Lost in Translation — an excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

We Didn’t Start the Fire

I’M NEARLY TO Roswell when the sky splits open.

Not metaphorically - actually splits, with fireball brilliance, a trail of fire that cuts across the dawn like a jagged scar. Two more zig-zagging arcs chase something. Blossoms of flame, catching it. The booms rumble down and shake the desert floor. Whatever it is, it screeches and spins out of control, trailing smoke and flames, crashing downwards, twisting futilely to escape, disappearing in the crags and rocks about half a mile ahead, among a cluster of boulders and scrub brush.

My first thought? Tech scraps! A Pacifica drone probing. Pa claims they’re constantly testing new tech out here, goading us, taunting the King. And my Pa’s guys are always shooting at them. My second thought is I should keep moving, steer clear. Getting to Pacifica is all that matters now. Don’t get involved.

But my third thought - the one that wins - while hair bristles on the back of my neck - is that it’s different. It seems alive, trying to get away. Someone flying it. Someone might be hurt.

I shift my backpack, switch off my latest pirated playlist, doff my buds so I can hear what’s going on around me, check the water bottle strapped to my belt, and head toward the dwindling flames in the distance. Pa would’ve barked, telling me I’m being foolish, putting myself at risk. None of my business, let his goons handle it. But Pa had also threatened to send me back East, to military school to “fix” me, so his opinion doesn’t count for much anymore.

The crash is smaller than I expect. Some experimental aircraft? I’ve been around flight lines and missiles all my life, and this is different. It’s sleek, with an iridescent surface that reminds me of the wings of a beetle. No markings, no logos, no Pacifica flag, nothing to identify who it belongs to. No canopy, no viewports I can see. No one on board. Just another exotic drone from the bad guys over the horizon. Maybe I can salvage some tech before Pa’s goons arrive to celebrate actually hitting a target for once.

The desert is cold in that way it gets just before sunrise, when the heat hasn’t remembered itself yet. My breath puffs white as I slow off the cracked asphalt and into the scrub. My bike’s AirLith battery blinks an anemic 12%. I have to pump again before I go much further. My knees still ache from the previous time - thirty minutes stamping up and down on the ‘pressor, swapping sweat for pressure. The battery farts incessantly as it scavenges ions. It’s not glamorous, but neither is being stuck a hundred miles from anything with border patrols sniffing for body heat.

I’d skedaddled from home before midnight while Pa was off on one of his inspections; coasting the back roads at thirty, maybe forty when the hills and valleys let me. Roswell is about a hundred and eight miles if you stick to the kind of routes no one patrols and that maps pretend don’t exist. I can go forty miles when I pedal, then pump. But I only get twenty when I’m lazy and run full throttle. Repeat. The pump is a rhythm your legs learn before your brain agrees. You stop thinking about how dumb it is to call this “escape” and start counting reps and telling yourself the ache is proof you’re still in motion.

Smoke is a dark smudge against the violet backdrop of early sky. Static crackles overhead, the sound of someone shredding a sheet of aluminum. I duck instinctively because that’s what you do when you’ve spent your last several years learning to be small and invisible. An afterimage burns my retinas, a comet smear flickering blue‑green before dying to gray.

I grab a carabiner from the handlebar bag, clip on my multitool, and wheel my bike into a notch between two sandstone slices. My bike wouldn’t be immediately visible if a trucker zoomed past. The rocks are cool under my palms, heat long gone from yesterday. I pull my hood up and take a breath that tastes like gypsum and ozone. I hoof the last stretch, picking my way among shattered debris and burnt veg.

Up close, the thing looks less like a plane and more like a discarded seed pod from a tree that evolved conceptual art. A cracked oval about the size of an old, ‘lectric Bug, half‑buried at an angle, one tip sunk into sand, butt sticking out with something else crammed up its rear. Not a consensual act, I’m sure. The iridescent hull isn’t paint; it’s the material itself, shifting color with angle, oil on water. Where the surface has blemishes, the edges refract starlight into faint prismatic sparkles. No rivets. No seams. Just a single blistered shell with the structure of something that never needed to pass inspection by a guy named Gary.

No fuel spill. No burning puddles. No chemical stink beyond the sharp, fresh bite of ionized air. The heat rolling off it isn’t that brutal, skin‑curling heat of a fire. It’s a ‘lectric, thing, like standing under power lines and feeling the hair on your arms decide it has opinions. And then there’s the smoke billowing from the stinger burning in the thing’s butt, waggling control fins like it’s still the master. I recognize it immediately. One of Pa’s. Another klutzy dud from AuldRuss. It might have struck this thing, but didn’t detonate. Maybe the two machines fought for control on the way down, and Pa’s missile lost. Good.

I circle wide. If the thing isn’t ours, I mean, the King’s, then it belongs to nobody here, and both options mean I should keep my fingers to myself. But I hardly ever do what I should. I crouch and reach out anyway, and the air hums like a refrigerator on the edge of dying.

