Vertan wakes up suddenly in a cold sweat, immediately clambering for a rifle that isn’t there.

  Looking around frantically through quickened breaths, he confusedly finds himself back in his room at his mother’s home. Light shone in the dark evening sky outside from one of the moons through the window.

  A bad dream? A nightmare?

  Vertan struggled in his attempt to remember what he had dreamt about. But of course! He swore that he had brought new data and findings to his hideout, only to be met with frustration over the usual. The rest of the dream had gone strangely; supposedly the mysterious man he saw die on Thoma came crashing back into his world, once more donning the powered suit of armor.

  A tight pain clawed around his brain; sometimes a cognitively intense dream leaves him with a mental exhaustion. Looking down, he finds that interestingly, he is in the same clothes as he had worn in the dream. Perhaps his mind had connected some dots between sleep and reality.

  Coming downstairs, he finds that his mother had prepared a stew, and was making company with someone. A rather, strange, looking stranger.

  “Oh, there you are!” says Mother Zviedal. “Hope you were able to rest well, I’m just about done preparing dinner for us, my son.”

  “Um, thank you, mum,” says Vertan, glancing towards the stranger, as he continued to come down the stairs. “Who is she?”

  “Oh, she?” replies Mother Zviedal. “Who knows! I don’t think she’s from around here. Couldn’t speak a word. I gave up on that a while ago.”

  “I meant, what is she doing here?”

  “I ran into her with you on the side of the road! It seems you fell unconscious when you were out today, and you were lucky enough that she found you. It was just coincidence that I found you two first! Did you forget to drink enough water again today? Don’t make me keep reminding you that you need to stay hydrated in this heat!”

  Unconscious?

  Vertan frowns as he thinks about this.

  “Oh, well, alright,” he says, unsurely. “Thanks for the reminder. Anything else happen for you, today?”

  “Nothing much, no,” says Mother Zviedal. “Though there was a huge ruckus all over the news about a meteorite impact earlier today, it actually shook the house all the way from over here! Thank goodness it landed in the middle of those woods, or people could have gotten seriously hurt, I was so worried about that.”

  Mother Zviedal chuckles at this as she serves the stew into the bowls. Vertan’s mind continues to recall its steps.

  Coming to sit down at the table, Vertan sat across from the kind stranger. She remained still, sitting perfectly straight, so silent that not even the sound of her breath is perceptible. Vertan wondered what must have happened to her. Half of the left side of her face was severely burned and disfigured, reaching all the way down through that side of her neck, and parts of her shoulder. Her left eye has likewise been replaced with a mechanical one, though of a brand Vertan is unfamiliar with. The right side of her face however, seems to have survived this graphic injury, and she appears a normal young woman, though highly foreign to Ulminh. In spite of this asymmetry, she seems to have a full head of dark hair, tied into a tight bun.

  Most strangely, her right eye contained multiple pupils, each a different color. Her eyeball appeared to rotate and switch between different modes, scanning and analyzing Vertan across different mediums, gathering all forms of different neural data for her.

  Despite the somewhat loose dark robes, Vertan could tell that she was rather physically lean and fit underneath, though to what extent, he couldn’t perceive.

  All this, as the stranger continues to sit with this disciplined stillness that is both gentle and stern.

  And an unsettling aura of familiarity.

  After a quick prayer, Mother Zviedal began to eat. Vertan prayed along only out of courtesy. Seemingly out of unfamiliarity, the stranger waited slightly too long before inspecting the bowl of stew.

  As Vertan ate his meal, he couldn’t help but sneak glances up to the strange woman and her behaviors. It seemed that she was inspecting every detail of her meal with meticulous suspicion, her mechanical and biological eye zipping through different modes of analysis before she decided to sample a taste. All within under a second. Upon tasting the stew however, Vertan swore that he witnessed a fleeting reaction within the otherwise stoic expression, one that seemed to express that the woman had never tasted a stew, or rather, any food of this kind, before. Slowly, and then quickening, the woman slurps up the rest of her meal.

