Olivia (90 page)

But how?  For what?

Olivia dropped back into her body and gathered some of the power.  She didn’t think about how she was going to do it and so it was easy, like flexing a muscle.  It also felt good to do this, maybe not volcano-good, but better than the sex that was putting the power into her in the first place.  She held the power for a moment, feeling it pulse in time to Sudjummar’s thrusts, and then probed at him with it.

He arched violently, slamming his claws into the wall and shoving into her as if he did in fact intend to drive her through the wall.  The constriction, the weight and musk of him, the feel of his hot seed battering at her; Olivia lost herself to wave upon wave of climax both physical and intangible.

She clenched her hands on his shoulders, concentrated, and did it again.

So did he, exactly the same way.

Olivia began to braid together tongues of power for a third attempt, then saw with her mind’s eye that Sudjummar was in tremendous pain.  Reluctantly, she released her half-formed probe and unfastened him instead. 

He rocked back, slammed forward, expelled explosively inside her, and then dropped flat on his back with a crash and a groan.

Olivia fell to her knees, now blind in the dark, and crawled across him until she found his wing, trying to trace it with her hands, certain she’d broken it.  “Are you hurt?  Oh my God, what have I done to you?”

“Not sure.”  She felt the leathery slide of his wings over stone and he struggled to roll over and then to stand.  He made it to his knees and then his hand closed over her shoulder, forcing her to face him as if he could see her in the dark.  “Now, you say your human mate would leave you and expect you to be celibate?”  He sounded incredulous.

Nervous giggles bubbled out of her.  “That’s right.”

“That’s appalling.  Great Spirit, my brother told me about you and I did not believe him.”  He leaned on her heavily, finally got his feet beneath him and slowly straightened.  “I need to sleep.”

Olivia led him to the wall and leaned him against it, and then got back to her knees and crawled over the floor until she found her bra and Somurg.  “I think you broke your belt,” she said.

“That’s not all I broke.”  A short pause.  “Where is it?”

She placed the pieces in his hands and he felt them experimentally.

“I’ll have to tie it on until we can get back to the forge.  This wasn’t part of the plan.  I was supposed to be showing you off in the commons by now.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be
sorry
! I’d thrash with you on a hot rock anytime you asked!”  He paused again.  “But don’t ask me again just yet.”

She got an arm under him, holding Somurg against her chest and carrying her pack awkwardly over her shoulder.  She was nervous about touching him, but the power, fed, remained quiet.  “Not yet,” she agreed, daring to slip an arm around his waist.  “Let’s get you back to bed.”

3

She stayed with Sudjummar all day while he slept, but hunger eventually drove her out.  Hoping to avoid a resurgence of the power, Olivia went to the women’s tunnels, arriving in time to share the last pot of stew with the tribeswomen before the kitchens were cleaned for the night.  Then, feeling guilty for spending so much of her day in isolation, she took herself to Tina’s clinic to see if Dark Mountain’s resident physician needed an assistant.

She didn’t honestly expect to find anyone there so late (the reflecting mirrors in the women’s commons were all dark, and Thurga was going around even now to put out the lanterns and candles in the tunnels), but to her surprise, she found Amy and Tina bent over Liz while Horumn taught them gullan massage techniques.  Liz seemed happy enough as she chatted away under the three of them, but the glance Tina gave Olivia was an ominous one.  Suppressing a shiver of dread, Olivia waited at the doorway until the lesson ended and Tina trotted briskly over to say, “How’s your head?”

“Fine.  What’s the matter?”

Tina took Olivia’s arm and propelled her bodily out of the clinic and into the tunnels.  “She’s going to lose the baby,” she said without preamble.

“What?  Why?  I thought—”

“The baby is perfectly healthy, as near as I can tell.  Liz is not.  She started having contractions last night, out of friggin’ nowhere.  Her blood pressure’s good, no fever, she’s alert, but if she stands up for more than a few minutes…”  Tina shook her head and glared over her shoulder.  “I think we got them stopped for now, but she’s only six months along.  If she’s got a problem with her works, it’ll only get worse as the baby gets heavier.” 

“Can we do anything?” Olivia asked.

“Here?” Tina demanded, and bared her teeth like a gulla.  “If we were home, I could at least ease the contractions off with a tocolytic like levonal, but of course, if we were home, we could just let it happen and give the kid a fighting chance in an incubator.”

