Last night I think I heard a lion.

The bright sun shines down from a clear blue sky onto a sea of green grass dotted with ancient oaks where deer graze and watch nervously. They must have heard it, too.

My name is Jacob Talis, and I grew up here in the High Weald of Sussex. Of the house where I lived, no trace remains, nor of the towns and villages that once sprawled across the Low Weald. During my childhood it was very different here. At the foot of the hill an ancient flint wall marked the boundary between the grounds and the estate farm. but by the time I left home the farm’s patchwork of woods and fields was gone, replaced by a maze of winding streets and small houses. Beyond, the clay of the Low Weald had been covered by acres of solar panels and a broad sea of identical gene-spliced dwarf trees cropped for biomass. The crest of the South Downs on the horizon was punctuated with a line of giant wind turbines.

I bought an overlander to make my escape. The first time my bratty pre-teen sister, Catherine, saw it, she pouted and sulked. “Why do you have to go away?” She demanded. “You’re leaving me to deal with Dad all by myself.”

“He’s never here anyway,” I told her. “He just works all the time.”

It took me some weeks to prepare, fitting out the van, stowing my gear, and Catherine was always underfoot. I took her to a wildlife park one day to quiet her. Wire fences ringed a compound where a pair of tigers sprawled on a decaying wooden platform. “They look sad,” she said.

“Yes.”

“It’s not like in those old documentaries you’re always watching, when they used to live free.” She looked up at me. I guess she must have seen in my face how I felt because she took my hand. “Let’s go home.”

“I want to see what’s left,” I told her as the car drove us back, “before it’s all gone. I know there’s no lions or tigers or elephants in the wild, but I want to see what I can.”

Soon enough the day came when I was ready to leave. She hugged me, sniffling into my chest. “I wish I could come with you,” she said.

I travelled for years, often alone, though sometimes I would find a companion who would travel with me for a time. Some grew tired of my restlessness, others proved more restless even than me. In my journeys I crossed equatorial deserts paved with solar farms and boreal forests of genetically engineered firs. Where rainforests once ringed the globe I found plantations that grew the oils and chemicals that fed our industries. Only the most desolate, inhospitable, useless places held any semblance of wilderness. Lichens, mosses, insects, crows and pigeons, the occasional rodent, were what remained of Earth’s wildlife.

When my father died I was in my late thirties. I returned to the family home on the High Weald where Catherine still lived with her young son. We inherited father’s shares in Talis Aerospace but neither of us had the skills or the inclination to take over the running of the company. I sold the overlander but soon became restless again. So it was that a year later, I stood on the terrace at the back of the house with my hands in my pockets, recalling the view as it had been in my childhood.

The door behind me opened, Catherine leaned against the wooden door frame. She’d grown into a gregarious, vivacious, optimistic young woman, ten years younger than me back then, though to look at her you’d have thought twenty. Her perpetual smile had a tinge of sadness about it. “Can’t you find what you want here?” she said, bringing back a fond memory of the bratty child she had been.

“You know I’ve tried,” I said. “Everywhere in this world is desolation, or…” I turned again towards the industrial countryside at the foot of the hill. “… or it’s like this.”

“It’s so far, you’ll be away so long.”

“There’s life there, I have to see.”

“Henry will miss you.”

“He barely knows me, he’s what, four?”

“Nearly seven, and he idolises you.”

She came and put her arms around me and rested her head on my shoulder. “I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll be back.” I gave her a brief, awkward hug and walked through to the front of the house where the car waited on the gravel drive.

I asked Marlene to picture the day her ex broke her nose and waved the wash out wand across the base of her skull. Her light hair fanned out around her head on the pillow as the ultraviolet waves penetrated her Hippocampus, where external event memories were thought to be stored. Prone, she recalled images of Freud and his ladies from early psych textbooks. Or, perhaps darker, if she slipped from the pillow to hang off the edge, someone would have mistaken her for a modern day pictorial of Fuseli’s Nightmare.

I sat close enough to her that I smelled her lilac perfume. Noticed an undercurrent of sweat, like onions.

