Alliance: An Intersolar Alien Romance, Book 6

22

Walking back to the shore relieved some of Fás’s worries. He would see Roz soon, share the snaps he’d taken with Gilladh, make her smile or gasp at the size of his kill. Seeing the pure curiosity in her gaze alone was worth hauling more than five hundred pounds of meat over the treacherous ice.

And once they were alone, he’d tell her about Gil. They were a good person, Fás could tell from the tones of their voice, but also their hardy laugh and generosity. Good people could be dangerous though, gullible enough to believe that the world had good intentions the same as them. Law-abiding without question, allowing themselves a gentle exit from their own guilt in light of a greater good and higher authority. Fás remembered the early days after leaving Byddie with a somber set to his jaw.

It was better to go as soon as possible.

They’d need to leave in the middle of the night and cover their tracks. Because any rescue team the operator contacted would assume Roz was just a doll. Fás would end up tazed and in a prison cell, and she…

He swallowed down the thought, unable to tolerate even the ghost of what she’d endure.

The closer they got to shore, the denser the crowd of ice became, making it easier to navigate. Gil started joking again, pointing out good spots along the horizon for hikers to see the sights. Fásach’s ear twitched, because though all of their suggestions were true, their tone was slightly sour. Nearly imperceptible, especially with the howl of the wind through the frozen beach as they hit the snow dunes and dragged the mootha saraa to shore.

“Idesh is the worst though,” Gil panted, continuing their conversation about how their fellow operators all lacked any real hunting chops. “That squid brain will sit on the ice for hours with his holotab playing music and wonder why nothing takes the bait.”

Fás stopped, falling upon a dune with one palm, breaking through the jagged crust of ice encasing its powdery white snow. Symphonic vertigo twisted the world beneath him as he squeezed his eyes shut and breathed through the symptoms his mamau had struggled with for so many years. He’d never felt it before. Something was off.

And as many times as he picked her up off the floor, she’d never once mentioned the wailing.

Discordant chords flew across the wind like rubbing the strings of an orchestral bow raw, searing his ears and brain, infecting his gums with the tang of aluminum. Fás blinked several times and shook his head, trying to remain calm, searching out the front of the Buoy where the entrance was hidden from the shoreline.

“You okay, my friend?” Gil asked, their heavy hand landing on his shoulder. His hackles rose.

Because just there on the wind, that tang… it wasn’t aluminum.

It was iron, like mammalian blood.

“Roz,” Fás breathed, clawing his way up the dune and through the remnants of vertigo by sheer will. He dropped the tail of the shark and left Gil behind, confused and trying to catch up.

When he rounded the corner and found the door to the Buoy jammed open, his stomach churned, acid climbing up his throat. Vertigo hit him again as his shoulder bumped against the Buoy wall.

“Roz!” Fás roared, skidding down the terraced platforms, hoping to find her huddled under a blanket. Her scent was cold, the air as still and frigid as a morgue. Had the power gone out? Blackened terror gripped his heart as he slid into the sleeping bags and checked the vital pods.

Misila and Safia were alright, all vital lights steady. He dropped their coats and blankets back over them just as Gil rushed in, their tendrils rising around their face in shock.

“What the fuck?” they yelled. “Roz! Darlin’, you here?” They ran straight to the wall of dials, meters, and controls. “Looks like a life support. Fás, can you smell her?”

“Cold,” Fás croaked, but took another deep inhale anyway.

That tang again. He looked down at the blankets where his knees had gathered them up and found a smear of liquid, a mixture of blood and lubricant that had turned brown like rust. Gil stilled, staring down at their feet.

“Is that–”

Fás followed his line of sight to a trail of little oxidized dots freezing on the floor like puff paint.

Gil burst into action, opening cabinets that had been locked with a wave of their wrist. They pulled out a bandolier of gear, slid it over their shoulder, and cinched it tight across their chest. A radio, mediplasma, zero-viz goggles, two pucks of some sort… They continued to suit up, adding a harness lashed in neon-colored climbing ropes and stakes, then tossed something similar to Fás.

“Put it on, over the coveralls. Legs first, then the top like a backpack. Snap it across the chest.” Their directions were all business as they filled a thigh pouch with rations and added two more bolts to their harpoon gun.

