Page 21 of Alliance
Panic crashed over me as my language center broke down. I slapped my hands over my mouth to stop myself from speaking in binary, but my tongue and throat continued to ramble even with my lips sealed shut, lagging.
“Roz?” Fásach asked with more concern. I shook my head, shoulders hunched. I was like a boulder, too heavy to move, and getting denser by the moment as each sensation piled up, hammering my brain with the need to be processed and the anxiety of the queue getting too long to handle. I wouldn’t be able to see or speak again until I’d sorted it all. Thousands and thousands of signals.Millions…
Slender velvety arms slowly wrapped around me and pressed my face into something warm and soft. Fásach took a deep breath, held it, then breathed out. In… then out. In… then out. His arms pressed around my shoulders and forearms, my hands still clapped against my mouth, and one of his palms cradled the back of my head.
He breathed in… then out.
When I breathed with him for the first time, his hug drew tighter, applying pressure on my skin and in my chest. He turned my head sideways against him, then pushed his calloused palm against my temple until all I heard was his heartbeat, thick and strong.
Bit by bit my senses recalibrated, and the clog of data berating my mind broke apart into a river that flowed more freely through me. My fingers relaxed over my mouth, and my shoulders eased. I shuffled in my boots, trying to find better balance, where before my knees had locked and Fásach hadtaken the brunt of my weight. I melted into his arms, and they tightened again.
“Your data halos and comm echoes are getting to you, right?”
“How did you know?” I croaked.
“It happens to yiwreni pups too.” Fásach’s voice rumbled against my ear and hands where I was pressed against him. “Coming into our symphony can be overwhelming, so we apply pressure to help center ourselves when it gets too loud. Is it helping?”
I stole a furtive glance at the venandi merchant’s talons. He had three just like he should, emerald green rather than rich brown, and they were currently grasping long black boxes above his head. He yelled about the quality of his extended mags as buyers shuffled around us.
I unfurled my arms, which were still trapped with my hands near my mouth, and wrapped them around Fásach’s waist. He was so much thinner than his fur and clothing suggested, even if his shoulders were wide. He wasn’t like Master at all. He was like my dad had been on Earth, shielding his daughters and breaking his body for their futures.
Fásach was shielding me too, even though I was a stranger.
“Yes, I like it. I’ll hug you too, when you feel overwhelmed.”
Fásach cleared his throat and gently unwrapped my arms from around his torso. “My symphony is too quiet these days to need it. But thanks for offering.”
I didn’t have time to ask him what a symphony was, or to say that I would hug him whenever he asked me to, even if he wasn’t overwhelmed by music but by something else, because his holotab buzzed and we both looked down at the notification. TheMummerwas due to dock in less than a turn. Fásach’s ears twitched, his flat, wide nose flaring with surprise at the time.
“Right. Time to get the girls,” he said, minimizing his holotab.“Comm Auntie…Hi Aun—” He winced, ears flicking back. “I know. I’m sorry. Yes, we’ll be there soon. We, you heard right. They need to be ready to go in fifteen. Thanks, Auntie.End comm.”
He sent the few things we’d bought to dock three via courier drone. Rations, some ammo and medicine, a few sets of clothing. We wove through the alleyways back to his neighborhood and stuck to the deep corners, eyeing other shadows with suspicion as they waved in the mirages of heat simmering up from the roads.
“Shh,” Fásach told me, wrapping one hand around my elbow as he glanced down the footpath to his home, his ears swiveling like satellite dishes. He locked onto the corrugated sliding door, which was now open, the street littered with the things he’d left behind—a blanket, my disintegrating rags, a plas curtain. The one window had been smashed, scattered glass shards glittering in the yellow emergency light mounted on a neighbor’s stone wall.
Though we heard no movement or voices, Fásach steered clear of the still, dark maw without a backwards glance.
A twist and a turn later, we were standing in front of a home that was one of many set in an ancient lava tube, its blackened roof curving into the walls. The neat row of doors and windows along the tube were akin to hillhouses or blimp hangars with a myriad of protective shielding strung up overhead on tall poles with decades worth of heat resistant materials vying for space like the red jungle canopy of Yaspur.
The neighborhood reminded me of the senior suburbs in Florida, with their astroturf lawns and perfectly square lots, the pastel windowsills and flamingos each dressed for a holiday theme. Only here, the astroturf was a bed of yellow moss, and the pastel windowsills were hand drawn with white chalk on thevolcanic rock. Instead of flamingos out front, there were painted sponges strung up on ribbons.
This particular house had been carved with large geometric patterns, circular windows angled up on the curve of the roof rather than looking out at the street. Iridescent fabric sewn into the shapes of flowers draped across the door, their little petals flitting in the scorching breeze.
Fásach brushed his boot soles off on a contraption to the side of the door with two wiry brushes mounted at an angle and stained with layers of tar. He motioned for me to do the same as he pressed a hot pink and yellow button glued to the rock.
“It’s Fás,” he said after the button played a little song inside the home. Several locks clicked and jangled, then Fásach helped pry the door open. It was a good foot above the ground, and based on the curve of its hinges, was heavy to lift with the thick layer of insulation weighing it down on the other side.
A mottled fleshy-pink person of a species I didn’t have in my database lifted their head out of the door, looking between us with round black eyes set more where a human’s temples were. They had no mouth or nose, but a porous, sensitive pad that looked like fuzzy yellow tire tread that made up the majority of the bottom half of their face, with a drooping soft mass at the back of their head. Two pliant feelers tested the air from the corners of their chin.
“This is the ‘we’?” she said, nodding to me.
Fásach licked at one of his fangs. “Yes. Auntie, this is Roz.”
I smiled and dipped my head in greeting. “Hello, I’m Roz.”
“He said that already.” Auntie’s feelers brushed over the tread of her face. “Fine. Come in.”
Then she disappeared like a gopher into the ground. Fásach motioned for me to head down first, holding the door above his head. I descended the steep staircase to a soft blue carpet.
