Tenebrism

“No, no, fucking no,” I said, and reached up to poke at Rysa’s shoulder. She felt like stone, or at least something completely solid and smooth, and absolutely nothing happened. “Oh come on, this can’t be happening.”

How had it happened? Had whatever I’d done before worn off? Or...had I actually done something just now when I’d touched her? I still had no real clue what had even fixed her and Keyd in the first place—what exactly had kicked this ability into working. It couldn’t only be touch; I’d touched both of them since and obviously nothing like this had happened.

So....there’d been something different this time. Like whatever had happened before in the cemetery, just reversed. Since I’d definitely been up close and personal to the whole spell removing thing, I should be able to figure out what that something was. If I could do that, maybe it’d help me now. It was worth a shot. Because if I couldn’t do it, who the fuck would? I couldn’t let Rysa just sit here like this.

I closed my eyes, focused, tried to think back to what it’d been like back in the cemetery last night. When my buddies had been being dicks and Keyd had been a statue. And I’d been kissing him. All I could really remember was the cool night air, watery beer, the smell of dirt, and a kind of grouchy anger surrounding the whole thing. On top of a mild buzz from being slightly tipsy at the time.

Okay, so that wasn’t useful. The second time then, with Rysa. In daylight and not drunk and....mostly thinking about Keyd, because he’d been breathing down my neck and kind of scaring the hell out of me at the time. Fuck, seriously, what else had I been thinking about or doing? There had to be something. Rysa was so sure I’d done something, and it was starting to look like she was probably right.

But without her or Keyd here to even give me a hint, I had no fucking clue where to start figuring it out.

I sighed and opened my eyes. Rysa’s creepy blank face was still staring right at me. A little part of me had hoped that she’d’ve gone back to normal, somehow, all on her own. But she was still grey and still and quiet, her arm frozen up in the air. I touched her shoulder again, wrapped my whole hand around her arm and squeezed. If I concentrated really hard on her, I could sort of sense something deep and far away, like a distant sleepy hum. Like maybe that was her, her energy, trapped somewhere under there.

“C’mon,” I muttered, pushing at her a little. Not real hard; I didn’t want to tip her over or anything. What if she broke? “C’mon, please. Don’t do this to me. Keyd’s gonna fucking murder me.”

I wasn’t even kidding. He really didn’t seem all that stable in the head when it came to her. I was glad he wasn’t here right now, because if there was only one thing I knew about Keyd it was that anything to do with Rysa made him flip the fuck out. Maybe she thought they were totally platonic buddies with just some kind of crazy naked warrior pledge, but I was starting to think Keyd was in love with her. Nobody acted like he did about someone they were just friends with.

#

Half an hour later I was sitting outside my room, leaning against the closed door, fingers laced over the back of my neck. I couldn’t sit in there with Rysa anymore. I hadn’t been able to do anything. No matter what I tried, it didn’t do any good.

Sitting out here wasn’t doing a lot of good either. I needed some air and I wanted to go outside and take a lap or two around the complex, just walk some of this fucking stress off. But if Keyd came back while I was gone and found Rysa like this...bad plan. He was gonna flip the fuck out anyway, but this time it was actually my fault and he had a real reason to aim it all at me. It’d been bad enough before when he just wanted my help.

When the front door pushed open quietly a few minutes later, I couldn’t even make myself look up. It had to be Keyd, and he’d definitely notice right away that Rysa wasn’t around. I was sitting right in a direct line of sight from the living room, so there was no way he could miss seeing me back here. I kept my eyes on the hallway carpeting and didn’t glance up even when his boots walked into my vision and stopped right in front of me.

“Did Rysa leave?” his voice said from somewhere way above my head.

“No,” I said to my knees. “She’s here. Just. Something happened. And I really—I don’t know what to do.”

Keyd crouched down right in front of me. I flicked my eyes to his face for one fast second; he looked real serious. “What?”

I slid myself out of the way so I wasn’t blocking so much of the doorway, and gestured over my shoulder. He could look for himself; I didn’t want to explain. Keyd rose smoothly to his feet, opened the door and stepped past me into the room. I stuck my fingers into my hair and pressed my face against my wrists, just waiting for the fucking fallout.

“Come in here.” I winced at Keyd’s voice—not because of how it sounded, but because of how it didn’t sound. He was way too goddamn calm.

I set my jaw and climbed to my feet. When I leaned into the room, Keyd was directly in front of Rysa. He wasn’t doing much; just standing there and looking at her. I couldn’t see a lot of his face, but he didn’t seem angry. Or upset. Or anything.

“What happened,” he said, and it was that same real cool, even tone. But I didn’t think that calmness went all that deep; it seemed uneasy, like it could break at any second.

I let my head thunk down against the doorframe. “I don’t know. It just—I touched her, that’s all.”

Keyd threw me a look over his shoulder. “And you just left her like this.”

“Not by fucking choice, man! I’ve been trying to fix it and I just couldn’t, okay, I’m sorry.”

Keyd reached out and cupped his hands around Rysa’s face, but didn’t actually touch her. Just hovered above her skin with his fingers spread apart. “You did it before,” he said.

“Yeah, but I did it without knowing I was actually doing anything, and now that there’s something specific I have to do I can’t actually fucking do it!” I said, and all the muscles around Keyd’s eyes kind of tightened up. He might have been angry or confused or almost anything else. Maybe that fucking mess of a sentence hadn’t even translated for him.

“Look.” I moved into the room, pushing my glasses up and rubbing at the bridge of my nose. “Just tell me how to fix it and I’ll do it, okay? Whatever I have to.”

Keyd took a step back from Rysa, closing his fingers together and dropping his hands to his sides. “I can’t tell you that, because I don’t know. Your ability is not the same as ours.”

“And why can’t you fix it, again?”

“I just can’t,” he said. “Not like this. I’d more likely hurt her if I tried.”

“Well that’s not fucking convenient at all, how the fuck do you fight some kind of war against this shit if you can’t even deal with it?”

“We just can’t,” Keyd said again. There was something different in his voice this time, and it made me take a closer look at him. His mouth was tense and pressed together, his eyes were bright and flickering around, and there were even little crease lines in his forehead. He looked really young, and completely over his head. With Rysa stuck like this, there was nobody here who could help him but me. And I seemed to be pretty fucking useless. He was really on his own here.

Then Keyd lifted his chin, set his shoulders back and breathed in, and it was all gone. He was totally composed and absolutely sure of himself.

“You need to learn to control this,” he said to me, and all the sympathy I’d been building up for him disappeared. I didn’t need to be ordered around by a guy who barely talked except to get on my case.

“Okay, hold on,” I said. “I’m trying, all right, it’s not like I know—“

“Try harder,” Keyd said.

