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Chapter Eighteen

Roth’kar

I have chosen to be a cat for Halloween.

It is the mortal enemy of a dog, or so they tell me, making it the natural choice.

This involves a pair of cat ears on a band over my head, and some makeup that gives me a pink nose and black whiskers, and black clothing.

It’s simple, but effective, vaguely resembling the picture Amara showed me.

On the other hand, my wife goes “all out,” as her friend Kendall says. We head downtown to find Amara’s perfect costume. She considers dressing as a Karthinian so we could be a pair, but I remind her I will be a cat, not a Karthinian, and she laughs one of her amazing, uproarious laughs.

Eventually she finds the perfect red sequin dress, deciding to go as a character from a movie we watched, Moulin Rouge . Her body looks flawless in it, and I am tempted to rip it off her when she emerges from the fitting room.

Then, it’s the night of the party, and a cool rain is coming down. I didn’t know water could fall from the sky, and I spend far too long standing in it, reveling in the feeling of it landing on my face before Amara hands me an umbrella.

“You’ll ruin your makeup!” she says as she shows me how to open it. The umbrella pops up to cover my head, and I think it’s a rather genius invention.

We get on a new kind of bus—a light rail, Amara calls it—that moves much faster and smoother.

It zooms along, the lights of the city flickering through the big windows.

We fly past immensely tall buildings until we’re clear on the other side.

Then trees take over the landscape, and I’m still amazed at them, how luscious they are even as the leaves start to change color.

It is, perhaps, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, aside from my wife.

Finally, the light rail comes to a stop and Amara gets up.

“This is us!” she says, grabbing my hand, and we hop off together. We pull out our umbrellas again and head off down the street, hand in hand.

It’s not long before we reach a rather large home with all the lights on and dozens of vehicles parked outside. The noise coming from the interior is so loud that it’s audible even as we approach.

“Fashionably late,” Amara says proudly as we go up the steps to the front door. She doesn’t even knock, as she had taught me to do, before opening it.

We’re greeted by a burst of noise—people talking and laughing, music booming. The house appears to be filled to the brim with humans dressed in costume and carrying red plastic cups.

“Amara!” someone calls out, and Fiona emerges from the crowd, throwing herself at Amara. After they’ve hugged, Fiona turns to me, and I think fast enough to open my arms to her before she hugs me, too.

“Show us to the drinks?” Amara asks.

Fiona leads the way into the kitchen, where we find Marguerite standing in front of a huge bowl of pink liquid, smoke rising off the top and billowing out onto the floor. She scoops some of the liquid and ladles it into a cup, one for me and one for Amara.

I sniff it suspiciously.

“Extremely alcoholic punch,” Marguerite explains. “Be careful.”

It’s sweet and sour on my tongue, and I know immediately why it comes with a caution. It would be much too easy to drink a lot of it, and fast.

Once we have our beverages, we say goodbye to Marguerite and follow Fiona into the living room, which is packed with people in various states of dress. I find another cat, but she has almost no clothes on, which seems odd when she is supposedly dressing as a furred animal.

We dance and drink, then when we’re too hot, we head outside onto the covered porch to enjoy the sound of rain. It comes with a lovely, strange smell, too, that I breathe in deeply as we step outside. A few others have already gathered out here and stand in an odd circle.

“Oooh,” Amara says, sniffing the air. “Someone brought the goodies.”

“Goodies?” I ask.

She gives me a huge, mischievous grin. “Want to try something new?”

I glance down at my drink, then up at her again. She hasn’t led me wrong yet when it comes to trying new things, so I might as well.

“Sure.”

Amara taps on someone’s shoulder, and the circle opens for us. There are a few gasps as I step into the ring.

“Oh, dang, an alien!” says one man dressed in an elaborate suit and top hat. He is one of the few human males I’ve seen since coming to Earth. “I haven’t met an alien before. How are you, man?”

I blink. “I am not a man.”

“Indeed!” He laughs a surprisingly loud, boisterous laugh. “Are you two joining us?”

“Yes, please,” says Amara, and someone hands her two small objects.

She lifts a glass tube with a bowl at the end to her lips, then flicks the little cylinder and a burst of flame comes out.

She brings the flame down to the bowl and inhales the smoke into her mouth.

After holding it for a moment, she releases the smoke, then hands me the glass object.

“Put the pipe to your lips and breathe in.”

I do as she tells me, and she brings the flame down to the bowl again. I inhale, and the smoke invading my throat nearly makes me gag.

“Bring it into your lungs,” Amara instructs, and though it’s uncomfortable, I do it. She takes the pipe from me as the smoke fills my diaphragm, and then I cough, sending it all back out.

It tastes awful, and the sensation of smoke in my lungs is unnatural. The pipe travels around the circle as everyone resumes talking.

“Did you know that what we think of as the ‘anglerfish’ is just a female, and the males are really tiny?” the man in the top hat says. “After they impregnate the females, they get absorbed into her body .”

Everyone lets out oohs and ahhs .

“So basically, they’re just sperm donors and then they get eaten?” Amara asks.

He nods vigorously. “Nutrition!”

“What bizarre creatures you have on this planet,” I say. “First spiders, and now… anglerfish? Where does this one live?”

