Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Vidar
Islept four hours and I do not require more.
The prints are cast and the scans are stored. I have run the stride measurement eleven times since I woke and it tells me the same thing, that no animal on this continent steps one hundred and ninety nanco.
So, it is an error. Obviously, it is an error.
Whatever crossed my equipment line went through the upper canopy in under ninety nancos and did not register on the four sensors in between. That requires something very light.
The prints require something heavy. Very heavy.
Those are not the same animal.
My plan for this diurnal is straightforward.
Walk the jungle nearest the wall and the entire area that is closest to the prints, in the daylight, looking for clues.
Sweep the ground scanner for a second track line running deeper into the preserve.
Take soil at the two deepest impressions for later testing against known species mass.
Set tags on the pair of trees the thing crossed between, so I have a fixed reference if it comes through the same route again.
That is my plan.
But I startle at the sound of glass shattering on the floor.
“Oh, Skylo, that tail of yours is always breaking something,” Avery wails.
Breakfast at the Hellstone table is a loud undertaking. I have left my quarters, which include a perfectly good food dispenser, to instead partake of the family meal. I am only here because it allows me to spend more time with Margaret. This is wrong. I know it’s wrong and yet I cannot stop myself.
I need to see that smile again and listen to that perfect inflection in her voice when she uses my language.
Humans speak Hyrrokin with a lovely accent.
She’s said that she has a popular audiocast called The Listening File.
I turned on an episode when I went back to my quarters last night and fell asleep to the sound of her voice.
Hannibal is at the head of the table, with the infant in the crook of one arm, feeding her something orange with his free claw. Avery is beside him. Their small daughter is in an elevated seat beside her brother. And Margaret is beside me.
She wears a green Hyrrokin tube top today. Her golden shoulders and arms are bare. When she reaches across for the traq there is a strip of her lower back visible above her trousers.
My cock thickens in my pants and I shift, trying to will it to settle down.
I look at my plate.
The vow is not violated by sitting nearby the female I am wildly attracted to. It is not violated by scenting her, which I do not choose and cannot stop.
It is not violated by wanting to put my claw on her lower back.
Across the table, Hannibal’s black eyes flick from me to Margaret and back down to his plate. He says nothing at all.
“How many diurnals until Halloween?” Mitry, the younger child, questions in between bites of her food.
“Nine,” responds her older brother.
“Nine until the alignment,” Avery corrects, “and the trick-or-treat is that same night, so nine for both.”
Nine diurnals.
Margaret’s fork pauses about two centimeters off her plate. She meets my gaze and raises her eyebrows, letting me know she’s thinking of this deadline too. She looks like she’s about to say something.
And then the front door bursts open without anyone knocking.
“Nobody get up,” a brisk female voice announces, “I’m not staying. It’s nice seeing all of you, but I have eleven things due before midday. I decided to drop in on my way out this morning to ask real quick if any of you can help organize a delivery for me.”
I recognize this female. This is the world-famous Riley Touchstone, bound of Aegir Touchstone. She arrives in the kitchen with a tablet already open in one hand.
Apparently, this is how this community operates.
“Chloe and our mother-in-law have all four of my children as well as hers,” she says to Avery. “They’re doing a gourd-carving trial run. With knives.”
“Brave women.”
“Right?” Riley taps something. “Anyway, Hogen Emberstone is outside, I brought him because we need to order the gourds and I have been at him about it for a week and we’re now on deadline.”
“For two diurnals,” says a male voice from the doorway. “You’ve only recently asked me.”
She rolls her eyes. “You’ve been avoiding me.”
“You only just placed your order.”
The male who comes in behind her is younger than I am with very tall, black horns. He greets Hannibal by name and grips his forearm. He crouches at Mitry’s chair and says something I do not catch and she shrieks with delight.
“Emberstone took the regional flame throw,” Avery explains to Margaret. “Three years running.”
“Four,” comments Dagr with admiration in his gaze.
