When she opened her eyes, she glared at him.
For some reason, she felt angry at him for endangering himself. And it wasn’t the usual type of anger.
This one was fueled by something she couldn’t quite pinpoint at that moment. “You scared me.”
“I really didn’t mean to.”
Wha—
Nia’s mouth fell open. “Y-you can understand me?”
His lips twitched a little and he nodded.
Nia stepped back a little. “You can?”
“Me and every single being on Hudo III can understand you now. I updated the database with your…” he frowned a little, “Een-glish?”
“W-what?”
“Sorry it took so long. Been a while since I did anything like that. I’m out of practice.” His frown deepened and all Nia could do was stare open-mouthed at him.
“How…”
Ka’Cit shrugged and Nia stepped back a little more till she was leaning against one of the seats.
His gaze suddenly became concerned.
“You don’t like it. Your face. It’s…not happy.”
Nia blinked.
“It’s not that…it’s just…I don’t understand.”
“I pushed an…update to the system. A code,” he said.
Nia blinked at him, her eyes nictitating. “You what?”
“A code.”
Nia’s mouth fell open. “You’re telling me you just uploaded a bug to the system? You hacked it?”
His brows furrowed again. “I didn’t put any creatures into the system and I didn’t slash at it either.”
She would laugh if she wasn’t still so shocked.
“I can understand you now…” he continued before gesturing to the planet far below them, “and everyone down there will be able to understand you too, once their translators update.”
Nia had to put her entire weight on the seat behind her. Her legs felt too weak.
“You just…uploaded English to the world?”
He was watching her intently, it seemed, in an effort to read her reaction.
His shoulders were tense and he remained unmoving as if preparing himself for something.
“That’s what you did?” she asked again.
He nodded this time.
Nia fell to her knees before she collapsed and sat back on her legs. Her gaze focused ahead at nothing.
“Nee-ya?”
“You have no idea what you’ve just done.”
There was movement and then he came to sit before her in the same position.
“I am confused if it is something bad or good.”
“Good.” She met his gaze. “Good.”
She swallowed hard and took a breath.
“You have no idea what a gift…”
Again she was feeling emotional.
“Apart from Riv and Sohut, I haven’t had much interaction with many aliens.
When I was taken, the alien slave ship I’d been on crashed and I was…” She took another breath. Reliving it was horrible, but she’d never talked to anyone about it before. Not even Lauren and Cleo.
When she looked at Ka’Cit, he was still studying her.
There was no insistence; no pressure for her to talk. This was her choice and, for some reason, he made her feel comfortable enough to speak about it.
She cleared her throat and continued. “I was trapped in a cage underneath the wreckage for over two days.”
She’d almost died and it was probably the reason why her claustrophobia had grown another head and was even more debilitating than it had been on Earth.
Ka’Cit tried to keep his face neutral, she could see, but she’d caught the shock that passed over his features.
“Two days,” she repeated. “At least, that’s how long I thought it was. I’d had no way of telling the time. For those two days, my biggest fear was that I was going to die—that no one would find me in time.” She sighed. “But after I was pulled from the wreckage, that fear soon disappeared only to be replaced by another.”
She met his gaze again. “I was face-to-face with a new set of aliens—not the slug-like ones and their alligator friends who’d captured me first. This new set looked like brutes. Big. Green. Ferocious-looking. I’d feared the worst, but I’d lucked out in the end.”
She took another breath. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this…”
“Go on. I am listening.”
And he was.
Nia swallowed hard and her gaze fell to her hands before she nodded.
“They sold me to an alien who only seemed to want to watch me like his pet bug in a huge glass box. He’d fed me. And he’d watched me. That was about it. It was that way for a long, long time until one day, I realized he wasn’t moving from the round seat he usually sat on.”
She glanced at Ka’Cit but he was still watching her, as if he was truly invested in her story, so she continued.
“After another day of no movement, I realized he was either dead or doing some kind of hibernating thing. On the third day when he started to smell, I started to panic. I was locked in a box with no way out. A big glass box, like the size of a small studio apartment, but a box nonetheless. If he was dead…then so was I, eventually.”
“How did you get out?”
“Luck. Again, it was pure luck. One of his friends, I suppose, visited. That friend saw me and brought me to a market. From there, I changed hands and was given to an alien with a huge protrusion at the back of his head like a big balloon.”
“Geblit.”
Nia smiled. “Yea, that’s his name. He’d seemed pretty upset by my presence and he’d hurried me to Riv’s Sanctuary as if he couldn’t wait to get rid of me.”
She paused for a few moments.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is that, through all of this…I didn’t feel like a…person. When I spoke, no one understood me. Even if they wouldn’t have listened to what I had to say, I didn’t even have the option to speak for myself. I was truly reliant on everyone around me. Even this,” she gestured to the vessel they were in, “all this partially happened because the Niftrills thought I was talking gibberish. They didn’t care to try and understand. I am a nobody to most of the aliens here.”
“Ta’ii…you are never that.”
“Thanks to you.” Nia smiled a little then. “To live in a world where you’re invisible…to not be understood and then to be given a
