd ever seen, bigger than even the most enormous Husky or Rottweiler. The glow of the trailer's taillights made it look black, but she thought it might be more like a dark gray or ...
Or blue, maybe?
It was an alien dog.
Well, of course it was. What other kind of dog was going to get dredged off the lake bottom along with an alien space pod?
The dog was coughing and panting now, its body writhing weakly as it fought for breath.
It breathed air. It couldn't have been in the water all this time. Had it been in some kind of stasis capsule in the pod? (She hadn't read all that science fiction for nothing.)
A glint in its fur caught her attention, and she leaned forward, closing one hand over its lanky foreleg. A silver bracelet dangled loosely around its ankle.
It was an exact copy of the bracelets Rei wore.
A copy, or ...
"Rei?" she whispered.
The dog groaned. Its ears pricked forward, lifting from its skull.
They were so close to shore now that she was stumbling in a rising heap of sand scraped up in front of the pod. Sarah wrapped her arms around the dog's wet bulk and tried to heave it off the cable. It was so heavy that all she managed to do was break its fall as it splashed into the shallow water. Sarah gripped the dog behind the forelegs and began dragging them both out of the way of the pod as it ground inexorably onward.
"Sarah?" her dad called. "You okay back there?"
"I'm fine!" she shouted back, stumbling out of the water with her arms full of the dog's sodden forequarters.
Rei couldn't have gone into the water and come out as a dog. He couldn't have. That was impossible.
As impossible as a spaceship falling out of the sky on top of her?
As impossible as blue people and injectable translation technology?
She collapsed to the sand with the dog half on top of her. They were both so wet by now that she could barely tell where its soaked fur ended and her coat began.
The noise of the winch stopped, and she remembered she was supposed to be keeping an eye on it to turn it off when the pod was out of the water. It must have run out of cable, or else her dad had shut it off. Lying on her back, she could feel the low thrumming of the truck's idling engine through the sand. She raised her head after a moment and saw her dad standing with a cane in one hand and his other hand hooked through his belt, gazing at the dark dripping shape of the pod. It was taller than the truck, with sand churned up around it and water streaming off its sides.
"Gettin' that thing on the trailer is gonna be a whole barrel of fun," he remarked. "Sarah, hon? Where are you?"
"Over here." She sat up, with the dog's forequarters sprawling across her lap. Dog, or ... something weirder and far more wonderful.
Its fur was definitely blue.
"Awww, punkin," her dad said, slogging toward her, his cane sliding on the wet sand. "I'm sorry about your alien friend. He didn't come up, did he?"
"I ... I don't know." She stared down at the mass of wet fur in her lap, as if she could make sense of the whole situation that way.
"What's that you've got there?"
The dog raised its head weakly, ears pricking forward.
Gary let out a surprised yelp. Starting to crouch down with the cane's support, he instead lost his balance and landed hard in the sand.
"Dad!" Sarah lurched up, and then back down, with the dog's unyielding weight pinning her legs. The animal was impossibly heavy ... about, say, the weight of Rei's dense, muscular body.
"'m fine," her father grunted. He didn't look fine—falling like that must have hurt—but he sat up stiffly and reached out to scruff the dog's wet fur. "Where'd you come from, boy? Man alive, you must'a got fed the right kind of dog food when you were a pup."
"Dad, I ..." Sarah hesitated, and then took the plunge into the crazy unknown. "I think this dog is Rei. Somehow."
"Sarah—"
"No, look." Sarah held up the dog's massive paw, with the bracelet dangling around its ankle. Its anklebones were smaller than the wrist of a man, but the large paw stopped the bracelet from sliding off.
"What the heck," her father said slowly.
It had to be Rei. She couldn't be wrong. If it wasn't, then Rei was dead beneath the waves on the cold, dark lake bottom ... or dying, even now, abandoned while his would-be rescuers exclaimed over a dog on the beach.
But she didn't think she was wrong.
"Let me check something." She felt behind the dog's ear. If this was Rei, there should be something she could feel where his translator ought to be, the same way she could feel hers under the skin.
