CHAPTER 26
ELERI
Eleri woke with her tongue plastered to the roof of her mouth and a throbbing headache.
Dehydration, no doubt, but she couldn’t for the life of her figure out where she was.
It certainly was too hot and dusty to be her room above the clinic.
There was a ratty gray tarp overhead with large holes in the fabric letting in strands of sunlight.
An exit was held together with hastily wrapped lengths of twine.
Eleri’s vision doubled as she tried to orient herself.
She rubbed her eyes and then her forehead.
The only time she could remember feeling worse was when she’d woken up after stasis.
It had taken at least three days for her to feel like a person again.
This time, however, she suspected the discomfort had more to do with the lump on the back of her head.
As Eleri assessed the damage, she tried to get her bearings in what seemed to be a makeshift tent.
Minor concussion, probably, judging by the headache and nausea.
Otherwise, she seemed unharmed physically.
She rubbed grit out of her eyes as the memories came spinning back into focus.
Raviks. There had been raviks on the road.
They’d spoken at her in an atonal, incomprehensible string of language.
She’d tried to run. She’d dropped her medkit and her hat and sprinted, but they’d swarmed her.
In a single moment of clarity before she lost consciousness, she was almost certain she would die.
But she was still here, and everything ached.
Her surroundings shifted into clearer focus with the dust and grime wiped away from her eyes.
The medkit in question sat haphazardly on its side.
Its electronic monitoring interface was cracked beyond repair.
Many of the contents were temperature sensitive, which meant they’d probably long expired.
Did this mean the raviks had brought it here for her?
Eleri kept her groan to herself as she popped open the side compartment, fishing around for the emergency hydropods she kept in there.
When she found them, only four were left intact.
The others must have burst on impact when she dropped the kit.
She pressed the first one between her lips, and the gush of liquid flooded her mouth with relief and a layer of silt.
Although it was tempting to consume all three of them at once, she had no idea where she was or when the next time water would be readily available.
Once she steadied herself enough to hobble to her feet, Eleri braved a peek outside the tent and found a cluster of four raviks keeping guard.
She’d never seen one before until they’d snatched her outside of the village.
When a horde of them had surrounded her with gnashing teeth and raised spikes on their bodies, it had been much more terrifying than the four nearby now.
Even still, she wasn’t going to call attention to herself.
She shoved back inside the tent structure, but it was clear they’d already registered her consciousness by the uptick in choral voices outside.
“Here… Coming… Again… Again… No… No… Waiting… Waiting… Waiting…” The three of them spoke in tandem, their words winding over each other in incoherent patterns.
Eleri scrabbled to the floor as they entered the tent.
The strange chorus of voices continued until one of them raised an arm, and the sound cut off into an eerie silence.
One of them moved forward, sniffing the air around her.
They said something in their garbled voices, but Eleri could only pick out a word or two as they all spoke over each other.
She shook her head, hoping to indicate her lack of understanding, but they continued speaking with the same rapid-fire intertwined voices.
“I can’t understand you,” she finally interrupted them to get a word in. “Please, can you speak one at a time?”
The raviks stared at her, then each other. At first, she wasn’t sure if they’d understood her, but they pushed one of the smaller members of their group forward.
“Am oldest. Speak without klatch.” The ravik approached her. “You here…” It trailed off, glancing at one of the others.
“Medical helping,” the tallest one in the back supplemented the end of the phrase.
“What kind of medical help?” Eleri asked. “I don’t have most of my supplies here. My help will be limited without medication or supplies.”
The three of them blended their voices together as they discussed before, finally one voice came through clearly. “Get. What need get.”
She paused before responding. It was a long shot, but if she could just convince them to let her go back to Laurus for her supplies, then she could do the necessary medical treatment on neutral ground.
They probably thought she was dead back home.
Someone had seen her be snatched, and her throat was still sore from the screaming.
It was worth a try. She didn’t want everyone to worry about her.
S’samph certainly would have noticed that she missed their appointment that morning, and if she knew anything about him, he would be furious and trying his very best to hide it.
Her stomach sank. She wasn’t much of one for diplomacy, but getting back to Laurus, back to S’samph depended on her not doing anything too risky or impulsive.
“If you let me go back to Laurus, I will have access to better medical supplies,” she repeated the request, hoping the second time would cause a different result.
It was the wrong thing to say. The three of them started shrieking again in unintelligible harmonized tones.
Their meaning was completely lost in the cacophony of the overlapping voices.
Eleri eyed her medkit and tried to take inventory of what was still viable.
Mostly bandages and a few temperature-stable medications.
When the shrieking finally subsided, Eleri waited for them to say something comprehensible.
The tallest ravik took the front position of the klatch again. “No. Here. Must be here. Help here.”
Eleri managed a tight smile. She wasn’t exactly in a position to disagree with the mandate. “Then you had better show me what I need to do to help.” She tried not to think about what would happen to her if the help was beyond the scope of her limited abilities and supplies.
“Come.” The first one said the word, and the other two started to echo until the single word swirled around them in harmony.
Eleri grabbed her medkit and followed out of the tent and into a proper settlement.
It was haphazard and built of mostly found items. She recognized fencing material stolen from Laurus holding up many of the dwellings.
The uneven roads were paved with castoff shells from vela bean pods.
But it was a settlement all the same. Large klatches of young ones scurried underfoot.
So many of them crowded together that she couldn’t even begin to count where one began and the other ended.
Eleri followed them, feeling suddenly self-conscious in her mostly clean new clothing while her captors dressed in scraps of fabric riddled with holes.
For a group of scavengers living in the shadow of their downed spacecraft, there was a surprising amount of civilization in what she saw.
But she kept her thoughts to herself. She’d only been here for a few moments, and if her training had taught her anything, it was that first appearances seldom told the whole story.
Her head continued to throb as they led her through the camp.
Some of the groups of younglings noticed her and stopped to stare.
They chittered loudly in unintelligible unison.
A few partnered raviks shooed them away with aggressive rows of teeth gnashing.
The groups of two seemed to move and coordinate with more thought than the three around her, and even more than the collections of five or more younglings.
The swiping eyestalks and snapping jaws were enough to startle Eleri back a few paces.
She made a point of sticking close to the four who had spoken with her earlier.
If anything, at least they wanted her alive for the time being.
The long walk up the bumpy main path brought brutal sunlight down on her, and she had no doubt the tips of her ears were starting to burn a path up her scalp.
Finally, after stepping around giant heaps of trash mixed with collectible junk, they approached a dwelling a bit less ramshackle than the others.
It had a proper construction with four walls and a tarp covering the roof to prevent water from leaking inside.
Random bits of foraged metal and stone decorated the exterior, and Eleri suspected someone important lived there.
Two of the raviks in her personal escort dragged their talons across the door, following a pattern of deep grooves that had been worn in by similar gestures.
In response to the sound, the door scraped open to reveal a lone ravik.
The fur trailing up two long eyestalks was pale white, and it seemed surprised to see Eleri standing there along with her cohort.
She hadn’t realized raviks were intelligent enough to show human-like emotions.
“Klatch Saakal, you have brought the healer?”
Eleri’s eyes widened to hear a coherent and accurate sentence spoken in universal.
The three other raviks responded all at once, their voices overlapping.
Although Eleri couldn’t make out most of the response, the ravik at the door seemed to comprehend them with no trouble.
He turned to Eleri and examined her with a slick gleam in his eye.
“Offer a tribute for your safe passage here, healer.”