Chapter Text
«Give me a soul, and I'll show you its fragments. Give me a heart, and I'll show you its wounds.»
The dawn light seeped through the window with the determination of someone who knows that, sooner or later, it always finds a way in. It crept slowly across the floor, climbed up the table leg, and finally spilled onto the desk, where the microscope, the open notebooks, and the rest of the objects on it remained exactly where Ryland had left them the night before. The metal responded to the dawn’s greeting with a handful of silvery flashes that danced across the room like tiny shooting stars.
Ryland Grace awoke gently under that faint but irritating white light, roused from sleep with just enough gentleness that he couldn’t remember what he’d been dreaming about. He made no attempt whatsoever to get up; he remained motionless, still trapped in that uncertain moment when the body already belongs to the world, but the mind continues to cling to the last stars of the night.
The room was steeped in silence. All that could be heard was the distant hum of the ventilation system and the faint murmur of the sea. This silence was different from the Hail Mary. It was also different from Earth. He had learned that every world had its own, as if even the absence of sound obeyed different laws under each star.
He narrowed his eyes and let the light finish flooding his body. It was a clear, serene morning, almost warm in its own way, though he knew it wouldn’t be long before it turned into the ash-gray that he love so much.
Even after a few minutes, Grace remained lying under the blankets, in no hurry to leave the last refuge he had left between sleep and day. He slept as he always did: with a pillow under his head, his legs drawn up in a fetal position, and hugging the pillow as if he feared it might escape during the night. He had developed that habit long before leaving Earth, when it was nothing more than a trivial eccentricity. There, however, that gesture had taken on a different meaning. The pillow was no longer a pillow. It was a substitute. A white lie that his body accepted while his mind slept.
What strange cruelty the body concealed. It was capable of adapting to the gravity of another world, of getting used to a sky humanity had never seen, of digesting impossible foods, and of learning a language born under another star. But it did not forget the warmth of anothers skin. He supposed it was because no one thinks about air until it’s gone. Only when it’s gone do you realize you need it for everything. Something similar must happen with human contact.
Three years living in Erid were enough to realize which longings would never fade. But they were also enough to turn a strange place into a home. Even with its ups and downs, Erid was his home. Or at least the only one he had left. And he was very grateful and happy. There were bad days, of course. He’d had them on Earth, and he continued to have them under another sun. There were mornings when nostalgia weighed heavier than Erid’s gravity, and nights when silence seemed to spread through the house like a slow tide, filling rooms that no piece of furniture could occupy. But a life isn’t measured by its worst days. And his was a good life.
He love Erid with that strange affection aroused only by things that, at first, one swore one would never come to love. He love it as one loves a brother with whom one has shared too much. It was not an immediate love, nor a simple one. It had been born of time, of habit, and of gratitude. Of discovering that an alien landscape could eventually feel familiar, that an impossible sky could herald the arrival of a peaceful morning, and that creatures born under another star could make him feel less like a stranger than many human beings.
Besides, he had a purpose. Every day he woke up knowing there was something to discover, a problem to solve, or a young mind to teach. He had survived long enough to realize that few things were as valuable as getting out of bed knowing why he was doing it.
He also had a home. It wasn’t the house where he’d grown up or the apartment he’d lived in in San Francisco. Those belonged to another life. This one was different. Quieter. More humble. Stranger. But every book rescued from the Hail Mary and placed on the bookshelf, every tool left on the table, and every laugh shared with Rocky had gradually turned those walls into more than just a shelter. Over time, he discovered that houses weren’t a home. Home was whoever always ended up knocking on his door. His home was Rocky and Adrian.
He thought of them and smiled without realizing it.
He never would have imagined that two people born light-years apart would end up holding such a deep place in his life. Yet there they were. His best friend. His chosen family. Two unlikely gifts that the universe had decided to bestow upon him when he needed them most.
