Sleep finally carried him to the faraway land he had once called home.
Dawn came.
A deer neared the creek, thirsty for a drink. Reza rose silently from his sanctuary and approached it. It did not run away, for it sensed nothing to fear; he appeared only as an insubstantial shadow, no more a threat than was the mist. That was how Reza preferred it. He wished the animal no pain. Death, when it came, was instantaneous.
This was the first time he had been able to make an unhurried hunt since leaving the Empire. Reza constantly craved meat, but there was no accommodation to be found in the mess hall. Instead, he was forced to hunt in the occasional spare hour or so that was not taken up by training or commander’s call. He knew his abnormal need for meat was a result of the Change, but it was one he welcomed; it was another means of preserving in his mind the heritage he had earned, the love he now missed.
He cleaned the deer carefully and stripped it of meat, cutting it into strips to carry back with him, where he would dry and salt it. What little was left of the carcass he carried away from the stream, that the other animals could have their share, and that the water would not become fouled.
He laid out the hide and began to cure it, fortunately a swift process using the methods Esah-Zhurah had taught him long ago. Getting the proper ingredients had been very difficult, but he had finally convinced a pharmacist at the hospital to make up what he had requested. When asked what Reza was going to use the concoctions for, he had told the man, explaining the process in halting Standard, the technical terms of curing a hide not coming to him easily. Strangely, the man had not believed him, but had indulged his request anyway, the ingredients being harmless ones. Reza shook his head in silent wonder at how humans so often mistook the truth for deception.
In any case, Reza was eager to have a skin to sleep on again, even one as thin as this. The human-fashioned bed in his room was unbearable.
“Hello, mon ami,” Nicole said as she leaned against the entryway. Reza had left the door standing open to let fresh air flow through the room from the window. “May I come in?”
“Of course, commander,” he said, coming gracefully to attention. He had been sitting on the deerskin, reading another technical manual. He had felt her approaching long before she reached the door, but he reacted as if he had not known this. He had discovered that certain of his abilities unnerved those around him, and he had gotten into the habit of screening himself with more human reactions, difficult as they often were to emulate. “You are always welcome here.”
“Please, Reza,” she said as she stepped into the room, quietly closing the door behind her, “we are off duty now. You can relax and call me by name.”
Reza nodded, noting her clothes and the light makeup that adorned her face. She was dressed in a close-fitting scarlet blouse of pure silk, skin-tight black pants, and a gold sash tied around her petite waist. A slim gold chain hung around her neck, and her feet were wrapped in soft black leather boots.
“I thought you had gone into town with the others yesterday, when I did not find you here,” she said casually, knowing full well that Reza would not have gone. This was the first and only free weekend the trainees would have during their basic training. Very, very few chose to pass up the opportunity to go into one of the nearby towns and get their fill of booze, gambling, and sex before returning to the discipline of the barracks. Jodi had begged Nicole to go, but she had refused, insisting that Jodi go on with some of the other instructors for an outing probably every bit as wild as those the trainees had in mind, Nicole claiming she had some work to finish that could not wait.
While she did not say so, Jodi had suspected otherwise.
“No,” Reza said lightly, smiling as he shook his head. “After Eustus explained to me the merits of ‘booze, babes, and booze’ and the controversy over ‘beefcake,’ I decided to forego such pleasures for simpler pursuits.” While Eustus was sometimes an awkward young man, his vigor in any endeavor he set his mind to was not to be underestimated. “No, Nicole,” he said, his smile fading slightly, “I have no need of these things. I went hunting instead.”
Nicole sat down on Eustus’s bed, and Reza folded back into his sitting position opposite her, his legs resting on the freshly cleaned and cured deerskin that lay atop a collection of blankets that he had scrounged from somewhere. He had removed the bulky bed frame, having found it intolerably uncomfortable. Along with his long, braided hair, it was written off as an acceptable – barely – deviation from the norm, and therefore exempt from inspection as long as it was kept orderly and neat, which of course it was.
Nicole shook her head. Very few things he did now surprised her. Or so she liked to think. “It looks very comfortable,” she said, silently wondering what the animal fur might feel like against her skin. She felt the stirrings of heat in her body and a flush rising to her cheeks, and she quickly changed the subject, groping for a more delicate way of approaching him.
“I have spoken several times with Eustus,” she said as she compared the two sides of the room. Eustus had the maximum number of allowable personal effects displayed: a holo of his mother and father, another of his whole family – so many children! – and a real photograph, tastefully framed in luminous black metal, of a famous singer with the woman’s autograph.
But on Reza’s side, there was nothing but bare wall and – she stopped. That was not quite true. The silver crucifix she had given him when they were children hung from a pin directly above his bed. It made her flush with a combined sense of pride and guilt, of conflicting duty and impatient desires.
“He thinks the world of you, Reza,” she told him. “And, from what the other instructors have said, not only he but your whole platoon has been performing and learning better and faster than the others, thanks to you.”
“All of them have the warrior spirit,” Reza said, proud that others had thought and spoken well of him. It was a far cry from what they had said in his first days among them, and there remained those who would never trust him because of his unusual heritage and the collar he wore. “They simply have not yet learned to use it and control it. But this shall come, in time.”
He looked at Nicole, who seemed to be studiously examining the portrait Eustus treasured. “Nicole,” he said quietly, sensing the turmoil within her, “what is wrong?”
“I am afraid, Reza,” she said, still averting her eyes. “There are things I would like to say, to do, but I…” She shook her head, a bittersweet smile on her face. “I am so silly, Reza,” she told him. “I have waited all this time to have you alone to myself for a while so that we could… get to know one another again. I thought it might be good to talk of things other than the war, or what you can tell us of your time in the Empire. To get away from all the things of official interest. But now I find my courage has gone. I do not know what to do, what to say.” She looked up at him then, her brown eyes brimming with tears. “Would you hold me?” she whispered.
Reza held his arms open for her, and she knelt next to him, wrapping her arms around him in a fierce embrace, her head against his shoulder.
“What is it in the world that could frighten you so?” he asked softly.