“Please.”
He rummages and comes up with a disposable drug kit. One tiny prick into the skin of my side, and I already feel the delightful numbness spreading. It might not solve the problems my wound is causing, but it makes me care less.
“Is that better?”
“Much, thank you.”
Vel sets his pack within easy reach, and I set my shockstick near my head. This time, it’s easier to settle against him. I don’t know if it’s the drugs, but since it’s a local, it shouldn’t affect my state of mind. I let myself enjoy the reflected warmth from his faux-skin and the snug protection of the thermal blanket. Wind whispers through the canopy, lulling me, then new noises echo through the jungle: shrill shrieks, raucous calls, gentle chirrups. The sounds blur into a soothing symphony, and I fall asleep faster than I expected.
I wake to a nightmare of teeth and claws scrambling up the tree below me. These creatures are different from the ones on the ground. Smaller, lighter, with talons curved for climbing, and they bear spines on their backs for impaling their prey. I scramble backward, conscious of how far I have to fall. The narrow ledge will make fighting a bitch, and where the hell is Vel?
He drops from above, his twin blades in hand, in the time it takes me to locate my shockstick. Though I’m hardly awake, I wade in swinging. The movement pulls the bite in my side, but there’s enough painkiller left in my system that it’s a bearable ache, not a sharp, stabbing pain. Right now, there are only two, though their screams may bring others.
I hit mine hard enough to knock it toward the edge, and I follow up with a side kick, which sends it tumbling off the platform. It tries to control its fall, clawing at branches and vines, but succeeds only in battering against the trunk on the way down. It hits hard and does not get up. In the time it takes me to dispatch mine, Vel has already sliced the other creature’s throat. The blood smells different from the other monsters we fought, less rotting vegetation and more mineral in origin. Life on this planet is truly strange.
“Have you slept?” I ask him.
“No. I moved to stand watch after you drifted off.”
So he only lay with me long enough to permit me to relax, as I wouldn’t have done alone. How well he knows me. That makes me smile despite the fact we haven’t survived our first night here yet.
“Then it’s my turn. You found a good vantage point above?” At his nod, I ask, “How far up?”
He directs me with an arc of his arm, and then I do something I’m sure he doesn’t expect. “Would you like me to stay until you fall asleep?”
Vel hesitates, his posture a clear Ithtorian expression of surprise. Then he simply answers, “Yes.”
So I lie down at his back, listening until his breathing steadies. I wonder if Adele suspected even before she saw the truth of him. Because he does not sound human at rest, even clad in faux-skin. His inhalations are too deep, slow and long, hinting at extraordinary lung capacity. I wait until I’m sure he’s out, then I slip out from under the thermal blanket and scramble up to the higher lookout position; it’s no more than a notch carved in a thick branch, but it offers a stable place to sit.
The rest of the night is quiet. I can only presume that the bodies at the base of the tree offered predators both an alternate food source and a warning. By the time the sun comes up, I’m tired again but glad of the light as well. Vel stirs as the day brightens, and we suck down packets of paste from my pocket. He swore once he’d rather die than eat the stuff, but we can’t cook up here, not even on his chemical burner, and we have no idea if we can safely eat any of the native flora and fauna. That problem is complicated by the fact that our technology is fried, so we can’t scan for local toxins. I don’t know what we’ll do when our food runs out.
“How are we for water?”
“We need to find a local source. I have purification tablets in my pack.”
“Of course you do. Just in case you get stranded on a class-P world with no functional technology.”
His amusement manifests in a quirk of his hidden mandible that almost resembles a smile when it pulls at his face. “Precisely so.”
“I’ll go down first. Warn me if anything’s about to swoop down on me.”
“Assuredly.”
On the ground, I note that the corpses have been gnawed while we slept. When he joins me, he slices off one of the beast’s legs with his knife. I don’t know if I can stand to watch him eat it; his people enjoy fresh meat. But instead, he pares the flesh away from the bone.
At my inquiring look, he explains, “I am making you a knife.”
After using his own blades to sharpen the bone to a fierce point, he lashes the blade to my shockstick with a thin, tensile vine, and then he cements them with resin seeping from the trees. I take the makeshift weapon and test it with a couple of swings.
“Thank you. We might live through this after all.”
“We will,” he says quietly. “Never doubt it.”
CHAPTER 27
We’ve spent seven nights without seeing anything capable of communicating with us. Ten different species have tried to eat us. This is our eighth day.
The jungle thins ahead, opening to a dark plain where nothing grows, all obsidian and basalt. Deep trenches have been cut in the distant land, though I can’t tell whether it was nature or machinery. I hope for the latter because that’s a sign of civilization.
“Good thing we found the river,” I mutter.
