Aila’s Luminous Colors

Summer had come and almost gone, and the slow, quiet heat of August was making its presence felt Topside, as the Catacombs dwellers often called it. The Catacombs, being underground, were a fairly constant temperature, but most of its inhabitants had to go up to the surface once in a while. It was a strange study in contrasts, the quiet, cool underground life lived in electrical lighting and the occasional skylight, and the noisy, crowded, sunshine-filled days above ground. A coat rack was left near the main exit to the L’aide Alchemique part of the tunnels, not for people to get a coat as they left, during this season, but to leave their jacket, hoodie, or what-have-you when they went above.

Aila’s wings had grown another foot in each direction, a foot and a half including her largest flight feathers, and had gained a measure of color. Her parents still had not found her, nor the police; she was still dodging them, and her wings made it harder than ever to hide. However, she felt that it was time to try to make contact with her old friend Irène, whom she had unhappily left hanging. She would have to rely on the old standby of wearing a hat, and hoping no one would think of how she might have changed. For her wings were not the only part of her growing; her body had not forgotten her normal human teenage growth. Aile had always been a skinny girl, but Aila was noticeably more curvy already.

She asked Dr. Halalo’s opinion, since, once again, she did not want a repeat of her previous faux pas with the consent form.

He squinted at her as if he was looking through her somehow. “Yes, very nice job. I’m guessing that particular issue will soon come to its conclusion,” he said mysteriously, and turned back around on his stool to work on papers at his desk. “Not the larger one, but that one, yes.”

Aila stood there for a moment, extremely confused. She was about to ask him what he meant when he waved a pen-holding hand over his head and said, “Sure, sounds good, be careful out there. Éloa.”

She gave him a wasted sarcastic look, and left his office with a quick “thanks” over her shoulder.

Dr. Halalo smiled and returned to his work.

Aila had donned her hat, shorts, and a special tank top designed for wings. She took with her, in her bag, sunglasses, wallet, and other sundries. Walking along the main hallway in the “colonized” part of the Catacombs, she had a converted hoodie as well. Past a door, the hallway suddenly and abruptly gave way to old, old stones and darkness. She switched on a flashlight and began the trek out.

This time, she emerged near the Cardinal Lemoine Métro station. Rather than exiting the station and ascending the stairs, she found the pay phone, inserted her card, and dialed Irène.

“Come on... please don’t have moved...”

Someone answered. Aila almost didn’t recognize her because her voice had become ever so slightly deeper, but it was Irène.

“Irène?” she asked tentatively.

“Yes. Who is this?” Irène gasped. “It couldn’t be Ai... uhm... Midnight?” Aila smiled at her friend’s use of her old nickname, actually feeling thankful; Irène’s parents might have heard her say her old name.

“Correct, Agent Daylight. Except I’m Aila now. Can you meet me somewhere? I’ve missed you so much.” That last came out as more of a half-cry than Aila would have liked.

“Yes, yes, definitely!” Irène responded with more than a little of her own emotion evident in her voice. “Where?”

“Let’s meet somewhere central that’s full of tourists and other people. La dame de fer?” The Eiffel Tower.

Irène giggled at Aila’s joking words. “Sure, why not? When?”

“Can you come in an hour? And please don’t tell anyone.”

Irène’s hand went over the phone and she called out to her mother in the background. A short conversation ensued, and Irène came back.

“I’ll see you there.”

Aila switched trains several times on her way to the Champ de Mars, reflecting that it was a good thing she was receiving a stipend for all her work in the Catacombs. Her delivery tip money had long since dried up. That led her to wonder, not for the first time, where L’aide Alchemique got all of their money, because it clearly took some funds to keep everything running. Another mystery for another day, she thought.

Exiting the station, she headed toward the iconic tower.

Aila found Irène waiting for her under the tower itself. She also found herself the target of as giant of a bear hug as another girl her age could give her. Irène carefully avoided Aila’s wings so as not to damage them.

“Mon dieu, A... Aila! They’re so beautiful...” Irène trailed off in wonder. Aila had been excitedly flapping her wings a little bit at meeting her friend again, and she now looked down a bit and blushed.

“Thank you,” she said finally. “Others have not thought so. But to me... they’re a wonder. They’re everything I could’ve wished for, except actually flying with them. That has to wait for them to get a little bit bigger, still.”

Irène tentatively repeated the same question that had gotten Aila in trouble last winter. “Can I touch them?”