“But of course,” Amy added, coming up to join them, “if we were home, you couldn’t do a damn thing, because you’re not an obstetrician.”

“What should we do?” Olivia asked, looking from one to the other.

“There is nothing
to
do, except wait.”  Tina slammed her fist into her palm hard enough to make a few of the other gullan heading off to bed jump and stare at her.  “God
damn
it!”

“Do you know how to administer levonal?  I mean, if you had some?”

“Yeah, if I had some, but what’s the friggin’ point of what-if games?”  She started to say more, saw Olivia’s face, and broke off.  Tina stared at her, then softly said, “Want me to spell it?”

“Please.”

Tina did, added, “You can use ritodine or nifedipine in a pinch, but levonal is the only one I can think of designed for long-term use.  Remember syringes.  Lots of them, because she might need a lot of injections and I am not set up to sterilize needles.”

“I’ll do the best I can.  Amy, can you take Somurg?”

Amy put out her hands and grimaced as the baby promptly socked her in the jaw.  “Damark doesn’t know what fun is until he gets it in stereo,” she muttered.  “So, you’re going to knock over a pharmacy, huh?”

“No, she’s knocking over a hospital,” Tina corrected.  “And I hope you know those things are pretty well-guarded these days.”

“What are my odds of pulling it off?” Olivia asked, trying for a smile.

But Amy didn’t return it.  “It’s fifty-fifty, kid,” she said.  “You either will or you won’t, but you’ve got some guts and that ought to count for something.  Godspeed.  Or, you know, whoever.”

Olivia left them at that, running back through the mountain as fast as she dared go over the uneven rock.  Vorgullum hadn’t left many hunters to sustain his tribe in his absence and she knew there would be regular night hunts, but if it was dark already, she needed to hurry if she was going to catch them.  A male moved to intercept her when she entered the commons, but she shoved him out of the way with an impatient, “Not now, dammit.  Doru!  I need you.”

He pushed through his gathering hunters at once, spear already in hand.  “What’s the matter?”

“I need you to take me to the nearest human hive.  Tonight.  Now.  Someone get me a backpack.”

“What do you need?  I’ll go alone.”

“You can’t, there’s no way you’d know what to look for.”  And because they were now surrounded by concerned gullan faces, she told him why, keeping the explanation brief.  

Doru listened and nodded once at the end.  “She’ll lose the baby,” he said, and rubbed at the base of his horns.  “A hard thing.”

“She might not lose it if we can get this medicine.”

He looked at her with a gentle blend of sympathy and gravity.  “If the earth wants her, the earth will have her.  That is life.”

“If the earth wants her, the earth is going to have to work for it,” she shot back.  “That’s Olivia.  Now are you going to carry me, or do I have to find someone else?”

He handed his spear to the nearest male and took the empty backpack.  “As you command.  Let’s go.”

4

Doru banked and dropped out of the sky to land on the roof of a Shop-Mart.  He set Olivia on her feet and crossed cautiously to the edge of the building and looked down at the lights of the small city.  “I don’t want to offend you, but do you know even roughly where we are?” he asked.

“I haven’t got a clue.  I know we left the Cascades behind us in the move, so I’m sure we’re in Canada somewhere, or maybe Alaska.”  She joined him and looked out at moving cars and streetlights and crosswalks and a thousand other relics of a world she had long since left behind.  “If you’re asking me what town this is, no, I don’t know.”

“If you don’t know where you are, how can you hope to find this magic medicine?  This is big hive, Olivia.”

“Help me find a ladder.”

“A what?  Why?”

“Do you see that thing down there?”  She pointed at a bank of telephones standing against the face of the Shop-Mart.  When he nodded, she said, “There’s a book there that can tell us exactly where the medicine is if I can just get down to it.”

He stared intently into her eyes, then looked at the telephones and nodded grimly.  “Stay here.”

Before she could protest, he crawled down the wall, raised his fist, bashed out the light of the Shop-Mart sign and then dropped easily to the ground.  A moment later, the beating of his wings heralded his appearance and he snatched her up under one arm and swept rapidly away.

