She screamed. It was a harsh sound, a cry of pure frustration and rage, utterly devoid of fear. Her head rocked, her face purpled, and her heels gouged impotently at the earth. She screamed and gasped for air and screamed again.
Tagen had sedative, of course, but no time in which to indulge the erratic effects it provoked in humans. He elected instead to slap her.
Her lip split, not for the first time by appearances, but it did silence her immediately. She stared at him with tight-mouthed hatred, her breath shaking through her in violent pants.
“Where?” he said coldly.
“How the fuck should I know?” She made herself laugh. It was a bitter attempt. “You won’t have to follow him anyway. He’ll come for me. And he’ll rip you in half.”
“Come for you,” Tagen echoed. He stood up, solely to take his curled hands out of reach of her. “He left you, human.”
She sneered at him, mocking him from the cold place of her convictions. “He had to get away but now he’ll come—”
“He kept the female he wanted,” Tagen told her, very softly. “He is not coming back for you.”
It took a long time for that to sink all the way down to the place where her thoughts were made. With every new breath she took, the truth caught a more hurtful hold, and when she opened her mouth again, there was no sound. Tagen watched her struggle to speak, and then he watched her eyes well with furious tears.
“Son of a bitch,” she whispered finally, raggedly. “You son of a bitch. He…He was going to fix me. He promised. He—”
“Where is he going?”
“You son of a bitch!” she screamed.
Daria moaned.
Tagen turned from the interrogation at once and went to the open hatch of the groundcar where Daria lay. Her lashes fluttered and her eyes opened, calm at first, then perplexed, and then flooding with baffled pain.
“Ow,” she said. She clutched at him, missed, and gripped the side of the groundcar instead. “Oh owww! Oh, what’s hurting me? Owww!”
Her hand dropped to her wounded leg and came away fast. She stared at the blood marking her palm and said, “I was shot,” in wondering tones. “I remember now. He shot me.”
“Can you stand?” Tagen asked.
She looked past him to the other human still scream-sobbing her obscenities at his back. “Is that…one of his? Where’s the other one?”
E’Var’s human arched kicking off the ground to bellow, “Bitch!” at the top of her lungs. Her voice broke in the extremity of the curse. Tagen had swung around to order her to silence, but he found he did not need to; she lay with her lips pressed pale, glaring at the sky with wet and baleful eyes in seething silence.
“He took her with him,” Tagen said, returning his attention to the answering of Daria’s question.
She gazed up at him then, her brow beetling. “You mean he got away?” Her expression continued its slow slide past confusion into dismay. “You let him get away because of me?”
There were a hundred ways to answer that, a hundred excuses, a hundred reasons, but in the end, he simply said, “Yes,” and silently dared her to argue with him.
“Oh Tagen.” She sighed and rubbed at the place just above her wound. She did not meet his eyes. In the tee-vee programs, males who saved the lives of females were frequently rewarded with adoration and affection. The tee-vee misrepresented many things.
“So now what?” she asked finally.
“If E’Var reaches his ship before we…before I reach mine, it will be over. But there is a chance that I could overtake him yet. He is on foot for the moment…” His voice failed him. He stared down at Daria’s pale hand where it lay atop the blood-soaked sleeve of her pant leg. E’Var and pursuit were suddenly of ridiculous unimportance to him. “…but I doubt he will remain so for long.”
“Where are we?” Daria asked.
“Further west. Not far from the place of fair. The car…confounded me,” he admitted.
“You drove?” A smile twitched at the corners of her mouth, the edges blurred by pain. “I’m probably lucky I was unconscious, aren’t I?”
He sighed, but he couldn’t in all conscience argue.
Daria sat up and scooted to the edge of the hold. She lowered her feet to the ground, tested her weight with a wince, and slowly stood. “It hurts,” she said, sounding strained. “But I think I’d know if it were broken and I don’t think it is. Just shot.”
“I wish he’d killed you,” the blonde interjected.
Tagen spun fast and would have no doubt struck her if Daria hadn’t restrained him with a soft hand on his arm.
“Don’t bother,” she said. “She’s scared, Tagen.”
“Like fuck I am, bitch!” The words were bitter; the tone, shrill.
“She’s helped him kill a lot of people,” Daria went on, still with that confidential sympathy. “She thought she’d be free and clear of it when it was over. Now she’s stuck here. And people are looking for her.”
E’Var’s human fell silent. Apart from spots of brilliant color high in her cheeks, she was almost perfectly white.
“So leave her alone,” Daria finished, and dropped her hand from him. “We’ve got bigger things to worry about now.”
That much was certainly true. He needed to take back some measure of control and come up with a plan of pursuit. The name of Pahnee was synonymous with good planning. Tagen closed his eyes to the sight of the burnt hole in Daria’s bloody clothing and tried to find his wits.
“Take me with you,” the blonde human suddenly said. Her voice shook. “Take me with you when you leave Earth and I’ll tell you where he was going.”
He looked at her sharply.
“Tagen,” Daria said and sighed. “She doesn’t know where he’s going. She wasn’t there when he landed. And we already know where to cut him off.”
“We do?”
“He killed three times along Highway 20,” she reminded him. “Three times on foot, moving east, just a few days after you think he landed. His ship is somewhere west of that.”
“Somewhere west covers so much ground.”
“Yeah, but there’s only so many roads.” She shifted, gritting her teeth, and sat down again, holding onto the side of the car for balance. “And now that he knows you’re here, he’ll go straight there as fast as possible, and that means getting a car. If he’s in a car, he’ll have to use Highway 20 to get close to his ship again, and his girl will probably take I-5 to get to Highway 20. Come on. Let’s go.”
Tagen glanced back at E’Var’s human.
“Let her go,” Daria said softly. “She can’t get away. Not for long.”
The blonde human stared back at him in plaintive and furious appeal. She had nothing to bargain with, and he was not in a bargaining mood in any case, but still she tried to sway him. “Just take me with you. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
Tagen went to her, turned her on her belly and removed his binders from her arms. “Were it up to me, I would see you imprisoned myself,” he told her. “But I will trust your police to catch you. I have already spoken with one of their number. They know who you are, and they are closing on you.”
She rolled onto her side away from him and curled there.
Tagen helped Daria take her rightful place at the console of the groundcar. He harnessed himself into his seat and brought Grendel onto his lap. The blonde lay weeping on the ground during all of this. She did not move, not even when the groundcar pulled out onto the road and rolled away.
*
It was a long drive that followed, one that gave Tagen ample time to sit and brood on just how disastrous this mission truly was. He was starkly aware of his prisoner’s advantages when he could not recognize any road that Daria drove, could not read any sign they passed. Even in the first days, when he had been on foot in the mountains, he had never felt so lost and so alone on this hostile world. And now his only ally was injured, and he could not even care for her; even if he had known how, there was simply no time.