1942664419 (S) (23 page)

“What do you mean?”

He recoiled when I reached for his back. “I can’t give you what you need, Jess.”

Ice carved through me, as if someone had ripped open our safe haven and exposed me to the frigid alien night. “What are you talking about?”

“You deserve more. You deserve everything you’ve ever wanted.”

But he
was
everything I wanted. How could he not understand that?

He covered his face. “I’m sorry. I wish I was … ”

I pulled his hands away. “You wish you were what?”

“Human.” His gaze lowered to the thin covering of brush and leaves beneath us.

My jaw fell, but I was too stunned to snap it shut. “What makes you think I want you human?”

His gaze returned to me before dropping back to the forest floor.

A flutter ran through my stomach. He wasn’t human, and Erescopians didn’t … I flinched. Visions of the clean, bare space between all Erescopians’ legs flashed through my mind.

“David, I wasn’t asking you to have sex with me. I was just … ” What
was
I asking him? Intimacy, yes, but how far would I have gone—if he were human?

“You might not be asking for that now, but what about later?” He ran his fingers along the denim between my legs. I did my best not to shiver. “Your body heated here when we kissed. In time, you will want more than I can give you.”

“No. I don’t need that. I need you. I don’t care about that.”

His eyes narrowed.

He’s empathic, you idiot. He probably read every dirty little thought running through your mind.

I gulped. “There are other ways to be intimate. We can touch each other. Are there places that feel good for you? You can show me where, and—”

He closed his eyes and sighed. The sound drained me.

“Okay, well, you like it when we kiss, and you sure liked it when I kissed you other places too, we can go with that as a start and—”

“Jess.” The tenor of his voice was so formal, so cold.

“We can make this work. We can. I want to be with you more than anything.” I sat back, trembling.

His smile didn’t reflect in his eyes.

“You have to believe me!”

His fingers whispered down the side of my cheek. “I do. The emotion I feel from you is deep and real, but your humanity one day will drive your desire to reproduce.”

Huh?

“I won’t take that away from you. It’s not fair.”

My already tense muscles turned to stone as David flopped to the ground. He shivered, but the air was perfectly warm.

Reproduce? Where had that come from? I was only eighteen. I hadn’t even thought of kids yet. Right?

My thoughts glossed over.
I lay in a hospital bed, smiling as David hands me a squirming blanket. Tears stream down my cheeks as I see my baby’s eyes for the first time.
A baby. A normal, human baby. But that wasn’t possible. I was in love with someone from a different species.

In an instant, my heart transformed from longing for David to aching for a child that may never be. I slid beside him.

I could deny wanting children, but what good would it do? He could see inside me. No secrets. “I’m willing to give up a family to be with you.”

His muscles hardened against me. “I know you are, but I care for you too much to ask that.”

I clung to him. “Please, David.”

“I’m sorry I did this to you. It wasn’t fair. This hurts now, but someday you will thank me.”

Wait. What?
“Sorry you did
what
to me.”

He turned and caressed my cheek. “When we first met, before I had a chance to know you, I inserted a thought in your mind to make you trust me.”

“You told me this already.”

He lowered his eyes. “When I researched your culture, I found that human pairings start with physical attraction. That attraction moves to trust, and trust moves to love.” His gaze returned to mine. “I took on the appearance of a man you were already attracted to. You moved quickly to love because you already had absolute trust in me. Trust that I
forced
you to feel.”

“Are you telling me that what I feel for you isn’t real?”

He frowned. “No. Your feelings are very real. I’m saying your emotions moved in a direction that I didn’t intend, and if we’d both had time to consider before I … ”

I pummeled his shoulder. “How dare you! How dare you belittle everything that’s happened to us? How dare you make light of the way we both feel?”

I punched again, and he grabbed my hands. “I’m only doing what’s right for you. You deserve better than me. You deserve someone who can give you a family and a real life on Earth.” His grip tightened. “Not someone who needs to put on an insulted coating just to touch you.”

