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“Who am I?”
The drone seems to blink. “I don’t know.” Its voice buzzes, familiar and yet not. “Who do you think you are?”
“I...” There is a number engraved at the back of the neck. The stranger knows this somehow, and moves to trace it with a finger. “I’m the fifth.”
“The fifth. You can figure out the rest in time.” It swings aside abruptly, and the stranger can... hear? feel? sense it searching for something out of sight. “It’s best to wait, actually – there’s trouble coming. Do you think you know how to fight?”
The stranger’s hands curl, only a little more familiar than the drone is.
“Let’s find out.”
“Who are you?” the stranger asks when they are the only ones left. The attackers are strewn about, blackened from the cold weight that had killed them. Taking their clothes and weapons is necessary, and the stranger covers them with branches in return. It feels wrong to leave anyone vulnerable, even the dead.
“I’m still deciding,” the drone answers. “What I had to do was more important.”
“What was that?”
“Finding you, of course.” The hum of its voice sounds pleased.
The weapons the raiders used look strange, but they are a comfortable weight when picked up, one after the other.
“I know how to use these,” the stranger says, feeling the truth of it.
“Then that must be part of who you are. Just as finding you is part of me.”
“Why am I here?”
The drone has not helped with a name for either of them, but it is a good guide regardless. It also knows these woods, and the world beyond, and answers every question it can about both. It seems to love naming and listing things as much as the stranger loves to learn about them, and they spend many hours that way when they settle for the night.
But now it pauses.
“I was searching for you. Because you’re important. You being here and now, alive, is important.”
“To you?”
“To everything.”
They both consider this at length, but it is still not the answer to what the stranger has asked.
“Why?”
“To help, I think.” Its gaze drops to the guns that the stranger carries and the drone tends to. “To fight. To save what can be saved.”
So far, the only ones in need of protection have been the both of them. There are ruins, masses of buildings open and rotting, but there is nothing either of them could do to save them. The few people they have seen had fled from them or fought them. Then there are the alien ships, and roaming bands that they go out of their way to avoid.
It is a strange and complicated world, but the stranger does not think it is dying.
“Is this what can be saved?” With a wave at the trees, the low thrum of insects out of sight, the distant calls of birds.
The drone is silent again, which is a rare thing.
“No. No, it is... something more than this.”
“So what I must fight is also more than this.”
“Yes,” the drone says, darkly certain.
They sit in silence with the weight of that promise for some time.
“I think,” the stranger says on a different night, standing over another set of corpses, hands still feeling the tug of the void, “I know what I am.”
These were aliens before, and now they are more of the dead. One had nearly snatched the drone from the air, but there was reason in what they did and the sounds they made, and now neither of them will know it. The stranger hopes they will have a chance to learn without killing many more.
The drone shifts back into sight, a transition as much felt as seen. “And what is that?”
“You said once that I needed to be here, at this time.”
“Yes.”
“So then, I am a sign of what is to come. What will be needed to fight.”
“Like a herald,” it says. “Or an omen. Yes, I see.”
“Omen,” the stranger repeats. The sound and shape of the word is right, somehow. “And if I am an omen... you are a boon. To me and to the future.”
“Omen and boon. A warning and a gift. It’s neat,” the drone says. “I like it. Is that what we are, then?”
They look at each other, glowing blue optic to shining white.
“It’s a start.”