“It’s supposed to be a taboo thing,” Aila replied. “And it’s not something that others should see, or they might get the wrong idea. But since you’re my best friend...” She gestured toward the hedges near the base, and walked over between one, so fewer people could see. Aila slowly spread one wing to the side. “This makes me so nervous,” she said with a giggle. “It feels like baring my soul. How did Kuléo ever give me that wing hug?”

Irène gasped before she’d even had a chance to touch Aila’s wing. The wing backs started close to her back and along the tops in black, a black as dark as midnight, as dark as her hair, and faded gently to an almost iridescent blue. Toward the bottoms, some feathers were blue with warm, light gray stripes; others were solid blue; and still others were blue with delicate black stripes. The other side of her wings faded from that same iridescent blue through a sky blue, and on to a warm almost-white. Upon closer inspection, Irène could see little downy feathers throughout all the others, where the wing muscles themselves laid. She very gently reached out and felt the flight feathers, and further up, the downy feathers. “It’s real...” Irène breathed. Her hand dropped.

Aila let out a breath, and folded her wings back. But she was smiling. She was proud of them, too.

“How,” Irène began, “could something so amazing, so beautiful... how could it be a deformity? How could it be wrong? But that’s what they’re saying about you in the old circle. I wonder what they’d think if they saw...”

“I guess we’ll find out sooner or later,” was all she said in response.

“You’ve certainly got less to worry about when it comes to picking out colors for clothes,” Irène said jokingly.

Aila smiled at that. “I think it happened when I first came into the place where they were set to growing,” she said. “He asked me what I wanted to be called, and it just came out... Midnight. I wonder.”

They walked back toward the tower while Aila told her friend some of what had happened to give her wings. It was an abbreviated version, and it felt weak to Aila, being told second-hand and in the bright of day. She just shrugged and her wings gave a little flap in response.

“Isn’t that adorable?” a grandmother asked a grandchild in English, pointing at Aila and Irène. “One of our little girls, best friends with a lez-vollunts.” Aila winced at her pronunciation but pretended not to notice; it was still always music to her ears to hear comments like that.

They bought tickets to take the elevators up to the top.

“Just think, Irène,” Aila said, as they looked down the Champ de Mars and off toward the horizon. “One day, I’ll be able to go to the top and just jump off and fly into the sunset. Not yet, but it can’t be too much longer. They’re getting so big.” She glanced back up at one wing she’d extended forward a little.

Irène shuddered. “Oh, don’t talk to me about such things.”

Aila laughed. “I forgot, you do have a fear for heights.” Irène nodded and they both laughed.

The two of them spent the next two hours catching up on everything they’d missed over the last several months. When they were back down on the grass, Aila motioned Irène to an empty area where they could continue their conversations without being overheard.

“Oh, this heat!” Irène exclaimed, wiping sweat from her face for what seemed like the fiftieth time. Aila smiled and started waving a wing at her, providing a considerable instant breeze. “Wow, practical value even now!”

“Hey, what can I say, they move air,” Aila replied. “Hmm, I wonder.” She stopped flapping at her friend and started flapping at the ground. Then she did it harder, and more quickly. The grass was flattening under the wind she was creating, and she had the strangest sense that she was lighter than she had been. A look of wonder came over her face. “Not yet,” she said finally, and folded them away. “But wow.”

“That was pretty cool,” Irène said. “You’ve got to let me know when you can fly. I want to see it so badly.”

“I will. I definitely will.”

They talked for a little while longer, sitting on the grass. Even now, Aila had to tilt her wings a little so they wouldn’t be a problem with the ground.

The sun started going down and they finally had to leave. The two girls made plans to meet up again some time soon and headed back home; Irène to her parents, Aila to the Catacombs.

I guess that’s home now, she thought. It was a strangely agreeable thought.

The week after her meeting with Irène, Aila began to meet with a native young woman of Hunéa. The goal of L’aide Alchemique was to allow its “HtK” seekers to be able to blend in somewhat to the existing Ka’aulele society on Earth. Many Ka’aulele children had been born on Earth who seemingly could not cross the aurora into Hunéa, so it was increasingly common for them to have a native French accent and know little about their ancestral homeland; but they were all at least conversant in the Ka’aulele language and culture, and they had grown up hearing the stories of their parents’ lives before coming to Earth.

Conversely, the “KtH” seekers were able to immerse themselves into and learn the Parisian culture without much trouble. The greater diversity of the local population and the expectation of differences compared to the “HtK” seekers among the Na’aulele were helpful. But Aila still spent time with both the KtH seekers and the Na’aulele trying to help teach them what she could.

Every little thing Aila could learn about the Ka’aulele world and culture was like a drop of water on the most parched desert. She drank it all in with relish. Today’s lesson was on language.