But human beings are stubborn creatures. They could survive the impossible and still let themselves be hurt by the smallest absences. Ryland Grace was a happy man who, every now and then, still missed a small part of the world he had left behind.
In the end, distance had taught him an uncomfortable truth. He didn’t miss Earth. He missed the people of Earth. He missed the murmur of strangers conversations in a café. The laughter of a group of students at the end of a class. The accidental brush of a stranger as they passed on the sidewalk. A hug given as a greeting. Those little things that seem insignificant while we have them and that, once lost, end up taking up more space in our memory than great feats.
And if the weight of that absence ever became unbearable, the door remained open. The Hail Mary was still waiting for him, patiently, just as it had waited for those three years. All he had to do was cross the threshold, power up its systems, and let the Hail Mary do the rest. No one would try to stop him. No one would question his decision.
And yet, he could never quite see himself actually doing it. After all, what would he find on Earth?
A saved planet, probably. A grateful humanity for a week, if he was lucky. Then the cameras would arrive. The endless interviews. The documentaries. The press conferences. Journalists camped out in front of his door, eager to turn every corner of his life into a news story. Some news anchor with a shark-like grin would devote two hours of television to finding out what the man who had saved Earth ate for breakfast, who he shared his bed with, or why he was still single. And, sooner or later, someone would decide that his bisexuality was a matter of public interest. It would become a headline, a topic of debate on talk shows, just another story that millions of strangers would feel entitled to have an opinion on.
In Erid, on the other hand, no one asked about such things. The Eridians did not understand love through sex or sex through gender. Those differences, which had divided humanity for centuries, simply did not exist for them. He found it curious. He had to travel across space to find a place where no one felt the need to define him before getting to know him.
Yes. He definitely preferred the calm of Erid.
He preferred the distant murmur of the Eridian cities, Rocky’s visits at dawn, and the simple peace of a home where no one expected anything from him except that he remain Ryland Grace. And at night, he even preferred the lie. While he slept, the deception worked. Some ancient, stubborn part of his brain accepted that those folds of fabric were arms, that the weight against his chest belonged to someone else, and that the emptiness remained full. Then dawn would break. And, like all white lies, that one, too, would vanish with the light.
And that was fine. He had already resigned himself to it and was at peace with it.
For a moment, he considered crawling back under the sheets, sinking into the warmth of the bed, hugging his pillow tightly, and stealing a few more hours from the day. He didn’t have class. No urgent experiment awaited him, nor any student eager to ask questions. Just a long empty morning. But restlessness had already awakened before he had. It had settled in his chest with the discretion of an unwelcome guest, and he found it impossible to close his eyes again. He had long ago discovered that stillness was the real enemy. When he had nothing to do, when his mind lacked a problem to solve or a hypothesis to debunk, his thoughts found room to multiply. And a mind with nothing to pursue ended up pursuing itself.
That morning, moreover, there was something different.
A vague, irrational sensation had been coursing through his body since the night before, as if the universe had held its breath before delivering bad news. He couldn’t explain it; it was merely a premonition, a persistent vibration deep within his consciousness. A faint, almost imperceptible buzzing that seemed to pound behind his eyes and refuse to go away.
Before getting up, he lay there for a few more seconds staring at the ceiling, as if hoping that nameless unease would decide to leave him on its own. It didn’t. It was still there, lodged between his ribs, silent and invisible, accompanying him from the very moment he’d opened his eyes. Finally, he surrendered to the evidence. He pushed aside the blankets, stretched as he yawned, and sat for a moment on the edge of the bed, his bare feet on the floor, as if he could still negotiate with the morning.
"Well…" he muttered to himself, rubbing his face with both hands. "Let’s pretend we’re functional adults."
No one answered. Talking to himself had long since ceased to seem strange to him. It was just another habit, like making coffee every morning or correcting his students homework out loud.
