On Tuesday, he wets the bed again. Fortunately, the elevator is in service. He takes a luxurious ride down to the laundry room and opens the door. Well, there it is. The dactyl is back. It should be far away by now, frolicking in the sun, relishing its freedom, whatever time it has left. She must be a clever thing. Escaping from a plant somewhere. Sneaking her way into the facility. Twice! She cocks her head, hits him with a blank stare. Maybe she remembers him. She hops off the washer-dryer and waits on skinny legs as he loads his sheets. When he sits in the folding chair, she plops down, too. The two of them sit quietly. He watches her rib cage expand with each inhalation until his breathing matches hers.
Buzz buzz-buzz buzz.
The laundry is done, and he has an idea. He wraps a clean, warm sheet around the dactyl, as gingerly as he can. She doesn’t fuss this time, doesn’t hop away. He picks her up and holds her on his hip like a baby. Her claws dig into him, but not too much. He brings her to the elevator. At the top, he makes sure nobody is in the hallway and carries her to his room. The exertion makes him wheeze. He arranges a bed of towels for her on the floor of his shower, and she curls up in it right away. He starts to make his own bed, but he passes out before he can finish.
When he wakes, the dactyl is pressed against him on the bare mattress. Her legs are tucked beneath her, her head scrunched into her pink ruff. His body jerks with the sudden remembrance of another’s pulse next to his. He pets her. She lets him. Pinky, he decides to call her. She stretches her pale neck so he can scratch underneath her jaw. It is soft as flour, velvet like rose petals. She opens her wings just a little and shivers, revealing lustrous flashes of fuchsia. He thinks of all the animals that develop camouflage. Chameleons and leopards and such. From what neon jungle did dactyls emerge, that necessitated the evolution of such a color? He imagines a shockingly vibrant landscape, before the planet died and was reborn. Maybe vicious predators chased after Pinky, and she disguised herself in the fronds of a giant pink palm. Or maybe she wasn’t designed to blend in at all. Maybe nature saw inescapable drabness all around, blurry grays and browns, and nature said, no. This one will be special. This one will have life! Or maybe it was just a biological engineer in a lab who flipped a genetic switch to help track runaways, to better protect the shareholders’ investments.