Chapter 18 Jean
“Um… aren’t we going to build a fire?”
Try as I might, I can’t quite hide the desperation in my voice. I only hope the translator device masks it a little.
It is late evening now, and we have stopped to camp beside a hill of smooth, black stone.
The gray haze that plagued us for most of the day has settled, but a thick layer of clouds still covers the sky, blocking much of the evening light.
Once the sun goes down, there won’t be any light at all. No starlight. No moonlight. Nothing.
It promises to be a long, dark night.
And I know what happens to my body in the dark.
I know all too well.
“Campfire?” Ghorak asks, like he’s never even heard of such a thing.
The big, horned alien is sitting cross-legged on the ground, puffing on a stalk of dreamweed. It is, by my count, his twentieth of the day.
I still don’t know exactly what the effects of dreamweed are, but they obviously haven’t interfered with Ghorak’s physique.
Shortly after we arrived, he decided to strip his tunic off.
Now his upper body is proudly on display.
Mountains of hard, green muscle. Abs that look like they were carved with a chisel. I try my best not to stare.
I can’t help noticing, however, that there is a symbol engraved on the right side of his chest, in the exact same position as Scythro’s brand. Ghorak’s is a different color, however—dark green—and a different shape.
Does everyone on this planet have one of those?
“Too risky,” Scythro chimes in.
He’s lounging on his side a few feet away, looking very much like a leopard getting ready to nap after a big meal. His pretty face is propped in the palm of one elegant blue hand, and his wounded arm is swaddled in bandages supplied by Ghorak. His tail dances languidly behind him, its own entity.
The longstrider is crouched behind him, its long legs tucked completely beneath its massive shell. The sight of it reminds me of the empty husk where I took shelter the day before, and everything that transpired within.
And everything that will happen tonight, once the darkness takes me.
“Risky?” I ask.
Scythro waves his bandaged hand toward the horizon. “Once it gets dark, a fire will be visible from a million draths away. Bad idea with Pharod’s men patrolling the wastes.”
Shit.
He has a point.
Still, if I get caught out here without any light to keep my urges at bay, I’m going to be in a different kind of trouble, and a lot of it.
“What about a small fire?” I ask.
A tiny fire. A candle. Any damn thing.
Scythro smiles lazily.
“Fire is fire,” he says. “Anything bigger than the end of Ghorak’s weedstalk will be visible from a distance. It isn’t worth the risk, trust me.”
I do trust him. It’s my own traitorous body I don’t trust.
My gaze drifts to the hillside next to our camp. There’s an old mining tunnel bored into the side of it. Abandoned, apparently. Scythro and Ghorak checked it for signs of predators as soon as we arrived, but they found nothing.
“What about in there?” I ask. “If we camped in there, we could make a fire without anyone seeing it.”
Scythro shakes his head.
“Not a good idea,” he says. “An old mine like that, there’s always a chance of a cave-in. Not the ideal place to go to sleep.”
I have to admit, I didn’t really like the idea all that much either. There’s something about that hole in the hillside that makes my skin crawl.
Ghorak exhales an enormous cloud of smoke, coughs.
“Don’t worry,” he says, misinterpreting my concern. “Me and Scythro will protect you.” He pats the big rifle lying beside him. “Between his senses and my musket, you’ll be safe.”
I nod, even though I don’t feel safe.
The threat I’m worried about isn’t external. It’s inside me. The urges. The drugs.
Of course, I can’t tell the aliens that.
A quick mental calculation tells me it’s been a little over two days since my last dose. Maybe the effects have worn off by now, but I doubt it, judging from the way things went yesterday.
What am I going to do?
What am I going to do?
“Want some dreamweed?” Ghorak asks, holding out the cigarette-sized stalk that’s burning between his fingers. “It’ll help put your mind at ease.”
For a second, I actually consider it. Maybe if I smoke enough of that stuff, I can knock myself out completely. Can’t go into heat if I’m not awake, right?
Then again, this is probably not the best time to start experimenting with drugs. For all I know, that stuff is poisonous to humans. I’m a 90s kid. My young brain was inundated with stories about children who dropped dead after smoking pot one time.
“No thank you,” I say, forcing a polite smile. “I’d better not.”
“Suit yourself,” Ghorak shrugs. He offers the stalk to Scythro. “How about you? Reckon it would help numb that arm a little.”
