“Ish, isha, ishan, ishi, isham, ishama, and ishoh?” Jack said carefully.

“Yes, correct,” Orv said. He, Jack, and Ki were standing outside in a light drizzle. They were supposed to be paying attention to a presentation of the flight mechanics of Tinaria’s battle airships, but Ki had already explained it to them in detail. The actual airships would be brought out in a few days' time, which all of the recruits noticed seemed entirely too early.

Apparently, as a rule, Tinarian Militia recruits didn't start working with airships of any kind until at least six months of training. Genys had announced the night before that they would start the training a bit early for 'no reason in particular' and Jack and Orv had immediately had Ki explain everything she knew about the airships that very night. Now they were taking full advantage of their time for language learning.

Jack continued. “Alright. So if I’m using the verb ‘to fight’ it would be—”

“Literally it’s ‘to war’” Orvalys interrupted. “But yes, go on.”

Jack pointed to himself, “Ish woka.” He pointed to Orvalys and said, “Isha wokan.” Then he motioned to Ki. “Ishan wokan.” There was another recruit a short distance away and Jack pointed at him next, “Ishi wokan.” He then motioned to all three of them standing huddled in the rain. “Ishamam wokam.” And finally, he motioned to everyone else who was currently watching the presentation beside them. “Isham wokam.”

“Yes!” Orv said excitedly. Ki was nodding as well.

“Jaak ishk rintan,” she said. “Ish inta isha akon Yarval han yohton kord ki Tinarial.”

“Did you get that?” Orv asked.

“I think she said I speak Yarvan better than Tinarian,” Jack answered. He didn’t know if he should take it as a compliment or not.

“Va,” Ki said, bemused. Jack was suddenly aware at how quickly she had seemed to pick up on what he and Orvalys said to each other in English. It was a little uncanny, especially because they generally tried to make it a point not to spend a lot of time speaking in front of her, let alone explaining the nuances. Orv insisted it wouldn't be necessarily 'tactically an advantage' to do so. Jack had initially assumed English couldn’t be as difficult as Tinarian, and Ki had spoken that fluently for years, so she was bound to pick up some of what they were saying, but it startled him how much she understood. Some part of his brain logged that information away and put a little caution flag by it.

Jack himself was certainly struggling with both languages. He quite liked the way Yarvan sounded and felt—it seemed to make a little more sense. Though his tongue still needed a lot of practice before it was ready to handle the words and phrases with any degree of fluency, Yerevan at least felt within his grasp. Tinarian still seemed like an insurmountable task.

“How are your Tinarian possessives?” Orvalys asked him. “My, your, her, his, their, our, and its?”

Jack shook his head. “Not good.” He scrunched up his face trying to make the sounds. “Tdri, yr, tichti, tichta, tirij, kirlt and rirl. That last one doesn’t even really come out of my mouth, it's like my tongue doesn’t make that sound.”

“It takes practice,” Orvalys said. “Think of it more of just the word ‘rural’ in English in a very southern drawl.”

Jack tried it out. “Eh, I like Yarvan better. Though I have no idea why a ‘k’ or an ‘m’ should ever come after ‘sh.’ Could you say them again for me?”

Orvalys nodded. “Ishk, ishak, ishank, ishik, ishamk, ishamak, and ishohk,” he said perfectly. “My, your, her, his, their, our, and its—you’ll get it, but Tinarian is the goal here anyway. That’s what we should be working on.”

“I know,” Jack agreed. “I guess I’m just more interested in the less useful one.”

Raaf reached out and grabbed his shoulder. Her grip was surprisingly powerful. “Ishak yim hahi som,” she said, and then in heavily accented English she added, “you word is very good. Strong good.”

Jack immediately had the strangest urge to pull away. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be touched, or that she had caught him off guard or particularly startled him. It was more like in his mind's eye a vibrantly visual thought suddenly appeared of himself moving away from her and because of that, it seemed like the right thing to do. He slowly did so, exactly mirroring the thought, and she loosened her grip. At the same time, as she maintained contact, he felt a shiver down his back. The peculiar strength of the ‘vision’ faded quickly and he was left wondering if it had actually been as strong as it seemed. A few moments later the significance seemed to dissipate completely, like a dream or sense of deja-vu that hits poignantly but dissipated and dissolved.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

What the—?

