Page 104 of Every Almost

The first thingCharlie noticed was that everything hurt.

Not in a specific, useful way, like a pulled muscle or a burned finger, where the pain told you exactly what went wrong and how to fix it. This was the full-body kind, the kind that made her think of the time she'd fallen off Frank's stepladder in the garage and landed flat on her ass on the concrete. Every joint, every muscle, even her hair somehow, hurt.

The second thing she became aware of was the floor. Hard and cold, yet she could tell it wasn't concrete, or even tile. It was something else, smooth and metallic, but with a faint vibration running through it.

Holy shit, it's an engine.

Somewhere below her, or maybe all around her, was unmistakably an engine running. Her body felt it and claimedthe knowledge like a lifeline, that at leastsomethingshe understood was going on here.

The third thing was the noises around her.

She kept her eyes closed. Mentally, she didn't think she was ready yet for whatever was on the other side of her eyelids. Not when every bone in her body felt like it had been reassembled by someone who'd lost the instruction manual. But the noises sounded like... voices? They were sounds that hadinflection.They were insistent, overlapping, urgent, but they were completely wrong. To Charlie, the rhythm sounded right, just like the cadence of conversation and the back-and-forth of people discussing something important. But the sounds themselves were nothing she'd ever heard. Not Spanish or Mandarin, not even the rapid-fire Farsi she used to hear in the Caltech cafeteria.

Charlie had spent a decade at Caltech and JPL surrounded by people who spoke dozens of languages. She'd learned to recognize the sound of most of them even if she couldn't understand the words.Thiswasn't any of them. It wasn't even close.

What would she be doing in a place that speaks a language she'd never heard before?

Her eyes shot open.

The ceiling above her was wrong. It was curved in a way that meant it was holding weight, made of a material she couldn't identify. Some kind of alloy but with a matte finish that caught light without reflecting it. And the light itself was wrong too. It wasn't fluorescent or incandescent, but something sourceless and steady coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. The seam where wall met ceiling had something running along it, perhaps a conduit of some kind routed with intention.Whoever built this place knew what they were doing.

Then the faces appeared above her and Charlie's brain went offline.

There were five, six, maybe seven of them, standing in a loose semicircle around where she lay on the floor.

And not one of them was human.

She processed this in pieces because her brain refused to take it all at once. Skin in shades that didn't exist on people. Eyes too large, too bright, the wrong colors. A figure so tall and broad that it blocked the overhead light entirely, with thick brown fur and a face like a bear. An actual bear, standing upright, wearing an... apron?

Charlie sat bolt upright and something sticky pulled at the back of her coat. She was covered in some kind of...was that batter? Her hands were coated in it, her jeans, her flannel, Frank's aquamarine coat.

She sniffed it from her hands.Hmm... not bad, actually.But what the hell was it?!

She saw movement to her left. The tall blue-graysomething, the one built like a statue of Arnold Schwarzenegger the way 'The Terminator'wishedhe was built, reached for something at his hip and brought it up in one smooth, practiced motion. Charlie blanched.

She knew what a weapon looked like.

She screamed.

The scream echoed off the curved ceiling and came back to her sounding thin and insufficient. The blue soldier adjusted his grip on the weapon and his pale eyes locked onto her with the focused attention of someone who had been trained to assess threats quickly and act.

Then another movement, this time to the right of where the blue bodybuilder man stood in his gun drawn stance.

It was a woman.

She stepped forward from the group and placed her hand on the blue man's forearm. Not pushing it down, instead just resting there, steady and certain. She spoke in that sound Charlie couldn't understand but figured it had to be some sort of language. The woman's voice was low and measured, and whatever she said, it seemed to ease the blue Schwarzenegger, because Charlie watched his shoulders release just a fraction as his weapon lowered. Charlie did clock that the weapon didn't go away entirely.

The woman turned to look at Charlie.

And Charlie forgot, for a moment, that she was terrified.

Her skin was green, a rich, living sage green, like the color of spring leaves first appearing on new flowers. Her hair was down but pulled back in thin braids that rested on her head like a laurel wreath. Strands had escaped, falling around her face in a color Charlie's brain could only call lavender. Her eyes were deep amber, almost golden, intense yet soft at the same time, making Charlie feel calm when she looked into them.

But it was the markings that stopped Charlie.

Gold patterns traced across the woman's face, neck, along her long fingers and up her arms. They glowed, faintly, with their own light, like constellations mapped onto skin, as though someone had taken the stars themselves and pressed them into her. And then the stars had stayed.

Charlie stared and she wentstill.Unconsciously, everything within her slowed. The word that surfaced from somewhere underneath her panic, underneath her confusion, underneath the sticky batter and the aching bones and the complete collapse of everything she understood about reality, wasmesmerized.It wasn't a conscious thought, but something her body knew before her mind caught up.