“You want to give them the run-down, or should I?” Greg asked. For the time being, he occupied the copilot’s seat. He and the real pilot sipped coffee alone as their target came into view. The others had slept for most of the flight over, but slowly each began to stir and wander. He felt it would be wise to keep them on track before a fight broke out, and he sensed Nash felt the same.

  “I got it,” she said, spinning her chair around. Together they proceeded to the crew cabin. In the kitchen area, Kory and Mia sat at the banquette table sniping at each other while the older sister tried in vain to braid the younger’s hair. Across from them, Zol stood at the counter, brute-forcing his way through the creation of yet another smoothie. One could admit he had a certain artistry to it.

  “Hold still!” Kory scolded, pulling on a strand of Mia’s hair.

  “Ow! There she is, let her do it while I still have any hair left!” Mia demanded. Kory flung up her hands in resignation and left the table. Without a word, Nash raised her own as each lock fell into place. When she was finished, the plaits laid evenly over each shoulder. “Finally, you were always good for that.” Mia danced her fingers lightly over her head.

  “Me next,” Sohrab teased as he sauntered into the room.

  Nash dismissed him with a look. “Let’s get serious everybody, this first one could get complicated.”

  “We don’t intend to bore y’all too much, but there’s some context to get out of the way.” Greg stepped forward to take his place by Nash’s side. Mia leaned her elbows on the table and twirled the end of a braid in her finger. Her sister occupied the opposite wall, looking through a window at the looming planet and its clouded atmosphere. Sohrab lingered on the threshold to the sleeping area, staring through the passel of hair that remained unbraided. Zol was still running the blender, blissful in a world of his own. “Z, buddy! Hey dude…” Greg raised his voice to get his roommate’s attention over the drone of the appliance. “…yeah can we turn that off for a second bro?”

  Hearing silence at last as Zol shut off the blender and faced the others, Nash couldn’t help but smile. She caught herself, lowered her eyes, and began the ‘run-down’ of what they could expect on this intended world. “This one’s unique. It was only discovered fifty years ago by Iolite scouts. The native populace, called the Larlac, had reached a rudimentary level of social and civic organization, much like Reccorsha a few centuries prior, if you all remember your history…” She grinned modestly and looked around the room. Realizing very few ‘remembered their history,’ she elaborated. “…There are certain worlds which have, we’ll say, been developed for some time. We all know of course about early adoptees, the one I just mentioned, and Cuanerel, there are others of course too. Earth, as we know, just celebrated their third century in the common presence.” She nodded in Greg’s direction.

  “So what?” Sohrab said. He gripped the top of the doorway and swayed back and forth impatiently.

  “So, this isn’t exactly a…” she chose her next words carefully, aware of those in the room who hailed from less-civilized locales, those whose help she could not do without. “…this planet is not as much of a mystery to us. It has a name, but not the best one, so it’s commonly referred to as C.A.”

  “Like for California?” Greg interjected.

  “Not at all! Now if I can finish what I was saying.” Irritation in her voice betrayed the grim awareness that she was losing her audience. The intensity of her tone was met with dead stares and eye rolls. “The Roamgild purchased the mining rights on this planet almost forty years ago. Yields have been going down for the past few, and while we’re aware of the market factors driving an increased demand for the stuff, experts suspect that other forces may be at work. To put it simply, the best and the brightest don’t always get sent here for their overseer assignments, and we suspect some of them have ‘gone native,’ so to speak, and have formed a sort of parasocial fixation on the workers they’re supposed to be supervising.”

  “Skimming a little off the top for themselves?” Sohrab added.

  “I’m afraid it’s more than a little, but you’ve got the right idea.” her countenance took on a grave quality. “Now, you all know I’m no labor negotiator, so it’s nice we’ve got a little more ‘muscle’ on this trip.” She looked briefly between each Toravai.

  “And what makes you think it’s wise to go around frying up just anybody?” Kory asked, a trace of anger punctuated her question. “So far we’ve only had to torch a few primitives.” The implication of her admission earned her a fascinated gaze from Sohrab, who up until that point hadn’t seen the full scope of that which his travelling companions were capable. He abandoned his childish posture and stood up a little straighter, folding his arms over his chest as he ventured a better look at her. She had her back to him, and didn’t notice him staring, but Zol did. He shot a hostile glare in Sohrab’s direction, which the psychic returned with his own air of disgust before looking pointedly back to Nash to hear her rebuttal.

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  “If it gets to that point, we’ll have already proven them wrong. And why would they go telling everybody and their mother what they saw if it implicated them in stealing from us in the first place?” Nash explained. Receiving silence in return as Kory looked back to the window, she addressed the new inclusion. “That’s where you come in.”

  “Obviously,” Sohrab replied.

