Nash attempted to put the ship down someplace where the sun was rising or the weather was a little nicer, but Greg wouldn’t have it any other way. At his insistence they waited somewhere in the upper atmosphere in the longest planetary arrival queue any of them had ever seen. Here on Earth, cargo carriers, commercial passenger craft, and small private ships alike all clamored into the same large hubs, just a few per continent. Clearance to land was granted at manned stations, all floating in geosynchronous orbits above their respective cities. Vessels from every corner of civilized space lined up one by one and had their digital credentials read and approved by a living, breathing person. The process was more streamlined on Celhesru, but Greg insisted his favorite city had always been like this and wasn’t about to change any time soon. “If you think the traffic is bad now, wait ‘til you see what we’re dealing with on the ground!” This was the fifth time he’d made that joke, not that anyone had laughed the first time.

  Zol was less than pleased when he learned they were leaving. His initial impression was that the strangers who appeared at his cave were only taking him to see their spaceship, not fly away in it. A few fights nearly broke out, but with Kory’s best attempts at translating and Nash’s ability to bind him in a force field, they managed to convince him that his life would improve ten-fold if he followed them for the time being. They assured him they would be back soon enough, and that the next time they landed on his home world he could stay forever if he wanted.

  The very concept of staying forever if one wanted, especially somewhere so isolated and hard to access vexed Kory as she turned it over and over in her mind. It never occurred to her to go anywhere but where others led. Her mother, Nash, and by extension, Nash’s uncle all seemed to have a better sense of which path to take than she did. Until recently, she hadn’t considered in the least how much easier it was to have somebody else navigate for her. Only Zol’s protests at being unable to change his direction had made Kory reflect on it at all. It reminded her of Sohrab, who’d decided on a whim just over two months ago that he needed to be so far outside spatial reality that no one might ever find him again.

  This sad business of ruminating and reminiscing didn’t sit well with Kory, especially where Sohrab was concerned. Something about the way she couldn’t even look at him, or say goodbye, filled her with an odd type of regret she could hardly put into thought, much less words. Rationally, she knew he had to leave if she had any hope of being free, as it wasn’t easy living beside this haunting specter, this pale shadow always around the corner on the edge of her view. It was hard enough explaining to people that she and the odd fellow had grown up together, never mind the things left unsaid. For whatever fondness she feared once passed between them, she’d done as much as she could over the past ten years to widen the distance so that neither could vault the canyon without falling forever. The creek bed at the bottom was a world of its own; a strange rift full of tenderness and bitterness, cautious whispers of dreams, foretold and foreboding, the unceasing vision, and the vengeful prophecy. She tried to shake her head of the troubling notion and the ghost of his memory and so swam against the current of nonsense until she found purchase on the last logical thought she’d had.

  “I didn’t plan on it going this way.” Kory whispered to Nash in a rare private moment. “But that trip just now taught me we don’t know as much as we thought we did about that place. And the next time we go back, we’re going to need Zol as a guide, possibly an ally too in case we run into larger numbers.”

  “We don’t even know if he knows where it is, or what it is.” Nash replied.

  “Right, but once we bridge more of the communication gap we can describe it to him or even show him pictures in case he’s seen it.”

  “And what makes you so sure he’s going to want to help us?”

  “Think about it like this.” Kory leaned back in her co-pilot’s seat and folded her hands behind her head. To her left, Nash inched the craft further in the arrival queue, eyes fixed forward, patiently awaiting clearance to descend into Earth’s busiest space port. “This guy has nothing.” Kory spoke a little too boldly.

  “Keep your voice down, they’ll hear us.” Nash whispered.

  “Zol has no idea what I’m talking about, and Greg has basically already figured it out on his own.”

  “Well, do you want to wake them up then? I can’t play pest control and land this thing.” Nash didn’t bother to conceal the venom in her voice, she knew her friend could handle it.

  “Fine,” Kory rolled her eyes and lowered her tone back down to a whisper. “But what I’m saying is: this guy has nothing, no money, no job, not even a real home technically.”

  “I don’t think anyone has money or a job on that planet.”

  “Exactly.” Kory continued, missing half of the point and all of the insult. “He told me his parents raised him and his brother in that cave, like away from all society…”

  “How does this make him a good candidate for being our guide later?”

