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My rudimentary knowledge of ancient maps comes in handy. I took no cartography classes - another profession that would have been more useful than mine - but with the team’s help, we draw a map of all we know. Our camp (which they can easily find; we figure we aren’t giving ourselves away), the forest, the riverbed, the golden grasses. Skye even draws a figure of them in the grass, and a few humans at the camp.
“Might as well include our ship. Have a little smoke coming out. We aren’t exactly trying to hide.”
“Can’t keep a shipwreck that big a secret,” she agrees, and sketches it in.
“Add guns to the people.” Judd’s been quiet through most of our drawing, but he cuts in, now. “We don’t want to make ourselves seem like easy targets.”
Good idea, too. Skye adds them.
I have to admit, I’m a little proud of our project. We could be sketching our way to our doom for all we know, but I don’t truly believe so. This was intelligent communication. Would they have responded to our note with a note of their own if they were hostile?
I don’t know. That’s another thing I’m not. An analyst. Or a general. How did I end up here?
“I’ll leave it,” I say, and I return to the open air of the riverbed. I may not be the most useful person on this trip, but I’m going to try. I’ll prove that bringing me wasn’t a total waste of a seat. I have to.
?????
I begin to map the moons that night, and for many nights after. The crew’s days consist of repairs, both of the ship and our injured friends.
The missing engine is nowhere to be seen. Kit’s drones won’t power on - I caught her crying over them one morning, whispering to one of them, to “just fucking work like it’s supposed to.” The computers are extensively fried, though the ship finally has power. Now Faith and Arjun are busy on the bridge, working on calculations to tip the ship upright.
We don’t even seek permission anymore. Team C’s days are centered on maps. We explore further and further from the ship and add on to whichever map we happen to have in our hands. Sometimes it’s ours. Sometimes it’s the aliens’.
We trade them back and forth and add what we find. They located a river. We found cliffs and the sea.
The scene would have reminded me of the cliffs and grasslands of Ireland if the colors weren’t so wrong - the grasses a jewel blue and the sea itself a lime green.
They found a path through some mountains, but didn’t venture far.
We found an open field of tall purple sunflowers. When we tugged one from the ground, we pulled some sort of root vegetable out of the dirt. Quinn has it, now. She wants to find out if it is safe for us eat. We have enough rations for a good long time, but the supplies aren’t infinite. And variety would be nice. And how cool would it be to eat the first alien potato?
Finally, on the fifth exchange, the aliens include a picture of their own ship on the map. It, too, has smoke coming from it. A greenish figure stands next to it with a frown on its face.
I guess we weren’t the only ones to crash land here. I guess that also means that they’ve decided we’re more trustworthy than before. That makes us chuckle amongst ourselves. They could have torn us limb from limb by now if they were determined to attack.
The next note from them the following day is even stranger. Even more shocking. I grab it and have Team C huddle around to stare at it.
No map this time. They’ve drawn a group of them on one side of the riverbed, a group of us on the other side, and in the middle, a human and an alien either holding or shaking hands.
I wave the page above my head. “They want to meet us!”
“Uh....” All four exchange glances, like I’m the crazy one, like I was the only one to have a hand in making this invitation happen.
“Look at what we’ve figured out so far,” I say. I pull the old pages from my bag, including the drawing of their smoking ship. “We think they crashed here, too. They’re as stranded as we are. If we can work together...” I trail off. I’m not crazy. I’m just thinking of forming a team with some large alien dudes. Not crazy at all.
But our ship still isn’t upright, and we’re no closer to finding the other humans or to finding our engine. The notes have been fascinating, enlightening, but they will not be enough if we want to enlist their help.
“And what if this meeting endangers everybody?” Judd asks. “What if they decide we look like food after all? That we’re so defenseless they may as well just kill us all for our stuff?”
“They could have done that already,” I say. “They don’t need a handshake to decide to rip our heads off.”
“They might,” Skye snorts. “We don’t know anything about alien war etiquette.”
I hadn’t considered that. We could be reading everything wrong. But somehow I don’t think we are. There’s a universal quality to a frown on a face, to a meeting of hands with smiles. They’re so similarly shaped to us, wouldn’t their expressions and body language be similar, too?
“Extra guns?” I suggest. “Make ourselves look as scary as we can?”
“I vote yes,” Hope says. “I know you’re leading this whole thing, Macie, but I think we should vote. It’s a big decision.”