“Ahh eee oooo ehhh ohhh,” Aila dutifully repeated. These vowels were familiar to her from French, but she had to work to pronounce them in the subtly different way her tutor spoke them.

“Yes, that’s good,” she said. “But ’ahh’ is somewhere half way between ’ahh’ and ’uhh’. And it feels like you’re still too tense. Again?”

Aila continued with this for a while, working her way through consonants: f, h, k, l, m, n, p, r–pronounced palatally like a Japanese r, t, w–sometimes pronounced like v, and glottal stop.

“This letter we call ’aka, and your linguists call it a ’glottal stop’. Have you heard someone say ’uh-oh’? It has two in it.” Her tutor wrote on their whiteboard: ’a’o. Aila nodded and tried it herself. Her tutor clapped her hands with a smile. “That’s great! Few understand it so quickly.”

Aila smiled at her praise and said it a few more times to make sure she’d gotten it.

They moved on from there to basic sentence structure, covering particles, both prefix and suffix, and then she began drilling Aila on vocabulary to use in those sentences.

“Words are a cultural product,” her tutor said. “Wind and rain are very important to us. In a practical sense, they affect our flying greatly. In an aesthetic sense, they produce rainbows and beautiful rain storms. And for the alchemists, they have a ritual significance. So we don’t have one word for ’rain’ and rain storms. We have five, but I’ll teach you the two most common. Latahala is the gentle spring rain that drips outside, lazily, and makes everything so green. Fuhari is a gusty rain that can blow you off course while you fly. And katao is thunder.” She said each word as if it were a sound effect, and Aila realized that that’s exactly what they were. The Ka’aulele language seemed to be very onomatopoeic.

“Okay,” her tutor said eventually. “Let’s make our first sentence. I want you to say ’I am Aila’ for me.” She handed the marker to Aila.

Aila felt little pins and needles of nervousness all over, but she looked down at her notes, and then wrote: “Eilia ’uru Aila.”

“Right,” her tutor replied. “And you even have some cute rhyming there. Let’s study this sentence from your culture.” She erased Aila’s sentence and wrote “Latahala wa ikilu ’emahu meha hefutata ta Tupeina ke.” She pointed to each part. “Rain, a subject, falls, primary plus the adverb particle, on plain, in Spain. Notice how vowels always follow consonants.”

By the end of their lesson, when her tutor mentioned that, oh, by the way, the Na’aulele also had their own writing system, Aila felt like she was staring at a huge uphill battle. She had trouble with the vocabulary, because the words tended to sound the same to her with the limited number of letters. But she was not willing to give up. It was difficult, but it was also terribly exciting. Their writing system in particular was exotic and beautiful to her. It looked like sheet music, or Arabic, or a symphony of curves, curlicues, and aesthetically pleasing angles; it was hard to say at a glance.

On other days, she studied customs and the history of Hunéa. It was during this time that Aila met Florian again. She walked into the room, looked at him, did a double-take, and then said, “Florian?”

“Hello, Aila,” he replied cheerfully. “I see you did make it here.” He still had his wings, after all. “Oh, these?” He pointed over his shoulder. “Well... I did a lot of soul searching and realized that I do still like them. And I like being Parisian and being human sometimes, too. We’ve come up with an English word for this that no one but us seems to be happy with. Wingqueer.”

Aila let out a laugh, and at his hurt expression, quickly amended, “No, no, I know what you’re referring to. And I think it’s a wonderful term.”

He gave her a reassured grin. “OK then,” he said in English with an outrageous Texas accent that he seemed to be fond of. “Let’s get this pony on the trail.”

Aila could hardly understand his words, but she laughed again, and it was the beginning of another strong friendship.

They discussed the geography of Hunéa, which was surprisingly different from Earth in some ways, and very similar in others. The land masses had broken up further, and became something more like groups of archipelagos. At some point in a past lost to their modern history, magic had been used to lift a number of these out of the tectonic plates underneath and float them up into the sky. Parts of their sky had these islands dotted all over, and the matter of how it had been done was still a subject of strong study and debate. There was much turmoil in their history, and there were rumors from fossil finds that they had, at one time, not had wings themselves. But some time after that turmoil, everyone had seemingly decided to live and let live, and their culture was now of a more egalitarian, clannish nature. They lived well and comfortably, but they did so in a kind of harmony with their environs that made Aila felt a bit of shame for having come from humanity.

