CHAPTER 19
The past, present, and future is wrapped up in archaeology. That’s not a rule, but it’s the undeniable truth.
I shouldn’t have let Zarek kiss me. Again.
If I thought I was emotionally compromised before, it doesn’t compare to the way I feel now.
I’m devising ways to cause another impromptu mechanical failure on this train.
I’m wondering how slow I can pretend to hike up this mountain.
I’m hoping the origin of human language is lost to the people of Terilia and Zarek will feel so guilty that he can’t give me what I want, he stays here forever with me trying to figure it out.
I am certifiable.
We exit our taxi, both of us obviously caught up in our own thoughts, and maybe trying not to address the astronomically large elephant in the room. Every moment feels both exhilarating and depressing, and the whiplash has both of us a little quiet.
My own mental spiraling is why I don’t notice the commotion at the front of the line to board the train, at first. But there’s some shuffling, murmuring in French and English and maybe some Italian as well, and then raised voices at the front of the line.
“We’ve been on and off this damned train for almost a week, and we’ve never had to show our tickets to reboard!”
The shrill, undeniably American voice rings out, and I cringe inwardly. Oh no. My people.
“Ma’am, that is simply impossible,” the tired attendant sighs, obviously trying to remain polite and contain the frustration in her voice. “Every patron must show their ticket to reboard the train, each time we embark.”
That is true. I’ve kept my phone well-charged and the physical copies of our tickets in my wallet as a backup, just in case, every time we leave the train. It’s been an inconsequential normalcy of this trip.
“Well, I haven’t had to. And one of your other train girls said it was fine.”
Ah, the classic American go-to. Blame some other nameless, faceless service industry worker. I roll my eyes.
“That would be against policy, ma’am,” the attendant replies, a little more forcefully this time. “If you have misplaced your ticket, you can show your identification in the station and we will get this sorted.”
“This is a free country, I don’t have to show you my ID,” the woman bites back. I watch Zarek start to stare out of the corner of my eye, his neck craning to see the commotion better.
“Don’t,” I grumble, elbowing him in the side. He doesn’t pay me any mind.
“While France maintains protections for its citizens’ civil liberties, I don’t think that’s what you mean.”
I’m proud of the little attendant. Go after that awful American, she deserves it. Also, don’t ask me any questions because I’m terrible at faking a French accent.
“These people recognize me!” the woman yells rather obnoxiously, turning back to the line of patrons who are suddenly very preoccupied with the phones and tickets in their hands. “They’ll tell you that I don’t need to show my ID.”
“I do recognize her,” Zarek murmurs to me, and press my foot down on top of his.
“Do not say a single fucking word,” I whisper-yell, looking up at him under my lashes with a glare that could melt icebergs. “I will not be associated with those kinds of Americans.”
Whether or not Zarek understands the cultural reference, he seems to get how serious I’m being.
The woman yells at a few more people in line as the attendant radios for assistance, carefully shepherding the obnoxiousness toward the station with platitudes and promises that this won’t take much time at all.
By the time another attendant arrives to continue our boarding process, the majority of the line is providing a scathing review of that little performance.
I hold out our tickets when we board the train, thankful that no one makes me speak and reveal my affiliation. And while this was all a very entertaining, if annoying, distraction, the closer I get to our cabin the more I feel my anxiety settle into my bones again.
I make the excuse of needing to shower to give myself a minute to talk myself off the ledge. Zarek just nods and settles himself on his bed, looking out the window like he’s trying to solve something only he can see.
I take my time through my little self-care routine, washing my hair and shaving, treating my curls and lotioning my elbows, trying to remind myself of what Jo said.
That this was supposed to be fun. An adventure.
I could try something new and open my horizons and not get all caught up in the inevitability of it all.
Right?
When I’m dressed in pajamas and have my hair braided down my back, I convince myself I’m okay.
The lie is unraveled when I open the bathroom door to find Zarek sitting at our little table with a massive, adorable smile on his face.
I join him, fiddling with my own fingers as Zarek almost gleefully opens the DIRC, so excited to find my discovery that will tie up one half of our bargain.
I’d be upset with him if I didn’t see the look in his eyes in that lavender field.
Man, we have royally fucked up.
My phone dings as Zarek warms up his device, and I slide it across the table, hoping it’s Jo making a ridiculous joke or telling me to leave this planet with Zarek at the end of all this. Instead, it’s my research group chat.
The site has been cleared by the safety crews. They are completing final paperwork, but everyone should expect to be back to work in ten days.
Ten fucking days.
How is it possible that, in barely more time than that, my whole life has changed?
I can hardly remember the person I was before I stumbled across Zarek’s crash.
I feel like I’ve peeled a thousand layers off my skin, like I’m brand new and shiny and cannot be trapped in the world I was living before.
How can I go back to being tolerated by the people I work with every day when Zarek looks at me like I hung the moon? How can I return to being stuffy and rule following when all I itch to do is discover more feelings that make me want to break them all?
I reply with a thumbs up. I feel like throwing up.
“So, while I was on the phone with Zul, I made sure to connect to our internet,” Zarek explains, the etchings in his skin reflecting the warm light overhead. I perk up a little in surprise.
“You did?” I ask, peeking my head around his arm to look at the screen with him. My glasses slip down my nose a bit, and I shove them back up hurriedly. I feel more than see him grin down at me.
