Yes, he needed it to be true. He was lost. He was so terribly, terribly far from home. And the semblance of belonging helped him to forget. He sniffed, feeling very sorry for himself.
And then he thought… it still might be okay. He really didn’t know for sure that it wasn’t. He could be letting his imagination get the best of him. He did that, like that time with Carter and the cat burglar thing. He knew he had a tendency to do that and—
A branch cracked.
Denton got to his feet, all panicked motion. Before he could run, a shape stepped from the trees. It was the girl with the white-gold hair, Eyanna. She watched him warily. She had probably heard him blundering through the trees earlier. Earth had probably heard him.
“Ta zhecta,” he said.
“Ta zhecta.” She hesitated, wary, then held something toward him. It was the photograph he had given to her. “Yours?” Her face was intent, questioning.
“No… I gave it to you. You keep it.”
She frowned at him in frustration. “Yours?” she asked again, more loudly now, holding the photograph up as if he wasn’t looking at it properly. “Is she your female?”
He hadn’t a clue what she was going on about and couldn’t care less. The photograph, its subject, the entire history and science of photography, for that matter, was the last thing on his freaking mind right now.
“Yes, she is my female,” he answered, more to shut Eyanna up than anything else. And then he remembered what John had said. What had he called Eyanna? A ghost woman? That was right! Her name had been said in the circle—and she was here, looking healthy and, if not happy, certainly alive.
“Eyanna, listen! My friend’s name was said in the circle tonight. What does that mean? What happens to these ones?”
Eyanna took a step back ungracefully. A small fearful sound escaped her mouth.
That was not quite the reaction Denton had hoped for. He tried to keep his voice calm. “Eyanna? Please? It is important. Tell me what happens to these ones. No one will tell me.”
She looked up at the sky, clicking her teeth anxiously. Her legs quivered as though she desperately wanted to flee. One arm reached back behind her, groping. She found a tree and her fingers dug into it. She squeezed her eyes shut.
Denton suddenly had the conviction, unwelcome as it was, that she was reliving something—the way her head was tilted up, the cant of her body. The thought made him turn cold, because whatever it was, it was not a nice happy memory. Oh no. She knew where John had gone all right. She had been where John had gone. And it was not a good place at all.
She whispered something. He didn’t understand the word.
“What? Eyanna, what did you say?”
“Skalkit!” she said loudly. She opened her eyes. They were wild. “Skalkit! Skalkit!” She looked at him, intense, as if she’d just revealed some big secret.
He wanted to stomp in his frustration. “I don’t know this word. Damn it! What is skalkit?”
She gave the gesture for “no,” backing away into the trees.
“Eyanna, what is skalkit!”
She stopped, just visible behind the foliage, her eyes huge, but she didn’t speak.
Denton took a deep breath. Made himself count to ten. If he wasn’t careful he’d scare her away and then he’d never know. He spoke with quiet hysteria. “The ones whose names are said, are they…” He pantomimed death again because he had no alternative. This time he grabbed his chest and fell to the ground, doing it in a half-assed way so as not to alarm her. He looked up to see if she had gotten it.
She’d gotten it. He could see on her face that she had. She gave the gesture for “yes.” He got up, his heart knocking. Okay. So they were dead. That was bad but he’d already guessed that much.
“But how? What is skalkit, Eyanna? How?”
Her face was slack in the starlight, her nostril ridges flared with her rapid breathing. She was traumatized, he could see that, but he didn’t care. He didn’t give a flying fig what she was feeling, as long as she told him. She had to tell him.
She slowly raised her hands. He had no idea what she was doing until her hands reached her shoulders and slowly formed themselves into the semblance of claws. Her lips pulled back, baring her teeth. And she roared.
Three hours later, Denton was on the run. He had managed to pull himself together enough to go back to the village and act like Mr. Happy-go-allooksaheed. He had gone to bed early. And then, when all sounds had died away, when he was pretty sure the entire Sapphian race was drunk and dead to the world, he snuck out of his hut and headed for the trees.
He took very little with him—a couple of blankets, which he had done up in a bundle, along with some cooked grain. He could live off the land easily. What he really needed was just to get about a million miles away.
He entered the jungle on a path that he thought led toward the bottom of the horseshoe gorge, the mouth of it, the way out. He hadn’t been there since the day he’d arrived and he’d lain in his hut for a good while trying to map it out in his head. He never had been good at directions, but he thought he could pull this off. He had to.
He didn’t know what the hell kind of animal Eyanna had tried to describe to him, but he knew that he never wanted to see one, hear one, smell one, or even see one on TV. Because now that he had faced the truth, now that he had made the firm decision to go and had given up on the fairy tale—and even on the sex part—this whole allook saheed thing seemed more and more like the biggest hunk of mouse bait he had ever seen in his life. What, were they fattening him up like Hansel and Gretel? Was he about to become an Aztecan Blue Plate Special or what?
Not if he had anything to say about it.
He walked down a dark path he thought was the way out of the gorge. He walked for a long time. Too long. He was about to admit that he was going the wrong way when the trees cleared and he got a view of salmon wall. It had to be the opening of the gorge. He increased his pace.
It wasn’t that he was not afraid. He was. But once he had put some distance between himself and the main circle of huts, he felt better. He would feel better still once he was out of the gorge, but he was not really worried about making it. Maybe it was that old denial, that conviction that nothing serious would really happen to him, that the bogeyman would not end up being under the bed when he looked, that he would be scared, maybe even badly, but that in the end he would be fine because he always had been before.
So when the path before him darkened and the shadows resolved themselves into Sapphians, to three or four males, he was legitimately surprised.
He stopped, not even having much of a reaction. Then, in a rush of as much annoyance as fear, he started ahead again, jogging, then running, prepared to plow his way through them and just get the hell out of there. After all, he was bigger than they were by far. Hadn’t he once thought he could easily take them if it ever came to that?
He picked up speed, seeing, even as he was running, that there were more than three or four of them there, that there were a lot, maybe a dozen, and probably more behind him, too. But he was still going to run right through them. He was! He would scatter them like bowling pins and…
He hit them. They had formed a line across the path. He did take down a couple, the ones right in front. But he went down, too, and before he could get up again, there were hands on him, many hands, and they were stronger than they looked.
He still struggled, an outraged American. He didn’t cry out, but there were athletic grunts coming out of his mouth. His feet pedaled over something soft trying to gain traction. They grabbed his legs. Someone was binding his arms, hard, behind his back, and there were no more bobbing heads, no more allook saheed, no words at all.