Chapter Text
The first thing I learned about being abducted is that it’s cold.
Not movie cold. Not a draft under a door. Real cold, the kind that finds the wet of your eyes and the inside of your wrists, that makes your teeth feel loose in your head. I woke up in it with my cheek against a floor that wasn’t a floor — smooth and faintly warm in a way that didn’t match the air, like the deck of something alive that had decided to run a fever everywhere except the room I was in.
I lay still for a while and did what they teach you to do when you wake up somewhere you don’t remember falling asleep. Inventory. Ten fingers. Ten toes. The dull throb behind my left ear where something had pressed and held. No restraints. No blood I could feel. I was in my own clothes — jeans, the gray thermal I’d slept in, socks but no boots — and that detail bothered me more than almost anything, because I remembered the boots. I remembered standing on the porch of the bunkhouse outside Plains, Montana, at two in the morning because I couldn’t sleep and the smoke from the Cabin Gulch fire had turned the moon the color of a bruise. I remembered the light coming down through that smoke, and thinking, stupidly, that it was a helicopter.
It was not a helicopter.
What it was, as near as I’ve been able to put it back together since, was that column of bruised light narrowing down to a blade, and a sound I felt in my breastbone before my ears caught up to it, and the porch rail going cold under my hands and then going away from them entirely. My feet left the boards. The part of the brain that keeps working when the rest has clocked out told me to grab something, and there was nothing in reach but the air, and the air had stopped behaving like air. I didn’t pass out so much as get switched off, one frame the moon and the next frame this cold floor and the loose feeling in my teeth. Whatever they did to me was gentle the way a hand over your mouth is gentle. It didn’t hurt. It just took the world away and handed me a different one without asking whether I was using the old one.
The room was the size of a horse stall and the same shape, three walls and a fourth that wasn’t there — just a seam of pale light where a wall should be, humming low enough that I felt it in my fillings. When I put my hand toward it the air got stiff, like pushing into deep water. I pushed harder. It pushed back exactly as hard, which is a thing solid objects don’t do, and I sat back down on the warm floor and breathed and told myself a story about staying calm.
I’m good at staying calm. It’s the one thing I’ve got. Fifteen seasons jumping fire teaches you that panic is just fear that forgot it had a job to do. I counted my breath down out of the red. I catalogued the room. And when the seam of light finally widened and she stepped through it, I had my calm laid out in front of me like tools on a tarp, and I still lost every one of them at once.
She was tall. That’s the first honest thing I can say. Taller than me by a hand, and I’m not short, and built long the way wolves are long before you notice they’re also heavy — deep through the chest, narrow at the waist, with a fall of silver-gray fur that went darker across her shoulders like a cape somebody had laid there. Her legs bent the wrong way, or the right way for her, folding back at the heel so she stood on the balls of long clawed feet. A tail hung low behind her, very still. Her hands were hands, more or less, four fingers and a thumb, black-padded, tipped in claws she kept curled out of the way. And her face —
I want to be careful here, because I don’t want to flatten it into a costume. It was a wolf’s face and it was a person’s. A long muzzle, dark on the bridge, fading to cream at the throat. Ears up and forward and swiveling at every sound I made, even my swallowing. And the eyes were gold — not yellow, gold, with a black slot of pupil that widened when she looked at me, the way a camera opens in a dark room.
She made a sound, and something at her throat caught it and turned it into English a half-beat later, flat and just behind her mouth, like bad dubbing.
“You are awake earlier than the model predicted,” she said. “Your kind metabolizes the sedative faster than your mass suggests. That is interesting.”
I did not say anything interesting back. I think I said, “Okay.”
She came no closer. She held a slim device against her forearm and read something off it, and her ears flicked once, and she wrote — or did whatever the gesture was, fingers moving over nothing. Up close she smelled like rain on hot stone and, under it, something animal and clean. I was aware of being aware of that and filed it under shock.
“You are frightened,” she said. “Your scent is very loud. I would prefer you were not, because fear changes the baselines and I will have to discard the first day of readings, but I understand it is not a thing you can choose. I am not going to hurt you.” A pause. The translator caught up. “That is true, before you decide it is a thing people say. I have no reason to hurt you and several reasons not to.”