Some consultant–likely worth a cool million–had advised the Bureau for Tragedy Exchange to structure their offices like therapists’ rooms rather than a doctor’s office. But they hadn’t sprung for leather couches and personal library collections, so we were stuck with teal IKEA couches and shelves with cardboard backing that held empty books, the spindled feet set on synthetic hardwood. Every time Marlene shifted on the couch, it crinkled loudly. At least the walls were a gentle taupe instead of hospital white.

The look and feel supposedly made getting rid of trauma easier, but I wasn’t so sure. Especially not ones with physical associations like Marlene’s. She had to see her nose every day, how it healed around the break, and pulling out all tendrils of this particular incident was tough work. Sometimes, I wasn’t sure the Exchange was up for it, but she was in too deep now. Once the treatment began, she couldn’t receive cash compensation, so she was motivated to see it through to the end. Mostly so, maybe, one day she could sleep again.

Her eyelids twitched as I brought the bleach light over the right-hand side by her temple. Blue veins mapped an interstate across her thin skin. The wand gave off a faint buzz. I hummed along.

The monitor at my desk blinked with the image of Marlene’s cortex, zooming in as the wand did its work. I watched the memory particles, small floating amoebas, pop and burst like enemy ships on a video game. I hoped, as I did with all my patients, that she wasn’t letting her mind drift.

We’d destroyed precious things by accident before.

When we were done, she rested in corpse pose on the couch so she didn’t fall over as she rose. I booked her weekly appointment. Always Thursdays.

“You good?” I asked.

“Yup,” her voice was weak and small. Gently, I helped her up to stand and led her to the door before motioning to the exit. Cassandra leaned casually–too casually–against the wall across from my office, but I ignored her. Cassandra waiting outside for you when an appointment wasn’t fully closed was normally a problem.

I focused on Marlene instead. The muscles in her face had relaxed, showing the divots of her laugh lines and the crackle of wrinkles across her forehead. The bump at the bridge of her nose. Her pupils, the ones previously hidden by her pale lids, had an unfocused quality.

“Have you tried covering up the mirrors? At least until we get somewhere?” I said.

“Not a bad idea,” she said. Which meant she hadn’t listened to me last time.

“Remember, don’t drive for the next hour and I’ll see you next Thursday,” I said.

“Thanks, Yvonne,” she said and headed toward the exit.

Patients never left the way they came in and often, unless you searched it out, you wouldn’t know a building was a Bureau for Trauma Exchange unless you requested an appointment. Of the two, I loved the disguised exit far more. It took folks through the back of the building and into a closed flower shop. As much as we liked to pretend it wasn’t the case, there was still stigma for seeking out the Bureau. It marked a person. The worst were people who sniffed at the work we did and called it ‘a hand out’ or worse, ‘woke welfare’. Not something the traumatized deserved for the horrors they’d endured.

“New intake for you,” Cassandra said. She had crossed the floor between us and leaned over my door jam, a brown file in hand

“Why can’t Becky take her?” I asked. “This is my only break today.”

“Not her specialty,” Cassandra said.

I rolled my eyes. “We both know that’s bullshit.” It wasn’t like we were the ear, nose, and throat guys.

“I think you’d find this one interesting. It’s a bit of a sensitive case,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. Sensitive was in our contract. Sensitive was what we dealt in every day.

“They’re from Lockland Correctional.”

My jaw dropped. Cassandra smirked. I’d vaguely followed the bill on my morning political podcast that had recently classified intake and exchange as a necessary medical procedure and, with prisoners, you weren’t supposed to withhold needed healthcare. They were people, though I’d noticed society did everything they could to tell us otherwise.

“What they in for?” I asked.

Maybe Cassandra was right. This was interesting. Maybe too interesting. Especially to someone whose life was all picture books about talking rabbits for my daughter, Tallulah, and large iced coffee with almond milk, please to the same cute barista at Blue Bottle who never remembered my name. And true crime documentaries, so many true crime documentaries, especially the ones about Mormons, that kept me up at night.

