"Chocolate's poison to them," the guy added.
"How do you know?" Ark asked.
The wexle made a gagging noise. The next moment, they leaned over the fountain railing and vomited the candy bar into the water.
"Point taken," Ari said.
The minnows, which had scattered in alarm, came back to approach the chunks of chewed candy bar. The wexle made a plaintive grunting noise and spread their fingers again for the fish.
"All right. Go ahead and eat some," Ari said. "What do I care?"
As the little wexle scooped up another minnow, Ari took the phone nub out of her ear, held it up and said, "Petri, switch to speaker. Volume up. Translate into and out of Wexle." Then she looked toward the wexle again and spoke slowly. "Where are your parents?" Her phone translated her words into a series of soft wails.
The wexle turned from the fountain, wiped his mouth with his sleeve and made another garbling noise.
A moment later, Ari's phone translated with its clear, crisp tones: "Parents gone."
"Your parents left you here?" Ari asked. That seemed unlikely. Her phone, meanwhile, converted her words to more garbling.
In response, the wexle's hands started to shake, and their yellow eyes went wider. Their next sounds were more like hiccups, and though Ari listened for a translation, her phone didn't tell her anything. She glanced toward the young man, who had come a few steps closer.
Ari covered the phone nub for a moment. "Should we get security?" she asked in a low voice.
"That'd be the sensible thing to do," he said. "But let's not. He's upset enough already." He crouched down beside the wexle. "Hey, buddy. We're just trying to help. Where are your parents now? Do you know?"
The wexle pointed a finger at Ari and spoke again.
"Go to library," her phone translated.
Ari spoke slowly. "I don't think there's a library here."
The wexle made a grunt of frustration and spoke again.
"Give me phone," her phone nub translated.
Ari smiled but shook her head. She reached back in her purse for a money chit and held it out. "I can't give you my phone," she said. "But you can buy your own. Can you call home?"
As her phone translated her words into singing noises, the wexle slowly took her chit in their small blue fingers and held it up to the light. An expression of cunning narrowed their big eyes. Only then did it occur to Ari that the wexle might be conning her.
"How much is on that chit?" the guy asked.
"A hundred feregs," she said.
The wexle sniffed audibly. A blur of blue flashed around her hand, and her phone nub was gone. Before she could react, a slurping came into her right eye, and the wexle's tongue sucked the contact lens off her eyeball. With a shriek, Ari covered her face, and by the time she looked again, the wexle was already speeding away between the trees. A high-pitched gurgling followed in his wake.
"They took my phone!" Ari said, shocked. She shivered in reflexive revulsion over the way the wexle's tongue had smeared around inside her eyelid.
The guy swore and started after the wexle.
Ari ran after them, too, but she took only a few steps over the slippery floor before she nearly fell. She lurched to a tree and held on. The guy wasn't getting much farther.
"It's all right," she called. "Let them go."
He looked back over his shoulder. "You sure?"
She lifted a hand, like what else? In the distance, a door closed, and Ari was certain the wexle was long gone. She looked at the two scan-bands on her fingers, useless now to interact with the virtual screen of her phone.
"We should call security," the guy said.
"Where have I heard that idea before?" she said, pulling off her scan bands and dropping them in her purse.
Carefully, she pushed off the tree and glided toward him.
The guy had a retro pocket phone, and he lifted it now to speak into it. "You want me to?"
She shook her head. She would cancel her phone once she got home. The wexle couldn't do much with it anyway without her biofeedback, and actually, in a way it was kind of freeing without a phone to rely on. Her cousins couldn't call and pester her.
Along the path where the wexle had run, a faint shimmer of purple shadow lay on the floor like a snail trail.
"Do you see that?" she asked, pointing.
As she watched, the shadow evaporated until it was barely a smudge, and then that evanesced, too.
"They were a fast little bug. I'll give them that," the guy said.
She frowned. "You don't think they just conned us, do you?"
"No. They were way too hungry."
"How did you know about the chocolate?" she asked.
"To be honest," he said, "I was thinking of dogs. I got lucky."
"When the wexle puked?"
"Yes," he said. He glanced her way. "I don't think that was a con. Have you ever been lost before?"
She recalled the sensation instantly. She had gone with her father to meet one of his friends on a space cruiser, a small, elite, private craft that slept eighteen. The adults were sharing a toast in the main cabin, and Ari, bored of waiting and curious about the rest of the vessel, stepped out to the hallway and went toward the scent of cinnamon rolls. She was eight at the time and certain of her bearings, but when she couldn't find the kitchen area she expected, she turned to retrace her steps and found nothing familiar. The hallway became a narrow, dark corridor with tiny lights in the floor. The tall doors were gone, replaced instead by low compartment cabinets. She turned again and found herself in a cramped, warm, loud room where a black dog was panting in a crate, eyeing her.
