At Cassie’s suggestion of teaching the alien morse code, Sarge smirked, the corners of his bearded lips flicking upwards. The leader of Grier folded his arms across his belly and paced as he thought, giving Cassie a few more moments to try to finish convincing him it was possible. The extra-terrestrial could not form English words with his exoskeletal lips and proboscis, but he could click and chatter his mandibles underneath his gas mask. Luckily for Cassie and Mr. Bean, Sarge was accommodating.

“All right,” He said, throwing his black leather jacket back and resting his hands on his belt. “He can live, and he can learn morse code. On three conditions. Firstly, you’re going to teach him. I don’t have the time or patience to work with a creature that doesn’t even understand the English language to begin with, but I will help you learn the codes and sounds. Secondly, you’re responsible if Bean, as you call him, goes AWOL, and you’re also responsible for feeding and taking care of it. Have fun with that. He’ll be locked up in the smaller bunker storage room at all times. Anything you need, swing it by me first. The final condition for letting him live is that I want information. Patrol routes. Caravans. Information on how their technology works, such as what kind of fuel they burn to power it, how we can adapt it, and how to re-charge the alien firearms we have. Transmission radios and the frequencies they use. All of it, but most importantly, I want a ship.”

Cassie, Dan, Oscar, and Jen all dropped their jaws in stunned silence. Sarge grinned devilishly. A half dozen questions raced through her mind, so many that it seemed impossible right from the beginning.

“A ship?” Cassie blurted. “Are you crazy? How do you plan on commandeering a Culicidae ship? Let alone how do we pilot it, hide it in Grier, staff it? There’s no way.”

Sarge shrugged his shoulders. “Those ships of theirs are more than just a form of transportation. I’ve seen bugs dash inside with empty guns and malfunctioning armor just to come out spankin’ new. They’re maybe even more than warships. I’d wager they practically mobile bases with enough guns, equipment, and power to continually churn out battle-ready bugs. And we may not be able to pilot it in an efficient manner, but if our blood-sucking friend can bring a single ship back here we would nearly have every tool that the invaders do in one fell swoop. Radios, attack patterns, logistics, and that technology to boot. We could learn so much from just one daring move, and I want you to find out how we can pull it off. Do you understand? Don’t find out if we can do it, tell me how. Dan, since you seem to be on Cassie’s side, I want you to help her out on this lofty goal of hers.”

Dan’s cheeks were pale, and it was not on account of his injured leg. “All of it?”

“All of it. First teach it to communicate with us, get the information we need from it, then form a written plan listing what you think our most feasible options are.” Sarge’s blue eyes swept over them. “Are the two of you clear on this?”

Cassie swallowed, then nodded in silence. Dan, however, had a bit of harder time accepting it. Raising his hands in protest, he asked, “What if Bean’s not even a pilot? What if he was just a grunt?”

“Even grunts know how the basics of things work. If anything, he can sneak into Culicidae territory and hold a pilot at gunpoint. I don’t care. Oscar, take our new ally down to the bunker, if you would. And be gentle. We need it compliant. Jen, if you would kindly finish patching up Dan’s missing foot, then see if we can get him a prosthetic, I would appreciate it. I will be starting these two bug-saviors’ first lesson in morse code within the hour.” Sarge smiled that evil smile again, unsettling Cassie until he turned away.

As much as she did not want to leave Mr. Bean’s wellbeing in Oscar’s hands, with the old man as aggressive as he had been, she didn’t have a choice. With a little cajoling, motioning with her hands, and smiles on her face, she seemed to help the alien understand that he was going with Oscar, who had holstered his gun at Sarge’s command but kept his hand on it. Cassie watched them go, Bean pausing just before the steps to look back at her. Even through the dark goggles of his gas mask, she could tell he was confused. With a final flick of her wrists, he understood and walked out of the room with Oscar.

When Sarge returned to the living room twenty minutes later, a book and papers in hand, Jen was already finished cleaning and wrapping Dan’s stubby ankle. Dropping the study material on the coffee table, and then himself on a reclining chair, Sarge began his lesson in earnest. Cassie had not known much about morse code other than it involved clicking or beeping noises to transmit letters across long distances, but Sarge explained that the system’s creation was intended as a means of faster communication, too.

Firstly, there were dots and dashes, each representing a short or long sound. Every letter and number had a specific combination of these. As reference, Sarge produced a chart and handed it to Dan and Cassie. Glancing over Dan’s shoulder, the chart held two family trees starting, one starting with a ’t’ and one with an ‘e’. Both trees split off into two different branches below, then again, and again, growing lower until the entire alphabet was displayed. For every branch to the left one went to reach the desired letter, one would add a dash, while a movement down the right branch added a short dot.

“There’s two ways you can learn morse code,” Sarge said, holding up his fingers. “One is by memorizing this chart, or always having it on you, and writing down the code as it comes and translating it afterwards by referencing your chart. It’s fast and easy learning, but experts in the code don’t suggest you learn what it looks like, because once you learn what morse code looks like it’s harder to for your brain to learn how to translate audio in real-time later on. So we’re going to master the audio right from the get-go. There’ll be no chart.” He snatched the paper out of Dan’s hand, who seemed a bit disgruntled.

