Ebbing…
Ebbing…
Dismayed, I struggled to focus. Had the world gone crazy? My mind slammed down a barrier, muting the rage of the approaching creature. Until this moment, I hadn't even known I could protect my mind that way.
It kept coming, tangled in its rage. As it left the forest, I saw it more clearly. Its shape was humanoid, but its torso was an armored trunk, its legs narrower trunks, its arms a tangle of long roots. Its face resembled tree bark, and its hair hung in a snarl of moss. With the cliff at my back, I had no place to retreat. My stomach churned.
The creature emanated fury. It came forward, closer and closer, until it stopped in front of me, its moss eyes staring down at my face.
"What do you want?" My voice rasped, low and husky.
It didn't answer. Instead it grasped my upper arm and closed its other hand around my neck. My heartbeat hammered. With clenched fists, I pounded its shoulders and chest. Although it jerked, it kept bearing down on my neck, cutting off the blood flow. I clawed at its arms. As spots danced in my vision, I knew I had no time left. I was going to die.
No.
I saw only one chance. I stepped back— off the cliff.
The creature had one instant to decide; release me or go over the edge. Whether it actually chose or simply had too little time to act, I didn't know. But we fell together through a chasm of air. I had a strange sense of suspension, as if we were drifting, undulating in this slow-mode gravity while we dropped past the cliff face.
Then I hit water, cold water. The impact tore me away from my attacker, and I plunged deep into the lake. With a hard kick, I slowed my descent. More kicks sent me upward through skirling, swirling water, but it wasn't fast enough.
I needed air.
In reflex, I gasped, sucking in cold water—
Suddenly I broke the surface, choking and coughing. Before I could catch my breath, arms grabbed me from behind. Thrashing in that air-stealing grip, I twisted around— and came face to face with a very living, very human man. No creature, this. The shock of hitting the lake had pulled my mind back from its limbo and thrust me into cold, human reality.
Water cascaded off his head. He had green eyes and dark hair that brushed his shoulders. His skin wasn't bark, but he held his face as stiff and implacable as the armor on the tripod trees.
Then he shoved my head under the water.
Thrashing in his grip, I kicked his legs and arms. But I had too little strength to escape. Desperate, I planted my feet against his torso and pushed. It sent me upward even as it thrust him deeper into the lake. I just barely managed to break the surface, amid slow sprays of water.
The treeman exploded out of the water next to me. He grabbed my hair and jerked me forward, making me gasp. As we fought, water whipped around us, turned red by the sunset. The liquid sprayed up in great arcs, then fragmented into a rain of fat spheres, glittering like slow rubies. I choked, unable to gulp in air. Ai! I had to
breathe.
But again he pushed me under. Frenzied now, I twisted in his hold… needed air… lungs hurt… don't want to die…
Suddenly I sagged, as if I had passed out. My act almost became reality, as I began to black out. Then, mercifully, his grip loosened. With a last surge of energy, I set my feet against his thighs and launched upward. This time I shot through the surface in a wild spray of water, coming out of the lake all the way to my chest, sputtering.
Air.
As I fell back, the treeman caught me in a deadly embrace that crushed out what little air I had managed to inhale. His muscular arms circled my torso. I tried to keep fighting, but my body wouldn't respond, drained by too many hours of hiking with no food, water, or rest. My fists uncurled and my palms slapped the water. My legs dangled. I tried to kick free and my foot grazed his leg.
We stared at each other, our faces separated by a hand-span.
I felt his reaction, just as I had felt his hostility before. Seeing me this close forced him to acknowledge he was murdering a human being, one less protected than himself. He treaded water and we floated, staring. What he expected to find, I had no idea, but this much I picked up, as sharp as the chime of a crystal bell: he hadn't expected the humanity he saw in my face.
My mind couldn't absorb that I was about to die. The situation took on a diamond clarity, as if it were etched in glass, disconnected from me. I watched from beyond the glass, protected from the full impact of the events.
With no warning, he rolled me onto his hip. My trance broke and I gasped in misty air. My hip scraped against the rough cloth of his soaked trousers. He swam with a sidekick, holding me in a cross-chest carry I had learned long ago. No, learned
about,
in a holo on water safety. I knew many things, but only in theory. My life had been protected with almost fanatical thoroughness. Why?
Our legs dragged through the muddy lake bottom. The treeman heaved me to my feet and we stood in the shallows near the shore, the water lapping in low gravity breakers that swelled to our knees. As I gulped in air, a stitch of pain jabbed my side. My whole body felt the pounding of my heart. The treeman stared at my face, his hands clenched on my upper arms. Whatever he saw, it stirred in him a disquieting mixture of fury, desire, and confusion.
Twisting hard, I jerked free and sprinted for the beach, a thin strip of eroded rock next to the promontory. The lake whipped around me in languorous swaths, swirling up to my head and drifting through the air in sparkling lassos of water.
