The bath was heaven. I had to drain and refill it three times before the water dripping off me was anything but green and slimy. There wasn’t anything I recognized as soap, so I just used my hands to scrub at my skin and hair until I thought I probably looked human again. The hot water made me even drowsier.
Gotta stay awake. Gotta make a plan.
A knock on the wall of the bathroom made me jump. I realized I had fallen asleep in the tub, water cooling around me.
Shiro held out a towel. “Here you go. Dry off and get dressed. I’ll meet you in the hall.”
I wiped myself dry, still finding bits of green that stained the beige towel. All the clothes were too big on me. Probably his own. I hadn’t seen any other humans on the ship and assumed he was the only one. The shirt hung on me, but there was a belt to hold up the pants. I rolled up the cuffs and pulled on socks. My own shoes were probably beyond saving, unless the bird ship had some kind of miraculous laundry service. Why not? They have gravity. And whatever smelled so good in that big dining hall. There was a pair of boots like Shiro’s on the floor, and they almost fit. I tightened the straps that held them around my ankles and exited the little room.
Shiro met me in the corridor, and I followed him back to the tables. Three other humans and two birdmen were waiting at a table. All three of the humans looked about twenty, two guys and a girl. The birdmen were the browns and creams I assumed were female.
Shiro handed me a small, silver cuff. It looked like a tiny bracelet, and I held it in my fingers.
“Put it on,” one of the guys said, pulling back his hair to show me how his ear held a similar cuff. “It’s a translator.”
I slipped the cuff on my ear and winced at a high-pitched squeal. The noise subsided, and suddenly the whistling of all the birdpeople around the room turned into the murmur of conversation. My eyes widened.
“Those things took forever to program.”
I whipped my head from face to face, finally realizing it was one of the birdwomen that had spoken. Around the English translation, I had heard her normal whistling language, but the words spoken into my ear from the translator cuff were quiet and clear.
“Pretty neat, huh?” That was Shiro. The cuff didn’t translate that, and I realized it would take my brain a while to sort out listening to the combination of real words spoken at normal volume, and whistles turned into English in my ear. It was hard to tell who was speaking at the moment.
“You don’t wear one?” I hadn’t noticed Shiro sporting a similar cuff back on the planet.
“Nope. I speak Siitsi pretty well.”
One of the females made a little titter that had to be a laugh. It wasn’t words, because my cuff didn’t translate it.
Shiro made a face at her. “I said pretty well. Not perfect.” He turned to the rest of the table. “Everybody, this is Jonah.”
I nodded at my name.
He introduced the two human guys as Ricky and Corey. The girl was Priya.
“And this is . . .” He made two distinct whistles, indicating the two birdwomen. Again, no translation in my ear. “Until you can make their Siitsi names, call them Weetzy and Tishi.”
The names sounded odd to me. “Siitsi names?”
The human girl, Priya, nodded. “Siitsi is what they are. Birdpeople, to us. It’s the closest translation to the whistle they use.”
I noticed that the two Siitsi females sported cuffs like ours on tiny ears I hadn’t realized they had under their feathers. “Their cuffs translate English into . . . Siitsi?”
The lighter cream-colored one named Tishi whistled, and my cuff translated. “Yes. We understand a lot of your language, but you talk so fast when you’re together.” It was still disorienting to hear her whistling but also get the words straight into my ears. She continued, “We can’t make the sounds you make, but some of you can learn to make our words.” She turned an eye to Shiro.
I shook my head. “Okay, this is . . . well, it’s frankly astounding. And I’m sure once I have a minute to think about it, I’ll be properly amazed at all this.” I indicated everything—the ship around me, the birdpeople, the humans. “But right now, we need to figure out how to get my people back.”
The others leaned in as I told my story. How the Delta broke down year after year, leaving us adrift. How the huge black bean swallowed our shuttle. How they took us captive and I escaped in the vat of algae. Shiro’s lips curled up at that.
“I remember that stuff.” He sniffed. “Grew up on it a million years ago on the Alpha.”
Another birdperson, a bright yellow male, arrived with trays of multicolored, soft-looking squares. I inhaled as a plate was set in front of me. This was the scent I’d noticed on the way through. Everyone around me was picking up the squares and shoving them into their mouths.