  “…but they would see other people sometimes. And maybe being introduced to larger groups by somebody more ‘native’ than me won’t be such a bad idea? I don’t know… all I do know is that this is how it is now, whether we planned it or not,” Kory sighed, determined to push through this difficulty and confusion wherever it led them.

  Nash didn’t like not knowing the next ten moves, yet there was some small part of her that didn’t mind having two extra on board. She liked being with Kory, but even more as part of a group. It made their private conversations even more special when it was them against everyone else, like threads in a larger social tapestry as opposed to just two flailing strands.

  At that moment a voice crackled over the ship’s intercom. “Guest Number Sierra Eight Twelve, chartered from Cinnfoara, Celhesru – stand by…” It was the dispatcher announcing their turn had come. “Your Preferred Traveler Quotient has been confirmed, please proceed to Private Terminal Six, Bay Eleven, Pad K-Fifteen. Feel free to take advantage of our many convenient vehicle storage options if you plan on staying with us for more than twelve hours. And as always, welcome to Earth and enjoy your time in Atlanta.”

  “Thanks, you too!” Both women chimed in unison.

  “Thanks, me too?” The voice mumbled before fading away.

  #

  The path of their descent was saturated with countless other vehicles coming and going. The private terminals may as well have had their own zip-code. Little schooners and even larger luxury yachts from the far reaches of settled space all competed for spots. It didn’t bear repeating that the scale of the traffic was daunting. Massive cargo freighters carrying the highly sought-after Earth exports to eager markets launched from a completely different county than the vast fleets of commercial passenger ships.

  On the ground, Greg mocked that they would not be taking advantage of the ‘convenient vehicle storage options’ offered at T. J. Newton Memorial Spaceport. He insisted they use his concierge service to whisk the ship away to his family’s personal spaces in a private hangar somewhere even farther afield. Nash raised concern over the notion of a random Human piloting her craft. “Would they even know how to fly it?” She implored. “It’s foreign after all. And the measurements are all different. We don’t even use your precious metric system on my world.”

  “Relax,” Greg reassured her. “On this part of Earth, we don’t use it either. And besides, these transfer couriers can fly anything under sixty tons, unless of course, you were steering it with your mind!” He joked. She didn’t find it funny.

  Somewhere in the depths of the private landing bays, Pad K-Fifteen purportedly, the four stood outside the comfortable little ship. Each of them carried their own insubstantial belongings, just one bag apiece; except for Zol who didn’t have anything at all. By some miracle, they had wrestled him into a spare set of Greg’s clothes. The fit wasn’t ideal, as the wild man was at the same time more muscular and not quite as tall as his generous benefactor, but it was better than what he started with. He still looked almost as savage as he had when they pulled him from the cliffside. The hair and beard needed a trim or several. Ever since they’d landed he was nearly catatonic, staring blankly at the madness all around him. It seemed cruel, or even funny, to take a man who had lived all his life in near isolation on a remote world, without knowledge of other planets, and drop him into the middle of Metro Atlanta. Yet, there he was.

  “Just where is he taking my ship?” An increasingly nervous Nash asked Greg, as the new Earthling pilot silently and automatically prepared it for its next sojourn.

  “I don’t know, somewhere in Macon,” he muttered, before shifting his focus to a car floating into view. “Looks like our ride is here!”

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  The weightless, unmanned cruiser was everything those accustomed to futuristic luxury could expect; it was quiet, smooth, and big. Nash and Kory proceeded to make themselves comfortable in an effort to shake off all their hard-won malaise. Riding around in a vehicle like this reminded them of the gentleness of life back on Celhesru, and all they had waiting for them after this necessary period of wandering was done. They helped themselves to the complementary chilled champagne and toasted pecans. Zol was convinced to try some bottled water.

  “Okay guys, what do you say we head to the beach and talk strategy? That’s what we’re here to do after all I assume,” Greg said, emptying his glass and pouring another. Doubtless, he was grateful for his hostesses sharing their refreshment on the preceding voyage, but the time had come for the real thing.

  “A beach? Why?” said Kory.

  “We don’t even have anything for that,” Nash added.

  “Ladies, please,” Greg assured them, loosening up now. “You’re my guests, and if we have to be here, so far away from your home, we might as well have fun. Besides, you can buy whatever you want when we get there, my treat of course.”

