She wasn’t clean. She was marginally malnourished and the toxic leavings of many drugs were there, as well as the disease Urak called the Creeping Waste, and that was a nuisance. On the other plate, there wasn’t anything wrong with her that couldn’t be fixed. It would take time, though. The Creeping Waste wasn’t as contagious to Jotan as it was to humans, but it was still deadly and unlike the human strain, it couldn’t be cleansed completely. Anyone stupid enough to swap fluids with the infected could find themselves suffering the result for the rest of their dramatically shortened life. Kane would have to fix it before he could mate with her, fixing it would take seventeen hours at the very least, and in the meantime, the sun would be burning down and filling his tsesac with hell.
Kane ran his eyes up and down the female’s body, weighing the urgency of his need against the frustration of having to stumble along for damned near a whole day with a female he couldn’t even fuck. And for the first time, Kane noticed her hair.
There were two stripes of white framing her face, but the rest was dark, and up until now, between one thing and another, that was all he had really noticed. Here, now, in the light of the groundcar and with time to catch his breath and think, Kane saw that what he had seen merely as ‘dark’ before was actually purple. A deep, dark, amazing shade of purple.
He’d never seen a human with purple hair before. The sight of it completely interrupted his chain of increasingly furious thought and he reached out to take some of it in hand. It flowed soft and straight between his fingers, not quite shoulder-length, but thick and full despite that.
Still…seventeen hours was a long time to wait just to fuck a human with purple hair.
But was there any guarantee he’d find another one in the same amount of time?
He really, really liked her hair…
Kane began to craft the necessary programs, a delicate mix of cleansers, filters, and aggressive anti-viral nanozymes. It was considerably less complicated than trying to correct the yellow-haired female’s congenital glucose disorder, but it still took time, and Kane was painfully aware that there were two bodies right there by the side of the road where anyone might roll by and see them.
At last, he was done and the dermisprayer was loaded yet again. He reached out for Raven’s arm and she flinched back and tried to cover her face.
Kane raised his eyebrows slightly, and then punched her in the stomach. “Don’t do that,” he said patiently as she doubled over, “If you expect to be hit, then I start thinking you probably need to be hit. Get up.”
She did, and he gripped Raven’s wrist and injected her just above the blue trace of a vein. The nanozymes went into her flesh on a burst of air and left a faint red circle behind for her to rub at.
“There,” he said, and leaned back against the front bolster of the groundcar. He offered her a thin smile. “You and I are going to be traveling together for a little while,” he told her.
She didn’t look surprised. Not pleased by any stretch of the imagination, but not surprised. She only waited, watching him with her wary eyes.
“If you behave yourself and obey me, you are going to live to see the back of me,” he said then. It was a thing Urak had been known to say from time to time, and he had always kept his word. Urak had often told him that a certain sort of person could always see a lie, however frightened or desperate they were, and Kane knew without question that Raven was exactly that sort of person.
Raven’s eyes narrowed now, searching his, and she must have seen the truth of it somewhere inside him because she ultimately nodded and seemed to relax, just a little.
Kane tapped a claw against the metal side of the groundcar. “What is this?”
“A car.”
“Can you pilot it?”
“Yes.”
“If you try to hurt me with it, you will die.” Kane raised his hand, studded grey with human brain matter, and raked his claws slowly through the air. “Badly.”
She nodded, pale as the face of the moon.
“Good.” Kane rose, shouldering his gear, and gathered up the corpses. He went to hide them from casual scrutiny and didn’t even have to order the female to stay with him. She followed, silent and obedient, at his heels.
*
There was both food and drink in the groundcar, although neither were immediately recognizable to Kane’s eyes. The food was something she called a ‘burger’, which was at least partially meat, and Kane ate all three of them, even the ones that the humans had taken bites out of. The drinks were sweet enough to be nearly undrinkable, and most of these he forced on Raven. The nanozymes cycling through her body would make her extremely susceptible to dehydration, enough that she might easily die. He told her none of this, of course, but he made her drink every last drop of what there was in the cups she showed him.
Kane rested in the seat beside her as she drove. He didn’t trust her enough to sleep, but he dozed a little as the sun rose. It was cool inside the car, cool and even a little breezy, and Kane savored the lull in weather with numb gratitude. By the time the weather turned foul again, perhaps the female would be ready and safe.
Hours passed without a word between them. The mountains fell behind them, the ground turned from stony and red to soft and brown, but it was all dry. The trees were nothing but dormant balefires. Even the sky looked thin and ready to spark.
Raven made a low coughing sound, bringing him out of his brooding, half-asleep inspection of the scenery. “We’re almost out of gas,” she said when he glanced at her.
The word meant nothing to him. Fuel for the groundcar, he supposed. “Get more,” he said. There had passed plenty of buildings and outposts along the way. Surely one of them could provide fuel.
“I don’t have any money,” she said.
Kane bared his teeth and aimed a sour curse at himself in lieu of the sound cuff Urak was not around to give him. Of course she would need money. And the two males had probably had the stuff. He hadn’t even thought to check the bodies for necessities. “Stop then,” he said. “We need to hide the car.”
Raven looked around at the empty road, the towering trees. “But-“
“Don’t argue with me, human.”
She pressed her lips tightly together and stared straight ahead. When she found the scars of a groundcar’s passage etched in the overgrowth to one side of the road, she turned off. It wasn’t a proper travel-way, and the car bumped hard as it tried to navigate the forest. When they were well away from the main road and completely lost to sight, Raven shut off the engines and sat back and looked at him.
Kane opened his door and heat struck him like the blast from unshielded engines. He rocked back, his senses swimming, realizing only then that the groundcar had some sort of climate controls and Raven had been using them. He was torn between feeling gratitude at this respite and unreasoning fury at her for not warning him. In the end, he settled for forcing himself out into the baking air and saying nothing to her except, “Let’s go.”
They walked for ages under the leaden stare of Earth’s baleful sun. Before one hundred paces had passed, Kane could feel the dull warmth and itch of seed growing in his tsesac. The itch became a swelling. The swelling became pain. The woods were all around them, deep and heavy and still, and the female was right beside him, close enough for him to smell her musky sweat. Right here. Completely unavailable to him.
“Stop!” Kane roared suddenly.
If she had jumped back (a natural-enough reaction, even in his extremity, Kane could admit that) he would have had an excuse to seize her, and having done that, he probably would have thrown her down and damned the consequences. But she did not jump back. She stopped dead in her tracks and watched him.