That was enough, that was it.

“Hey,” I snapped at him. “Hey, look. I am not fucking prepared to deal with this kind of—this kind of insane shit and I don’t have to take this from you, okay? Okay, goddammit?”

“No.” Keyd’s voice was hard and flat. “This is important. Not a game or a trivial matter. You can’t ignore this like you have been. Accept responsibility.”

“You’re not helping, so lay the fuck off,” I said. “Maybe it’s easy for you to deal with this shit but it’s not easy for me, okay? I’m trying to accept it, just give me more than a few fucking hours to do it!”

“This wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t been acting like you had nothing to do with it.” Keyd sent me another one of those intense looks over his shoulder, and then turned back to Rysa.

“You don’t know that! Hey, hey, at least look at me if you’re gonna insult me!” I almost reached out to grab him, then figured that’d be a pretty bad idea. “Hey, we’re not fucking done with this conversation!”

Keyd sure thought we were. He was doing a real good job of acting like I wasn’t even here anymore, focusing all his attention back on Rysa. Just staring at her, like he could make her come back with sheer willpower. His concentration was kind of impressive, actually, but he was just pissing me off with it.

“Hey.” I got up as close to him as I dared, which was still like two feet away, but he couldn’t completely ignore me if I was up in his face. “Hey, we’re not done.”

Didn’t even get eye contact from the guy. So I did the stupidest thing I’d done yet since this whole mess had started. I threw a punch at him.

It wasn’t stupid because I hit him; it was stupid because I didn’t even get close. Keyd’s hand flashed up and knocked my arm to the side, practically just brushing it away. Then he was right up against me, his other arm solidly against the inside of mine; a firm pressure came down on my elbow and shoulder and then I was being pulled forward and twisted down so that I had nowhere to go but to the carpet. I managed to catch myself on one knee and the palm of my free hand, but barely. I didn’t even know how Keyd’d done that. It’d been so fast and careless, like it wasn’t even a big deal, like he blocked punches all the time, like he could’ve done it in his sleep.

Then Keyd let go, pulling his hands off me and actually taking a step back. He curled his fingers up into loose fists and just...looked down at me. I was still down on my knee, still trying to process how the fuck he’d gotten me here, and all I could do was stare back. He hadn’t hurt me at all, not even a little. He’d just effortlessly put me on the ground.

“All right,” Keyd said. He sounded so mild and distant again, like none of it had even happened. “You should get up.”

“You don’t get to fucking tell me what to do,” I said. Now I was embarrassed on top of everything else. Trying to hit him had been really fucking dumb in the first place, but he hadn’t even needed to fight back. I wasn’t a threat; he didn’t have to take me seriously.

Keyd pushed his eyebrows together for a real fast second. “Then stay there if you want,” he said. He turned away from me and back to Rysa, clearly done with this conversation. Right, yeah, we had some more serious problems at the moment.

“Okay,” I said from the floor. “Okay. I got one idea left I didn’t try. I just didn’t think it was real appropriate.”

“And what was that,” Keyd said, without looking at me.

“I didn’t try kissing her again.”

Keyd’s reaction might have been funny if it had come from anybody else. The slow, blank look he turned on me was pure sitcom material. It lasted for a couple drawn-out seconds, and I actually managed to hold his gaze without chickening out and backing down. Then Keyd set his jaw and said; “try it.”

“What, seriously?” I said. I climbed up off the floor and eased over to my desk, leaning against the edge of it. “You really want me to?”

“No, I don’t,” Keyd said. “But it did work before.”

I curled my fingers around the edge of the desk and stared him down. He really did seem serious, but that was kind of his default setting about everything. And if he actually had some sort of thing for Rysa like I was starting to think, then there was really no way he wanted to see me macking on her for a second time.

I started to shake my head. “We could figure out something el—”

“Try it,” Keyd said again. Then, unexpectedly, “please.”

Hearing that killed any drive I had to argue. He was seriously asking me, and I didn’t have much of a real reason to say no. I wanted Rysa to be okay more than I really cared about Keyd’s weird issues or how much I didn’t want to cooperate with him. “Okay,” I said, and leaned off the desk. “I’ll...give it a shot.”

Keyd stepped back against the wall to let me get closer to Rysa. Since she had her head turned to the side and her arm in the way, I had to get a knee on the edge of the bed and lean a hand on the mattress to get in at a good angle. I threw a last look at Keyd just to make sure he wasn’t changing his mind, but it was still impossible to tell anything he might be thinking. His face was a perfect mask, only ever showing one damn expression and that expression was the best fucking poker face I’d ever seen.

It’d be better if I just got the hell on with this.

So I moved in, hesitated when my nose brushed into Rysa’s strangely solid one, then leaned forward all the way. Even less of a kiss than the first time, which hadn’t been much of one either. This was just a dry, awkward, drawn-out tap. Like the way Ashley had always made her dolls kiss when we were kids; mushing their hard plastic faces together and holding them there.

Then I pulled back, enough to get a look at her.

Nothing was happening. She looked the same; the exact same, no change at all. Grey and stuck in place, blank-eyed. The fix had happened pretty damn fast last time, almost immediately. But there was no sign that anything was happening now, or ever would.

It’d really been my last idea, and it hadn’t fucking worked.

Keyd already knew it hadn’t; he could probably tell just from my face when I looked up at him. He turned away, tension set in his shoulders. I saw his hands curl up into slow, careful fists.

I dropped my hands down on Rysa’s stiff shoulders. “Fuck, Rysa, just come back,” I muttered.

But begging wasn’t gonna help. We had to come up with something else to try. Keyd needed to be a better fucking team player this time too, and do more than just tell me how bad I was at handling all this. Worst morale booster ever.

Rysa was starting to feel kind of warm where I was touching her. I slumped back from her and dragged my fingers over my hair. Squeezed my eyes shut, opened them again. Then sat straight up and leaned close to her, because something was happening. Patches of color were fading up on her through the grey. I was starting to get that same dry electric itch up under my skin that I had before. All the little hairs on my arms and back of my neck were on end, and tingles were burning down my spine like my whole damn back had gone to sleep.

“Thank fuck,” I said. “Keyd, hey, Keyd—I think she’s okay, I think everything’s okay.”

Keyd was right over us in a second, going to a knee next to the bed—which dropped him down to my eye level—and watching her carefully. She looked pretty good by now; this spell shit went away fast once it got started. Her raised hand suddenly dropped down into her lap and she swayed forward, then jerked back up like she’d been falling asleep and startled herself awake. Her eyes blinked around and flickered over my face.

“What,” she said, almost politely puzzled.

