Orra pressed her hand against her mother’s rough tree bark. It had been a while since she visited her birthplace. She had forgotten how it felt to sit upon an entity that transcended death. For her species—the Shids—it was normal to shift from a blood and flesh being into a sap and bark one. But on other planets, fewer and fewer beings remained alive after death. Rocks had taken the place of plants. The thought made Orra's jaw clench in horror.

 

She sat on the roots of the enormous beech, breathing in the strong aromatic fragrance of the tree. Her mother had grown and recovered well. The damage from the volcanic eruption two thousand years ago was no longer visible. Orra had no memories of when her mother had lived as a person. She didn’t know why she started visiting her as a tree, either. But there was something in the silence between blood relatives who had never met. After all, she owed her peculiar condition to this beech. Her biological mother should assume some responsibility for her disheveled life.

 

I am losing my temper and my sanity. She thought, rubbing her temples. For a Shid she had an awful lot of strong emotions. Maybe it was the long years, maybe it was the time she spent on other planets around more alert species.

 

She leaned against a branch and wrapped her hands around herself, grabbing the shoulders and melting into the soft texture of her codom. How long had it been since she wore her codom? She had forgotten how well the traditional cloth protected the sensitive skin of a Shid against the rough textures of reality.

 

‘I wish you would have made me a beech.’ Orra grimaced, scratching the dry bark with her trembling nails. ‘I’m tired of walking. No one should walk this long.’

 

The beech’s sprigs fluttered in the lazy breeze. Orra’s messy hair mingled in the leaves, and she felt their texture through the millions of nerve cells engrossing every tuft of it.

 

If she had the option, she would never leave this hill. Never would she turn her eyes to the vast universe out there. Her heart filled with aching desire to soak the soil with her blood and fatten it with her flesh. But she could not.

 

‘Sadella.’ A villager dragged her feet up the hill holding up the hems of her codom. ‘They are here. They will cut us down.’ The villager stopped in the shade of Orra’s mother, gasping and patting her wrinkled forehead.

 

Orra waited for her to catch her breath.

 

‘Apologies for the interruption,’ the villager mumbled.

 

‘No need to apologize.’ Orra stood, brushing the bark from her nails against her codom. ‘The conquering of our beloved planet is a good enough reason to interrupt a conversation.’ Orra smiled brightly and raised her eyes to the sky. The imperial battleships entered Galea’s atmosphere like a swarm of cicadas with red eyes. That fleet could turn their planet into a piece of coal in a matter of minutes.

 

‘They will exterminate us,’ the villager said.

 

‘We aren’t a threat to them. If they want to conquer us, then we will let them.’ Orra started down the hill at a slow pace. Shids had little to no sense of urgency. Not even in the face of total annihilation. Peace and serenity were hard-wired in them.

 

‘They will still kill us. They love blood, Sadella.’ The villager followed her steps on the forest path.

 

It was strange to have people call her Sadella after so long, but her duty toward Shids somehow still survived throughout the millennia, and it was always the thread she could cling to when there was nothing else left.

 

‘There will be deaths. Yes. But not as many as if we resisted. We can evacuate the planet before the diplomatic procedures are finished.’ Diplomacy always took more time than a war with the Empire. With some luck, no sapling would be left behind.

 

Orra turned toward her with a soft smile. ‘We and the Empire don’t cross paths. War cannot happen if there is nothing to share between us.’ Her eyes lifted once more, and her voice pressed in a heavy tone. ‘Nothing bonds us.’

 

The grim shadow of a massive spaceship engulfed both of them.