Page 13 of Fathom

I jogged to catch up with him, but before I made it to him, he slowed his pace with such an abruptness that it was clear it was deliberate. Another point in his favor. I made it next to him, and he kept his long-legged steps slow so that I was able to walk instead of run, glancing down at me out of the corner of his eye.

"I didn't want to be alone," I told him, even though I knew he couldn't understand me. "I need to see my environment, not collapse in on myself. If I stay in that room, I'm going to freak the fuck out so bad I don't know if I'll ever be able to leave it."

Not that collapsing in on myself wasn't a perfectly reasonable option at this point. I had been proud of myself for how well I handled the night before, but that didn't mean that was the entirety of how I had to handle everything. I remembered something I'd read once, that the ability to dissociate was an ability that dramatically improved survival. Instead of feeling it all, of sinking into the trauma, I was packing it up and away to deal with later so that my mind could remain calm,clear, and ready to handle whatever it was I needed to do. When I eventually unpacked it, the feelings would still be there, screaming in terror and crying on the floor, and when I decided to do that, it would be perfectly alright. For right now, I could take a stroll through an alien city, looking around, absorbing my surroundings, and figuring out how to survive in it.

I could cry on the floor of my future therapist's office, as long as it was a clean floor. Maybe I'd just sob into a tissue.

Eun answered my statement in a low rumble, the sound rolling softly, and his voice seemed to sand down the sharp edges of the box. My emotions rattled inside.

We rounded a corner onto a street that was much busier than the one we left behind, and my ability to focus on him was torn away by my need to make sense of the world around me.

The alien world filled with aliens.

There was no question that I wasn't on Earth anymore, especially now that it was light enough to see everything around me. There were some similarities to things I knew, but I realized that most of those were my mind's attempt to categorize things into already-known quantities so that I could understand what was going on and how to integrate with it. I let my mind settle on those categories, creating images of familiarity out of the chaos of newness.

Everyone was different, and I labeled them with names I knew.

Some of the people walking down the sidewalks resembled the four-eyed hyenas, but looked more like walking four-eyed cats or wolves. Even among the hyena species, no two looked alike, with different fur patterns, heights, and facial structures. There were other aliens that were dramatically different. Towering, broad-shouldered figures fifteen feet high thudded along the sidewalks, the ground shivering beneath their steps, their skin wrinkled likethey were made out of dripping mud. They would fit through those tall, weirdly shaped warehouse doors, I realized. One of the big guys was even carrying an entire stack of crates similar to the ones I'd seen before. Eun would shift aside to let them pass, giving them plenty of room even as he held his arm out in front of me to draw me with him without touching me. At least not with his arm. Anytime I got close to him, that glowing tail would reach out and brush against me, like it wanted to grab onto me, but before it could wrap around my wrist or waist, Eun was tugging it back again.

The third time we moved out of the way of a larger, lumbering alien, I reached out my hand and met the touch of Eun's tail with my fingers. It was soft, supple, warm. Eun's entire body stiffened as I stroked it, the tip intertwining with my fingers and wrapping itself all around them. When we began to walk again, I held onto it, and it slid up my wrist, wrapping me up in its grip. It was amazing how gentle the touch was. I'd seen it crush that alien's ankle the night before, but when Eun had me pinned against the alley wall, and I put the knife against his throat, the touch had been just as gentle as it was now.

Holding onto his tail and tucking myself in close to his side made me feel more confident to look up and around, to really try to see the details of everything around me rather than just focus on where we were walking.

The large beings weren't the only ones that were startling. There were see-through tubes along the sides of the buildings where the sidewalk touched the wall, and inside were tiny beings, the largest no bigger than rabbits, the smallest the size of mice, scurrying along their protected walkways. They were miniature, safe from the feet of the lumbering giants, but being afforded the same space to move and travel around the world without the risk of being stepped on.

Then there were aliens that came up to my hip, some that were closer to Eun's seven feet of height, glancing down at me as they passed with four or six eyes, with fur or skin or scales.

