Auntie Em’s face scrunched with concern for a moment, then it softened. Darsh typed away on the laptop. I took a deep breath.

  “Ah,” I struggled to get my mind in order. “I think I’m okay.”

  “I’ve never seen a reaction like that. You’re not supposed to touch the crystal, by the way, that’s what the disk around it is for. What did you hear?”

  “I didn’t hear anything. It was almost like being stuck in a memory. But not my own.”

  Emma’s frown deepened. She very carefully took the amulet from my hands, and set it back on the table without saying more. If what I had experienced had been dangerous, I’m sure my aunt would have said something. Right?

  What was that? What did I see?

  Sometime later, I paced over to where Darsh was, at the folding card table we’d set up for him. I could see a rough blueprint of what the armor would look like. It was sleek, like a sports car, and only half a foot taller than me if I got the little numbers next to it right. We’d settled on a Runic configuration.

  “It says, Ferdiad 2.0?” I asked.

  Darsh looked up at me, only slightly startled, then he answered while keeping his attention on the blueprint.

  “Uh, yeah,” he said. He clicked on the helm and started adding lines of code to what looked like the Heads Up Display. There was some kind of interesting ring of sensors that floated around the helm. Not sure what that was for. This was all too technical for me. “I don’t have a name for it yet.”

  “What about Morrigan?” I asked.

  “Ooh,” Auntie Em cut in, “that’s bad luck.”

  I looked over my shoulder. She had a beer bottle in one hand, and played some sort of game on her phone with the other.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Armor platforms are always men. Ferdiad. Arthur. Etcetera.”

  This was true as far as I knew. I didn’t know of any that were named after women. But other than the two she named, I also didn’t know many of their names anyway. Arthur was Commander Parker’s armor. She was the most famous, or infamous, of the Terran Knights. And there was my Aunt’s. It must be bad luck or something to give it out to the public. It certainly had been for Arthur’s pilot.

  “Again, why? Knights are always women. Isn’t it sorta misogynistic to name them after men?”

  “What? No! Maybe. I don’t know. It’s just tradition.” She pointed at the laptop with her beer bottle. She had a band T-shirt on today over some thermals. “Also some men are Knights, ah at least that’s what’s been speculated. Or they could be. I don’t know. It’s just a stupid superstition from the Somnifer. And it should be a hero, the name, not a mythical creature or god. It’s bad luck.”

  “Fits with the crow theme,” I said.

  Darsh crossed his arms, and watched us with a look of annoyance.

  “You mean raven,” Emma corrected. “Look if you want to go with a raven theme, why not Giddeon? Or Owain?”

  “I like Morrigan.”

  In the silence, only the whine of the laptop fan could be heard. Darsh sipped his soda loudly.

  Emma hummed a tune I wasn’t familiar with, then said, “alright.”

  At the end of a week, Morrigan was three quarters finished. We had the whole helmet system, and chest done, as well as the skeleton midlayer.

  It was coming along well!

  The ring that floated around the helm was the aural sensor array. They would interpret my sonic environment, and encode the world into music. Or something like that. Once it was powered up, it should slowly rotate in a circle from my chin, around my ear and behind my head so it didn’t impede my vision.

  It also was responsible for something called a Visual Projection. I could see with my eyes, but to the armor, that was just one sensor — maybe the best, but not only. Once I was in the suit, I could see more than what was just ahead of me. I could see around me, and more besides.

  It wasn’t long after that then, that the Dreadnaught found us.

  I was at the piano working my way through Morrigan’s song, when a strange feeling overwhelmed me. The feeling buzzed like something between anxiousness, and urgency. Paranoia? I think paranoia is the right word. As I was playing, my fingers keyed dissonant chords without even thinking about it.

  Something was wrong. I grabbed my hoodie, and walked out to the front porch.

  Emma and Darsh were there too.

  Suddenly, as if it were some kind of normal thing, as if it were an everyday occurrence, two figures rounded the bend in the road, and approached the property. Two armored figures.

