31
Though the break was much needed, Roz and Fásach convinced the girls to return to their pods for safety in the late afternoon on the next day. They whined, but both adults shared glances of concern as time ticked by. While Roz hummed the lullabies she”d been learning to soothe them to sleep, Fás hurriedly packed the needle. His ear twitched as a sudden burst of frenetic music erupted from Roz”s mouth and the girls dissolved into giggles. She caught his eye and his ear twitched again.
”Reggaeton, was it?” he asked with amusement. Safia snorted, and the giggles started up fresh. Misila pointed at her and clutched her stomach.
”What? It”s the lullaby of my people,” Roz shot back. Both of the girls bounced in their strap-ins, mimicking the sounds of the horned instruments with uncanny similarity. All three spent a few moments jamming together before Misila yawned and the music faded away.
They bumped foreheads with both Fásach and Roz, then settled into their harnesses with smiles on their faces.
”We”ll be within the hundred mile stretch soon,” Roz told him, showing him a map as the needle started up. Her holowell flickered. Fásach glanced at her but chalked it up to blinking. ”By the end of the day, as long as the trail is intact. We should start at the eastern end of the stretch and follow the river westward.”
”I defer to your judgment,” he said, hugging her waist as she warmed up the engine. She stretched open the length of her neck and he buried his nose against her pulse, dragging in a deep breath. As soon as they”d entered the heat of the jungle, she”d discarded the helmet, and Fásach was pleased with it.
But as cozy as it was to sit on the humming engine block with Roz backed up into his groin, the air was thick and still, and his predator-primed muscles ached after an hour. He ran abreast of their stolen vehicle in long bouts, jumping back on its sled when he felt winded. He wanted to wrap Roz in his arms, but she was focused on the trail and both of them were hot. Instead, he used the comb he”d gotten for her to pull tufts of his undercoat out of his pelt, wadding up the remnants in Roz”s discarded polar coveralls to avoid leaving a trail of yiwreni fur in their wake.
Their shared silence was peaceful, meditative even. She focused on the trail, and he kept an eye on their surroundings, sometimes sprinting ahead to move debris. It was a silent collaboration that needed no words, and even so, she still chimed here and there. A sneeze, a grunt, shifting on her seat.
Then Roz listed sideways off her saddle. The needle engine whirred with a high-pitched whine, the plasma throttle over-expending fuel without acceleration as the fob looped around her wrist was wrenched from its safety port.
Harmonic vertigo immediately set Fás”s heart racing with ice water. His hands and ears went numb as if he was back on Svargapan Samudr with Gil, hearing that horrible screeching warning through his symphony.
”Roz!” he gasped, several meters ahead of her. He dropped the tree branch he”d been dragging off the path and slid on his hip, catching her arm before she rolled down the ditch. The phantom sound of electricity humming through the antenna like angry hornets made his heart pound so hard that his vision blurred. His claws remembered how her coveralls ripped, the wind stealing hot droplets of blood as she dangled from his hand. His grip nearly failed on her wrist before he pulled her up into his arms with a whine of terror.
”Roz,” he panted, pushing her curls off her face with harried, trembling fingers. When he uncovered her eyes, dead and vacant, his heart shattered in his chest.
Then the blue light in the back of one of her pupils blinked. Steady, slow...
He crushed her to his chest with a heave of air, rocking her back and forth with her arms hanging limp over his biceps.
”She needs to charge,” he managed, his ears pressed back. ”It”s okay. She”s okay,” he told himself. ”It”s just a low charge.”
He rocked her in his arms for a long while before he felt comfortable laying her down on the ground to look for a solution.
Fásach downloaded the snow needle”s manual, unable to understand half of the gibberish in its scrolling files. He”d never been good with machines. Eventually, he figured out how to use its charge as a powerbank. Built for rangers and heavy-duty off terrain work, it was equipped with an adapter for biognostic riders.
The sun had set by the time Fásach had Roz wrapped in a light blanket to keep the dew away, her head bent forward to reveal the charging port outfitted with her S-Ion Slab4. There was half a slab”s charge on that, which she must have been saving for emergencies. He sat down beside her, exhausted, unsteady, and hungry.
Halfway through the night, he killed a sleek, red-pelted animal with u-shaped pink markings. It had big, forward-facing eyes and a long heavy tail made for pouncing and climbing. Whether it was stalking his camp or not, it became dinner. He stacked its offal and other organ meat away from the trail, then ate its steaming liver and heart. All while sitting in front of Roz, staring at the blinking light in her eye, making sure it didn”t simply... stop.
He touched her cheek gently, then snarled when he realized her skin was cold. Bone deep. Not simply chilly. He pressed his bloodied face to her chest and listened, reassuring himself that her heart and lungs were still functioning.
They were steady and strong but working at a snail”s pace. Power saving mode, his logical brain told him. Dying, his instincts insisted. Distant memories of news feeds tracking the rot came to mind, bodies stacked under dirty tarps in muddy black fields that had once been thriving with clovers and luffe flowers.
He piled more blankets over her until she looked like a mountain of laundry, took nearly an hour to light a fire that would have taken him minutes in his youth, and bloodlet, skinned, and cooked the animal. Preparation wasn”t pretty, but he was sorely out of practice and had been a rowdy pup with the attention span of a gnat. He was lucky he remembered to drain it of fluids.
Roz didn”t wake up that night, nor the morning after.
Fásach had no way of checking her charge but by monitoring the needle. By the rate of depletion, he guessed she”d drained half of its remaining power. But it wouldn”t last forever. She wasn”t a biognostic that had evolved for maximum efficiency and diverse power acquisition. She”d been built as a toy, a bird in a cage. Having a long charge would have defied the leash for which her builders had designed her.
Reaching Renata, regardless of the dangers, was urgent now. Or else she”d power down again and maybe… not wake up.
Fásach knelt in front of her, crusted with blood and dirt, and pressed his forehead to hers.
”I miss you,” he croaked, voice unused. Then his brow drew together. ”Don”t come back to me until that needle is dead, got it? Drain it down to nothing.”
He released the vital pods from the needle’s bed so they floated like ducklings behind him, laid Roz gently on top of the sled, and tied her down like she was luggage. Then he wrapped a bright orange climbing rope around the needle, slipped it across his chest, and pulled.