“Bai.”
“Aerra bai... Little star?” I made the pinching “little bit” gesture with my finger and thumb again, then pointed at his sandy stars before pointing up at the sky.
He stood with such sudden force that I would have stumbled backwards if not for the firm hold on my hand.
“Aerra bai,” he said once more, and it felt like confirmation.
This time, I really did smile. I couldn’t help it. It was so small, so aerra, but it was something. The tiniest little win. It made me ever so slightly less afraid.
He’d said something to me, and I’d understood him.
Now I just needed to figure out why he kept mentioning a little star. Was that important for some reason? Something about space travel? He kept repeating it, so it had to have some meaning to him.
I realized I was still smiling. The alien’s expression had softened somehow. It should have been impossible in a face as brutal and alien and angular as his, but there was no other way to describe it. The intense brightness of his eye felt slightly darker, a crackling golden warmth instead of blazing flame.
“Aerra bai,” he breathed, squeezing my hand slightly. His other hand came up to caress the side of my face, and my smile froze. “Aerra bai...” He sank his claws into my hair. “Aerra bai...”
He was looking at me and only me as he said it. He wasn’t trying to communicate something about an actual star in the sky. It wasn’t a message.
It was a name.
He was calling me little star.
The elation I’d felt at understanding him, the small victory of it, imploded around me. I grew colder, my jaw tightening with anxiety. There was no good or sane reason for this alien to be giving me some weird pet name.
There was no reason he should have taken me in the first place.
He wanted something from me.
Something that I promised myself he’d never fucking get.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Skallagrim
My little star looked unhappy. Its pink mouth thinned and twisted, and the openness that had been there a moment ago was gone. A sense of deep frustration throbbed in my river-smashed head. The frustration of not knowing where I was, who I was, or how to communicate with the one being in the universe who seemed to be able to ground me. I did not know what the little star was meant to be to me. Only that I could not risk losing it now.
“Whatever you are,” I rasped, sliding my claws out of its hair, “you are important to me. You will remain with me until I can figure out why.” And until I can figure out how to remain in the light without you.
I realized that I had essentially trapped this creature. It was not a mere animal to be trained or taken. Like me, it was conscious and competent, a sentient being. I had no name for its kind, but it was intelligent and emotive and starkly beautiful with its wide, wet eyes and moon-river hair. I was doing something terrible, maybe even unforgivable, by capturing it like this. Dimly, I remembered seeing a few others like it before we’d come here.
I took it from its people.
“There was no choice,” I said forcefully, as if trying to convince both myself and the little star of that fact. The sudden vehemence of my tone sent a wave of tension through the creature, and it flinched in my hold. The movement made the covered swells of its chest bounce, its cushiony abdomen sucking inward with a tight breath.
Everything about this creature seemed so starkly in opposition to myself. Small where I was large. Soft where I was hard. Delicate. Silken. Sweet.
There was a word for it. An important one.
I almost seized it before it was lost to the river. I snapped my jaws in irritation, and the little star gasped again and tried to shrink away from me.
I was scaring it.
“I don’t mean to,” I growled. “I am not trying to frighten you.”
I breathed out slowly and jerked my head away from the little star. I turned my attention to the river’s edge, studying it. The moonlight was bright tonight and I caught sight of my own reflection in the still water.
I nearly reared back with the shock of it.
I’d forgotten what I looked like, but even so I knew I did not look like myself.
I forced myself to confront the creature staring back at me. One blazing, maddened eye glowed like an ember in the water. The place where the other eye should have been, where I was convinced I’d had another eye before, was a mangled, dug-out mess of tissue. My hair was a harsh tangle about my shoulders, and somehow I knew that was all wrong, that I did not usually wear my hair that way.
A braid. It should have been fragrant with oil, shining and combed and arranged into a long braid, then tied at the end with a sleek metal clasp.
That was how a Bohnebregg male of my standing wore his hair.
A Bohnebregg male...
I tried to hold onto that thought, to follow it through the murk to some sort of conclusion, to connect it to other information about my life or this river or this world. But it slipped away. With a foul, frustrated grunt, I thwapped my tail against the water’s surface, shattering the image of a male I only halfway recognized and entirely rejected.
The little star said nothing, but I registered a tension in its hand as it tried to pull away from me. With a growl, I turned to face it once more.
“I will not hurt you,” I ground out. “I know I have done wrong by you. But I cannot...” My throat ached, and my voice sharpened in response to the feeling. “I cannot go back to the darkness without you.”
The little star stared back at me, mute and guarded. I forced myself to loosen my hold on its hand. Just slightly. Enough to indicate I did not wish to squeeze too hard.
But not enough to let it go.
“I will take care of you,” I rasped. “I will protect you, honour you, put your life above my own. You are my salvation and I will let no harm befall you. But make no mistake...”
A deep, primitive instinct spread dark wings inside me. An instinct that whispered, take, treasure, hoard. My spine prickled and my blood heated.
“Make no mistake. I will keep you. No matter the cost.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Suvi
The alien led me along the riverbank for what felt like hours, never letting go of my hand. It seemed as if he was looking for something but he didn’t even know what it was. Sometimes he would stop and look around, eye bright, as if on the verge of realizing something, only to jerk his head forward again with a deep growl and continue plodding onward. The only sounds were the gentle sloshing of the water, buzzing insects among the rushes, our footsteps, and the heavy scrape of his tail through the sand. I kept pace with him. Walking held the chill mostly at bay and gave me something to focus on. One foot in front of the other. Over and over again.
But I couldn’t keep it up forever. I slowed and started stumbling more often, then limping, pain radiating from where blisters had formed on my heels in my wet boots. The alien noticed and scooped me up into his arms without a word. I should have fought him. I should have wriggled and scratched him and screamed.