“Intaja dar,” Keyd said, and caught one of her hands. Rysa glanced at him, then back at me, and seemed to figure out pretty quick what’d happened.

“Again?” she said, and Keyd actually shot me a dirty look. This time I couldn’t even try to defend myself against how stupidly unfair he was being. I just flopped down to the bed and buried my face in the blanket. Rysa was okay again and I was done. Just fucking done. With all of it. This had to be one of the worst goddamn days of my life. I forced all my tensed muscles to relax out until I could actually take easy breaths again, and breathing was all I wanted to do for now.

A quiet conversation was going on in another language over my head. Someone touched my shoulder, just a light pressure of fingers against my sleeve.

“Don’t touch me,” I muttered into the blanket. “Just in case.”

The hand disappeared, and the bed shifted like Rysa had gotten up. I rolled my face out of the bed and watched sideways as she and Keyd kept talking—or maybe arguing, it was hard to tell with them—and making little gestures at each other. Rysa put an arm out, tried to nudge Keyd towards the door, but he shook her off.

“This is still a problem,” he said, looking past her and right at me.

I slapped a hand down to the mattress and shoved myself upright. I’d planned on standing up all the way, but a major head rush swooped dizzyingly over me and all I could really do was sit there and snap back at him. “Jesus Christ, don’t you fucking start with that again!”

Keyd’s reply was to turn around and walk out of the room.

“Yeah, well, fuck you too, buddy!” I yelled, scooping up a shoe from the floor and hurling it after him. It hit the door and bounced into the hallway. “Shit.”

Rysa had leaned herself against my desk, and was watching all this with slightly raised eyebrows.

“I’m really sorry,” I said to her, and she made a little gesture with her hand that seemed like she didn’t want to hear any of that from me. I dragged my hands down over my face and looked at her through my fingers. “I guess this is really real then, huh. That I can do this.”

She didn’t even respond to that incredibly stupid question. “It is important that you figure out how,” she said instead. “Keyd’s right about that.”

“I know he is, I know,” I said into my hands. “But he’s gotta fucking calm down about it, and I mean seriously. He was about as helpful as a punch in the face.” Which was actually what I’d tried to do to him, so probably not the best comparison.

Rysa stretched her legs out in front of her, crossing one over the other at the ankle, and braced her hands back on the desk.

“Right before,” she said. “You were thinking about wanting the spells gone; about needing them out of your body.”

I dropped my arms to my lap. “Shit, you meant figure it out right now? Well, Jesus, maybe that’s what I did, but I don’t really remember!”

Rysa waited calmly for a few seconds, then said, “you were getting somewhat upset about it.”

Oh, yeah. I remembered that part all right.

“Okay, yeah, I guess,” I said. “I wanted it all out. Then you touched me, so—but then, just now, I was thinking about wanting you to come back. I mean, I was the whole time, but it was kind of getting desperate there at the end.”

Rysa was nodding as I spoke. “That’s likely why it happened. With your ability, the energy of the spells was triggered with simple concepts. Out, come back. Perhaps the result was not what you meant, but intentions can be misinterpreted.”

“Wait, so like—no magic words or anything is involved in this business? It just takes thinking?”

“To use our own abilities, that’s how it works. It’s a strength and focus of mind. And it seems to be similar with your own.”

“Well fuck,” I said. Now I wasn’t gonna be able to touch anybody without getting paranoid about it. “But...I wasn’t thinking about anything like that the first time.”

Rysa dropped her open palms towards me, kind of like a shrug only without her shoulders getting involved. “I don’t think you had any real control then. It was your first exposure, and reactions can be unpredictable. But now these spells, this energy—it’s yours, to use as you want. It obeys you.”

“I—fuck,” I said again. “Okay. Um, okay. I need, uh, I just need a second, here.” I leaned over my knees and really hoped I wasn’t gonna throw up. That lightheaded feeling hadn’t really gone away. “Can I just—get a second?”

“All right.” I watched as Rysa’s boots moved away from the desk and out the door, which clicked shut behind her. I just kept breathing towards the floor, leaning on my knees and flexing my fingers in and out. I probably wouldn’t have been so riled up about all this if Keyd hadn’t been acting like such a dick. And the way he’d put me on the ground—it’d been like a second nature. It was impressive, and a little fucking scary. I’d known these guys were soldiers, but that’d really been something else.

Being slightly afraid of them didn’t seem like a bad choice at all.

<div align="center">#</div>

When I was finally ready to sort of face them again and kinda maybe deal with all this...they were gone.

“Well what the fuck,” I said to the empty living room. They couldn’t have left, because their armor was still all in my room. So they’d just taken off for no reason. To fuck knows where. Nice.

And they didn’t come back for hours and hours. I honestly couldn’t have said what I did all day—I think most of it was spent on the couch watching all the mindless shit I could find. Not thinking about anything.

It was getting dark by the time Rysa and Keyd showed up again, and daylight savings hadn’t even ended yet. It was pretty late.

I’d figured the first thing out of them was gonna be more about this shady ability I had and how I needed to deal with it—but neither of them said a word. That was fine with me. We could talk about alien magic shit that I could do tomorrow. Or the day after. Or never. And Keyd at least seemed a little less like he had it out for me. No dirty looks from him. Or really any looks at all.

It was late enough by now that I started thinking about them needing a place to sleep. Clearly they were staying here at the apartment—I’d agreed to that. So I set up something for them in the living room, getting all the stray blankets and pillows Martin and I had shoved in our hall closet and hauling them to the couches. They were beige corduroy and old and ugly as fuck, but also really broken in and pretty comfortable. I’d spent a night on them more than once, even accidentally. But they definitely weren’t built for people Rysa and Keyd’s size.

“You guys gonna be okay on these?” I said, tossing a stray pillow onto the far couch and kind of feeling like I was trying to pass off doll furniture as real furniture. The couches just looked so small.

“We would have been fine anywhere,” Rysa said. “The floor even.”

“Okay, the couches are definitely better than the floor,” I said. “Maybe a little...shorter, you know, but please don’t sleep on the floor.”

Rysa smiled, then did a little thing with her hands that was too quick to catch, mostly because I was already looking so far up to see her face. “Thank you, for all this, Alan,” she said. “You certainly didn’t have to.”

“It’s really fine. No problem.” It was still nice to get the appreciation though.

Keyd was standing near the couch that was against the wall, staring down at the pillow I’d thrown over there. He hadn’t said a single word to me since they’d come back, and had hardly looked in my direction. Well, I had tried to punch him earlier. Then thrown a shoe at him. Maybe I deserved a little of this cold shoulder stuff.

It seemed too weird to say goodnight to them. So I didn’t. I went out of the room, my hands in my pockets, and left them alone.

#

Someone was shaking me awake. Again.