Fás put on the climbing harness with shaking fingers, then rushed for the door, remembering Roz’s first nosebleed, how she climbed to reach an echo he couldn’t hear, and felt an urgency prickle his hackles like the world was splitting beneath his feet. Gil hauled him back by the neck and he snarled. The shilpakaar’s mane hissed in turn.

“Listen, friend, her blood doesn’t mean much. There’s no struggle in here and she hasn’t lost much of it. She might just be looking for a medikit. Nose bleed, or a shallow cut.”

“We have a medikit,” Fás snapped, shrugging them off. Their hand snapped right back into place, holding him still again. For the first time, Gil flashed their colors in warning. Neon yellow stripes that raced vertically along their tendrils and cheeks, bright enough to leave spots behind Fásach’s eyelids.

“Her prints are almost gone, and the snow swallows the heat of the blood,” they gritted, forcing him to look down by grabbing at his ear. His lips shivered with a snarl, but his eyes fixed on pockmarks in the snow. “We gotta go slow, or else we’ll lose her trail.”

Fásach nodded once, licking his lips back into place as he refit his teeth into his mouth. He didn’t need to follow a trail of sunken blood in the snow to know where she’d gone. She’d been staring at it ever since they arrived.

He glared up at the relay station with a doomed sense of hope that he was right.

?

“She’s not in the control room or the medilab,” Gil huffed, falling in beside Fásach as they met back up on the relay station’s massive tarmac beneath the central antenna. Whatever had been bothering Gil was gone from their voice, replaced with golden chimes that Fás fully trusted. They worked as a team, eliminating room after room, splitting the search to work faster.

Looming directly overhead, the antenna’s disc was too large to see without panning one’s head, a sensation that made Fás feel as if a string was tied to his belly button and someone was pulling him back and back, trying to widen the aperture of his eyes.

And he hated it. Not the sensation, but the disc that took up just as much of the sky as Big Blue. For reasons unknown, it made the hackles rise on his shoulders, the straps of his climbing harness cutting into the fur. He didn’t even like having the back of his neck to it, as if the great basin might fall and split him in two.

He cut his claws through his tresses with an aggravated growl and turned away from the looming giant to cup his voice against the howl of the wind.

“Me too,” he snapped, having just swept the supply sheds and an old transpo garage filled with miscellaneous parts. “Maybe we– maybe we missed her.” He clenched his fangs shut, holding back a whimper of concern. “Maybe she just took a walk.”

Gil grabbed his forearm with a pitying look on their wretched face. Fás peeled his upper lip away from one of his greater fangs in warning before the operator could insinuate that she might be lost or worse.

“Hypothermia confuses people, Fás,” they said over the wind. “We should look for her clothes. I’ve got nocs in the control room. You comb over things again and I’ll look out over the cove, see if I can—”

Fás stumbled, the wind screeching desperately in his ears again. He covered them as the vertigo tossed him to his knees like a novice on the deck of a ship at sea. His symphony was screaming at him, rising above him at such a pitch that he couldn’t hear Gil as they shook his shoulders. He lifted his face to the operator’s wide-eyed shock.

Then his eyes went wide at the sight over their writhing mane.

A grey silhouette, buffeted by the wind, so small that she must be high above the tarmac now. Her tresses whipped the air like ropes in the twists he’d redone for her in the time since they’d left the warmth of the Mummer.

Roz was climbing.

Fás pulled himself up by the straps of Gil’s climbing gear, pointing towards the ladder, unable to form words beyond the desperate chuckle in his chest. Anxious, viciously angry, terrified…

They both sprinted for the ladder but Fás was quicker, even if his claws made the climb difficult at best. A shilpakaar from the shallows might have been faster, but Gilladh was from deep waters where they had evolved to dive, not to swing from the great forests of Dharatee.

And lucky too, because something was wrong.

Unnaturallywrong.

“Comm Roz.Roz! Roz, stop!” Fásach bellowed. He knew she should be able to hear him. His linguitor connected with her systems just like they’d set up in the Pipes back on Huajile an eternity ago. She wasn’t more than twenty rungs away now and had stopped. Was now hugging the ladder with bare, red hands and her face hidden from the cold.

