Chapter 34
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
NORA
They followed the river for three days, heading farther inland.
Its calm surface reflected the suns, only disturbed by the occasional flick of a black fin.
Airik marked their progress on a map with Nora’s pink cat pen, which she thought she’d lost, but Airik had admitted he’d confiscated it for her own safety.
“I get it—I’m dangerous,” she had replied, remembering the gun he’d given her in her backpack. She hoped he didn’t notice how she stared, enraptured by how tiny the pen looked in his hand as he traced their journey.
His English improved as fast as her affection for him.
Under the guise of practicing words, she pressed him to keep talking, and he asked her questions in return.
What color is Earth’s sky? Do children live with their parents, or are they raised in groups?
What food do you like to eat? Do all humans’ hair curl like yours?
Are all humans “okay” all the time like you?
As she answered, his lips would move, silently repeating what she said as if feeling the words in his mouth.
It was as endearing to her as the way he sometimes fidgeted with his sword.
Though she hadn’t tried to lift his sword while he’d been unconscious, in case she accidentally made it explode—if there was a way, Nora would find it, it seemed heavy even for him.
He moved it constantly from his back, where it magnetically attached to the harness he wore over his bare back, to his hip, where it stuck to his belt.
When he wielded it to cut branches out of the way or when he’d brought down the monster, he did so with ease.
So it was strange to see him struggle with it so much at rest. Or perhaps he wasn’t used to rest at all.
If there was ever any question whether Ed’un wanted them dead, Lucky was there to remind them of the dangers that lurked.
At Airik’s command, Lucky patrolled ahead, rooting black lizard-like creatures with spike-tipped tails out of holes in the ground.
He’d tear them into shreds, gleefully stripping flesh from bone, chittering as he ate.
When full after a dozen or so, he’d fling the screeching beasts high into the air for Airik to slice in half with his sword on their descent.
Nora had stared at them both, in utter shock, the first time it had happened.
“Their bite has enough venom to kill twenty men,” Airik had said, giving Lucky a pat on the head when he returned for his due praise. “Lucky and I have become friends, too. We want the same thing.” He managed a very small smile. “He shows me what tries to hurt you. I kill it.”
She had nodded, averting her gaze from the trail of dead lizards in their wake because they’d been unfortunate enough to cross her path.
And yet she couldn’t help the little smile she bit back as she walked between her alien protector and the vicious-but-cute cat-wolf, leaving a trail of dead lizards in their wake. What an improvement over her life on Earth and the Abeona.
Not several seconds later, images of her uncle, Loretta, the Abeona, and the rest of her Earthly life had slammed into her, wiping the smile off her face and sucking the air from her lungs.
And then, she’d remembered, as soon as the three of them made it to the city and help arrived, she’d lose the small bit of joy she’d found.
They moved from forest to farmland to meadows. Rounded bots armed with pruning blades whirred back and forth, maintaining crops for people who would never return to see the fruits of their efforts.
They crossed wide, glass-like sheets, which Airik explained were roads for magnetic groundcars.
She even saw one of them hovering in a containment shed when he went to refill their water bottles from the river.
It looked like an antique Beetle car she’d seen in her shows, but with a broad base, jittering like it still wanted to start.
Nora, excited to find something helpful, hurried up the path. “Hey—this looks like it still works!” she called back. “We can use it—”
“No!” Airik yanked her back, and she braced to slam into the ground. He caught her, stood her straight in front of him, his chest to her back, forcing her chin up by pulling on her braid.
Arousal hit between her legs, a surge of desire though he hadn’t even touched her skin. She gasped, ashamed to admit it even in her own thoughts.
“All is poison,” he growled, looking down at her from above. “That’s why everyone is gone or dead. Why I will break this planet apart, I’ll show you now.” He let her braid slack, not fully letting go.
Still some two hundred feet away, he tossed a rock with surprising force, and it landed on the car. Yellowish-green dust fell from its bottom, sinking to the floor like heavy snow.
Lucky hissed, the fur on his back standing straight. “It’s okay—” Nora looked down, reaching for him.