“Mmrnwhat,” I muttered, and tried to roll away from whoever was wiggling my shoulder.

“Sorry to wake you,” said a voice that sounded a lot like Rysa. I shoved the blanket down and squinted at her through the dim blue light of the room. The sun was barely up. Again. These guys needed to learn how to sleep in.

I pushed myself up on one elbow and rubbed at my face with the other. “s’okay,” I said. At least she was being nice about it.

“We just have a favor to ask,” Rysa’s blurry face said. She was kneeling next to my bed, not close enough to see well with my shitty eyesight. She was mostly blobs of black in a bluish-white oval. “It won’t take long.”

“Mm, sure, ‘kay. What do you need?”

“Maps.”

“Maps?”

Turned out, she and Keyd wanted to get a handle on the general layout of this area; where things were, how big it was, all that kind of tactical stuff. I really thought Rysa might have been expecting me to go get some sort of giant atlas or roll out a big paper map for them. I did have a Thomas Guide out in my car, but it was easier and faster to just drag my laptop out to the kitchen and fire up Google maps.

It was cold and quiet out here, the linoleum of the kitchen floor freezing under my feet. Keyd was keeping his distance, leaning on the far wall with his arms crossed. Any time I glanced over at him, he was staring right back, watching us from under his eyebrows. He didn’t blink all that much, and his expression was so neutral that it was getting kind of creepy. I still couldn’t believe I’d tried to punch him yesterday, what the fuck had I been thinking? I was lucky that all he’d done was put me on the ground. If he’d actually wanted to do damage, I’d probably be dead. Or at least in the hospital.

I set the laptop on the kitchen table and booted it up, yawning and trying to shake myself more awake while Rysa stood nearby and watched curiously. I was pretty sure the computer didn’t make much sense to her or Keyd, and I didn’t try to explain what it was. It was too early in the morning for this.

“Okay, so...here we go,” I said to Rysa, who’d edged up behind my shoulder. I circled my finger in a big loose loop around the three or four most local towns on the map I’d pulled up. “This is kind of the whole general area here, and this is where we are right now.” I zoomed in closer and scrolled around until I could point out my apartment complex.

“Interesting,” Rysa said, and rested her hand on the top edge of the laptop, leaning closer in. Right away black lines started spiking through the screen, and the picture pixelated and warped sideways. Then with a sad little pyuuu, the whole computer died and went silent. Before I could even try to do anything, it hummed and started kicking back into life again.

“I’m sorry; what happened?” Rysa said, holding up her hands.

“It just restarted itself,” I said, grabbing the sides of the screen and scooting the laptop closer to me across the table. My laptop was old and kind of shitty, bought in my freshman year through some deal Dell had with our school. The clunker could barely handle CS, and either way I’d pretty much asked my parents for a new one as my graduation present next May. If Rysa had fucked the thing up, maybe I could convince them to get a preemptive start on that.

But the system started back up fine once I overrode the safety mode. Everything seemed to be okay.

“Yeah, maybe just...don’t get too close to it,” I said to Rysa, who was already standing a few steps away with her hands behind her back. I slid the laptop away and closed the lid. “Anyway, I have a better idea.”

#

The only issue with the Thomas Guide was that everything was kind of split up all over different pages, so to actually look at all of the town put together we had to tear them out of the spiral binding, rearrange them, and stick them back together. Even then we were kind of missing chunks because they were on the backs of other pages. But it was better than nothing.

Rysa asked for a pen, and so I dug up a Sharpie for her from a kitchen drawer. She narrowed her eyes at it when I handed it to her.

“Whaddyou even want it for,” I asked her through a yawn. It was only seven fucking thirty in the morning, and day two of ass-crack early wake-up calls for me. And I still wasn’t caught up on the sleep I hadn’t gotten on Friday. That I was even staying on my feet right now was kind of a miracle.

“A gai has a limited range of movement,” she said from the floor. She and Keyd had decided to spread the map pages all over the living room carpet instead of the kitchen table, since they took up a lot of room. “It can only go so far. Your school was within that range, but we don’t know how far it was from its host at the time. But we can estimate a general area from that, then keep track of where we’ve already looked here.” She stopped examining the Sharpie and tapped one of the map pages with the cap.

I scratched at my hip through my sweatpants and yawned again. “What’s the range?”

“Three kolot.”

“Uh huh. Can I get that in miles?” I asked, and Rysa frowned at me.

Frequency could translate a lot of things, but it wasn’t very good at distance. I couldn’t really explain miles to them, in the same way I still had no idea how long a kolot was even after Rysa had tried a couple of times in different ways. And even if gai could only go about three of them away from its clarbach, what if a kolot was like fifty miles? That’d be a huge fucking range.

We gave up on it eventually, and I had to settle for knowing that the gai could get three times half the distance a horse walks in an hour. Even if I’d known a fucking thing about horses, that was too much complicated math for this early in the morning.

“Where’d you even find the gai in the first place?” I asked Keyd, and then instantly realized what a stupid question that was. Unless it’d been near something distinctive that he could describe, there was no way he could really answer.

“A train stopped nearby,” Keyd said.

“The train station?” I said. That was a pretty good distance from the park where we’d been that morning. When Keyd stormed off he really didn’t kid around. Also he knew what a train was. I hadn’t expected that after the car thing with Rysa. But the Metrolink station wasn’t all that far from my school, so Keyd could’ve chased the gai from one to the other pretty easily. Especially with how fast that thing had moved; covering the distance between wouldn’t have been a problem for it. Or for Keyd, since he could fucking fly.

But how was nobody seeing this shit? If Keyd had been flying around after a giant glowing frog in all these public places...somebody should have noticed. People would be talking about it. Even if they thought it was some kind of stupid stunt. It would have been on the news. Something. The fact that it wasn’t, at all, was giving me the uneasy idea that I was going nuts, and that none of this was even real. Wasn’t that what schizophrenia was; hearing and seeing things that weren’t there? What if Keyd and Rysa didn’t actually exist? Jesus.

No, wait. Martin had seen Rysa. There was that. Unless I’d imagined him being in that conversation. Fuck, it was really too early for any of this.

“Do you know where that is?” Rysa said, and I snapped my attention back to her. She was holding the pen back out to me. “That would certainly help.”

Train station, right. I got down on my knees with them on the floor, crouching over the pages. The part of the guide where the station would be was near Keyd’s hand, and he didn’t move out of the way when I reached for it. I nearly had to bump heads with him just to get it and pull it in front of me.

“This is the station, here,” I said, and circled the approximate spot. “My school’s here, and this is how far they are from each other.” I lined up the two pages, and dropped a finger down on each black circle. “And this is about...I don’t know, about a mile. Probably a little less.”