  “Your treat?” Nash raised an eyebrow at him.

  “Naturally! We’ll take the catamaran out. And if you ask me, after what we’ve just been through I can think of nothing better than being ankle deep in the powdered sugar sands of the south coast.”

  #

  Unfortunately, the four were not able to ‘jet down to Destin’ for a few days as Greg had anticipated. He had failed to plan on the fact a mid-October squall, common in that region, had rendered his beloved catamaran completely unseaworthy. He insisted the whole thing would be a bust and that they should stay with him in his condo instead. The nasty weather hadn’t made it far enough north to ruin a good long weekend on the town. They weren’t with him but one night and already he had managed to book a tee time for the next day so that they could all ‘sneak in a quick nine’ in the morning. Of course, he didn’t mean ‘nine,’ it was never ‘only nine.’

  In reality, they never made it past the driving range. So enthusiastic was the Human to have company for his favorite hobby that he took for granted the bare minimum amount of practice hours required to play golf. As far as his new friends were concerned, this amount was zero. Be that as it may, the guests continued to their brunch reservation at the clubhouse, none the wiser to their host’s disappointment. Served him right for thinking they could appreciate Earth’s greatest space-consuming pastime. But things weren’t all bad for Greg, thankfully his new friends looked the part.

  The night before, after much attrition, Zol got a haircut. Through gritted teeth, the unruly man relented to the touch of a barber who disliked questions and small talk nearly as much as his client. Nash, Kory, and Greg went with him not only out of necessity, but for moral support as well, smiling stupidly in the mirror beside him all the while. Perhaps the mirror itself was the worst part of it. For Zol’s entire life, he’d never seen what he looked like. The image filled him with dread. Where some might call him strong or even handsome, he saw the opposite. With no one to share his newfound sense of aesthetic shame, he kept perfectly still, watching the handfuls of hair fall away until a man he recognized even less emerged. “Learn all you can,” he mocked in his head. “I didn’t need to learn this.” This had been a weird week for Zol, to say the least.

  “What a time, right dude?” Greg teased from across the table. There was no response. The Human was used to it by this point. Zol continued to say nothing as he looked down at his menu through the sunglasses Greg insisted he and Kory wear in public. Kory knew better, of course, as she’d had her identification photos taken with contacts in, but they itched like no other, so she preferred to do without and let the world feel the perpetual unease right along with her. There was no disguising Nash’s appearance, but Iolites were a common sight on many parts of Earth. It was the other two Greg was trying not to explain. As for the language barrier, Kory offered to any who asked that Zol was her ‘cousin from Portugal,’ and as such would be speaking no English and doing all his communicating through her. She even ordered his food for him when the waiter came.

  “Get him the fish, it would be the thoughtful thing to do” Nash suggested.

  “He’s been eating fish his whole life. Let’s make him try chicken.” Kory insisted. “Wouldn’t you be sick of fish if you’d eaten it your whole life?” When the food arrived, Zol found the chicken acceptable. Though still a little clumsy with his utensils, he ate as politely as he could manage and made no mention of the fact that he would have preferred fish.

  #

  On and on the day dragged into more mundane diversions, each more pointless than the last, until finally the night descended. With it came the threats of a shift in tone, the crossing of a threshold into some new purpose. They all felt it coming. Just after sunset the four laid about Greg’s condo, relaxing not in the slightest. Zol reclined on a couch and watched a fan turn. The lights outside the large terrace window made the most enchanting patterns on the ceiling when viewed through the spinning blades. Kory sat on a bar stool, absently stirring a drink poured an hour ago. The condensation formed by ice long melted left a little pool of water at the base of the glass, soaking the paper napkin underneath. She didn’t notice. On and on she stirred and stared, unable or unwilling to snap out of it and clean the mess on the counter.

  Outside on the balcony, Nash gazed over the city. It wasn’t as old, serene, or logical as any on Celhesru, but it contained some aspect she couldn’t place. Earthlings were known for their intensity of feeling, a fact made manifest in their architecture. Anywhere on their world one could find the most dazzling and beautiful structures up against far more puzzling, seemingly non-functional ones. Outsiders struggling to compliment the scrapbook landscapes could at the very least muster up the word ‘authentic.’ Humans considered this a high compliment. “The few times they have the good sense to flatten something older and poorer so that something new and grand can be built in its place, they feel guilt over it for centuries and cry about what could have been. It’s baffling.”

