Chapter 11 Dom
ELEVEN
DOM
The rain hasn’t let up in the human week since Gara left with Arabella. In a way, it suits the sorrowful mood drenching us, because we know our crewmate isn’t likely to come back.
‘Might,’ Nevare sends. ‘Ilia came back.’
‘Ilia escaped. Barely,’ Arik corrects.
I know the black and white: any exile who returns will be put to death. I’d be hard pressed to keep from strangling him myself if we’d gone with him, because the laws are clear and simple. Not easy, but simple.
I raise my eyes to the farmhouse, dim and shadowed in the nighttime. Law-rah has only come out to get into her vehicle and leave with a roar up the track, returning long after the sun sets. The urge to approach her keeps growing, but will that cross one of her boundaries?
“Where is she?” I mutter. “Is she late?”
‘The stars wheel overhead. Some that weren’t close to the horizon when she returned before have disappeared behind it,’ Nevare observes.
So she’s getting later and later. Perhaps it’s the work she does demanding more and more of her, but I suspect something else instead. Whatever it is drives her, gives her purpose. I want to know what it is, so I can assist her with it, even though she laughed at me when I suggested it.
I will be useful to her.
“Well?” I ask Nevare again, startling Arture.
With a scowl, he rolls back to resting on his new pallet. El-len gave us access to materials to make our temporary living quarters more comfortable, but I didn’t take anything. I can sleep on plascrete in any weather, the discomfort sinking needles to tether me in reality.
A spark of light flashes up the track. “There!” I cry.
Law-rah’s vehicle grumbles across the yard, the glare of headlights strobing over me, and I wait for the reward for my patience.
When she cuts the engine, she’s briefly illuminated in the pilot’s seat, revealing her long blonde ringlets tumbling down her shoulders, her blood red lips, and her puffy eyes.
My fists ball until the tendons creak, the stab of pain adding to the fire building inside. I don’t know what puffy eyes means in humans, but whatever it is spears me with a sharp shard of despair. It isn’t right.
I press myself to the edge of the lean to get a better view.
‘Spikes. Spikes everywhere,” Nevare muses. Shade crawls over his fingers, feeding on the waves of strong emotion and leaning toward their source: Law-rah.
‘Just outward?’ I ask him. Nevare speaks in abstract terms but Arik and I have learned to read his intent. If Law-rah is ‘spiky,’ that means she’s afraid. When I was very close to her with heightened emotions, I could sense that much with my paltry psychic ability.
‘All over. Especially inward,’ he reports.
I suck in a breath. Drok na, she’s hurting.
The very idea causes my chest to cramp, hearts aching, and drives me to do something I hardly ever do.
I close my eyes, flow down the connection to Nevare, and ride his power.
It’s like holding onto the outside of a spaceship as it takes off.
If Nevare doesn’t take me with him, I’m exposed to all the mental and aura energies swirling around us all, invisible to dulled senses but not to Nevare’s.
I’m not the apex, I can’t survive seeing the way Nevare does without going completely mad.
I hold on as much as I can, peering through the roar and bright lights to try to see Law-rah’s energy.
Nevare scoops me up and the overwhelming attack on my senses eases. ‘Dom, you can’t be out here,’ he chides me gently. ‘Stay centered.’
‘But I want to know how she’s feeling, how I can help.’
‘Can’t help her if you’re dead,’ he points out.
He’s right, of course. If I’d been the winner of the genetic lottery and been our apex, I’d need strong bases to keep me grounded. A base can’t be an apex, or be a good mate. I shouldn’t want this.
Then he says, ‘Go to her. Arik is with me, I won’t get into much trouble in a few human hours.’
‘Are you sure?’ I would leap at the chance, but Nevare has to come first.
He mentally scowls at me. ‘I don’t have to be first. We’re all equals. Go to her,’ he says, with the ring of an order as he shoves me back into my body.
I take a gasp of air, tingling unpleasantly all over, as if all my veins had become restricted while my mind rode with Nevare’s.
Law-rah’s door opens, her dangerous umbrella thrusting out and flaring into a wide shield as the rain starts, obscuring her face from us. I roll to standing and jog out to her car, taking the stalk of the weapon to hold it up for her.
She startles, then scowls, red eyes snapping away from me. “I’ve got it, it’s fine.”
“I want to help and…” I glance at the farmhouse but it’s quiet, the only light on in Ellen and Ilia’s room. “I desire to talk to you, if you are willing.”