“Haij kahlkhem kolot,” Keyd said to Rysa. I had to guess he was estimating the distance between them.

I tapped the pages of the map again. “So then, how many of these can a gai go?”

Rysa sat back on her heels. “About eight.”

Weird horse-based math was out of my league, but I could definitely calculate up the rough area of a circle in my head. “That’s like two hundred square miles where this thing could be, Jesus. You guys’ve got a weird definition of limited.”

“But they rarely do go that far,” Rysa said. “Especially in a foreign world. Even half that distance is a more likely range where we’d find the clarbach.”

Four miles in every direction from my school and the Metrolink station. This search could take forever.

“Yeah, well, good luck with that,” I muttered.

Rysa glanced up at me. “It’s not that large of an area to cover, with our abilities.”

“The ones that weren’t working so well earlier?”

I wasn’t trying to be skeptical of what they were capable of, but they hadn’t even been able to find the gai in a four-story building. Now they were going to be looking for something in an area that covered about a fifth of the whole county. If I were them I wouldn’t be counting on their abilities to help much.

Rysa glanced over at Keyd, who was staring down at the maps with the back of his knuckles curled up against his mouth. “Baet kasetaij isijar,” he said, and got to his feet. Rysa stood up after him, and I scrambled up myself because having them both looming over me was kinda unnerving.

“Mriat ejjshet ihkel,” Rysa said to him, and then they were off having a full conversation in their own language again. I still wasn’t sure if it was rude or not that they kept doing this, if they were keeping important stuff from me or if they just didn’t figure these discussions were relevant.

I leaned against the back of the couch and just let them talk for a while. Their language was actually kind of nice to listen to, now that I was getting more used to it. It was still rough, and once in a while there was a choking noise out of nowhere, but the rhythm of it was kind of pretty. Especially when they were doing it quietly like this. It didn’t sound all that alien.

I must have actually dozed off standing up, because the next thing I knew Rysa was right in front of me and saying my name.

A charge of adrenaline flickered through me, and my head jerked up. “What?”

“We’ll likely be gone for most of the day,” Rysa said. “We’ll take your map, if that’s all right.”

“Oh, yeah, fine,” I said. Jesus, I could still feel my heart beating hard in my neck, just because Rysa’d startled me. Behind her I could see Keyd picking up all the pages off the floor. A couple of them were covered in Sharpie now, long black lines in overlapping circle shapes. I only saw them for a second before Keyd tucked them all under his arm and turned away. “I’ll probably just...be here.”

“All right,” Rysa said. She and Keyd let themselves out the front door, into the early blue light outside.

As soon as they were gone and the door was shut and the whole apartment was quiet, I rolled myself over the back of the couch and flopped down on my back. I’d expected to tumble into a lump of blankets left there, but Keyd and Rysa had actually folded up everything into nice little piles and left them on the arms of the couches. How oddly fucking polite of them.

I shut my eyes, breathed out slowly. I could fall back asleep right here. That’d be just fine.

But I’d hit that horrible point of being too awake, and now I was stuck. For about an hour I just lay around on the couch, until the living room was filled with too much light and trying to sleep was stupid. And now I was staring down a whole damn day with nothing to really do—Martin was gone, my new roommates from Dimension X were gone, and I had no idea what the fuck was I supposed to do with myself with this alien shit hanging over everything.

#

What I did was run every fucking errand I’d needed to do for the last week and then some I’d planned to do this next week. I gassed up my car, picked up some random shit I needed at Target, did a grocery run, even wasted a good forty-five minutes getting my car washed.

When I ran out of shit to do around town I went back to my place and filled out the pass/fail paperwork I’d picked up last week for my calculus class, because fuck it if I was gonna take a GPA hit for a general requirement class. My grades weren’t perfect, but other than my first semester they were pretty solid, and I wanted them to stay that way. I’d worked pretty hard for it. But I always took the worst hits in math, and I could already tell I’d be taking one in calculus.

Then I scrubbed down like half of the apartment. That was unofficially my job around here; Martin sure wouldn’t do it and it’d gotten embarrassing when his girlfriend had started doing our dishes and Febreezing everything whenever she stayed over. Martin’s room and bathroom were the only things I didn’t ever do. He pitched in by buying all the cleaning supplies. I just left the empty cans and bottles on the edge of the kitchen counter so he’d know what we were out of.

By mid-afternoon I was down to doing laundry and half-heartedly sorting out the piles of junk that were growing at the bottom of my closet. I just had to keep moving, stay busy, keep doing things. If I stopped, I’d start thinking about what was going on, how fucking crazy it was, and then I’d go crazy. I’d even taken a walk earlier, lapped once around the complex and then the whole damn neighborhood block, which had taken up some time but hadn’t cleared my head as much as I’d wanted.

On top of all this, I still couldn’t find one of the shoes I’d been wearing on Halloween. Maybe I’d lost it in the fucking cemetery; I’d been drunk and stupid enough for that to be real possible. It was probably lost forever at this point. Down a shoe and up two aliens; not exactly what I’d expected from this weekend.

#

They didn’t come back until it was already dark.

I was burned out on the couch, flipping uselessly between the news and the food network and eating leftover Halloween candy like a slob, when the front door opened and somebody slipped in. I heard a kitchen chair being pulled softly across the linoleum, and when I looked over into the kitchen Rysa was just sitting down in one of them, her profile to me. She combed her fingers back through her hair and shook it all out. The kitchen lights reflected a purple tint off the waves kinked into it. She stretched her neck over the back of the chair and closed her eyes, breathing out slowly. It looked like a tired, didn’t-accomplish-shit kind of slouch.

“So, uh. No luck?” I said to her, slinging my arm over the back of the couch and leaning on it. I hit the mute button on the remote and the Iron Chef America cheddar cheese battle kept on going noiselessly in the background.

Rysa lifted her head and gave me a little smile. “Unfortunately. You were right about our abilities not working fully here. It’s been rather...trying.”

“That sucks,” I said. But I wasn’t real surprised, and I could just imagine what a ‘trying’ day with Keyd would be like; no wonder she looked fed up with everything. “What exactly are you looking for, anyway? I mean—how’re you gonna know if you’ve found these guys?”

“A grove.”

“A...grove,” I said. Was that a translation error or something? “You mean, like...trees?”

Rysa nodded, that same smile pulling at the side of her mouth. “Similar,” she said. “But if the clarbach are truly here, it’s what they will try to create. To see if it can feed off the energy here—if your world is useful.”

“Useful,” I said. Jesus. That sounded...well. Really fucking bad. “Is this gonna be some kind of invasion here?”

“That’s what we’re trying to determine.”

