When the Human that had hit her noticed she’d seen him, he straightened up and spread his arms, “Wassat, abom? Want sommore?” Despite it being a heavily accented version of StEC, she understood enough – “abom”, short for “abomination”, a catchall epithet for anyone not Human.

She scanned him for a weapon, and finding none figured she may have underestimated the power of a Human fist. Still, she wondered what a full-force open strike from a Mraboran would do to a Human face. Either from boldness or stupidity, he showed no fear as she approached him, arms hanging limply at her side, a pose that may have looked entirely harmless, even comical, to someone unfamiliar, but to any Mraboran who saw would have been an obvious sign that blood was about to be spilled. A Mraboran did see, though, and risked putting himself in the line of fire to pull Angzal away from the street.

“Don’t be daft,” Rzena hissed at her in Mraboran, though his speech was somewhat slurred, prompting the Humans to make crude meowling noises in mock imitation as the two of them retreated, shoving past the law enforcement officers and out of the suffocating strangle of the march. Here, the pedestrians thinned out quickly, and only two blocks later they felt safe enough to slow down.

“I can’t believe you were actually about to fight them,” Rzena said, annoyed, as if it was him who’d had to drag her half-conscious bug-eyed self over that bridge.

“Me!?” She whirled on him, considering for a moment that it hardly mattered which individual served as an outlet for her rage and wondered where the same fire had been when she had to drag him out of there all on her own. “They’re the ones that attacked us first.”

“A few glancing blows. You think that would have been enough to justify a Mraboran diplomat disemboweling a few non-consequential Humans? I can almost imagine the headlines back home. Or is it that you seriously don’t want to keep this job, do you?”

“Forget the job, I’d rather live.”

“Exactly.”

Looking into his eyes, the right squinting from the swelling on his brow, she took his impatient exasperated tone for what it was – gratitude that he could never express in so many words.

So she dropped it, and they continued to put distance between themselves and the protesters until their presence no longer caused that ripple in the air that Angzal picked up on when they had left the restaurant. Rzena walked with a slight limp that he looked to be trying to hide but couldn’t avoid, so Angzal made no mention of it. As for her own injury, she touched the back of her skull and realized quickly that unless she enjoyed the sensation of a hot needle stabbing through her head temple to temple, then she should probably not do that anymore. Angzal knew the prudent thing to do would be to get it checked out by a doctor, but she had no appetite for dealing with Human xenobiologists, and the one Mraboran clinic in town would not be open at this hour. She wondered if Rzena had walked himself through the same equations yet.

“How’s your head?” she asked.

Rzena put a hand to his brow and then studied his fingers. “Bleeding’s stopped.”

“That’s good.”

He chortled at that. “Yeah, I guess it is.” He touched it again, seemingly harder this time since he winced and like Angzal thought better of poking around again.

They were passing in front of the consulate offices. The only evidence that this was the starting point of tonight’s conflagration were an abundance of litter, a sign with a snapped handle tossed to the curb and several abandoned low metal fences, for posterity, to show that some effort to control the crowds had obviously been made.

“You think you’re going to get that checked out tonight?” Angzal motioned with her head to Rzena’s swollen brow that continued its advance over his eye.

“I’ll live,” he answered, and then with a shrug added, “probably.”

“Yeah, I’ve also seen enough Humans for one evening.” A rowdy group of locals stepped out of a nearby restaurant and onto the street. By all accounts, and Angzal knew this, they had nothing to do with the others, and were simply having a good time, not even paying any mind to the two Mraboran. Still, they both made the silent decision to cross the street and out of their path, walking at a pace that was uncomfortable for Rzena until their paths diverged a few minutes later and Angzal offered to see him to his door.

“Don’t bother,” he said, and there was a pang of something akin to sorrow in Angzal to hear him sound his age. It looked as if something else was dancing on the tip of his tongue, perhaps some kind of joke or comment he wanted to use to brush the whole series of events under the rug, clear the slate. Instead, all he said was “Good night” and turned to head home.

She waited for him to disappear behind a corner before going on her way.

For Angzal at least, any notion of home was still lightyears away. Nothing about her apartment suggested any sort of sanctuary and, given the throbbing that now ballooned where the Humans had struck her, even the possibility of lying on her back in her strange bed on this strange planet and staring up into a painfully boring white ceiling to put this whole day away was taken from her.