She shifted, but couldn’t seem to get her limbs together enough to rise. She settled for looking around again. Trees and trees and bushes and more trees. The day was still suffocatingly hot and shrilling with the kind of high-summer insect noise that made sane men butcher their families in their beds. And somewhere, somewhere there were sirens. Lots of them. Raven’s world came a little more into focus. “Where’s Sue-Eye?”
He dismissed that with a curt shake of his head. “Back at the fair,” he said. His claws brushed along her cheek, but his gaze was elsewhere, stabbing at the shadows surrounding them. “V’kai showed up.”
She didn’t need clarification on that. Cop-words had the same sound in any language. “Where are we?”
He growled laughter. “Not nearly far enough away. Fucking heat!” Or maybe he meant Heat. Hard to tell sometimes.
“We need to get a car.” Raven tried again to rise and this time, she succeeded. His hand stayed with her, steadying and strong, until she found her balance. Just standing there, she could feel her head clearing, as if the fugue that had settled on her was susceptible to gravity and could be poured out onto the ground as long as she wasn’t lying on it. She swiped limp strands of hair out of her eyes and looked down at Kane with new clarity. “Do you know where we’re going?”
“That way.” He pointed with confidence, but there was a certain frustration in his eyes that showed he appreciated the unhelpfulness of his reply. “And it’s one fuck of a far walk off.” He got up, fastening his pants in curt, angry movements. “You can tell me you told me so if you want to,” he added bitterly.
She glanced at him, sorely tempted, and then shook her head. “Later,” she said. “When we’re good and out of this. I’ll probably even smack you around a little.”
He gave her a sharp sidelong look, and then showed his teeth in a brief, rueful grin. “Deal. Now get moving.”
He picked up his pack and caught at her arm, but she dug in her heels and stopped him. “We can’t run in this heat, we need to get a car.” She stared intently at the forest, trying for her bearings in futility. The sirens she heard weren’t moving and the longer she had to listen to them, the closer they felt. “Where’s the road from here?” she asked.
Kane aimed a claw, but his expression was dark. “We’re not getting anywhere near it,” he growled. “We were seen, Raven. V’kai and your law both. We were goddamn good and well seen and the last thing I’m going to do is walk out in front of them and let them see us again.” He glanced at the trees and then back at her, scowling. “It’s slower this way, but it’s safer.” He tried to move off with her in hand again, and again, she dug in and refused to budge.
“No, it’s not.” She pulled all the way out of his grip and he let her go, his head cocked and an expression of frustration growing on his face. “If your v’kai guy gets to his ship before we do, he’ll just be waiting for us out in space. Could you take him in a firefight?”
Right around the words ‘waiting for us’, Kane’s eyes went wide enough for a thin white ring to show their edges. By the time she finished her pointed question, they were narrowed nearly to slits. “No,” he said, and bared his teeth again. “I don’t even think the fucking thing has guns.”
“We’ve got to get a car,” she insisted. “Now.”
Kane snarled, but he was nodding. “Not here,” he said. “If we come out of the woods on that road, your v’kai will be waiting to take us down.” He shot a glance unerringly back at the siren-sounds. “Chok.”
Raven conceded the point with a nod and rubbed at her temples, trying to shake a thought free. “Okay,” she said finally. “We’ll keep going this way. We’re not that deep into the woods, we might run into a crossroads. If nothing else, it’ll get dark and we can find a house or something. Kane…how did this v’kai guy know where to find you? Are you wearing something?”
“Wearing…what?” Suddenly, his frustration washed out and he stared down at her, showing the whites of his eyes for the second time in as many minutes. Then they were gone again and Kane gazed away into the trees, his face closed. “I don’t know,” he said quietly. “It’s possible. I didn’t think they did anything like that, but…they keep prisoners unconscious to control them.”
There was no expression whatsoever on his face as he made this calm admittance. Somehow, that was the scariest she’d ever seen him look.
“It’s probably nothing,” she said. “It’s easy enough for someone to follow a trail of bodies.”
Kane grunted and adjusted the pack strap that lay over his shoulder. He started walking and she followed. “What made you even think of something like that?” he asked sourly.
She tried to avoid an answer with a shrug, but when he frowned at her, she said, “Your v’kai guy came to the fair before anyone knew we’d been killing people there.”
He spat out one of his alien curses, looking baffled and furious. Mostly furious. “But if that were true, he’d know I was here now.” He let that hang in the air for a while. “I shot his ichuta’a. With any luck, she’ll die. Hopefully, that’ll slow him up, even if he does have some kind of sacrat sunk in me.”
“You’re assuming he’s the only one.”
Kane shot her a third white-ringed stare. Without another word, he scooped her up and over his shoulder and started running.
*
There was a tube of dermal restorative among his medical gear, and Tagen applied it in a thick layer to Daria’s wound after determining the pellet had indeed passed completely through her thigh. There could be any amount of damage done; although soldier’s sense told Tagen it was not serious, he was no expert in human anatomy. He did not trust any of the pain medications provided by vey Venekus to work on humans, but he could prepare a dose of nanozymes to speed her healing and so he did.
She stirred when injected and Tagen stroked her cheek anxiously in case she wakened fully. It was unreasonably important to him that he be the first thing she saw when the neural stunner’s effects finally wore off.
But it was the blonde female who began to wake first, groaning and clutching blindly at her surroundings before falling back again. E’Var’s female. His prisoner, perhaps. Perhaps his accomplice. But a distraction now, in either case, from his injured Daria.
Tagen touched the soft hair that fanned out behind Daria’s lolling head for one last, lingering moment, and then he gathered up the other human and pulled her from the hold of the car. He lay her down in the dry grass and waited on one knee beside her, his hands clenching rhythmically on empty air, watching her fight her way out of stupor.
The blonde’s eyes opened. She stared slackly around for several seconds. Confusion sank in first, and then panic. “Kane?” she called, and looked at Tagen for the first time.
He saw recognition of his kind enter her, along with the awful understanding that she was caught. He had no sympathy for her. Prisoners do not call their keepers by their familiar names.
“Kane!” she shouted and tried to lunge away.
Tagen sprang after her, bringing her down with considerably more force than was necessary. She struggled, but she would be no match for a Jotan male even if she were not groggy from the neural stunner. He pulled binders from his gunbelt, flipped her facedown, and pinned her arms, wrist to elbow, behind her back. In seconds, he was rolling her onto her back again and snarling into her pale face, “Where is he going?”