I’m too tired to be afraid. My body’s senses are dull, as if the heat has enveloped me and overheated my brain. I look up at the person staring down at me, squinting against the sunlight slicing in between petals of the rhohedron. With the light behind them, it makes it difficult to see their face. I want to stand but I can’t seem to find the energy. My head buzzes ceaselessly but not sharply the way it had in the containment room. It has returned to a purr almost below my consciousness.
“Hello,” I say. What else can be said?
The person doesn’t respond. They shift their weight from one bare leg to another; a massive brown leg as spotted as the arms and neck. The person is more difficult to see now than a moment ago. Is it the light in my eyes? I blink and refocus, but I can’t make out the legs anymore, the arms.
I realize slowly that it’s not a trick of the light. The person’s skin has changed from the smooth brown that made them so visible a moment before to a vibrant red. In my dazed state I think that perhaps they somehow slipped on a skinsuit like mine between the slow blinks of my eyes. But it can’t be. In places on the red skin I can still make out the spots, also red but a slightly different shade. My head continues to buzz.
“Your skin changed,” I say.
The person’s teeth are a flash of brilliant white, and then the face with the teeth comes closer, the red body kneeling down to look at me. The person is tall: I still have to tilt my head far back to see them. But this close I can make out their features. Broad face. Unusually large eyes, wide set. No nose to speak of, just a slightly raised area at the center of the face. No ears that I can see. But the face is not unfamiliar. Cheekbones, lips, defined eye sockets.
“You’re Faloii,” I say, not surprised, really, but at this point in my state of mind I’m only capable of making observations. Another observation floats to the surface of my mind, its origins unclear: the Faloii person is female.
“Yes,” she says.
“Do you understand me?” I ask slowly, not for her benefit but for my own. My tongue feels thick and sluggish.
“Yes implies this, yes?”
“Yes.”
We study each other. Her lips are parted a little, showing just a glimpse of her teeth. A moment later she stands again.
“Come.”
She pushes through the heavy red petals of the rhohedron and disappears out into the sun. I swallow, gather my strength, and drag myself up from the ground. My legs tingle uncomfortably. I wiggle my toes inside my shoes where they’re asleep, take a deep breath, and follow the Faloii woman out through the petals.
She’s already almost brown again when I join her. She stands in the sweltering sun, the vibrant red disappearing from her skin like ink sinking out of sight into deep water. I stare at her. I can’t help it. From her massive legs to her large feet that resemble paws, to her long muscular arms with hands also like paws, she is like no person I’ve ever seen. She wears what looks like a head wrap, also brown, that hangs down over the back of her head, covering the nape of her long, sloping neck. I feel tiny next to her: my head barely reaches her chest. She’s studying me too. She doesn’t have eyebrows like mine; rather, a pattern of darker brown, almost black, spots spread up her throat to her face, arranging around her eyes like dotted fingerprints. They fan out onto her forehead as well; and, staring at them, I realize they’re moving. At first I think it’s my eyes—that I stood up too quickly, came into the sunlight too fast. But no: the spots around her eyes and on her forehead shift as she inspects me. They form a pattern that gives her face an expression of curiosity, arching slightly, one side of the pattern peaked above the other.
“What’s your name?” I ask. My head buzzes—with questions or exhaustion, I can’t tell.
The spots shift again, spreading a little way apart, fanning out into a pleasant pattern.
“This is a question you can answer for yourself,” she says in her smooth voice. Hearing it, I have an impression of wood: polished wood, deeply brown and shining. That’s what her voice evokes. But I don’t understand what she means. We’ve never met before. How can I answer for myself when I don’t know her? I open my mouth to ask, but she interrupts.
“Listen,” she says in the smooth, wooden voice.
Something in my mind shifts as she says the word. I almost start to speak again, but the something is tugging at me in my head, an unseen hand pulling gently at an inner ear. Inside, my mind’s eye looks toward the pulling sensation, and it’s as if a tunnel opens slowly before me, widening, allowing a hazy light to seep through. And there it is: a word. A word I’ve never known or heard or shaped in my mouth, but I find myself speaking it slowly, lilting at the end to form a question.
“Rasimbukar?”
“Yes,” she says, showing her teeth again, the spots on her forehead fanning out, wide like a bird’s wings. “Good.”
I can’t think of what to say next. My body is heavy and tired. Out in the sun, outside the protective camp of the rhohedron’s petals, I’m exposed and I remember, as if from a dream, the monster.
“The dirixi,” I say.
“The beast is gone,” Rasimbukar says, the spots on her forehead settling low, closer to her eyes.
“Dr. Espada. My friends . . .” I take a few steps toward the jungle but pause. I can’t remember where I entered the meadow. The jungle around the field of rhohedron looks uniform in its green intensity, the trees rising on all sides like mountains. I might as well be an insect, separated from the hive and easily squashed. Somewhere in the jungle my friends are hiding in a tree. Or maybe the dirixi had found them. I have no way of knowing, and no idea how to find them. I would consider crying if I weren’t so thirsty: the idea of even a single drop of water leaving my body is enough to make me hold back my tears.
“Dr. Espada is safe,” Rasimbukar says. Her spots cluster close to the center of her forehead. “I am not sure about the others.”
“They climbed a tree.”
“It is likely that they are also safe. Dirixi travel alone. This one followed you here and then continued toward the sun, not back.”
I stand apart from her, trying to decide how to take these words. She might be lying. I know nothing about her or the Faloii. I take a step backward, ready to run.
“You do not need to fear me,” Rasimbukar says, the spots still low but spreading into a wider, looser pattern.
“How can I be sure? How do I know you’re not going to hurt me? Kill me?” My conversation with Yaya in the exam room yesterday vibrates in my mind. Rasimbukar doesn’t seem dangerous but what if . . .