Chloe's nostrils flared and her breathing was heavy. She balled her little hands into fists and let her straw blonde hair fall in front of her eyes. For a split second she thought she was about to have one of her overpowering headaches again but it was just her jaw clenching that made her head feel funny. James walked towards her, a tentative hand held out to her but she crossed her arms over her chest and turned sideways to him.
“Listen, I’m very sorry. I know it will sound harsh, but truth is often harsh. We all die. Everyone will die if you do nothing, including you. If you try to help us then there may be a chance.”
“I hate you.”
“I know. As you should.”
“I should just kill you now and spare you the invasion.”
“Why haven’t you terminated me yet?” James was honestly curious. It was his fault she was here in the first place. So why did she not obliterate him?
“I haven’t terminated you yet because I still need you. I thought I did. And maybe I still do. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on or how to do anything useful. I don’t even know how I’m supposed to help you kill the try-aliens or whatever they’re called.”
“The Trygernons,” James said, his tone was as even as his gaze on her.
“Whatever. Who is going to put me in a space suit and have me fly up there to kill them? How far away are they? How long will it take me to get to them? I don’t know anything about space-travel apart from a couple things I read in some of your books. And I wasn’t really looking at that stuff.”
“I can help you read all the books about it you might like. Perhaps it will get you ready for the battle ahead.”
“What if I run out of air and food out there? My daddy told me astronauts needed special suits to get to the moon. Do you even have those?”
“What is an astronaut?”
“A person fit to go into outer space. They wear special suits and ride in rockets to the moon. That’s all I know about it.”
“The moon hasn’t been a destination for Americans. We have visited other planets, though.”
“How the heck do you get to them?” Chloe remembered her Dad trying to explain to her about Light Years and distances. What he described seemed too fantastically big at the time for her little brain to understand. Now she was beginning to get a sense of the scope of space travel as she thought back to what he said. Somehow her growing brain was processing information much more rapidly, and this was part of it.
“Get to ‘them’?”
“To the other planets?”
“Very special vessels convey us from here to other planets very quickly. Much quicker than it is to ride on a light board.”
“Is that what you actually call them?”
“What else would we call them?”
“Anyway…James…I can’t go fight in outer space. I don’t even know how!”
“There are no ‘space-suits’ in America, but there are space-clothes. We can have a seamster make you special fitted clothes for outer-space. It will be no trouble. As for food and water, we can provide them. I haven’t seen you eat here. Are you ever hungry?”
“No…were you hungry in my America?” Somehow this question seemed very important. Almost more important than all the others.
“I had a can of soda in your America. I tasted sweet, but I was not thirsty. I was able to sweat, but felt no heat. It was very strange.”
“I never sweat. Perhaps because I’m young. And a girl?”
“We cannot know, I suppose. There are no precedents for what is occurring with you, or with me. We have no mark-bench for it.”
“Mark-bench? What…never mind. Listen, James…I don’t hate you. I don’t really know what I feel. I feel like I’m going crazy.”
“Malfunctioning again?” James expression was dubious, as though he wanted to come forward and back up at the same time.
“Something like that,” she said.
“Try drinking some water and see if you feel different,” James said. He held out his hand and for the first time since she got here, she took it. It felt like holding nothing. For a brief moment she thought of her father and wanted to squeeze James’s hand until it broke, until he lay on the floor screaming, but then she let it go. Her father was now beyond her reach in time and space.
James led her into a space and tapped something on a blank slate of wall that only he could see. A slot opened and a clear tube that looked like an oddly shaped glass with clear liquid was there. He grabbed it and handed it to her.
She looked at the glass questioningly, then drank it. The water slid down her throat nice and cool and sank into her belly which felt hollow.
All of the sudden she felt ravenously hungry.
“I need food!”
James arranged for her to get food as quickly as he could and when she was done with one plate she asked for more. Ten plates of all the finest food later she seemed to finally be satisfied. After a few moments of sitting and staring into empty space, breathing shallowly, and bits of food on her chin and cheeks, Chloe belched loudly, and both Dr. Lang and James yelped and closed their mouths at the same time as though they were in some secret routine together.
As if emerging from a dream Chloe slowly turned her head and looked at them, smiled, and began giggling. Within a moment she stopped as abruptly as she had began and then stood, holding her belly.
“It seems like the only time I ever feel anything lately is when it’s going on inside my body. And right now I feel both full and happy.”
“We usually eat more as a contrivance than as a need,” Dr. Lang said. “But this is beyond anything I have ever borne witness to.”
“As it is for me,” James said.
Chloe began pacing the small room they were in. She felt more alive now, more there. Everything was vivid and stood out to her in ways she hadn’t noticed before. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, the barely there ‘furniture’…she fancied she could hear both Dr. Lang’s and James Mallory’s heartbeats. Who knew, maybe she could? Outside the MAA she had sworn that when she focused her vision hard enough it was like looking through a pair of binoculars. She looked through some once when her Daddy had brought home a pair. He invited her to look at a tree that was very far away and when she did she saw the individual branches and even some birds there. Though the birds were not that clear, she could make out what they were.
Just earlier had been like that. She focused very hard on James’s stomach but all she could see was a very close up of the fibers that made his suit coat.
“Chloe what are you staring at? Is there some malfunction in my chest?”
“No,” she said and stopped. “I was just wondering how far I could see.”
“What do you mean?”
“If I stare, if I concentrate my eyes in an area…I see things far away as if they were a lot closer.”
“Remakabel,” Dr. Lange said in a breathy whisper.
“You mean remarkable?”
“Re…what?”
“It doesn’t matter. But let me say this…now that I’ve eaten I almost feel like I know what it’s doing in my body. I probably could fight a whole war singlehandedly now. But I’m scared,” she looked up at both of them now, her eyes gleaming wetly.
“That’s the first sign,” James said, looking to Dr. Lang now. Timothy looked at James, his eyes wide, emotion flooding it.
“She truly is a child…of the fairybooks, but more importantly, she is the Unknown!”