“But people would notice that, right? I mean, if some kind of alien trees were growing around here people would fucking know about it.”

“You would be able to see them, because of your ability, but they might be invisible to others here.” Rysa cricked her neck to the side then leaned forward over her knees, suddenly serious again. “That’s often the case, especially in muted worlds. As you said, if others here don’t seem to be aware of anything unusual, then they probably aren’t.”

Well, that’d explain why no one had been talking about seeing giant frogs.

“Why can I even see this stuff? I mean—why is it me who wound up like this?”

Rysa shook her head. “You just did. We don’t know everything about the way this works, either. Some worlds have the Presence touching them, and some don’t. Some natives to those worlds have the talent to use its power, others don’t. Our own world was always connected, but for a very long time our race couldn’t access it because we didn’t have the capability to do so. And your world is muted, and yet you have a natural ability. It’s all very unpredictable.”

“Fucking fantastic,” I said. “Is the whole abilities-not-working-here thing part of that too?”

“Not exactly.” Rysa laced her fingers together then pulled them apart again, those magic tattoos dark against her skin. “There’s something here, other communications, that are interrupting how our energy works. It’s been difficult even between Keyd and myself. Nearly impossible to sense anything else.”

Other communications. “What, you mean like radio or WLAN or other shit like that?”

She eyed me. “What are those?”

“Uh,” I said. “Like that, over there.” I jerked my thumb at the DSL router that was sitting on a shelf of the TV cabinet. Rysa shoved back from the table and came over into the living room.

“No, the smaller thing,” I said, when she started looking the TV over. “The grey box with the lights—yeah.”

Rysa moved her hand down near the router, kept it there for a few seconds, then nodded. “This is at least part of it.”

“Okay,” I said. “I guess you guys can’t compete with wireless signals.”

“What does this do?” Rysa said, leaning down and peering at the router. The whole row of green lights on the front were all starting to flicker crazily. Maybe her energy was messing with the signals back. The TV was even kind of going fuzzy and snowy, and I turned it off.

I could have explained exactly how the router worked in a lot of geeky techno-speak, but I didn’t think that’d actually mean much to her. “It, uh... it makes a little network so all our machines can connect to each other without a lot of wires. And I’m guessing none of this is really making sense.”

She laughed. She had a nice laugh, and she didn’t seem to mind doing it. Not like Keyd, who didn’t even smile. “None of it at all.”

“Okay, well...it puts out signals into the air, maybe kinda like your energy does. But it’s definitely for communicating.”

“There’s a lot of this here, then.”

“Yeah, everywhere. Radio waves, Wi-Fi, satellite—it’s all over. There’s not really gonna be a place where it isn’t around, so you’re kind of out of luck there.”

Rysa moved away from the TV, coming up to the couch and settling her hip on the arm of it near me. “Well,” she said. “That means any clarbach here will be limited in the same way. They won’t be able to find us here, the same way we can’t find them.”

“Would they be looking for you?” I said, and her eyes flicked away from me. “...do they know you’re here?”

“I can’t answer that,” Rysa said. She was still carefully not looking my way. “Not without being more sure about what’s happening.”

Before I could say anything else, a tinny noise shrieked from inside my pocket and I nearly jumped off the couch. Fuck, I was just getting a call. I tried to ignore the way my heart had started banging around in my chest, dug my phone out and hit ignore without really looking at it. Seriously not in the mood. I pocketed it again, my heart still fluttering a little. Christ.

“What is that?” Rysa said. She was looking at my pocket.

“It’s...well, it’s kind of like the way you and Keyd do your...whatever, sensing each other. It’s another communication thing,” I said. “I can talk to other people with it.”

“Oh,” she said, like that made perfect sense. Maybe it did; she didn’t have to understand technology to get the concept.

“Hey, where is Keyd, anyway?” I said. “Did he come back with you?”

“He’s here,” Rysa said, and nodded towards the patio doors. I leaned around her so I had a better view through the half-open blinds. In the orangey light from one of the walkway lights I could sort of see a person-shaped dark lump out there, leaning against the patio fence. He was holding so still and blended in so well there was no way I would have ever noticed him.

“What’s he doing?”

“Being frustrated about this,” Rysa said.

“Seriously? It’s only been one day.”

Rysa folded her fingers together on her leg. “He likes results. And having our abilities limited like this is something new for us. It’s certainly not improving his mood.” She slid off the couch arm and stood up. “I should tell him that you figured out why it’s happening.”

“Sure, right,” I said, and watched as she went across the room and pushed the sliding door open. The stretch of shadow that was Keyd moved slightly, lifting its head and saying something to her, then Rysa closed the door behind her and any sounds were muffled behind glass.

I thought about turning the TV back on, but even the idea wasn’t holding my attention anymore. So I went back to my room for a while, because I probably had homework or something and maybe I should get it done. But it was hard to even think about doing any work—it seemed kind of pointless if we were gonna have a fucking alien invasion here. How much did a passing grade in calculus really matter? Or the project for my photography class? Before Friday night those had been the things that’d seemed the most important, the only real immediate things I was worrying about. Somewhere past that had been anxiety about graduation next semester and what the fuck was gonna happen afterwards with my life, but now even that seemed stupid.

For a while I just lay on my bed and stared at the lumpy white ceiling, drumming my fingers on my stomach. A couple of times I had to stop my leg from jittering up and down. At some point I realized Martin had come back; his muffled music was coming through my wall. This was as good a time as any to talk with him about all this. I rolled myself off the bed, went over to his room and rapped on his door with the back of my hand.

“Yo!” he yelled from inside.

I pushed the door open but didn’t go in. Martin’s floor was always completely coated by a layer of stuff, and last time I’d walked in here I’d stepped on a plate that’d been under a pair of jeans and broken it. I didn’t know how he got in and out of here alive every day. The doorway was as far as I’d go anymore.

Martin was sitting at his desk—which was made out of a big wide plank of wood balanced on two file cabinets—and on his computer. He was clicking through some pictures of girls in underwear, but he minimized it as soon as I’d opened the door.

“Man, I’m not your mom,” I shouted at him over the blast of Def Leppard. “Plus the Victoria’s Secret site is not even porn.”

“Just habit, dude,” he said, and cranked down his stereo about halfway. “Claire’s birthday’s next week. She seriously told me to get her cute underwear. Victoria’s Secret is cute underwear, right? Or is that just sexy underwear? This is so much pressure, man!”

“You’re the one with the girlfriend,” I said. “You should know these things.”

“Uh huh,” Martin said, then kicked off his desk and swiveled his chair all the way around to face me. “By the way, dude, how was your weekend?”

Huh. That wasn’t something he usually asked. Then I realized; he’d amscrayed out of the apartment for the whole weekend, right after I’d told him that Rysa was my girlfriend. My new girlfriend.

