Page 38 of Invasive Species (Outcasts of Oloria #2)

TWENTY-SEVEN

ARABELLA

Present Day

The ceiling glows green. Not metaphorically—literally.

Every breath tastes like mint and lightning, and the soft gel of the nutrient bed cradles me like a cross between a jellyfish and a particularly affectionate marshmallow.

I’m not sure if I’m awake or dreaming, but the veins of light running through the Milagrove tree hum with something that feels real. Real and ancient and huge.

My brain’s a carousel. Thoughts spinning too fast, horses leaping off their poles. Gara’s gone—was gone? Is he gone?

My arms float in the nutrient gel, color blooming behind my eyes.

Bright oranges and ultramarines, tangled threads of copper and cobalt blue.

They're him, somehow. His moods always had color to me—grey-stone when he was grumpy, but gold around the edges, like sun catching metal. And now there’s this color right in the center of my chest, like?—

Like someone tugged a string that’s still attached.

He has to be alive. He has to be. Because otherwise what is this thing unfurling under my ribcage, fluttering and hot and sharp all at once? It's not panic. I know panic. This is different. Deeper. Like a low note thrumming through me, tuned to him.

“Gara,” I whisper into the green-gold air. The tree seems to answer, its lights pulsing slower, softer. I don't think I'm imagining it. I know I'm not.

If he were gone, the bond between us would be empty, right? But it's not. It’s hurting, yeah, but only because it’s still there.

I blink, wetness trickling down my cheeks. Not ugly sobs like before, just little tears slipping into the nutrient gel like ink in water.

I press both hands to my chest. “You're not gone,” I tell the warm green world, my voice shaking. “You're not.”

But is this wishful thinking? Regardless, the carousel slows just a little. Just enough for hope to climb on.

Pressing the heels of my hands into my face, I take a deep, shuddering breath. Gara wouldn’t want me to slide into a depression over him. He brought me here because I was so seriously ill, he believed only alien technology could save me.

He’d risked himself so I could live, and I have to make that worth it.

Pulling myself to sitting, I draw my scraggly hair back from my face. I will live, for him. “I want a shower, please.”

Ezla’s face brightens up. While it's so similar to Gara’s it hurts, his scales go a different color, shimmering blue like a shiny new car. I don’t think Gara ever went so light blue: he favored brighter, bolder colors, like he wasn't afraid to stand out.

And he shouldn't. I can still make him stand out. I'll treasure every single second I had with that irreplaceable alien.

“After my shower, I want some paints. ”

Now Ezla’s face falls a little. “Paints… pigment? Does your kind eat pigment?”

I force myself upright, wobbling on the nutrient bed. “No, we don't,” I say with a grunt, tendrils of fear gripping my chest at how weak I've become. “Um… I’d like meat, potatoes, veg.”

He fusses over the readouts and dials behind me, glaring at the screens like they aren't telling him anything good. Probably doesn’t like all the red and orange lines trailing down on my graphs. “Veg. What is this?”

Rubbing my eyes, I search the dregs of my foggy hurting brain for a way to explain. “Edible plants.”

“Edible…” The alien’s scales flash a warmer blue, like pictures of the Mediterranean Sea. “I shall have some prepared immediately.”

“Great.” I flop to the side, not wanting to see the screens behind me.

It’s grossly unfair and horrible and a tragedy that Gara’s gone, it would be a travesty if it was for nothing.

I feel… well, like I have the flu, bones aching, body shaking, and my mountain of grief on top of it.

My heart yearns for Gara in a way I can safely say it's never ached for anyone else.

I want him, here, right now, safe beside me.

Curling my hands into throbbing fists, I grit my teeth. “I want those paints please.”

He backs out of the room bowing. “At once, female.”

Ezla seems afraid of me, because of course he is; I'm a female and I apparently hold the power of life and death over him and others like him. If I'm not careful, I could get someone into so much trouble they’re killed for it.

So I have to be considered, even when my brain's spiraling. Gotta channel a little Gara, careful and precise.

When Ezla returns, it's with arms full of boxes and a big flat surface. It’s a brilliant shiny white, something I’d associate with a whiteboard rather than a canvas, but it’ll do. As he lifts it next to my bed, the walls reach out with little hooks and grab hold of it.

“Holy shit,” I breathe.

“Please do not be alarmed by the Milagrove. We have worked around and inside it for many tens of full solar cycles, and it is perfectly safe and healthy.” He sets the box right beside me on the bed, making it rock a little it’s so heavy.

“I have sent for our best pigmentation equipment, and this was supplied to me.”

I open the box and get hit in the face with a scent wall of heady rich dirt, the calming smell of freshly cut wet grass, and a hot, dry hit to the back of the throat like fire.

Running my fingers over thin glass tubes that glitter in the roving lights on the ceiling, I notice each has a different color inside and a thin sponge at the very tip. These are high-tech types of markers, and while the grooves are for bigger hands than mine, I can hold them just fine.

“I’ve also ordered edible plants and freshly cooked cuts of meat,” Ezla informed me.

“Right, yeah. I’ll eat after my shower.” I don’t want to eat, or shower, or move, really, but I can’t sink slowly into the orange jello bed until I rot.

There's a little pulse in my chest, and I know.

He's out there somewhere. He’d want—no, he wants—me to get better.

I have to trust he knew what he was doing.

And trust my instincts.

After my shower and choking down some food, I confront the board mounted beside my bed.