“That’s — good,” I said. “Those are good reasons. Where am I?”
“Aboard a survey vessel. Yours is the third intelligence-bearing world I have catalogued and the only one that builds machines and still poisons its own air, which my supervisors will find significant.” She tilted her head. The motion was so canine and so unselfconscious that something low in me turned over, slow and frightened. “You may call me by my designation if your mouth can make it. Saereth. I am a field xenobiologist. You are a specimen of unusual quality and I intend to return you in better condition than I found you.”
Specimen. I held that word the way you hold a coal you’ve already picked up — too late to drop it without it costing you something.
“I have a name,” I said.
“Most things do.” She was already turning away. “Names are a contamination. If I learn yours I will start to reason about you as an individual and the data will bend toward what I want to be true. I have made that error before.” Her tail moved once, a single slow sweep, and then went still as if she’d caught it doing something. “Rest. Eat what the dispenser gives you. Tomorrow we begin.”
The wall of light closed. I sat in the cold with my knees up and my back to the warm floor and I did the math I’d been avoiding, which was that nobody was coming. There was no crew boss to call. My brother had been the one who’d have torn the world apart looking for me and my brother was four years dead under a burnover on the Lolo, and I had built my whole quiet life around the fact that there was no one left who’d notice the shape of my absence for a week, maybe two. I had wanted it that way. It had felt like safety. It felt, now, like being a thing nobody had bothered to write a name on.
A panel in the wall produced a cube of something that tasted like unsweetened bread and ocean. I ate it because the body is a crew and you feed your crew.
Much later, with the lights gone down to embers, I heard her on the other side of the wall.
She was humming. No tune I knew — a low, rolling, three-note thing that dropped and lifted and dropped, more felt than heard, the sound a big dog makes in its chest when it’s almost asleep and content and doesn’t know you’re listening. It went on a long time. I lay in the dark of an alien ship a hundred miles or a thousand from any human voice, and the monster who’d stolen me hummed herself toward sleep like anybody, like everybody, and against every instinct I had, I stopped being afraid long enough to fall asleep too.
The tests were not what I’d braced for.
I’d braced for the table and the lights and the cold instruments, because I’d seen the same movies everyone has. What I got was closer to the worst week of a sports physical run by someone who’d never met a human and found every part of me faintly miraculous.
She measured how fast I could close my hand. She rolled a ball across a tray and watched my eyes track it and made the small writing-motion when I caught it. She had me name colors, then name them in the dark, then tell her which of two weights was heavier until the weights were so close I was guessing and she seemed delighted that I knew I was guessing. There was a treadmill that read my gait, a puzzle box that I cracked in under a minute, a taste panel of forty little wells where I had to say sweet, bitter, sour, salt, or “I have no word for this,” which happened twice and which she circled both times.
She narrated everything. I came to understand that she narrated to herself the way some people whistle, to fill a silence she didn’t like.
“Your pain response is poorly calibrated,” she told me on the second day, watching a readout while I held my hand in cold water past the point I’d have pulled it out for anyone but her. “You override it. Your species feels and then decides whether to act on the feeling, with a delay. That is either very advanced or very foolish.”
“Both, mostly,” I said. “You’d have liked my brother. He had me beat on the foolish.”
Her ears came forward. The translator gave me her words a beat late, but I’d learned to read the ears by then, and the ears had already asked the question. “You said had.”
“He died.” I took my hand out of the water. She let me. “Fire. The thing I do — did — for work. We fight wildfires. He was on my crew. I was the boss.” It came out level. I’d practiced it level for four years. “I made a call about a ridge — I’d called it safe — and the wind made a different call, and I’m the one who came down the mountain. That’s the whole story. People always want there to be more of it.”
She was quiet for a long time, which was unlike her. The device on her arm kept blinking with numbers she wasn’t reading.
“I have discarded the last interval of data,” she said finally. “Your baselines moved. That is my error; I asked an individual’s question.” She set the device down. It was the first time I’d seen her set it down. “On my second survey I traveled with my line-mother. Donnu. She taught me to read atmospheres, to taste a world’s age in its rain. A vent opened under our skiff on a moon I had said was dead. I had said it was dead. I came back up through the ice and she did not.” Her tail had gone flat to the floor. “So. We have each told the other a thing that bends the data. Now we are even, and you will please stop being interesting in ways I cannot measure.”