“The best way to learn the audio method is by associating a phrase with each letter’s morse code, where the syllables of the phrase match the short dots and long dashes of the letter’s morse code. Pairing the code with a sound will also make it easier for you to make sense of it in real-time. For example, the letter ‘a’ consists of a dot and a dash, and associates well with the word ‘apart’. The ‘a’ is the short dot, ‘part’ is the long dash. See? It matches with the syllables. A-part. The letter ‘a’.”

Cassie nodded. Maybe learning the code wouldn’t be so hard after all.

With a smile, Sarge said, “A good phrase for remembering ‘p’ is ‘a poo-pee smell’. Can you guess what the code is for ‘p’?”

Cassie chuckled at the goofy-ness of the phrase. It was certainly a way to remember it. Repeating the words aloud a few times seemed to help her figure it out. “Dot, dash, dash, dot?”

With a loud clap of his hands, Sarge said, “Yes. Good. Now let’s break down all the letters together. I’ll let you write these down. Here.”

And so they studied. With Sarge for a few hours, and then by themselves, for days. Tapping out sounds with their pencils slowly, they first worked to memorize the phrases and corresponding sound patterns for each letter, quizzing one another at random before moving on to full words. Dan and Cassie spent hours practicing each day between their other chores around Grier.

Tending to Bean and trying to keep him as comfortable as possible was a chore on its own. Not a full day in, she caught him pouring water over his bug-like skin and wetting his entire shell. At first, she thought he was simply bathing himself and gave him more water, but the frequency that he wetted himself seemed off. Every day he would go through a five-gallon cooler of water, far more than any citizen of Grier was allowed in such a time frame.

Over a few days, she realized that something must have been bothering his skin and noticed that in some places his bug-like shell had hairline cracks and water seemed to soothe him. She thought about the suits that Culicidae usually wore and realized it must be Earth’s air. The alien needed more humidity in the air. A day later, she provided him with a humidifier and that seemed to stop a majority of his waste of water.

Feeding Bean was a task that she could only bear to watch once, to learn and see how she might accommodate him. When he took off his gas mask and revealed his big fly-like eyes, black mandibles, she came to realize a multitude of things. Cassie had heard that Culicidae had a proboscis like a mosquito, but Mr. Bean had no such thing. Only a stub just above his mouth, that looked more like like a nose than a blood-sucking tube, was damaged and scarred. While he had a mouth to consume meat, blood was what he truly wanted.

The first food she brought him was a rabbit she had trapped the night before. The moment his mask was off, he winced and groaned in what Cassie first assumed was hunger pains. He was quick about eating, thankfully, and even more frantic to put his mask back on. Once it was, he seemed astoundingly relieved. Only then did she realize that even with the added humidity for his skin, the air in the bunker was still incredibly uncomfortable to him.

The gas mask seemed to help filter whatever it was that hurt him, so Cassie came back with an air purifier to Sarge’s dismay. He didn’t want a second device in the alien’s cell. Mr. Bean was now using more power from the few gas-powered generators they had hidden in the barns above than all of the other people in Greir, but Cassie got his permission eventually. It seemed to ease his pain into discomfort during the times that Bean ate, but he never parted with his gas mask for long.

Occasionally the other kids, Evaline in most cases, teased her harder than they ever had before. Some said that it was only natural for an orphan to house an orphan, while others questioned if Cassie was in love. Like she was Beauty and Mr. Bean was the Beast, her only chances of finding love were with a Culicidae. That and more, the barrage was never-ending, but Cassie was determined to ignore them. The few times she did lose her temper, she argued that the others wished they could be given such an important task, to matter. That made Evil-ine’s cheeks turn red, and Cassie relished in her jealousy.

By the end of the first week Dan and her felt that they had enough of a grasp of morse code to start teaching Bean. Going in, they had not assumed that teaching something they were so new to themselves would be easy, but they had also not expected it to be quite so difficult. Turns out, when her pupil was an inter-galactic alien who had no concept of human letters or speech, things got a little complicated.

They started off with their names. Cassie pointing to herself, tapping out her name, then to Dan, and lastly Mr. Bean himself. It took dozens of rounds before Bean even seemed to realize that they were trying to communicate with him, but once he did he seemed to excel. Making clicking and chattering noises with his mandibles was a part of his native tongue, the only difficult thing was getting him to understand what they were referring to with the pattern of the taps of their pencils. Switching from names of people to the names of species confused him. What was once ‘Cassie’ and ‘Dan’ were now both ‘human’, and ‘Bean’ was ‘Culicidae’. When Bean finally responded with Cassie Dan Human, Bean Culicidae, they knew he understood.

Then they moved onto harder things; nouns. Using books with pictures as references, they taught him the most important things first: the morse code patterns for gun, ammunition, electricity, sky, ground, vehicle, water, and more. With a basic vocabulary of words, they moved on to more abstract things like feelings, verbs, and adjectives, which were the hardest. Cassie tried to emulate ‘cold’ by shivering, or smelly by plugging her nose. The latter confused Bean to no end and they had to give up trying to teach him what smell was.