  “Why, you must be so hungry!” exclaims Mother Zviedal, going back to scoop another bowl from the pot. “Isn’t that right, Vertan? You seem quiet, why don’t you try and make some conversation?”

  “Hm?” mumbles Vertan through a bite. “Oh, I thought you said she doesn’t speak?”

  “Not our language, but I’m sure she does.”

  Mother Zviedal brings the refilled bowl of soup back to the woman. The woman looks at the bowl for a moment, a thousand years’ worth of reflection passing within that second.

  After this brief pause that only Vertan seemed to notice, she looks back up to Mother Zviedal, and bows her head with a gesture, both hands put together, one pointed up, and one pointed towards her. A sign of acknowledgement.

  “Oh!” exclaims Mother Zviedal. “I think she means to say thank you.”

  Mother Zviedal reciprocates the motion.

  “Thank you!”

  The woman stared at Mother Zviedal for a moment, thinking, processing, calculating.

  “Thank you,” she says, an almost perfect replication, save for a slight accent.

  “Ah!” exclaims Mother Zviedal giddily. “Our guest is learning our language! How wonderful!”

  “Thank you,” she says again.

  “She learned that rather quickly,” says Vertan, continuing to quietly observe her. “Mother, how long has she been here for, again?”

  “A few hours, I found you with her just a little before the sun came down,” replies Mother Zviedal.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  A little before the sun came down? That was about the same time when all that happened in that dream.

  Vertan’s thoughts continue to process in private. Perhaps all of that did happen, and the foreigner had coincidentally found him near the crater by chance. He was lucky, then. Still, it didn’t make sense how she could have found him so far from the roads. Perhaps, he may still be in another layer of dream, if such things didn’t connect.

  The woman finishes her second bowl of stew, leaving it clean and orderly. Once again, she bows her head in respect and acknowledgement to Mother Zviedal with the same hand gesture.

  “Thank you,” she added this time.

  “You didn’t teach her anything, did you?” asks Vertan.

  “No, not really,” replies Mother Zviedal. “She figured that out herself. This is my first time hearing her voice, I just assumed she was a quiet type of person.”

  “I see,” says Vertan. His shoulders relax a little, looking back at the woman with a curiosity, whose eyes continue to scan every detail of the room.

  “Would you like some more stew?” Mother Zviedal asks the woman as she moves back towards the stove, preparing to scoop more into the bowl.

  “Mum, I think she’s had enough, no need to force—”

  “No, thank you,” says the woman.

  Vertan turns back with an eyebrow raised.

  “No, thank you,” she says again, only a slight accent hinting her voice. “No more stew; I had enough.”

  Mother Zviedal appeared stunned by this. Vertan was only confused.

  “I thought you said she couldn’t speak our language?” Vertan inquires.

  “I swear, that’s what it was like!” exclaims Mother Zviedal. “The past few hours, she couldn’t understand a single word I was saying. She made good guess-work on context clues, though, but she hasn’t spoken a single word up until now. I really thought she didn’t know.”

  A flash of a sympathetic emotion flicks across the woman’s otherwise stoic face.

  “I don’t know,” she replies. “I am learning.”

  “Huh,” chuckles Vertan. “Well, what a quick learner you are, then.”

  “Quick learner,” she replies.

  “Heheh, yeah!” says Vertan.

  He turns back around and nods at the woman.

  “Tell me, where are you from?”

  The woman remained blankly silent.

  “Oh, um,” stammers Vertan, stumbling over his thoughts for a moment. He begins to point at himself and his mother.

  “Us,” he continues. He then points at the woman. “You.”

  “Us,” she repeats. “You.”

  “Us,” Vertan continues, before gesturing towards the ground and general area. “From here.”

  “Us,” she repeats. “From here.”

  Vertan nods this off. He can understand the message well enough. He points back at the woman again.