He started, pausing in confusion.

She wasn’t wearing her boots. Just soggy neoprene socks.

Her coveralls were haphazard, as if she’d been preoccupied while she latched them up. Ice collected in her tresses and across her shoulders, in the fine hairs along her cheeks.

“She okay?!” Gilladh called from below. Fásach leapt up the rungs without answering, his grip slipping on the damp metal, then swung to the wrong side of the ladder so he could shelter her from the wind. His heart clenched, nervous about the damage. Still, all he could think was a chorus of gratitude that she was alive and they had mediplasma.

But when he found her face, his hope froze over like hell.

She stared out at the mountains, an eerie green light blinking from the back of her eyeballs, murky through the fluid visible within her pupils as it lit up the interior of each orb. He shook her, yelling her name in her ear, but she remained transfixed, even as her lips and ears and fingers turned blue. He glanced at what she watched, dread gathering like lumps of coal in his gut, but there was nothing there. Just a sliver of the red jungle beyond, where the light was strong and warm.

“Is she okay?” Gil called again, smart enough to be careful on their ascent, hooking themself into the rope system one carabiner at a time.

“Roz,” Fásach murmured against her ear, coaxing her quietly. Gil couldn’t see her like this. He licked his lips and they tightened with the cold as he tried again. “Please,” he whined, desperate for time. “Look at me. Please.”

When he pressed his shoulders against the tower and used both hands to move her head, her eyes remained glued to the horizon, even as he forced her face away. Her pupils disappeared beyond the pinch of her eyelids, exposing an intricate map of gold and copper wiring intertwined with capillaries in the whites of her eyes. Too disturbed to push her further, he let her turn towards the horizon again and covered her hands in his with a pleading whimper.

“Fás—” Gil pushed.

“She’s okay!” he called down on a broken yell. “Just give me a minute. She… She’s scared.”

He caught Gilladh’s eyes and nodded with a tremulous smile. The operator watched with a stitch in their brow, mane collapsed against their neck and roiling in a slow pattern to keep the cold rotating around their tendrils. They looked pensive, worried, but waited.

Fásach blew out a breath and pressed his forehead to Roz’s frozen hands. He reached behind her head and felt around her charging port for any signs of damage, trying to make it look like he was lifting her cowl around her neck.

A drop of lubricated blood fell on his brow and dribbled onto his cheek. She shifted and his face sprung up, lit by hope.

Then she opened her mouth in a wide, silent scream. Black beads—her parumauxi—rimmed her teeth and pulsed beneath the glistening pad of her tongue. Her mouth stretched open wider than should be possible, straining the corners of her mouth until they were white, pulling her cheeks vertically until the clear ridges of her cheekbones stood in stark contrast to the hollows of her jaw.

Fásach’s hackles stood on end, and he leaned back on instinct, eyes wide and terrified. Whatever she was doing was horrific, emitting a sour, toxic something that warped their harmony until it snapped apart, unraveling and corrupting within his senses. It was unnatural, not Roz. Fásach had never experienced a loss like this, one that ripped his mind apart until he was bleeding, disintegrating from the inside out.

Then it stopped with a thick, meaty thud and a sharp pain in his rib.

Fásach looked down, shell-shocked with ringing ears.

A harpoon bolt was lodged in Roz’s puffy polar coveralls, red-stained batting poking out and caught on the sharp head like fake cobwebs where the tip pressed against his diaphragm.

Time suspended between beats of Fásach’s heart. He stared at Roz’s face as her parumauxi swarm retreated from her mouth like the snap of a rubber band. Her jaw went slack, and her eyes rolled back. Her head lolled, upturned to the antenna as she listed sideways off the rungs of the ladder.

“No!” Fásach roared as she tipped out into the open air. Another bolt from below sliced the space between them and Fásach caught her arm just in time, his claws cutting her sleeve and skin to red ribbons. He held onto the soft flesh as she dangled a hundred feet in the air.

Then his feral rage landed on the operator. Gil was reloading with a deadly glare, eyes locked on Fásach.

“She’s not actually human, is she?” they called up, cranking back the bolt. Their voice was all wrong. Righteous, true, honest as always, but resigned.

