“He’s this way,” she said.
I stared at the seam line that marked where my room ended and the rest of the base began.
But it wasn’t only a base. It was a whole world where Chax no longer lived. He was dead on that side of the door. In this room, he was still alive—to me anyway. To keep him alive, I had to stay in this room. If I stepped outside and saw his body, if I accepted he was gone, it would infect this room and remove him from all existence.
I stepped back.
The automatic door slid shut. Stari was there a moment later, appearing in the doorway.
I fell back on the cot and sat with my head in my hands. A deep chasm opened in my chest, a hole so big and deep I knew I could never fill it.
Stari let the door slide shut behind her. She stood there for a while and didn’t say a word.
“I’ll… come back later,” she said.
She turned to leave.
“Am I free to leave?” I said.
“The door’s not locked,” Stari said. “You’re free to go anywhere. But I hope you won’t leave yet. We need your help. If you go up to the surface, it’s only a matter of time before they find you. Then there will be nothing we can do for you.”
Tears overtook me and wracked my entire body. Stari let me grieve. I wept for my loss. Chax was gone.
And he was never coming back.
Time slipped through my fingers as I fell in and out of sleep. When I slept, I dreamed of him. When I awoke, I thought of him and wept. I cried so hard, I grew exhausted. One wracking breath would barely leave me before another came nipping at its heels. Then I would fall asleep and begin the cycle again.
Sometimes my dreams were delicious reenactments of the intimate moments we spent together. But most of the time, they were filled with pain and anguish.
His final words featured heavily.
“I will love you until the end of time.”
But his time had been cut short and now I had to face the reality of enduring life without him. I would never forget him. I would always remember him. I doubted I would stop mourning him for years to come.
Then, after countless hours of living my grief-stricken life, I awoke and the tears didn’t come quite so hard. They still came, but it wasn’t like Niagara Falls every minute of every day.
I could move. Although my eyes hurt and my body was weak, I felt a little more like my old self.
True love was a rare thing. I should know. I’d spent my life looking for it. I’d had relationships that lasted for years and the love never burned with this intensity. I suppose when you were forced into a warlike situation of survival, you developed bonds quickly—bonds that usually took a lifetime suddenly happened in hours.
What was I going to do? Wallow in self-pity here forever or get on with finding a way back home?
Alone.
My lips curled and my eyes seeped with the threat of more tears. I didn’t know where the water was coming from.
I could pretend to be strong. I could pretend like I was ready to move on. But I knew in my heart I wasn’t. I doubted I would ever be ready.
But I also couldn’t stay in this room forever. I needed to figure out a way to return home. I put the question to Stari when she came with my latest offering of jellied food.
“Not easily,” she said. “Earth is a long way from here. A small shuttlecraft wouldn’t get you there. Well, it would, eventually. But you might have died of old age by the time you arrived. A large ship could take you if you had enough credits.”
“What are credits?”
“They’re the galaxy’s currency. To allow trading to take place smoothly between so many different races, we needed a universal currency system. That’s the credit.”
I felt a tingle up my back. There was something she said earlier that sounded strange.
“You knew I came from Earth,” I said. “How could you know that?”
“Because you’re famous,” Stari said.
She took a device from her pocket. It was a cube that sat easily in the palm of her hand. A holographic image beamed up from it and presented a replay of the scene from when I was trapped in the strange Changeling room when I first arrived.
“We know everything the program Controllers want us to know about you,” Stari said. “Local cuisine on Earth. Famous sights and a basic history of your planet. Tourism will probably pick up there because of the coverage.”
Strange to think I was famous now. On a planet I’d never heard of before.
The holo showed me meeting Chax for the first time. Then the scene shifted to us making love. I felt a little embarrassed with Stari standing there watching but she took no notice. Then our adventure continued with us receiving our mission to find the shuttlecraft. Our conflict with Iron Hoof and our time in the barn, turning the tables on the Changeling siblings. Finally, we made it to the shuttlecraft.
The fire consumed us both. Chax turned his back on the flames. He wrapped his arms around me to protect me as best he could from harm.
Stari sniffed and wiped a tear from her eye. Our final scene affected her more than all the others combined. Any concerns I’d had about her being a stooge of the Changelings evaporated upon seeing her genuine sadness.
No Changeling could fake those emotions. Maybe that was why they liked to watch shows like this. The emotions were strong and real. They could mimic them at home, even if it was only superficially.
“They’re replaying the events of the episode because they’re resetting for the next one,” Stari said. “At least, they’re supposed to be resetting. Our scanners indicate there’s unusual activity. They’re up to something else. Something they’ve never done before.”
“What?” I