I tasted one. Sweet, soft, full of juice. I closed my eyes and sighed.
“First time eating fresh fruit?” Shiro asked.
There weren’t words, even if my mouth weren’t stuffed full. I just nodded and shoved in another bite.
“Not so fast,” he cautioned. “There’s plenty of it. Don’t want to get sick.”
But I didn’t care. We had grown some vegetables in the gardens on the Delta, at least until the power shut off. I knew what carrots tasted like, and beets, and parsnips. But I’d only seen fruit trees in videos and read about them in books. The reality was so much sweeter.
Conversation paused for a moment as I filled my aching stomach.
“So tell me again about the ship,” Shiro said. “It swallowed your shuttle?”
I described what I remembered. “It was like it just . . . yeah, swallowed us. And ate through the edges of the Delta so we didn’t lose our hatch pressure. And then we were inside it.”
“Wait,” Priya said. “The ship was invisible against the sky?” She exchanged a look with Corey. “You don’t think . . .”
He shook his head with a glance at me.
My story continued with the sounds of other creatures behind other hatchways. The factory floor where the plastic-looking stuff was being made into all kinds of things. The guns. The huge, woody vines and the aliens that all looked different, plugged into tiny mouths on the vines.
“Botanists,” Corey said. His light eyes narrowed to slits. “We call them Botanists. It’s who we went to Reganus Five to trade with. They can make anything you want, and all they want to be paid in is organics . . . animals, seeds, eggs, other plants.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Other plants?”
Priya nodded. “They’re plants, of course. We’ve known that since they started showing up on trade worlds. The little ones they send down to do the trading don’t talk. Always little and green, but different shapes. They seem . . . almost like little robots. They must have some kind of rudimentary brains, but they don’t ever seem to think on their own, and if you don’t do exactly what they expect you to do, they just skitter away.”
Corey was tapping a thumbnail thoughtfully against his teeth. “We’ve always thought they were a hive mind of some kind . . . programmed by something more intelligent on their home world or on a mother ship. No way were those little things capable of space travel on their own.”
I thought about the huge room full of vines that lit up like nerves all around.
“I think you’re right,” I said. “I think there’s one giant brain running the whole ship. They have these vines that they plug into and just seem to . . . go to sleep.” I felt like an idiot for not realizing it sooner. Of course they were buds off the larger plant. The giant pitcher in the center that ate Mr. Albert.
And Doc Walsh.
It was the center of the brain that controlled all the little green plant aliens.
“Is it possible they’re using all the things they trade for to . . . program new ones?” I told them about Doc Walsh. How he’d been taken away and, a few days later, new Botanists were budding that had his face.
Ricky’s eyes lit up. “DNA. Of course they are!” He turned to Priya. “It’s why they only want organics. Somehow they’re reading the new DNA and using it to differentiate into new forms.”
I shook my head. “Not reading it. It eats them.” They stared at me as I told them about the huge pitcher in the middle of the nerve nest. I left out all the screaming when they threw in Mr. Albert.
“It’s the mouth and the brain,” Priya said. “It must dissolve things down to proteins and use that to evolve itself. All the Botanists we’ve ever seen must be part of one huge organism.” She exchanged another worried look with Corey but said nothing more.
All the science was making my head spin. My eyelids were getting heavy, my head nodding in exhaustion.
“Okay, I think we’ve got enough to ponder for tonight,” Shiro said. “Let’s get Jonah some sleep, and tomorrow we’ll figure out where we go from here.”
We all stood up from the table, and I stumbled back to my room.
Shiro stood outside my open doorway. “If you need anything, just touch this panel and say what you need.” He showed me a panel on the inside of the doorway. “It understands English.”
“But what about my brother? My people?” I could barely form the sentence.
He gave me a gentle push toward the pile of blankets. “Tonight, you need to sleep. Tomorrow we’ll figure out how to rescue your brother.”
I turned to watch the doorway slide closed. He tried to hide it behind an encouraging smile, but even as tired as I was, I could tell he was lying.
Shiro didn’t believe I would ever see my brother again.