Fásach snarled, his nose bunching up viciously as he extruded his fangs to their full bite force. He licked them, trying to buy time even as lava heat ran through his veins. “She is,” he insisted, hoisting her up by her ruined forearm. He hugged her against the ladder and tied her in place with his climbing ropes, looping her to the ladder as best he could while Gilladh aimed.

“No, my friend,” Gilladh said with duty-bound remorse. “She isn’t.”

Before they could fire again, Fásach leapt from the ladder feet first, taking a gamble. Gilladh shot wide in surprise, their mane puffing up to its full size. As soon as Fásach hit the shil’s shoulders with his heel, they careened off the ladder together in a mess of ropes.

Gilladh had been hooking themself into the rope system as they climbed, and now it pulled taut, jerking them both with a whiplash to the head that discombobulated their brains. Fásach couldn’t tell up from down as he grappled, digging his claws into the fabric of Gil’s jacket. They swung as the world righted itself, and Fásach found them nearly upside down, his claws clutching the operator’s hip and shoulder for dear life.

“If you give us a chance, we—”

“She’s a doll, Fás!” Gilladh barked, heaving for air and baring their dental ridges in pain. They flailed, trying to get hold of the ropes holding them both aloft.

Fásach snarled, scrambling to keep himself from falling off Gil’s dangling body. “No! You don’t believe that. I’d know if you did.”

“You’re right, I didn’t,” Gil panted, gripping Fásach’s hackles and biceps. Not trying to fling him off, but to save him from falling. They held onto each other, swaying in the arctic wind. “Her pheromones don’t scent synthetic. She must have fooled you, too—”

“I know what she is—”

“Then you know dolls like her are dangerous! You have to let her go!”

“If anyone calls her a doll one more fucking time, I’m going to rip their throat out,” Fásach snarled, his tongue lolling at the prospect. “I’m not ever giving her up. She’s alive and we can prove—”

Gilladh got their hand on their bandolier, ripped open a pouch, and sliced at Fásach’s palm on exit. He roared as the wind tossed them again, slamming them against the tower. His hold slipped and he fell forward over Gil’s chest, feet dangling over a crushing fall to the steel-plated tarmac below. The operator pulled a disruptor puck from a chest pouch and Fás batted it out of his hand with a swipe of his claws that nearly upended them both, his heart in his throat. That puck would have overloaded Roz’s systems. It would have killed her with just the touch of a button.

Gilladh grabbed Fásach by the scruff and, with more strength than he could fight, lifted his head away as they plunged their knife towards his neck with a hiss of frustration. It caught in what was left of Fás’s dewlap, ripping the flesh open. The shilpakaar’s yellow stripes flashed as they tried again.

As strong as Fásach had become over the last several days, it was nothing compared to the strength of a shilpakaar that had been encoiled with a mate for as long as Gil had been. Every tendon strained against the operator’s hold, but it was almost no use. Without a full rut, Fásach couldn’t win a contest of strength that didn’t involve his jaws. The whites of his eyes rimmed his ungulate glare in terror, Gil’s hissing a sour warbling vibration in his senses. All wrong, so wrong.

How had this turned to rot so quickly?

Just as the knife descended again, the blizzard gusts battered them headfirst against the tower. Gilladh’s head smashed into the cold, gunmetal siding with a crunch as Fásach bashed his thickened horns against it on instinct, as if fighting another buck for territory. The shilpakaar beneath him went limp, turning completely upside down, a stream of coppery green blood gushing out into the wind.

Fásach struggled, grasping for the ropes to keep himself from slipping off. His claws made it difficult to grip their thin diameter, but he managed, digging their points into his own palm.

He centered himself on Gil’s hips, catching his breath, staring in terrible awe at the dead operator. Their tendrils twitched, the top of their head several inches closer to their neck than it should have been.

Fásach looked up at Roz, still strapped to the ladder and limp, a trail of red crystallizing all the way down to her ankles. He took Gil’s bandolier of supplies and pulled on their rope, swinging himself closer to the ladder.

And once he was back to the perilous safety of the rungs, he swung Gilladh’s body over Svargapan Samudr’s mosaic of sea ice and cut them free.

.