“We’re going in now,” she said. “Are you coming?”

“Coming... with you?”

Blast. I never knew a brain as half-decent as the one I’d always imagined I’d had in my head could be so thoroughly bludgeoned by nothing more than the sight of my pretty mate with flowers in her arms and sunshine on her hair.

“Of course,” I said gruffly, trying to regain my footing among this sudden attack of stupidity. I’d never seen Suvi go stupid when she looked at me, and I wondered if this was solely a male phenomenon, or something unfortunately specific to me. I wasn’t sure which option was less comforting.

What was comforting, though, was her little smile upon my answer. She was actually glad I was going with her, thank the cursed stars, because I was not entirely sure how I would have recovered if she’d looked unhappy instead.

I reached my hands for the load in her arms.

“Let me carry that for-”

My question was cut off by Jolakaia immediately depositing a massive, unwieldy bundle of flowers, leaves, and stalks into my upward-facing palms.

“Since you were obliging enough to offer,” my cousin-niece said brightly.

“I was making the offer to my mate,” I said archly. But both females were already walking back into the temple with their own bundles of collected plants, thoroughly ignoring me. Fighting to keep the many bits and bobs of plant-matter together in my hands (skies above, why are so many of these blasted petals falling off!) I followed.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Suvi

The room where Jolakaia and the other Mother’s Hands mixed their medications was probably the nicest lab I’d ever seen. It was advanced, with alien machinery and glass beakers lined up along the walls, but it was also beautiful. Huge windows let in flowing sunlight, illuminating the wooden benches and copper-coloured metal worktops.

There was only one other Mother’s Hand in the room when we arrived – an old Bohnebregg woman with dull, pond-green scales and short black hair that was interspersed with rust-red. It seemed that, when Bohnebregg people aged, instead of their hair going grey or white, it faded to something more reddish. Nutmeg and pepper instead of salt and pepper. Jolakaia introduced her as the oldest Mother’s Hand in the temple. Her name was Koraba, and she gave us a gummy smile, several of her largest fangs missing, before returning to her work bent over what looked very much like the Bohnebregg version of a microscope.

Jolakaia led us to a clean, bare metal table, and we dumped down the cuttings taken from the garden. Skalla followed suit, his pile largest of all.

“I will give you a short tour before we begin,” Jolakaia said. She took us around the room, demonstrating the various machines used for things like purification, distillation, heating, or cooling. As we went along, one question grew and grew until I finally had to turn to Skalla to ask him to translate it.

“What’s the power source?”

It was something that had already been niggling at me. For example, the two-wheel vehicles seemed to have a small, tubular battery on them rather than a combustion engine, but I’d never seen any evidence of such things being charged. Likewise, I’d never noticed any wiring in the apartment, nor attached to any of these machines here.

“I do not understand,” Jolakaia said.

“Where I come from we use energy, like electricity for example,” I explained. “Metal can conduct it to power up appliances like these. But they’re usually plugged into an outlet.”

Skalla translated, but Jolakaia did not look any less confused than before.

“The power source is within the object itself,” she said, tapping a claw on the metal side of a machine used to disinfect tools and beakers. “It is not simply conducted by the metal; it comes from the metal. Or, more precisely, from the Shara plant.”

Now it was my turn to be confused. Jolakaia rolled her robe’s sleeves up to the elbows, as if gearing up to teach me a complex lesson.

“Here. Regard the Shara plant.” She held up one of the cottony, metal-lined flowers. “As the plant grows and thrives, it takes in sunlight, water, nutrients, heat.”

I nodded. That much, at least, I could understand. I was a botanist, after all.

“The metal,” her claw twanged against a bright thread, like she was plucking a guitar string, “conducts the plant’s energy up and down its length. But it also acts as energy storage. This stored energy then powers the objects created from the metal. Even more than this, the metal retains an echo of its life in the plant – a memory of sorts – and it can continue to collect and distribute energy from sunlight long after it has been stripped out of the living plant.”

“Are you telling me,” I said, disbelief catching in my throat, “that you are essentially growing your very own self-sustaining, solar-powered batteries? In a garden?!”

After Skalla translated, Jolakaia jerked her snout in confirmation.

“Is it not so on your world?”

“Definitely not,” I said, shaking my head and staring at the simple, brain-bendingly extraordinary plant Jolakaia held. No natural gas, no nuclear fusion, no hydro. All the Bohnebregg people had to do was to let these plants grow in their native environment, soaking up sun and energy, and in turn they could power entire cities with the stuff.

Instantly, I started thinking of all the ways such a plant could benefit Earth. We could eliminate pollution, shut down mines, save forests and oceans and people! So many people!

My excitement had a bucket of cold water dumped on it when I realized that this was exactly the sort of thing our mission had been sent out into the universe to do. The whole reason I was abducted from Earth was to find, no, to steal alien technology and resources that could sustain Earth into the future.

But no human ships had come to this world. At least, not yet. The Shara plant would remain here, untouched and safe.

And so would the people of Bohnebregg.

After my brief and mind-blowing lesson on Bohnebregg energy production (or cultivation, I supposed) and a few more demonstrations of the lab’s machinery, we got to work. I learned how to use the feathery yellow Mother’s Breath to prepare an antibiotic tincture, and how to extract Mother’s Tears (a viscous clear sap) from the stems of plants of the same name. I peeled threads of metal from Shara plants, sliced stalks open, boiled and bottled, all the while peppering Jolakaia with questions translated by Skalla.

She didn’t appear to mind at all. In fact, she seemed happy to have such an enthusiastic student. I was happy, too. I was so engrossed, so glad to be immersed in work like this, that at one point Jolakaia stopped, looked at me, and said with a laugh, “You were born to be a Mother’s Hand!”

“I do like this sort of thing,” I admitted, blushing at her compliment. “Back on Earth, I used my botany skills mostly for survey work. I’d go over project sites for utility companies and make sure they weren’t harming any endangered species. Stuff like that. But...”

I gave my freshly collected Mother’s Tears a stir with a metal rod.

“But I always had a passion for this kind of work. My sister got very sick and the chemotherapy – the human treatment for her illness – caused her a lot of problems with her skin. I used to create skincare products and salves for her in our kitchen using different natural ingredients.”

No matter how tired or sick she’d felt, she’d always exclaim over a new batch of anything I came up with. “You should sell this stuff,” she’d told me. “Seriously! Go on one of those American shows, get a bunch of start-up money, open a factory!”