Finally, he got up and crossed the room barefoot, letting the coolness of the floor finish waking him up. On his way to the shower, he took off his pajamas one by one, letting the cold bite into his skin. He walked into the bathroom without bothering to close the door and made his way to the shower. He turned on the faucet, and the murmur of water began to fill the room as steam slowly began to blanket the mirrors and tiles, taking over the bathroom with the patient slowness of fog at dawn. Grace waited a few seconds, naked, feeling the cold of the tiles beneath his feet while unease clung to his chest like a thorn that refused to come out.
Finally, he took a step forward. The hot water enveloped him immediately, sliding down his shoulders with a familiarity so ancient it bordered on intimacy. He closed his eyes and let his head fall back. A long sigh escaped his lips, as if the steam had found its way to the exact spot where his weariness was hiding.
He had always believed there was something almost miraculous about his morning showers. The water didn’t wash away his longing or fill the voids, but it managed to silence them for the rest of the day. Under that steady stream of water, the light-years separating him from Earth didn’t exist, nor did the unanswered questions, nor the weight of being the only man of his kind in that world. There was only the sound of water hitting the floor and the warmth enveloping a body that had gone too long without knowing any warmth other than its own.
Sometimes he caught himself thinking that this was the closest thing he had left to the warmth of an embrace.
"Pathetic, Grace." he murmured with a weary smile, letting the water slide down his face.
The shower, as usual, had no opinion on the matter. However, for a few more minutes, it continued to play along with the pretense.
A few minutes later, the hum of the hair dryer filled the bathroom with a constant murmur. Grace stood in front of the mirror as the hot air gradually cleared the steam fogging the glass, as if drawing back the curtain on a all-too-familiar stage. When the reflection finally came into view, there he was the same man as always.
His hair remained determined to defy every law of physics and common sense. The dark circles under his eyes were no longer just a reminder of a bad night’s sleep; they had become his traveling companions, discreet but loyal. His beard, for its part, was beginning to demand a little attention with the stubbornness of weeds that had been growing unchecked for far too long. He studied himself for a few seconds, tilting his head ever so slightly, with the dispassionate curiosity with which a scientist examines a particularly strange specimen.
“Every day you look more and more like a science teacher,” he thought. The idea made him smile. “Wait… Crap. You are one.”
He let out a quiet chuckle, one of those little laughs that only exist when there’s no one around to share them with. Then he ran a hand through his beard and made up his mind. He didn’t strive for perfection; he’d given that up long ago. A few snips here and there were enough to tame that look of an enlightened castaway that threatened to take permanent residence on his face. When he was done, he surveyed the result with feigned solemnity.
"Much better. You still look like a teacher… but now at least one they’d let into his own classroom." he thought.
He nodded to himself, satisfied with that irrelevant assessment, and left the bathroom with the feeling of having regained a tiny bit of order in a universe that rarely granted it.
He returned to the bedroom, got dressed with the calmness of someone in no hurry to get anywhere, and picked up his laptop from the desk. For a moment, his fingers rested on the closed lid as he let his gaze wander around the room. Years ago, all of this would have seemed like an impossible scenario to him. Now it was simply his home.
As he left the bedroom and crossed the living room, he raised a hand toward Armando.
"Good morning, Armando." he greeted him cheerfully.
Armando, as he did every morning, responded to him greeting with the unfailing punctuality that only machines possess. Grace smiled.
"I knew I could count on you. You haven’t missed a single day of work."
Once in the kitchen, he set his laptop on the table and opened the folder where he kept all the music he’d managed to download from Earth. He didn’t even look at the screen. He double-clicked on the first song he found and let chance decide the morning’s soundtrack. A second later, the opening chords of “Puckrocker” by the Teddybears filled the house. Grace smiled to himself and turned up the volume a couple of notches, until the music began to bounce off the walls with enough energy to chase away the silence.
That’s how almost all his days began. And just like that, the kitchen came to life with him.