  “You,” he repeats again. “From?”

  “I,” she responds. “From…”

  She begins to gesture to someplace far out there. Vertan makes a wide distance between his arms.

  “Far away,” he says. He closes this gap. “Close by.”

  “Far away,” she responds. “I from far away.”

  “My, she does learn so quickly,” comments Mother Zviedal. “I wonder what place she must be from, they must be so educated there.”

  Mother Zviedal, in her own attempt to communicate, points to Vertan.

  “Vertan Zviedal,” she says. She then points to herself. “His mother.”

  The woman nods in acknowledgement and understanding.

  “Lym,” she says as she points to herself.

  “Hm?” Vertan blinks at this. The woman’s eyes seemed to immediately perceive Vertan’s heightened heartbeat. But ultimately, she sees no threat.

  “Lym,” she repeats. “Lym Alzie-Rugen.”

  “Ah, Lym!” Mother Zviedal exclaims as Vertan begins to sweat, and his mind begins to race. “What a nice name! I like the sound of that. Oh—!”

  Mother Zviedal gestures to her and Vertan, and then across the rest of the environment.

  “Us,” she says. “From Ulminh.”

  She continues to point towards the ground.

  “Ulminh,” she continues. She then points to the woman named Lym, and points upwards gesturing to the stars. “You Lym. From?”

  The woman named Lym once again nods in acknowledgment at this question.

  “Hà Pi Yá” she responds.

  “Ah, Lym from Happia!” Mother Zviedal exclaims. “I’ve never heard of such a world before. How strange, I should know, I used to score highly in worlds studies back in university. Perhaps this is a new culture I don’t know about—”

  The room began to spin for Vertan, and his head swam. He struggled to stand up and steady himself as he tried to fetch himself a glass of water, his hands shaking. Mother Zviedal’s concerns soon became nonsensical background noise. But more overwhelmingly,

  he could feel those eyes following him. He hates that right now, it likely knows his body’s physical reactions down to the atom.

  “Vertan!”

  A gulp of water. His trembling hands almost drop the glass.

  “Are you alright?” Mother Zviedal asks. “Did you hear anything of what I just said?”

  “Mum,” Vertan says, lowering his voice. Though he was unsure lowering it could meaningfully do anything. “What is that thing doing in here?”

  “Thing?” Mother Zviedal replies incredulously. “What are you talking about? I don’t like your tone! Where is your gratitude? She may have saved your life earlier today, and you call our guest a thing?”

  Vertan, with wide and desperate eyes, turns around to look back at the woman named Lym. She continues to sit there, looking back at him. A normal, if not very physically scarred woman.

  A far cry from any abominable “thing”.

  Controlled breaths. Lightheadedness. Suppressed flashbacks.

  Another gulp of water.

  Look back.

  Nothing changed about the foreign woman.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” mumbles Vertan, lightly panting. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I don’t understand!” exclaims Mother Zviedal. “What was that all about? What was going on?”

  Mother Zviedal moves to address and accommodate her guest, the woman named Lym, once more attempting to make rudimentary forms of conversation. This drowns back into the background for Vertan as he stares down onto the kitchen countertop.

  His mind raced as he continued to be bombarded with flashback after flashback, the dying man named Aru once again before him on top of the ruins of Base Seven, amidst the slaughtered planet of Thoma. His dying breaths, bloodied face, eviscerated body, and saturated armor.

  The organ slush that stained the walls and pavements. Distorted reality.

  What was it that he said? He had reached towards the sky for something. Vertan couldn’t understand it at the time. He had since written it down to the best of his understanding, but the meaning of those words had struck him as completely alien and foreign.

  Lym Alzie-Rugen.

  Those weren’t just words, were they?

  He looks back at the Lym Alzie-Rugen still sitting at the dinner table, attempting to communicate with his mother.

  Aru from Happia.

  Lym from Happia?

  What is she doing here?

  Why was he left alive?