Time. It rode him, whipping at Tagen’s back, and he could do nothing but sit and stare out the window and smell Daria’s blood in the air.
She was frightening him badly. She had driven through the day, white-faced with pain, managing traffic that would have overwhelmed Tagen, moving from cities that frequently had them halted cold on the pavement to winding lanes fringed with forest, and then with mountains. She stopped only when the car needed refueling, and would not allow Tagen to do more than look at her wound.
Not that there was anything he could do for her. And if it were not for who she was and what she meant to him, he might admit that the injuries were superficial ones, or at least, they would be if they were back on Jota. She was young and healthy and her immune system was surely strong; the tissue would knit in its own time, but shock was the factor that unnerved him most. She was piloting the car without complaint, but she was doing it in an obvious haze. He tried only once to convince her of this and received in reply a rambling lecture on time and speed and necessity and perhaps on solar flares as well, it was difficult to tell.
But now, as the sun set, Daria suddenly pulled the groundcar over to the soft side of the road and looked around.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his hand going already to her injured leg.
“I—Ow! Don’t touch! I’m fine. Do you know where we are?”
Alarm unfolded in a hot spray through every bone of him. “Do you not?” he gasped.
“No, I…I mean, yes, of course I know where I am. I…” Her voice faded and she raised a hand to brush lightly at her eyes. She was pale, too pale.
Tagen tried to turn her towards him and she pushed his hand away with a grimace. This time, he threw out a warning growl and forcibly caught her chin, making her face him. He studied her eyes (watching him with strained amusement) and saw weariness there but no confusion.
“You are worrying me,” he told her. He kept her chin cupped in his hand and even raised the other to stroke her cheek. Her answering smile did not reassure him.
“What I’m trying to say, and mangling horribly,” she began, “is that the road sign we just passed says we’re about five miles beyond the place where E’Var’s first bodies were found. We need to turn around.”
“Ah.” He released her with reluctance and gave their surroundings an officer’s scrutiny. He could not be certain, but he believed these might be the same mountains, albeit a different cut of them, in which he had himself landed. Flipping up the panel of his armband locator, he saw that he was correct. They were scarcely fifty kilometers from his ship.
“So if he’s coming like I think he is, we need to go back a bit so that we can cut him off.”
“Cut him off?” he echoed, frowning at her.
“Yeah, that’s where you—”
“I know what it means. What puzzles me is how you mean to do it. You cannot think to lay a trap across the road.” A slight uplifting of the last word made it into a question; surely Daria was clever enough to see that placing hazards across the traffic lanes had a better chance of causing injury to innocent bystanders than in stopping E’Var.
Daria looked adrift for a moment, and he had time to think again how pale she was, how much pain she must be feeling, how it had felt to see her drop back so suddenly and fall with blood pouring from her. Then her eyes cleared and she looked merely chagrined. “No, I see what you’re saying. No, I wouldn’t do that. We’d only ending up killing the first guy who came along with his eyes on the radio instead of the road. Well, let me think.”
Tagen waited, watching the empty highway as the sky faded from pinks to blues and the mountains took on the black contrasts of night.
“Okay, we’ll go back to just before Santiam Pass,” she said finally. “The road’s pretty narrow there and we can find a turnout to watch for him. Then we can—”
“In the dark?” he asked quietly.
She looked up, as if she could see right through the roof of the groundcar to the twilight sky above. On her face was an expression of exhausted astonishment. “Oh damn,” she said mildly.
And then began to cry.
Grendel came at once from the rear of the car, but Tagen was there first. He cupped her face in both his hands, smoothing her tears away and refusing to let her hide against the console. He murmured nonsensical words of solace and she cried harder.
“It’s all my fault!” she wailed.
“No.”
“If I hadn’t gotten shot—”
“No, Daria.”
“I made you have to—”
He stopped her mouth the only way possible, with a kiss. She tried to pull away, but the hands he twined into her soft hair locked behind her neck and kept her pressed to him. Denied escape, her resistance faltered. Under his gently persistent coaxing, her lips parted and he kissed her deeply. Her hands came to rest heavily on his shoulders, and she gave in to him entirely.
The rage of time and its urgency did not disappear, but it did dim. He held his Daria, breathed for her, tasted her tears and felt her trembling, and he did not allow any thoughts of Kanetus E’Var to rob him of the precious beauty of the moment. He ended the kiss at last, but remained touching her, brow to brow.
“What now?” she asked softly.
He sighed and drew back to rub at his eyes. “To begin with, we will trust that his retreat from the fair left him without transport and that he will be delayed.”
“Not for long.”
“No, but long enough, perhaps. We will go as you suggest to a lairing place and wait. The sun will rise and we will watch for him. And if by late morning, he has not come, then…then I will go to my ship and watch for his launch.”
She turned to the window, her fingers restless in her lap. “You should go there now,” she said.
“No. Not yet.”
She looked at him, her eyes deep and unhappily aware of his reasons. She said nothing.
“He has a female with him still,” Tagen said and tried to sound as though this were his only concern. “I would not have him escape with a hostage if it can be helped. If it comes to apprehending him in space, I would be responsible for his captive’s life and I would not have that stain my judgment.”
Daria looked down at her hands. She still did not answer.
He met her silence for as long as he could, and then quietly said, “Not yet. Not until I must. I will claw at every last moment.”
“And he’ll get away.”
“No.” And then, venomously, “Perhaps. We can do only as much as we can do, and it is beyond me, Daria Cleavon, to leave you now.”
Silence. At last, she sighed.
“Will you drive?” he asked.
She nodded and began to do things to the console, preparing to re-enter the empty road.
“And will you not speak?”” he asked softly.
She looked at him. Away. She shook her head.
He faced out the fore-window and into the mountains, not seeing them. “Why not?”
“Because I don’t want you to leave,” she said unsteadily, and took them out onto the highway. “But I can’t be the reason that this guy gets away. I can’t live with that, Tagen. I can’t think of all the people he’s going to keep killing because you couldn’t leave me. Me. I mean, I’ve got a newsflash for you, spaceman, I’m not all that great.”