I glance over at Zuul’s body. I feel like I should be feeling more about the fact that he’s dead. I feel sad that Tyll has lost his biological father but… the guy tried to use him as a bargaining chip for the buggy guys to take instead of me. I don’t think I could ever forgive that.
“He will need rest and the site of the blast should be shielded from sunlight for a dozen days,” Yix offers, standing a little further away, now as he gestures to Zyntarr’s chest.
Zyn’s head snaps back toward the alien, and he struggles to sit up as if he’s actually going todosomething about Yix still being here. “Hey, hey,” I say, trying to calm him down. His hand is already searching his body for hidden blades he might use. “He’s okay, he’s a friend. Zyntarr!”
“He is no friend,” he wheezes, still scrambling to try and get up.
“He shot one of his own men to try and help us! He healed you. You need to stop moving!”
“It is true,” Tyll adds. “Yix has been kind.”
Zyntarr pauses and looks back to Tyll and I before glancing down at his chest for the first time since he had awoken. He touches the new, tender skin, inspecting his fingertips when he pulls them away as if he’s expecting to find blood there. But there is none. He’s scarred - so much more than he had been before, but he’s alive, and that’s all I care about. “I was touched by their lightning weapon,” he murmurs as if he only just now remembered the fact he’d been shot.
When he turns back toward Yix, the guy is almost trembling. Zyntarr struggles, but he stands, despite my protests and his unsteady legs. He straightens his spine and stretches his wings, and even though he’s still injured, it is a sight to behold. He takesone stiff step, and then another, until he is towering over Yix - whom I swear lets out a squeak of fear as he tilts his head back to look Zyn in the eye. “You saved my female from being taken by your kind?” he asks.
“Y-yes,” Yix answers.
Zyn grunts in approval and lays a heavy hand on Yix’s narrow shoulder. “Then I am in your debt, strange creature.”
Yix laughs nervously. “I-I only wish for what is best for the humans,” he chirps, his mandibles and antennae moving as he speaks. “They have been the only kind to be my friends.”
“You will come to our village and we will tell them of how you helped us this day.”
Tyll jumps up beside me but slows his excitement when Yix starts to shake his head. “No, no. I cannot. I need to return to Mama Z’rykby and tell her that all the humans have perished on this planet. That way, she will not send more of her husbands here to retrieve her lost stock,” he explains. Zyntarr starts to sway on his feet and miraculously, the frail-looking Yix catches him and lowers him back to a seated position on the ground. Tyll and I both rush to him. “You need to rest. Here-”
It’s then that he swings something off his shoulder. Is that… is that anold lady’s handbag?
It’s soft leather and beige in color with lots of zipper compartments. It looks like something my mom would have found very practical. I watch as he roots around in there, pulling out… are those candies? “Here,” he says, giving a few to Zyn. “Consume these hard glucose units. They will help with your recovery.” He then goes on to point to the caramel-colored ones that are so obviously butterscotch candies. “These,” he says before pointing to the red-and-white striped peppermints, “are more tolerable thanthose.”
Zyntarr eyes the candies laying on his big, flat palm. There’s a bit of fluff attached to one of them.
“Did you get that from Earth?” I ask, pointing at his purse.
It’s kind of hard to tell with Yix’s facial features, but he moves his mandibles and antennae in a way that makes me think he’s delighted by the question. “Yes!” he says, moving the bag in front of his body. “Do you like it? I saved up, and managed to get the winning bid from a black-market collector. It has numerous pockets!” he says, thrumming with energy now as he opens and closes each zipper to show off the handbag’s ‘numerous pockets’. “And it came with many authentic human trinkets like these,” he says as he starts pulling various things out to show us. First, an embroidered handkerchief, then, there’s some bobby pins, an old-lady coin-purse, a TV remote, a single post-it note with the word ‘REMEMBER’ scribbled on it and a small rubber duck wearing sunglasses.
I… ok.
“The flare is in here somewhere, bear with me,” Yix says, holding up a boney finger for us to wait. He hands off all the items he’d unearthed so far to me while he has a good rummage. The coin purse is the kind that has those metal twisty-clasps that keep it together. It’s made of a deep green leather with the letter ‘B’ stitched in gold thread. I smile at that and can’t help but open the purse to take a peek inside. There’s no coins to be found, but there are some neatly folded pieces of paper.
Yix is still pulling out various items from his numerous pockets, but none of these look even vaguely human so my focus goes back to the pieces of paper, wondering if they’ll tell me who ‘B’ is.
The first is a letter. It’s very old-looking, written in proper ink with a pretty swirling script. It starts off with,My dear beloved Betty…
I wonder if the whole of this bag belonged to ‘Betty’?
My eyes fly over the page and what starts out as a sweet longing love letter, soon changes to a more intimate, explicitdescription of what the writer wants to do to his beloved Betty. My cheeks heat just glancing over the words, and I scan right to the bottom to see it signed, ‘Your John’.
The next piece of paper is another letter. This one starts with ‘Dear Beautiful Betty’, and is much the same as the previous. My heart swells at the thought of a little old lady treasuring these love letters from a man who probably became her husband, and treasuring them enough to keep them close in her coin-purse for years and years. Except, when my eyes fall to the bottom of this one, it is signed with ‘will you honor me by becoming my wife? Carlos.’
Oh.
Ok.
In the end, there had been five letters in total that Betty kept in her purse. Each from a different man. John, Carlos, Edward, Dario, and a mysterious-sounding, ‘Captain S’. Three of the five proposed marriage. All of them had fallen hopelessly in love with Betty.
“Ah! Here it is!” Yix says, having completely emptied out his handbag. “The flare device.”
I expect him to hand me a gun of some sort. Or something that looks like I need to light it and send it up like a firework. At least, that’s what comes to mind from movies I’ve watched. But the thing Yix hands me is a small, black, shiny cube - no bigger than a dice.