Amara pats my shoulder. “I don’t think you’ll encounter an anglerfish in the apartment. They live in the ocean.”

“Already had a run-in with spiders?” a woman in the circle asks, blowing out smoke. The pipe returns to Amara, and she takes another big whiff of it. “I’m terrified of them. I will scream like a baby if I see one.”

I nod in understanding. “They are terrible.”

“Is the squirrel or the spider worse?” Amara asks, passing me the pipe.

“The spider is smaller and, thus, worse.”

Someone else in the circle snorts. “I wonder what you would think of elephants.”

While Amara lights the pipe for me again and I inhale the smoke, my translator supplies me with an image of an enormous beast, gray all over with wrinkles and a long snout that drags on the ground.

“At least you would know it’s coming,” I say, coughing the smoke out again. “I could hide in Amara’s closet.”

Everyone laughs, and I’m happy knowing that I did it.

My brain feels almost… syrupy, thick. But also sweet, like something I tried called cotton candy .

I realize I’ve been smiling widely for some time now, and so is Amara, her hand clasped around my arm as she likes to do.

She has so many habits, all of them interesting, most endearing.

Even the ones that aren’t, like sniffling while we watch a movie instead of blowing her nose because of her allergies, are still cute because they’re hers .

Still, I often supply her with a box of tissue after an hour has gone by.

I realize I’ve been lost in thought, and everyone is looking at me expectantly, waiting for an answer.

“Roth’kar, he asked about your cool toothbrush thing?” Amara reminds me gently.

“Oh, yes.” I pretend like I didn’t miss anything. “You see, it has a sonic vibration that knocks all detritus off of the teeth, and then you simply rinse it out.”

“What other cool alien gear do you have?” the man in the top hat asks.

Though they are all strangers, I feel far more confident than I ever have around humans before. All their eyes trained on me, waiting for my answer, pleases me. I was never much of a social being in the Hole, but now I feel happy and bold.

“I have a communicator.” I withdraw the tiny device from my pocket. It’s small enough so as not to have an input display—it projects one, which it does when I hold it out. All the humans gape and gawk, clearly having never seen anything like it before. I preen.

“That’s so cool,” Amara says. “You’ve never even shown it to me.”

“It is typically private. But I will share anything you like with you.”

“Ooh,” says one of the other women in the circle. “He’s a good one. You should probably keep him.”

Amara giggles and pulls me closer. “Yeah, I think I will.”

Though I have been operating under the belief that Amara will want to stay with me after the trial ends, hearing her affirm it so easily, so casually, makes my whole being radiate with joy.

One of the humans asks to see the communicator, so I set it to English and pass it around, and they all marvel at how small it is. I feel so warm in the best way, my arm around Amara, new friends chattering around us.

The humans start pressing buttons on the display, seeing what it does.

“ Message from Zono ,” it reads aloud. Oh, no. I forgot about that.

I try to snatch the communicator back from the human currently examining it, but it’s too far away.

“Zono?” Amara asks. “Isn’t that one of your friends back on the ship?”

Once again I reach for the communicator, but it’s moved on to the next person to look at, and they are too inebriated to notice me trying to recover it.

As a human would say, fuck .

The message pops up, displaying in the center of the circle.

“ I had a thought ,” Zono says, the communicator automatically translating him as it reads aloud. “ You should connect me to one of your wife’s friends so I can also get out of here. Just give them my name! You know I would give you all my chips for a free, easy ticket out of here, too.”

Amara is watching, listening, her mouth slowly falling open.

No, no, I can’t have her hear this. I reach for the communicator again, desperate to retrieve it before Zono can make it even worse.

“And then when we both have our citizenship, we can leave and go exploring together, Roth’kar! We won’t need them anymore. I have been researching Earth, and ? — ”

I finally snatch the communicator from the top hat man and snap it closed. But Amara has already heard Zono’s message, and there is nothing I can do to rip the words back out of the air.

“Roth’kar?” she asks, her voice small, painfully small. “What is he talking about?”

“Foolishness.” My skin crawls as I shove the communicator back in my pocket. “Zono is an idiot.”

Amara takes a step back from me. “You’re just here to get your citizenship on Earth?”

Everyone else in the circle is silent. It feels as if the entire planet is turning upside down. I reach for Amara, but then she takes another step back, so I can’t touch her.

“You were going to use me?” Her joy is collapsing in on itself, morphing into a devastating sadness. “You only came here to… get away. To escape the Hole. Didn’t you? It was never about me.”

My mouth opens and closes. It feels like it’s full of that other candy, the terrible one. Toffee . My lips are stuck as I try to figure out the right words to say. If I lie to her now, again, it will only make this worse.

No, the truth was obvious in Zono’s message.

“Yes,” I say at last. “I only participated in the Matching Program to get away from New Droth’ar II .”

Someone in the circle gasps.

“But Amara, I didn’t know. I’m sorry. I didn’t know you, I didn’t know Earth, I didn’t understand how wonderful and kind and?—”

Amara’s face slams closed. It’s like a hardness has risen inside her, cold as a stone. Before I’ve even finished speaking, she turns on her heel and walks back into the house.