The Lost Girl Read Online Free

over an angelic, pale face, and the steely glint of his black eyes still pierced my own. His stare was cold and sharp, always vigilant and analytical. That stare alone made everybody approach him with a certain caution and a small sense of fear.
    Vigil was still trying to understand human behavior, and his physical movements and verbal phrasing were slightly affected by what he had so far learned from us. The ways of humanity offered a difficult puzzle for him to solve and it was one of the topics we usually discussed.
    “Hello, Joe.” He smiled faintly, watching me as I sat across from him.
    “Hey,” I greeted him back. “So, Vigil, wassup?”
    “Excuse me?” His expression was puzzled at my question. I usually avoided using slang whenever speaking with Vigil. He was very literal-minded.
    “I mean, what is going on? What do you want to talk about?”
    “Oh, yes,” he said, unfrowning his face. “You see, I have this new job …” he began.
    Ah.
The job
. Vigil’s job. That was another regular topic of our long meetings. Vigil liked to discuss his various assignments with me. He said I was good at understanding chaotic things, and how they would turn out. His race had a very strict and narrow-minded way of seeing things, so I provided a more flexible reasoning and a human perspective, and somehow it helped him fix whatever needed to be fixed.
    I was his “Consultant on Chaotic Affairs”. His “Expert on Unstable Matter”.
    The thing was, after Vigil started “consulting” with me, he also started getting better at his job. Like, a lot better. His levels of efficiency rocketed sky high and he was nowbecoming renowned for it among his “colleagues”. Now he was
The Guy
you called when you needed help.
    “… and it is giving me some grievance,” he continued. “I can’t manage to get a grip on this one; it is a sneaky little thing. Maybe you can find something I’m overlooking?” he said, putting his hands on top of mine in a gentle, familiar gesture. The throbbing pain in my arm stopped immediately.
    “Okay. First I need to ask you: Is this new job dangerous, Vigil?”
    “I don’t know what you mean by that,” he said. After I rolled my eyes impatiently, he added, “You mean, dangerous for me?”
    I sighed and glared at him.
    “No. Hardly anything is dangerous for me,” he continued. “Now, for you, I have to say yes. But
everything
is dangerous for you humans. Staying in the sun for too long is dangerous for you. Not drinking water is dangerous for you. Bleeding for more than a minute is also very dangerous—”
    “Okay, okay. I get it! Everything is dangerous for us. We are a very weak species,” I snapped, annoyed. “So, it is not dangerous
for you
, then?” I stated, watching him as he nodded an affirmative. “Is it urgent? Like, it needs to be solved in a few hours tops, urgent? Or do you have some time to work on this?”
    He thought for a minute, probably contemplating the differences in the time lapse between his reality and Earth’s reality, so that he could figure out what I meant by a “few hours”. Sometimes talking with Vigil was very complicated. It could get so philosophical and metaphysical that it would give me a heavy migraine.
    “I have ‘some time’ to deal with it,” he answered cautiously.
    “Some time, as in …?” I asked.
    “Well, now, that is a tricky question, you see, because time is a very relative concept when you consider—”
    “OKAY! All right! I know where this is going, and I’m so
not
going there right now!”
    He gave me a baffled look.
    “What I meant to say is, if this new job is neither dangerous or urgent, can we please discuss it some other time? I am exhausted right now. Us ‘weak humans’ need to rest, remember? If we don’t sleep, our brains don’t operate properly, and I can’t really help you when I’m tired like this …” I hunched over in my seat and rubbed my eyes.
    “Oh. I see. Okay, Joe, I understand. We can talk