Ezla wants me to stay abed. Well, he keeps asking and pointing out instead of demanding, or being belligerent like Gara would have been. I suspect he’ll get in trouble if I don’t do it, and I don’t want him to be hurt, but I need to do this.

I channel the pain in my heart out to my fingertips, picking up several of the alien markers until I feel one that’s just right. A sweep of color becomes his strong cheekbones, a swerve to reveal his nose, another slash his lips tight like he’s worried.

I draw and draw and draw, carving him out of the canvas with the scent of the markers wrapping around me, each pigment slightly shiny like his scales so it gives me a spectrum of color depending on how much I use.

Every line I stroke on with love. His jawline emerges first, sharp and familiar, and I breathe through the sting behind my eyes. I layer the color again and again, watching it shift under the light like his scales used to—mossy green, jade, and mostly his happy nuclear green.

Closing my eyes, I can imagine him in all the ways, sitting close beside me, staring down at me like I both annoy and intrigue him. Underneath me, smiling softly, like we share a secret.

“Come back to me,” I murmur. I really hope this thing in my chest isn't a hallucination. I can't cope if he was just a memory, weak neurons sparking off.

I need to imprint him over everything so I don’t lose this connection.

“My goodness,” a female voice says, sultry like a premium phone number.

I look over my shoulder, my neck crackling as I move. How long have I sat here, in communion with the lines?

Behind me is an older woman in silver, all curves in the right places and somehow looking both strong and delicate. Expensive comes to mind, with how the soft silks of her layered outfit whisper over her hips and thighs as she steps forward, staring at my drawing.

“Who are you?” Of course I’m going to be rude to anyone who might have hurt Gara, and any woman here is a suspect.

Her scales, smaller and more tightly packed than Gara’s, kaleidoscope across deep ocean blues and verdant vermillion, before turning blood red and then settling into a cold, pale silver. “Your work, this talent… it’s very remarkable,” she says, voice almost a hum.

“Uh huh.” The markers creak in my hands. I place these ones back in the box before I accidentally snap one.

Finally, she tears her gaze away from my artwork. Her eyes are limitless silver pools, and now it’s my turn to shiver. She’s alien in a way Gara and the others who crash landed on Earth aren’t, and the sharp intelligence in her eyes is almost cutting.

She softens her severe look with a wide smile, nodding at the plastic hanging around my neck. “I see you got the headphones. They will help you to understand while the nanites in those around you slowly get to know your language. I have become fluent from another visitor of your world. How is she?”

“What, assuming everyone on Earth all knows each other?”

She inclines her head. “I assume the woman who came here in my personal craft, which I had gifted to another woman, would know her, yes.”

Rats, she had me there. Cheeks heating, I mumble, “Ellen is fine.”

The alien woman comes closer, silks unfurling across the floor like water pooling over her pretty shoes. “I hope everything is to your liking while our finest Selthiastocks work on you?—”

“It’s not,” I blurt out, and out of the corner of my eye I see Ezla go very, very still. “Everything is perfect, I mean, apart from the fact you… you…”

I can’t say it, and yet this woman needs to hear it.

“You killed him!” I shout, pointing at the picture now dominating the room.

All the lines are wavy like I could hardly hold the marker.

Gara, standing looking down at me, arms loose at his sides like he might lift them any moment to welcome me back.

Who am I kidding? Gara's gone. I can't keep clinging to a false hope, I can't smile and nod and carry on regardless. I slam my hand over my chest. This thing is pure delusion, the demented demands of my brain, not reality.

The woman puts a hand over her mouth, those scary silver eyes fathomless. “Killed?” she breathes, like she can’t believe it.

“Euthanized,” I grate out, dropping the rest of the markers to plop into the bed and sinking my head in my hands.

What does she care? Gara's not important to her. I gulp back a hitching sob. She won't understand.

A soft touch on my shoulder makes me look up, and then the woman envelopes me in her arms.

“I’m so, so sorry,” she murmurs. “I thought… but I…” She shakes her head, tears dripping onto my shoulder and staining my smock.

It shocks me more than anything else. I thought all the women here would be heartless, haughty with all these men’s lives in their hands. Gara had certainly made it seem that way.

This one does seem to genuinely care.

Wiping her eyes, the woman straightens up, her eyes not leaving my drawing. “My name is Shara, but to the clones, I am known as the All-Mother.” Her eyes fill with tears again, turning them into a pool of sadness. “Please, may I have this?”

I glance at my work. It’s not fully Gara, not everything he is and could have been to me.

Shrugging, I say, “I’ll be making others. Take it.”

“Thank you,” she whispers, like I just gave her a planet on a plate. She beckons to Ezla who leaps to take it off the wall and hand it to her.

“Thank you so much,” Shara says again, holding it at arm's length. She looks angry now too, like she might actually do something useful. Too late for Gara, but it gives me a flicker of hope for those like Ezla.

I grunt, “Bye,” and turn away, grabbing another slick canvas for the next picture.

Ezla approaches, a turquoise blue like the ocean around a tropical island. “I… I need to…”

I carry on drawing as he gathers his thoughts, another image of Gara unearthed by my brush strokes. Wish I could summon the real one just as easily.

“I will return with… essentials,” he says, ducking his head. “Please return to the bed to rejuvenate yourself.”

“I just want to finish this bit right here…”

The desperate look he shoots me breaks through my hyper focus.

“Oh, alright then.” Letting my arm fall feels like a defeat, because once I lie down, I'll be stuck in that bed with only my thoughts for company.

And now I know the truth.