Alien Avatar: An Alien Sci-Fi Romance (18 page)

Marko stood under the awning of the dining hall and watched the Halians go about their afternoons. He appreciated the way that they mourned with celebration, and he could feel how genuinely happy they were - happy to be alive, happy to have known Jintak and the others who had died in the tunnels, happy to be carrying their legacy.

But he couldn’t make it work for himself. Watching them work and dance and laugh under the slate grey sky, listening to the sounds of joyful music getting lost in the drone of the steady rain. It all made him feel so small. He’d spent most of the afternoon in the kitchen, keeping his hands busy, freeing someone else to join in the wake.

The work was done now, and he was trying to figure out what to do with himself. He thought about going out and joining the dancers, but he couldn’t make himself move. He felt rusted over, like a force had taken over his body, seizing his joints, and that it took all of his energy just to walk or talk or think.

He wanted to find Naeesha, just to be with her, but she was off somewhere. He’d seen her like this once before, the first time one of her trainees had been killed in combat. She’d found the woman - a human like her - after a fierce firefight with Halian insurgents. Naeesha field stabilized her, carried her back to their transport, and tried to perform surgery while the autopilot took them back to base.

Marko had found her sitting in the back of the shuttle, covered in blood that didn’t belong to her, just staring. Not crying, not shouting, just
staring
. He wished he’d known better than to interrupt her that time. He’d interrupted to ask if she was okay. Naeesha didn’t say anything. She just turned her head until her gaze met Marko’s. The few seconds that their eyes locked were some of the most terrifying in his life.

He gave her space, making sure that nobody bothered her, and that’s what he was going to do now. He just wished that he didn’t need her so much. But he would get by. He would be okay.

Even though he couldn’t join in with the happy, dancing Halians, he could go and be with them. He walked out from under the awning and sat with the rest of the tribe that wasn’t actively working or celebrating. It felt better being with them. Their joy was contagious, and it was better than the way he felt when he was alone. He wished he knew how they did it. Wished he could do it himself. But he couldn’t, and that was alright.

What he could do was to sit there, and take everything in. The sound of the music and laughter, the smell of cooked food and campfires, the taste of fresh air and rainforest. He felt the cold rain on his skin and the love that radiated from his tribe - his family. That was all he could ask for, and it was all that he needed.

Well. Almost.

He searched the trees, looking for Naeesha. She would be somewhere nearby, he figured. Watching from a safe distance. But the rain and the mist and the thick swaying forest made it impossible to see much of anything. He abandoned his search and turned his attentions back to the celebration around him.

A small colorful blur shot by in the corner of his eye, and he turned to see Kiran slide to a stop beside him.

“We’re outside again!” the child shouted.

Marko forced a smile and tousled Kiran’s hair.

“That’s right,” he said, not sure what else to say.

“There are birds and trees and clouds and rain and fires and mud and bugs and sunshine and grass and…” Kiran chattered on for about another minute, listing every single thing that had been absent from their lives underground. It was amazing how many things the child listed that Marko had never even thought of.
Pinecones.
Marko never thought about pinecones. “I
love
being outside!”

“Me too,” Marko said. “Me too.”

“Have you seen Naeesha?” Kiran asked.

“I’m sure she’s around here somewhere.”

“How come she isn’t dancing? She loves dancing.”

“She just needs a little time alone. She’ll be back soon.”

Kiran frowned, and in a strange way, it made Marko happy to know that Naeesha had earned a place in the hearts of the tribe, or at least in Kiran’s.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll dance with you.”

Naeesha had never been a huge fan of the outdoors. Common side effect of nearly getting killed so many times whilst surrounded by trees. But she was beginning to come around to this whole, “woods” thing.

For one thing, she could be alone. Truly, completely alone. That was the only way that she found peace - when there was nobody around to take it from her. It was funny how the chatter of the birds didn’t bother her the way that peoples’ did, or how the drone of insects was infinitely desirable to that of traffic. It just
was
.

She’d given up on trying to make sense of anything. Nothing made sense. She couldn’t understand why she’d spent so many years trying to ascribe order and logic to a world that contained very little of either. Maybe it was her way of coping. Of reassuring herself that behind all of the chaos and turmoil, there was a
reason.
Some divine truth that governed every little thing that happened, from a missed note in a song, to the most terrible evils that people could inflict upon others.

Maybe that’s why she liked nature. It never let her forget the only real truth, which is that there is
no truth
. There was only what she chose to make of it. But that in itself was a mighty choice. What
would
she make of it? All this suffering, all this conflict. Why? The truth was whatever she decided it was. Either that, or it was utterly meaningless. She could decide that, and it would be true.

She chose not to. She knew better.

Everything has a reason, and it didn’t matter that some of those reasons boiled down to a choice that somebody made for some reason she’d never understand.

Now that she believed what she’d already known for years, she had to figure out what to do with that belief. Again, the woods gave her a solution. Cut ties. Go her own way. Make her own truth and distance herself from anyone who would not let her have it. She finally understood the hermits.

But that wasn’t what she wanted to do. It wasn’t what she was
going
to do. It wasn’t necessary. No, she was going to have her world, and she was going to find a way to break down every single person and thing in her way.

Now that she knew what to do, all that was left was to decide how to do it. That’s where she ran into a problem. Violence wouldn’t work. At least, it had never worked before. But walking up to a military patrol with open arms would just get her and everyone with her killed. She couldn’t count on changing the minds of anybody whose minds were made up and who were intent on keeping them that way.

