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I mean, I guessed he wasn’t wrong. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that a purple man shot my brain stem full of tiny machines that handed him the entire English language all at once, though apparently the things didn’t provide a user manual along with the translations. If I stopped a moment to calm down, his broken sentences made a semblance of sense, if a bit primitive.
He should consider himself fortunate that I wasn’t multilingual. I couldn’t imagine having to make sense oftwonew languages at once, and one of them being English? No, thank you.
“My language is kind of complex, yeah. It’s hard for even native speakers to get it right. Hell, we can’t even decide what’s right between one region and another. Most don’t bother trying.”
Q’on nodded and sat back on his heels. I noticed that while some of him had dried off, one arm still glistened wet. That’s when I realized he got hurt somehow in the lake. I felt kind of shitty for making him chase after me when he was bleeding, especially after he did whatever he did to fix my twisted ankle. I had run from him screaming like a banshee, and he made sure I was okay before anything else.
I pointed at the dark blood oozing out of his arm. “You’re hurt. We should go inside and make sure it’s not too bad.”
Was I insane? Stranger danger, Amber! This guy could have been an alien serial killer for all I knew. Still … guilt won out over practicality and safety. I couldn’t just let the guy bleed to death on my front lawn.
Like a true gentleman—something Ryan wouldn’t know a damn thing about—Q’on helped me to my feet. He waited for me to lead the way and stayed a respectable distance back as we walked inside. I didn’t know if it had something to do with his culture, or if it was a result of something the nanites told him, but I was grateful for his politeness. It made me feel better about the whole thing, though I tried to remind myself that Ted Bundy was a pretty suave dude from several accounts. Manners did not necessarily equate to safety. He could still decide to murder me.
I led him into the kitchen, where I felt better about my chances of cleaning up any spilled alien blood. I doubted my beige carpeted living room would fare well if he sat on the couch, and while the leather might be a bit easier to clean, tile and granite were definitely better for the occasion.
“Sit here.” I pointed to a barstool at the island counter. “I have a first aid kit. Let me get it and see what we can do.” A thought paused me halfway to the bathroom medicine cabinet, and I shouted back down the hallway. “Wait! Does your little glowing box thing fix cuts?”
When I turned around to get his answer, I damn near slammed into Q’on, who had followed me. “Jesus!” I put a hand over my heart and tried to stop myself from screaming again. “I thought I told you to sit down.”
He gave a brief glance back to the kitchen but didn’t explain why he came down the hall with me. “Laceration device missing. Lost in crash. You have?”
Laceration device? Ireallyhoped he meant a healing machine like the one he used on me. Depending on the translation, “laceration device” could easily be interpreted as a thing tomakelacerations. Knife. Sword. Scalpel. Rusty nail. I could think of a whole slew of things that could be described as laceration devices.
I decided to assume in his favor. “Uh, no. I don’t have any laceration devices. The first aid kit has gauze and tape, though, and stuff to clean the cut. Don’t want you getting some weird Earth infection that your race can’t fend off.”
After pausing for a second, Q’on finally nodded. “Gratitude.”
“Thanks. You mean thanks.”
“One means the other. There is difference?”
Oh, geez. This was going to be a long night. “I guess so? I mean, I suppose it could technically be correct to say ‘gratitude’ in this case, but usually when we’re expressing gratitude, we just say ‘thanks.’ Makes it simpler.” I got to the bathroom and grabbed my first aid kit, opening it up to see what I even had in there. “Let’s see, where’s the antiseptic?”
“Earthites make simple more complex.”
“Humans.” I corrected him without thinking, and when I turned back to him with a washcloth and antiseptic in hand, his confused expression made me realize my blunder. “Humans. My species doesn’t call itself Earthites. We call ourselves humans.”
“You are apex species?”
Apex? Oh, yeah. I guess he was right there. “Yes. That’s right.”
“Planet is Earth.”
“Yes.” I started cleaning the cut, which wasn’t as bad as it looked. Maybe the water made the blood run more, so it seemed like it was deeper. I didn’t know quite how scale wounds healed, but in my unprofessional opinion, he was going to be fine. He might scar, but if I was being honest with myself, a cool scar across his bicep might actually be kind of hot.
“Planet is not Human?”
“What? No! A planet isn’t a person. Human is the people. Planet is the place.”
Q’on grunted. “On Xalan, planet is people. Xalanites apex species. We rule. We name.”
A little egotistical of them, but whatever. “Well, humans are weird.”
“Yes.”
I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. That must have been it. Humans are weird. He didn’t even question the definition of weird. Just rolled with it.
Based on his one interaction with a human: me.