So that was both thoughtful of him and a little awkward. Now I could either keep up the fake lie about Rysa being my fake girlfriend, or make up some other fake story about who she actually was that would also be a lie.

Or, third option, pretend like I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Fine,” I said, giving him kind of a look.

He laughed. “Okay, okay, I got it.”

“Hey, but, about her. And the other guy. I should explain...both of them.”

“Yeah, I’d like to hear. Do they even speak English?” Martin said. “‘cause that dude, man, he looked at me so mean when I tried to say something to him.”

I winced. Jesus, Keyd. “Well, not…to each other, really, no. The guy’s my cousin,” I added, on an impulse that just came out of nowhere. “Really distantly. They’re just in town for a few days and need a place to crash. I told them it was cool to stay here, but I really should have checked with you first.”

“Hey, man, it’s all right,” Martin said. “I mean I’ve never really asked you if it was cool that Claire stays here sometimes. So yeah, it’s all good.” Then he hesitated, and raised his eyebrows slowly. “That Lisa chick isn’t your cousin too, is she?”

“No! What? Jesus, Martin, no. She’s just his friend. Not related. To either of us.”

“Oh. Good.” Martin gave me a thumbs up. “You know, you should have told me about this, man. Then I wouldn’t have told Chelsea you were, like, single.”

Chelsea, the girl who’d invited me to the Halloween frat party that I really should have fucking gone to, because then I wouldn’t be in this whole insane situation. I had no idea why Martin was even bringing her up.

“Uh, okay?”

“She’s always asking about you and shit, like if you’re gonna come to any of the parties in the frat block. So if Lisa doesn’t work out or she has to go back to Uzbekistan or whatever the hell she’s from, you got more options.” Martin grinned and gave me a double thumbs up this time.

“Thanks,” I said, and almost laughed. Uzbekistan. Rysa was from further away than that. “Anyway. Thanks for being cool with this.”

“Yup,” Martin said. “Dude, though, what’s with the face thing on your cousin?” He pointed at his left eye. “Is that shit for real? Like, permanent?”

“I don’t even know, he just showed up with it,” I said. And then, because it was true, “he’s kind of weird.”

Martin popped his eyebrows up again. “No kidding.”

“I’d just stay out of his way,” I said as I ducked out of his room. That’d gone pretty smoothly, considering. Considering it was the worst cover story ever.

“Hey, by the way, dude,” Martin yelled after me. “Are we really out of all that cleaning stuff?”

#

My weekday alarm went off at eight-thirty on Monday morning, and I woke up with a helpless sense of total disbelief. Holy shit, did I really have to go to class? It seemed just as pointless as doing my homework yesterday had been. I didn’t even get out of bed for at least an hour, rolling around and hitting the snooze button every five minutes until I couldn’t even pretend I was asleep.

Keyd and Rysa had already left by the time I hauled myself out to the kitchen. They’d probably gone out looking for the clarbach already. It was clearly going to take some serious time if they had to crawl over every inch of the town manually, since their energy sonar or whatever was out of commission. Clearly they were committed as hell to it, too.

I wasn’t sure if it made me more or less nervous that they were always gone all day—maybe they were out of my way, but they were in everybody else’s. They might scare the shit out of somebody just looking the way they did. Like…Mrs. Hadley, who was seventy-something and lived in the apartment backing mine and Martin’s and gave piano lessons to eight year olds and watched soap operas so loud the sound came through our walls. She’d probably drop dead if she saw either of them and their magic tattoos.

But Keyd had been running around town before and nobody’d seen him or called the police on him, so maybe there wouldn’t be any problems at all.

I drove to campus and got a spot in the topside lot. There were tons of other students around, headed to classes or just milling around. For a minute or two I just sat in my car, watching through the windows. Everyone and everything looked so fucking normal out there, and I wasn’t even sure I could handle it. They were all acting normal because everything was normal. I was the one out of place, even though nothing had really changed.

When I finally got out of my car and edged into the main part of campus, it was almost like I’d never seen my own goddamn school before. Like that feeling you get when you sit in a movie theater and then go out into the real world and everything looks the same but too bright and distant and muted. It was like looking at some bizarre copy of the world, where the details weren’t exactly right and everything was just off. Even the voices of people around me were too loud.

I couldn’t even get anywhere near the library. I took a stupid huge detour just so I wouldn’t have to walk by it, seriously glad that scheduling hadn’t put my class in ones of the computer labs in the basement. Instead it was in a computer lab in a building just sort of near it. Not a big room, just a classroom with two long rows of work tables facing a whiteboard at the front, two 22” monitors to a table. The graphic design major wasn’t a real popular one at this school, so most classes related to it could be stuffed in these tiny rooms. Most people were here already, including the professor; I slunk to a computer near the back corner.

I was fishing around in my bag for my cell phone to switch it to silent when somebody dropped into the workspace next to me. I jumped, and my knee banged into the table leg. Fuck, ow. And it was just Chelsea, who was tiny and blond and kind of a ditzy sorority girl and not scary at all.

“Hey, Alan,” she said. Usually she looked real put together, but today she was in worn jeans and an oversized t-shirt with her hair tied up into a sloppy bun. She looked about as tired and beat as I felt. She wasn’t even wearing any make up, because I could see freckles on her nose and cheeks that I’d never known she had. They were kinda cute.

“Hey,” I said back. It had only been two days since I’d last seen her, in this same class last Friday, but it felt like fucking weeks had gone by. “How’d that Halloween party go?”

“Oh my god it went practically all weekend,” she said, slinging her bag down off her shoulder. “I can’t even believe I made it to class today. Were you there? I can’t remember if you were there or not.”

“Yeah, I didn’t actually make it.”

“Oh.” Chelsea said. “That’s too bad. I’d—”

Whatever she’d been about to say was interrupted by class starting. And right away, I knew showing up had been a giant fucking mistake. I was on edge and fidgety the whole time, I couldn’t concentrate, and I changed maybe one thing in my project. Then I changed it back because I didn’t like it. I was looking at the clock about every thirty seconds, and whenever Chelsea tried to talk to me I only managed stuff like, “huh” and, “hmm” and, “oh, yeah?” After a while she gave up. But then being stuck in my own head with just my nervous thoughts was almost worse. What were Rysa and Keyd doing right now? Had they found these other aliens by now or not? And which one would be worse?

“Alan, hey.” Chelsea’s voice broke back into my thoughts and I looked around, startled. I’d been spacing out on my screen; class had ended and most people were gone. Chelsea looked a little worried, and hovered around the back of her chair as I started packing up my stuff. She dropped into step with me as I headed to the door. We were the last people out of the room.

