Page 28 of Ruby
We still need to meet up with the others, my time on the ground keeps making me miss my flockmates and if I am to survive any further I will need to make these strangers my new flock.
At least for a short time.
It’ll be hard with this one. Despite my best efforts, it seems I have only managed to enrage her more. I want to ask her why she is so angry at everything and what I can do to help but I quickly realize that like me, she has been displaced.
She is lost, confused, and unsure of who to trust and it is blinding her from seeing that all I want to do is help.
I decide to be patient with her, even though it feels like I am losing grip on the situation. Ree did not give up on me when all I wanted to do was sing death.
“You sing how want, but not here. Not now.”
11
Ani
He’s a nearly useless climber but I never would’ve gotten down from the tree myself. Just glancing up at where we were makes my heart race. I should thank him, but I don’t.
I can’t.
The Bitch is laid over every inch of my body and voice now, my terror making it even more important to cling to what is most comfortable.
I ignore the voice of my therapist trying to tell me how useless that mask is. What does she know about crash landing on a fucking alien planet?
Every time he corrects me I know he is right… but there is something in my mind that isn’t working right. Something I need to control or it will get me killed. Except the control I have always prided myself on seems permanently out of my reach.
My knees wobble a bit and I’ve never been happier to see a flat surface. I steady myself, holding upright so I seem less like prey in his eyes. Now that we’re on the ground, I wonder what will happen next.
He is standing only a few steps away from me and I can’t help but notice how big he is. Much taller than most living things I have directly interacted with, and it bends my sense of reality even more than it already has been, scaring me. The skin on his arms isn’t smooth like his face, with deep craters of wrinkles in a darker yellow in odd patterns around raised blue splotches of skin, no clear uniformity in their size or shape, though the dots are smaller on his long, multi-jointed fingers.
The bottom set of hands have far more joints than the top. Small, thin, white and yellow feathers are scattered along the roughed skin of his arms, none of them longer than an inch. His legs are far too short compared to his long torso, something about the way the long toes with thick talons splaying on the ground seem clumsy. Most of him is a large mass of feathers, making his form hard to discern beyond the fact that he is huge.
I’m just over six feet tall and he is well over double my height. Such an odd alien, but I don’t feel repulsed by him.
More curious than anything. I’m glad I have that privilege and I’m not finding myself in his digestive tract. However, the song language is fucking annoying. There are words I cannot convey and not being able to talk directly to someone is killing me more than it ever has. I pride myself on conversing properly and it is impossible.
His eyes scan our environment, probably on the lookout for these “hunters” he keeps speaking of. I don’t know if it’s the gray alien blobs but if it is, I’d very much not like to get caught.
Though I’m still not sure about this Ree woman.
Not only does she have an overwhelming presence, from when I was kidnapped to me being saved by an alien, she happens to have an unusual rapport with them. That only comes from someone deep enough in human-alien relations. Perhaps like me, she can easily speak the language of these aliens. Communication means someone can choose to work with the enemy.
I’ve bedded down with enough terrible people to know sometimes you do what you have to.
“Bright,” he suddenly sings, staring down at me, but higher than my eyes.
My hands instinctively reach for my head, and I realize he’s talking about my hair. It is indeed a luminous color. It’s not what I’d choose, but that is nothing new.
“Not mine,” I respond grumpily.
He blinks those gorgeous eyes, but I don’t think he understands. How annoying indeed. He gestures to a part of the forest, the place I was actively trying not to look at because of how tall and huge the trees are. He wants us to go in there.
“With me. We go. If short name need, Szhe’ka.”
My eyes narrow at how his name sounds like a familiar bird call. Like from something from Earth I can’t quite place.
“Not mean I trust,” I lilt.
He sings back to me and there is regret in his melody, something sad and forlorn but I cannot bring myself to listen. “I want to help.”
