The fires were burning dim now, and the heat that came from the conflagration was no longer so oppressive, but the ash in the air stung my eyes and hurt my throat. The toga I wore over a tunic was covered in the stuff, and I realized it would be best to take the garment off. The second layer had helped stave off some of the heat at first, but it was redundant now. I had never been near such a large fire, even in all my travels with Aileen, and the heat it radiated was insufferable.

The two of us were stuck where we were though, huddled in a little alcove between two stone buildings, till the fire in front of us died down enough for us to walk out. That would be soon, but I realized that we would be waiting here a little longer, because I would have to wait for Aileen to be ready to leave.

She was still staring at the inferno we had just witnessed, tears rolling down her cheeks and streaking through the ash that was caked to her face. She was not wailing, and she was not crying out like she had before. Now she was just watching, as streams of water fell from her eyes. I wondered if the way that her species cried was unlike mine, and if she could even ‘ugly cry’ like so many ‘normal’ humans do.

Her continued silence was broken by something which I had come to expect of her. A question.

“Do you remember…the woman?” she asked, her voice quiet.

“Who?” I asked in response. She had stopped doing this quite a long time ago. That is, she had stopped asking questions that did not give enough context for me to understand them. This was a regression back to old ways then. Perhaps this was caused by her grief?

“Stella. The woman, you loved?” she said, repeating the question but with the context I needed to understand. Her face was still unchanged, and her voice was almost monotone. She stared forward, like she was looking past the fire at something very far away.

I smiled, and felt nostalgia for my lost love. I had come to accept what had occurred by now though, and so all the time I’d spent with her in my life, the good and the bad, was a joyful memory rather than a regretful one. “Of course I remember her. How could I forget?”

“What is love?” Aileen asked. “For your kind?”

I shrugged. The idea that her kind did not have love did not surprise me. When I first started travelling with Aileen I may have been sad or horrified that she could call herself human, but not experience love. Now, I had accepted such strange oddities. I then looked toward the blaze before us, almost mirroring Aileen’s expression. “Like this. Like a fire that burns hot and bright. It is…it is not controlled, you don’t get to choose it, and it can hurt you. It is like fire. You want it, because otherwise you are cold.”

I could not tell for sure, but it looked like more tears fell from her eyes at that moment.

“This...fire.” Aileen said. “This fire will burn you out...Do not show me anymore of this love, I do not wish to see it in your histories, or know it. It is horrible.”

I looked at her with some confusion, but then sighed and accepted it. I would understand in time what she meant. After deciding that, I launched into what had become my normal response to her questions, a question of my own.

“Does your kind have love?” I asked.

Aileen blinked. Her tears flow was stemmed, but she continued to stare forward. For a long moment she said nothing. Every now and then, she would blink. Then, I saw a little smile on her face, as if I had reminded her of something nice. It made me curious.

“Is that a yes or a no?” I pressed. Now I was interested, and not just asking a question in response to hers per a routine.

“Yes.” she said, and she wiped away tears from her eyes, careful not to smudge ash into them. Her wide blue eyes looked bright and clean against her ash covered face.

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“Well then, what is it like?”

Once more, she stopped. I could not tell what she was doing whenever she did this, rare as it was. I had always assumed that she was just thinking, but in recent times I had become less sure of that. Her mind, her soul, had more computing power than the entire modern world. Why would she ever need to think?

“It is patient, and kind. The stories of love you’ve shown me now…they are about pride and envy. They tell the world of their love. Love does not do that. Your love tears down. It is selfish. It is angry. It looks for mistakes. Love does not do those things. Love is honest. Love is trust, hope, protection, and perseverance. It-”

“-it never fails.” I finished. My chest ached as I said the words. The ache came from want and from envy. I had showed Aileen so much of human history, and at the end she had concluded that our love, the thing which we wrote poems and songs about, which so many of us sought incessantly, was insufficient and terrible. Yet here she was, quoting back to me our very own beliefs about love. “Where did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” she asked, her eyes now moving to look at mine, as if searching for my meaning.

“Who taught you that verse? It isn’t exact, but you paraphrased a verse from the Bible.” I explained.

“Is that the religious book you used to read a lot?” Aileen asked.

I nodded. “Yes, that one. What you said is a verse in it, about love.”

“Which love?” Aileen said. She looked confused. “My kind did not exist when that was written. It could not have been our love that you humans were talking about, and that verse does not describe your kind’s love.”

“No, you are right, it doesn’t. I that perhaps the verse was trying to describe perfect love. Ideal love. Not like…not like romantic love or even human love.”

“But it is human love. I am human.” Aileen replied.

I considered her words before speaking. I looked at her and smiled. “But how did you know that verse?”

She shrugged, and then leaned her head against my shoulder, as if tired. “It is wisdom that my kind have. It is something that was once told to us by our ancestors, and that my love told me.”

“You - you have someone? Who are they?” I said, my eyes going wide and accidentally catching a little ash in them. I winced and tried to get it out of my eye as quick as possible. It was not long before Aileen noticed my struggle, and extended a hand towards my eye. I paused by attempts at wiping the ash away, which was only worsened by my fingers rubbing my eyes, and tried my best to stand still. Her Manus Dei reached out with a precision that kept me from even feeling it and cleaned all of the foreign matter out of my eyes. It didn’t feel like my eyes had been washed, but they felt better than even before I had caught a piece of ash in them.

“Yes.” Aileen replied, and she smiled. “They are the one who initiates the jumps, and I speak to them when I am quiet and staring. They are a helper to me, and a partner in research.”

And just like that, when I had thought Aileen was out of revelations to give me, I was amazed again. This entire time I had been working not with one of her kind, but two. I remembered all the times she had gone quiet and stared onwards, as if in another place, and realized that in those times she had not been thinking - as I suspected - but she had instead been speaking to someone somewhere else.

“Could I meet this someone?” I asked, grinning a bit at the thought of Aileen with a significant other. Did they also look just as childlike? Were they another girl or a boy? It raised so many questions I had not thought of before.

“No. They cannot come here. It is already difficult with one of us here. Two of my kind would ruin the experiment.” she explained, and then her face fell a bit. She reached out to the air, and caught a piece of burning ash. She closed her fist around it and then opened it again. There was dust covering her palm, much like the rest of the ash on the two of us. “What happens when your love burns out?”

It was hard question. So often you hear songs of never ending love, and of love that would last till the end of time. I wanted to believe those songs. I always had thought I’d find true love one day. I had always thought that there would be something magical and wonderful about it. All of that had been true of the love that I had found, but it had not lasted. Now, I was not so sure.

“Well, once that love is gone, we must move on. We must die.”

“Time. Chaos.” Aileen said, and then stood up. It was apparent that she was ready to leave. The fire was getting cooler, and we’d be able to escape our little alcove without being incinerated. “To a cold end.”

“To what?” I asked.

“I do not know.” Aileen replied. “Perhaps that is why I could not find it sad or beautiful, the love that you have. I empathize, I understand. That is why I gave you the time you had with Stella. However, it is not your kind’s most wonderful thing. It is your most dreadful. It is the most terrible thing about you. It is horrible. It would better, that you be alone.”

“Why?”

She looked down at the ash in her palm and frowned. “Because it will burn you to ash. All of you with it.”