“Four,” the male agrees gravely. “But your father took it the year I was born, so I will not be boasting in this domicile.”
Hannibal makes a low pleased sound.
Then Emberstone sees Margaret. I watch it happen. His attention crosses the kitchen, arrives at the human female in the green top, and simply remains there. His nostrils flare, once.
I set my cup down.
“The yard’s across town,” Riley explains. “I just need someone to go and pick out the gourds for the carving station. Avery?”
“Can’t. I have to get Dagr to his exam and then I have an audit closing today and three calls stacked afterwards.
Bestla and Narvi are taking Sela and Mitry, I assume to join in that gourd carving, while Hannibal and I are working this morning.
I was already feeling guilty that I wouldn’t be able to spend as much time today with Margaret as I wanted.
” She turns to look at her friend. “Tomorrow, starting tomorrow I promise I’m on vacation too.
I thought it was starting today but stuff came up. ”
“Oh, no problem,” Margaret answers with genuine honesty. “I understand. It happens. I’m a big girl.” She glances over at me. “I can find things to keep me busy today.”
Warmth spreads in my chest.
Riley looks over at the second in charge of Molten Lava Security. “Hannibal?”
“Bergelmir has the team on a contract brief.” Hannibal is already standing. “I am an hour late as it is.”
Dagr grumbles in his throat.
“Dagr, do you want to go with us?” Emberstone questions.
“He’s got a schooling assessment this morning,” Avery says. “Sorry, bud.”
The older offspring shrugs and returns to his meal.
“I’ll go,” Margaret says.
Every being at the table looks at her.
“What? I’ve been here one entire day and all I’ve done is eat food and stand in a jungle at midnight. It’s obvious I’m entirely free today. Put me to work. I want to be useful.”
“That would be very welcome,” Hogen Emberstone says, his tail flicking behind him suggestively. “I would be glad to have you picking out the appropriate gourds.”
Fire churns in my chest. My chair scrapes back against the stone floor and suddenly I’m standing. Everyone looks over at me. “I will accompany you to the yard,” I announce.
Dagr looks up from his plate at me for the first time this entire meal. Avery’s eyebrows shoot up. Riley’s tablet lowers. Even the baby appears to be staring at me.
Hannibal does not look surprised at all.
“Vidar?” Margaret is staring at me. “What’s wrong?”
Nothing is wrong, except there is a male in this kitchen with tall horns who has just scented a female I have no claim to, and I will not let this go unchallenged. “The road east passes near the Academy annex,” I hear myself saying. “I require a comparative soil reference.”
“You do?”
“For the impression testing.” None of this is true. I have soil references and a full regional set in a labeled case in the lower quarters that I brought with me. “Also, the gourds will be heavy,” I add.
Margaret looks at Emberstone, who is roughly the size of a domicile door.
Riley Touchstone does not say one word. She looks at Avery. Avery looks back at her. Something passes between the two of them that I cannot decode and do not care for at all.
And then all of us exit the domicile and load into Hogen Emberstone’s vehicle.
Dagr comes with us after all.
The schooling assessment was delayed, so he gets in the back with me. And then Hannibal orders the wulver to accompany us and the beast gets in the back too with all three heads out the far window. I’m squished between a boy and his wulver.
Margaret sits in the front passenger seat, next to Emberstone.
I have a very clear view of the back of her head.
“So what’s the process for the gourds?” she asks him, as we pull out. “Are you growing them or only selling them?”
“Both. The shell is grown, the interior is fabricated out to spec. This is a new type I’ve never made before, to Riley’s human specification, which was interesting. These will all be orange, with a wall thin enough to carve and thick enough to hold a flame inside.”
“Huh. Are they strong enough to handle all of that?”
“They are now, but the first batch collapsed.”
“What’d you change?”
And he tells her, at length and without once talking over her while she asks more questions.
The wulver’s center head shifts and his tongue hangs out. He puts his full weight on my thigh.