Six blocks later, he touched down on the roof of an apartment complex and handed her the telephone book with a length of linked cable still dangling from the spine.  He hunkered down before her and watched with interest as she flipped impatiently through the Yellow Pages.  It wasn’t long before she stabbed her finger down with a triumphant, “Eureka!”

“Who?”

“Midvalley Midwifery,” she told him.  “A subsidiary of Midvalley Physicians and Obstetrics.  Right next to each other.”  She repeated the address to herself several times, then bent over the roof and peered down the parking lot of the complex until she found the name of the apartments.  She flipped through the phone book again.

“Now you know where it is?”

“Not exactly, but bear with me, Doru.”  She located the map in the front of the phone book.  “Okay, we’re on Fourteenth and Walnut.  We need to be on Sixth and Cedar.”

“Let me see that.”  He plucked the phone book out of her hands and turned it right side up.  That alone surprised her.  “Where are we, do you know?”

She found the cross-streets on the map and pointed.

“And where is this medicine?”

She placed another finger on the map.

“Got it.”  He tossed the book aside, then held out his hands.

“Are you sure you know where you’re going?”

“What do these—”  He unfolded his wings and gave them a mighty flap.  “—look like to you, Olivia?”

“Sorry.”

“Hold on to me.”  He leapt from the roof, caught the air, and climbed high over the lights of the city. 

Olivia twisted in his arms to look at them, spread out below her like a glittering blanket.  She’d never seen them this way; she’d never been in an airplane, never gone over the mountains at night and seen a city glowing from below.  It was amazing to her eyes, row upon row of yellow and orange, stripes of white alongside red passing each other endless as rivers, lined by flashing greens and blues and pinks.  So much light…and no sound at all with the wind rushing across her ears.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“What?”

“The lights.”

He was dropping out of the sky again.  “I’ve always thought so.  Too bad they’ve come to mean such danger.  Sometimes I wish the humans would just string them up and leave.”  He brought his legs forward and struck home with a gentle
paf
!  Absurd to hear such a huge creature make such a small sound.  “Is this the right place?”

Olivia peered over the top of the building and saw a sign nearly as tall as she was reading Midvalley Midwifery Services.  “Yes.  Now we just have to get in.”

“In is usually the easy part,” Doru said, crossing the roof to the access door.  “It’s out that gets thorny.”  He tried the doorknob, grunted, then hunkered down to examine the lockplate.

“Do you think it has an alarm?” Olivia asked worriedly.

“Only one way to find out.”  He seized the doorknob, gave a tremendous wrench and snapped the knob off in his hand.  He held out his hand for silence, his eyes pricked forward, and finally waved her over.  “I don’t hear anything, but stay close to me.” 

She gave him a gullan salute, which he bared his teeth at, and then he

pushed the door open and led the way inside.  Unaccustomed to navigating stairs, he went down sideways, very slowly, and gripped the rails on both sides.  When at last they came to a door, he breathed an audible sigh of relief before squeezing himself through it.

“This place stinks,” he remarked as she joined him in the hallway.  He stepped forward and tapped a wall-mounted plaque with his claw.  “What do these words say?”

“You know those are words?”  Just when she had begun to think he couldn’t surprise her any more.

“I don’t know how they sound, because I don’t speak human very well, but I can recognize some of them.”  He studied the plaque, brow furrowed.  “That one,” he said after a moment, underscoring the word
Level
.  “That’s a way of marking the place you are inside the hive.  That little squiggle in front of it means a number.  That says we’re standing on the fifth height of the building.  But no, I don’t know anything else.”

“The pharmacy is on the first floor.  That’s where the drugs will be.”

“Hm.  Where else would they be?”

She looked around at him, confused, then surprised that she would be confused.  Of course there would be humans here.  Hadn’t she just been looking at the building directory?  The regular birthing rooms were on the second and third floors.  Surely someone was down there being pregnant; babies didn’t just come during work-hours. 

“I…I didn’t think of that.  I’m not sure where else to look.”

“Well, we’re here.  Might as well throw a spear and see what it hits.  Easy, Olivia,” he said, giving her shoulder a pat.  “They probably won’t come up here unless we make a lot of noise, so we’re safe as long as we’re quiet.  And to save Gormuck’s baby, I’ll go down and fight them while you find the medicine. I’d just rather avoid that if we can.”