Page 129 of Stripped By the Alien

- Nora -

Apollo has grown enough in three days that I almost don't recognize the stall when Sophia and I duck inside it. His hide has darkened from pale newborn beige to something closer to the Beast's own deep, mottled brown, and the propulsion buds along his flanks look sturdier already, less like potential and more like function.

"He's bigger," Sophia says, running a hand along his side with the careful, assessing touch of someone who's spent her whole career evaluating unfamiliar hardware. "How fast does he grow?"

"Krix'vorr says once he's out of the mother, it will be weeks, not years. He'll be fully mature faster than anything on Earth ever would be." I press my palm flat against his hide, and he presses back, gentle and eager, the way he always does. “So he has to grow fast. I actually don't want him as huge as his mother, but I don't think I have a choice.”

"We were trained on spaceships much smaller than her," Sophia says. “But imagine the looks when you show up at Scout Station Six with that thing!”

I grin. "All Earth's spacefaring problems solved. Until he decides to leave." I glance sideways at Sophia. "How are you feeling? Really. Not the version you gave the medical creature."

Sophia's mouth twitches. "Honestly? Better than I have any right to. Whatever that thing is, the tentacled one, with all the eyes, it did something to my shoulder that three different Space Force medics couldn't fix in a year. I don't understand the biology at all, and I've stopped trying."

"They don't trust machines out here," I tell her. "Not for anything living. Krix'vorr says the whole Brood considers medical technology a kind of affront. Like you're insulting a body by assuming it needs correcting instead of healing. So they use the Mirex." I gesture vaguely. "And that was that creature."

"A very calm, very patient octopus," Sophia says, "with unsettlingly gentle tendrils. I'm not complaining. I just wasn't prepared for it."

“Uh-huh. They have another healing process, too, when things are getting really serious. One day I’ll tell you about it.”

“Oh? You can’t tell me now?”

“I’m not drunk enough,” I explain. “This is a three-drink minimum story. Bordering on four.”

Sophia looks around, tapping her lip. “Well, there’s gotta be a bar in this place. It’s basically a royal palace. Don't royals drink a lot of champagne?”

I chuckle, and then we both go quiet for a moment.

I feel the thing I've known since yesterday afternoon rise up in my chest again, insistent, refusing to wait any longer. "Sophia. There's something I have to tell you."

Something in my tone must give it away, because her whole posture changes, wary. "Yeah, that's always a good start. Okay, girl. Go."

"It's not bad," I say quickly. "I don't think it's bad. It's just… big." I take a breath. "I'm pregnant."

For a long moment Sophia just stares at me, and I watch about six different reactions cross her face in quick succession before any of them settle into words.

"You're—" She stops. “From before? From Earth?”

I just look her in the eye and slowly shake my head. My eyes well up.

Sophia's hand goes to her forehead. "Nora. He's not even the same species."

I quickly wipe my eyes. "Not even close."

"I mean that as a completely serious medical question, not a joke. Is that even—" She gestures helplessly at the calf beside us, at the whole living ship around us, at the entire impossible scope of everything we've both seen in the last few weeks. "Is that biologically possible? Did the octopus creature confirm this, or⁠—"

"I didn't tell it, because I didn't know. It told me. I don't fully understand how, and neither does Krix'vorr, honestly. But it's real." I press a hand flat against my own stomach, still mostly just startled by the gesture itself, still getting used to it being true. "I have a theory, for what it's worth."

She steadies herself on Apollo's finely furred side. "I'd love to hear it, because right now my working theory is that the universe has stopped making sense entirely."

"Marankz," I say. "The bonding thing. The lightning." I watch her expression change from alarm toward something more careful, more listening. "Krix'vorr told me that when it happens, between a locust and an outsider, the pairs that survive it eventually have children. Strong ones. It's part of the old mythology. I think the bond isn't just... romantic, or symbolic. I think it actually does something. Prepares the ground, somehow, between two bodies that shouldn't be able to make this work at all."

Sophia is quiet for a long moment, processing that with the same careful, methodical attention she's clearly always brought to impossible problems. "So it's not universal. It's not that any human and any locust could…"

"I don't think so, no. I think it needs whatever this is. The bond. Whatever the lightning actually means. But I can't be sure."

"That's..." She shakes her head slowly. "That's either the most romantic thing I've ever heard, or the single most terrifying piece of alien biology anyone's ever tried to explain to me, and I genuinely can't tell which. Sorry, Nora. I should be more supportive. Just let me get over the first surprise.” She takes a deep breath and slowly lets it out. “Okay, that should do it."

"It's cool," I say, and find myself laughing, unsteady and relieved, because saying it out loud to her, finally, was a real relief. "It's a weird thing to have happen."