“Not okay.” Airik held her back, this time by gripping her chin, forcing her to face the kudra. “If you breathe that, you die. If you touch that, you die.” He roughly turned her to face him. “We don’t get close. Do you understand?”
Though it was firm, his touch didn’t hurt.
In fact, the exact opposite, it stirred an erotic instinct at the base of her mind that she wasn’t quite ready to let out.
The way he held her, looking straight down at her, upside down, made her feel protected and precious, as if her getting hurt would be the worst thing in the world.
At least to him. And…to matter to one person—someone like Airik—that would be more than enough.
But the sudden shift in his demeanor demanded a response. “I-I’m sorry—”
He leaned closer. “I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to understand.”
“I understand.”
His eyes wavered, his fingers against her chin twitching.
After a sigh, he let her go. “Kudra is dangerous,” he said, much gentler. “I don’t want to watch what it does to you, too.”
While he was picking up English at an astonishing pace, he still got some things wrong. Nora assumed that was what had happened when he’d said too. But something about the distant look in his eye when he said it lingered, burrowing uncomfortably in her heart.
On the third day, by mid-afternoon, they came upon a set of benches and a platform, at the center of intersecting tracks—what Nora thought to be a transit station.
“For a smaller species—the kirjarix,” Airik said, noticing her sizing up an unusually small bench at the end of the row. “Even shorter than you. Their world was one of the first to belong to the Veynari.”
“Because they were too small to fight back against giants like you?”
“No, they wanted to join. Not all worlds need a morazir to help them to accept the Veynari. Some want to be protected by giants like me.” He stood behind her, bending so she could see him over her head.
“And to use better technology. To control the weight of things like the Veynari can. And…” He leaned closer.
“Not only size matters. There are now kirjarix as morazir. One is enough to bring an entire city of giants to its knees.”
“It’s the strength inside that counts—got it.”
“It is,” Airik said unexpectedly. “The…engine that decides all things picks a morazir when they are young, because of the strength they will have. It says in their…cells. The words that determine how a person will look or think. Not just for a morazir. But all things. Who you breed. Your work.”
Nora’s legs wobbled as she processed his words. “The Veynari dictates your lives based on genetics? And it’s final say?”
“Is genetics the instructions inside your body?”
“Yes.”
“Then, yes.”
Before she succumbed to confirmation that yes, the Veynari were an evil empire, she slipped away from him, plopping onto one of the benches.
Airik must’ve gotten some of the words and descriptions wrong. She’d clarify later. It made no sense how someone like him—kind in his own way, warm, and safe—was the product of the society he described.
The bench was so low her knees jutted out—like she was sitting at the kids’ table at a birthday party. “I would have been a god among them if I had gotten to them before the Veynari.”
“Maybe—if they didn’t have poison spit that would kill you.”
“Thank you,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I almost forgot for a second I wasn’t at the bottom of the food chain.”
“Food…” He smiled. “Are you delicious, demon eyes?”
Nora found herself wanting more of that. She wanted him to smile so wide his fangs would show. “I might be. But I’d stomp them before they could get a bite.”
He let out a laugh, the tips of his fangs glinting. “I do not think you would—you’re too sweet to hurt another life. You might even give an arm yourself to make it easier for them.” He looked around them, his laughter softening. “Maybe you are food, demon eyes. It would be so easy to eat you.”
She hummed, unable to make words or to focus on anything beyond how beautiful he was and how wet she’d gotten just from the strange way he talked. “Then…maybe I can just be their tall, benevolent god.”
“Is that all that’s needed to command humans? Height?” He sat beside her, practically in a squat. “All of you are in trouble, then.”
She slid her gaze to him and grinned. “You’d be a god among humans. An angel, at the very least.”
Airik’s expression hardened, and she thought he’d get up. But after a moment, he relaxed. She held still as he reached over and flicked the hair from her eyes. “Don’t say that word. The Veynari do not like to hear bad words—they’re dangerous.”
