Starfish

Thirteen

Ardus felt it when Nina turned away, putting distance between herself and the Dreen gathered around Nia's terminal. He listened to the click of her shoes on the polished floor, slow and soft and receding. She is upset. The lockdown, no doubt. I should go talk to her. He waited, thinking it best if he gave her a few moments to herself. He watched from the corner of his eye as she passed a display of minerals in glass cubes, arranged by family and stacked in order of atomic weight. On the wall was a reproduction of Onu's Periodic Table, an artistic rendering of the known elements arranged in a growing spiral according to abundance. Nina stopped and looked up, the rendering reflected in her goggles and obscuring her grey eyes. Ardus waited a few moments more before he backed away from the group and walked over to the human woman. She acknowledged him with a glance. Folding his arms over his chest he said, "Nia is presenting a lifesaving discovery that would have been impossible without you, and yet you are standing over here alone." He leaned forward, looking down at her face. "Are you all right?" he asked softly.

Nina looked up at Onu's Table, silent for a few moments. Thoughtful. "It's hard to be excited when people could get hurt."

"I understand that." Ardus straightened. "We had a similar event a few months before you arrived, and it turned out to be nothing."

"A lot of people died the last time a package like that came here."

Ardus shuffled his feet, his clawed, semi-webbed toes clicking on the floor. "True, but no one in this room believes you had anything to do with that. I know you had nothing to do with it."

"That doesn't stop everyone else from staring."

He smirked. "They stare because you are half their size."

"They stare because I'm human. Because I'm the same species as the people who destroyed that cargo vessel, killed and hurt all those Dreen." She reached out and straightened a glass cube that encased a piece of chromium the size of Ardus's thumb, pushing it into place with the tip of her finger. Her voice had a hard edge to it. "They stare because a few idiots made my whole species look like murderers, and they wonder if I'm just like them."

"But you are not."

"Basic survival instincts tell us to avoid the things that look like things that have hurt us in the past, even when logic tells us otherwise. It's hard to separate the individual from the species when life or death are on the line."

Ardus listened. The lockdown hadn't upset her as much as the idea that her own people might be the cause, he realized. "You feel guilty for the actions of others?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because it's stupid." Nina huffed into her mask. "Hurting people is stupid, hating people because they're different is a waste of time. I never understood it." She picked up a cube containing a twisted lump of copper, turning it over in her hands. "I always thought that being different was a good thing. If everyone was the same, there would be no new ideas, no art, no music, just the same everything over and over."

Ardus took a cube with a lump of vanadium. He held the cube up to the light and admired how the vanadium sparkled. It was the same color as her eyes, variations on steel and storm and silver. "I agree."

"Why is it so hard to accept that Dreen exist?" Nina continued, setting down the copper and picking up osmium. "Why do they see you as a threat? All you want to do is meet us, learn about us, work with us, and my people have to go and do something stupid." Ardus watched Nina's fingers clench around the cube before she set it down, her hands balling into fists. He looked at her face and saw her brow furrowed, her eyes narrowed. Though her voice was too quiet to carry, Ardus heard bitter anger in it. He marveled at her fury, her frustration. She cares so much, like someone else I knew. Something in his chest knotted. "Doctor," he gestured to the nearby table littered with pipettes, glass tubes, manuals and equipment, "come, sit with me."