Chapter 1. Twig.

There was a human male, in a town called Coulton, in a county called Blackwater, in a land called Kentucky, on a planet the indigenous peoples dubbed Earth, who was named Indrid Caldwell. Indrid Caldwell was an accountant. He lived alone. He was a bachelor in his mid-thirties. As far as the people of Coulton knew, he liked walks in the forest and peanut brittle. He disliked mind-altering substances, small dogs, and social gatherings with his coworkers.

I was not Indrid Caldwell. 

Everyone thought I was, which was good. I’d worked very hard to make them think that, after all. 

But as I returned from my now almost-daily hike in the mountains to find a wine-red minivan tearing up my driveway and heading right towards me, I had a sinking feeling in my human-shaped stomach that Indrid Caldwell’s life was about to get very complicated. 

I had been Indrid Caldwell for eight of Earth’s months. My most prestigious mission yet from the halls of the Explorer’s Academy, the institution that prepared myself and those like me to venture into undiscovered lands and explore the far reaches of space. The goal was simple. Blend into the indigenous population for long enough to retrieve one of our own downed vessels and whatever was left of its three occupants. A trio of our finest explorers had disappeared in this region many years ago, and it was an honor to be selected to retrieve my superior officers. I wanted, one day, to have as many successful missions and scientific accolades under my name. 

Human beings were simple creatures, not even yet aware of extraplanetary life. I believed this had helped me in my ruse. But it also meant that I had no database to aid my search, and no way to curate substantial resources I needed without drawing attention. And beyond that, something about this floating rock’s ambient radiation thoroughtly interfered with my own equipment. So what should have been a simple mission became day after day of a ‘nine-to-five,’ and then scoping out the mountains on foot on my days off, all in this sad, pink human form. My one refuge was the solitude. Indrid Caldwell did not have much in the way of friends or family. 

“Indie!” called a woman perhaps a few years Indrid Caldwell’s senior, leaning her head out the window as the van skidded to a halt on the gravel drive, mere feet from me. I knew I had never met her, but something about her face tickled the back of my memory.

“Indie,” I repeated slowly. This was not a greeting I had heard before. 

“What, I’m not allowed to call you that anymore?” the woman asked. She was smiling, but her makeup was smudged in such a way that I could tell she had recently engaged in the emotional release of ‘crying.’ 

“Call me whatever you want,” I said. I had learned that humans recently recovered from ‘crying’ were still volatile, and the wrong words or actions could trigger another attack. I did not like crying. It was one of the few things about my human facade that I had yet to master (well, that and smiling. For some reason it continued to elude me. The nuances of baring one’s teeth as a social gesture rather than a threat display seemed… complicated).

“How have you been?” the woman asked. We had barely spoken, and I already wanted her to leave. Her familiarity with Indrid Caldwell was causing a bitter taste to rise at the back of my mouth and I did not like it. But she did not leave. And she was waiting for me to say something.

“Fine,” I said. 

She blinked. “Is that it?” 

“Is that what?” I asked. 

“Just fine?”

I hesitated. “Yes. Just… fine.” The over-wet quality of her eyes indicated to me that she was still vulnerable to another bout of tears. “Should there be more?”

“Shit, Indie!” she said. “I don’t know, you’d think after almost ten years there might be!”

Oh, yes. That is the other thing. Indrid Caldwell may have been someone else before he was me.

“Ten years,” I repeated.

“Long time,” the woman said. 

“Over ten percent of our projected lifespans,” I agreed. 

She looked at me oddly. Her lip quivered, and my stomach dropped. But she just said, “God, you got grim.” 

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“Listen, listen, Indie,” she said. “You remember my little girl? She calls herself Twig now.”

“Absolutely,” I lied. 

She grinned, the expression somehow fragile. “Well, I’ve got her here with me.”

 I regretted lying. 

A silhouette shifted in the passenger seat beside her, and the woman’s grin faltered. “I’ve got them here with me,” she corrected herself. “Could we… come in, maybe? We drove all the way from South Ohio, you know.” There was a thready quality to the words that made me think they were rehearsed. I could not fathom why. The woman switched off the minivan and stepped out. “I’m sure Twig here has just been dying to see their uncle Indie! And we’re still family, after all.”