“Thank you.”
I watch as Scythro gracefully rolls to his feet and accepts the proffered weed. He brings the stalk to his lips, inhales gently, holds it…
Then erupts into a fit of violent coughing.
Something tells me I made the right decision.
“Sorry,” Ghorak rumbles. “Should have warned you. It’s a powerful strain.”
“Sweet Goddess,” Scythro says between hacks. “Powerful indeed. How the null do you smoke so much of it?”
He hands the stalk back to Ghorak, who accepts it with another shrug.
“Tolerance, I guess.”
He takes a long drag and exhales it without so much as a hitch. The cloud drifts away like a ghost on the breeze, and he watches it go. Then he turns his fuzzy green eyes toward me again.
“Food!” he says, like it’s the most brilliant idea ever. “Food always helps to calm a body down.”
He stands up, walks over to the longstrider, and starts rummaging through one of the many packs strapped to the creature’s shell.
“He’s right,” Scythro says, his voice still hoarse from coughing. “You need to eat something. It’s been a long day.”
It has.
All we did was ride. I shouldn’t feel this exhausted, but sitting on your butt all day can be surprisingly tiring—especially when you’re sandwiched between a pair of large alien males. When Ghorak said it would be a tight fit atop the longstrider, he wasn’t kidding.
We stopped once to rest and eat, and I devoured the last of the nutrient cakes from my survival pack. That was several hours ago. Now there’s a hollow feeling in my belly.
Ghorak comes lumbering back from the longstrider with a few bundles in his hands. He plops them on the ground in front of me and starts to unwrap them.
“Here,” he says. “Try this.”
Thick green fingers hold up something that looks like a piece of beef jerky, but grayish. Normally, I would find that color off-putting, but at the moment I’m in no position to complain. My stomach is starting to grumble with hunger.
It occurs to me that, as with the dreamweed, there’s a possibility this food will make me sick or even kill me, but if I don’t eat anything, I’ll starve to death.
I decide to go for it.
Using the maneuver I invented yesterday, I take a deep breath to fill my lungs with air.
Then I remove my breathing mask. Holding my breath, I quickly snatch the piece of jerky from Ghorak’s fingers and stuff the whole thing in my mouth.
I don’t bother to start chewing until my mask is firmly in place again.
The two aliens watch my behavior with silent curiosity.
The jerky isn’t bad. Salty and savory, with a touch of sweetness. Plus, it’s softer than the beef jerky I’m used to. I like it.
“S’good,” I mumble through my full mouth.
Ghorak seems pleased that I like it. He flashes a lopsided grin.
“It’s slug jerky,” he says. “My favorite.”
I nearly spit the stuff all over the inside of my mask. Somehow, I manage not to do that, and I force myself to swallow. Ghorak notices my discomfort and frowns.
“Water?” he asks.
I nod frantically, unable to speak thanks to the dried slug meat in my throat. Ghorak offers me a waterskin, and I perform my mask maneuver a second time. I force myself to drink slowly, taking care not to choke like I did yesterday inside the longstrider shell.
Once my mask is back in place, Scythro makes a little gesture with his good hand.
“You know,” he says. “You probably don’t have to do all that. You’re an oxygen breather, right?”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
“Lucky guess. You don’t look much like an ammonia breather to me.”
“Oh?” I say. “I wasn’t aware they had a look.”
I also wasn’t aware they existed.
“Then you’ve never seen one,” Scythro says. “Consider yourself lucky. And don’t even get me started on methane breathers.”
Ghorak grunts in agreement.
“Anyway,” Scythro continues, “all the inmates here on Ul are oxygen breathers, just like you.”
Interesting. If there’s oxygen in the atmosphere, that means I won’t die from asphyxiation.
Of course, I already kind of figured that was the case.
My mask obviously doesn’t have a built-in oxygen supply, so it’s probably just filtering out any harmful chemicals that might be in the air.
I already inhaled some of that air by accident yesterday, and it didn’t make me keel over and die.
Come to think of it, I didn’t even feel sick. Still… better safe than sorry.
“I think I’ll keep it on for now,” I say. “Just to be careful.”
“Fair enough.”
I turn my attention to the ground in front of me, where Ghorak has finished unwrapping the other bundles of food. In addition to the slug jerky, there’s a little pile of what looks like hard-boiled eggs, and another pile of biscuits.