His words smothered me with the blunt, driving force of a tank. I wanted to fight him, to scream that it wasn’t true, but everything he said
was
true.

But did it matter?

“I felt you inside me. You care just as much about me as I do for you.”

He shook his head, but his eyes lightened and seemed to gloss over in the green tinted glow from the leaves. I tried to pull from his grasp, but he held firm.

My hands clenched beneath his grip. “Why are you lying to me?”

He looked down.

“Stop it.” I swallowed the most painful gulp of my life. “I know you love me.”

“What I feel doesn’t matter.”

“I think it does.”

His neck flinched. “Are you done hitting me? Because I’d very much like to let you go, now.”

I pursed my lips. We both knew I couldn’t hurt him. I flexed my red knuckles. It was more likely I’d hurt myself. Damn he was solid. Like hitting a wall.

David offered his arm and let me cuddle into his chest. At least he gave me that much. For now, I’d take it. But the reality of his words slowly set in. We couldn’t be together. We weren’t meant to be together. There were hundreds of billions of miles between habitable planets for a reason.

We lay back, and I concentrated on the luminescent, warming veins in the leaves over us. The glow faded in some points but gained strength in others. I closed my eyes and burned the design to my memory, clutching to that moment before it faded forever.

28

A fuzzy, green glow surrounded me. I supposed someday I would get used to the odd color of alien day.

I shivered; cold despite the warming leaves above. I slipped on my shirt. How had last night gone so wrong? The bedding beside me lay empty, but was still warm with David’s indentation. Had he left as soon as he could? Abandoned me? I sucked in a calming breath. He’d never do that. Not while there was a chance of us getting home.

But if we ended up stuck here, would he change his mind? Would we be able to be together?

“Jess!” David’s voice boomed from outside, shooting ice through my veins.

I pushed up the branches and scooted through. David stood a few feet from the opening.

“What is it?” I asked.

His eyes remained fixed straight ahead. I followed his gaze to a small lump on the ground surrounded by sticks. I tensed, realizing those thin, rigid canes were not sticks, but legs pointed up toward the sky. “Edgar!” I sprinted toward the prone creature, David close behind. “Why didn’t you go to him?” I screamed, turning Edgar off his back.

David knelt beside us. “I couldn’t. Not without taking your air.”

Oh, yeah. Big invisible air bubble. We had to stay close to each other. So much for him being able to abandon me.

Edgar’s abdomen rose and relaxed in shallow breaths. I ran my fingers through the coarse hairs on his back. “What could have happened to him?”

David rose, his legs shaking. “Jess.” He took a step away and hesitated when I didn’t follow. “Come here.”

“No. I’m not leaving him.”

“I really think you need to see this.”

I wiped the tears pooling in my lashes. Gah! It was a big, icky spider for goodness sakes. If we were on Earth, and he was smaller, I would have stepped on him.

But we weren’t on Earth, and he wasn’t smaller. He was Edgar. And I needed to help him. I just didn’t know how.

David stepped closer to the large trees outside our safe haven, toward a silvery reflection behind the branches.

“What is that?” I asked.

David circumvented the trees. His jaw dropped.

Gathering the panting, drooling spider in my arms, I followed and gasped as the trees opened to a huge blob of gelatinous reflective goo—the same goo that hung from the trees two days ago—the pieces of the ship, all neatly herded into a blob of mercury-like blech.

“It’s impossible,” David whispered.

I glanced down at the quivering creature in my arms. Impossible? Maybe, but not improbable for our ten-legged friend. I took a canister from my backpack and brought some water up to Edgar’s fangs. He drank greedily, not raising his head.

“Be careful,” David said. “We don’t have much water.”

“We eventually won’t have any water if we can’t get off this rock. If he’s dehydrated and can’t do his thing, we’re screwed.”

Edgar rolled out of my arms and thumped onto the forest floor.

I crouched as he inched toward the mound of silvery goo. “You don’t have to do more now.” I rubbed his back. “You should rest.”

