The sound of the public phone striking down had drawn Grendel’s attention as well. The cat draped itself over the back of Tagen’s chair for a time, watching as Tagen watched. Daria picked up the thick book chained to the comm center, paged through it, and then suddenly tried to throw it as well. The short tether prevented more than a low thump and rattle, but even the sight of it in its tight swing could not satisfy Daria. She kicked at the solid wall of the darkened building at which they were stopped, and then limped a little ways off and leaned her face into the bricks.
He hoped that meant they were done for the night. They had driven until dark, stopping at every public privy and fueling station they passed to inquire after E’Var, and then at every feeding place as well. When the sun failed, Daria began to make her calls, leaving the highway to search the lesser roads for towns she may have missed. Now, with full dark all around them, she had turned and taken them perhaps halfway back to their starting point of the morning, calling all the places she had stopped them at during the day, and still there was no sign of him, no word. Somehow or another, the prisoner had eluded them.
It was an ugly turn to what had begun as such a promising day, but Tagen’s own frustration had long been swallowed up by weariness, and then that by concern for his human. Pursuing E’Var’s shadow all night would do nothing but dull their wits the next day. Tagen knew that, and he could put this setback aside for another day, but Daria was fueling her dismay with fatigue, and the deterioration of her ready mind and mood were now evident to anyone. If she did not have sense enough to see that it was time to stop, he would have to order her, and that would not be pleasant.
At last, Daria raised from her slump and turned away from the phone. She began to trudge back across the parking bay to the groundcar, and the cat, demonstrating a startling lack of good sense, leapt into the foreseat and curled up on Tagen’s lap to await her return. Tagen rubbed the animal’s neck uneasily. Daria was not meeting his eye through the window. The foreseat was likely to soon be a very bad place to be.
She opened the driver’s door and dropped into the pilot’s seat. There, she sat. Her hands tightly gripped the guidance wheel. The open door admitted a warm current of night air scored by insects. She stared straight ahead, her face tight and deeply shadowed where the vehicle’s interior light did not touch her.
Tagen waited. Under his hand, the cat began to purr.
Suddenly, if not entirely unexpectedly, Daria made a fist and slammed it down on the console, bringing Grendel awake with all its fur on end and its claws sunk deep in Tagen’s thigh. “Goddamn it!” she shouted. And then sighed and covered her face, all her energy spent.
Tagen took a tight-jawed moment to extract the bristling cat from his person and deposit it in the rear of the vehicle before addressing her. “It is late.”
“No, it is early,” she shot back in clipped, sarcastic mimicry. She glared at him from between her splayed fingers. “It stopped being late hours ago. Where the hell
are
they? How did I lose them?”
That she hoarded the blame for herself did not escape Tagen’s notice, but he had to pick the things he responded to and it was more important now to calm her. He said, “He does not travel every day. We have seen this.”
“But he left the hotel this morning!” She struck at the wheel again and Tagen heard the cat skitter to the furthest corner of the car. “If he stopped somewhere to…well, we’d have heard about it on the radio by now! Where
is
he? Why didn’t I…” She burst into tears.
Guilt rolled through him helplessly as he looked away out the window. This travel was torturous for her. She’d borne up well thus far, but every new day was harder. Six years she said she’d locked herself away, and now, all at once, he had forced her into this world and away from her securities. He had made her in part responsible for E’Var’s capture without any training of any kind. She could not even ask another human for help because of the danger it would mean for Tagen. The sooner he was gone from her (his heart sank and burned), the better she would be.
“Daria,” he said, once the storm of weeping seemed to slacken. “Anything could have happened. It could be as simple a thing as…as a need for a new wheel.”
She sniffled and scrubbed at her eyes, aged by exhaustion. She gave no sign that she had heard his words. When he laid his hand over her knee, she did not even look at him.
“It is time to rest,” he said. “E’Var will move on tomorrow. We will find him.”
“What if he’s gone?” She did turn then, searching his eyes with shame shining in hers. “What if he hit his limit and left? What if that was our only chance and I let him get away?”
