She studied the water, her face subdued. “Everyone agrees because the person being sent away is not them.”
“But it could be them!”
“No one thinks it will be them.”
“Yeah, but someday it will be them.”
Eyanna made a gesture of indifference. “No one thinks about this.”
Denton thought that was inane. Then he thought about how polite and friendly and helpful everyone was—not just to him but to one another, too. What hypocrites! It was all such a lie!
But it wasn’t a lie, he realized. It was a clue—or it would have been if he’d been paying attention. No one could be that nice all the time, not unless the alternative was pretty severe. For the Sapphians, it was.
“Do they choose the old and sick mostly, or…?”
Eyanna made the gesture for “maybe.” “Yes, this is the way. But also, females have many children. It is known that some of them will go. Mothers choose the ones who will go. Children who are chosen like this are sent as soon as they are grown.”
Denton gaped at her, shocked. They bred children for the skalkits? Poor John, with his deformed hand. He never had a chance.
“That is terrible! Do they not understand what it’s like to die this way?”
Eyanna didn’t answer, but Denton knew. The Sapphians didn’t want to understand.
Eyanna wrapped her long arms around her long legs, huddling. “If we do not feed the skalkits they come into the gorge looking for the meat. That is worse.”
He could picture it. Oh, yeah. Sitting around the communal circle and hearing them coming through the trees, people running and screaming, being chased through the jungle, skalkits tearing through huts, ripping up pathways…
He looked around uneasily. They were sitting on a riverbank. Skalkits might come here to drink. Might? Probably. They probably came here to drink. And the swimming option seemed less reassuring than it had a little while ago.
“We will walk,” he said, getting to his feet. He pointed toward the mountains. “That way.”
She stood up, but her face was troubled. She looked back over her shoulder, toward the gorge.
“Eyanna, we can’t live in the gorge. Your people will catch us and they will send us to the skalkits again. I can’t hide in trees like you.”
“Ta zhecta,” she said, backing away. Good-bye.
“Eyanna, no.”
She was going to leave him, and then he would be completely alone. It was one thing to find himself outside the gorge with gorgeous, natively savvy Eyanna at his side. It was another to be a defenseless foreigner on his lonesome, with long cold nights and skalkits lurking.
“If you go back to the gorge they will catch you, Eyanna, and they will send you to the skalkits, and you will not get free again. If you come with me, I will find a place that is safe. I promise.”
Eyanna knew what he was saying was true, he could see it in her eyes, but she made the gesture for “no.” “I cannot leave the gorge.”
“You can. I know you are all afraid of—”
“My children are there.”
She said it in a quiet, doomed way, and he knew in an instant that, of course, that’s exactly what it was. He’d thought Eyanna hung around the village out of some Sapphian fear of the unknown or maybe a desperate need to be near her kind. But now he remembered that the times he had seen her had been in the mornings, when the women and children were in the circle alone. And she had watched from trees with such an intent, longing expression not because she wanted to be part of the group—she was watching her children.
Crap. That really sucked. He even knew which ones they were. There were two young girls with hair white-gold like Eyanna’s—pretty, shy little things. He whined in frustration, rubbed his eyes. Why did she care anyway? It sounded like Sapphian mothers weren’t exactly swelling with maternal instinct as a rule.
Like, for example, his mother, who would not only ship him off to the skalkits to save her own neck but probably send along his dog and gerbil, too.
No, Eyanna had to be different. He had to be stuck with the one Sapphian who was a saint.
“Your children are safe in the village until they are full-grown. You said this.”
“Yes.”
“So they do not need you now. And if you are there, the people will always remember they are your children and maybe they will send them to the skalkits. But if you are not there, Eyanna, if you are not there the people may forget they are yours.”
She looked stricken by this logic. He almost felt ashamed for manipulating her, but hey, it was for her own good. She couldn’t go on living the way she had been before, and he certainly couldn’t.
“Your children are safe in the village. And outside the village,” he waved his hand at the surrounding area, “there are skalkits. You cannot take them outside. You cannot help them, Eyanna.”
Tears filled her eyes. Her golden shoulders heaved.
“And you can always come back,” he reminded her. “Anytime.”
Following the riverbank with Eyanna was an exercise in frustration and fear that could have been designed to train Special Ops agents for enemy territory. The ground was uneven and the days, and the walking, were endless. Unlike those first few days on this world, Denton now knew what lurked in those trees. He was constantly tense and his eyes grew tired from watching the jungle with every step. Then there was the constant rein he had to keep on Eyanna, who looked more and more reluctant with every mile. Most of the time, she looked like a cat being dragged out for a walk in the rain. He had to keep up a constant barrage of chatter to keep her going.
Only one thing kept him going: Eyanna’s body gracefully moving ahead of him. And that was its own form of torture. Damn. Skalkits or no skalkits, he hadn’t been this rabidly horny since he was fifteen. It had to be something in the air. That or Eyanna.
“How much further do we go?” she asked one night at their campfire.
“I don’t know. Not far.”
He said “not far” because that’s what she wanted to hear, but the truth was, he had no idea. He was looking for something—a cave, a ravine, anything that looked like it might be safe.
“How did you get away from the skalkits, Eyanna? The first time when your people sent you there.”
She had been eating a large piece of fruit, but at his question she lost her appetite and put it aside. “My man hid a knife and cut himself free. Then he cut me free also.” She played with her toes in the dirt, her face close.
“What… What happened to your man?”
“The skalkit got him when we ran.”
“I’m sorry.”
She looked up at him with surprise, as if she did not know what to make of his sympathy.
“Do you not…” He felt kind of like a heel for saying it, but he could not go on like this forever. “Do you not miss having a man?”
She stood up to tend the fire. He was starting to recognize her body language. Whenever she tried to avoid a conversation by working, it meant she disagreed or didn’t want to talk about it. He supposed Sapphians learned at a young age not to argue.
“Eyanna…” he pressed gently. “It is not good for a woman to be without a man.”
She poked at the branches. “When my man was taken, I promised there would never be another.”
Great. That was annoying. It was also plain stupid, especially for a Sapphian. As far as he had seen, they were all complete sluts and had sex about as often as they ate. Besides, Eyanna being celibate was like the biggest, most perfectly shaped Christmas tree in the lot going unsold. What a waste.