Vel’s purification tablets rendered the water safe to drink but we’re running out of prepackaged meals. Soon, we’ll have no choice but to eat local food and hope for the best. That’s a hell of a gamble, and not one whose odds I like. Though I haven’t said anything, the wound in my side isn’t healing like it should, and gray streaks web my skin around the wound. I’m running a low-grade fever constantly, and nothing in his pack can help me; I searched one night during my turn on watch. I’m not worried because I hope, in time, my nanites will work out a way to repair the damage from alien parasites. I just have to sweat and shiver through their learning curve. I hope.
Of course, if they don’t, there’s nobody to fix them, nobody left who understands how they work. In which case, I’ll die a horrible death. Or maybe I’ll mutate into some hideous alien monster. That’d be okay, too.
On one hand, it feels good to leave the jungle I’ve grown to hate so passionately, but I don’t feel confident about the land looming ahead. It doesn’t much look as if it can support life, but the only alternative is to backtrack to the broken gate, presuming we can find it and set it off in another direction . . . with no guarantee anything better lies ahead. I wish Dace had given us a map or more indication of what the hell we’re supposed to see.
But that presumes she knew this would happen. Point in fact, we’re sure of nothing—and it’s frustrating as hell. For all I know, she only meant to show us a star-walker artifact because she thought we might know something about it.
“Any bright ideas on how to get us home?” I ask him hopefully.
“Working on it.”
I glance at Vel, who’s studying the terrain ahead. Yesterday, he shed his faux-skin and didn’t generate more, as the temperature has been climbing the farther we head . . . well, since I don’t know the directions on this world, I’ll just call it west. It looks to be hot as hell out on those plains, and geysers of smoke puff up periodically.
“Sulfur springs?” I guess.
“I believe so. The smell indicates volcanic craters.”
If we’re not careful, we’ll get cooked alive out there. I eye the steam and the rugged landscape with more than a little trepidation. At this point, I feel like I have to abdicate judgment, as I’m too sick to think straight. Not that I’m admitting it to Vel. There’s nothing he can do, and there’s no point in his worrying unless I keel over.
“What do you think? Push on or head back?”
“The jungle is no more hospitable,” he answers. “Only dangerous in a different way. Perhaps once we cross these flats, there will be . . . something.”
“You lead, then. Your eyes are better than mine.”
His olfactory sense will help, too. With any luck—though that’s been lacking since we put down on Marakeq—he can find us a way off this world. I won’t give up hope that we’ll find a gate; there should be another, but there’s no telling how far away it might be . . . or what kind of condition it’ll be in when we find it. I say when because I can’t contemplate any other option. I can’t leave March wondering what happened to me.
I can’t.
I know what he’ll think, and I can’t let it end like that. Sure, I reacted to his leaving me. Again. But I never meant for it to be forever. I didn’t intend to punish him like this—with an inexplicable disappearance. Really, I just wanted a little time to come to terms with the way his life would change when he found his sister’s kid . . . and my own fear about where it left me. I thought I’d get Carvati working on a cure for the La’heng, take care of my business with Baby-Z, then head to Nicuan to see March. A practical decision, but also to show that I don’t dance to his tune—that I still have my own life.
Sure, some life.
These bleak thoughts carry me onward. Three hours into our hike, we’ve breached the volcanic flats, leaving the jungle far behind us. The sky is a strange blue-violet overhead, but it’s definitely daytime. I surmise it must be a gas effect similar to what we see on Gehenna, just with a different chemical composition, but there’s enough oxygen that we can breathe.
“What if we can’t find a way back?” I ask eventually.
The question has been weighing on me, but I didn’t want to voice it because it seems like if I speak my fears out loud, then they gain ground. The unthinkable becomes possible. Before answering, Vel navigates around the edge of a crater within which water boils; I smell it now, and the reek is overpowering.
Once we reach a safe distance, he faces me, imperturbable as always. “Then we build a life here, Sirantha.”
“Wherever here is.”
I try to hide my horror, but the last thing I ever wanted was to settle dirtside, and now it looks as though I might be stuck here with no means to contact anyone in the life I left behind. It’s not that I don’t want Vel to be part of my life—always—just not here. Not like this.
“We cannot give up hope. This world is vast, and it will take time to explore.”
“True enough.” With a faint sigh, I start moving again.
At what we estimate to be midday, we stop for food and water. The land slopes up to a natural plateau, elevated for us to get a clear view of anything moving to attack us. Here, he can mix up a batch of his soup, a nice change from the paste. But I only have two packets of those left, and he empties his stores for this meal. We eat in silence.
“Have you ever been in a worse spot?” I hope he’ll say yes and tell me a story of how he got out of it. He’s lived such unimaginable adventures, after all.