“Of course. As soon as he called I knew we would have to disconnect soon. I wanted to make the most of the time.”
I blink back what I absolutely will not admit are tears. It’s just emotional…in a moment where Zarek thought he might have been discovered by his government and in a world of trouble, he still thought about me and my silly quest for knowledge.
“Thank you,” I say, hearing the waver in my own voice and refusing to meet his gaze. I cannot do this. I cannot break down about the end of my sort of sexy adventure with my alien not-boyfriend.
“Always,” Zarek says, making things so much worse. He clicks through some kind of portal, and then enters a lot of information too quickly for me to even pretend to follow. “It’ll still take time, but I think we have more power behind our search now. Kind of like a closed local network we can use.”
And use it, we do.
Shoulders pressed together, we dig into the weeds of the newly-organized data.
It’s not really a search engine in the way I understand it—with keywords and filters and all that—but more like a detailed organization system.
Zarek understands it far better than I do, obviously, and graciously doesn’t spend a lot of time trying to explain.
Instead, he pulls up file after file, asking me questions about historical context and timelines, translating and transcribing in record time.
It’s a flurry of talking over each other, reading field notes, and pulling up diagrams. It feels like I’m running, and Zarek must sense my heartbeat with my arm pressed to his and the way I hold my breath every time he opens a new piece of evidence.
“Wait,” I say, gripping Zarek’s arm like a vise as he’s about to close another document. “Go to the bottom of that.”
You could hear a pin drop as Zarek waves slowly in front of the screen, scrolling the document down toward the edge.
“Is that…”
Diagrams. Records. A list of words.
“More than simple communication,” Zarek translates, sounding as breathless as I feel. “Do you see? The anatomical diagrams…”
“And the societal structures. Holy…does this have a date?”
He navigates the document around carefully, like he’s afraid to lose it. I am a little bit, too.
Right there. A year. Zarek has to put it in context of the Common Era for me, but there it is. A record of the first time another conscious being noticed the development of human language.
“It’s not a definitive answer,” Zarek says, and I can hear the furrow in his brow. A soft laugh, almost disbelieving, escapes my lips.
“It doesn’t have to be,” I mutter, staring at the diagram of human bones and muscle in front of me.
Mouths and tongues and teeth, sketched out like an artist on a pad.
Zarek explained earlier that the Terilians did not abduct and dissect, as movies so often depicted, but they did scans of lifeforms when they could get close enough.
“But you don’t have your answer yet,” Zarek argues, his arm pressing closer to mine, like he’s trying to fuse our skin together. That would be nice, maybe. “‘What factor caused the development of human language’…that’s what you asked. And this is just…well, it’s a lot of factors.”
“That’s just the way humanity works,” I mutter, gawking at the detailed depictions of societal structures of my human ancestors.
About functional need turning into societal development, of humanity expanding its fragile fingers into the future with every new utterance.
“It was always going to be a thousand things all happening at exactly the right time, with the right group of humans.”
“That seems so…improbable,” Zarek replies, and I finally tear my eyes away from the discovery filling my heart with such boundless joy I know Zarek can tell there’s been a fundamental change in its anatomy. “It’s like it was luck.”
“It is,” I shrug, smiling in a way that’s showing more teeth than is probably reasonable. I can’t help it. The joy of knowing, of learning, of connecting with something so beautifully human is pouring out of my very veins. “Evolution and a little bit of luck.”
“You are happy? With your discovery?” Zarek asks, a little sad, a little worried, and a lot thrilled. For me.
“I will want to read every single scrap of sapphiro knowledge associated with that report, but yes. So fucking happy.”
With a wobbling little smile, Zarek looks back to the DIRC, inputting some kind of code that I don’t witness because I’m staring at the side of his face.
He did this for me. He risked getting caught and captured and not getting his edelweiss so I could have my discovery.
My glasses start to fog, evidence of tears I’m trying valiantly to stymie.
Before I can come to terms with the reality of that, Zarek is pressing a thin chip that looks a lot like a microSD card into my hands.
“In case we don’t get to do more, this is everything collected in the one hundred years before and after that report was authored,” he says, lacing our fingers together with the chip pressed between our palms. “I know that won’t cover everything, but I want you to have something to remember me by.”
I think the exhilaration of learning something so fundamental to my sense of self has shattered my ability to keep my emotions in check.
Hot, awful tears are leaking out of the side of my eyes, even while I still have this manic grin on my face.
Zarek uses his free hand to wipe them away, thumb to cheek, even as his own track from those galaxy eyes.
“Thank you,” I say, my voice breaking on a sob I didn’t know was trapped inside me. “For making my dreams come true.”
“Thank you for being my dream,” he says.
And what the hell else am I supposed to do with that?
I turn my body so I’m practically in his lap, the chip with my life’s purpose trapped between our palms, and lace my fingertips through his hair.
I promise myself I’ll take a thousand photos, even if I have to lock them down in some Fort Knox of a file server.
Or if I can’t, I’ll memorize the way those swirling rivers cut through his skin, and the cerulean feels like a warm ocean beneath my hands, and how his eyes literally glitter when he looks at me.
I’ll etch the feeling of his hands into my hips and thighs and every inch of my body.
I’ll make him say a thousand words, in Terilian and English and his terrible French, so I will know his voice forever.
And most importantly, I’ll kiss him as much as possible, so I never forget the lips of the being who made my dreams come true, and gave me a few new ones along the way.