“Mind you, we’re not without our problems,” Florian said. “We fly, our wings are beautiful, we do amazing magic. It leads to a kind of arrogance in many. We have a philosophy, you might even call it a spirituality, that regards that arrogance as distasteful. But some Na’aulele consider it, in their arrogance, to be beneath them. The part of Hunéa from which we came tries to hold itself aloof from the ensuing politics, but it’s not always easy.”

Aila nodded soberly. They had to have some kind of flaw.

“Also we’re rather boring,” he said with a grin. “I like the excitement and vitality of humanity. It’s one reason I feel so at home, here.”

“I rather like the peace and meditative feeling of the Catacombs, myself,” Aila said. “But from what you’ve said, that would make sense.”

Florian nodded.

“We are not the only speaking race on Hunéa either,” he said, to Aila’s surprise. “It’s strange to us that humans are, here. We have sea creatures called mei’a that are somewhat like your dolphins, but we can speak with them. Our mystics speak with the stones and Hunéa herself, and have learned many interesting pieces of history that way. In fact our word tanau that you might want to translate as ’human’ or ’sapient’ has none of those implications; it merely means a thing that can speak.”

Aila took this in wide-eyed, and tried to imagine what a world like that would be like. How different things might be if the “mere animals” could talk back.

“I imagine there must be some conflict there too,” she said.

Florian smiled. “Conflict and humor.” But he left it at that.

They discussed bartering, exchange, social customs, holidays, magic, temples, and other things.

“I wish I could visit. It sounds so wonderful,” she said hopefully.

“Sadly, wings don’t always get you back through anymore,” he said. “Even some who came here from Hunéa can’t go back. The mystics study it, but no one knows why, still. You might be able to when you can fly. Or you might not.” He shrugged.

Their lesson had run over time, so they called it a day. But Aila had stars in her eyes again that recalled to her those initial feelings she’d had upon hearing of Dr. Halalo.

She was learning about her people.

In late September, the heat of summer was finally starting to let go. Some nights, a crispness could be felt in the air, and children were preparing to go back to school.

Aila and Kuléo emerged from a Métro station near his old home, where he had used to live with his parents. He was visiting to give them a small present for their anniversary.

“I always come before the day,” he said sadly. “If I come on the day, or after the day, they spend their day dreading my visit. This way, they know it will be over with, and they can enjoy their anniversary.”

“That’s really sad,” Aila replied, looking at the pavement.

“It is,” he said. “But it’s reality.”

A few minutes’ walk farther, and they were there at the door. A plaque said “Bisset”. Aila realized then that she had never known his last name; of course many Na’aulele went without one, even here, and he’d left the old identity behind.

He knocked. There was an indistinct sound inside that resolved itself into someone walking, and then a person visible through the marbled glass in the door. It opened, and his mother was standing there.

Aila could see the resemblance; it was very clear. But to her eyes, his mother looked strange without wings. She had a momentary reaction, expecting that of course a winged person would have a winged mother. But no, of course not. Her mother was not winged, either.

“Pierre. I see you brought a friend with you this time,” she said with a strained smile. She put a strange emphasis on friend. “Pierre” sighed, but Aila didn’t rise to the bait.

“I’m Aila. It’s nice to meet you, madame,” she said, holding out her hand. His mother took it quickly and let go again. It seemed to Aila that his mother was almost afraid of catching something from her, but it was too fleeting of a feeling to say for sure.

“Come in, come in,” Mme. Bisset said, and headed back into the house.

The house was small and humble-looking on the outside, if well kept. The inside gave one a feeling of tasteful grandeur, of wealth without tackiness. Warm wood floors ran from the tiles near the door and on throughout the house. The walls were a slightly warm off-white, and the tall ceilings were curved. A chandelier hung in the entryway. Aila could see a hint of a spiral staircase with wrought iron railings down the hall.

“Wow,” she said quietly to Kuléo.

“Heh. It’s pretty for sure,” he replied quietly. “But there are skeletons in these closets.”

“Papa, Maman,” he said when they had all seated themselves around a wooden table in yet another high-ceilinged room. Kuléo and Aila had both had to turn the formal, high-backed chairs so their wings would fit. He placed a wrapped present on the table.

“Happy anniversary,” he said simply. They thanked him and nodded their heads to him.

“This is Aila,” he said to his Papa, gesturing to her. Papa nodded to her.

A meal followed with surprisingly little awkwardness, all things considered. Aila noticed that his parents carefully avoided looking at him, and especially at his wings. They were hard to ignore, but somehow his parents managed it. A few moments of awkwardness still happened, of course; it was more or less inevitable.

“Are you still wearing those silly green contacts?” Maman asked.

