Nova (39 page)

Yet she did not.

Though the immediacy of their connection had been granted a
reprieve, Z’arr could still feel their bond singing through vein, mind, and
soul, and now knew that nothing short of expiry could snuff this manifested truth.
For K’llan, there was perfect clarity, no mystery, no question to be asked or
answered.

Yet for the Human, and she had to consciously stop herself from
thinking of Avara in terms of
my
Human, there was lingering confusion, a
sense of traveling through and trying to sort out the unknown. Beneath all
else, K’llan sensed an uncertainty and unease born of remorse and vague guilt
that hurt Avara deeply.

 “Avara… I am sorry.” K’llan finally uttered, voice low with
emotion, feeling her words to be woefully inadequate.  She gently pulled back
and sitting up, gave the woman the space she knew Avara needed.

Moving to sit a further pace away, lean arms wrapped around
her knees and
nya
flailing with an attempt to sort and quantify, to
regain equilibrium, Serros responded, “No need. It’s fine… I… you… are you okay?”

Smiling slightly inside at Avara’s sense of consideration
even when within her own confusion, K’llan answered softly, “Yes. My fear of not
being able to stop myself from… harming you in my current state of depredation
seems to be a non–issue.”

Neither spoke regarding Z’arr’s statement. She could feel
that they both knew her words were true, knew now that with the bond that they
shared, K’llan could no more drain the life from Avara than she could order
herself to stop breathing.

Just as we both know that my other concerns about our Feeding
have proven true.

The thought hung between them, a whisper unspoken as they
fell to silence and eventually, to sleep in their separate bedrolls, apart yet
not apart, listening to the still persistent
pit–pat–pit–pat
of rain
falling on grass and earth.

CHAPTER 20

With a sense of quiet triumph, sunlight streamed through the
tapering mist of rain to puddle in the entryway of the cavern, a beacon calling
for the abandonment of sleep. Carrying a faint sense of reluctance despite
feeling more vital than she had in days, Avara shrugged off the last vestiges
of sleep as she escaped the cocoon of her bedroll to a sit–up position.

Without deliberate thought, she found her head turning towards
her traveling companion a few feet away, still curled up onto her side and
breathing with the steady rhythm of sleep. Head cradled on her arm, K’llan’s
hair was loose, locks pooled about her head like a long–trained crown made of
sky, pearlescent skin a muted shimmer in the low light of the cave.

The color of the Vosaia’s hair was echoed in the delicate
azure tracings that brushed along her hairline, starting from her ears then coursed
gentle whirls at the inception of high–arched cheekbones. The natural sigils were
then lost in the swirl of sapphire tresses to persist, Serros knew from the
past week of travel together, along her back.

With a sudden urge, Avara found herself wondering if the
marks continued their path and what K’llan’s fully bared back would look and
feel like, wanted to follow and map the course of cerulean patterns. Like a rifle–shot,
images and feelings from last night snapped through her mind. The cinematic
play threatened to drown out vision as they repeated like a Vid gone mad. Though
she couldn’t quite pin down its full significance, exactitude a fleeing quarry,
Avara knew with certainty that the very mutual experience of Feeding that had
taken place between her and K’llan had changed something. Perhaps everything.

With a jaw–aching grit of her teeth, Avara shook off the
train of images and quickly gained her feet, using the physical movement as a
means of escape. 

Retrieving her now dried outerwear by the fast fading fire,
the Shield dressed and quietly began gathering their belongings for the day’s
journey.

Minutes into the task, Avara knew before she spoke that
K’llan had awakened and was watching her as she worked. “Is it that time
already?”

Pushing strands of internal disquiet aside, Avara turned her
head towards K’llan as she disabled security nodes and turned off their portable
generator. “Yep, I’m afraid so.”

Slipping away from her bedroll and also donning her outer
garments, K’llan offered “We are making good time.”

 “True; we’ve already covered about a third of the
distance.”

Of course, that meant they still had at least another two
weeks of travel before reaching the Karukai outpost.

That thought, and its ramifications, hovered in the silence
between them as Serros met K’llan’s striking violet eyes.

