The Wrong Kind of HELP

You walk off the space harbor, compact backpack making your back sweat. You don’t know how much trouble you’re really in. Passing through security is a breeze; there’s nothing in that backpack that’ll get you arrested, no weaponry or genetically hijacked being or nearly-undetectable biochemical abomination. What’s in there is a target; a perfectly constructed decoy with a timer that ticks to your footfalls. But that’s not what you see. You see hope in the contents of the backpack; a map to a planet highly coveted by both the lofty planet tycoon PlaNet ICS and the non-profit intergalactic housing organization HELP. It’s a goldmine. An Eden.

You look to the sky and see the tallest building in the city: a hotel, catering to all species that fly through the hotspot of intergalactic business, legal and illegal. You head towards it, because that’s what they told you to do, and you were too naïve to question them. The good side. With their hooded faces “protecting you” and vague instructions smothered in false assurance. “You’ll get there,” they said. “We promise. You will be a hero, a founder to unharbored souls galaxy-wide.” So you said yes, because to be a part of something as big as HELP, that not only is revolutionary in its philanthropic pursuits, but also openly speaks and pushes against power-hungry monopolies like PlaNet is everything you’ve ever dreamed of.

This city is big. Much bigger than any others you’ve offered your services to. Much more diverse, filled with beings of different girths, limb lengths and numbers, pigments, languages. It exhausts you. The bustle of beings who don’t have to worry about having enough money for the next meal fills the crowd with an energy directly opposite of the energy you find in abandoned housing projects. Usually you are the energizer to the impoverished, but now you feel your energy sap out of you with each step. You are just a young woman, with a name nobody knows and a purpose nobody cares about. But you keep walking, because you never were one to pity yourself.

You make it to the long glass double doors at the front of the hotel, then follow the next painfully vague direction: walk left. Under no circumstances stop walking. Make it to the destination, even if you must drag yourself on your hands and knees. Out of the heart of the city, the traffic becomes slower, the establishments deteriorate, and you relax. This is what you’re used to. Poverty, being the source of hope rather than the overlooked. And, clever woman, clever Flórara, that’s exactly what you do. You notice, impeccably, the two beings following you. You don’t know that they’re a species called Tlakatao, because you didn’t bother asking anything about the organization you’re helping. You don’t know that with them following you, your chances of survival have increased considerably. Instead, you notice the way their protruding shoulder blades cast shadows in the second sun’s glare, and that despite the deformity of their feet hidden within thin canvas shoes, they walk with a grace than makes humans like you (well, mostly like you) look handicapped. 

Your heart pounds a little harder. Your breath comes a little quicker. You glance back, think about how you’re leading them straight to HELP, how you’re jeopardizing millions of lives. You look around, think of slipping into a back alley, losing their trail, getting to the target location safely. But you know you won’t do that as soon as you think it; you’re a rule follower, and you’re practically a tourist. Knowing they’re there, following, makes your neck prickle, but you resist the urge to rub it away, resist the urge to look back and check if they’re following. Too much depends on you getting to your target location on time. Too many people. Too much glory.

The last direction flashes red across your eyes; enter a shack called Korth’s Kraprack. Walk into the back room. You look up, spot the place. It doesn’t just look empty, it looks abandoned. Even the homeless, drug-addled know that there’s better places to lie at night than the barely standing establishment in front of you. You walk across the desolate street, open the cracked bamboo door carefully so the doorframe doesn’t collapse, and head towards the back room.

You’ve always thought methodically, slowly. Being in the empty room, dusty and crusted over with substances that blended into one color over time, you finally put the pieces together. You never talked to HELP. You’ve been played. And there are two strangers following you. Nobody knows where you are, besides the people that conned you. There’s a window in the room, dusty and shattered, but you barely have time to clear the shards and think about jumping through before the two strangers enter the room.

“Give us the backpack, Flórara,” the Tlakatao on the left says. You see his broad nose and long canines. Your breath catches at the back of your throat.

“How do you know my name?” Oh, Flórara. Why wouldn’t they? They’re professionals.

You watch as the second Tlakatao takes a step closer, puffing out his chest in a way that contorts his shoulder blades horribly. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be. We know you’re working for PlaNet ICS. Hand the backpack over.” You see his dark nails and padded palm beckon in the air.

 “I-I’m not working for PlaNet. I’m a freelancer.” Your throat is dry, and you don’t know what to say. “For HELP, I thought.” You feel little again. Poor girl. It’s a mistake anybody like you could’ve made. So slow to trust anybody but people like you, beings who help other beings. You didn’t know that moral corruptness feels like a paper cut to some, because to you it feels like a heart attack. And right now, you feel on the verge of cardiac arrest.

The two Tlakatao look at each other, and you see everything that you cannot know pass between them. They relax, and you do too, a bit. You hand them the backpack and watch the being on the right pull out a manila envelope, unaddressed. He opens it, looks at what’s inside, and curses what he sees, throwing it to the floor.

Your feel your voice stuck deep within you, under your stomach and cowering against your spine. Looking down, you see that you’ve been tasked with delivering a child’s scrawling of a map, full of imaginary places and illogical routes carved out by a nonexistent civilization. Suddenly your voice bubbles up, light as helium.

“Oh my stars, I’m sorry-I’m so sorry! I didn’t know—” You’re interrupted by sirens, tri-tonal from what you hear, racing towards you. Above, you hear the low thrum of copter drones, whizzing to the Kraprack. Your knees have a mind of their own and give way, but you grab onto the windowsill behind you and stay upright.

The Tlakatao look at eachother. “It was a trap,” the one on the left says. He looks at you, and you feel your eyes well up in response to his sharp glare. “You know who sent you, right?” You shake your head, barely. “PLaNet ICS. You’re bait, meant to attract us. And now they’ll arrest us and press us for information.” Your eyelashes can’t hold back your tears any longer and you feel them streak down your cheeks.

The sirens grow louder, and you feel the despair begin to ferment into inert hopelessness. The Tlakatao turns, looks out the window. He scratches his sallow skin. “Leave,” he says, turning to look at you. Your heart sinks, but you don’t know if it’s out of guilt or relief. “Leave and never involve yourself with HELP again. Change your identity, if you can. If you can’t, fly far away. Tell nobody about this.”

You can’t find anything to say, so before you curl into the ground and become useless, you thrust yourself through the window and sprint back to the space harbor. You see the police cars drive by and duck into an alley behind a shrub as pathetic as you feel. They don’t seem to notice you duck into hiding. You’ve counted ten by the time all the vehicles have passed, and realize how stupid it was to think you were qualified to associate with HELP in any way other than a day volunteer.

You have no time to pray for the two men’s survival because you begin sprinting down the sidewalk anew, towards the heart of the city. You become nobody in a sea of somebodies, and the panic squeezing your chest eases up. You make it through security, because there’s nothing on you that’ll get you arrested, and suspicious behavior in the busiest city in the galaxy isn’t enough to warrant security to waste time on you. You enter the ship your family gave you after they upgraded to something sleeker and fly away, as far as possible.

It’ll be some time before you speak again.