Her red lips twist. “I’ve been busy, not to mention worried for Arabella. I hate that we don’t hear anything… anyway.” A huff of breath puffs out like steam from her flared nostrils. “I haven’t been in the mood.”
I don’t know what that means, but she is certainly in a mood. “I’m not pressing to talk about carnal activities,” I reassure her. “I… I just want to say, I’m a strong Base.”
She blinks slowly at me, her countenance remaining stern.
Words fumble out of me as if my lips have turned to betrillium under the hard ice of her gaze. “I… I provide a strong foundation. Good support for Nevare. I can… I can try to do the same for you, Law-rah, if you wanted it.”
“Like, mentally crawl inside here?” She points to her head and snorts. “No. That’s a hard border for me.”
“No, no, I only sense auras if I’m close, I can’t read your mind, only my Apex can—”
She swings to face the shadowed lean to. “And is he? Because I don’t fucking consent.” Vibrating with anger, she’s terrifying despite her tiny size.
And I want to wrap her in my arms to shield her from whatever drove her to such fiery rage.
In her proximity, with only the flimsy metal pole of the umbrella separating us, I can feel the spikes Nevare mentioned, cold ones pressing all over her psyche, driving her onward like pain does for me.
Each grows like a needle making new pathways of mental anguish.
As I watch, another one spears straight to her heart.
She rubs her temples. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to take my anger out on you.” Her voice is remarkably calm for the level of torture I can see pressing into her from all sides.
“You need caring for,” I tell her. “If Nevare was half as tired, stressed and upset as you, I’d force him down and sit on him until Arik managed to get food in him. Then we’d lay next to him to keep him down until he slept.”
Her eyes flash up at me. “Sounds… hm. I don’t entirely hate it.”
My grip on the umbrella pole softens. “Let me do something equivalent for you.
You don't have a Base to help stabilise you, and you seem… more alone than the other humans. More independent. It's a positive thing, of course, but… You can get relief from me. Let me be your Base for a few hours.” I hold eye contact, willing her to see what a strength I could be to her, if she’d let me in.
“Okay,” she allows, and my hearts rejoice.
Rain patters on the roof of Law-rah’s vehicle as we drive along the plascrete rivers that wend their way through the land. As we approach lit areas of habitation, more vehicles with two lights on the front and red ones at the back appear, each containing their own humans.
“My windows are blacked out, so no one can see in,” Law-rah says. “Still, this is insane. I’m taking an alien for a joyride.”
“I can camouflage myself.” I change my scales to a darker shade, matching the jacket Law-rah wears. She has a crisp white shirt that glistens like her hair, and I replicate that as well.
She glances over, looking at me in the artificial light from the poles set along the road. “That’ll be okay at a distance, but close up you look like you painted it on yourself. Which, actually, might start a new trend in Bristol.”
Questions swirl around me, like how many humans there are and whether they have predators, about the tall gray buildings that flash past, and the craft Law-rah pilots so skillfully, but mainly I want to ask about Law-rah and the spikes I can feel in the short distance between us.
Starting, however, is another matter. With Arik and Nevare, I don't have to say anything, I know how they're feeling and what's bothering them so I can fix it without asking. Law-rah’s problems are enigmas to me, because she’s so far above me and not even from the same planet as I am.
But I want to learn.
‘Go to her.’ Was that an echo of Nevare’s voice, or him actually reaching out to prod me again?
I take a breath to speak when Law-rah says, “Here we are.”
She pulls away from the rows of short white and cream buildings speckled with windows onto a road with fewer lights, and then directs the craft to a smooth stop.
Pulling her jangling set of keys from the ignition, she sits with her hands in her lap.
The interior light comes on, outlining her red-rimmed eyes and the shadows under her cheekbones.
She points out the wide front viewing port.
“In the daytime, you’d see this huge gorge where the river Avon wends its way out of the city to the sea right at the very bottom.
We have a famous bridge, the Clifton suspension bridge, connecting the sides, but before it was impassable.
” Chuckling, she says, “Supposedly it was made by giants. Two giants fell in love with one woman, Avona I think, giving the river its name. Apparently, she asked them to drain a lake, and one chose to dig one way in a frenzy while the other chose this way. The latter was the more industrious and paced himself, never giving in but never going all out either. He was the winner.”
“And he got his mate?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“Then his strategy was superior.”