She cocked a brow, uninterested in acknowledging the force that’d soon rule her life. “But you would,” she insisted, emboldened that he chose to sit so close and had even touched her for no other reason than he wanted to. “Not because of height. But because you’re just so…beautiful.”
She had never told another man that in her life. But Airik wasn’t really a human man, and he deserved to hear it. “Not…that that’s more important than what’s on the inside, of course. Which, for you, I know is nice, too.”
His lip twitched. “Do you find me beautiful, demon eyes?” Of course he hadn’t missed that.
All she could do in response was look away, the bravery of seconds ago quickly fading.
If she told him the truth about how she found his entire existence—his words, his spirit, his body and face—inescapable, she feared their tentative friendship would crumble and she’d have to mourn its loss too soon.
When the suns set, Ed’un’s moon rose. Airik had explained that it would always appear full because of the way the twin suns illuminated it from two angles.
Airik, checking for a place to rest for the night, crested a hill. Nora heard alien words whispered in shock.
“Come to me,” he said quickly. He held out a hand, his expression unmistakably excited. “You must see this, demon eyes.”
“I don’t like that name,” she said, going to him.
“And I don’t like Major Asshole.” He offered his hand again.
Before he could realize his mistake, she took it and squeezed it, letting him help her up. Her mouth fell open at the sight he’d wanted to show her.
White flowers carpeted the fields, reflecting the moon’s light so brightly that they looked incandescent. The entire valley between the hill they stood on and the forests in the distance glowed with serene light.
“Rori flowers,” he said, watching her. “They have a story. A little sad. Do you want to know it?”
“Yes,” she said without hesitation. How could a story about lovely flowers be sad?
He stepped closer, taking her braid as if it were a reflex. “If a child leaves their body too young, they become this flower. They only open at night, it is thought, to light the darkness for children still connected to this world.”
The air suddenly went too still.
“When a child…” Nora said the words slowly. “Leaves their body?”
Airik’s expression faltered. “Yes…so they won’t be afraid of the dark.” He paused, perhaps realizing his mistake. “It’s only a story—not real.”
For a moment, she thought maybe she had died in the crash. That this was Hell and the myth had been created just to remind her of Theo, who couldn’t sleep without a nightlight.
“Nora?” Airik tightened the loop of her braid in his grip.
“I need to sit.”
He helped her down, kneeling beside her, looking as broken as she felt. “I…I am sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said it. I—”
“Do people on your planet die?” Nora asked, large hot tears already stinging.
His eyes widened, perhaps stunned by the ridiculous question. She knew the answer—he’d just told her about children dying. Yet a persistent, debilitating hope remained that maybe his world might have been different from Earth.
“Of course we die.”
“But from old age, right? You probably have fancy medicine and everyone gets to live a long, healthy life.” She turned to him. “Don’t they?”
He thumbed the end of her braid, facing the flowers. “Usually.”
“Usually?” She let out a short, disbelieving laugh. Sobs overcame her restraint. Worse than the memories swelling fast was the helplessness on Airik’s face.
Her braid fell slack across her back. Before she could mourn the loss of his touch, he began to stroke her hair from the nape of her neck to the ends.
Had anyone ever touched her like this? If they had, she couldn’t remember.
With each slow pass, his fingers grazed her back, the fire of his fingertips permeating her shirt, warming her.
“Nora,” he said after a moment. “What has happened to you?”
She fought the sudden urge to laugh again. “That’s a loaded question,” she said, wiping the last of the tears. “Let’s keep moving—I’m okay now.”
She tried to rise.
Airik tugged on her braid, keeping her down beside him.
He turned to her, eyes so bright they rivaled the flowers and the moon. “I am not…okay,” he whispered, tilting his head as if lost in thoughts he couldn’t make sense of. “When you cry, it’s as if your tears are mine…coming from my eyes.”
“I’m…sorry,” she said helplessly.
Airik plucked a flower that had fallen by his hand. He tucked its stem into her braid.
“I don’t know what’s happened to you,” he said, adjusting the petals so they lay prettily against her hair. “But this one was waiting until you came—so happy, it jumped from its stem to be with you.”