Grace began moving back and forth with the ease of someone who had rehearsed that routine hundreds of times. He opened cabinets, took out ingredients, put water on to boil, and, between one movement and the next, let the music do the rest. He tapped his foot to the beat, gestured with his hands, spun around to reach for a utensil, and when the chorus came, he hummed the melody with more enthusiasm than talent. At times he even sang, completely off-key and completely happy to be alone so that no one could judge him.
Although, if he had to pick one thing to judge, he might start with Erid’s food, which were still quite an experience. Even after three years, he still couldn’t get used to its taste, its texture, or that strange sensation of chewing something that defied all earthly logic. If he was honest, he wasn’t even entirely sure the human body was designed to digest such things. But, as with almost every problem in his new life, Rocky and he always managed to work it out. Because Rocky was incapable of living with an inconvenience without trying to fix it. Rocky fix.
They had made use of every last corner of the Hail Mary. They salvaged every seed they could find: tomatoes, grains, legumes, fruits… Even the tiny sesame seeds embedded in a sorry-looking loaf of whole-wheat bread ended up becoming a small treasure. If anything had the slightest chance of growing, they would try. But meat and fish had proved to be a very different challenge. Erid had its own ecosystem, but almost nothing in it resembled what evolution had achieved on Earth. Many of its creatures grew among the rock and minerals with a naturalness that still seemed absurd to him. Feeding on them wasn’t as simple as putting a skillet on the stove.
Replicating animal proteins with the resources available on Erid had taken them years of experiments, calculations, and an unhealthy amount of scientific debates. And the result of all that was… acceptable. At least from a nutritional standpoint. From a culinary one, it still looked like something a geologist might have found under a mountain. More than once, Grace had thought it would be easier to just become a vegetarian for good. And in theory, he more or less was now. But Rocky never accepted “I’ll settle for what I have.” If a solution didn’t exist, Rocky would build one.
And among all those little everyday miracles, there was one that Grace considered sacred: coffee.
The first harvest had been cause for celebration. He remembered hugging the pot like an idiot while Rocky watched the scene, unable to understand why those little green leaves were provoking such an emotional reaction. Every morning he gave thanks, almost with devotion, that those plants had thrived. There was still nothing even remotely resembling milk, nor did he expect there to be any soon, so he’d resigned himself to drinking it espresso. He didn’t mind too much. After all, that first sip still tasted like home.
So, he prepared his usual breakfast: a steaming cup of coffee and some toast with freshly crushed tomatoes. Nothing spectacular. Nothing worthy of a chef. After all, cooking had never been his thing. When he still lived in San Francisco, he’d always preferred to have breakfast at a café or order food for delivery.
With breakfast ready, he sat down at the kitchen table with his laptop open. Music continued to play throughout the house as he opened the document for his next class. He took a bite of toast, sipped his coffee, and began editing an explanation, adding a couple of notes and rephrasing an example to make it easier to understand. He had never stopped being a teacher. Not even on the other side of the stars.
For quite a while, nothing else existed but the soft tapping of the keys. He corrected a couple of notes, rewrote an explanation of atmospheric chemistry that didn’t quite convince him, and added a simple experiment for his students. As he worked, the music shifted from one artist to another almost without him noticing. When one song ended, another took its place. The minutes did the same.
When he was done, he let out a satisfied sigh. His fingers hovered over the keyboard for a few seconds before pressing a combination of keys he knew by heart. Then, a photograph appeared on the screen.
Stratt.
He had taken it himself, almost by chance, during that last night on Earth. The night when he still believed the Hail Mary would take off without him. Stratt was standing next to a table covered with reports, her sleeves rolled up and fatigue casting shadows under her eyes. She held a cup of cold coffee in her hands and smiled in that strange way of hers, a tiny, almost invisible smile, as if even happiness had to be used sparingly.
Grace realized that he, too, was smiling as he looked at the photograph. Just a little. He could never quite return that smile in full. It had taken him a long time to forgive her. At first, he had hated her with an intensity that embarrassed him to recall. He had say her name with rage, cursed her, and imagined impossible conversations in which he yelled at her all the things he’d never actually said. Then came the days of survival back home, the reunion with Rocky, the discovery of a new world, shared laughter, and, finally, peace.