Family. Humans were social creatures, and most of them seemed to move in one kind of unit or another. Their idea of family varied wildly, but one thing that seemed to be a universal constant was that it was almost a sacred word, invoked as this woman had done in cases only of dire need. I could say no, turn this Twig and their mother away and allow them to weather whatever storm brought them to me on their own. But if I did, I would be ignoring the invocation of family, a misstep that may be profound enough for people to begin to question the life I had built here. If I were found out, even my slim hope of rescuing my people would be lost.

“Y—of course. Come in,” I said, extending an arm to the house and thanking the Eyes of the Cosmos that humans could not hear thoughts. Because somewhere in my head, a part of me was screaming.

#

I made tea. I liked tea. Humans seemed to as well. My research indicated that it was often used as a calming agent, or even a mild sedative. I hoped that a cup of chamomile might coax Twig’s mother, who they called Sara, down from her emotional precipice. 

The two interlopers were sitting in silence at opposite ends of Indrid Caldwell’s gray suede sofa. It was a piece of furniture that I found completely superfluous for someone who had no friends to entertain upon it. But now, as I set cups on the tables on either side of it, I was grateful for the expanse of space it allowed between its occupants. 

Twig was a short, stocky youth with blue hair and a shirt featuring a skeleton in religious regalia. They glared hard at Sara, who seemed to be looking for any excuse to avoid their eyes. I sat in the armchair across from them, sipped my own tea, and waited for one of them to break the silence. 

They didn’t. 

“Is this how visits usually go?” I asked. “Seems… counterintuitive.”

“How visits usually go is that they don’t,” Twig said. 

Sara twitched a little. “This tea looks great, Indie. Thanks,” she said. 

I nodded. “Why don’t they?”

Twig shrugged. “Why parade your freakazoid around to friends and neighbors, right ma?” 

“You are angry,” I noted, eyeing them.

“Oh, look,” they said. “Unkie Indie can read a room. This’ll be great.”

Sara ignored them. “Besides fine, Indrid, how have you been?” she asked. 

“Um. Same,” I said, shying from specifics. “In good health.” 

“How’s your job? You still doing finance?” 

I nodded. 

“And that’s providing okay? You’re comfortable?”

“It does well enough,” I said. 

“Christ on a crutch, Sara,” Twig said. “I’d bet ten bucks he’s got two working kidneys, too. Is the interrogation necessary?”

“I’m just making smalltalk, sweetheart,” Sara said, not looking at them.

“Yeah, you’re making smalltalk like a loan shark trying to collect on a debt makes smalltalk.”

“What do you know about loan sharks?” Sara demanded. 

“Plenty, considering how many your paycheck gets split between,” Twig sniped back. 

I looked between them. This was not how the families I had learned about behaved. 

We lapsed into silence as Sara sipped her tea. Twig’s was untouched. Their expression was grim. 

When Sara set her cup aside, she flashed a watery smile in my direction. “Indie, where’s the little girl’s room? After that drive, I’m dying.”

“Down the front hall. It is the third door on the left,” I said. I watched her carefully as she stood. It didn’t look like she was dying, so I assumed it must have been a figure of speech. She scooped up her keys. 

Twig’s expression went from grim to resigned. 

I sipped my tea. Sara was in the bathroom for a long time, I thought. 

Then I heard the engine kick on outside.

I looked at the front window. Then I looked at Twig, still on my couch. Was I well paid, she had asked. Did I live comfortably. 

I ran for the front door, not even bothering to put my shoes back on as I chased Sara’s car, past the suitcase left by the foot of the stairs, down the driveway and into the street. The minivan turned and vanished around a corner on the narrow mountain road, and all I could do without betraying my identity was watch it disappear, one bare foot on either side of the faded yellow line. 

#

My feet hurt quite badly by the time I walked up Indrid Caldwell’s porch steps. Human locomotion is rather inefficient, by the galactic standard. Their extremities are soft and prone to sometimes debilitating injury. 