  I cursed.

  “Katherine,” Emma said, “get back inside.”

  Go back inside? And do what? Wait for them to kill my aunt? Destroy my armor? Maybe they can be convinced.

  “It’s my armor,” I said. “Whatever happens, I should be here for it.”

  “Yeah, I think I’ll go—” Darsh began saying.

  “Nope,” Auntie Em said, cutting him off and grabbing him by the shoulder, “make sure we have the blueprints backed up.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Hurry.”

  Darsh cursed, and ran back into the barn.

  Now that the armored figures were closer, I could tell who they were. One was taller, thinner, maybe approaching seven feet tall, with white, red and lavender accents. She had a small red rose on her chest.

  Knight armor remained a constantly evolving technology on earth. They always must be custom built for the fighter, so conventions in design have changed over time as combat ideology changed. The first ones were bigger, and bulkier. Current generation Knight armor usually stood not much taller than the person it needed to fit. The new ones also had a more organic look, with softer curves.

  This Knight didn't seem to be carrying any weapons, except for a single sword. That wasn’t unusual for her.

  I knew because she remained, after all, incredibly famous.

  Paula Martinez was named the Knight of Roses — one of the original twelve. She was far and away, even in her advanced age, one of the strongest Knights still living. Only Dara, or Commander Parker, was held in higher esteem.

  Her apprentice—I assumed because anyone else had to be of secondary status—though shorter, was far larger in bulk, her armor black and red with a massive gun slung over her back. She was newer. From my time on the Knight forums, I think her name was Kalea.

  Even if my armor was complete, even if my aunt had her armor as well, we would have been screwed. You didn’t fight the Knight of Roses, and live.

  If they wanted to come in hot, and kill us all — they would have come in running. It was still incredibly nerve wracking, waiting for them to get closer. Aunt Em started walking down the drive to meet them.

  I followed. What else was I going to do?

  “Emma. What a welcome surprise,” Paula said through the speakers in the neck of her suit. Her voice echoed warm and friendly, and had a heavy Spanish accent. “I know you are a reasonable one. I’m sure we will have this sorted in no time, yes?”

  “I’m sure!” Emma responded, a measure of nervousness in her voice.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “Oh, come now,” Paula said, “no need to be frightened.”

  Her mask slid open to reveal a beautiful face, lined with age, but looking far younger than I knew her to be. How that worked with the Knights, is anyone’s guess. I’d have to ask my aunt about it later. She wore a hint of makeup, pink eyeshadow, and lipstick. Her hair had been styled in an elaborate braid, pinned up in a bun to highlight her undercut. Most knights cut all their hair off, like Aunt Em, but Paula seemed to take a lot of care in a feminine presentation.

  “I’m not frightened,” Emma said, “just cautious. The Dreadnaught doesn’t send two Knights out, if they don’t expect action.”

  “If I was expecting some action, I would have brought a bottle of wine,” she ended that sentence with a cute little laugh that seemed to hint at some kind of shared joke.

  “God, Paula, in front of my niece?”

  “What? She doesn’t know about us?”

  “There’s no ‘us’ anymore, Pau.”

  “Dios mio. It’s a joke. Kalea, talk to the kid, yes? Get her version of the story. Em and I will be in the barn.”

  Auntie Em rolled her eyes, and led the Knight of Roses to the barn. I hoped that Darsh had been able to download the files in time. Else, all this could have been for nothing.

  I stood next to the six-foot-tall armored figure, and waited for her to speak next.

  “Well,” I said to cut the tension, “want a soda or something?”

  The armored figure laughed. It was strange to hear a laugh come from the speakers of the suit. It sounded slightly tinny.

  “Do you not speak english?” I asked, and felt a little embarrassed that I could be right.

  The Knight replied in a language I couldn’t understand.

  The mask of their suit peeled away to reveal their face, and for the first time, I got to see what an Alien looked like, up close and personal.