The resentment had worn away like a stone underwater. Even so, every now and then a small edge remained. A tiny, stubborn voice kept reminding him that she had robbed him of the chance to choose. Then another voice, much more reasonable, would always reply the same thing: “And thanks to that, you’re still alive.” And not only that. Thanks to her, he had met Rocky. Thanks to her, two species continued to watch the sunrise over their respective worlds. Thanks to her, he had found a home where he would never have imagined looking for one. It was hard to hate someone who had given you a second life, even if she first had to destroy the first one.
Sometimes he wondered what had become of Stratt. Whether the little beetles had fulfilled their mission. Whether Carl was happy. Or whether, at some point, in the quiet of an ordinary night, Stratt allowed himself to remember the science teacher he had condemned to becoming a hero. He would never know. Eleven light-years from Earth, distance was measured not only in milles, but also in questions. No message could reach him. No answer would ever come back.
Nor would he ever know what had become of the rest of the world. Sometimes he wondered if the oceans had regained their blue color. Other times, if someone had composed his future favorite song, the one he’d never be able to hear. And, every now and then, an idea as ridiculous as wondering whether Harrison Ford was still alive would cross his mind. That always managed to bring a smile to his face, caught up in the absurdity of it all. Because if he ever found out that Harrison Ford had died and he’d only learned about it several years later, he’d probably feel that the universe owed him an apology. And since the universe never apologized to anyone, it was much more comfortable not to know.
Suddenly, above his thoughts and the music, several sharp knocks rang out against the front door.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Grace looked up, and a smile softened his features even before he realized it. He didn’t need to look at the clock. Rocky and the clock had long since reached a silent understanding about visiting hours.
“Punctual as a Swiss watch…” he murmured, shaking his head to herself with a smile born more of affection than irony.
There were days when he suspected that the very idea of being five minutes late would be physically offensive to Rocky’s logic.
With a couple of taps, he turned down the volume on the music. Michael Jackson kept singing, though now his voice was barely a murmur mingling with the silence of the house. He closed the photo of Stratt and, with it, put away the thoughts that accompanied it. He stood up, grabbed the cup of coffee he’d left to grow cold on the side of the table, forgotten, and set off toward the entrance. He hadn’t even made it halfway down the hallway when the knocking returned.
Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock.
Faster. More impatient. Ryland let out a laugh.
"I'm on my way ” he called out as he quickened his pace. “You know, humans need more than three seconds to walk through a house.”
From the other side of the door came Rocky’s deep, familiar voice:
“You take too long. That mean trouble. Rocky worry.”
That simple explanation made Ryland smile even wider. For Rocky, there was no such thing as overreacting when it came to someone he cared about.
He opened the door.
Rocky was waiting where he always did, enveloped in the faint glow of his protective armor. The morning light glided over the xenonite from his shell, casting muted reflections on the sand. He stood motionless, steady on his five limbs, with that mineral-like serenity that only Eridians seemed capable of conveying.
Ryland rested one shoulder against the doorframe.
“Worried?” he asked, raising an eyebrow, amused. “Rocky, it’s been… what? Twenty seconds?”
The Eridian’s notes dropped a tone.
“Twenty seconds long time if Grace don't answer.”
Grace’s smile lost some of its teasing edge. He was still surprised by how easily Rocky could turn a simple phrase into something that made his chest feel warm.
“Good morning, Rocky,” he finally greeted him, a faint smile playing on his lips.
The eridian’s notes rose instantly, warm and luminous. Two of its front limbs lifted a few centimeters off the ground in a gesture that, over the years, Grace had learned to interpret as a greeting.
“Good morning, friend Grace! ” he sang with such sincere joy that it seemed impossible not to be swept up in it.
