“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.
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.”
“You are.”
She didn’t seem to know how to respond to such quiet conviction. At last, she felt back on her first argument, uttering it with a high despair that was close to tears. “You need to go back to your ship!”
“In the morning,” he said, and his heart clenched inside of him. “Whether I have found him or no. In the morning. Please.” He did look at her then, although she shivered away from meeting his eyes even for an instant. “Wherever he is, he is surely hours behind us yet. Do not ask me to spend those hours alone in space.”
Her shoulders hunched. “Okay,” she whispered. “You win. God help me.”
He turned his eyes out to the road ahead of them again. The sun was falling down, the night short, and the morning mere hours away.
Gods help them both.
*
The sun was low in the trees when Kane came to the end of the forest and saw the houses. The sight of them standing pleasantly in the sunshine of a summer’s evening infuriated him. It shouldn’t, and he was lucid enough to know that, but it did anyway. This was the hour he’d thought to be loading his females onto his ship and making ready for launch. Instead he was here, on foot, his
ichuta’a
gone and Raven at her limit, with no food or water since the previous day, and Heat scouring at him yet again. He couldn’t seem to feel anything apart from rage and that was a dangerous way to be.
He ordered Raven to sit and stay, and then he got low and crept in to the edge of the woods to get a better look. He saw no movement of any kind, not in any of the windows. There were groundcars parked before some of the houses, but not all of them, and Kane was smart enough to know that a groundcar on display was no guarantee that anyone was at home. Just his luck. All the humans that lived here had probably gone to the fucking fair.
No, a shadow moved. Kane’s eyes narrowed, trying to pierce the curtains and see clearly whether it was a human on the inside of that house or an animal, or just reflected light spilling in through the window and broken by branches. Futile. He could make nothing out but curtain.
The urge to just go kick in the door or smash through the window vomited up from somewhere deep inside him with enough force to momentarily blind him. Just tear his way inside and kill everything that moved—humans, animals, shadows, walls, every fucking thing.