Twig leaned against my doorframe. They looked up at me through a shaggy fringe of blue hair. “So, are you going to sell me into indentured servitude or whatever?” they asked. 

The part of me that was screaming had become all of me. I leaned on the other side of the doorframe to dig a piece of gravel out of the sole of my foot. “Did you know?” I asked. 

“Are you asking if I was in on it, or if I figured it out?” Twig asked. 

I looked up from my foot at them. “Either.”

“She didn’t tell me,” Twig said. “But we never go to visit anyone anymore. ‘Specially not you, since y’all had that fight when I was little. And she cried so much in the car on the way over I figured she had to be planning something stupid. Did you know?”

I got the shard of stone out and flicked it away, but the cut began to bleed. It was deeper than I had first thought. “If I had I would have stopped it.”

“Shit,” Twig said. “You need a Band-Aid?”

I remembered a box with a word like that. “They are… in the kitchen cabinet over the stove.”

Twig nodded and jogged off. They came back with the box, and a half-wet dish towel. It was good thinking, because my foot was becoming alarmingly slick with blood. 

I wiped it off. Twig opened a band-aid for me. Easy to apply, I positioned the absorbent pad over the wound and pasted the adhesive strips to my skin. 

“What do we do now?” I asked, lowering my foot and standing up straight. 

“I dunno. Elevate it, probably. Check it every day or so. Put an antibacterial on it if it starts to look red and gross. I’m not a doctor.”

Good advice, even with the disclaimer. I filed it away. “No,” I said. “What do we do with you?”

“What do you mean?” they asked, going shifty around the eyes. 

“I mean I do not want a child,” I said. I looked down the front steps at the bag at their foot. “Is that yours?”

Twig looked between it and me. “Yeah. So what, you’re going to get rid of me too?”

“No. I never had you in the first place to get rid of. You should get that off the driveway.” I turned to go back inside.

I made another cup of tea in the kitchen. I hoped, irrationally, that chamomile might soothe me too. When I heard Twig return, their case thumping behind them, I asked, “Is this normal? Children being left with strangers?”

“I’m not a child, I’m fifteen,” Twig snapped. 

“You did not answer my inquiry,” I said. I turned to face them and leaned on the counter. My imitation of human posture was one of the things I was proudest of in my ruse. This was an affectation that I liked to think of as businesslike-casual. It was confident, but still put other humans at ease.

“Why are your hips doing that?” Twig asked, nose wrinkling. 

I looked down at them. Cocked out to one side, supporting most of my weight on one feeble leg with the other bent for balance. It was a perfect execution of the businesslike-casual stance.

“I am beginning to think you are avoiding the issue on purpose,” I said, looking back up at them. 

“No, it’s not normal. But neither are you, so.” They made a face. 

“I am normal,” I said, perhaps too quickly. “I am a perfect example of normalcy. I fit in.”

Twig stared at me, jaw slack. “And mom thought I was a freak,” they muttered. 

“Well look at you,” I said. “You appear aberrant to the population at large. Is that not what a ‘freak’ is?” 

Twig’s facial expression went oddly flat. Like a paper mask. “Well, I’d rather be a freak than whatever the hell you are,” they said. “Sara might be a bitch, but at least she’s not a total toolbag.”

“I was stating an observation,” I said, raising my hands in a common human gesture of submission and placation. “I did not mean any offense.” Twig was not reassured, so in an effort to smooth the waters further, I attempted the elusive smile, pulling my lips back to reveal clean, perfect, rounded teeth. Good dental health should have been a nonthreatening indicator.

“Oh my god,” they said, taking a step back and dropping their bag. “You’re totally going to kill me in my sleep, aren’t you? Sara left me here to die. This is the worst.” 

I blinked, the smile falling. “I will not kill you.” 

“Most people don’t have to say that out loud, Uncle. Jesus Creezus.” They pointed over their shoulder at the stairs. “Bedrooms are up there? How about this? How about I go back to my room and spend the next several hours building a barricade around the windows and doors. You go plug in to charge, or talk to the dead body in your shed, or do whatever it is you do when real people aren’t around to watch.”

My jaw worked against my will as I tried to brush the comment aside. “You will need sheets for the bed,” I said.

