She was also able to consider his actions, and how she might have misinterpreted them. Though he’d given her a drug that made her calm and happy, he hadn’t made any move to take advantage of her. In fact, other than that first moment after she’d put on the dress and caught his fixed stare at her body straining the silky fabric, he’d shown no other sexual interest in her. If that had even been what he was showing then. She could have easily misread him, given his alien features.
He also didn’t seem keen on killing her, though the disgusting necklace showed that he held no qualms about killing humans. Perhaps it had something to do with aggression. The other bodies in the pit had all been wearing uniforms, from what she’d seen, and there had probably been more weapons in the gruesome pile than the one she’d found. Maybe he only killed humans who threatened him.
She wished she could ask him questions that he could comprehend and answer. If nothing else, finding some commonalities between them and building a rapport with him could end up saving her life if he still had some intention of killing her. The drug he’d given her would undoubtedly wear off, leaving her belly feeling empty and bereft of the warmth that now filled it, and her mind capable of straying back to the dark places it had been trapped in when he’d presented the mug of liquid. He’d done so in a bizarrely twisted position that had him crouching towards her sideways with his head turned away and his neck exposed.
There had to be some significance to that strange behavior. She’d noticed, even in the state she’d been in, that he’d approached her with caution, slowly, like she was a wild animal. She didn’t think her vicious bite had made him feel that threatened. Certainly not given the size disparity between them and the fact that he had natural weapons in his teeth, claws, and spines, in addition to whatever dart gun he’d used to take her down initially.
He hadn’t ripped her head off after she bit him, an act she now recognized as incredibly stupid, but she’d been in a fog at the time. She’d still been confused and delusional about her chances of escaping him. Now, she was calm enough to understand that she would have to temper her natural fight or flight instinct, and put more consideration into how she acted around him. Miscommunications could get her killed.
And misinterpreting his intent could land her in an even worse fate.
“Jotaha,” she said, noting the way his focus on her somehow grew more alert, his head spines half lifting from his scaly scalp, before he lifted a hand to smooth them flat.
“Ssarah,” he responded, drawing out the “s.”
She pointed to herself. “Just Sarah. You don’t need the extra s.”
He cocked his head in clear confusion, so she repeated her name without drawing out the first letter a couple of times.
“Sarah,” he dutifully repeated after she’d fallen silent, proving that he could say it without the hiss. Proving that they might even learn to communicate effectively with patience.
“Jotaha.”
He watched her expectantly, no doubt wondering what the purpose of her repeating his name was. She fumbled for something else to say. She’d already rambled on and on for quite some time, and he hadn’t seemed to pick up any meaning from her words, but at least saying them had felt strangely therapeutic for her. At some point, she knew she would face more emotional fallout from what had happened in that mine, and Beth’s abandonment, assuming she lived long enough.
For now, she just wanted answers. Craved them so much that even the drug didn’t dull the strong desire for explanations. It wasn’t merely her survival concerns that had her wishing they could understand each other. She was face to face with a literal alien, a “monster” the likes of which belonged only in sci fi, fantasy, and horror fiction. She’d played enough video games to have seen so many variants of lizard-men that facing one now shouldn’t have been so bizarre, but in all her escapism into fiction, she’d never really believed she’d actually meet a living, breathing alien.
He wasn’t wearing clothes at the moment, but he’d been dressed in some kind of armor when she’d first encountered him, though her terror had been so great that she might have only imagined him dressed like some kind of barbarian lizard warrior.
He certainly wasn’t sporting anything that appeared high tech or space-aged. His pack appeared to be made of animal skin, and the weapon he’d felled her with hadn’t been a death ray, but rather a dart gun. The mug he’d given her had been made of fired and glazed clay from the looks of it. The only difficult to explain items were the “coals” in the firepit.
She’d stared at them long enough now to notice that they were more like river stones than charcoal, and they put out a surprising amount of heat and light. Some alien kind of technology, or a natural phenomenon found in this underground cave system? Unfortunately, Jotaha couldn’t answer in a way she could understand.
The seam she’d crossed over had been very odd too, and could be another example of advanced alien technology. Some kind of cloaking device or some other tech to keep humans out—or trap them in, which seemed to be the more likely purpose, given the death pit. Whatever caused that seam, she had a distinct suspicion that she would not have been captured by Jotaha if she hadn’t stepped over the line.
Of course, she would have probably starved to death in that mine if she hadn’t, since there was no way she was getting back up the shaft. There was also the whole issue of the freaking bat-cat furry monster that she’d accidentally killed. It likely wasn’t the only one in those caves, and its intention to rip her to shreds had not been questionable. She might actually be safer with Jotaha, who looked like he could handle a bat-cat with ease if another one followed her trail down the mine shaft.
“Sarah,” Jotaha suddenly said, breaking the long silence that had fallen as she’d debated what her next step needed to be.
She shifted her attention from the river coals back to Jotaha, realizing that she’d been staring into their strange, pulsing glow like she was in a trance. A side effect of the drug, or perhaps something caused by the stones themselves, she couldn’t be certain.
Once he had her full attention, Jotaha pointed to her with his injured hand. He glanced at the bitemark that had scabbed over with a slight narrowing of his eyes, then returned his gaze to her. “Sarah, drahi arxi Jotaha.”
“Draw he?” She knew she’d heard that before from him. “Ar-chee?” She wasn’t able to add the strange hiss on the second set of sounds that he had, but she hoped he understood her attempt anyway.
Perhaps encouraged by her repetition of the words, Jotaha spoke in a rapid-fire way, interspersing that odd hiss into some of his speech that she suspected was part of their language. The sounds all ran together in his apparent excitement that they were communicating. When he fell silent, she almost felt sorry for him when she had to shake her head and shrug at his expectant look.
She might not understand his words, but his body language was closer to human than one would expect from such an alien creature. At her head shake, he seemed to deflate, leaning forward in his cross-legged sitting position to rest his elbows on his legs, his broad shoulders rounding with defeat as he stared into the pulsing river coals. He muttered something beneath his breath, occasionally making a soft hissing sound.