A day had passed since our discovery that there was no other exit from the carapace caverns. I had decided that I would begin a new project.
My canvas would be the section of wall at the back of the first hallway, which curved around a vaguely circular room. The rope ladder that gave us access to the second floor still dangled into the middle of the room, but that was actually convenient; I could tie the lantern to various points on the ladder to shed light at different angles while leaving my hands free.
My medium would be the chalk I had used before to mark the passageways. There was plenty still left, and though chalkwork had never been my favorite, it would do in a pinch. I did have to sigh as I ran the ridged pads of my fingers over the chalk. It would have been nice to have varying colors. If only I could tear through the walls and escape to my ship, oh, the options I would have… but what was the point of wishing?
The picture was clear in my mind’s eye. From a distance it would be the creature who had once inhabited this shell in my imagination, steady and stalwart. But up close, the shell would be filled with intricate patterns that hid careful designs and mysteries. Simple or complex; it all depended on your point of view.
I was still carefully outlining the outer shell when sounds from above alerted me to Zander’s return. I paused my work and watched as he climbed down the ladder. We had rested the night before, though sleep was optional for both of us, and he seemed happier now than he had been when we found the last dead end.
“I got a rubbing of that swirling pattern in the big room,” he said as he took the last step off of the ladder. He flashed a grin back at me, then turned back to the ladder so he could start twisting it around. “Not the whole thing, obviously, but enough to get a sense of it. You want to take a closer look at it, Si?”
“Maybe later,” I told him as I turned back to my work. “Why a rubbing, though?”
“The computers will run out of power eventually. We’ll need to move anything important from them into physical notes before they do.” A whirring noise came from behind me and I glanced over my shoulder; he had twisted the ladder up tight before releasing it, and it was now spinning its way back to its original position. “I don’t have much paper, but we can write on the walls. Well, unless you need all the chalk for your fancy project there.”
A smile twitched my mouth up as I looked back at the wall. “You can use some of the chalk.”
“Oh, good.” He wandered up next to me and peered over my shoulder at the line I was drawing. “Are you planning to tell me what this is gonna be?”
“That’s not the point,” I said, still looking straight ahead. “My understanding of the mural may differ from yours. Seeing how others react to what I create brings me just as much joy as the act of creation itself.”
“No pressure, then,” he muttered, which made me smile again. Then he backed off to make his way back to the entrance.
At least, that’s what I thought he had done. Five minutes later I realized I was wrong when he spoke up again from the back of the room.
“Have you ever wondered what it would be like to die?”
He had timed the question well; I had just lifted my hand off the wall so I could move to the side again, so I didn’t have to worry about marring the drawing with a sudden movement. I lowered my hand and turned around completely to find that he was sitting against the passage’s wall, looking down at where he held his hat in his hands.
I took a few steps towards him and settled down in the middle of the room, next to the lantern. “Yes,” I said as I crossed my legs and tucked my tail around them. “Many times.”
He nodded and looked back up at me. “You ever try to?”
That made me pause. Many species had cultural stigmas when it came to talking about death. Most had strict social norms regarding discussions about ending one’s own life. There were a few exceptions, of course, but it was still odd to hear the topic be brought up so casually.
“Yes,” I finally said in reply. “A few times.”
Nothing had worked, of course. Substances that would have been poisonous to most beings had been filtered and processed by my organs until they caused no damage at all. Asphyxiation had done nothing. Blunt trauma had led to my body healing in overdrive, knitting itself back together right in front of my eyes.
Zander didn’t look disturbed or offended by my answer. He simply nodded once, then looked back down at his hat. “I’ve never tried,” he said offhandedly, “not on purpose, anyway. But sometimes I wonder. When I do something crazy, like learning how to catch a bullet, am I really doing it for the challenge? Or deep down, am I rolling the dice at a chance for mortality?”
