"Then you can get me out of him." He suggested, as if it were that simple and I could just take a saw to split him in half to solve the problem.
"It's much easier to take a parasite out of a human than a human out of its host... Humans are the most efficient parasites in the galaxy."
"But how can I be the parasite?"
"It's a complex cycle... When you were swallowed by the fevino your body was dissolved, but your nervous system got tangled with his." I tried to summarize. "Your fear led the fevino to do everything he did, so, in fact, you are both guilty of the crime..." He looked at me as if he couldn't understand, but the panic in his face told me he did. "When the fevino was outside he used his own resources to re-produce you under his skin, and when you were no longer in danger, his body peeled away like a cocoon to free you again. Right now he's hibernating under your skin... To emerge when you're in danger again."
"So you're saying I was rebuilt?! It cannot be possible." I would have found it impossible too if I hadn't gone through an entire course in college just studying human as parasites.
I lifted his shirt and pointed to those defined muscles in his abdomen.
"No belly button." He stared at himself as if an alien was exploding from there. "Your body was rebuilt. So there are no scars." At that moment, taken by so much terror, he started to scream for a help that would never come, when I flew my hand in his mouth. "But I can help you... If you help me."
I pulled my fingers away from his lips as if disarming a bomb and, when he opened his mouth, I swore he was going to blow me up:
"What do you want?"
"To go to the galaxy's core."
And he laughed.
Until he saw the seriousness in my face.
"Are you serious?! We are at the farthest point in the galaxy from the core!"
"I know."
"And there are many beasts on the way."
"I know."
"And there's nothing there!"
"Well, this..." I leaned forward. "I do not know. And neither do you." He didn't strike me as the kind of creature that passed through the core... The dead kind. The long sigh he let out also confirmed my speculation.
"All right. I'll take you." He surrendered, opening a smile on my face that made him a thousand times grumpier. "If you do your part."
"I'm a human of my word."
I approached his feet and used the ID card on my arm as a key to free his ankles, which he moved as if using them for the first time. I let go one of his arms and went to the other while he snapped the knuckles of his free hand - a hand that could hold me to the edge of a cliff... Or push me.
When I released him from his last handcuff, he smiled.
His fingers gripped my arm, pulled me onto the hospital bed, and, with reflexes as fast as a beast's, he locked the cuff around my wrist.
Just like that, I was stuck where he shouldn't have been freed from.
"But I'm not." He purred, playing with my stolen bracelet. "You'll have more luck with some other species."
Then he turned his back on me.
I had forgotten how much humans betrayed each Other... And that a human was the last being I could trust... But I really needed his help.
"The parasite will kill you!" I screamed. He stopped at the door a step before crossing into the hallway and, slowly, turned back to me. "But I know how to stop it..."
"I think I can figure it out myself."
"You know you can't. Or wouldn't have stopped."
He moved closer, with each step making me shrink back a little more. There was nothing that could stop him from breaking my neck right there as he said he did to those other creatures; and every word I said just made him more willing, reminding me of my mortality just with his gaze. He stopped inches from me, exhaling a danger that intoxicated me.
"Tell me now."
I don't know where I got the courage to say:
"Only on the galaxy's core."
He let out a bitter laugh and ran his hands through his hair as if his fingers were dodging the currents of a stormy river... But something told me that what existed on his mind was much more chaotic. When he turned to me once more, our gazes challenged each other and collided from afar.
"It would have been better to let me die..." He grumbled, reluctantly releasing my cuffs.
"Don't celebrate so soon. I still can."
• • • ֍ • • •
The Artifact was a sphere covered in carvings that repeated themselves in concentric circles, forming symbols that told an unheard story, in an unknown language. Many thought that there were written all the answers to all the questions, but actually there was a recipe for something that no one ever felt the need to build, in two alien languages conversing with each other... Because the Artifact hadn't been sent to us.
Build the pore. Risk of extinction... The order reached us from the stars and even though we didn't know what exactly the pore was, there was no question about extinction.
