“Easy, Raven,” Kane said, smiling. Sue-Eye was not as amused. He gave her a pat as he put the last vial into the preserver and sealed up his pack. “We’re all hot and sore here.”
Raven muttered something and stood down.
Kane shouldered the thick strap, feeling out the weight of a full pack with real pleasure. “Let’s go,” he said.
Sue-Eye started moving; Raven stayed where she was.
“Can’t we just leave and get something on the road?” she asked. “Air conditioning, Kane!”
“Obedience, Raven,” he retaliated, and she sighed and showed her teeth at the ground. “Let’s go,” he said again, and this time there was no argument. They moved out of the woods together and went to be swallowed up by the fair.
*
Inquiries at the entrance had been fruitless, but that was neither surprising nor discouraging. There were thousands of humans here and only two persons at the gate. Upon first passing into the jumbled city of teeming pathways and crowded booths, his perception of it as hunting grounds for Vahst only increased. If E’Var was not here yet, then surely he would come here soon. It was not impossible to imagine that this fair was the reason for the disturbing quiet of the previous day; perhaps E’Var had made his camp nearby, preparing for a full day of hunting in these choice environs. His humans, who had taught E’Var so effectively of movie theaters and motels, would have been quick to guide him here.
Knowing that, it was easy to be patient as he patrolled the outer walks nearest to the gate, but slightly more difficult to be nonchalant. Tagen walked at Daria’s side, his hands curled at his sides and Daria’s socks upon his feet, searching the crowd around him for sign of his prisoner and doing his best to ignore the curious looks the humans had for his uniform.
Under other circumstances, Tagen thought he might enjoy ‘fair’. Circumstances involving, for example, a day of heavy drinking and temperatures perhaps half what they were now. Ah, no, in all honesty, he supposed all he’d truly need was to be a boy again. This had to be a child’s idea of heaven. All the bright colors, flashing lights, loud music, unhealthy food, gaming shops with toys as tall as Tagen for prizes, the rides…great merciful gods, the rides…and of course, the throngs of other children to provide camouflage so that one could freely indulge in the most deviant behaviors.
When he’d been a boy, he probably would have given the teeth out of his head for a day in a place like this. Looking around now, however, he could not help but see it as a place of near and inevitable danger, even without the threat of E’Var’s possible presence. He wondered if that was a soldier’s perspective or, with the healthy female of the past many days’ matings at his side and in his thoughts, a father’s.
“Do you have fairs on your planet?” Daria asked suddenly, distracting him from the wistfulness that futile thought evoked. Her hand twined with his and lightly squeezed.
“More or less,” he said. He was intensely aware of her thumb. She was rubbing it back and forth along his wrist, seemingly without being aware of it as she swept her gaze across the other humans. “Less crowding. Less screaming.” He glanced up at the capricious trackline of one of the open-car rides. “Less imminent death.”
“And more what?”
He found it a little disturbing that she hadn’t argued with his assessment of the rides. But he considered the question carefully, thinking back to the few public celebrations he had attended in his life. The Child-Hall where he had spent his youngest years sponsored several, and although he could not recall them clearly beyond a general sense of frenzied fun, he knew they hadn’t been much like this. After he’d been sent to live with Kolya Pahnee, there had been very little in the way of revelry of any kind. Public observances were limited to those at which his father were receiving honors of some kind—Veteran’s March, High Tribute, Fleet Academy Commencement, that sort of thing.
“More to do,” he said at length. “There were things to make. There were musicians and entertainments. There were games. Not games of this sort,” he added, waving at a booth where several humans were attempting to thread a rotating wire maze. “Fields of games. Contests.”
“Did you ever win any?”
“Oh yes.” Considering Kolya Pahnee’s ruthless training techniques, it was a wonder Tagen hadn’t won all of them. “The rewards were much the same, I think. In principle if not in form.”
“You sound like you’ve been to a few.”
Tagen grunted noncommittally, eyeing a booth of moving targets and the pellet projectile weapon that was meant to be used against them. Were it not for his hands and the need to keep them hidden, he would be sorely tempted to try his skill.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been to one of these.” Daria plucked at his sleeve as she set off in a new direction, moving towards the inner fair, toward the smell of food. Her eyes, too, were scanning the masses, but there was a smile on her lips to suggest not all her attention was in the here and now. “Ten years, at least. It just figures I’d have to come now, for this.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“I am. I’d love to kick it around here for a few hours without having to worry about killer aliens harvesting brain stems.”
He gave her a long, dubious look. She didn’t seem at all nervous. “How is it,” he began tactfully, “that you have such difficulty approaching those we meet at your hotels—”
She laughed. “And not here, when I’m literally drowning in total strangers?” she finished for him. “Look around, Tagen. No one sees me. If I fell down, they’d step right on me and keep going. It’s as good as being here by myself.”
Tagen frowned and stared out at the crowd again.
“For crying out loud, you’re a seven-foot-tall guy with visible fangs, yellow eyes, three fingers and claws, walking around in socks, wearing a shiny military uniform and an empty gunbelt and no one’s even stopped to ask if you’re performing here or anything.”
His frown deepened.
“I could stand on your shoulders and shout out that you’re an alien and I don’t think most of these people would even stop to stare.”
“You have made your point,” he told her. The sense of this place as a chemist’s killing grounds was now overwhelming. To distract himself as much as her, he said, “Why have you not recently been to fair if you enjoy them and are not frightened?”
She shrugged. “No one to go with, I guess. It’s no fun being at the fair by yourself.” She looked wistfully around her. “And this one looks like a really cool one. They’ve even got roller coasters.”
Tagen glanced at the nearest loop of unstable track just an open car came thundering through it with a full load of shrieking, unharnessed passengers. “Which I would never allow you to ride,” he said.
“And I’d eat. You can’t get food like this anywhere but at the fair.”
Tagen watched a cook pull a dripping battercake from a vat of boiling grease and coat it with pure sugar until it had a solid crust. “Have you never wondered why?”
“You know, I bet you were just mountains of fun when you were a kid,” she said wryly.
“You would lose that bet.”
“Yeah, that’s why I…oh never mind.”
He smiled, and then knuckled sweat from his eyes. “If you insist on poisoning us both, you had best do it swiftly. I am losing to Heat, and much as I dislike the thought of scandalizing your cat, there are some things I have no doubt will draw attention even in this crowd.”
Pink rose high in her cheeks and she giggled. “Well, okay. I have to do my part for Jota’s boys in blue. Or black, as the case may be. I see barbeque chicken on some of these people’s plates, you ought to be able to choke that—Oh God!”