I frowned and leaned forward, studying him more closely. He kept turning his hat over in his hands again and again, and his face had settled into grim lines. Worried, then. But why? We had his father as a failsafe for escaping this place, even if that might take a decade or so -
Ah. That was the problem. I was surprised it had taken me so long to see it, given that the same concern persistently nagged at the back of my own mind.
“Don’t worry so much, Zander,” I told him with a flippant flick of my tail. He glanced back up at me again. “If you run out of things to explore here, we’ll just find other things for you to do. We’ll get you a project like the one I’m starting here. There’s no need to do anything drastic.”
He frowned as he looked over at my wall. “What, you want me to start making chalk art too?”
“If you like,” I said with a small smile. “Or I could teach you how to dance. Or we could focus on singing, or poetry… there are many art forms that require nothing more than your body and brain. What better way is there to pass the time?”
“Hmph,” he replied, still looking skeptical.
“It’s a better fate than boredom, at least.”
He snorted at that and put his hat back on his head. “Well, I suppose I’ve got a while to go ‘til that becomes a problem. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get desperate enough to take you up on that offer eventually.”
I leaned back and watched him as he got to his feet and ambled off towards the entrance. “You just let me know when you’re ready,” I murmured into the distance after him.
~
It took a little under a month for the last of our batteries to die.
The lantern was the last thing to go. It sputtered out suddenly just as I was in the middle of drawing a delicate flower with hundreds of tiny petals in the center of an expanding spiral. I paused my work, then hissed in displeasure. Without the lantern I couldn’t make out any detail at all. Just like that, my weeks of hard work had vanished from my sight.
I stood up from my sitting position and groaned, stretching my back out. Then I picked up the now-useless lantern and made my way back to the entrance.
I could just barely make out Zander sitting with his back against the outer wall. Based on his posture, he was probably reading his rope again. The thin rope was another one of his adventuring supplies, but he wasn’t putting it towards its usual purpose. Whenever the mood struck him - perhaps once a day - he would tie a new knot into it. Most of the time he just sat there, feeling the knots he’d already tied. I suspected it was a journal of some sort, but I hadn’t asked.
“It’s done,” I said with a regretful sigh. “No more light for us, not until someone comes to the rescue.”
Zander blinked up at me. He had adjusted his eyes weeks ago to help him see better in the dark, which was a handy trick. I wished I could do the same. True, I could still occupy myself with music or other pursuits, but my mural wasn’t even halfway finished. It would keep itching in my brain until I completed it.
“Sorry, Si,” he said in an honestly regretful tone. “I should’ve thought to keep the flashlight for you to use sooner.”
“It’s not your fault.” I sprawled out on the ground with my head on top of one of the rucksacks and stared up at the darkness that was the ceiling. “I just wish this was a proper cave. Maybe then we’d have a chance to grow bioluminescent moss, or something like that.”
There was a pause, and then Zander spoke. “Say that again?”
I glanced over in his direction. It looked like he was sitting up ramrod straight. “I wish this was a proper cave?”
“No, no - the moss! Bioluminescent moss!” He sprang to his feet and I heard his rope drop to the ground. “I could do that!”
I tilted my head to the side. “You could be moss?”
He blew a raspberry at me, which made me grin. Then he closed his eyes and focused.
The shift took longer, this time. Maybe it was because he’d never tried it before. In any case, after half a minute his skin suddenly started to glow with a soft purple light. He took off the rugged jacket he normally wore and frowned at his arms, then closed his eyes and tried again.
This time when the shift happened, he burned bright like a spotlight.
I screeched in an undignified manner and covered my eyes with both hands, moving so hastily that my claws scraped against the carapace on my head. “Too bright!” I yelled at him immediately. “Turn it down!”
“I know!” he replied, sounding flustered. “Oh, stars, I can still see it through my eyelids, that’s painful. Give me a sec -”
The brilliant light that had been trying to leak in through the edges of my vision disappeared, so I cautiously raised one hand. Zander was still glowing, and brightly enough to light up a large portion of the room around him. But it was no longer an eye-scalding light. It was comfortable and pleasant, just like him.