“Try some of these,” Ghorak says. “They’re—”
I cut him off.
“Don’t tell me!” I blurt. “I don’t want to know.”
The next several minutes pass in relative silence as the three of us eat.
Aside from the blue color of their yolks, the eggs taste exactly like the ones I’m used to on Earth, and the biscuits are buttery and flaky, almost like little croissants.
They remind me of the last breakfast I had with Mel, and for perhaps the hundredth time today, I find myself wondering about my missing friend.
God, I hope she’s alright.
I turn and look at Gerber, who is lying motionless atop my survival pack. His feathers flutter softly in the breeze, and his exposed metal skull gleams faintly in the dying light. I hope Ghorak’s friend really can fix him. It’s my only hope of ever finding Mel.
A sound snaps me out of my thoughts. A pair of them, actually. The first is a heavy thud, followed a moment later by a noise like someone sawing a log.
It’s Ghorak.
While I was staring at Gerber, the big green alien must have passed out, because now he’s lying flat on his back, snoring. The weed-stalk has burned down to a nub between his fingers. Scythro carefully extracts it and grinds it out on the ground next to him.
“Is he okay?” I ask.
“Depends on how you define okay,” Scythro says with an ironic smirk. “He’ll have pleasant dreams tonight, that’s for sure. They call it dreamweed for a reason.” He shakes his head. “Never seen anyone smoke so damned much of the stuff.”
He turns to look at me, and his eyes gleam faintly like a cat’s.
“You should consider getting some sleep as well, Jean. We have another big day ahead of us tomorrow.” He pauses for a beat, then adds, “How are you feeling?”
The way his voice hits that last word, it’s obvious what he means.
And right on cue, I feel it. That old familiar tickle deep within my core.
Oh no.
No, no, no!
The urges are coming back.
I look around in a panic and realize that the world is already much darker than it was just a few minutes ago.
There’s still some light filtering through the clouds on the horizon, but I know it’s not going to last for long.
It will be full-on night soon, and when that happens, my urges are only going to get worse.
Already, the tickle is turning into something far more intense.
“Jean?”
Scythro’s voice shocks me back to my senses, and I realize I’ve left his question hanging for a full minute or more. As soon as I look at him, a surge of lust fills me, and I quickly dart my eyes away.
“It’s happening again,” Scythro says, his voice gently concerned. “Isn’t it?”
“No!” I blurt. Then: “Yes, but…”
Scythro reaches out and gently caresses my arm with the back of his hand. Even through the material of my bodysuit, that touch raises goosebumps all over my body.
“I can help,” he offers, a hint of purring in his voice.
I fall for it and lean toward him, pressing harder into his hand. Then I snap out of it, and quickly pull away.
“I don’t need help.”
“Yesterday…”
Scythro doesn’t have to say any more than that. The rest is crystal clear. Yesterday, I desperately needed help.
And he provided it.
“Tonight will be different,” I tell him.
They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. But then, I bet whoever came up with that saying never crash-landed on an alien planet. I could probably teach them a thing or two about insanity.
Besides, my confidence is not wholly unwarranted. It’s been multiple days since I had my last dose of Znthian breeding drugs. Surely the effects will have started to wear off by now.
Right?
I glance around, looking for a place where I can take care of business in private.
My eyes fall on the entrance to the mine.
The shadows within are even deeper than before, as black and impenetrable as ink.
I shudder. That place is absolutely out of the question. I’ll have to take care of this outside.
“Listen,” I say, turning toward Scythro again and daring to look straight into his pale blue eyes. “I’m going to go around to the other side of the longstrider. I want you to promise me something.”
“Anything, Jean.”
“Promise me you won’t look.”
I don’t know what his night vision is like, but based on his performance inside the bug shell yesterday, I’m guessing it’s a hell of a lot better than mine.
Something flashes behind Scythro’s eyes. I can’t tell if it’s disappointment or concern. Maybe it’s a little of both.
“Jean…”
“You said anything,” I remind him. “Now promise.”
He sighs in defeat.
“Very well,” he says. “I promise.”
I cut my eyes briefly in Ghorak’s direction. He’s still snoring. Out cold. I don’t think he’ll be coming round anytime soon, but I want to be extra safe.
“If he wakes up, um… keep him occupied, okay?”
Scythro nods solemnly.
“You have my word.”