He spoke again, then, and it made my head spin to have an alien trying to engage in conversation with me. He was trying to tell me something, to communicate. That had to be a good sign, right?

But then again, even psychopaths were capable of speech. Serial killers could talk, too. It didn’t actually mean much, and that scared me.

Once again, he ended the string of unfamiliar sounds with aerra bai. I wondered if aerra bai was a phrase used in most sentences of his language. Maybe some kind of honorific, or a verbal form of punctuation.

“Aerra bai,” I repeated, entirely without thinking.

His nostrils flared, his eye focusing even more intently on my face. Clearly, I’d shocked him by engaging in his own language, but I wasn’t sure I could have even helped myself from doing it. I was so desperate to understand this situation, to understand him. My human brain couldn’t stop itself from poking and prodding at every edge of the problem, from sinking into the familiar back and forth of language even if that language was entirely foreign.

“Aerra bai,” he repeated back at me, his voice a deep rumble. He raised his free hand, bringing his fingers and thumb close together, like he was pinching something tiny and invisible between his long claws. “Aerra.” Then, he gestured upward with that hand. “Bai.”

“Pinch... sky?” I said, frowning. Was he talking about what he’d done in the sky? How he’d brought us here?

It occurred to me how absurd this was. That I was so focused on figuring out some random alien phrase instead of thinking ahead to what came next. But the puzzle of figuring out this phrase felt somehow safer. Trying to understand a new word was more comfortable than deciding when I’d try to run from him and how I’d survive when I did.

And it definitely felt safer than thinking about how I would probably never see another human again.

Don’t go there. Don’t fall apart.

“Aerra bai,” he said again. He was an alien, and I was entirely unfamiliar with his facial expressions, but there didn’t seem to be any malice or aggression in his tone of voice. He wasn’t snarling it, or growling it. The violence in him, the pure chaos of his power that I’d witnessed on the other planet, seemed to have been gentled somehow. Like he’d eased back from the edge of something terrible. I hoped it wasn’t some tactic to get me to drop my guard. But then again, someone as strong as him wouldn’t need to manipulate me into trusting him before he ate me. He could have killed me at any point.

But he hadn’t.

He repeated the phrase again, and when I showed no new or obvious sign of understanding him, he suddenly crouched. He didn’t let go of my arm, instead letting his hand glide downwards, clasping my hand firmly in his own. He grasped a fist-sized rock from the riverbed and held it up.

“Loirra pak.” He tossed it down, then grabbed a much smaller rock, a pebble. “Aerra pak.”

Big rock... Small rock...

I remembered the pinching motion of his fingers from before.

“Aerra! It’s small, right? Little?” I pointed to the pebble, then used my index finger and thumb to indicate “a little” in a similar gesture to his.

He stared up at me, then did something that nearly knocked me flat on my curvy human ass.

He smiled.

Despite the foreign features of his face, there was no mistaking the expression. His snout pulled, revealing his fangs in a way that wasn’t frightening or aggressive. His golden eye glittered. I was too dazed to smile back, and he turned his attention back down to the ground. His smile vanished, and he made a thoughtful grumbling sort of sound, rubbing at the underside of his snout with his free hand. His other hand was still wrapped possessively around mine, and I shifted back and forth on my wet feet, feeling antsy at the odd intimacy of it.

The alien stopped rubbing his snout and lowered his claws to the damp sand. Using a single claw, he started dragging deep lines through the sand. I recognized the two circles he drew but couldn’t figure out where I’d seen them until he gestured at the sky again.

Moons. He’s drawing the moons.

Around the two moons in the sand, he jabbed his claw downward over and over again, making a dozen or so little dots that I realized were stars. He pointed to one of the tiny divots he’d created.

“Bai.”

“Aerra bai... Little star?” I made the pinching “little bit” gesture with my finger and thumb again, then pointed at his sandy stars before pointing up at the sky.

He stood with such sudden force that I would have stumbled backwards if not for the firm hold on my hand.

“Aerra bai,” he said once more, and it felt like confirmation.

This time, I really did smile. I couldn’t help it. It was so small, so aerra, but it was something. The tiniest little win. It made me ever so slightly less afraid.

He’d said something to me, and I’d understood him.

Now I just needed to figure out why he kept mentioning a little star. Was that important for some reason? Something about space travel? He kept repeating it, so it had to have some meaning to him.

I realized I was still smiling. The alien’s expression had softened somehow. It should have been impossible in a face as brutal and alien and angular as his, but there was no other way to describe it. The intense brightness of his eye felt slightly darker, a crackling golden warmth instead of blazing flame.

“Aerra bai,” he breathed, squeezing my hand slightly. His other hand came up to caress the side of my face, and my smile froze. “Aerra bai...” He sank his claws into my hair. “Aerra bai...”

He was looking at me and only me as he said it. He wasn’t trying to communicate something about an actual star in the sky. It wasn’t a message.

It was a name.

He was calling me little star.

The elation I’d felt at understanding him, the small victory of it, imploded around me. I grew colder, my jaw tightening with anxiety. There was no good or sane reason for this alien to be giving me some weird pet name.

There was no reason he should have taken me in the first place.

He wanted something from me.

Something that I promised myself he’d never fucking get.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Skallagrim

My little star looked unhappy. Its pink mouth thinned and twisted, and the openness that had been there a moment ago was gone. A sense of deep frustration throbbed in my river-smashed head. The frustration of not knowing where I was, who I was, or how to communicate with the one being in the universe who seemed to be able to ground me. I did not know what the little star was meant to be to me. Only that I could not risk losing it now.

“Whatever you are,” I rasped, sliding my claws out of its hair, “you are important to me. You will remain with me until I can figure out why.” And until I can figure out how to remain in the light without you.

I realized that I had essentially trapped this creature. It was not a mere animal to be trained or taken. Like me, it was conscious and competent, a sentient being. I had no name for its kind, but it was intelligent and emotive and starkly beautiful with its wide, wet eyes and moon-river hair. I was doing something terrible, maybe even unforgivable, by capturing it like this. Dimly, I remembered seeing a few others like it before we’d come here.

I took it from its people.

“There was no choice,” I said forcefully, as if trying to convince both myself and the little star of that fact. The sudden vehemence of my tone sent a wave of tension through the creature, and it flinched in my hold. The movement made the covered swells of its chest bounce, its cushiony abdomen sucking inward with a tight breath.