Unfamiliar Territory

"She's stable, Captain…"

"No broken bones…"

"…lucky to be alive…"

"…just over five months…"

Everything hurt. My head throbbed, my shoulder ached. Even breathing sent sharp pains through my sides. Fixing my body position wasn't an option; my muscles screamed in protest. I felt like I'd been jumped on by Badger.

The room was blurry when I tried to open my eyes. I saw the misshapen forms of human faces above me, turned dark by the lights in the ceiling. When the humans pulled back, speaking in words I couldn't understand, the light shone fully. It hurt my eyes, and I looked away. Couldn't they turn them down a little?

As I blinked the room became clearer, and I could see three humans dressed in white coats. They stared down at me over the tops of the gray vent panels they held in their hands. I didn't understand why they were playing around with vent panels. What use could they have for them and what did they have to do with me?

Mom was right, I thought, blinking again. Humans are strange creatures.

One of the humans lowered his panel and came closer to me. He extended his hand. I hissed at him. Just because they rescued me after my fall didn't mean they could touch me. He drew his hand back, not surprised, and looked at someone outside my line of vision.

"She's a wild one, Captain," the whitepelt, as I deemed him, said. "She must have come from one of those feral colonies on Reach."

I froze and stared up at the human. I had understood every word that came out of his mouth. That couldn't be right. I had never been able to understand human speech. I shouldn't be able to understand human speech! What had changed now?

Maybe it was the fall, I thought, staring instead at the wall. Maybe it changed something in my head. The thought didn't sound unreasonable. After all, I had hit the floor pretty hard. Maybe this was something that would go away in a few hours. I liked the sound of that, and decided to wait and see how I made out. In the mean time, I would take in every scrap of information I could get from the humans. Why waste time?

The Captain's voice brought me back to reality. "It doesn't surprise me, Doctor. Her mother was feral when I first saw her, and she's been hiding out in the ship ever since."

My heart thudded. The Captain had always known about us. What had Mom been fretting about, then?

"Her mother isn't feral, Captain." That was the voice of the strange blue-red human, my ears told me. I was sore, but not too sore to sit up halfway when she appeared on one of those stands near the table I was lying on.

"Did you know her mother, Cortana?"

Cortana nodded. "Quite well, actually. Reef was her name. She stopped in every so often to see Doctor Halsey. She always stayed a few hours, just talking to us. Then…she ran off one day and I hadn't seen her since." She smiled. "I was surprised when she turned up on the Autumn after all this time away. Now I know why." She was looking at me, with an amused smile on her face.

"Can I help you?" I asked, disturbed at the new information I had on my own mother. She only laughed. It was obvious she didn't speak Cat.

"I think she's going to be as feisty as her mother," Cortana said. She leaned forward. "What should we call her, Captain?"

"Cortana, she isn't staying with us."

"Oh, but we need to call her something until she gets better, don't we? Or do you expect us to call her 'Cat' all day?"

I held back a purr. This "Cortana" had an odd sense of humor, but I liked it.

My ear swiveled around as the Captain sighed. "All right, pick a name. We'll figure out what to do with her once she's recovered."

"Thank you, Captain."

The Captain didn't say anything, and I couldn't see him from my point of view. But I watched him leave the room without another word.

Cortana turned her attention back to me. "All right, little one," she said in a gentle voice. "What are we going to call you?"

"Flame," I tried telling her. "My name is Flame."

She sighed. "It's a shame there isn't translation software for cats. Maybe then I'd be able to understand what you're trying to tell me." So she understood I was trying to talk to her. It wasn't much, but at least we were getting somewhere.

"Flame," I tried telling Cortana again, but it was useless. She couldn't understand me. But for whatever reason, she was staring at me like I'd grown another set of eyes.

"I've heard of dogs that could almost talk," one of the medics said, "but I don't think I've ever heard of a cat that could do it."

I stared blankly at him. What was he talking about? I hadn't "almost" forced my voice into human speech. Had I? I shook my head. This day was getting weirder as the hours went by.

"I don't think she's any ordinary kitten," Cortana mused. "Try again."

"Flame." I felt nothing but the usual vibrations of my feline vocal cords. Nothing out of the ordinary. Stop staring at me.

"Hmm," Cortana said. "Interesting." Her blue eyes shone thoughtfully. "What should I call you, then? Little Red?"

I hissed my displeasure.

"All right, all right." Cortana held her hands up. I didn't know what that meant. Maybe she was trying to calm me down? "What about Stripes?"

"Stripes?" I repeated. "Is that the best you can come up with?" There was no doubt in my mind that she had been made by humans. She wasn't very creative with this naming thing.

"We could call her Rocket," one of the younger medics suggested.

Rocket? What on Reach was wrong with these people?

"What about Autumn?" The suggestion came from the only female medic in the room. "She may have been born on Reach, but the Autumn is her home now."

