Chapter 20
Szhe’ka
I wake up to something pressing into me painfully and when I open my eyes, I see a purple and orange plume.
I shake my head trying to center my thinking, dazed and confused. My hand reaches out to find Ani but she is nowhere around me. Panic sets in but my memories are fuzzy and incorrect. There is hardly any pain but I feel as if I have chunks missing from the events of the past.
The memories come rushing into my head; the dizzying odor of the hunter and Ani, scared; pain in my shoulder; and life leaving me.
“Ani,” I murmur, the world spinning around me.
“Who that?” someone sings, bringing my attention back to my painful reality.
“Ree?” I chirp.
“Yes,” she answers, then she switches her language and I can no longer understand her short, harsh words.
Someone rumbles back in the same language.
“Forgot,” she sings. “Szhe’ka. You hear?”
“Do hear,” I sing back, my voice weak. My vision is starting to fail.
“Give medicine. Change you forever, but you live. You want?”
Do I? This is my chance to slip away, I realize. Embrace my grounding and just die. All I have to do is tell them where Ani is and they will help her. Far better than I did.
I don’t want to, I realize. I need to see her safe.
“Yes, give,” I respond.
There is a sharp pain in my upper left arm and a hissing sound. The pain worsens, quickly becoming unbearable as my vision blackens.
***
When I wake, the pain has lessened and when I open my eyes I can see clearly.
Ree, who looks different when I last saw her, not just in body, but also in her expression as she looms in front of me. I think back to the tonality of her song and realize something in her has changed since we last met.
A quick glance around and I see Thivoll is with her, though turned away. He’s sniffing the breeze, pulling in whistling breaths.
“Glad you live,” Ree sings, pulling my attention back to her.
She is holding a silver tube of some sort.
“This have many other songs in it. Hurt throat. Want?”
I’m not sure I want to speak like they do. I’ve already given up my wings. But then I remember how much Ani hates how long it takes to sing.
“Human song?” I ask.
“Yes,” Ree responds, moving her chin up and down in a gesture I have seen Ani make.
“I take,” I sing back before I can think better of it.
My body tenses, ready for the pain that came before, but this time there is only the sting of the tube piercing into my skin.
After a long silence, she speaks again. “Can you understand me now?” Ree asks.
I blink, mind trying to catch up with the speed of her words. I open my mouth to respond and there is a stabbing pain in my throat.
I’m using one of my hands to massage it as I reply. “Yes. Understand.”
Ree shows me her white teeth. “Good. This is Thivoll’s language. We mostly use it as our default, but only because no one can agree. Your language is incredibly beautiful, but… slow.”
“Yes,” I agree. “Slow.”
“You don’t need to speak in such short sentences now,” she tells me.
“All I know,” I admit.
I look over at my shoulder and see that the wound there yesterday has started to heal.
Trying to move it is not as difficult as it should be and I wonder how long I have been knocked out.
It can’t be more than a day or some animal in this forest would have started taking chunks out of me for their meal.
Raising my head, I look up to see that it is early afternoon. After getting shot by the hunter, my body shut down for an entire day so that it could repair itself. If I want to fully get better, I will have to rest some more.
But not right now; the longer I am away from her, the more danger her life is in.
“Ani taken,” I tell Ree, urgency in my voice making it even rougher and flat. There are no harmonics to communicate greater levels of meaning. It’s disorienting.
“Who is Ani?”
“Red plume,” I tell her.
“Right. I called her Ruby. Thivoll said he smelled a Genali and a human. We can track them.”
“We go,” I reply as I push myself to my feet. I expect to feel dizzy and for my feet to hurt but they don’t.
I groan, the pain from my new wound added to that in my wing stubs and feet making me dizzy again.
“I can’t believe they gave everyone else we’ve met healing nanites, Thivoll, but not him. Why not him? An oversight?”
The orange beast snorts out a harsh breath. “No. They wanted him to suffer.”
“Nanites?” I ask, confused by the exchange and still working through the speed of their words.
“That’s the medicine I gave you,” Ree explains.
“It’s little robots. I mean… Nevermind. I don’t think it will translate.
I put something in you that will heal you, but it will take it a while to get you back to normal.
And… well, I don’t think it’s likely to fix your wings.
We need to get moving. The hunter has a large lead on us. ”
I will only slow them down, I realize. “You go, I follow. Too slow.”
Ree bites her lip. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. Go.”
She moves her chin up and down again, and then moves to Thivoll, vaulting on to his back. He pulls in a long whistling breath and then bounds through the foliage, quickly disappearing from view.
