“Forget the fence—look at the sky.” Danielle pointed towards the huge metal pyramid and Brav gasped.
A beam of pink energy as thick as a building was shooting straight out of the top of the sacred pyramid. It shot into the sky like an enormous laser beam, piercing far into the blackness above.
“That’s fucking amazing,” Brav said, still staring. “You think it’s coming from the Mother Stone?”
“Where else?” Danni frowned. “I wonder if it’s some kind of radiation?”
“Radiation?” Brav frowned. “What are you saying, little girl? Are you and I going to start growing extra body parts if we hang around here too long? A third eye or another nose or some shit like that?”
“Or maybe our heads will just get a lot bigger—like the H’rakens,” Danielle pointed out.
“Don’t know how I feel about that,” Brav growled. “I want to make this alliance for the good of the Mother Ship, but if we’re talking about living and working in hazardous conditions, I know Commander Sylvan would want us to come back.”
“Well, it doesn’t seem to have done the H’rakens any kind of lasting harm.” Danielle frowned thoughtfully. “Wait—I have a detection instrument in my carry-all—I can test it.”
They went back inside and she got out a small instrument from her carry-all cube and pointed it carefully at the pink energy coming from the fireplace. After a moment, the instrument beeped and a green light appeared on its display.
“Hmm…” Danni turned it over and studied the read-out carefully.
Brav waited impatiently as she frowned over the instrument.
“Well?” he asked at last. “Am I going to start growing a third ball or what, little girl?”
“I don’t think so.” Danni frowned at her instrument again. “If this is correct, this pink beam is a kind of radiation, but not a harmful kind.”
“There’s radiation that’s not harmful?” Brav didn’t know if he believed that.
“Yes. You see, with regular radiation, the radioactive particles that are small enough to pass through your body can disrupt your DNA—break the bonds between the chemical bases, which causes mutations—sometimes fatally so. But this stuff…” She gestured at the pink energy beam passing through the fireplace. “Seems to be actually repairing instead of disrupting.”
“Repairing?” Brav frowned skeptically. “What, you mean like, it’s healing us or something?”
“Maybe. It may be more like a detoxification process.” She pressed some buttons on her detector and ran it over herself and then over him. “Yes—it seems to be purging our bodies of impurities. It’s almost like a de-aging process.”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind that,” Brav admitted. “Once a male gets into his fifties, there are more aches and pains than there used to be. And old war wounds tend to bother you more than they did.”
“I don’t have any war wounds, but I have to admit I’m not as limber as I was when I was younger,” Danielle said thoughtfully. “There are some yoga poses I just can’t manage anymore. But right now, I feel like I could do a Crow Pose with no problem!”
“Crow Pose?” Brav shook his head when she started to explain. “Never mind. The point is, this weird pink power isn’t harmful and might actually be healthy for us?” he clarified.
“That’s what it seems like.” She looked at her device again and nodded. “It’s really pretty amazing. Maybe this explains why everyone in town is in such good health. I guess they don’t need a doctor after all.” She looked up at Brav. “Speaking of which, why did you tell them I wasn’t a doctor at dinner?”
Brav explained what he’d seen at the weaver’s house and how Gosef had healed his wife, Teezle, just by kissing her wound.
Danielle’s eyes widened as she understood.
“So it’s a kind of sexual healing, in a way? And only spouses heal each other?”
“Exactly, little girl,” Brav told her. “So if you said you wanted to ‘heal’ everyone in town—”
“They would have thought I was some kind of prostitute or loose woman!” Danielle shook her head. “Okay, I didn’t get it at the time, but you really saved me there. Thanks for stopping me from ruining my own reputation.”
“Anytime, little girl. We have to get each other’s backs here—this is one of the weirdest first contacts I’ve ever been on,” Brav admitted.
“It is? I was wondering if this kind of thing is, uh, normal.” She cleared her throat. “Especially what happened during the, uh, feast.”
Brav felt a rush of guilt.
“About that—I’m really fucking sorry they made me, uh, fondle you. I know you think I’m an asshole but I’m not that kind of asshole—I would never normally touch a female against her will.”
“I believe you,” Danielle said simply. “And I won’t hold it against you—I mean, you were kind of stuck between a rock and hard spot, as we say in my culture.”
Brav was relieved.
“I’m glad you see it like that. I would hate for you to think I’d take advantage of the situation to, uh, grope you.”