He let out a gusty sigh of relief. “Better?”
“Much better,” I confirmed with a grin.
~
“You’re standing too stiffly,” I told Zander. “Loosen up.”
More time had passed. It was difficult to keep track of the days as they would be measured by the outside world, but I would estimate at least a month had gone by since the lantern had died, perhaps two.
We had settled into a comfortable pattern, Zander and I. A period would be spent in my room with the chalk mural, with Zander sitting on the ladder as a light source while he worked on his knot diary or talked idly about whatever he was thinking of. When he got too restless we’d switch to roaming the caverns, looking into whichever mystery he wanted to investigate that day. When that became too boring for me, we’d go back to the entrance room and spend a period of time resting with Zander’s bioluminescence turned down to the dimmest setting he could manage. I usually spent the time meditating, though occasionally I slept.
That pattern was going to change now. I had noticed that Zander was getting more restless the past few ‘days’, and today he had finally admitted that roaming the caverns had lost its appeal. What he wanted was the opportunity to go somewhere new, but that was obviously impossible, so I had repeated my offer from before. He was skeptical, yes, but he was also ready to try a new path. Now the two of us stood in one of the larger caverns, ready for a different type of exploration.
I flicked my eyes over Zander’s now-relaxed shoulders and nodded. “Watch how I do it first, then try to do the same.” I started stepping in the proper pattern, smiling at the familiarity of it. “Right foot back. Left foot back. Feet together. Left foot forward. Right foot forward. Feet together.”
I turned to look at Zander and barely kept myself from laughing. He looked completely befuddled.
“We’ll slow it down,” I said with a gentle wave of my tail. “Here, you try. Right foot back.”
He stepped back, though he looked wary about it. “Why am I going backwards?”
“I’m teaching you the follower’s movements. Left foot back.”
His other foot moved backwards. “Follower?”
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“This is a two-person dance, with a leader and a follower,” I explained. “Feet together. It’s one of the classics and shows up in some form - left foot forward - or another in practically every world with a bipedal species. Right foot forward. Even you Humans probably have it.”
“I wouldn’t know,” he muttered as he stepped forward. “I never bothered with this part of Human culture.” He moved his feet together before I could tell him to.
“You’re getting it already,” I said with a grin. “Go ahead, try it again. No, it’s left foot first…”
It took a few tries, but eventually he settled into the pattern well enough, at least for a beginner. Once I was satisfied with his progress I tapped two claws together and asked him to stop.
“Now that you’ve got the footwork down, let’s try it with a partner.” I stepped up to him, then hesitated as I looked up. “Oh. I didn’t think this through.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked with a frown.
“You’re too tall,” I said simply, thumping my tail against the ground for emphasis. “This works better when the pair are around the same height.” I hesitated and pulled a face before waving my hand in the air. “Do you think you can…?”
He grinned and swept his hat off his head, bowing elaborately. “You need only ask.”
Then he shifted, and suddenly he was only a little taller than me. I nodded approvingly and stepped forward to get into position, then took his hands in mine. Stars, his hands were warm. I supposed that was only natural for a mammal. Still, it felt oddly nice.
I gently moved his left hand so that it was positioned on the side of my right shoulder and placed my own right hand against his shoulder. Our other hands laid palm-to-palm, with the tips of my claws just barely touching his fingertips. “This is the most traditional positioning,” I said in a rush, for some reason feeling like I had to justify the contact. “Some others do hands interlaced, or the off-hand against the side, or you can add in interlocked tails or tentacles… umm, I suppose that doesn’t matter.”
I felt like all my blood was rushing into my face, which was ridiculous. I had done variations of this dance thousands of times with hundreds of different partners. The fact that Zander was just standing there with a focused look on his face, waiting for my next instruction? That shouldn’t make a difference.