And there it was: a little bump, rolling under the skin like a subcutaneous cyst.
Sarah burst into relieved laughter. Her eyes stung. "It is you. Oh, thank God. Rei, can you change back?"
The dog blinked dazedly, closing and opening eyes that were, come to think of it, exactly Rei's amber color. Sarah didn't think he was quite all there yet.
From across the lake, the low chop of the helicopter's rotors changed pitch. Gary looked up. "We gotta get that thing on the trailer and get out of here."
"Yeah—yeah." She pulled her legs out from under the dog and draped her coat over him before giving her dad a hand up.
They'd brought heavy boards in the truck bed to serve as a makeshift ramp. Sarah steadied the pod while her dad winched it slowly onto the trailer. Rei was right, it was lighter than it looked. No way she could have moved it on her own, but the boards didn't crack under its weight, and the trailer didn't settle too badly.
She had trouble concentrating on the work, and kept glancing over her shoulder at the huddled shape under her coat, as slow waves lapped up the beach against his paws.
How?
Maybe something on the ship itself had caused him to transform? A ... an Infinite Improbability Drive or something like that?
That's from a book, Sarah, you nitwit.
But aliens and interstellar spaceships were supposed to be fiction, too.
"Crap," Gary muttered. "Chopper's comin' this way."
They heard it pass over the lake, a little way down. Sarah glimpsed it for a moment, a sleek black shape like a hunting shark gliding through the thinning fog beneath the low bellies of the clouds.
It's an actual, literal black helicopter, she thought in disbelief. She pinched her finger painfully as she fumbled with the straps, trying to get the pod ratcheted down as quickly as possible.
"I got this," her father snapped, shaking out one of the tarps that had been wadded up in the pickup's bed. "You see if you can get Blue into the truck."
"I'm here," Rei's voice rasped.
He was standing right behind her, with the sheepskin coat draped over his shoulders. He looked like he could barely manage to stay on his feet, and that probably wasn't his healthiest shade of blue, but he was there. Alive. Not a dog.
A quick glance along the beach assured her that the dog had vanished. The dog was Rei. Somehow.
Sarah flung her arms around him, catching him in a quick, wet hug.
Rei jerked in surprise, which provided an instant for her logical brain to catch up with the rest of her and make her realize that she was hugging a wet, naked man, in front of her dad. She dropped him just as quickly and stepped back. "You need to get in the truck," she said. The rumble of the helicopter was getting louder. It sounded like it was right above the trees and coming their way. "We gotta get out of here."
She was pushing him into the truck as the helicopter suddenly roared overhead at treetop level. Light speared down at them and then was gone, but she could hear it circling around for another pass.
"Dad!" Sarah yelled, sliding into the driver's seat. "Get in!"
"Comin'!"
Rei pulled him up into the passenger's side of the truck. She still wasn't sure if Rei was completely tracking on what was happening, but he'd definitely picked up on the urgency. Sarah killed the truck's headlights and stomped on the gas, lurching forward into the wet, dark woods.
The very, very dark woods.
"Damn," she whispered, braking. She'd been driving this old road a few times a year ever since she got her license, but she didn't think she could do it blind. The minute she turned on the headlights, the helicopter would find them and could follow wherever they went. It was her desperate hope that if they kept the headlights off, visibility was so poor in the fog and the rain that it wouldn't be able to find them by the glow of the taillights alone.
Except it won't matter if I kill us by driving into a tree.
Paralyzed by indecision, she clutched the steering wheel. The chop of the helicopter's rotors shivered the air. It sounded like it was either landing on the beach or hovering right above it.
"Sarah, we gotta move," her dad said.
"I can't. If I turn on the lights, they'll find us."
Rei spoke up suddenly. "Can't you see?"
"No," she said, surprised. "Can you?"
"Yes. I'll guide you."
"You sure this is a good idea?" her dad asked as she put the truck in gear and began to creep forward.
"Rei says he can see." She kept forgetting her dad couldn't understand him. "He can help me drive."