Grace felt his own smile widen a little more.
There was a brief silence before Rocky tilted his body slightly, observing him with the attention of someone examining an interesting phenomenon.
“Grace happy today, statement.”
The scientist raised an eyebrow, amused.
“Oh, really? And how did you come to that conclusion?” Grace asked, almost teasingly.
Rocky tapped two of his paws lightly on the sand before answering, as if he were sorting through the data.
“Look happy. Grace face so noisy, statement.”
Ryland let out a soft snort through his nose, smiling instantly.
“See? That’s why I could never make a living playing poker.”
Rocky responded with a brief sequence of musical notes that Grace already recognized effortlessly as laughter. He returned another, low and heartfelt, as a broad smile lit up his face. Sometimes he forgot how strange it felt to laugh with a creature born under a different star. Other times, he simply stopped caring.
Then, together, set off down the path that ran alongside the house to the beach. Before following him, Grace closed the door behind his with a gentle slam, even though it wasn’t necessary. On Erid, it almost never was. But Rocky insisted that doors were meant to stay closed when no one was passing through them, and Ryland had ended up accepting that rule for the same reason one ends up learning a family’s little quirks.
As they walked side by side along the shore, Rocky looked at the cup Grace was still holding.
“Coffee make human work good. Rocky remember.”
Grace smiled and raised his cup in a toast, as if celebrating a universal truth.
“Exactly. Without coffee, I would have forgotten even how to open the door,” he replied before taking a sip from the white cup printed with the word “HeHeHe,” written with three helium symbols from the periodic table. Below it, in smaller letters, one could read: Laughing gas.
Rocky remained thoughtful for just a moment, then replied:
“That would be improbable, statement.”
“Yes.” Grace took another sip before smiling. “But not impossible.”
Rocky let out two low notes, pondering it as if he were actually recalculating the odds.
“Acceptable.”
That morning, the sea of Erid breathed with an ancient calm, oblivious to the hustle and bustle of men. The waves rolled over the dark sand with a deep murmur, and as they receded, they left behind an ashen sheen that vanished almost instantly, as if the planet itself refused to hold onto memories.
Grace sank down near the shore, where they almost always sat to watch the waves come and go. Rocky followed suit. He folded his five limbs one by one until he settled onto the sand with that impossible elegance that only the Eridians seemed to possess. His heavy protective armor emitted a faint metallic creak before coming to a complete standstill. Grace, on the other hand, rested his forearms on his knees and let her gaze wander toward the horizon.
How strange the universe was.
Of all the living beings he had encountered throughout her life, the most important one had turned out to be a creature born under a different Star, with a body of rock, five limbs, and a way of thinking so different from that of humans that, in theory, the two of them should never have been able to understand each other. And yet, there they were. Not a single day went by without Grace being grateful to hear those impatient knocks on the other side of his door.
In the stillness, the sea continued to breathe. The wind swept a thin curtain of sand between them. And for a few minutes, neither spoke. Grace was silent because he was at peace. Rocky was silent because he was waiting for the right moment. And Grace could sense it. He had learned that Eridians were silent too, though their silences never meant exactly the same thing as a human’s. Humans usually hid doubts, fear, or words they didn’t dare to speak. Rocky’s silences were different. They were silences filled with calculation, reflection, or anticipation.
Then he heard it.
Tick…
Tick.
Tick… tick.
Rocky’s two front paws began to tap gently on the sand, tracing an irregular rhythm that Ryland would have recognized even with his eyes closed. He smiled to himself. He’d been living with him for too long not to know how that little drumming always ended. The Eridian’s deep notes finally broke the silence.
“Rocky have news,” the Eridian finally said.
Ryland turned his head slowly. The smile remained on his lips, though a hint of amused resignation was already creeping into it.
“I’m starting to get worried every time you say that.”