  “Do you need me to come?” Greg inquired. “I don’t exactly have umm…”

  “Of course I do! The native Larlac of C.A. look almost human, but off, so having you there may put them at ease, plus you know the industry and –”

  “Off? How off?” Greg stopped her, confounded by her choice of descriptors. Even by his standards, it sounded odd. “Do they have a third eye or something?”

  “Don’t be silly, it’s nothing like that.” She said.

  “They’re not purple?” He joked.

  “Or chalky like drywall?” Kory taunted, looking over her shoulder.

  Sohrab felt his face burn with an unexpected fury. The feeling only magnified when he caught Kory smirking at him. She must have found herself quite funny. He made a mocking face in her direction then went to take his seat. As he looked angrily out of the thick glass protecting them from the vacuum of space, he couldn’t help but imagine pressing her face against it.

  #

  Touchdown was uneventful. An Iolite man who represented the Gild met them at the landing pad and walked ahead with Nash. The two spoke in hushed tones to each other in terms known only to them while the others followed at a respectful distance. On the ride from the port through town in an open-air vehicle, they saw the broad stony streets lined with Larlac men, women, and children. Each wore the same veil of distrust as they paused their work and darted out from the alleys to behold the strange car full of off-worlders gliding by.

  It was Greg who broke the silence first, forsaking all former promises he’d made to himself to be more culturally sensitive. “You weren’t kidding,” he leaned forward and whispered over Nash’s shoulder.

  She sat up front next to the other man as he drove them to the mine at the top of the mountain. “Right? Off.” She answered.

  “No, you nailed it,” he murmured, showing little discretion as he reclined and gawked at the fleeting faces. There was indeed a familiar Earthling quality about them, but on the whole they were taller and longer of limb than the average Human. What passed for a normal physique on this world would make up only a handful of fringe cases on his own. Their skin and hair were the same shade of bronze, with a nearly metallic sheen, and their eyes seemed to alternate moment by moment between a variety of bright and brilliant hues. The majority of them wore skillfully woven garments in variants of terracotta, ochre, and moss, but a select few here and there sported a stylish, synthetic accessory or piece of clothing; a promising sign of future interplanetary trade to come.

  After a while, the town and its structures tapered off. The car floated unimpeded over a lonely stone road trailing ever upward to the extraction facility near the top of the mountain. It was a measure more modern than the abandoned Innovar plant they’d nearly died in over a month prior, but it couldn’t boast a similar size. The man brought the vehicle to a slow stop just inside the porte-cochere, exited, and approached the front door.

  “You’re just going to leave it here instead of parking it somewhere out of the way?” Nash said, hurrying after him.

  “It’s fine,” he assured. “No one else is coming.”

  The light from the sky shone white through the low haze, but it was fading fast. Nash was halfway into the building by now, pursuing the man who’d brought them there. The others left the car reluctantly, but none more so than Sohrab, who leaned against the side of the vehicle facing away from the building. His unfocused gaze drifted downhill toward the town, as he smoked a half-remembered cigarette. When an unforeseen hand touched the back of his arm, he bolted back to reality, on edge yet again. To his surprise, he turned to find Kory there. The gentle neutrality of her expression unnerved him. It was as if she hadn’t perceived his irritation with her, or worse, not cared at all.

  “Tell me the truth,” she whispered, leaning in close. “What’s going down in there?” She could only be referring to the general discontent they’d waded through since landing. The space port crew, the guide from the facility, even the local townspeople seemed to exude an aura of unease. It didn’t take a psychic to sense it was not only the Larlac’s Humanesque appearance that was ‘off,’ but the vibe as well.

  In that moment, Sohrab remembered who he was and locked in. He took one last pull off the cigarette, dropped it to the ground, and crushed it beneath the heel of his thick-soled boot. Then he placed a hand on her shoulder, finding solace in the brief widening of her eyes at the gesture. “You want it to go well, you hope it does,” he looked to his left at the front door to the facility, then he looked back to her. The exterior lights all flickered to life in that moment, cutting through the advancing darkness. “But the chances of that are low, so let’s not keep them waiting.”

  He tightened his grip and half-led, half-pushed her around the car and into the building where the rest lingered. She writhed against him, upset, but moving forward all the same. As they crossed the threshold of the door, he caught a glimpse of a thought that could have only come from her. He saw the image of her floating high above a desolate plateau, held aloft by a powerful voltage not of this world, generated entirely by herself. Bolts of lightning even shot down from the sky to meet her. The notion nearly stopped him in his tracks as she shook his hand from her shoulder in a huff and rejoined the others. Again, Sohrab felt the familiar sting of being made aware of his own weakness. Was he truly drywall as she’d said? Not merely chalky, but punchable, breakable, and made of dust? Like any and all bad feeling, he willed himself to forget even as it threatened to swallow him whole. If anything, it’d be another brick in the tower he’d scale to possess whatever power was not yet his.