  Greg joined her at the railing. They were far from the ground in this luxury high-rise, and even larger buildings towered all around them. As the two stared into the maze their faces were bathed in a revolving cascade of pink, yellow, blue, and red light. Just around the corner the screams of thousands hung on the breeze, cheering on something or someone in an enormous stadium. The trains would run extra-long tonight to account for the fans, even if they still didn’t go exactly where anybody needed them to.

  “What’s the move?” said Greg, diving headlong into the current that had come to sweep them away. It was an innocent enough question, but they both knew he didn’t mean plans for the evening.

  She paused and took a breath, her eyes still firmly ahead. “We have to go back, soon if possible. And if you want to come with us, there are some things you should know.”

  “I assumed you all’s… unique blessings weren’t the only piece I was missing.” He ran a hand through his hair. He still had that partial-bowl-cut-bangs type of style that usually only little boys had. It looked odd on a man of six and a half feet tall.

  “I need to be sure we can trust you.” She turned to him. “And I say that knowing full well that Zol is also not savvy to what we’re doing, but if he tries anything we know I can handle the situation without laying a hand on him. For now, as far as we’re concerned, he’s powerless. He has no way to communicate, no access to funds, and no capability of functioning in this or any other real society. Whether you believe it or not, Greg, you have real potential to compromise what we’re doing.”

  “I promise, you can trust me.” He assured her. The look in his eyes was genuine, he took her hand, and in that moment, she really believed that he believed what he was saying. “And besides, I’ve always felt I belonged somewhere else…” The logic was good enough for Nash, though she did politely withdraw her hand.

  “If you come with us, you have to swear to me that if at any point, you disagree with what’s going on, you’ll walk away quietly, and make no attempt to stop us.”

  “I will.”

  As the night went on the four sat around the living room as the Iolite made plain the facts of their mission. Kory translated as best she could to Zol the part they wished him to eventually play. Nash divulged that the real point of their original expedition was to visit that isolated world and to look for deposits of the most valuable mineral in the galaxy. Dropping off Sohrab at the end of the line had been something they simply needed to get out of the way, an unavoidable chore. Greg was struggling to comprehend who Sohrab was, and Zol didn’t care, but Nash assured them both it would never matter, only so long as they understood how the journey to the Toravai planet began.

  “Wait, what’s Toravai?” Greg interrupted.

  “It’s the technical name, for what Kory and Zol are, at least where I’m from.” The subjects of her sentence sat not even four feet from the Human, blissfully unaware of the threat they represented. Nash hesitated to reveal just how much archival information she’d devoured in the last few months, especially when a large portion of it might offend her friend.

  “But why you two specifically? Not to downplay your skills of course, but…” he searched for the right words. “…as you recall my dad is involved in one of these big energy companies –”

  “And so is my uncle, decades back in fact. But I’m sure you need no introduction to the prominence of the Iolite Roamgild,” Nash grew tired of his constant interruption. He could presume to rival her competence all he wanted, but their civilizations were hardly equal.

  “Right, so you get it. And aren’t these scouting operations usually a lot bigger? Like with more equipment and people?”

  “Yes,” Kory chimed in for the first time. She leaned forward and placed her drink on the coffee table. It was the same watery, messy one from before. “The place we visited was different. It may contain some of the oldest and largest undisturbed deposits of Vercoden in the known systems. And the planet itself is very… tricky as far as access goes.” Kory continued. “You saw yourself how, at least where we landed, there was nothing, and almost no one.” She briefly pointed her eyes towards Zol, who was as quiet as he was bored.

  “You’re right, I remember when we touched down there were all kinds of strange sounds… and that wind was howling something fierce, but I never saw anything.” Greg said.

  “You might soon,” Kory said blithely.

  “Before we can take you, and all of us, back to Celhesru, we need to regroup and go back to that world. We cannot show up back home empty-handed.” Nash explained. At that moment a breeze blew through the room. The balcony doors had been left open.

  “I think I understand.” He said, shuddering just a little bit.