“It was not you—”
“Yes, it
was
, dammit!” She wrenched her knee out of his grip and would have jumped from the car if he hadn’t caught her wrist. “I should have had that map figured out the first day! And I would have, if I wasn’t so…fucked up!” Her fist drove out again, and her target was not the console this time, but her own leg.
“No,” he said, beginning to be alarmed.
“This is all my fault!” she shouted, and struck herself again.
“No!” He caught her hand before it could land another punishing blow, then cupped her chin and forced her to face him. “No,” he said intently. “Criminals elude the law, Daria. I will not—” She tried to twist away and he brought her back forcefully, his voice taking on new vehemence. “I will not hear you punish yourself because you have not done in three days what neither I nor
all
Jota’s soldiers could do these past fifty years!”
She stiffened under his touch, her eyes till averted, and then slumped slightly. She sniffed, knuckling at her reddened eyes. She said nothing.
“You are tired,” he said, releasing her. “And so am I. And somewhere, Kanetus E’Var is surely sleeping.”
She took a shaky breath and nodded. “You’re right,” she said dully. “I’m so sorry.”
He bared his teeth at the apology, and then softened his irritation by leaning across and nipping gently at her shoulder. “Whatever may have happened,” he said, “it is clear that we will not meet with him tonight. Let us find a bed, my Daria. Tomorrow, perhaps, will bring us news of this day’s work. And if not, still it is another day.”
Again, she nodded, though she still refused to meet his eyes. Her hand found his, however, and her fingers twined with him for a moment, but her heart was not in the gesture and she soon pulled away. She leaned out to catch her door and close it, and then fired the groundcar’s engine and set the vehicle in motion, all without speaking.
Silence. It was not a comfortable companion.
Tagen stole several sidelong glances as the car passed through pools of roadside lighting and saw only the despondency of his overwrought human. He knew of nothing more to say to her that could console her, and it gnawed at him.
Daria took them a very short distance before pulling into another parking bay. The building there had the look of a hotel, and he knew by the defeated way in which her eyes moved over its identifying letters that she had called them already, asking after E’Var, and viewed coming back here to rest as a kind of defeat. She began to unharness herself, her shoulders bowed.
“If I were a better man,” Tagen remarked, looking out the window at the sky. “I would know what to say to ease your mind.”
“If I were a better woman, you wouldn’t have to say anything, because you’d have caught him by now.”
He frowned at her and halted her retreat with a hand on her knee. “Why must you insist on blaming yourself?”
“Because it’s my fault!” She wrenched away from his touch, her hands drawing into fists. “This, all of this, is my own fault!”
That made so much no sense that he couldn’t even determine how to argue with it. Cautiously, he returned his hand to her knee. On the tee-vee programs, over-strung females responded best when first broached with physical contact. He said, “It was through your efforts that we were able to determine E’Var’s victims from Earth’s own dead.”
She did not reply. He wasn’t sure whether to be encouraged by that or not. He continued, “It was your eyes that saw the pattern in E’Var’s hunting. Because of your help, we know we are on the right road.”
“Big deal!” she exploded. “So we’re on the right road! He didn’t spend the whole day just screwing around! We were driving up and down this stupid right road while he was out killing people! And-” Fresh tears welled up in her eyes and she slapped at them, hard. “And we could have had him last night if I—”
This was what was scratching at her?
“If you what?” he demanded. “If you humiliated yourself to a stranger? Do not you dare to take blame for that!”
She rolled her eyes at him, and if he hadn’t already seen this gesture performed on the tee-vee, he might have thought her over-exhausted nerves had provoked her to seizures. As it was, he had seen it, so he recognized the gesture as a deriding one.
“Daria,” he said, biting down hard on the anger that threatened to warm itself up in his belly. “A female should never be made—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” she said curtly. “Being a female is nothing special here on Earth. A century or two ago, it was common practice to bury us alive as babies all over the damn planet because feeding us was such a nuisance. Fifty years ago, it wasn’t a crime to rape us. Twenty years ago, a guy couldn’t be prosecuted for beating his wife unconscious. We are still being stoned to death in some parts of the world for wanting to pick out our own clothes, so don’t try to tell me I’ve got some gender-inceptive right to respect from everyone I meet. I’m really happy for you that chivalry isn’t dead on your perfect planet, but the bitch is good and buried here so I don’t want to hear about it!”