“Alright,” I said hurriedly, “let’s try this. I’ll count the time, just step in the same pattern that you did before and follow my lead. Ready?” He nodded. “Step, step, together. Step -” I let out a small oof as he stepped forward with the wrong foot, nearly knocking me off balance.
“Sorry!” he said immediately as he took a step back. “Just got confused.”
I huffed out a laugh. “Happens all the time when you’re starting.” I stepped forward, feeling a little more confident now, and grabbed his hand. “Let’s do that over again.”
There were plenty of false starts, but eventually we managed to get a smooth back-and-forth going. Zander’s shoulders had gone stiff again after he knocked into me the first time, but he relaxed as time went on and even started to look like he was enjoying himself.
Certainly I was enjoying myself. Having someone to dance with again was lovely; dancing with Zander in particular, with his hand warm on my shoulder and his palm against mine, was somehow even better. Though it was strange to see him standing at about the same height as me, and so close. I was used to craning my neck back to see him. Now I could even reach his hat, if I wanted to.
Which I did. I reached my right hand up and lightly flicked the front of the hat up a bit, then put my hand back into position before he could complain. “Why do you wear that all the time, anyway?” I asked, partially teasing but also authentically curious.
He actually made us pause the dance for a moment so he could tug the hat back into place. “I just like it,” he said with a grumble as we started moving again. “I always thought it looked nice.”
“It does,” I said quickly to reassure him. To tell the truth, I thought it looked more than a little silly, but I had gotten used to that silly hat on Zander’s head. Seeing him without it wouldn’t feel the same. “I’m curious, that’s all.”
That made him smile a little reminiscently. “I suppose I got the idea from my mother,” he said in a low voice. “She told me all sorts of Human folktales when I was growing up, from back in the ancient days. Gladiators, knights, footballers, that kind of thing.” I tilted my head to the side, not recognizing any of those words, but decided to let him continue. “But my favorite stories were about cowboys. They were these heroes of the middle ages, back when Humans were still planetbound. They’d roam around the land doing good deeds, stopping bad guys, and pulling brave stunts on horseback.” He sighed in a wistful way. “I wanted to be just like them.”
I nodded slowly. That did explain a great deal of Zander’s behavior. “So,” I said with a mischievous grin, “they are not half-cow and half-boy, then?”
He squawked so loudly in denial that I immediately fell over in a fit of laughter.
~
Bright lights blinding my eyes, never going away. A door that will never open, except when I wish it would remain closed.
Pokes and prods and unpleasant numbness, electric zaps when I try to curl in and defend myself.
A thin, tight face above mine, gray and long, with dark red eyes.
When I woke up I was already screaming and I couldn’t stop. It was him, he had come back somehow, and he would lock me up and never ever let me leave, not this time -
“Si!”
Zander was shouting next to me. His hair was rumpled and he only wore the undershirt and short trousers that he always used for sleeping. His skin was still in night mode as well, only letting off the faintest light to pool around the two of us. But it was enough light for me to see his face, his warm brown eyes filled with concern.
I didn’t, couldn’t think. I threw myself towards him and grabbed his shirt with both hands, burrowing myself into his chest as close as I could. For a heartbeat he sat very still; then he wrapped his arms around me and rested the side of his head against my skull so that I was surrounded by a tight embrace.
“I thought you didn’t like being touched,” he murmured against my head.
Replying was impossible. I just breathed shakily in and out, still pressed up close against his body. My heart was pounding and my head was a muddled mess, but warmth was slowly spreading into me from every place that we touched, and it helped, at least a little.
After a few moments, Zander started to hum a tune that I didn’t recognize. A Human melody, maybe. It was uneven and his voice cut out from time to time, but that didn’t matter. I was able to focus on his humming and my breathing and slowly, as the minutes passed, slowly my heart returned to a normal tempo.