“Hello?” I say to no one in particular. “If anyone’s in there, I’m not a goon. I’m … just me. Avery.”

Nothing. No response. What do I expect from a machine?

I jump at a soft, high whistle “xeeping.” It’s so faint I’m sure it’s in my head. I spin around, scan the rocks and bushes nearby.

A labored, keening sound, see‑saws and “xeeps” and whistles again, cuts off, then returns, then cuts off again. Not mechanical. Not inside the machine.

“Okay,” I whisper to the desert, feet apart, hands on my hips. “Okay, someone’s here.” I straighten my shoulders to look bigger and braver and suppress a shiver. Maybe I should have kept going and not stopped. I could still leave, pretend I hadn’t seen anything.

I turn back to the iridescent wreck and look for a hatch. Nothing obvious. A tiny seam from the impact point in the butt, thin as a hair. If someone had been inside and gotten out, they’d sealed it again pretty snug. Even with my multidriver, I’m not sure how I’d break into it.

The whistle comes again, a note that snags deep in my soul and pulls my attention to the rocks on the other side of the debris. In the faint light, the red sandstone stacks in awkward slants, a gash of shadow between them deep enough for a person to wedge into if that person has no plans for circulation in their legs. And doesn’t want to be seen. Like, I can see anyone in the dark anyway.

I pull out my phone and toggle the flash, shining it on the gash, as I slide sideways toward the darkness, keeping the hull in the corner of my eye. The whistling “xeeping” grows a fraction louder, and with it comes a low, almost inaudible stab of pain behind my ears. Whoever it is does a good impression of a cross between a teakettle and fingernails on a dry chalkboard.

“I’m coming in,” I announce, because vids have taught me you announce yourself around crash sites to avoid being shot or eaten. “If you can understand me, don’t freak out.”

CHAPTER TWO

Invisible Touch

THE SPACE BETWEEN the rocks is cooler, never sees the sun directly. The smell changes from smoke and hot metal to something metallic and weirdly green, like pennies and crushed cilantro. My pupils dilate to pull in what little light there is from my phone. Nothing moves.

Then the air five feet to my left shimmers. Not heat shimmer. Something else: the background gets conned into doing one magic trick and is convinced to stay for two. A shape bulges out of empty air and then vanishes, only I’ve seen something, already seen the wrongness, and you can’t unsee wrongness once your brain calibrates.

“I see you,” I lie, throat tight, seeing nothing. “It’s okay. I’m not … ” I stop, catching myself. Who am I kidding? Not what? Not a threat? Says whom. “I’m Avery. I’m going to … Do you need help? I’ll help if you’ll let me.” Why? What am I thinking? Leave now, leave now!

The “xeeping” rises, trembles, goes thin. A scrape sounds on stone. And then the air bends, light catches on a surface that decides to stop pretending it isn’t there. Not completely. More like my eyes find the edges and hold.

Ghostly. Isn’t that what the vids say? An outline. The suggestion of a shoulder, an arm, the curve of a head. The surface is … skin? Not armor. It tracks the rock’s color and texture with eerie accuracy as I scan with the corners of my eyes, and then lags when I move, like a chameleon with a software update downloading over dial‑up.

Something like a hand clutches at a crack in the sandstone and slides. The shape slumps with a soft, pained sound that makes my stomach twist. Instinct beats training. I drop to my knees and reach out. My fingers meet a surface that’s warm and damp and softer than it has any business being.

The shimmer flinches and misfires where I touch, like I’ve freaked out the person, blooming into a pale, translucent gray that shows a hint of what’s underneath: a mesh of fibers under skin, lines pulse with a slow, dim light, a dying heartbeat. Not blood vessels, exactly, but whatever does the same job.

I freak. What am I doing? “Hey. Hey, it’s okay,” I say, which is what you say to frightened dogs and crying kids and apparently invisible people. Yeah, people had dogs once. Til the Kingdom banned all dogs; I guess they didn’t like the King much, so none of the rest of us could have pets either. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

The shape turns rigid. Under my palm, light speeds up, then steadies. The air fills with that faint cilantro‑metal smell. There’s a wheezing, sucking, popping. The sound your peanut butter makes when you first open the jar.

“Water,” I say, patting at my belt. “I’ve got water.” I open the bottle and reach out.

The shape recoils so fast my hand slaps rock, knocking the bottle across the gap, spilling the precious contents into the sand. The whistle pitches up into a screeching “XXEEEEEEPPP!”

“Ouch! Okay, no water,” I blurt, pulling my hand back and lifting both palms in the universal human sign for ‘See, No Threat, I’m Just A Soft Idiot.’ “Got it. No water.” No kidding, mine’s gone now in the desiccated gravel. Good thing there’s more on my bike.

The screeching softens to a breathy, tremoring exhale.

“Do you understand me?” I ask. All strangers understand if you speak slowly enough, right?

Silence, then: “xeeeep - ”

I hear, no, I feel in the base of my skull a finger tracing the lip of a crystal goblet.