"Autumn," Cortana repeated. "I like it." She smiled at me. "Autumn it is."

~O~

So I was known as Autumn among the medics in what I learned was the "infirmary." It was different that the deck I had fallen on to. This deck was longer and wider, and there were two straight rows of white nests on either side. The humans called these "beds," and I was the only occupant in the place. I guess the other humans didn't need to recover from anything.

The human that had picked me up off the floor, as I found out later, came to see me every now and then. He seemed pleased that I was getting better every day he saw me. That was true. I wasn't as sore and my head was a lot clearer. I had already started walking around the bed, and by the third day I was running to the edge and back. The lead medic wouldn't let me down on the floor. I guess he wasn't sure I was ready for that yet.

Cortana and the Captain, whose full name was Captain Keyes, came to see me every so often, too. I think Cortana found me amusing. She watched me so closely I could feel her gaze burning into my fur. Captain Keyes mostly came to check up on me. He was starting to warm up to me a little, and that made me happy. I liked him. I liked them both.

The only being that hadn't crossed my mind in almost two days was Mom. There was a grate in the infirmary, but whenever I looked I never saw her there. I wondered if she watched me while I slept, or if she even came by at all. She hadn't come to get me after I fell and she hadn't come to see me the second night when the medics left me alone for a little while. Sometimes I wondered if she was angry with me for going too close to the grate. Other times I wondered if she was disappointed in me for having disobeyed her. Most times I wondered if she was just scared to get too close to the humans.

I suppose I could understand that, but at the same time I didn't know what she was so worried about. The humans hadn't hurt me at all so far. In fact, they had been nothing but kind to me. Whatever Mom had been worrying herself out of her fur about was beyond me.

On the night before my third day on deck I caught Mom's scent in the room from the vent. It was the first time in three days I had smelled her. I looked up toward the vent and saw her green eyes glittering from behind the grate.

"Mom."

Her eyes dimmed and lit as she nosed opened the grate. She jumped down from the opening with a grace I envied. She was a long, slim cat; she was tall and narrow. She wasn't sickly thin; it was just her body type. Her brown and cream pelt looked rougher than it normally was. I knew I had been gone a couple days, but I had always known Mom's fur to be smooth and well groomed. Now her pelt was messy and under-groomed.

"Flame." There was something about her voice that unsettled me. I caught a sour smell in the air from Mom's breath. She sounded relieved, upset, and defeated all in one word. "How are you feeling?"

"Much better," I said. "The medic says I'll be okay in another day or two. I can't wait to get out of here." I looked around the room to emphasize my point.

Mom chuckled. "The medic says," she repeated ominously as she leaped up onto the bed. "The medic says. Does he now?"

The fur along my spine stood up. The first thought to run through my mind was the consideration that Mom might be going mad. I nodded. "After the fall, I can understand everything the humans say," I told her. "They can't understand me, though. It gets annoying. Do you know they call me Autumn?"

Mom froze from the tips of her whiskers to the tip of her tail. "Ohhh…" She turned her head away from me and muttered something I couldn't hear. When she turned back to me, her eyes were worried. "You can understand them, then?"

I nodded slowly. Her tail tip twitched. She was silent for what seemed like a life time.

Finally, she sat down. "Flame," she said, "have I ever told you of our heritage?"

"No," I said. I bit back the words You don't tell us much of anything. I didn't want to upset her any more that she already was.

She wrapped her tail neatly over her paws. "You come from a long line of powerful cats, Flame," she said. "What you're experiencing, your ability to understand the humans, comes from your ancestors. It's not going away, Flame," she added. My stomach plummeted. I was getting used to understanding the humans, but at the same time I kept wondering when it was going to go away. So far it hadn't, and it had been two days.

"Ever?"

"Ever. I wasn't able to understand the humans until I was one year old. I suppose your fall activated it early." She licked the top of my head. The sour smell that wafted off her pelt made me want to pull away. "You have great power in you, Flame. You just don't know it yet." She hopped off the bed and in one graceful, powerful leap went back to the vent.

I watched her nose the vent into place and walk away. When she had gone I rolled over, shaking her mysterious words off. My mom's going crazy, I thought. My mom's going absolutely crazy.

~O~

Reef staggered as she made her way back to her nest. She stopped and leaned against the wall. A wave of nausea swept over her. Pain gripped her belly. She cringed.

It's only a belly ache, she told herself. I'll be fine in the morning. But she couldn't help but wonder if it was the Sickness. She had been warned that it would come after her when she denounced her power, but she hadn't believed it. She wondered if now it was coming to get her, if this was her punishment for letting her kit stray.

A sharp pain made her buckle and drop. Oh, Plain of Fallen Warriors, where did I go wrong? She let the pain subside before she tried to stand again and hobble back to her nest.

Only a belly ache, she thought again. Only a belly ache.