Kuléo blushed heavily and replied, “Yes, of course. Unless you know of a way someone can change their eye color.” Aila looked down and bit her lip to avoid laughing; she’d had no idea about his eyes.

“Well, they certainly found ways to change other things about you,” Maman said.

A few uncomfortable moments of silence followed that volley, but the rest of dinner passed mostly without incident.

At one point during the meal, Aila went to use the toilet. The room was tiled with a black and white checkered pattern, and had a toilet with an antique flusher, tank near the ceiling and a long chain hanging down. While she was washing her hands, she looked at the small set of shelves near the sink and saw a prescription for antidepressants with a woman’s name on them, presumably Kuléo’s mother. She returned to the dinner table with a feeling of sadness.

Kuléo made their excuses shortly after dinner, and they left. His parents told him they loved him, but there was no feeling in their words.

“They didn’t used to be like that,” he said as they walked away. “They used to be the warmest, most wonderful parents I could hope for. But I guess they just couldn’t make that leap.”

Aila thought back to the antidepressants. “I don’t understand... why is it so hard for people?”

Kuléo shrugged with a little feather ruffle and said, “I don’t know. Sometimes it feels like they miss me so much, and other times it feels like they don’t consider me their child at all. At least they have my sister. We should visit her next time, she’s totally different.”

“Let’s do,” Aila said with a smile.

Kuléo thought of Aila’s unresolved problems with her parents and wondered how that would turn out.

“Hey, we’re early,” he said. “Let’s go see a movie before we go back.”

“That sounds great,” Aila replied with some enthusiasm. She wanted to get the taste of that encounter out of her mind.

They found a cinéma nearby and watched a foreign film. It was a comedy from Canada, Quebec specifically, and thus in French. She and Kuléo had to sit near the back of the theater along with several other Na’aulele to avoid blocking the view for others with their wings, but it was fun to laugh and let go of the troubles that had bothered her lately.

After the movie, they found themselves in an ice cream shop, sharing a sundae.

“I’ve been taking lessons on culture and language,” Aila said to him. “With Florian. He’s a friend from my delivery route days.”

“Yeah, I know,” Kuléo responded with what sounded like a hint of jealousy.

“Oh, come on!” Aila said with a laugh and whacked his arm. “Are we getting possessive now?”

Kuléo laughed and shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking down. “I just...” He was startled to find Aila’s hand holding his on the table.

“Don’t be,” she said. She took it away and they resumed their ice cream eating.

“You kids,” a voice nearby said in Ka’aulele. “Speaking their language, wearing their clothes. Don’t you have any respect for your own customs?”

Kuléo and Aila were startled and both simultaneously affected deer-in-the-headlights expressions that might have been comical under other circumstances. An older Ka’aulele woman in clothes of their native style walked up to them with a stern look on her face.

Kuléo tried to respond since he had more experience, but what ended up coming out was something like, “So sorry. My language has pig’s feet on its rain.” He saw her face turn even redder, and she made a clicking-clacking noise with her tongue that sounded almost like a bird’s beak tapping together.

“There’s something strange about you two,” she said in badly accented French. “Your energy is all wrong. You’re some of those foolish humans who think they can become us, aren’t you?” Her voice was quite raised by that time, and other customers were embarrassingly eyeing the conflict.

Aila and Kuléo were both frozen between anger and mortification, and a resurgence of that little nagging doubt from before.

I guess this is that arrogance, Aila thought. Here it is for everyone to see. She felt like she should be more embarrassed and upbraided than she was. But I’ve already received just as bad from my parents, and this is, after all, only one Ka’aulele out of many. Holding Kuléo’s hand a moment ago hadn’t hurt her confidence, either.

“Pardon, Madame,” Aila said to her. “I believe we’re trying to eat some ice cream here.”

The woman muttered something that sounded surprisingly like a curse word, for that melodic language, clicked her tongue again, and stomped away.

Kuléo and Aila were considerably subdued after that, but they managed to hold it together until they could leave, many of the other customers sneaking glances at them and trying to get a look.

On the way back to the Métro station, though, Aila could hold it no longer. She started silently crying and wondered if this was how her life would be: hated by both races. But no, many people on both sides had shown her much compassion, love, and tolerance. She’d just have to learn how to deal with the situations where it didn’t happen. It was a scary thought to her that some of them could just read her like that; perhaps Dr. Halalo could teach her some way to mask it, like the cloaking glamour.

That thought cheered her, and it cheered Kuléo too, when she shared it. She realized at some point she’d taken his hand and was holding it; but she felt no real urge to let go of it.