“Do you get yours from Bed Bath and Beyond, or the morgue?”

“You are being cruel to get a rise out of me,” I said.

“Is it working?”

I thought about it. “I do not think so.”

“Damn.” 

“Are you going to make good on your half of the bargain?” I asked. “It is very awkward to talk to the dead body if someone is watching. It ruins the ambiance.” If Twig could needle, so could I.

They stared at me blankly for a moment before exhaling a single sharp breath and sweeping up the stairs to the guest room, taking their bag with them. 

“I will go to the linen closet, then,” I called up after them.

The linens in the linen closet had not been used since I arrived, and perhaps long before. They smelled of mothballs. I carried them up the stairs and knocked on the guest room door.

“What?” Twig snapped. 

“I have the sheets,” I said. 

“Leave them outside. You can’t serial kill me if I never let you in.”

With a sigh, I set the sheets down and descended the stairs. I knew Twig was picking at obvious, exploitable differences to turn their venom upon me, but some of their accusations were closer to truth than I was completely comfortable with. However, they were wrong about one thing.

The body was actually in the basement.

#

On my planet, we did not have ‘parents’ and ‘children’ the way humans seemed to. New members of our various species were grown in labs, genetically engineered to be as perfect a fit as possible for the environmental niche they were expected to fill. We were raised in broods by Physicians, who looked after and instructed us until we were ready to live on our own. And once we did, by and large an Explorer’s life was solitary. The longest I had ever spent traveling and researching with another Explorer had been perhaps three of our planet’s weeks. That was as long as we could bear before another person’s presence began to rankle. So, in this instance, I was finding it difficult to approach this from a position of understanding.

However, the internet is a quite useful piece of human technical engineering. A rudimentary digital network though it was, I was still able to summon nearly any information I sought to the tip of my finger. Though I was quickly finding that not all of the information was good. 

I was searching on the laptop at my work-bench. The answers I sought were “What to do if you come into possession of an abandoned child.” The advice all involved calling the police. I turned to look behind me at the refrigerated preservation chamber I had jury rigged upon my arrival. I had seen police and what they did on television. They would not like what was in the chamber.

I turned my question instead to “how to deal with moody human teenagers.” Indrid Caldwell had not had much in the way of family in his current life, so I had thought the initial research into the subject unnecessary. However, with the way my day was going, I was feeling woefully underprepared. There was a sharp pain behind my eyes that throbbed in time with my heartbeat.

 Most of the relevant links in my internet search brought me to a close-knit community of “mommy blogs.” These ‘mommy-bloggers’ were a fascinating subspecies of humanity that seemed to subsist entirely off of the emotional high of external approval, so much so that they even used their own spawn as a sort of bait to draw out the adulation of others. Most of these websites cited drugs, sex, boredom, or ‘the wrong crowd’ as the source of a child’s discontent, and recommended improving the situation by isolating the child from the bad influences and punishing them for acting out. But what if the child was already isolated? I couldn’t get Twig much more alone than they were now.

Maybe the cause was wrong. Why else might a human child be upset? Several of the mommy-blogs mentioned puberty. I looked into it. A period of intense and volatile hormonal shifts in growing children, resulting in dysregulation of emotions and increased appetites for food and rest. Twig would be finding themself right in the middle of these changes. I sighed, realizing as my shoulders slumped what I would have to do to make them more compliant. 

#

“You didn’t have to take me out,” Twig said. 

The warm vinyl of the booth, always slightly damp in a way that I told myself meant that it was freshly cleaned, had a texture that made me want to lay down napkins over every surface my bare skin would touch. 

But that would not have been normal.

“Oh, trust me,” I said. “You would have been disappointed in my refrigerator.” 

Humans, dietarily, needed much different things from my people. My disguise was good. It was nearly impossible to tell from looking that I was anything except Indrid Caldwell. However, the visage was rather like a rubber suit worn one size too tight. I could never forget that the face I showed was not my own. And like a rubber suit worn one size too tight, it didn’t change who I was at my core. And when I periodically shed Indrid Caldwell’s face, I still had a form to feed. The mercury content in cheap seafood and scrounged from other places like old thermometers was just about enough to keep me functional, though anyone from home would surely laugh at how weak and fragile I had become. But it was not the sort of pantry that would have been enjoyed by a growing human child. 