“I’m gonna head over to the caf and get lunch,” she said to me once we were in the hallway. Another class was getting out a couple rooms back behind us, and noisy voices were ringing off the walls and echoing up to us. Chelsea tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear and looked at me. “You want to come with?”

We hit the front doors to the building before I could answer, and I pushed one open and held it for her. She slipped through under my arm. Then like six more people pushed past while I was standing there all fucking chivalrous and everything, and I had to stand there like an idiot and keep the door open.

Chelsea was still waiting for me when I finally got outside. “So, uh. Did you want to...you know, go eat?” she asked.

“Actually I have—I need to go,” I said. “I’ve got some family in town.”

“Oh.” Chelsea bit at her lip. “Sure.”

“Hey, but, some other time though, yeah?” I said, shouldering my bag from where it was slipping off my arm. “I’m just kinda busy....now. Sorry.”

“Okay,” she said, sounding more cheerful. “I’ll hold you to that!”

“Sure,” I said, not exactly sure what that meant, at all. What was so special about lunch at the cafeteria? I ate there almost every damn day. So did everyone else. I watched as Chelsea swung her bag onto her arm and headed off towards the building that housed the cafeteria. That long free strand of her hair fluttered behind her in the sun, like a wave goodbye.

I shook my head and pulled my focus back in. Clearly I couldn’t handle fucking classes today. I was just gonna ditch the rest of them, since I’d been pretty much useless in the one I’d even gone to. I had to get home to make sure my visitors hadn’t blown the apartment up with magic sparkles and phantom dogs.

#

The apartment was quiet and empty when I got back; no sign of either Martin or aliens.

I made myself some lunch, throwing a few frozen things into the microwave and nuking all of it until it was more or less edible. I was just about done eating when a shadow flitted down behind the drawn blinds of the patio doors, and I heard a light thump of boots on concrete. One of them was back.

I’d told them to use the patio to go in and out instead of the front door, since Martin and I liked being able to keep that locked. Plus the patio was shielded by a fence and a hedge and our apartment didn’t face a big traffic area of the complex, so nobody’d be likely to see people with giant wings going in and out. That’s what I’d hoped, anyway.

The sliding door pulled open and Keyd came in through the blinds, alone. He managed to do it so smoothly that they barely even clattered around him. It’d been warm today for early November, and he looked a little sweaty. His hair was damp and raked back off his face. It had to be a pretty good workout, flapping around under his own power like he did.

“Hey,” I said to him.

Keyd looked over at me like he had no idea how to react to that. Like instead of ‘hey’ I’d said ‘go screw yourself’. I was starting to think that this guy just didn’t know what to do around people who weren’t Rysa. Or maybe it was just me. Or maybe it was because the last time we’d had something close to a conversation, I’d tried to punch him in the face.

“Hello,” he said, finally.

“Where’s Rysa?”

“Nearby.”

“Okay.”

And....now I was out of things to say. There was just something about Keyd that set me on this weird edge, made me over-aware of anything I said and did. Even if he and Rysa were both warriors from another planet, Rysa knew how to not come off as so fucking alien. It was easier to forget that she wasn’t from here. And I genuinely kinda liked her. She was real cool and together and she even joked around sometimes like a regular person.

But Keyd was just weird. Even just standing there doing nothing. The way he held himself, the way he looked at me, even the way he breathed; just the way he did everything. All of it was slightly off, like he was out of sync with the whole world. Was he like this on his own planet? Did he have friends, other than Rysa? It was kind of a sad thought, but I couldn’t imagine that he did. He just seemed like a loner. And clearly he had no fucking people skills.

“I apologize,” Keyd said, out of fucking nowhere.

“Uh,” I said. “What?” He still wasn’t looking my way, and I wasn’t sure if he was actually talking to me. But there was no one else here.

“For the things I said to you the other day,” Keyd told the wall. “It was out of place. I understand this is not familiar to you, and I expected too much.”

“I—it’s...okay,” I said. The last thing I’d expected from him was an awkwardly sincere apology. And it was definitely that. “I get it. You were worried about Rysa.”

“Yes,” Keyd said, and finally looked at me. “I was.”

So this was like Keyd’s one giant redeeming trait that I could actually get behind. He cared about Rysa a lot. More than a lot; almost more than anything else. He’d made a fucking terrible first impression because of it, but since then he hadn’t actually been so bad. Mostly just quiet and distant. Except for the second time that he’d gotten all wound up about her. But I was starting to get this pattern now. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy overall, and maybe I should cut him some slack.

“I’m sorry I tried to hit you,” I said, for a start.

I almost—almost—thought I saw Keyd smile at that. It had been just a little twitch at the corner of his mouth, and it disappeared in the next second. But it might have been a smile. Maybe. More like a smile baby. That could maybe one day grow up and turn into a real one.

“I’m sorry you felt that you had to,” he said, which was the weirdest thing I think I’d ever heard anyone say. I was still trying to figure out what he’d meant by it—if he was actually apologizing again or just accepting mine—when there was another light sound of feet touching down on the patio. Rysa came in the sliding door a second later, her wings flashing back down through her clothes as she did.

“Hey,” I said to her. Thank fuck you’re back, I didn’t say.

“Alan,” Rysa said, brushing her hand along the back of Keyd’s neck as she passed him. He was staring at the wall again, arms stiff at his sides, and didn’t react at all to the touch. He didn’t even stand like a normal person; his shoulders were always set back with his spine really straight and he never fucking moved an inch. Like a mascot for good posture. It really screamed military and reminded me, just a little, of my dad.

I dumped my dishes from lunch into the sink and sloshed some water over them—I’d get around to actually cleaning them later—and while I was wiping my wet hands idly off on the front of my jeans, I thought of something.

“Hey, Rysa,” I said, and she glanced up. “Do you guys eat?”

They’d been awake and conscious here for over two days by this point and they hadn’t even brought it up. And they were both tall and in shape and doing lots of physical things and they seriously had to need some kind of food. Unless they had weird alien metabolisms that digested air or something. That’d be kind of cool.

Keyd actually answered me. “Not as often as you do,” he said.

“How often is not as often? I mean, I can’t really cook worth shit but I could, you know. Make you guys something. I can do sandwiches.” I didn’t think they’d appreciate Hot Pockets or microwaved corn dogs. But I had a shitload of groceries now from my errand spree on Sunday.

Rysa rested her hands on the back of a chair and looked at me. “You don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t,” I said. “But if you’re saving my planet from a giant frog invasion, I can make you lunch. That’s a pretty good trade.”

“That sounds fair,” Rysa said with a smile. And over her shoulder, I saw Keyd almost doing the same thing. Almost.