Eventually I was able to think again. I released the stranglehold I had on Zander’s shirt, and he loosened his grip on me so I could sit up properly. I looked at his shirt and grimaced; my claws had gone straight through it. “Sorry,” I muttered in a low voice.
“Hey,” he said in a mock-scolding voice, “no apologizing.” Then he leaned back so he could look at me properly. “What happened, Si? You were screaming for at least a full minute there.”
Thinking back to the dream made my heart start to thump wildly again. Part of me wanted to push it away, tell him it was just a nonsense nightmare. But on the whole, I decided that perhaps it was time. Perhaps I was finally ready to get this off my chest.
I turned around so that I faced the darkness of the entrance hall, still sitting close to Zander but not quite touching him. As always, I could feel his presence with me, even if I couldn’t see him. Then I started to speak.
“You asked before where I came from, what kind of planet could produce another immortal.” My voice was raspy from my screaming, so I cleared my throat before continuing. “It wasn’t a planet. It was a person.”
He didn’t say anything, so I kept going. “I was… created, Zander. On a moon that doesn’t even have a name, deep in the Mechanical System. By a scientist,” I spat out the word with venom, “who was trying to find the secret to immortality through genetic experimentation.”
I looked down at my claws, eyes tracing the way they melded into the scales of my hands. What was it that he had said, that one time he deigned to tell me where I had come from? A mix of Peranese drake, Terran tortoise, Estafli jellyfish, Oiua iguadi, and on and on, all species chosen for their long lives and healing capabilities. Additional genes from a range of sentient species for adaptability, intelligence, and communication. All blended together until I was nothing like my composite parts, but something entirely new instead.
I remembered his face clearly now, as if he was right in front of me. He was a half-breed, part Koraian and part Unjati, tall and long-limbed with dry gray skin and dull red eyes. He had always been so emotionless. I could scream in his face and he wouldn’t even blink.
“He made me,” I continued, blinking rapidly, “but that wasn’t enough. He had to know how I worked. So he kept me locked in an observation room for years. Every day he’d come in and run, run these tests, injections or cuts or, or… he wanted to see if there were limits to what I could heal from. When there weren’t, he just decided that meant more tests were needed.”
Zander was silent behind me, but that was probably for the best, because the words were pouring out of me and I couldn’t stop. “Then one day, the restraint that held my right arm to the table broke in the middle of a procedure, and I - I killed him, Zander. I lashed out and cut his throat.” I looked down at my hands, which were clasped tightly together. Even now I could remember how it had felt when my claws tore into his skin. My voice shuddered as I kept talking through the tears that were building up in my throat. “And do you know the worst part? I wasn’t even the only experiment. I found others in the building. Most of them were dead. The rest died within a few weeks. I didn’t know how to keep them alive. But me, I lived, because I always live.”
I broke down fully into sobs, unable to hold it together any longer. It was true. From that first laboratory to the Scarlet Plague to the tsunami that had hit a coastal town in Orai when I was visiting on one of my art expeditions. I always survived, even when all those around me were taken.
A pair of warm arms wrapped around me, and Zander leaned forward to rest his head against the back of mine. I heard him whisper something, though I couldn’t quite make out what it was. Then he fell silent and let me cry.
Eventually the tears started to abate and I began to think more logically again. At some point during my crying spell I had leaned back against Zander’s chest, and I could feel his warmth through my entire body. I nestled into him a little deeper, half-thinking that I should probably move away, but mostly just wanting to stay right there for as long as I could.
“Hey,” he said after a few moments, his voice soft. “D’you feel a bit better now?”
I nodded against his chest, not quite trusting myself to speak.
“That’s good,” he said, squeezing me just a little. “Si… stars. I don’t even know what to say. I’m so sorry.”
“It happened over three thousand years ago,” I replied in a shaky murmur. “I should be over it by now.”
“Heavy stuff like that, it don’t leave so easy.” There was that edge in his voice again, the one I noticed every so often. The feelings he kept hidden away.