So instead we sat at a booth at Stacy’s, a diner where Indrid Caldwell used to eat almost daily, until eight months ago. Stacy’s did not fit in with the rest of Coulton. It was a low, squat diner with white-washed walls and chrome trim and big, round windows out to the dusty street it sat alongside. Inside, the floors, always just a little sticky, were checked in black and white, and all the seatbacks and tables were marbled in shades of teal.  It looked a little aged around the edges, some of the tile yellowing at the corners, some of the booths spotted with patches of melted Vinyl from amateur repairs after small rips. 

But the parking lot, from open to close, was always packed full of cars, squeezed tightly together like dull little beetles in a display case, and the air inside was full of the smell of rich human food and cheerful conversation. 

I had been to worse places, all things considered.

Twig ordered a double cheeseburger with a large triple chocolate shake and a side of broccoli and cheddar soup. The waitress couldn’t help but look impressed as she scrawled it all down. 

“When was the last time you ate?” I asked, after she was out of earshot. I was currently imitating the posture of a man I watched two booths down from us. I had learned that humans liked other humans to be ‘loose.’ I spread my arms along the back of the seat and crossed my legs.

Twig eyed me. “Recently enough,” they said. “I’m alive, aren’t I?”

“That is not reassuring,” I said. “Ideal nutrition is three square meals per day. Or four to seven smaller meals spread throughout the day.”

They paused. “Sure. And how often does your android body have to plug in to charge?” 

“I am not an android.” 

“Yeah, sounds like something an android would say.” Twig said. They laughed a little, and their levity caught me off-guard. 

“I—well—What is your plan?” I asked. “Now that you are here?” 

“My plan? My plan?” Twig scoffed. “I’m fifteen. What’s your plan?”

I am not human. Checkmate, I thought. But I kept myself from making a face. “Will Sara… come back?” I asked. 

“Probably,” Twig said, pouring some salt from the shaker onto the swirls of the blue-green tabletop and drawing in it with their finger. “As soon as she gets lonely, or feels bad, or manages to wiggle out from whatever her worst debt is. Like a salamander under a rock.”

“Why… why did she do it?” I asked. I had been trying to parse this for several hours, but some things even the internet could not answer for me. “She is your blood; why leave you here?”

“You’re blood too, technically,” Twig muttered. 

“But we have not spoken for a decade.”

“And?” Twig shrugged. “Time was never important to her, you oughta know that. Blood’s blood. Or something.”

Humans ascribed a mystical power to their blood, claiming that shared genetics within it linked them on a strange, metaphysical level. “Or something,” I agreed. I knew this power to be false. Otherwise Sara would surely have recognized me for an imposter when she saw me. “I searched on the internet for what to do with an abandoned child,” I said. 

“Not a child,” Twig muttered. 

“Most of the resources available advised calling law enforcement.”

Twig paused their drawing, looking up at me once more through the fringe of blue hair. “Are you gonna?”

“Why should I not?” I asked. The waitress brought waters for us, and I sipped mine through a black plastic straw as I waited for her to leave. “I have nothing to hide.”

Twig looked at me with a strange expression. “For her,” they said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear. 

“Sara?”

Twig nodded. “She’s… some kind of messed up,” they said, after a long silence. “But she’s not evil. And she’s in debt to some really bad folks.” They swept the salt away. “They wouldn’t like it if the cops were sniffing around her.”

“Why would she indebt herself to bad people?” I asked. 

“She needed money. No one else would give it to her. Her credit’s in the toilet; her friends know better than to loan her cash. And it’s not like you ever did anything to help.” They didn’t say the words in a cutting way, but they still stung. Why, I wondered? Why feel bad for failing people I’d never met?

“I… am sorry,” I said, lowering my arms from the backrest. 

“You probably did good, honestly. Getting out of there when you did. She’s a user, you know? She uses anyone who lets her.” Twig looked around the diner. “Is it always this busy in here?”