“Just treatment. No talk therapy,” Cassandra said.

Always push treatment first before compensation, they’d told us. If someone hadn’t been around when the Bureaus were first established, they might have mistaken the thirty-second ads of readjusted people playing on water-sucking lawns for government propaganda about antidepressants.

You’re entitled to another shot at life after trauma. You deserve a life free of the memories holding you back, the very white people in the very white commercials said, even though, statistically, trauma disproportionately impacted minorities and those in lower socio-economic groups.

But clearly, that wasn’t an option.

The holding cell is well-used, but clean. Made for the native Tyulti population rather than the Earth-born, everything is wrong-sized for the group of human women that have arrived over the last few hours. Linda closes her eyes for a moment. Her stomach cramps again. The feeling subsides, and she checks out the cell. Most of the other five women are silent, but their sideways glances speak of suspicion and fear.

Linda guesses them to be a range of nationalities and languages. Two older German speakers occupy the lone, sheetless bunk bed and hold a rapid-fire conversation in low voices. Before she can reach any conclusions about the others, she feels tears welling up. She closes her eyes again and forces herself to think of something else. She calculates whether her worst student has any chance of passing her English class. Maybe. The tears subside.

Linda wishes she had stayed on Earth. She’d swap this cell for an Earth police station cell. Or even a hospital. At least then she’d know why she was here.

The dingy passageway is muted now. Earlier, a constant stream of Tyulti enforcers passed through on their way to other holding cells. The stream became a dribble, then a drip, then no one for a long time. Hours passed. How many? She replays the last few days from memory as she waits.

“Earth-born people play games to learn how to obey rules.” Linda pursed her lips, red pen wavering over the homework assignment she was grading but moved on. “Sokker is a good game for learning rules.” This time a circle. “Earth-born people learn when to bent rules,” at this Linda’s pen darted in to change the ‘t’ into a ‘d,’ “by the use of fowls.” Another mark.

A knock on her apartment door startled her. Who could it be so long after sunset? Sitting at her dining table grading essays on her students’ favorite Earth sports, the knock could have been a relief. It could have been her neighbor, or even the building manager, but it wasn’t.

The monitor attached to the door frame illuminated as she approached, and Linda sucked in a tense breath: three Tyulti in Enforcement garb. Near-human except for coats of fur that blended into the grey-black of their uniforms, two of them stood at relative ease with rifle-sized diasho cradled in their arms. The shortest one, still much taller than Linda, was empty-handed.

She considered ignoring the visitors. But Steve Masser had ignored a visit from the enforcers last year. Mr. Enio, the Tyulti who had recruited them all from Earth, had told the teachers that he’d been repatriated because of a family emergency. No one had ever heard from him again.

Linda opened the door.

“Aaahhhhh,” said the tallest, best-groomed member of the group. “Hello, you speak Tyult?” He blinked. Linda also blinked politely, failing to read the situation.

“No, sorry. Can I help you?”

The official spoke in short, Tyult syllables to both of his junior staff, who answered in the negative with regretful head tilts.

“Passport? Passport? See?” the officer asked with a smile.

“Oh, sure”, Linda said, holding up her first finger. “Wait one minute, please.”

The officer nodded. “One minute, yes.”

Linda grabbed her Earth passport, bringing it back to the door.

After inspecting the document page by page, the officer asked, “Visa? University Visa?”

Linda frowned. “It’s in process; I don’t have it yet.”

The officer at the door asked again, with bared teeth—a Tyult frown.

Linda held up her finger again. She scrambled to grab her handheld, a thin plastic oblong that lit up as she lifted it from the tabletop. Returning to the door, she pulled up the contact details for Mr. Enio, the recruiter of all alien faculty.

“Ahh,” the Enforcer said with relief. With a sharp word, one of the younger males produced a smaller handheld. The young officer tapped it against Linda’s device, the diasho dangling in his other hand.

“Thank you, that is all,” the officer said, and the trio strode back to the apartment building’s elevator while Linda looked at their retreating forms, perplexed.