“At least it has stopped raining.” K’llan said a moment later,
deliberately, Avara knew, shifting focus away from what two more weeks travel
meant in terms of acquiring necessary sustenance. Avara smiled in return at
K’llan’s consideration, and the two went about breaking camp in companionable
quiet, leaving the Captain time to stew in her thoughts and more fully collect
herself.

As K’llan had explained it, Feeding from another person
rather than consuming Vitani was much more nourishing and so could sustain a
Vosaia for a number of days that was closer to a week than not. Yet no matter
how the math was worked, even in the most ideal rescue or escape scenario,
K’llan would have to Feed from Avara again, and probably more than once before
their trek was complete. On one hand, last night proved that the fear of K’llan
unintentionally causing physical harm to Serros while Feeding was a non–issue.

On the other, there was most certainly danger on an
emotional and personal level. Despite having lived with an Arca Synergy
Enhancement for over six years now, Avara had never experienced something like
the exchange of emotion, thought and memory that had taken place between the
two.

Though anything but unpleasant, Avara felt disconcerted, out
of control in some way that was entirely unfamiliar to her. The bond that had
somehow sprung between them upon their initial encounters and then was further nourished
by their still growing friendship, had been expanded. Avara couldn’t escape the
feeling that there was now a still–open psychic door between herself and
K’llan. She suspected that the condition would not be short–lived.

And yet, even more than trying to reach balance in the face
of the unsettling mental reality of the aftermath of the Feeding, was that just
as K’llan had warned, the experience had been anything but platonic. Avara’s
penchant for brutal self–honesty disallowed even an attempt to deny that the exchange
had been anything less than passionate, sexual, and decidedly romantic in
nature. All of which brought her back to the other source of unease and
uncertainty.

Diana
.

Avara consciously stifled the nagging sense of irresolution
as she finished the last of her morning camp chores and shrugged on her pack. Looking
around the cavern one more time, Serros was torn between the opposing desires
to both stay and leave this place far, far behind. Quelling internal debate,
she asked Z’arr, “Shall we then?”

“Yes.”

The air held the sweet smell of earth and flora recently
bathed in water, life renewed and refreshed, much as the two Nova Squad
members. They moved easily at a ground–eating lope, the miles falling away like
poppy–seeds bobbing in the wind. By the time night had fallen and they’d made
camp, the two women had managed to travel farther than standard, a total of
ninety miles in a single day.

It was not difficult to understand why they had made such
progress. Having eaten well for the first time since landing on Dantis, Avara
felt like a new person, and she could tell the same was true for her Vosaia
companion. K’llan exuded a sense of vigor and vitality that burned so brightly,
it almost seemed chemically induced, and Avara knew without asking that
vivacity had been wrought by Feeding. Given Avara’s own level of recuperation,
her guess was that at least to a degree, the exchange of life–energy had been
reciprocal.

Their rapid pace of travel was a trend that continued much
of the next several days, the miles flying away. Five days after having left
the cavern, the landscape gradually changed, becoming noticeably drier, with savanna
fading into patches of scrub over rust colored sand and rock–swept flatlands.

The stream they’d been following had disappeared to a
slight, half–stagnant trickle and the heat beat down upon them with the persistence
of a smith working a forge. Before long, thorn–tipped low bushes and varietals
of purple or yellow–shot cacti became a normal feature in their travels, as did
a significant increase in the type and number of reptile life. Evenings offered
a new challenge in discouraging both reptilian and arthropodal visitors, the
latter of which uncomfortably resembled rust colored, four–clawed and dual–tailed
Terran scorpions.

In response, they went out of their way not to make camp by
the fading stream and switched to religiously sleeping in their sealed tent
every night.

As they traveled, the duo regularly supplemented Avara’s
supply of dried jakhri with smaller game kills, mostly rabbit and the wild pig–like
creatures that seemed to be a favorite food of the local grass–cats. As
confirmed by CPA scans, a small, green–leafed bush and some of the cacti also
turned out to edible, if not particularly appealing and somewhat difficult to
prepare. The steady, mostly meat based diet provided the baseline of sustenance
that Avara needed, but she knew her body was feeling the lack of dietary variation.

