Starsnatcher - Trapped In An Alien World [COMPLETE]

Chapter 5.6

The rainfall lessened.

Far from the merciless torrents of before, the droplets trickled over my helmet like a sprinkler. Soft mist poured down on us two. Gently, silently, too silent to distract me.

How do I start this conversation?

Even I knew how stupid it was to start with why she attacked me. The singularity stone undeniably triggered a trauma you wouldn't talk to a stranger about.

"Isn't it cold?" I asked. "In the rain, I mean."

"It was stuffy under the helmet."

I broke eye contact.

This conversation was hard. She was in her early twenties, about my age. For a normal person, this would have simplified matters, but not for me.

When talking to the Seizers, I wasn't expected to understand their rules. Everything was direct, we literally beamed thoughts into each other's minds and broke eye contact whenever we wanted.

This was different. We held a conversation with rules I didn't understand.

The bushbot approached me, carrying the finger I put on the rock to bait her. I took the finger. Was this a hint by Crick, Helix, or whoever ordered the robot on what I had to do?

I turned back to Kira. Her expression remained unchanged, but what did it mean? Was she tired, annoyed, bored?

Why on Earth did I have to start talking?

I showed her the cut-off finger.

Kira's eyes opened without widening as if seeing her own finger was a mere intellectual curiosity.

Her eyes were blue in the way ice was blue. Cold, piercing, and with a shine I hadn't noticed before. It wasn't the type of shine characters' eyes in clichéd romance novels had. More like a shine that made me doubt if these eyes were hers or implanted by a machine.

I threw the finger and Kira caught it. She held it in a five-fingered black gauntlet.

"Put these gloves off," I said.

Without as much as a response, she pulled both gloves off, revealing hands as colorless as her face. Both had five fingers.

"You can regrow fingers?" I asked.

She nodded.

The singularity stone embedded itself into the back of her right hand like the stone Iris wore on her forearm. That explained a lot. When I still owned the green stone, it hadn't made me able to read people's minds like Iris or super strong like Kira. Because it had never been mine.

It was Kira's. Thinking about it, the stone had healed me several times, too, although it restricted itself to fixing bruises rather than regrowing fingers.

"Super-strength, shining eyes, breathing in this atmosphere, and now even a healing factor?" I asked. "Is it because of that green stone? Why did those aliens give it to you?"

Rainfall trickled in the background like ambient music.

I faced the ground. "You think you're funny with your silence, don't you? Who are those aliens who dropped you here? What do they want? Why are they attacking my friends' homeworld!"

"Your friends' homeworld. I take it your home isn't as important."

"It is."

"Really?" she asked, subtly rolling the "r".

For all her modifications, her voice sounded unambiguously human, even with the slight Russian accent one expected from someone named "Semenova".

"What makes you doubt I miss home?" I asked.