He couldn’t have heard that. The words ran themselves through his mind again and he broke open each one in search for some secondary context, shock freezing him a little harder as each maintained its meaning.
They killed their females? No. The humans he knew were obsessed with their own offspring, with keeping and caring for them, with bonding to their sires, with—
They
killed
their infant females?!
“All I had to do was flash the guy,” Daria was saying. “I let my pride be more important than catching a killer and he got away. If even one person died today, it’ll be because I made it happen. And you’re trying to cheer me up like it doesn’t even matter, and it matters, damn it.” She sat with her hands in her lap, staring at the guidance wheel of the car. Water from her eyes dripped from her chin. She whispered, “It matters.”
Tagen sat with her in the dark, in the parking bay of the hotel, neither one speaking, neither one touching. He sat and thought very carefully of the best way to put his words, came to the ultimate conclusion that there was no diplomatic way to say what he was about to say, and said it anyway.
“You are acting like a fool.”
She started crying harder.
Tagen sighed and rubbed at the bridge of his nose restlessly. All right, there probably was a slightly more tactful way than that. He tried again. “It is understandable that you should be acting like a fool. I can see that you are exhausted. You look terrible.”
Through her tears came first a groan, and then a giggle. She raised her head from her hands and rolled her eyes again, this time at the heavens instead of him. Then she wiped the back of her hand across her face again, muttering, “One of these days, you are really going to have to learn just to say, ‘It’ll be all right’, and let it go, spaceman.”
“It will be all right,” he said.
She finally looked at him, still worn through and without hope, but at least with some phantom trace of humor. “If I asked you to go back to that stupid hotel and knock that lecherous little jerk around for me, you’d do it, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh yes.”
Her small smile twitched wider. “That makes you either a really great guy, or a really bad one, I can’t decide.” She sighed and looked away at the hotel. “And it’s a moot point, anyway, I guess. I’ll go get us a room.”
She opened her door and closed it behind her, and Grendel came slinking out of the rear of the car to try Tagen’s lap again. Daria crossed half the lot under the artificial light of the hotel’s lettering, but then paused and turned around. She came back to Tagen’s side of the vehicle, opened his door, and leaned in to press her lips to his cheek.
“You’re a really great guy,” she whispered. She drew back, smiled faintly, and shut his door.
K
ane dreamed of the ship and of himself, a boy barely old enough for breeches, waking suddenly in his dark room. The
Yevoa Null’s
engines were a comforting heartbeat in his ears; the stars, a familiar curtain drawing endlessly back beside his window. He rose, his boy’s body dropping with an ungainly thud from the high bed, and shivered in the temperate air.
He did not know what woke him, but there was a prickling in him. It was neither fear nor nervousness, but something insistent all the same. Some danger, unknown but very close to him. He couldn’t face it alone.
He left the comfort of his quarters and crept across the sitting room to his father’s bedroom door, reaching up on tiptoes to push at the locking pad. The inner room, lit by the same slowly-scrolling stars, was quiet. The only disturbance came in the low form of Urak’s sleeping breaths.
Kane crept to the bedside where his father lay naked, his huge, scarred hand resting on the back of his latest slave. The smell of mating was in the air and Kane hesitated, afraid to intrude, unwilling to retreat.
The sounds of sleep stopped all at once. Urak stirred, opening one red-dimmed eye, and looked at him. “What is it, boy?”
“I don’t know.”
Urak grunted and pushed at the slave until it roused and crawled to the floor, making room for Kane on the bed. He climbed up gratefully and curled against the warmth and reality of his father’s body, filling all his senses. The beating of the great heart, the firmness of the hard muscle, the scent of his sweat, the look of the loose strands of his father’s hair interrupting the vast plain of his chest—this was all there was, this was truth again.