“Good news.” The Eridian’s notes rose in pitch, bright, almost jubilant. “News will make Ryland Grace very happy, statement ”
Ryland let out a resigned smile. For a moment, he thought he knew what it was about. Perhaps some Eridian holiday. It wouldn’t be the first. Ever since he’d arrived on Erid, celebrations seemed to spring up as easily as the tides. Some had emerged after the planet’s salvation, when the Eridians decided to make the stranger who’d come from the stars a part of their collective memory. Others had existed long before humans even discovered they weren’t alone in the universe.
And, for some reason he never quite understood, he ended up becoming part of all of them. At first, he had tried to slip away with the awkwardness of someone afraid of intruding on others’ traditions. The Eridians never let him. To them, Ryland Grace was no longer a guest. He was one of their own.
And he didn’t just attend those celebrations; he was part of them. No celebration ended without some Eridian covering him in thick paint, mineral-like to the touch and smelling of damp stone, or adorning him with necklaces and jewelry carved from Eridian minerals, whose meaning varied depending on the occasion. He had long since stopped resisting. He simply remained still while dozens of claws, protected by their armors, painting on him with a delicacy that never failed to move him. They were small tokens of an affection that this species did not always know how to express in any other way.
And there was one gesture that was never missing.
Rocky always ended up painting a small mark of his claws on the left side of his chest, right where his heart beat, as if he had always known it was there. He never needed to ask what it meant. Some things didn’t require translation.
Every time, at the end of a festival, he gazed at his reflection, his face covered in impossible pigments and his body adorned with Erid minerales, he couldn’t help but think of Avatar. Then he would smile to himself. James Cameron had imagined an extraordinary world. Reality, once again, had proven to be far more imaginative.
However, the news that awaited him had nothing to do with music, tradition, or celebration.
“Okay, then shoot.” The smile was still on his lips, though it was already beginning to take on a hint of curiosity.
“NO, NO, NO. ROCKY NOT WANT SHOOT GRACE. WHY GRACE SAY THAT, QUESTION?” Rocky’s five legs twitched with unusual nervousness, producing a brief cascade of jumbled notes.
Grace immediately raised both hands, palms open.
“No, no. Relax. It’s just an expression. I don’t want you to shoot me. I just want you to tell me the news.” he said, so much to calm him down.
Rocky stood motionless for a few moments. His chords faltered as he processed the phrase, as if he were searching through thousands of rules of human language for the missing piece. Finally, he played a brief, warm chord.
“Oh. Rocky understand now.”
Grace let out a smile. After three years, he still kept forgetting that sarcasm, metaphors, and idioms were little more than a form of torture for an Eridian’s brain.
Then Rocky stopped drumming his fingers on the sand. The gentle rhythm that had accompanied their conversation died away abruptly, as if the sea itself had held its breath. Then he slowly moved one of his limbs.
“Rocky friends return yesterday from mission.”
Ryland’s expression changed instantly.
“The ones who went to the neighboring planet?” he asked.
“Yes.” The Eridian’s tone dropped a notch before he continued, “Looking for minerals. Found something else.”
The smile faded completely. Ryland tilted his head ever so slightly.
“What did they find?” Grace pressed.
Rocky stood motionless for a moment that seemed to drag on forever.
“Picking up signal.”
The murmur of the waves continued to reach the beach. The foam kept advancing and receding over the dark sand. Very close by, the wind swayed the gray coastal grass. But Ryland stopped noticing it all. His entire world narrowed down to Rocky’s voice.
“A signal…?”
The next words came slowly.
“A distress signal.”
Something tightened in Ryland’s chest. That indefinable sensation that arises when intuition precedes understanding, and the body senses danger or a miracle before the mind does.
“Was it a beacon?”
“Yes.”
“From a ship?”
Rocky leaned forward slightly.
“Yes. Rocky friends found small ship.”
From that moment on, Ryland’s heart began to beat a little faster. Possibilities flashed through his mind at the speed of a frantic calculation. A probe. An unmanned capsule. The remains of some experiment. An unknown Eridian spacecraft. Some artifact lost for centuries.