Many days were fraught with endless frustration for everyone, but repetition and correction had Mr. Bean repeating full sentences within a month. When he crafted his first shoddy sentence of his own volition, Cassie give Bean water food, a great weight lifted from her shoulders. He was making progress, all on account of their hard work. The feeling of joy and accomplishment she felt was far stronger than when she taught Scout a new trick. They were getting somewhere. A few more weeks passed, and she asked him about his species and ships, about why the Culicidae came to Earth and the beginning of the information that Sarge was pushing so hard for.

Culicidae ships from sky far away, Bean chattered. Many skies. Culicidae no eat, no grow. Culicidae die fast. No eat, no grow, no Culicidae. Fly sky ships to find food. Many skies.

Cassie nodded, understanding that Bean was saying his species travels from planet to planet and that there were many of them. I understand, Cassie said with the tip of her pencil. No food, no Culicidae. But why Earth? The air is poison to Culicidae. Why did Culicidae come to Earth with bad air?

Bad air, Bean agreed. But food. Culicidae fix air. Not hard, just long time. Fix air, grow food, eat.

Cassie’s eyes narrowed. She turned to Dan, who sat nearby, and asked for insight.

“I don’t know,” Dan said. “Ask him.”

Fix air? She asked.

Yes.

In ships? In suit?

Yes. No.

Yes in ships, no in suit?

No and yes.

Cassie groaned and rubbed her eyes in frustration, but she was determined to get to the bottom of this. She tried again, saying, Fix air where?

Sky. Earth. Fix Earth air for Culicidae.

How?

For the first time, Mr. Bean looked away as though something bothered him. He thought for a long moment and Cassie dared not to intrude. Finally, he said, Big… houses. Big houses fix air. Culicidae air bad air for human and animal. Take animals... Humans... underneath houses. Food below houses. Animals grow. Humans grow. Food below houses grow. Culicidae grow. Big house fix Earth air for Culicidae… No human Earth. Human just food…

Cassie froze in place, unable to move or speak except for her racing heart. Bean wasn’t just talking about the eradication of humans, he was talking about colonization. About cultivation. Human cultivation. About terraforming the planet until it was more hospitable to the Culicidae. This was more than an invasion, this was slavery of the human species. To them, humans were nothing more than pigs and cattle to feed their growing numbers. How many people were captives underneath these big houses? The thought terrified her. The Culicidae were driven by hunger and the threat of death, moving from planet to planet colonizing and enslaving other species. They were, in so many ways more than just their bug-like exoskeletons, cosmic locusts.

Dan was the first to snap out of the grip of paralyzing fear. He scooted his chair across the room, to the table, took up his pencil and tapped the message, How much time until the big houses fix the air?

For the first time, Mr. Bean exhibited his first human-like motion: he shrugged his shoulders and said nothing. Dan repeated the question, substituting ‘time’ with ‘days’ in the hopes he simply didn’t understand the question. Bean’s response was disheartening.

Bean don’t know. Maybe soon. Bean gone from Culicidae long time. Only Bean now.

That spurred on more questions in Cassie’s brain. She asked, Why did Bean leave the Culicidae? She had always wanted to know why he was alone, and why he saved her life by killing what must have been his brothers in arms.

With a crusty, black finger, he poked at his gas mask where a human nose would be. Damaged…. Mouth. Culicidae… chase Bean away. Hard eat, so Bean deformed. To Culicidae, Bean monster. Outcast. No house for Bean with Culicidae. Only Bean now. Bean and Cassie.

Even though he had used the morse pattern for ‘mouth’, Cassie knew he was referring to his proboscis. She remembered what it looked like and shuddered. He was ugly for sure, apparently even by his own species’ standards, but she wanted to know more. Gripping her pencil, she asked, Why Bean protect Cassie? Why Bean kill Culicidae?

The alien was quiet for a moment, the tinted glass of his mask like shimmering orbs in the florescent lighting. In time, he said, Bean no house long time. Live in woods. Hide from Culicidae. Hungry for food, hungry for… He stopped for a moment, unable to find the right word. Bean alone. Bean learn in woods. Help other humans and other humans help Bean. Earth… good.

A minute passed in silence. Then another, until Dan interjected their thoughts. Where is big house? One or many?

Many, Bean said. One big house close.

So, big house fix Earth air soon. Big house close. Does big house have ship?

Cassie glanced over at Dan, realizing what he was getting at. He seemed to sense her questions coming and put a finger up, shushing her and letting him continue talking with Bean.

Big house has ship.

Bean take us to big house? Turn off big house? …Outcast humans? Fly sky ship?

The alien leaned back in his seat, seemingly surprised. Crossing his arms in another human gesture, he said, Bean no fly, but ship fly ship a little. Cassie, Dan want turn off big house? Okay, Bean help, but Bean get ship when finished.

Why Bean get ship? Cassie asked.

Culicidae catch some humans. Not Bean. Culicidae kill Bean, so Bean fly sky. Earth doomed, so Bean find new home.

Before Cassie could respond again, Dan stood upright, pushing his chair out behind him. Looking down at her, he said, “We’ve got to tell Sarge.”