The diversity was dizzying, so many forms, colors, movements. My mind scrambled to sort them into anything familiar. The giants, massive and deliberate, I labeled as mud elephants, though they had no trunks or ears, just rolls of flesh and a second set of eyes nestled at the backs of their skulls so they could see behind. The smallest ones were scaled and sharp-eyed, with extra arms and lizardlike tails, reminding me of rats or insects, though they moved with startling grace. One figure was nothing but a quivering dome of gelatinous goo, pulsing with each step, a silver object suspended inside its translucent body like a trapped artifact.

That one I called a gelatinous blob.

I knew that all these aliens had their own names for their species, but I grasped onto the words that made the most sense as I grappled with the sudden shock of being somewhere so dramatically different. I held onto those small similarities, labeling them with words that made sense to me, like they were lifelines to my understanding. I was in a world filled with strangeness, and I was going to get lost in it if I didn't categorize things into forms I understood. They needed labels and places to be put on the shelves of my mind.

Then I saw something I understood.

Curving horns adorned the head of a creature not too much taller than me, wearing a flowing, form-fitting dress. Because of the outfit, my mind labeled her as a her, but I couldn't be sure. Just because I was identifying clothing as dresses, pants, or jackets didn't mean they looked exactly the same or had the same meanings or social assignments, but none of my labelsmattered to other people; they were for me and my understanding, so she remained a she for now.

She had long, lithe limbs, four arms, two legs, and a soft, downy, tawny fur dappled with zigzag stripes of darker brown. She was wearing a flowing dress-like outfit with slits at the hips that exposed her strong legs. As she walked past us, I saw one or two other aliens turn their heads to watch her, as if she were beautiful.

Horror rose up in me, like bile in the back of my throat, as the sight of her horns forced me to confront what I already knew.

The bodies in the warehouse had been people, one human, one alien, both of them hung up and harvested by the hyenas as food.

I'd known that already, but part of me was hoping that I misunderstood, that it had been just an animal they were eating, not a woman. I had clung onto the idea that maybe I'd been mislabeled as non-sentient, and that was why they planned to eat me.

I shuddered and moved closer to Eun, then focused my attention on my surroundings, holding onto the things I could control: my grip on his tail, my closeness to his body, my awareness of my environment. I couldn't report the murders to the police if I couldn't talk and no one knew my language. I had to learn about everything as fast as I possibly could so that I could provide the details that caused those evil hyenas to be brought to justice.

There were the vehicles, hovering shapes that drifted past in silence. Not quite cars, more like gliding pods, rounded and oval, designed in various sizes, some clearly built for the towering species, others no larger than a bathtub. They were far more advanced than the air-polluting vehicles I was used to onEarth, or at least I assumed they were, given that they hovered and the air didn't stink of car exhaust, supporting the idea that I was on an alien planet if it wasn't obvious already by literally everything else I'd observed. The city moved around me like a living organism, every part strange and yet organized to manage the movement of so many different sizes and shapes of bodies, and I followed alongside Eun, moving out of the way when he did, following beside him or in his slipstream depending on the moment, holding onto his glowing tail, which held onto me back.

This was a city filled with people, and Eun was my person.

When Eun pushed through a swinging door, I followed close behind, grateful for the escape from the bustle and noise into the new enclosed space. The quiet inside was welcome, warmth wrapping around me. The outside world was too much, too loud, too strange, too diverse in its extreme differences. I could handle it in doses, but it would take time to build up to it, and for now, this new space was a relief. The air was thick with the scent of broth and herbs, the same rich aroma from the soup he’d given me the night before, the familiarity a note I clung to. Steam drifted from an open window that looked into the kitchen, where someone with gleaming scales stood stirring a wide pot.

Eun called out in his language, and a figure stepped through a beaded curtain in the back, a towering, bipedal lizard with emerald-colored skin and tongue that flicked out in the air. His two eyes slid over me, slitted and golden, and I stared back at him and his two arms, a rarity on this planet, too, in shock by all of it to do anything but stare.

"Lizard people are real," I whispered.

Eun spoke again, longer this time, voice low and steady. The lizard listened, then responded with a deep rumble that I feltmore in my bones than heard with my ears. Whatever he said, Eun turned away and led me toward a small table nestled near the archway. He bent down and patted one of the seats.