Due to an incredibly active professional and personal life that
included a rigorous, daily exercise regime, Avara had always been sleekly
muscled. Yet now, the gradual loosening of her belt and the way her travel–worn
Karukai jacket and trousers snapped and whipped around, drew attention to a
frame that was noticeably becoming too spare. More, with the lack of water,
Avara felt like grime and grit had permanently taken up residence in her pores
and she found her mind constantly conjuring up fantasies that fluctuated
between spending a week in cool bath water and consuming the cargo of platters
heaped with every food she’d ever even remotely appreciated. The only part of
her that felt relatively clean was her mouth, a fact based in the hydro–fluid that,
thankfully, also provided sun–protection from the planet’s roasting solar rays.

Serros knew K’llan felt much the same way and if anything,
the red–tinged dust and sand granules were even more noticeable against the
Vosaia’s porcelain hued skin, making her look a bit like a weirdly slender, cinnamon–smudged
marshmallow topped with blue frosting that some overly creative and unattended
kid had gleefully whipped up.

The image made Avara laugh aloud as the two picked their way
past a particularly rock and ramble strewn part of their path during the early
hours of their thirteenth day of travel.

The sound caused K’llan to turn around, lips upturned in a
smile of wry acknowledgement. “Reveling in the glamour of the moment, are you?”

 “You know it.” Avara barely even paused as once more,
K’llan had effortlessly and without any discernable form of focus, been able to
exactly
read her emotions and translate them to actualized thought. Avara
could feel the gentle trill of K’llan’s own feelings at the exchange:
amusement, affection, and a sense of good–natured, self–deprecating humor at
the situation and their ragged appearance.

Again, amazement warred with the growing awareness of
expectation at the existence of the cognitive and emotional link that existed
between the two. It was becoming almost natural for Avara to hear the low song
of the Vosaia’s presence, to feel the connection between their
nyas
.

Avara wasn’t sure if the experience of isolation from all
others and being in constant orbit of one another over the last weeks had
heightened what the Feeding had opened between them, or if it would have been
true regardless. Given that the connection had existed previous to the
Ardent’s
explosion, she suspected that the answer was a little of both.

“It will be an interesting experiment to see if we even
recognize one another when we make it off Dantis and are finally clean.”

The Vosaia’s words were sprinkled with silvery laughter that
did much to lift Serros’s spirits. More, a picture of a water–soaked and well bathed
K’llan sprang immediately to mind, an image that stirred her body before Avara
had even realized the thought had formed. Closing her mind like a vise pinning
joint to plank, Avara shifted her gaze from K’llan’s brilliant, lilac hued eyes
that both saw and knew too much. “Not much chance of that.”

Serros easily caught the upsurge of emotion from K’llan;
comprehension and a flow of desire, before she too consciously retreated from
the link between them, allowing Avara privacy.

Attempting levity to dissipate the hovering awkwardness at
the exchange, Avara remarked, “I’ll tell you one thing for sure; it’s gonna be
Hell to get me out of the shower. I might just take up permanent residence.”

Laughing in return, K’llan responded, “Not surprising, water–child
like you. Sometimes I wonder that you could even leave your sea–world for the
stars.”

Avara felt a rush of gratitude that once more, K’llan did
not press for a discussion regarding the Feeding or what lay between them. She
knew without having to ask or be told that Z’arr was intentionally giving her
as much space as their situation allowed for. That K’llan was granting her the
time she needed to shift through the roil of confused emotion that she struggled
to tame, even as they spent mile after mile to reach Outpost J2.

Surreptitiously contemplating the Vosaia as they walked,
just as clearly, Avara also understood that the topic would have to be broached
soon, at least to a degree. Serros had noticed over the last couple of days
that K’llan’s strength and endurance were fading, and she knew, despite the
Vosaia’s attempts to keep the fact submerged, her hunger was increasing. K’llan
was once again beginning to starve. That Avara would insist she Feed once more
was not even a question. The thought of letting anything happen to K’llan was
akin to the notion of deliberately taking a knife and slicing herself from gut
to sternum.