But there were plenty of people who were still stuck in the middle. She just knew it. There were plenty of assholes who believed the lies about the Halians - hell, she had been one until about a week ago - but for every one of them, there were ten more who didn’t know what to think. They just needed a reason to make up their minds. If they could see what she had seen, Naeesha didn’t doubt that they would find a way to accept the Halians the way she had.

Damn shame it was too late.

Didn’t matter though. They’d make it to the portal, and they’d go back to Hala, and they’d make whatever world they wanted. Naeesha knew they would, because she knew there was nothing that could stop them. She’d seen the way that the Halians had handled everything so far, and she knew that they could handle anything.

It was strange, feeling so certain in the face of everything. But that was the point. By letting go of everything that was uncertain, Naeesha only had to worry about one thing - that she could handle whatever the future brought her. And she didn’t have any doubts that she could.

She walked through the woods with fearlessness, not letting her mind wander to the future, or the past, or in endless circles going nowhere. It was a peace that she’d forgotten was ever possible. And now that she had it, now that he could hold that tranquility in her hands, her only concern was finding something nice to do with it.

Something like going to see Marko.

              Marko started worrying once the second sun went down. Naeesha hadn’t come back, and nobody had seen her. Her pack, along with everything in it, was sitting by the edge of the tunnel. Her weapons, her food, her water, her clothes. All of it. And she was nowhere to be seen.

He took a deep breath and tried not to worry. She could take care of herself. She could handle anything in these woods. She would come back when she was ready.

In order to pass the time and to keep himself from going completely crazy, Marko spent some time flying around, trying to get a sense of where they’d come out of the tunnel. He had some good maps, courtesy of the military unit that had tried to attack them back at the ruined forest, but they wouldn’t be of any use unless he could figure out where they were.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot to go off of. They were far inland, and the only river he could see was barely big enough to count as a creek, and wound and snaked so much that he saw very little hope in trying to match it against anything on the map. The best clue he had was a big hill just over the horizon to the south. It rose up out of the ground, towering above the surrounding forest. It stuck out because Marko couldn’t see an other hills or mountains nearby. With any luck, it would be marked on one of the topographic maps.

He landed back in camp and took the maps out of his bag, unfolding them on a table in the dining hall. Alderoc was a big fucking place, and he didn’t have the faintest idea about where to start looking. He decided to begin by finding the Dynasty compound and scanning north. The scale was huge, and he wondered if he’d the hill was even big enough to register, even if it
was
marked. He ran ran his finger north south, tracing the contour lines and searching for a little blip, a tiny set of concentric circles standing out all alone in a sea of gentle, rolling hills.

He slowly worked his way west, thinking that they’d wandered that way before finding the tunnel. He found nothing. That was alright, there was still another half of the map. With a deep breath, he started looking east of the compound. There was nothing there either.

So he double checked. And triple checked. And he got Rakkan to look, and then had Kiran take a look at the map - just to be sure. But there was nothing that matched the profile of the hill anywhere north of the compound. He was about to give up and go join the circles when he got an impulse to check the rest of the map.

It was a desperate move, and he made it just to keep himself busy, more than any other reason. His most generous estimate was that they were still more than fifty miles north of the compound, but still, he looked.

And thirty miles west of the Dynasty compound entrance was a lone hill, surrounded by gentle hills. There was a even a small, winding river that ran through the surrounding forest.

He shouted for joy, and began to cry.

***

Marko’s news was fuel on the fire of the night's celebration. He made it to the circles just in time to tell the group that they were closer than they hoped. It was his estimate that they were ten miles east of the hill, and so only twenty miles west of the compound. They could make the trip by second sunset tomorrow.

He couldn’t wait to tell Naeesha, whenever she made it back.

People started talking about plans - plans for what they would do when they made it to Hala. Nobody had said much about their homeworld before now. He wasn’t sure if they were superstitious, or just didn’t see the sense in planning on something that, until just now, still seemed slightly impossible.

One thing was quickly agreed upon. They would take Jintak’s body, along with the remains of the other six who had perished in the tunnels, and they would bury the fallen back on their homeworld. Of the six, only two had ever seen Hala. That’s how long they had been kept from their home.

The celebrations died down shortly after dinner. Everybody was tired, and everybody wanted to be well rested for a hard day’s march tomorrow. After all, their journey was not over when they made it to the compound entrance. After that, they had to find a way inside, and then, they would face Hala. Marko had heard several Halians use that expression verbatim. They spoke of Hala as though it was a rival, an enemy to be bested. It was the only time he’d ever heard the Halians speak of anything in that context. Everything else they did was an act of collaboration. It was never them against anything. He wondered what made their homeworld different.

Everyone was in bed within an hour after dinner. But Marko couldn’t sleep. He didn’t need it - he was well rested and could go for the better part of two weeks before it started to slow him down. Still, he would have liked to be able to lay down and let the time pass more quickly. Mostly though, he wanted to have Naeesha here with him.

And she wasn’t.

He stayed up, walking the empty camp, waiting for her. There were nearly twenty sleeping tents, and he wondered if she’d just picked one to sleep in without finding him. It seemed unlikely, but it was easier to consider than the alternative - that she was still out alone in the woods.

It was everything that he could do to resist going out to look for her. He knew that she wouldn’t like that. She’d want her space. Would want him to trust her. So that’s what he was going to do. Sit here and wait, and be here for her as soon as she came back.

He waited for an hour. And then another. And for six more. The first sun came up, and she did not return. The second rose and the camp woke up and cheerfully began to tear down the camp and pack up for the day’s hike. They were wasting no time this morning. Marko went around, asking everybody if they’d seen Naeesha at all since they left the tunnel.

Nobody had.