Twenty-One #2
When she turned back, Garral P?r was running toward her.
His limbs were loose and a little awkward.
His hands were in fists until he caught up with her, put one arm around her to cradle her neck and the other at her hip.
All her professional life, she’d heard stories about fieldwork flings.
People who’d spent weeks or months in the wilds away from any city or town, and found comfort in each other there.
She’d been jealous then and a little disgusted.
There wasn’t much hygiene in the field. What would it be like to kiss someone who hadn’t bathed in days when you hadn’t either. In practice, it turned out to be… nice.
After, she put a hand to his chest, his heart beating hard under her palm, and gently, gently pushed him away.
“Next life,” she said. “Look me up in our next life.”
“It’s a date.” His voice was thick.
She turned and walked away.
About half an hour after she left the crash site, the wind started picking up and the clouds thickened.
Jessyn stepped up her pace. At this rate, she was going to have to guess when they were close to sundown from the depth of the twilight.
If it got too dark, it would be harder to find her pear grove.
She’d have to pick some other place to hide the weapons.
And the closer she got to the ships, the more likely it was she’d run into one of the other researchers or the Carryx overseers while she was still carrying them.
On the other hand, a storm would wash away her tracks.
Trade-offs. There were always trade-offs.
As she walked, the ruins of the city towers shifting slowly into a more and more familiar silhouette, she imagined herself in front of Third Gardener.
The story she told the Sinen overseer was going to have to be convincing, it would have to conform to the evidence that the Carryx would find and the actions that Corvall was about to take.
I found a cave that seemed like it had signs of recent inhabitants, and since Garral was working in the city, I thought I should consult with him.
Did that track? She thought it did. How would she have found the cave, though? Maybe Manta and Omco had left a trail. They’d been foraging the pears, that was good because it was true. If she’d noticed tracks, and followed them.
I was working in the orchard, and I saw signs of someone foraging…
But no, that was bad. Corvall didn’t eat pears the way the others did. If she brought foraging into it, that was evidence that there were other humans to keep looking for. But the cave was going to do that anyway, wasn’t it?
Better to keep it simple. She’d been exploring. She’d called Garral. If they pushed her, she could go shame-faced and admit that they’d been having a tryst. She was sure they wouldn’t be the only two of the human moiety who’d paired off.
The first drops of rain came, hitting the leaves around her like little bullets.
The tapping turned to a roar. She wasn’t sure where the sun was anymore, and the ruined city was harder to see.
She couldn’t let it get to full dark before she found the orchard, or she’d be stumbling around in the rain all night.
Dying of exposure on her way back to the ships would be a stupid way for the plan to fail.
And the downpour was harder now. Her tunic soaked up the water.
The weight of the weapons pulled uncomfortably at the fabric.
She wished there were some lightning so that she could get glimpses of the towers…
And she came around a stand of bushes and into the trees she knew.
There were the burned pears. There were the living ones.
There was her equipment, exactly where she’d left it when Omco had appeared with his knife.
It felt like she’d abandoned it in some other lifetime, but here it all was, still displaying the data from her last run.
She knew the way back now. Getting to the ships was trivial.
She looked around the site. The impulse was to hurry—get it done and get out of the rain.
But the Carryx might very well come to look, and she had to be sure they wouldn’t find anything.
She wished she knew more about Carryx sensory apparatus. If the Rak-hund were also scent hounds…
At the back of the orchard where the fire had been worst, she found a little hollow at the base of a burned-out tree.
It wasn’t much, and it wasn’t obvious. She could cover it with a rock and a handful of mud, and it would be about as secure as anything she could manage.
And the cold was starting to get more than annoying.
She didn’t want to try keeping her story straight through hypothermia either.
She cleared out the niche with her hands, then took the cylinder and packed it in with two handfuls of fallen leaves and litter. Then the gun…
And the gun.
The next hurdle was being believed. Wouldn’t she be more convincing if she’d been wounded? A victim of a deathless soldier who’d magically gotten away unscathed could raise suspicions.
“All right,” she said. “You can do this. It’s all right.”
The gun was small and black and curved like a seashell.
The only obvious functional parts were the mouth of the barrel and the little white button that was the trigger.
She gripped it in a tight fist, trying to keep the feeling in her chilled fingers.
The wound would need to look genuine. If it just grazed her arm or her leg, that would seem convenient.
If it hit her ribs, like the soldier had been aiming for her center of mass…
She flipped the gun around in her grip, her thumb against the trigger button. She lined up the shot so that it would go through her left side, too low to pierce her lung. It was going to hurt, but that was fine. She’d been hurt before.
Jessyn took a deep breath, relaxed, and pressed the trigger before she could lose her nerve. The muzzle flash and the report were a single thing. And then a pain that took her breath away.
Oh , she thought, this was a very bad idea.
Jessyn Kaul crawled. She’d forgotten why she was crawling, only that there was someplace she had to be.
Her legs felt like they were very far away from her, and her arms were getting weaker.
Her sense of self was growing smaller and smaller.
Not even her brain, but just her lips. She was right there, at the point where breath came in and went out, observing the expanse of her body as it suffered.
Help , she cried because she’d been crying it all along. Help me.
Something ahead of her glowed. And then something stepped in front of the glow. Jessyn rolled to her side, knowing as she did that she wasn’t going to have the strength to roll back. The mud and the rain felt comfortable. Being here for the rest of her life wouldn’t be so bad.
A crablike thing shifted in front of her. True People. A True Person of Hannic. She felt a little rush of pleasure at remembering the species. A voice came, the same neutral half-mind voice as always. Are you in distress, thin-fur?
“I’m dying,” she said, and then time did something odd, and she was inside. The pain in her side was like someone had stabbed her with a burning sword. It was so bad, she couldn’t breathe.
The True Person of Hannic had turned into Holom Coombs, the geologist. The one who’d known about the limestone cliffs. He looked panicky. Someone had cut her tunic away and left her bare and exposed. She felt a moment’s outrage and tried to cover her breasts with hands that refused to move.
“She’s awake,” Coombs said. “It worked, she’s awake.”
And then time skipped again. Coombs was gone. She was lying under a blanket on the deck of a room she didn’t recognize. Something was clinging to her abused side like a bandage that made its own heat. A goat-eyed Sinen was looming over her, its pseudotentacles twitching.
“Jessyn Kaul,” the voice of the half-mind said. “You will report now.”
She tried to find words, but she knew some of them were wrong. There was something she was supposed to say and something to keep quiet.
“There was a monster,” she whispered at last. “It was all black. It killed Garral…”