Jack resisted the temptation to look down questioningly as Orvalys, which is what he usually did when something inexplicable or peculiar happened. The homunculus usually had an explanation, but Jack would have to ask later. He didn't want Ki to think he was acting strange, or do anything else that may draw attention to the small group. He already found his mind explaining the strangeness of it away.

“Isha ante,” he said politely and tried to casually move further from her. For a split second, a wave of confusion crossed Ki's face, but it quickly shifted to a polite smile.

She nodded, and said, “Isha ante wokyor,” before throwing her hand up in a goodbye and walking away into the crowd.

Jack noticed that their surroundings had brightened a bit–or at least he could see the other recruits more clearly than he could in the haze a few moments ago.

The storm must be passing.

----------------------------------------

Across reality, a lone ship shuddered through the infinite blackness of space a million miles from where it had begun. Fuel ran out weeks ago, and inertia alone now carried the little vehicle inconceivably further than it was ever crafted to go. It had been designed as a temporary transport from the massive asteroid of frozen oxygen to the anchored structure that housed the miners and not much more than that. In fact, the air supply only lasted about half as long as the fuel had, but now the shifter didn’t really need either of them.

It had simply pointed the little ship in the right direction and pushed the throttle open to the maximum level in an attempt to reach the highest speed possible before running dry. The gauges, buttons, and levers were incredibly complicated, but the shifter could simply rely on the muscle memory of the corporeal form it currently wore.

It wasn’t inhabiting the actual body of the woman who had been called Natala, not directly anyway. That body had been used up—dissolved—broken down into its base components so that the shifter could recreate it, organize it exactly as it had been. That way the shifter could access skills woven into a body by years of habit and practice. It recreated every muscle fiber in exactly the right place, every cell realigned so that when it reached for the controls the hands already knew what to do.

But that was weeks ago, when the body had still looked like Natala. When the oxygen ran out the shifter had felt the lungs labor and then stop drawing in air. The skin turned blue and the eyes bulged. It wasn't long before the muscles spasmed and the heart jittered to a halt. The electrical signals running through the brain flickered and died, but the shifter watched this all happen from somewhere underneath it all, unaffected. The monster forced control into cold muscles and continued to direct the ship toward a certain distant point, even when the central heating unit failed and those muscles began to freeze and crack.

After a few weeks, there wasn’t much of the original body left. Things rot much slower in space, but even so, they do degrade. As pieces sluffed off inside the space suit, the tendons of the arms maintained their grip. The shifter made sure of that. Even after the eyes went cloudy and the brain had been subject to the ravages of resident extremophile bacteria the shifter kept along.

And now it was close.

The gateway appeared first as a speck of light, twinkling in the distance. The colors then became visible and not long after the shifter could peer through into the world beyond.

It was the correct world.

But there was a problem. The slight drag of a million cosmic particles over weeks had redirected the craft ever so slightly. It was the smallest of redirections, maybe a half of a half of a degree, but due to the extrapolation of that redirection along thousands of miles, the ship was going to miss the gateway completely. The steering mechanisms had died with the ship’s power, and that was also the last time it had pointed in exactly the right direction. In moments the shifter would pass by powerless and be lost to the emptiness of the infinite nothing beyond.

Quickly it cracked the petrified arms free from the wheel. One crumbled immediately into frostbitten pieces, and the other held together just long enough to punch the eject code into a console on the left. The front panel of the craft suddenly depressurized and popped open. The shifter felt whatever liquid remained in the body begin to boil in the vacuum.

With the only remaining finger, the creature reached to lift the final lever which would disattach the panel entirely. As it did so, the whole arm threatened to fall apart. It only needed this one final move—one last action before abandoning that body—only one more bit of usefulness before it surrendered the muscle memory forever. The finger finally made contact with the lever and the shifter pushed, snapping it off with the force.

But the lever engaged. The panel lifted away and the shifter immediately assumed its true form, casting aside the old skin and launching itself toward the floating gateway.

Its aim was accurate—in line with that magnetic pull, it felt throughout its being. In the darkness of deep space, it careened forward. There was no sun out here, no rays of irradiation to destroy it on a molecular level. The only light was coming from the gateway itself, and that was the darkening light of a murky afternoon on another world. Even those would harm it, but it would find cover fast.

It would find another form to inhabit.

A few moments later the shifter cleanly sailed through the opening. As it did so, the shining iridescent border sputtered and evaporated until it was nothingness, leaving behind the broken ship and floating dust that had been a person consumed by darkness