I laughed. It surprised both of us. Her ears shot up at the sound and her head cocked and she stared at me like I’d produced a second sun.
“That is the noise of distress in many species,” she said, “but your scent did the opposite thing.”
“It’s the noise of — it’s a laugh. We do it when something’s true and we didn’t expect it.” I shrugged. “You made a joke. I think you made a joke.”
“I did not intend to.” She considered this. Her tail lifted an inch off the floor, hesitated, and gave one small, involuntary sweep before she stilled it again — and I clocked it, the way you clock a card someone doesn’t know they’ve shown, and I didn’t say anything, because some things you just hold. “I will note that you find truth funny. That is rare. Most minds find it frightening.”
After that the days changed shape. She still ran her tests, but she started asking the unmeasured questions in between, and answering mine. I learned that her people were called the Vharu, that they had crossed to the stars eight hundred of my years ago and made a law about it called the Accord — that you study a young world, you never touch it, you take nothing that can’t be put back exactly. I learned she’d been alone on this survey for nine months and had three more to go and had requested the solitude. I learned the cube food could be made to taste like nine things and that she’d been giving me the same flavor for days because she hadn’t thought I’d care, and when I told her I cared she spent twenty minutes cycling flavors with an attention I can only call tender, watching my face for each one.
There was one test she kept coming back to, and it took me longer than it should have to notice she’d stopped pretending it was a test. She was fascinated by my hands. It started clinical — grip, release, pinch, the thumb walked against each finger while a sensor read the small machinery of it — but she lingered, and the lingering grew its own weight. Vharu hands are strong and clever and the claws get in the way of the fine work; she couldn’t, she admitted, do what I could with a length of thread or a knot. So she would take my hand in both of hers and turn it over and run a black-padded fingertip along the lines of the palm with a care that had nothing to do with data. “You have no defense on these,” she said once, mostly to herself. “No claw, no pad, no scale. Soft the whole way down. And yet this is the part of you that builds the machines and the fires. A species betting its survival on the most undefended thing it owns.” She glanced up, caught me watching her instead of the sensor, and set my hand down with a great sudden show of being busy, recording a number I don’t think meant anything at all. After that I started finding reasons to hand her things. She started finding reasons to take them.
I taught her the word okay. She found it grotesquely overpowered. “It is a unit of meaning that means anything,” she complained. “Assent, survival, mediocrity, surrender. How do you ever know which?” And I said you just know, you read the rest of the person, and she went quiet and looked at me and her ear flicked and I had the disorienting sense of having said something larger than I meant.
But on the sixth day she pushed a cube across to me that she’d shaped, somehow, into a rough flattened oval with two notches, and when I picked it up I understood it was meant to be a face — a clumsy, careful, wolfish little face — and she watched me get it with her whole body still, the way you wait to see if a gift lands.
“A designation that is not a name,” she said. “So the data stays clean. You are ’the one who finds truth funny.’ It is too long. In my head it has become shorter.”
“What’s it become?”
Her tail betrayed her again — one sweep, two — and the translator, when it came, came soft.
“It has not got a sound yet,” she said. “Only a warmth. I am working on it.”
I should tell you that I was still a prisoner. I should tell you I still tried the wall of light every night, still mapped the ship in my head, still meant to escape the way I’d meant it on the first day. All of that is true and none of it is the part I remember. The part I remember is that on the ninth night I woke to the three-note hum on the other side of the wall, and without deciding to, I hummed it back — badly, a human throat doing a Vharu thing — and the humming stopped.
Then, after a moment, it started again, slower, like she was teaching me the spaces. And we did that, the two of us, a wall apart, until I fell asleep, and I’ll be honest: it was the least afraid I had been since the night the moon turned the color of a bruise.
The alarm came four hours later.
It did not sound like an alarm. It sounded like the ship taking a breath it couldn’t let out — a rising pressure, a groan I felt in the warm floor turning suddenly, horribly cold — and then the wall of light died, every light died, and in the dark I heard her claws scrabbling on the deck and her voice, stripped of the translator, raw and animal and afraid, calling something that needed no translation at all.