She closed the door and leaned against it, only then noticing the sweat rolling down her back. She texted Mr. Enio, “Hi. Enforcers came to my home asking about visa status, please advise?”

Wracking her brain, Linda tried to remember what Steve had said in his last appearances in the teacher’s room. Something about regulations? Interpretations of what’s true? As hard as she tried, she couldn’t quite remember. Steve complained a lot.

No reply from Mr. Enio. She sat back down to her students’ assignments but couldn’t focus. At midnight, she went to bed, spending the night with restless dreams.

Oh, for crying out loud. This is the guy who so desperately needs my help? Puh-lease.

Here—stand next to me. See where I’m pointing? He’s the one pondering a giant jar of bone broth protein. What the hell is that? I swear, you humans are going backward in your evolution.

Don’t get butt hurt. You are. The first step to healing is admitting your problem.

His shopping cart is already brimming with bull shit: sipping vinegar, ten bottles of supplements, ancient grain granola— Seriously? You people nourish your bodies with what you think is a hunter-gatherer’s diet while surrounded by concrete and steel and lights, which literally snuff out the heavens. You don’t even know what the night sky looks like.

Sorry, I’m ranting when I should be paying attention to this dumbass.

Peering in, listening to his thoughts, reading his memories—

Oh, don’t look at me like that. I know it seems invasive, but I’m allowed. Now be quiet, I’m trying to figure this guy out.

Holy fu—

Wow.

Okay… the tearful begging prayer makes sense now. Sheesh. Lots of work to do.

I see you’re sticking around to watch, you voyeuristic sicko. Well, here are the bullet points so you can follow along, cause if you’re going to stay, you’re damn well going to learn something. This here is Kirby Reid. He’s just shy of thirty years old, a pharmaceutical rep, and single, which is baffling, cause look at him. He’s muscular, tall, and symmetrical, his hair and beard oil-black and I believe those are called “bedroom eyes.” His short sleeves and tight pants beg the world to stare and boy does he love that.

So, of all the people who could use my help, why him? You’re all quite pitiful. In this grocery store alone there’s a love-addicted sexual abuse survivor, a woman whose son is a heroin addict, a heartbroken youth, a bulimic. So much loneliness, and with a simple root cause: you’ve surgically separated yourself from the life force you’re an integral part of and, thus, believe you’re alone in this universe.

But you’re wrong. As above, so below. Which means I feel the same despair and hopelessness. It’s hard not to feel—

Ahem… sorry. You don’t want to hear about that.

Anyway.

So, why Kirby? I haven’t the foggiest. Creatures like me—your folklore has named us a million times—we have a higher power, too, and as I understand it, I’m only sent to people who can help themselves. I haven’t been put to use in a long time, though. Long enough that I was beginning to wonder if there was any hope at all…

Well shit, there I go again.

Never mind me. I’ve been in a mood lately.

I have an idea for Kirby already. Pretty boy is rather fond of this guy Ryan, a kind-hearted sort-of friend, who’s so calm and forgiving normally that when he gets angry, the impact is like a nuclear bomb. I need to set Ryan off, so someone he loves will have to die—

Alright, alright, no need to be so dramatic and accusatory. You wouldn’t be protesting if you needed help. You’d want me to do whatever I could. So zip it, hypocrite. Also, promise me something: whatever happens next, remember that Kirby asked for this. He also wasn’t specific. Just this morning, he begged and begged, please make me healthy, even though not a damn thing is wrong with him.

Poor fool doesn’t understand what he’s asked for and that’s not my fault.

Hang tight for now. I’ll be in touch when the show starts to get interesting.

So, you’ve come back for more, huh?

I’ve been thinking—I’m a little worried you’re going to hate Kirby, so I’ve decided to let you in his head. Supervised, of course, to make sure you behave yourself. You can’t root around his subconscious, no matter how riveting it is in there. Understood?

Good, let’s get you up to speed.

A week has passed and things have happened, but I’d like to keep you in delicious suspense. Kirby is back in the grocery store, heading to checkout.

You ready? It’ll be weird, listening to someone else’s thoughts.

Enjoy.