Holding my feet out, I’m grateful to see that the wounds on my legs have healed—not completely, as I can still see the yellow welts but I know that they will turn into scars in a little while.
My people often fall into deep sleep after serious injuries, sometimes for a full week if the wound is severe enough but seeing as I have only been asleep for what seems like a day this must be because of Ree.
I find myself wondering why I’m even still alive; if the hunter had fired at my head, there’s no amount of sleep that would have fixed that. Ani must have protected me somehow; the thought of her fighting with the hunter to keep me safe stirs something within me.
I must find her and return that protection.
I have to find Ani.
Who knows what those hunters could have put her through by now?
She is a fighter, at the very least in spirit, and the fact that her smell is mixed up with that of the hunter tells me that she was not able to escape them.
I am going to have to get her out of there before those creatures can hurt her or, who knows what else, they could have started torturing her for daring to escape.
These hunters don’t seem very forgiving.
I croon under my breath; my song feels so empty without her beautiful voice to sing along with me. “Ani, be safe.”
I can feel the sense of urgency bubbling up in my chest. I can’t let anything happen to her. I promised her sister I would bring her back safe and sound but honestly, that’s not what is motivating me anymore; I want to save her for my own reasons.
Lowering my form, I allow my sense to lead me through the trail Ani was taken through. If at any point she was able to escape, her scent would separate from the hunter, and if she was harmed in any way, the scent of her blood would not have been completely covered up yet.
The thought of my feisty Red being hurt in any way by her captors sends a strike through my chest that almost hurts physically.
I cannot bear the thought and I try to think of her getting away from the hunter instead. Although I would not put it past her to harm the hunter if she gets a chance to do so, punching into his shapeless body with the most adorable staccato of anger in her voice until he is depleted to nothing.
Joy creeps up on my face at the thought, even though I know it is very unlikely.
If she had tried to fight back, there would surely be evidence of it—a broken branch here and there or bits of blood splashed around.
The fact there is none tells me she either didn’t try anything or wasn’t successful.
Their scents are still intermingled as I continue, and I do my best to quicken my steps.
The pain from my legs stops me in my tracks and I look behind me to see that I haven’t made that much progress. My slow walking will not get me to Ani quick enough and the more time I waste, the more danger she’s in.
I frantically try to think of how to get to her, then it hits me; I can use my hands as extra support instead of just my legs.
I have four of them and I cannot understand why I did not come to this conclusion sooner. I had used them in a similar way to climb up the tree when I rescued her and when I had to walk through that windstorm but somehow I had not made the connection until just now.
A sense of shame spreads through my entire body but I cannot afford myself the time to sit here and sulk. I must get to her quickly.
Instead of asking myself any more questions, I bend over, fold my fingers inward and once I am sure my weight is evenly distributed between all six limbs, I start moving.
It is a little unsteady at first and I feel like a hatchling learning to walk for the first time. However, I remind myself that I don’t have any time to waste and my pace increases to a light jog and soon I am running.
It feels different to use my hands like this. I never had a reason to run except to do it for fun when I still had my wings and even then, I never had to do it for any long period of time. It almost feels like flying but not quite, as I am still tethered to the ground.
I pick up speed as I barrel through the forest like an enraged beast. Moving this way still hurts, but not in the same way using my legs alone.
I am used to the pain now.
Even if I were not, I would find a way to make it work because Ani deserves it.
She protected me, I’m sure of it. They are vicious creatures who do not just hit once and let go; they hurt to kill you and then torture you some more, like they’re trying to use the pain to bring you back to life.
As I make my way through the trail, I make sure to be as quick as possible because the scent carries on for longer than I expected it to. It enrages me as I think of how much Ani was made to walk.
If we were together, she would have let me know just exactly how she feels about long walks.
There are more civilizations than I ever bothered myself to know but the grounded creatures preferred to stay grounded and my species dominated the air and were bigger than whatever contraptions they would want to send into the sky.
The ship that killed my brothers and captured me was foreign, something we had never witnessed before and that was why it took us by such surprise.
I don’t know much about technology here, or at all but it does not seem like there are many native creatures intelligent enough to use it anyway.
The night deepens and I am angry at myself for not getting to Ani quick enough. I nearly failed her once before.
I would not be able to live with the thought of losing another being I care about.
The only reason I have weathered the loss of my flockmates, Nnaiv, and my wings this well has been due to the relationship that has budded between me and her.
If I had not been so single-minded in my mission to return her to her people, I would surely have collapsed from grief and my injuries long ago.