I taste ozoned rain, electrified metal and blood. It's cold. I'm close to hibernation. One tentacle throbs.

The spaceship lies in pieces and Imala is gone. I unbuckle my harness, yank exposed cords loose and fashion a sling, aching as I crawl from the wreckage.

Trees and grass burn despite the rain and gray light reveals our wake of brutalized forest.

I cannot see my beloved but send warmth to touch her.

There is nothing to touch.

Scorching despair ignites ship debris, and worse: humans come to help. I try to quell my anguish and save them, but it’s too late.

My rescuers ignite like walking saplings, shrieking. What have I done? They disintegrate. I can do nothing for our agony.

More of them hide until the fires die. Perhaps they hope I’ll perish, but my people are born of heat. Cold is our anathema. I waver in and out of hibernation when they return in protective suits.

“Don't touch it!” A helmet-distorted voice says. They use machines to scoop up my body.

I do not blame them, but their distance is a cold anesthesia. I wake in a laboratory.

“It's moving again,” one man says. “Drop the temperature another degree.” They heal my torn flesh while I sleep and mourn.

This is not kindness. It may be torture. I do not care. I have killed and deserve my fate.

They imprison me in a glass cell surrounded by tiers of oppressive black metal and unblinking lights. The door above is a series of metal panels and locks.

I wake from hibernation periods and one-sided studies with puncture wounds until, at last, men try to communicate. Our gestures are meaningless to one another. They bombard me with sounds that make my heart jump, but my people do not make sounds. We share warmth. Sometimes light.

However, fluorescent communications are involuntary, private conversations between family members. I cannot make myself change a single cell color.

I try to share my warmth, but they must believe my grief was an attack. My temperature spikes and coolant flows into my cell. When I wake, those scientists are gone.

During my incarceration, fifteen people watched and studied me. Two left an impression. Of those, one remains. George, whose hair when he was younger appeared to combust into shocks of red and gold, never comes close. But long ago he followed Halia like I used to drink Imala's warmth.

Halia— the only Terran who ever approached without fear.

Just once.

She stared at me, her head cocked. One lock of brown hair caressed her cheek. “It doesn’t look healthy.”

I had landed the year before. Their language was still strange. I will never speak as they do, but by then, I understood meanings and some nuances. I understood 'It'. Names encourage friendship and warmth; things I would never know again. So I thought.

“Do you need anything?” She asked.

Caring enough to ask was more sustenance than all their protein and vegetables.

“What is your name?”

She stepped close enough for me to tell her everything. I summoned warmth from my extremities.

George pulled her from the room, pointing out my elevated heart rate and temperature. White-faced caretakers sent me into hibernation for two days. When I woke, George glared at me with red-rimmed eyes.

They fired her. This is one of their strange phrases. To me, this implies warmth and light, but to them? I hope that doesn't mean they killed her.