My small friend trilled, and limped toward the glob. He sunk one of his front legs into the goo, and the mass shifted away from the trees. The blob rounded the trunks and moved down a small decline in the forest floor. Edgar limped behind the huge form, prodding the blob forward like it was a herd of protoplasm.

“He’s sending it to the nerve center,” David said.

“Stubborn little dude, isn’t he?”

I picked up the giant spider and held him close to the mound. He poked the material once more. His hind section trembled as he chittered, and the blob, looming over my head, advanced at his command.

“Why does something so big do what he tells it to do?” I asked, advancing with Edgar still in my arms, keeping him within reach of the goo.

“It looks like one big entity to us, but remember there are thousands of smaller parts that coalesce to make the whole. All of them are smaller than him.”

Thank goodness they weren’t smart enough as a whole to realize they could crush all of us in one swoop.

The mound picked up speed, gathering more droplets into the whole as we followed. Edgar cuddled into my arms, poking out a leg intermittently to prod his herd forward.

David and I slowed as we approached the staircase. The nerve center was invisible, encased within an opalescent globe. The mound we had been prodding sprang forward, bouncing back from the sphere once before disappearing inside, adding its mass to the larger, circular form of the ship. The shape twisted and shimmied to the right, but remained whole.

“You certainly have been a busy bee.” I kissed Edgar over the top of his center eye. His coarse hair scratched my lips, but I didn’t care. He deserved the attention.

David ran his fingers through the liquid metal. He closed his eyes as if searching through the material with his mind.

I placed Edgar down on a soft patch of pink moss. “Is there enough to get home?”

David’s hand slipped free. “Yes, but the new material isn’t regulating itself. It should be a sphere, like it was when we walked up.”

“Does Edgar need to do anything?”

“No. It should happen naturally. Unless … ” He closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“Unless what?”

“Unless there’s not enough power.”

David took a deep breath and sunk his hands into the material. A frown disfigured his face before he slumped onto a nearby boulder and rubbed his forehead.

My jaw clenched as I stifled a snarl. “You’re kidding, right? Edgar did all that work, and we don’t have enough power to turn the damn thing on?”

David shrugged. “It looks like there is enough of an electromagnetic wave for the inner rings to hold, but not enough for an entire ship to form. And definitely not enough to break through this planet’s atmosphere.”

“So how do we make it go? There has to be a way.”

“We’d have to find a way to generate a six
pouleian
chain reaction, and we’d need twice that much power to get back to your solar system.”

“
Our
solar system,” I said, meeting his gaze. “We both live there now.”

His nose flared in that
we’re never going home
way. It took all my willpower to keep from slapping the expression off his face.

I rubbed my jaw, easing the tension. “Let’s think this through. What can we use for power?”

“We’d need an energy supply. Something able to produce concentric, pulsated power.”

I lowered my hand. “Like a battery?”

“Yes, but one—”

“That could power a small city?”

David furrowed his brow. “Yes. What are you thinking?”

I dashed back to our hideaway, David at my heels. Taking a deep breath, I unzipped my backpack and took out the tuna fish can sized battery the nice recycling-alien had given me as a souvenir. “Will this do?”

His eyes widened. “Where did you get that?”

“Call me resourceful. Will it work?”

He took the can and turned it over. “There is not much energy left inside. It should have been recycled.”

“They said it could still power a city for a few months.”

He hefted the can in his palm as if weighing it. “I don’t know about that, but it is probably enough to break the atmosphere.”

“And what about getting home?”

David rubbed his chin. “The static from leaving the atmosphere should be enough to power molecular cohesion for two days. That’s what I learned in basic training, at least. It is an emergency protocol, a last resort.”

“I like resorts. Then what?”

He stared at the ground before meeting my gaze. “I wouldn’t know until we got up there. It all depends on how strong the gravity is in the outer atmosphere.”

“You are saying we could get stuck up there, adrift.”

He nodded.

I wrapped my arms around my waist, hugging myself for strength. “I guess we need to pray for low gravity then, huh?”