• • • ֍ • • •
I walked through the corridors with the shadow he had become and we went back to the janitor's room, where I kept some iatric garments - something he would need to wear so we could walk through the hospital unnoticed.
I handed him a gray blouse and pants. While he was getting dressed, I pushed aside the cleaning supplies - some of which could corrode my skin if I wasn't careful - and peeled back one of the wall panels, revealing an opening where I kept some secrets that the Oasis wouldn't let me have - since everything that was human seemed to be so toxic.
I observed, among wires and pipes, some iatric supplies that I had stolen and something much more important: my mother's letters. I collected everything quickly, and when I turned around, the stranger was already disguised as an iatric. But, even in those clothes, I knew he couldn't pass for an iatrician. His skin was too sun-marked, his eyes had no dark circles from sleepless nights and his hair was longer than they liked, almost falling into his eyes - even though, I also had long black locks of mine... Because some battles I had to win. Still, that would have to do.
On my bracelete, a map of the Oasis guided our way through wards I had never ventured into, leading us to a bridge that connected the halves of the hospital. It was completely filled with windows that, however much the Oasis spun on its own axis, always aimed at the core...
My feet stopped for me as my eyes were caught by the sight outside. How had I survived so long without seeing it?
My pupils dilated, insatiable, to absorb the starglow that joined together in an arm of the Milky Way, guiding my eyes to the confluence at the core. I got lost in the stellar landscape, inhospitable, even though it contained all of Itopis in its planets, and watched the light stretch towards me as if it could steal me from the ground. The fingers of stardust could almost close around my waist and pull me with that gravitational attraction to the abyss...
My destiny...
But then the stranger touched my arm.
I looked at him, his face eclipsing the light behind the other window. No lamps illuminated the hallway, but I could see every detail of his face under the galaxy starlight. His eyes were a very light green, a rare color in places like this, so far from the forests of Earth that his irises reminded me of. His face was partly hidden in the shadows of the waves of his hair.
"There will be better visions along the way..." He whispered and I slowly confirmed with my head.
We continued through the Oasis and slowed down to pass the cafeteria without attracting attention. I had spent enough time suturing the stranger's cut for us to pass there at that exact time, when most of the guards were resting, which lessened the chances that we would be stopped - I had been stopped there enough times to know how to not be anymore.
We climbed the stairs to the top of the building, where the employee garage was, for those who could leave the Oasis. But, when the stranger turned on the lights by pulling a lever on the wall, I saw the ambulances wedged into the wall...
We were in the wrong garage.
"No..." I growled. "They shouldn't be here..." They were not in the 'survival manual' they offered to the most 'backward' species in the Oasis.
"So I imagine that turning on one of them is not in your plans..."
"No." I confessed grudgingly. "I spent months collecting genetic samples from employees to steal one of their ships..." Since a cell was all I needed to access one of their vehicles. "But an ambulance is another story... I can't turn them on."
"For the sake of morality or skill? Because only one of them can get us out of here and I hope you have the right one."
"Apparently I have neither."
I had spent so much time planning this... How many nights had passed by me, while I awaited the last piece of the machinery of my plan, never knowing if I could actually execute it? More than I liked to remember.
I could almost see the disapproval on my mom's face if she knew the situation I was in. She always said that success was a mixture of luck and competence, and when chance knocked on my door, I had to be prepared to receive it. "But what if I spend my whole life in my best clothes and it never shows up?" I asked her, and her answer was always the same: "There is nothing you can do, because you can only control your part". So she forged me with the iron of her discipline for me to always be ready.
Now that the luck was staring me in the face, I couldn't help but be frustrated. It had no idea how much I'd prepared myself... Just for it to not be enough.
"Do you have a knife?" He asked.
"Why? Are you going to take me hostage?" Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea. "Or are you going to kill someone?" Not me, preferably.
"Neither." He opened the smile of someone I couldn't trust with a knife. "I'll get us out of here."
I raised an eyebrow.
Maybe my luck wasn't so bad after all.