Echo's Arc

Chapter 2 of 8

Astrid led Echo through the entrance of the sun building, pointing out where the cosmic creature exhibit would go. Echo barely listened. His mind kept circling back to the word costume. She thought his skin was painted. His three fingers were props. Everything he was, everything he'd trained for, reduced to fabric and makeup. A boy appeared at the doorway, maybe seven years old, holding a spiral lollipop from the stand outside. He looked Echo up and down. "You're just a guy in green paint," the boy announced. Other children gathered behind him, sticky-fingered and skeptical. "I bet you can't even scare anyone here." Echo's heart lifted despite the insult. A challenge. A chance to prove himself. He pulled out his ID card, the one with the official seal from his training academy, and held it up. The children leaned closer. "Whoa, cool card," one said. "Did you make that yourself?" Echo climbed the vine-covered tower at the edge of the grounds, the children following like a parade. At the top, he struck his most terrifying pose, the one his teacher had perfected over decades. Arms wide. Eyes glowing. A sound from deep in his chest that should have frozen blood. The children stared up at him. One yawned. Another took a bite of her lollipop. "Do something scary," the boy called. Echo tried again, adding the ritual words in Alienese that meant I see into your soul. A girl giggled. "He's speaking made-up language now." Echo sat down on the stone rooftop, his boots dangling over the edge. The children wandered away, bored, back toward the colorful stand and its sweets. He put his ID card back in his pocket. On his planet, this card meant everything—proof of his training, his lineage, his purpose. Here it was a neat toy someone made themselves. The difference struck him fully now: back home, everyone already believed. Here, he had to make them believe first, and he had no idea how to do that. The challenge wasn't his technique. It was that Earth didn't have space in its thinking for him to be real.