It was then her fear took off.
She imagined that the ship could take off with her still on it and understood that she might be lost not just for the moment, but for all time. Worse, she blamed herself for straying from her father. She backed up out of the storage room, bumped into a skyfarer, and was soon reunited with her father. Still, it was a fear she'd never forgotten, the sense that she'd betrayed herself, that she could no longer trust the future.
"Yes," she said now.
"Me, too," the guy said.
She expected him to tell his story or ask for hers. When he didn't, when he left the conversation hanging on the assumption they both understood what it was to be lost, Ari took a closer look at him. He was an even-featured guy maybe two or three years older than she was, with dark eyes and a steady, frank gaze. His shirt and pants were gray and black, neat but not stylish. She hadn't detected an accent in his voice, which made it unlikely he was from off planet. Probably he was a grounder. Politeness prompted her to introduce herself, but innate caution made her refrain. She perked up her ears, conscious of the quiet around them and hoping they weren't completely alone.
"I'm not lost now," she said.
He smiled faintly. "Neither am I."
With a little step, she came to the next tree and gave herself a little shove to get gliding back in the direction of the main entrance. He walked slowly after her.
"What brings you to the forest?" he asked.
"I didn't know it was a forest. I thought it was a church."
"What brought you to the church, then?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said. "I thought it might be quiet. I actually didn't think the church would be real. And then it wasn't. What brought you?"
He reached a nearby tree and pushed off it to glide parallel to her direction. "Remorse, probably."
She wondered if he was serious. "What do you mean?" she asked.
"It was a mistake to come to Ito tonight."
"Then why did you?"
He shrugged. "My friends were coming. I needed to get out. You know how it is."
She didn't really. She liked nothing better than cuddling up at home on the couch.
"I'm glad now that I came," he added, and leaned his nose near to one of the tree trunks. "Are these real do you think?"
"I'm guessing not," she said. "They have gray leaves."
"But they smell real. Who would think up something like this?"
She hadn't thought about it, but now she considered. "The gambling casino designers."
"Are they saying a forest is a place to worship?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said. "Maybe they're not saying anything at all."
"So then, they're mocking religion?"
"Can't it just be a church with trees inside?" she asked. "No big message?"
She pushed off from another tree to glide a bit further. She held her arms out for balance and felt his gaze following her. The truth was, she didn't feel like analyzing why she liked this weird, surreal place. She just did.
"No," he said. "Not once you start thinking about it. It can't be an accident. It's a church of trees in the middle of a gambling complex."
"Then maybe they're saying a church is another gamble," she said.
"It's a gamble to believe in something?"
She had never thought of it that way before. "Why not?" she replied.
Through the trees, a bit ahead, she saw a couple of throgsneks testing out their ability to walk on the smooth surface, and their tentative steps made her realize how much she'd already mastered her glide.
She slowed her progress, not ready to reach the entrance too soon. Her companion slid past her to the next tree, and curling a hand around the trunk, he pivoted around in front of her so that when she caught up to him, they were holding the same tree.
His face was near, his gaze aimed upward.
"Listen. Hear that?" he asked softly.
She listened, hearing only the quiet voices of the other couple and very faintly, the trickle of the fountain behind them. She looked at him curiously, expecting him to look at her, and when he didn't, she became aware that her fingers were only an inch from where his hands encircled the tree trunk.
"I don't hear anything," she said.
"No, listen," he insisted. "Don't you hear that music?"
Very faintly, so faintly she never would have heard it if she wasn't trying to, she heard a resonance, like the strings of a distant orchestra holding out a soft, shimmery note. It wavered and became two notes, and then a dissonant chord, still barely audible. She looked up, too, trying to locate a source for the sound, but the leaves were not stirring and the music was too quiet, too elusive.
"Is it the wind outside?" she asked.
"I don't know," he said. "Maybe."
The chord resolved and then faded back to the single sustained note. She had the bizarre feeling he was imagining the music into her, like magic or poison.
She lowered her gaze to find him watching her, a readiness in his expression, as if he were still listening, too.
Ari didn't stand this close with strangers, yet she was doing it anyway. The longer she lingered, attending to the invisible music and not actually touching him, the more she felt a delicious, unaccountable pull.
"I probably won't ever see you again after tonight," she said softly. She didn't know why she regretted this aloud.
"Then again, maybe you will," he said.
His cool fingers covered her own and held.
Author's Note: Thanks for reading! Come back tomorrow for another chapter.