Rei reached out a hand to curl his fingers over the steering wheel beside her own. With small tugs, he guided the truck as Sarah crawled at less than ten miles an hour—horrifically slow, and yet much too fast. She couldn't see a thing beyond the glow of the instrument panel and the rain slopping on the windshield in the wipers' wake.
From the sound of things, the helicopter was on the move again, cruising above them. Very low above them. The noise rattled her teeth.
"The road is ahead," Rei said quietly.
"Hold on. I'm stopping."
She braked just before turning out onto the lake road. The side of Rei's hand rested against hers on the steering wheel; his shoulder, through the jacket, was pressed to hers.
The helicopter skimmed across the treetops in a flash of lights, ghostly in the mist.
"It's behind us," her father said. "Go."
Sarah gunned the engine, turning out onto the road. She glimpsed distant taillights far down the road, but there should be few people out in this weather and at this time of night.
Yeah, more opportunity for the Men in Black to grab us. Lucky us.
The truck responded sluggishly with the weight of the trailer behind it. Not that she wanted to go fast. In pitch darkness and rain with no headlights, thirty-five felt more like eighty.
"Rei," she said, her voice breathless with tension, "I can't see if we're coming to a curve. You've got to tell me when I need to slow down."
"I will," he answered softly.
"Turnoff to the Muller place is coming up," her dad said.
"How do you know? You can't see either!"
Gary flashed her a quick grin. "You might think you know this corner of the county pretty good, kiddo, but you ain't got nothin' on the old man."
"I'm slowing down, then," Sarah declared.
She braked, her heart rate slowing markedly with every five miles that the speedometer dropped. At least until headlights appeared in her rearview mirror, making her realize that with her headlights off and the trailer blocking her brake lights, other vehicles couldn't see her. It was coming up fast behind her.
"There," Rei said quietly, just as her father said sharply, "Turn here!"
Sarah wrenched the wheel and pulled off, wincing as the bottom of the truck scraped something in the dark. The trailer rattled along behind them, and the other vehicle, whatever it was, roared past on the road with no awareness of their presence.
They also seemed to have lost the helicopter. Sarah could hear it flying a search grid as they jolted along the shortcut through the Mullers' back pasture, but it was staying behind them, at the lake.
"We got away." Sarah discovered she was grinding her teeth when the words came out indistinct. She forced her jaws to unclench. Her teeth were chattering, her whole body shaking.
"I'll take over," her dad said, reaching over Rei to pat her arm. "Hear me, hon? You did good, but I got this. You take a break now."
"Your hips," she protested shakily. "Driving is—"
"Something I've been doin' for forty years. Take a break, punkin."
She was too shaken to argue. It was all hitting her now, the chase and the fear and—and being hunted, that helicopter had been hunting them, and Rei vanishing into the cold dark water and not coming out—
"Hey, sweetheart. It's okay. You did good, kid."
They stopped to change drivers, and she ended up on the outside, with Rei's arm around her. That was awfully nice, wet though they both were. She leaned, shivering, into his solid side. He was shaking too, but from cold, she thought, not fear. She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling like a terrible coward.
"You were very brave," Rei said quietly.
Sarah opened her eyes, looking up into his warm amber ones.
"Hey, kiddo," her dad said, "think you can ask Blue to do for me what he was doing for you back there, show me which way to go and all that?"
Rei put a hand on the steering wheel. "He can understand you," Sarah said. "It's just that you can't understand him."
"Yeah, well, keep that in mind, so if he says I need to do something in a hurry, you gotta translate."
The truck jolted into motion.
It was a less seamless process with her dad driving. Rei guided them around obstacles, but Sarah had to translate any detailed instructions, such as the need to stop for gates blocking the road. Still, they managed, with Rei as their eyes and her father's strong, capable hands on the steering wheel, and Sarah as the translator mediating between them.
When she thought back on this night afterward, the fear was not entire gone—but it had been eclipsed by the memory of those last miles, and Rei's quiet voice, guiding them home through the dark.