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“Oh. Then. Yes. Perhaps your ship’s stores would be more nutritionally appropriate.”
“Perhaps,” she agrees with a dubious look at me that indicates she finds me somehow inherently wanting. I will break her of that attitude soon enough.
We both adjourn to her ship, where she dons fresh clothing, a cotton dress with a floral print that is quite pretty. I remain naked, which seems to please her, judging by the way I catch her eye wandering to me and over me as she raids her food stores.
I barely fit inside her vessel, as it was built economically to transport relatively small humans. I have to stoop to move through the entryways and halls, but I do find enough room to sit eventually, pressed between her flight console and a bookshelf containing a series of tomes marked “JOURNAL. DO NOT READ.”
I am, of course, deeply tempted to read them.
Ava catches me looking at them. “You can look,” she says. “I stopped journaling after my grandmother died, but the early stuff is less depressing.”
“I am sorry to hear of your grandmother’s passing.”
“She was the last of my family. Besides me, I mean. My mother died not long after I was born, and my father never knew I existed, by all accounts. The asteroid was Grandma and Grandpa’s farm. It ran by their rules, but Grandpa died when I was about ten, and Grandma passed when I was about eighteen. It’s just been me since,” she explains while preparing her meal.
“Solitude can be a painful cross to bear,” I commiserate.
“I don’t mind it. It’s the company of Growlers I don’t like. They’ve become so destructive over time. It’s because I’m not brutal enough. I don’t like killing. I can do it if I have to, but I hate it.”
I am glad to hear that she is peaceful. Everything about Ava pleases me greatly.
“What do you call this dish you have created?” I ask the question with curiosity as she chops into a range of vegetables and tosses them into a bowl.
“This is a salad,” she says.
“You’re not going to cook it?”
“No.”
“So you do like raw food.”
“Sure,” she smirks. “Just not raw meat.”
I’ve never seen anybody eat a bowl of hard and leafy plants so aggressively. She is clearly hungry, and the pitiful vegetable cannot help to provide her with the protein she needs to keep insisting that she actually owns me.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like some meat?”
“Very. After you’ve sworn off meat as long as I have, eating a steak is like taking a high-powered washer to your insides. Ask me how I know. Ask me about the ham sandwich of 3034.”
“I think I might not.”
She gives me another one of her little smirks. “Good call.”
3
Ava
It does not take long to arrive at the asteroid where I live, a decent sized rock with just enough gravity to keep things on the surface and not much more. It is easy to see where land has been cultivated, and where it is still wild. Forest covers much of the surface, but my ancestral family home is a little red farmhouse perched in the middle of several fields, and it is next to that structure we land.
I find myself embarrassed yet again at the simplicity and condition of the things I own. Generations of my family built the house and farm, but it has been falling into slow disrepair because I am just one woman and there are three days’ worth of tasks to be done every day.
The only thing to distract from the dilapidation is the fact that Growlers areeverywhere. The farm has been completely overrun. I thought I had more time when I set up the perimeter defenses. They should have been good for at least seventy-two hours, and I’ve only been gone seven.
Growlers are highly sentient alien beasts partway between rats, pigs, and the person who tells you to tie your shoelaces when you’re not wearing shoes with laces. They are obnoxious to a fault, with an unerring instinct for destruction. Their native homeworld is unknown. They spread easily, pregnant females stowing away on ships and sneaking out on new worlds to spawn litters of baby Grumbles, which are cute at first, but inevitably grow up to be big, bitey Growlers.
They have grown so bold they don’t even bother to scatter when Azlan’s ship lands out the front of my house. They just flow around it, their patchy furred bodies partially clad in scraps of what used to be my clothes. They took the fabric off scarecrows, and if I’m not very much fucking mistaken, out of my house.
A large Growler scampers by with a pair of my late mother’s lacy pink underwear on its head. In addition to having laid waste to the most sacred domestic stores of my house, they have grown bold enough to attack Azlan’s ship as well, their big, long incisors taking casual bites at the hull, making little ‘ting ting’ sounds that can be heard even on the interior.