He took a deep breath. The anticipation was killing him.
“So…?”
Rocky remained motionless. Only three soft beeps escaped the translator before he replied.
"Found human.”
The entire universe seemed to come to a standstill. The foam continued to fade away on the sand. The coffee continued to give off its aroma from the cup Grace held in his hands. The breeze continued to caress the beach. But all of that suddenly belonged to another world. Grace had heard only one word. Human.
“...What?” His voice barely managed to leave his throat. It was little more than a breath.
Ryland’s heart began pounding in his chest with a force uncharacteristic of a calm conversation. Rocky, on the other hand, continued speaking with the composure of someone who still didn’t grasp the magnitude of the news.
“Rocky want to say it last night,” he paused briefly. “But Rocky thought make surprise be better. Finding another human be better surprise for friend Grace.”
Grace wasn’t listening anymore. His pulse was pounding in his temples. Another human. Not a lost transmission. Not a memory stored on a hard drive. Not a photograph. A human being. Alive. For years, he had accepted that he would never again hear human laughter mingling with his own. That he would never again argue with someone over which pizza to order. That his last contact with another living human being had been hands pinning his to the ground while he begged them not to take away what little freedom he had left, like a little fox that has fallen into a trap and knows it's going to die. He had grown accustomed to it because there was no other choice. And now… Now that resignation was cracking like glass under too much pressure.
His hands began to shake with a violence he couldn’t control. Before the coffee spilled, he set the cup down on the sand with a care uncharacteristic of someone whose heart was racing. The air no longer seemed enough for him. He took a deep breath, then another, but his lungs refused to fill. He ran a hand through his hair, clinging to that mechanical gesture, while he tried to bring order to the whirlwind that had just been unleashed inside him.
“Is there… another human?” he managed to ask in a hoarse voice.
Rocky slowly leaned forward.
“Yes,” he added, with all the caution he could muster; “That what Rocky believe. The anatomy human… but different. Rocky friends say very strange.”
Ryland could barely make out those last words. The questions came tumbling out one after another.
“Is alive?”
“Yes.”
“Conscious?”
“No. New human hurt, new human in a coma.”
“Will recover?”
“Rocky thinks injuries not serious.”
“Where is she... or he?”
For the first time since the conversation had begun, Rocky let a hint of pride show. He’d waited all night to be able to give her that surprise.
“Waiting to meet Ryland Grace.”
Grace didn’t know what to make of it all. His emotions came flooding in all at once, in no particular order, like a dam that had just burst. A broken laugh escaped a mid an ancient sob one that had been waiting far too long to surface. He covered his mouth with one hand, unable to hold it back, as tears blurred his vision until the world became a smudge of light and color.
Rocky stood motionless. He had learned to recognize human tears, but he still didn’t fully understand why, at times, happiness and sadness shared the same face.
“Friend Grace is okay, question?” he finally asked, conveying a musical tone that sounded concerned.
It took Ryland a few seconds to answer. He took a deep breath, wiped his tears with the back of his hand, and lifted his head. Then he looked at Rocky and smiled. It wasn’t that small, polite smile you give to reassure others. It was a radiant, immense smile, born in some corner of his heart.
“You know…?” he managed to say, his voice still breaking. “I think… I think it’s been years since I’ve felt this good.”
He let out a brief laugh, still choked with emotion.
“Thank you, Rocky. Thank you so much… really.”
The Eridian’s notes grew warm, deep, almost enveloping. No translation could possibly capture everything they were saying.
“Rocky very happy. Rocky want friend Grace happy.”
Ryland took a step forward and rested both hands on the rough edge of his friend’s protective suit. His fingers rested there gently, as if that touch could convey everything that words were unable to express. Rocky’s limbs wrapped around him as well in that embrace.
And, for the first time since he had awakened alone among the stars, Ryland Grace stopped feeling like the last man in the universe.