I look out the window.
My entire adult life has been spent in labs, lecture chambers and field camps. I am not given to strong feeling. A recent peer review described me as temperamentally inert. The Fellow who wrote it meant it as an insult and instead, I had it framed.
And yet, here I am chasing after a human female I have very, very strong emotions about. Never in my life have I been jealous of another male over the companionship of a female.
My fists clench. It must be the vow. It is driving me crazy. Two months without any relief whatsoever and my regulation has degraded. This is a physiological problem with a physiological cause and it will resolve when the year is out.
“Vidar.”
Margaret has turned around in her seat.
“Sorry…the soil thing. If the ground under the wall never dries because it’s shaded, does that mess up your depth readings? Like, is a print in permanently damp soil going to read deeper than the same print in soil that dried out?”
“Yes. Considerably. It is the largest source of error in the measurement.”
“So how do you correct for it?”
“Moisture content at the point of impression. I sampled at four depths last night before I cast.”
“Okay.” She nods slowly, thinking about it. “So if you had a second track line further in, and the canopy’s thinner and the ground actually dries—”
“Then I would have a comparison and the correction would be real rather than estimated. Yes.”
“Right. Okay.” She turns back around. “Sorry. Carry on about the gourds.”
Emberstone carries on about the gourds.
I lean back in another male’s vehicle, underneath a wulver, pleased that she has turned around to ask me something two separate times since we left the domicile.
The yard is loud and smells of scorched resin.
Crates are everywhere. Both suns are overhead. Rows of multi-colored gourds in graded sizes are on pallets, and workers move between them. The young Hellstone disappears almost immediately toward the gourd fabrication unit to speak with a worker who is clearly delighted to be asked.
Margaret stands in the middle of all of this in that green top, with her bare arms in the sunlight, looking fantastically beautiful, asking questions. Finally, she is at the enormous pile of oddly shaped orange gourds that have been specially created for this human Halloween.
“We call these pumpkins,” she tells me. “And this one I’m holding is the perfect size and shape for our needs.
We will require forty of these, just to be sure we have enough.
This is the one we’ll use as our sample.
I need you to help me dig through all of these pumpkins to find forty of them that look and weigh as closely as possible to our sample.
” She points. “The ones you find that you feel are a good match go on that pallet. And when we get to forty of them, we’ll be done. ”
I nod at her instructions and get to work. Emberstone helps us too and the three of us work together. I don’t like this arrangement because he stands too close to her and finds too many reasons to converse.
And then, at the same moment we reach thirty pumpkins, Emberstone straightens and turns to her. I know precisely what is about to occur.
“Margaret.” His tone has changed. It is warm and it is not presuming anything, which is correct, because he can scent as well as I can that she is not aroused by him and he has arranged his approach accordingly. “I wondered whether you might allow me to—”
One hundred and fifty nanco of wulver arrive between them.
Skylo strides into the space where the two of them are speaking, turns broadside, and sits down next to Margaret’s foot. All three heads look up at her and blow out small flames of greeting.
“Skylo.” Margaret is already laughing. She grabs the nearest horn and gives it a shake. “You menace. What are you doing?”
Emberstone steps back and rubs his horn and says something rueful about Hellstone’s beast. The moment between them is gone. It has evaporated and cannot be recovered.
I have never in my life been so grateful to an animal.
Finally, all forty pumpkins have been collected and the arrangements have been made for delivery to the compound. I finish speaking with an employee and turn to find Margaret.
She is not there.
I check the row of crates and then the vehicle. Then I stride over to the office and the loading bay. Where has she gone? The shaded area beside the fabricator where the young Hellstone was standing is now empty.
I glance around the entire yard. The wulver is gone too.
“Emberstone.”
He straightens up.
“Where is Margaret?”
“She walked off with the Hellstone boy.” He nods toward the far end of the yard, where the pallets end and there is nothing but a fence and some shade.