author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Notes from the author:

This star-crossed lovers story cycled through several permutations on the way to its current form. At one point, the lovers were a rich kid and a poor kid, and the rich kid pulled strings to get their girlfriend a seat on the spaceship escaping some environmental catastrophe. But, unbeknownst to the protagonist, the spaceship was a lie; their powerful family was actually intending to kill off everyone who boarded. Except I wasn’t sure I was ready to be responsible for such a close allusion to the Holocaust. So, OK, back up, start over: it’s just Romeo and Juliet. All right? But, get this, the Capulets are in fact extraterrestrials.

Turns out, you get an entirely different class of story problems when you make one of your main characters an alien.

Mehtai ran. She ran through the exhaustion. She ran despite the cramp stabbing her in the side, despite each gasp filling her lungs with fire. It was only the illusion of fire, after all. It was nothing. B3’s people might burn for real, might be already burning, might be dead—

No. She couldn’t afford to think that way. She had to believe she could still get there in time, or else she wouldn’t, and B3 would die. And it would be all her fault.

She ran harder, welcoming the pain. She’d betrayed B3’s secret; it was only just and proper that she should suffer for it.

“Why so sad, Tai-Tai? You’ve barely touched your dinner.”

Mehtai shouldn’t have answered. She knew it even then. But her wits were worn out with weeks of having carried her secret grief alone.

“Great news, Ma,” she said bitterly. “B3’s leaving forever. That should make you happy, right? No more disgusting Exto corrupting your daughter.”

Her mother sighed. “Mehtai, you know how I feel about your... connection to that External girl. I always said there was no future for you there. But, sweetheart, I love you. I hate to see you in so much pain.” She held her arms open. “Come here.” And Mehtai accepted the hug, and wept, and, little by little, allowed her mother to wheedle the whole story out of her.

She felt guilty about it later, but what harm could she possibly have done? In mere hours, the Externals would be safely on their way. Thirteen generations of hurt and humiliation at the hands of Mehtai’s people—ended, just like that.

And B3 gone forever.

Mehtai cried herself to sleep that night, and woke well before dawn to the gentle movements of B3’s mind over her own. Opening herself fully to the link, she felt herself in two places at once, both in her own bed and in B3’s, holding each other tight. They’d done this before. When the link ended, she could choose where to be, and oh, she chose, she chose?—

“Goodbye,” she heard B3 whisper. And Mehtai returned to herself, alone in the dark.

She hadn’t time to process this newest loss before she realized she was hearing voices. Her neighbors, snickering meanly rightly outside her window, offering each other rough congratulations. One said, “About time,” and another, “Shoulda done it long ago.” A third: “Years of them stinking up the place?—”

“Walking around like they thought they were people?—”

“Creeping into our wives’ beds, under your daughter’s skirts?—”

“Shut your filthy mouth.” Mehtai’s eyes went wide as she recognized her mother’s voice. “That’s all over now, and I won’t hear of it more. My daughter’s the one what told us in time to act, don’t you forget.”

Cold certainty swept over Mehtai and left her shivering with panic and shame. This is what came of telling when she’d promised she wouldn’t. She’d told her mother, and her mother had told their neighbors, and they’ll all gone over and—what? What horrible things had they done? Sabotaged the Externals’ ship? Burned down their homes? Killed them all in their sleep?

Mehtai flung herself out of bed, dressed in haste, and crept quietly out the back door. Then she ran.

The launch site was five and a half miles downhill and another half mile to the east, screened from malignant human eyes by the narrow belt of pine woods. Mehtai knew the way. B3 had brought her here not long ago. Mehtai had taken one look at the ship and said, “You’re leaving me.”

“We’re all leaving,” B3 had replied. “We’re going home.”

Now that ship stood scarred, its flank scored deeply by human tools, dented by human violence. The loading bay gaped open, and there was broken glass upon the ground. Mehtai rushed inside, fearing the worst.

There had been rows and rows of pods in which the Externals would sleep the long interstellar journey through. “This one’s going to be mine,” B3 had said. She’d opened the lid and pushed Mehtai inside. It was tiny, narrow as a coffin. When B3 climbed in on top of her, the back of Mehtai’s brain barked claustrophobia. Then B3 kissed her, and the mind-link blossomed, and Mehtai’s awareness was subsumed.

They’d sanctified that pod like a marriage bed. Now it lay in pieces, profaned, defiled. And yet, Mehtai realized, there were no bodies among the wreckage. No blood. No personal effects. No sign, in fact, that the Externals had ever boarded.

Mehtai’s lungs still burned, but she found breath enough to run again, this time all the way to the External’s village. What she found there made her howl with despair. Every door stood open. Every window was smashed. The wooden sculpture that Mehtai had loved so much, a figure reaching for the stars, was down in pieces and the pieces were burning.

Inside B3’s house, furniture lay overturned and smashed. The food stores had been broken open, and spilled grain rolled slippery under Mehtai’s feet. But the destruction seemed confined to the common area. In B3’s narrow room, the bed was neatly made, the window open wide, the curtains drawn back.

“Oh, B3,” Mehtai murmured, collapsing on the bed, “Where are you?”

As though in answer, something crinkled underneath the pillow. Mehtai snatched it up and found a piece of folded paper underneath.

A letter, addressed to her.

“My love,” Mehtai read, “the spaceship was a decoy. I never knew. My parents didn’t tell me, because they knew I’d tell you, and they don’t trust you like I do.” Mehtai moaned her guilt aloud, reading those words. “We’re actually going to leave by mind-link. It’ll be just like the time I brought you out of your house and into my room, only a whole lot farther—all the way to our home planet!

“I wanted to bring you with me, but I can’t. It’s too far. There’s no room in a human brain for such distances. Even with your heart big enough to hold both of our people side by side, you just can’t conceptualize the distances we’re crossing like we can.

“So you have to stay here, among your people who hated my people, and teach your people how to love. My parents said to tell you that. It’s really important. Because we’ll be back someday to finish what we started, and we’re relying on you to make things ready. It’ll be hard, but I know you can do it. You’ve been practicing for it all this time, loving me. And I love you. Always.

“Until someday,

“B3.”

Mehtai clutched the note to her chest and wept until her tears mingled with the ink and seeped darkly into her clothes. It was too much. She’d failed B3’s trust once already. How could she be trusted with this? Her people were murderers, or wanted to be. And she was supposed to somehow get them to be even the least little bit less hateful?

But the thought of letting B3 down once again was too dreadful to be borne.

“All right,” she muttered. “I’ll do what can. When you come back, you’ll see.” She flung the thought out into space, trying to reach B3, but of course she fell short. She was only human. For now. “And I’ll be practicing, B3, I’ll be thinking about distances all the time, bigger and bigger distances, until I can fit the whole way from my planet to yours inside my head, so that you’ll never have to leave me behind, ever again. But until then...”

She wiped her eyes and took a deep breath.

“Until then, I’ll try. For you.”

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