“ - xxxx - eeeee - eep … ”

The voice is higher than I expect and comes in pieces, like it has to slot each sound into place. The vowels have a funky, old-timey radio‑taught roundness to them, old announcer vowels.

“You’re hurt,” I repeat, and dig one‑handed into my pack. I keep stupid things in there. Useful stupid. A roll of kinesiology tape. A triangular bandage. A mylar blanket folded down to the size of a graham cracker. I pull the blanket free. “I’m going to put this over you, okay? Just a corner. It’ll make it easier for me to see where you are. You can still … do your hidey thing with the rest.”

There’s a pause in the “xeeping” and then a minute movement I decide means yes.

I ease the blanket open as quietly as I can. It crackles, potato chips in a library. I drape a corner over what I think is a shoulder and part of a chest. The shimmer under the film hiccups, then gives up. The blanket reflects back a distorted version of the rock and the sky and me, but the shape under it becomes readable. All the shimmering ceases, and a form emerges. I choke back surprise. Not a Pacifican pilot in a fancy stealth flight suit. Not hardly. Nor the King’s. Not even. I mean - what?

I gulp and rock back on my heels to take it all in. This only happens in vids.

Arms, yes, but jointed wrong. Hands with too many parts, fingers tapering into fine pads. A torso with subtle ridges that moves with each labored breath - not ribs exactly, but structural. A head with no hair, except a dollop of scraggle poking out of the top; smooth features until the light catches them: two glossy eyes, a small mouth, the only orifice I see, no nose or ears. Does the pilot use that for everything? The shimmer must be camouflage; now the skin under the misfiring camo is a pale, opaline gray dotted with darker nodes that pulse with each breath.

“Hi,” I say, repeating my intro, because my brain has decided we are doing this like a school presentation. “I’m Avery. I’m going to look at your - ” I gesture at the ridges. “Your ribs? You seem to be having trouble catching your breath.”

“Xeep,” the pilot thing says. The voice wobbles. “Xeeeeep xxxeep.”

“Yeah, that’s what I said.” I swallow. My mouth is dry, the way your tongue turns into a disappointing sweater. “I’m going to check for bleeding. No water. Promise. Do you bleed?” I stare, not sure what to do. What am I saying?

I slide my hands along the blanket and under, let my fingers learn what my eyes can’t. The skin is slick in places with fluid, but it isn’t blood, just by smell, at least, not human blood: no iron reek. It smells saline and veg, like tree sap farmed by someone who thought about electrolytes a lot. When I touch one ridged section, the pilot flinches, and that “xeeping” breaks into a series of whistles my ears can’t parse and makes my eyes hurt.

“Sorry. Sorry. Okay.” I move higher. One of the ridges has a step in it that seems out of place. Displaced. I remember that feel, from the time I fell off the roof and a rib was sticking out of my chest in the wrong way, and Pa reset it with a grim line and a lecture about “toughening up” that lasted longer than the pain.

“This is going to hurt,” I say, which is code for I am about to do a thing that will make you hate me. “But it’ll help you breathe. I’m going to count to three.” No one ever waits for three.

The pilot’s head bobs, which I take as the faintest approval to proceed. The blanket makes everything slippery, but it also makes the pilot visible, and visibility is non-negotiable now that I have to apply pressure in the right place. I brace a hand above and another below the step in that ridged structure, count because that’s what I always tell other people I do when I’m about to do something painful, and on two, push. Shocker, I don’t wait for three.

The “XEEEP” the pilot makes zaps straight into the place between my teeth and my spine. The ridge slides and makes a gurgling poof, just like that punctured tube you patched and popped back into your bike tire. The pilot’s pulse throbs through the blanket, then slows. No more drowning in dry air sounds.

I let my own breath out. I don’t realize I’m holding it, which is a thing people say, and I always assume is dramatic nonsense until now.

I lean back. “Better?” I ask.

The glossy eyes squint shut and then blink. “Xeep.”

“That’s one way to say it.” I let a shaky smile leak onto my face where the pilot can’t see. “Okay. What now?” Light is coming to the sky and filling the void beyond the rocks. The big, round eyes scan me slowly and look out toward the wreckage.

“I don’t think you’re going anywhere in that.” I snort. “No surprise that crappy missile didn’t work. The goons can barely get them off the pad. I’m amazed it actually hit you.”

The pilot starts to rise, pushes my blanket back to me. All the shimmer stops, and I see clearly now - the silly feather tuft sprouting from the top of the pilot’s head makes me chuckle.

“That’s some doosy camouflage you’ve got there. That’s what it is, right? Is the shimmer camo to blend in? Oh - or is it glamouring? I’ve listened to enough stories where they use mental glamour as disguise for the weak-minded.” I grimace. And that’s me, all right. That’s what Pa told me. Weak-minded.

That memory sets me off. His goons aren’t going to celebrate on this one. I can at least rob them of their trophy, even if it isn’t a Pacifican pilot!