The Boy Who Mourned in Colour

Dr. Sefa had counselled grief for thirty years, and the boy on the other side of the table was teaching her she had only ever counselled one kind.

His name was Iri. He was fourteen, human by every gene, and he had never in his life met a human family. The Velreth had found his survival pod after the Aldebaran came apart, had taken in the infant the way they took in any orphaned thing, and had raised him for fourteen years inside a culture that did not, as far as the xenologists could tell, possess a word for alone. Now the Velreth elder who had reared him had died, and the station had pulled Iri here, to the human deck, to be — the order said — reintegrated.

He sat very still. He had not cried. That was in the file, underlined: Subject displays no recognizable affect of grief. The medical staff were worried. A boy whose mother had just died should weep, should rage, should at least go quiet in the human way of going quiet. Iri did none of it. He had asked, politely, for a bowl of water and a handful of the station's dye markers, and now he was sitting before it, doing nothing Sefa could name.

"They tell me you've lost someone," she said gently. "I'm sorry, Iri. I'm here to help you carry it."

"Carry it where," Iri said. Not rude. Genuinely asking. "Among the Velreth grief is not a weight you carry. It is a colour you release, so the others can see what you have lost and addtheir own to it. We do not hold it inside. Holding it inside —" he searched the human word "— is what you would call cruel."

He dipped one finger in the water and touched it to the surface, and a thread of deep blue unspooled across the bowl.

"That is her," he said. "That blue. I have been making it since she stopped. No one here will look at the water, so no one knows what I lost. Your people grieve in the dark and call it strength." He looked up, and for the first time Sefa saw something move behind his calm. "Is that what you came to teach me? To put her away where she cannot be seen?"