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“!¡ confusion ¡! But today... at the transit station. You were with a chlick.” I remembered the being’s ancient features, remembered wondering how many generations of my own kind she-he must have lived through.
    Marek had turned to me. “!¡ chiding ¡! There are good aliens,” he said, “and bad. Just like there are good people and bad. Just because Saneth-ra is a chlick, it doesn’t mean she-he’s the same as the chlicks who led the raids on Westwalk and Seagreen in Angiere.”
    “Multiply that,” Callo had added, echoing the line of my own thoughts earlier. “!¡ awe ¡! Up there. Good, bad, all shades of the rainbow in between. !¡ sadness ¡! Motivations that are neither good nor bad but something else entirely, and something else, and something else. It’s hard to know what’s in one chlick’s head, let alone a million of them, a billion. Alien minds hold thoughts that we could never form, just as our minds hold thoughts that they could not shape.”
    “This is how it is,” said Sol. “Aye, this is how it is.”
    So later, when the others had retired and it was just me and Callo pointing at the starship’s sky-trail and being reminded again of the scale of things, I said, “Sometimes... !¡ tentative ¡! Sometimes I wonder how we hang on. Like cockroaches.” Had I said this already earlier, or just thought it? “Why they let us survive at all...”
    “‘Let us’?” asked Callo, turning to me with a click of humour. I had not really paid much attention to her before. A woman maybe ten years my senior, she was a handspan shorter than me but gave the impression of being taller, something to do with the authority in her voice and manner. Her dark hair had a coppery tone to it, her eyes green, her skin a pale olive.
    After a brief silence she continued. “They don’t let us hang on, Dodge. That’s not how it is. Whose planet do you think this is? Whose territory?”
    “!¡ awkwardness | distraction | attraction ¡! I... Well...” Talking in click betrays much. It’s hard to conceal your immediate responses and I was thrown by my sudden reassessment of this refugee from a destroyed city.
    “!¡ humour | interest ¡! It’s ours, Dodge. All of it. We are the indigenes. This is our home, and yet we are confined to Ipps and the wilderness.”
    I shrugged. I didn’t know how to respond. As I say, I never was a one with high principles; I had no agenda, no manifesto other than to survive as comfortably as possible. I was no revolutionary.
    “We shouldn’t be hiding in the shadows, Dodge. We shouldn’t be waiting for them to eradicate us, like they did in Angiere. Just think: what might we have been if we weren’t over-run by aliens? What is our true potential? And why do they want to snuff it out now?”

 
     
    Chapter Five
     
     
    I DREAMED OF her that night. I dreamed of her soft authority and of how she could arouse herself to sudden intensity and passion, and of the fire that sometimes roared but always smouldered deep within her.
    I dreamed of her kiss.
    The night had ended shortly after that exchange. I looked into her eyes and realised that she was exhausted, kept awake only by the heat of her words and the tail end of the day’s adrenalin. There were faint crow’s feet radiating from the corners of her eyes, but otherwise her skin was flawless, a smooth olive tone that ran to dark pools beneath each eye.
    “Thank you, Dodge,” she said.
    For a moment I wondered what she was thanking me for, and then I realised she was thanking me again for my role at the transit station, for getting her through that final barrier on her escape from the destruction of her home city.
    I shrugged, then looked away with a click of awkwardness.
    “You’re special,” she said. “!¡ sincere ¡! Do you realise that? Really special.”
    I felt like an awkward teenager then, out of my depth.
    “!¡ dismissive ¡! No...”
    She put a hand to my cheek, her touch soft, almost imperceptible.
    Her