Chapter Two
“Shhh, hold still,” said a voice—a child? Leicho craned her head. Yes, a child, a humanic child (on a seed world?). She was much paler than Leicho’s people, but had brown hair in two messy braids, just like any child of Auvik. Leicho found that strangely comforting.
“It’s all good,” the child said, crouching in the tiny space beside the soft bench where Leicho had been lain. “Me and my dad totally got this. We’re taking you to the hospital and you’re gonna be just fine.”
Her translator strained over the word hospital for a moment. When its meaning penetrated, Leicho bolted upright, despite the pain and dizziness.
The translator gave her words, simple but unfamiliar; her tongue struggled with them. “No! No hospital! Please!”
“What? Why not?” In the cockpit of the vehicle sat the man who had tried to speak to her in the road, now turning to look at her in alarm.
Because I’ve read the reports of what happens when an alien turns up at a seed world hospital. Not that she could tell him that. “I—I can’t pay,” she stammered, then bit her lip—what if this was like the better worlds of the HWA, where no one would think of asking money for medical care? Did they even use a money system here? But she seemed to have said the right thing; the man winced in a sympathetic sort of way. “I’m not—ugly hurt,” she continued, encouraged. “Truth. Not hurt. Only...” She flipped frantically through choices from the translator. “Surpri—Stunned. And bruised.”
“But there’s blood all over you!” the child said—was it a girl? She thought it was a girl.
“Yes, my head. A little cut. Heads bleed very much!” She laughed, as if it were a trivial annoyance, but couldn’t stop a wince as she dabbed delicate fingertips at the wound.
“Look, you gotta tell us what happened,” the girl said. “The thing—the thing that exploded—what was it? It didn’t look like an airplane...”
It certainly didn’t, if the image her translator brought up was anything to go by. But their technology had surely advanced in the last 56 years—movement was generally swift once a society harnessed electricity—and the child did look uncertain. “Yes, airplane. Big airplane. Exploded?”
“Look.” The girl pointed over Leicho’s shoulder, and she turned to see, through a transparent viewport in the back of the vehicle, flames towering over the dark treeline. Something inside her seemed to go into freefall; she couldn’t look away. How many survivors might still be trapped in there? Surely no one was left alive by now...
“I don’t think that was an airplane,” the child said. “And you—you talk weird. And your clothes are weird.” Frowning, her face a study in mingled apprehension and excitement, she leaned in closer to Leicho. “Are you an alien?”
Leicho felt her jaw drop. For a moment they stared at each other, and Leicho saw suspicion blooming into belief on the girl’s face.
“Briana!” the father snapped, in a tone that made it clear this was both a rude and ridiculous thing to ask. The translator threw its hands up at the word Briana and declared it Untranslatable—probably the child’s name, then. “This is no time for your nonsense! The lady just lived through a plane crash. Look, ma’am—what’s your name?”
She was hoping to dodge that question until she had some idea what passed as a normal name here. Now she had no choice but to tell the truth and hope for the best. “Eleichononareyac.”
“...what?”
“Leicho, in brief. For short, I mean. For short.”
“Leicho. Right.” The man’s eyes, in the mirror above his seat, were sharp and wary. “Leicho, can we call somebody for you, when we pull over? I’m going to pull in at that gas station there and call the police.”
‘Call’ was a reference to a long-distance communication device, the translator assured her, but—“Police? Why?”
“Why? Did you miss the giant burning wreck? Of course we have to call the police!”
“No! No police!”
Again those sharp eyes in the mirror. “That accent of yours,” he said, sounding thoughtful. “Spanish?”
She frowned. Spanish was another Earth language the translator offered. “Is... Spanish bad?”
“No, not... bad.” He sighed, looking somehow both burdened and relieved by whatever conclusion he’d reached. “That explains a lot. An alien after all.”
She stiffened, opened her mouth for a frantic denial, but the little girl touched her arm. “He means, like,
“Oh.” That might work in her favor, then. A handy excuse for talking strangely, being unfamiliar with local custom—assuming this people tolerated foreigners among them. But the man didn’t seem to be flying into a xenophobic rage so far.
An island of light was fast approaching, a building with several vehicles outside—the ‘gas station’ he had spoken of? Where he would summon police. Leicho’s breath froze to think of seed-world government forces crawling over the transport, making discoveries they were in no way ready for. What if Summer Blossom was still there?
But it was impossible to keep locals from investigating the scene somehow, and she was in no condition to take on Summer Blossom even if she found him. The best she could hope for right now was to keep herself out of government hands.