Endosymbiosis

8. Reuptake

He turned his back to me and headed toward his ship, judged more by himself than by me. My silence hurt as much as if I had said something - not because my opinion mattered, but because, to him, anyone's did, imbued with what he thought everybody was thinking. I remained silent and followed him to where the collectors were concentrated.

After rummaging through the trash, we smelled like rejection - the scent of camouflage. I was trying not to think about the layer of hungry interstellar germs that covered us, expecting the least mistake of our immune system to feast on us. Maybe it would at least be better than to be devoured by the collectors.

We hid our faces in the rags, but our hands didn't deny our kind.

When we crossed the landfill, some groups of collectors were completely indifferent to us, chatting absently about what they had found in the junk. But some focused on our footsteps with special attention... Until the conversations around us fell completly silent.

When the screams exploded around us in languages ​​I couldn't understand, I knew we were in danger.

All those dangerous creatures rushed towards us and ripped off our disguises, surrounding us on all sides. We raised our hands in surrender, but something told me the collectors would have no mercy. Their screams around us were pure cacophony, since my translator could only catch one word or another:

"Throw them in the sun like the garbage" Some suggested. "No! We need their organs!" Others screamed. "I want the skin!" And then they started fighting over our parts.

The translator was heating up in my head, not knowing which language I should use... And so I spoke in the only one that seemed to make sense at that time: hers.

My tongue replicated the sounds and, without the human beside me being able to understand me, I yelled:

"We are iatrics!" A half-lie. "We came here to help you!" A whole lie. And then silence took the platform.

Every mortal was cursed by its finitude; and all wanted the salvation that beings like the iatrics promised to bring. We just needed to build the illusion that we had it... As we always did.

"We brought supplies. Check it out." I nodded at my bag on the floor and watched it get attacked by claws and thorns, until its contents were scattered across the dirt on the floor.

"What's happening?" The stranger muttered.

"They think we've come to heal them..." I whispered in our language, our secret.

"Cure them of what?!"

"Of anything!"

He nodded and looked at me like he knew what to do... At least one of us seemed to have a plan.

The beings surrounding us opened the circle, allowing me to run and, kneeling in the mud that covered the platform, collect the scattered iatric supplies - what I did until a shadow came over me.

I raised my eyes slowly to the being in front, an upright centipede, with countless sharp legs reaching from his trunk to dangle before me. His "face" was made up of overlapping pieces that looked like nothing I'd ever seen before, as if he'd tried to be a bug and got distracted by a few additions.

"Follow me." He demanded in the language I shouted, and I obeyed.

I sent a look over my shoulder at the stranger. He could just as easily take his ship and leave me behind, to be dissected by the collectors after my services were no longer needed - it wasn't like I was the only iatric in the galaxy who could help them, after all... But when his gaze met mine, I believed for a brief moment that a human was capable of not abandon another... That maybe it was possible for me to trust him.