The treeman caught up in two steps. As he yanked me to a stop, I socked his jaw. He dodged the blow, but lost his balance in the process. In a surreal silence, we toppled to the beach, only half out of the lake. The slow fall kept my head from cracking open when it hit the rocky ground, but it still struck hard. My ears rang with a hollow clang, like a cry of desperation. I didn't feel pain yet; I couldn't take in the sensations flooding me, all tangled in fear.
The treeman pinned me on my back, my legs and hips in the water. He held my arms clamped to the ground, kneeling over me, straddling my hips, his body silhouetted against the gas giant that smoldered in the sky behind him.
He had such a strong reaction to what he saw that the image burst from his mind into mine. I lay below him, breathing rapidly, my eyes huge from terror, my skin pale. Rips showed in my shift where the cloth had snagged on plants in the forest. One of my nipples poked through a ragged hole. Soaked with water, the cloth had become translucent. I didn't need the empathic skills I apparently possessed to know what he intended next.
Except he didn't move. I caught only threads of emotion from his mental turmoil; the barriers that protected his mind were even stronger than those that most people instinctively raised to shield their thoughts. But I picked up enough. He couldn't go through with it, neither the assault nor the murder. He longed for vengeance with an intensity that burned. I had no idea what he thought I had done, but even now, when he believed he had a long-desired revenge within his grasp, he could go no further.
I swallowed. "Don't kill me."
He answered in a language I almost understood. It resembled— what? Chays. Chay? Shay. Yes, Shay, an obscure tongue used on a few frontier worlds. The name came from
tza,
an ancient Iotic word that meant cleverness.
Clever or not, right now this Shay wanted to kill me. I searched my nodes for Shay words and came up with, "Understand not." Less than scintillating, but it would do.
He spoke again. "****."
"Understand not," I repeated.
"**** Manq?" he asked.
"Again?"
He spoke more slowly. "Manq, are you?"
"No." I had never heard the word before.
"Who, then?"
With him holding my arms, I couldn't point at the sky. So I indicated it with my chin. "Out there. Skolian." It was true, I realized. I was a citizen of the Skolian Imperial ate.
"**** Skolia," he said.
I felt like a computer trying to access data in the wrong format. "Understand not."
He shortened his sentences. "Lying, you. Here Skolians never come. Hunter, you are."
I had no idea what he meant. "Me no hunter."
He shook my arms.
"Liar."
"Not lies!" My voice vibrated with his shaking.
His anger mixed with another emotion, one harder to define. Grief? "Kill you, I need not. Just tie you here." He gestured to our surroundings. "Opalite, she will finish."
Attuned to his mind, I understood what he meant— and wished I didn't.
Opalite
was this moon. If he left me bound here on the beach, I would die from starvation and exposure. I didn't see how someone his size could perceive me as a threat. Low gravity grew big people and he was no exception. If he found me strange, I had no argument with that, given this bizarre situation. But why the hatred? Despite the many gaps in my memories, I had no doubt I had never seen him before this day.
His rage was mutating into a new anger, this time at himself. He had no wish to feel sympathy for his intended victim. But he felt it. He didn't want to suffer remorse for an act he had yet to commit, but his guilt gnawed. He had no wish to desire a stranger, but his arousal refused to abate. What finally decided him— compassion, remorse, or lust— I had no idea. But he made a choice. Standing up, he hauled me to my feet and jerked his hand toward the forest.
"Walk," he said.
So I walked.
It was better than dying.
3
Hajune
Dizziness made my thoughts sluggish. I slowly became aware of my surroundings. I was sitting sideways against a wall, my legs curled under my body. This cavity resembled the one I had fallen into my first night, mossy and green. This time, however, a net of cord-like roots held my body from shoulder to midthigh, as if I had sat here until the forest grew over and around me. But this was no random growth; someone had set these cords with deliberate intent. My wrists were bound together by a looping root that buckled out from the wall. It held my hands by my shoulder, palms inward. I had heard that tying a prisoner's wrists in front of the body was ineffective, but for me, right now, it worked all too frighteningly well.
I bit my lip. I couldn't show vulnerability, not even to myself. Never give in to fear. But gods, I didn't want to die. I drew in a long breath, my chest rising with the effort. A circular opening in the opposite wall taunted me with a promise of freedom. It had no door, not even a gate. If I could only reach it. Beyond that opening, the forest brooded in bright, midday sunlight…
Midday…
Dawn showed beyond the entrance. I struggled to focus. Had I faded again? I couldn't stop shuddering. Saints only knew what the treeman had thought if I turned into a ghost in front of him. Maybe he believed this web of roots could hold a specter. If so, he was apparently right, unfortunately, in my case.
A fire smoldered in the center of the cavity, in a depression lined with rock and bordered by wet moss. Smoke curled through a hole in the roof. The heat and humidity made the place like a sauna. A scrap of cloth lay among the coals. Charred cloth. Blue. It was all that remained of my clothes. Embarrassed, I tugged on my bonds, trying to cover myself. The roots flexed but showed no sign of loosening. If anything, they tightened. I quit fighting and concentrated on breathing, which had suddenly become a challenge.