“You’re hurting too,” I said, leaning my head back to look up at him. I couldn’t quite see his face from my current angle. “Tell me about it.”
He let out a harsh chuckle and shook his head just slightly. “Mine’s stupid. It’s nowhere near as bad as yours.”
“That doesn’t matter. Tell me anyway.”
He was quiet for a long while, to the point that I thought he wouldn’t reply. Then, finally, he spoke.
“It’s just… sometimes people see me and they don’t know who I am, and they think, oh, another Human, and they ignore me. That’s fine. I prefer that, really. But when they do recognize me, it’s always, oh, you’re a Xinian! Can you do this? Can you do that? How do your powers work? Which other Xinians do you know?” He let out a long, frustrated sigh. “They look at me and see some imaginary person they’ve built up in their heads, not me.”
I hummed in agreement. I felt the same way sometimes, especially when people stayed to see me after a show. They always had an expectation for what I would be like, and they often seemed disappointed when I didn’t match what they had in mind.
“If it was just that, I could handle it,” he continued. “But the conversation always turns to people asking me to make other changes. Turn this water into booze! Make my friend’s hair pink! Oh, wait, you can’t do that? I thought real Xinians could make any change they wanted.” He growled and tightened his arms around me. “Well, sorry I’m not a real Xinian, asshole. Even the real Xinians have limits, y’know. You ever see a real Xinian make a star disappear? No? It ain’t for lack of trying, not for some of the madder ones I’ve met.” He took a deep breath, then let it out in a whoosh. “Sorry. I’m venting. And like I said, it’s all stupid compared to what you went through -”
“It’s okay,” I told him, curling my hand up so I could pat his arm. “You listened to me, didn’t you?”
“Mmm.” He paused again, then spoke hesitantly. “I think it wouldn’t hurt so much if I didn’t care, but I do care. About being Xinian, I mean. None of us half-breeds are as strong as our parents, but most can do more than I can.”
Ah; that was the real problem, wasn’t it? Not what others thought of him, but what he thought of himself.
“Hey,” I said as I curled my tail around his ankle and squeezed it gently. “We don’t get to decide what we’re born with. That’s life. We have to make do with what we’ve got.” I leaned against him and looked up. “But it’s okay to be upset about it. That’s life, too.”
He pressed his forehead against my head and mumbled something unintelligible, and I smiled a little. “Besides,” I added. “I think you’re fairly impressive already.”
“That’s just ‘cause you haven’t seen what the others can do,” he grumbled. “I know a guy who can create illusions that look absolutely real, and a gal who can shift the weather to be whatever she wants, and -”
“Zander,” I interrupted, fully grinning now. “I don’t just mean the reality warping, though that’s certainly impressive on its own. I mean you. How you’re always trying to do new things and grow as a person. How you immediately offered to help the people on this planet by doing what you do best. How you’re always warm and welcoming, quick with a smile. That’s who you are, and that’s extremely impressive in my books.”
“You kidding?” he said, lifting his head slightly so he could speak more clearly. “You’re the impressive one. You took a downright horrible introduction to the universe and turned it into a life full of beauty. You’re so dedicated to your work, and you share it with so many other people. And you’re the steadiest person I’ve ever known.” I chuckled at being called steady of all things, but he kept talking. “I’m glad I met you, Si.”
“Same here.”
“You sure about that?” he replied quickly, craning his head to the side so he could look at me properly. “If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t be stuck in this place right now.”
True. If I’d never met Zander, I would probably be hunkered down in my ship right now, deep in work on some project. Or perhaps I would be passing the time by parsing through articles from across the universe, looking for a lead on where to go next after the planet’s quarantine had ended.
I would have been content, spending that time by myself while I waited for the months to pass me by. But deep down, I also would have been very alone.
I turned my head to meet Zander’s eyes and smiled. “I’m sure.”