  She was surely Somnifer. Her skin nearly glowed with the characteristic green hue. Her floral culture traveled in a strip of moss, lichen, and flowers much like a mohawk from the top of her head to disappear down her neck, and into the suit. She had wide human-like features, and large eyes.

  I was startled by her beauty, and strangeness.

  The flower culture and feminine features told me she was quite old. I wondered what kind of life she must have lived before becoming a Knight. Her dark eyes had a kind of kindness to them. Though all Knights were women, of a sort, not all of them used the same pronouns. Should I ask them?

  There was also the fact that she was literally an alien. I only knew what I saw on TV, and the things whispered in forums. The Somnifer were more likely to talk about the ‘beautiful diversity of the intergalactic community,’ than explain their culture and biology.

  The knight stepped closer to me, and exhaled spores. I should have seen this coming.

  The spores quickly entered my nose and mouth. I coughed, choked, stumbled back, but in seconds I began to breathe again. I briefly saw hallucinatory, iridescent butterfly-like creatures before they disappeared. I knew them to be species from the Somifer home planet. They were a common hallucinatory side-effect of this kind of exchange.

  Her speech then continued with what sounded like gibberish at first, but then…

  “But I’ll stay out here if it’s all the same,” she said with a smile.

  On the one hand I knew what this was, the fungal exchange that incoded their language patterns into your mind, but hearing it, experiencing it, it almost seemed too much to understand.

  Language should take work. It should take effort to understand. But here I was hearing, and understanding it all the same.

  I realized that I had been staring.

  “Yeah,” I said, “be right back.”

  I scrambled up the porch in front of her. I at first worried that she would shatter the front steps as she stepped up onto the porch behind me, but the armor must not have weighed as much as it looked.

  My parents weren’t home, and so there wasn’t anyone to see me as I visually freaked out. I had a Knight, not just my aunt, but an actual Knight in armor, and an Alien, on my front porch!

  I told myself to be calm. Center yourself. This is serious business. I have to convince them to let me have my own armor. And if I say the wrong thing, they could pop me like a grape.

  I grabbed a soda from the fridge, and ran back to the porch. The Knight had her hands behind her back, waiting patiently.

  I handed it to them. She took it in two of her massive fingers.

  “So,” I said, “your name is Kalea?”

  “Indeed,” she responded. Except that’s not what she said. She said something else, and that’s what I understood it to mean. I get that this was how language always worked, but I didn’t have the lexicon. I just had the meaning. I didn’t know anything about the language, but I understood it.

  She seemed to have no trouble drinking the soda with her large, gauntleted hands. She must have had practice.

  “So, um, what are your pronouns?” I asked. This was a polite thing to ask when meeting someone from a different culture. But even to this day, some people got weird about it.

  “She/her is fine.”

  This didn’t surprise me. Almost nobody had ever seen a male Somnifer. They existed, I think, but they were supposedly well guarded, far away from Earth.

  “Okay,” I said. Neat! I can update that part of the wiki now.

  “And you?” she asked me.

  “Ah. She/her, also. Do I, um, not look like it?”

  “Sure. But I try not to make assumptions. You let your men just walk around with you.”

  “Right. We do, don’t we.”

  Jesus, this was awkward. The lack of men among them was a cultural, and biological thing I didn’t understand. I wanted to ask her about it, but held my tongue.

  “So,” she said, “you’re building armor in the barn?”

  “Right to it, huh?”

  She gave me a nervous smile, then took one single sip of the soda.

  “Look, I ah, I usually just hit things,” she continued. “Or shoot them. The fact that we’re talking at all, is sorta weird.”

  “You’re not going to shoot me, right?”

  The gun on her back was insanely large. I guessed it was one of the new coilguns. Could be a railgun though.

  “Not if I don’t have to,” she said. “Certainly be easier though.” Her eyes looked away, and she said something I took to be a curse word. “Ah, man. That was a bad joke. I’m sorry. I just. I’m trained to fight robots mostly. We don’t fight people anymore.”