“Stacy’s has a local following,” I said. “It has been here a very long time.” 

“Oh. Cool.”

“Did she use you too?” I asked. 

Twig laughed. “Are you kidding?” they said. “Of course she did. But I was her kid, what was I gonna do?”

“What changed?” I asked. 

“I realized what was happening. And I was getting older. I got too queer, too angry, too fast for her to cope. So she kept me at home. She was ashamed of me I think.” They shrugged and sipped their water. “Or she didn’t know what to do with me now that I wasn’t useful to her.” 

I didn’t know what to say to that. 

“So… That’s why you shouldn’t call the cops.” 

I nodded thoughtfully, as though the idea was not a small relief.

Most humans were inundated with propaganda about their law enforcement, schooled to regard them as an institution worth trusting. Humans that were mistrustful of the police were often thought to have something to hide. 

This was largely inaccurate. But in my case, it was, no pun intended, dead on. 

Twig leaned in across the table, resting an elbow on the surface and their chin in their hand. They looked at me directly in the face for once, unobscured by their fringe. Their eyes were a honeyed-brown color, and their mouth was crooked and sharp, like they knew something I did not. 

“And also,” they said quietly. “Because the only people who have to say they don’t have anything to hide super duper do. And if you screw me, or my mom, I will make it my mission to find out what that is so you go down with her.”

In my shock, I stared back at them, just as intently. “Blackmail is a tool in a criminal’s arsenal,” I said. 

“You pretty familiar with a criminal’s arsenal?” They asked. 

“I watch television.”

“Mm. So? Do we have a deal? No cops?”

I was the perfect imitation of a human. Mimicry was an art that I had long since mastered. But… in bureaucratic settings, I admit I was untested. I would have to do more research to adequately prepare. I’d avoided law enforcement for eight months. I hadn’t even gotten a speeding ticket. 

“No ‘cops,’” I said, unable to hold back a sneer. 

“Great,” they said, grinning and sitting back. The damp vinyl creaked. “Then I’ll just hang out until she gets over it. If you get weird, or turn out to be a creep, I will call the cops. But not on her.”

I frowned. “Creep,” I repeated. 

“Yeah, like a hitter or a pedo or a serial killer or whatever. Or if you really do have a body out in the shed.”

“I am not a creep,” I said. “I do have a few rules that you will abide by.”

“Hey, I’m not unreasonable.” They shrugged. “Shoot.”

“If a door is locked, do not open it. Knock before entering anywhere. The shed is off-limits. Do not leave dishes in the sink. If you use it, wash it. No shoes on the carpet.”

“Sounds good.” 

We were interrupted by the waitress bustling up to us, her smile chipper, if plastic. “All right, all right! For Mister Caldwell, we got the fish-and-chips-hold-the-chips, and for his friend we’ve got the double Stacyburger with extra house sauce, one triple megafudge shake, a side of the fries, and our world-famous broccoli-cheddar soup.”

I wondered how it could be world famous. Who decided that? Twig smiled their thanks as the waitress handed us our plates and left. I knew better than to follow suit.

“Oh, and one more thing,” I said to them. “Stay out of the basement.”

#

When we pulled back up to Indrid Caldwell’s house, Twig sat in the passenger seat of his all-wheel-drive truck even after I had disengaged the ignition. 

“Are you well?” I asked carefully. I knew humans who ingested too much food too fast could become sluggish or even ill. 

“Yeah.” They shrugged. “I just guess dinner didn’t totally suck. So thanks. Or whatever.” 

“Or whatever?” I asked, looking over at them. 

“Or whatever! Don’t make it weird!” With a sound of what I had come to learn was exasperation, Twig opened the door and spilled out, slamming it behind them as they hurried up the steps. 

I am very smart. To get here, I had piloted a ship through interstellar space. I had invented technology to aid in my search even in the absence of my usual tools. I had puzzled out the deepest nuances of the society, language, and behaviors of an alien species in less than one of their solar years and could perform them to effortless perfection. But watching Twig jog up the stairs through the front window, I had no other choice but to acknowledge that in this precise scenario, I might have been out of my depth. Wherever Sara was, I hoped she would come back soon.

###