Panting, half from the surprise and half from the exercise, I looked over at him.

Something seemed... off. He was different from before. We’d developed a somewhat easy (or perhaps not easy, but unavoidable due to proximity) intimacy being together nearly non-stop for more than a month. But that feeling suddenly went cold and vanished. It was as if his being out of the room for thirty minutes had erased weeks of contact between us. All those endless hours of conversation and bumbling language acquisition, awkwardness and even laughter, vanished.

Hell, the man had even seen me naked. More than once.

But now...

Now he looked at me as if for the very first time.

I fussed with my robe, unsure what to make of his almost ominous silence. And not just silence – distance. Usually, he was within arm’s reach of me at all times, unless one of us was in the adjoining bathroom. But now, he remained where he was, all the way across the room, his back and his hands plastered to the door he’d just shut as if someone had glued him there. He was breathing heavily too, I suddenly noticed, his gleaming green and gold chest heaving beneath the white robe. His eye on me was brighter and more intense than I’d ever seen it, and yet, at the same time, his gaze was incredibly serious. Solemn.

My sweat became a cold one. Because something in his gaze, his expression, reminded me of when Elvi’s doctor told me she wouldn’t make it. A sobering sort of gravity that told me bad news was coming my way, and quickly.

“What happened?” I said, fighting for a steady voice.

Something had changed.

It scared me that I didn’t know what it was.

Because in all the turmoil of recent days, Skallagrim had been my only constant. If something was going on with him, something that would change how things had been, how they were...

If he decided to leave...

No. You don’t need him. You’re a survivor and you will figure this out.

If he decided he didn’t want to be around me anymore, if he had other things to do, if he left me here and never returned me to the ship... Maybe I could stay and find some way to be useful. I understood enough Bohnebregg to at least be able to do something around here. I’d scrub floors if I had to. Perhaps I could help in their gardens. Jolakaia was the only one I’d had much exposure to in this new place, but I liked her well enough. She seemed caring and gave me hope that maybe she would vouch for me even without Skallagrim.

In Skallagrim’s silence, I built up a whole emergency plan about how I’d survive in this world without him. If I couldn’t stay in this specific building, maybe I could find somewhere to go beyond it. When we’d been out in the courtyard area today, I’d seen the buildings beyond – what looked like an entire alien city.

Or I could go back to that abandoned house, if I could find it, anyway. Maybe, just maybe I could hack it on my own out there. Catch fish in the river. Start a small Bohnebregg veggie farm. I was a botanist for fuck’s sake, and even if my training had been mostly restricted to Earth plants, surely I could figure out some way to feed myself without my big, scaly babysitter who currently stared at me like he’d never seen me before in his life.

When Skallagrim finally did answer, it took so long that I’d forgotten I’d even asked a question.

“I talked to Aeshyr.”

I shivered. Aeshyr. That was what Jolakaia had called that other winged being who’d come from the sky. The creepy one. Despite the wings, the glowy bits of skin, and the ability to apparently travel between worlds the way Skallagrim did, Aeshyr looked completely different from Skallagrim.

Skallagrim was an alien like Aeshyr, sure, but he was also a sculpted marvel of power and vitality and, frankly, beauty. There truly was no way to deny Skallagrim’s beauty – he was fucking drenched in it, like river water running endlessly down his scales. Even the rough scar of his lost eye didn’t diminish the stark, almost arrogant appeal of his features.

In contrast, Aeshyr had looked like...

Like something mostly dead. Something that should have been relegated to the nightmares of folklore, like a vampire or a zombie or one of the shadowy ghouls of Tuonela, the Finnish land of the dead.

“OK...” I breathed out when Skallagrim didn’t elaborate. “Is he... is he still here?”

“No.”

Well, that was a bit of a relief. The dead-eyed Aeshyr was gone. But that still didn’t explain Skallagrim’s sudden weirdness around me.

“Then what is it? Why are you...” I couldn’t think of a way to easily express my current whirl of thoughts in English, so instead I flapped an impatient hand at him and settled on saying, “Why are you just over there looking at me like that?”

Skallagrim cleared his throat in his odd, dragon-like way. It was a harsh, husky sound that honestly seemed like it should have been accompanied by a puff of smoke out of his snout. Then he reached into his robe’s pocket and pulled out pieces of some kind of shiny, rainbow fabric.

“Put this in your ear.”

It was a fairly simple sentence, but there was no way I’d translated it correctly. I was about to ask him to repeat himself, or to explain, when he reached up and shoved some of the rainbow stuff inside his own ear. I gaped, then grimaced when I saw just how far he shoved it in there. His snout tensed, and then he gave the side of his head a solid wallop with the butt of his hand before finally crossing the room and closing the distance between us. He held out a second piece of the fabric.

“Put this in your ear.”

Alright, I guess I had translated that properly the first time.

I shook my head rapidly.

“No way. Why? And where the hell is the one you put in your ear?”

I cocked my head, staring suspiciously up at his ear. He’d shoved in a large enough scrap of the fabric that I should have been able to see the ends of it poking out, but I didn’t. It was like it had melted into his ear canal and disappeared.

Well that’s alarming.

“It will help us talk. Understand each other,” he replied. He said something else, a word that shared the same base as the verb to translate.

“You mean to tell me,” I said, “that a slip of fabric is... What? Some kind of alien translator?”

“Yes.”

That made about zero sense. A translator would have to be some sort of machine, wouldn’t it? Like a computer, with data and memory and a speaker to spit the translated words into your ear? It wouldn’t be some shiny, silky thing that was ethereally pretty but ultimately as limp-looking and useless as a doily.

But he’s already put one in his ear...

“Does it work already? Can you understand everything I’m saying better now?”

When he said yes, I didn’t believe him.

So I decided to test him. I tried to think of saying something with words I’d never used around him before. Vocab we would have had no reason to cover until now.

Snow.

We’d never once talked about snow. We knew each other’s words for air and sky and light, but not snow.

“We get a lot of snow in Finland.”

His eye glittered knowingly.

“Sounds cold,” he quipped back instantly.

I started, shocked, then frowned in denial. Maybe I had talked about snow once before after all...

“Vinland...” His snout struggled with the soft F sound. “This is your... Your...” He mimed shaping a sphere as if with invisible clay in the air.

“Not my world. It’s a country. It’s the place I was born on the planet I’ve come from.”

He seemed to absorb and understand that perfectly, which was jarring, to say the very least.

Switching gears, I said something else, this time in my third language of Swedish, which I was sure I’d never once spoken around him.

“Salmiakki is a type of Finnish candy. I hated it as a kid but now I love it.”