  “Right,” I said. “That’s good.”

  “Yeah,” she replied. A look of mild panic crossed her face.

  The conversation stopped there.

  “Oh! Right,” I said, stumbling over my words. “Yeah. So, I’m building armor in the barn.”

  “Cool. Or I guess. Not cool. Depending. What are you going to do with it?”

  “Fight robots. Help save the world.”

  “The war’s over. Just stragglers out there,” she said.

  “Emma thinks differently. Says that there’s something big on the horizon.”

  “Does she?” the alien asked. Her large black eyes studied me carefully. “What’s that?”

  “She won’t say.”

  “Hmm.”

  Kalea took a second sip of the soda, then put it on the railing. She sighed, the suit peeled open like a blooming flower, and she stepped out in one fluid motion. My brain had a hard time comprehending what I was seeing at first.

  She was hot. Like, unexpectedly hot.

  But I’m also not sure what I was expecting, though. She was all of maybe five feet, but, man, was she massive — like protein-shake-chugging, barbell-curling, biceps-the-size-of-my-head massive. She paced in front of me, agitated. I could see the power rippling beneath her muscled shoulders. Were they all like that, jacked?

  No.

  I’d seen other Aliens on TV. They were usually very shapely, and womanly. Word on the Intranet was that they looked hot because the spores, and pheromones in their floral cultures caused arousal. But if that was the case, why did they need to have tits like that?

  Lots of speculation on the Intranet about that also. The prevailing theory was that they were ‘seeded’ by the same extraterrestrial DNA as earth, that they were guided to be mammals like we were by some ancient designers.

  That didn’t make any sense to me. But then again, how else would you explain them looking like hot green women?

  Anyway! That’s right. I was talking to a Knight! I mean, not just my aunt, but an actual honest-to-God hero!

  I was staring again. That was rude.

  And I didn’t want to exotify her too much. She was a person. A person like me. Or well. Not like me. Twice my weight in muscle, and with a steely gaze that I found myself unable to break from.

  “You okay?” she asked with a wry grin, her eyes dancing around, always searching the surroundings.

  “Yeah. Just never seen a Knight up close.”

  “You’ve seen Emma.”

  “Right.”

  “Look, I just thought we could talk better without the suit, but you’re still being weird.”

  Her underlayer was different from the one I’d seen my aunt wear. Mostly grey and black, It pressed tight against her, giving her a boyish chest like they all did, but lacked any covering on her arms or back. For the arms, that was an odd vanity. For the back, I guessed it was to make sure her floral culture didn’t get squished.

  I mean, maybe I’d do something like that too, if I had arms like her. And her abs! Oh, man she had abs. I could see her obliques through her underlayer. She must be ripped. Just, absolutely shredded.

  “Hi,” I said, trying to focus, “my name is Kat.”

  “Hey, Kat. Kalea.”

  I put my hand out for her to shake. She took it firmly, but not uncomfortably, not like she had something to prove. I could feel the strength in her hands. They were rougher than my aunts.

  It was all so normal! I just shook hands with an Alien! No tentacle popped out to grab me. No more of those spores. Just a normal handshake.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, taking my hand back, absentmindedly.

  “Likewise,” she waited for me to get back to explaining myself.

  “My Aunt has been training me for this, for a long time,” I said. “I can use the suit responsibly.”

  “That’s not necessarily the issue, Kat. Why don’t you start at the beginning.”

  I started at the beginning. I told her how I’d always wanted to fight back. I told her about the stories I grew up with, about my aunt. I recounted how she just showed up a week ago with the fabricator, and asked me to help her design my own Knight armor.

  She listened patiently, interrupting only intermittently to ask a question here or there. Listening is a skill, and I felt like she knew it well.

  Then, I told her about the song, Morrigan’s song.

  “A song, huh?” she asked. “How does it go?”

  “Well, it doesn't really have any lyrics. It’s a piano piece.”

  “Okay, Kat, lead the way. Play me this song.”