by Lauren Esker
"I don't know! I just did it. Just like back on the ship. I don't know, maybe the symbiont helped me? The same way it's helping me understand everybody, since presumably everyone on this planet does not speak English."
"I guess so." He was still holding her. It was nice; she didn't want him to let go. "I have no idea how it's doing any of this. I didn't even know it could!" He sounded exasperated. "You've had it for a week and you're better at using it than I ever was. No wonder it left me for you."
Now she felt guilty for a brand new reason. "I don't think it's that—"
"No, it's exactly that. The Rhuadhi are very choosy about hosts. Selinn told me it's important to them to get a good match between a symbiont and its host. I don't think I really believed that it mattered, but now I see why it does matter. As soon as my symbiont found a more compatible host, it jumped ship. It wants you. It never wanted me."
She shivered. "Can we talk about something else? This is creepy."
"How about this?" He planted a quick kiss on her forehead and then let her go, but laced his fingers through hers. "While my ship is crawling with locals, let's take a quick walk and I can give you a crash course in how to use your cuffs."
"Do we have time for this?"
"We'll make time." He gave her hand a gentle tug, and they set out into the sun-dappled shade between the purple trees. "If you're going to be wearing those, I'd rather not have you accidentally setting me on fire or cutting a hole in the hull of the ship in deep space."
"I agree," she said. "I would also like to avoid those things."
As they left behind the clanks and thumps and shouts of the work crew unloading the ship, the woods became peaceful, bordering on idyllic. Small rustles in the undergrowth turned out to be fast-moving, colorful lizards. There were strange birdsongs among the trees, and the breeze itself had its own music, rushing between the trees like the sound of a distant waterfall.
"So, correct me if I'm remembering wrong," Claudia said as they strolled along, his hand warm in hers. "But didn't you say there are enormous terrifying animals that are immune to energy weapons on this world?"
"Probably not this close to the village."
"Probably?"
"Well, nothing in life is guaranteed."
He grinned at her. His manic good humor seemed to be back.
"I swear to God, if I get eaten by a dragon or something—"
"Don't worry. I'll keep you safe."
The crazy thing was, she believed him. In spite of everything that had happened to her in the past few days, and in spite of the fact that most of those things were largely his fault, she felt safe with him. The warmth of his hand and his near proximity felt good. Here in the forest's cathedral calm, she could almost wish away the desperation and danger of the world outside; she could imagine herself in a nature preserve, walking with her ...
Boyfriend?
"This looks like a good place," Skara said, and she looked up, startled out of her thoughts, to see they'd entered a sunlit glade. Flowers stood knee-high in the meadow, a dazzling splash of yellow and orange amid the purple and green.
"This is too beautiful to set on fire," she protested.
Skara laughed. "You're not going to do that." He stepped behind her. "May I?"
Claudia nodded, though she was unsure what she was agreeing to. Skara's arms came around her from behind. She tensed instinctively, then relaxed, settling into his embrace. He was a strong presence at her shoulder, a warmth enfolding her.
"The nice thing about the energy cuffs is that they're very simple and intuitive to use." Skara grasped her right wrist gently and raised it. "Point and shoot, but don't shoot yet."
"Okay." She flexed her wrist, then touched the cuff lightly with her other hand. It was slightly warm from her skin, but without that strange heat from earlier.
"You have several power settings. The lowest setting is a stun. It does nothing against anything inorganic, but it disrupts people and animals' nervous systems slightly, causing them to pass out. They'll wake up in a half hour or so with a headache."
"Yeah, I can testify to that," she muttered, grimacing. Headache was putting it mildly; she'd awoken with a screaming migraine and a general hungover feeling.
"When you raise the power from there, you get into the killing settings, able to sear a hole through a human body or drill through inanimate objects. At the maximum power setting, you can discharge your cuffs in one plasma blast if you want to try to punch through someone's shield or blow a hole in the side of a ship."
"These can do that?" She looked down at the gold bands with new respect.
"Ordinary civilian cuffs can't. All they can do is deliver a mild shock or a stun, or raise a simple shield. These are military grade." He held his fingers a few inches apart. "They're much wider. That's how you can tell the difference by looking."
"Okay, so I can stun people and shoot things. Do you want me to try it?"
"Not yet. First you'll make a shield."
"Oh, I've done that already! I bet I can do it again."
She concentrated, trying to remember how that mental twist had felt when she'd dropped the shield for Kite. She found it with a feeling like a tiny snap at the back of her brain. The cuffs warmed against her wrists, and a faint green glimmer sparked in the air around them.
"Good job. Okay, let it drop."
It was easier this time. She banished it with a thought, and the shield popped like a soap bubble.
Skara laughed, spun her around and gave her a quick kiss. "I knew you'd be good at this."
The sudden brilliance of his delight left her breathless. She found herself grinning up at him, and Skara grinned back.
"Can I shoot something now?"
"I knew you'd turn into a weapons nut as soon as I turned you loose with these." He turned her around with a light touch of his hands on her upper arms. "Sure. Pick a tree, any tree."
She pointed at a tree across the clearing, started to fold her hand into a fist, then pointed her fingers. "Does it matter what I—"
"No, not really." His arms went around her, bracing her. She couldn't help noticing his lightly spicy scent, what she had once mistaken for cologne, but now knew was simply what he smelled like: an enticing man-smell that made it hard to pay attention to his words. "You can't shoot yourself; the cuffs won't let you. In the military they taught us a certain style of using them, holding your hands a certain way and so forth, but it's not actually that important. Like with the symbiont, just do what feels natural to you."
She tried pointing one finger, then two, and found that she liked that; it made her feel like an enchantress casting a spell. She struggled to find the exact thing she'd done when she had zapped the bush, screwing up her face in concentration, and managed to briefly raise and lower the shield instead.
"They couldn't have just given these things a nice voice command, could they?"
"Well, you don't want it to be easy to accidentally shoot people. It might take you a few sessions to—"
But just then, she found it again. Eye-popping green light stabbed out of her fingertips, and across the clearing, the bark on a tree slightly to the left of the one she'd been aiming at suddenly sizzled and popped and smoked.
"Yes!"
Skara squeezed her in a quick, triumphant hug. "Looks like you had the power set a notch or two up from a stun. Want to try it again on an even higher power setting?"
"How? No, don't tell me. It's just concentration, right?"
"Right." He pointed over her shoulder, and moved his hand side-to-side. "Like this, for example."
A tightly focused green beam, solid-looking as a glowing metal rod, swept through the base of the tree whose bark she'd singed. The tree teetered and then toppled into the one next to it, neatly sheared off at the base.
"Show-off."
Skara laughed against her hair. "Keep in mind I've been doing this for most of my life. It takes awhile to get good at it."
"We'll just see about that," she m
uttered, and focused on the cuffs with furiously single-minded concentration.
Her beam was not as tight as Skara's, her aim sloppier. Her arm trembled with the effort she was pouring into it. But her beam wobbled across the trunk of the tree she was aiming at, and as it teetered and began to fall, she let out a cheer.
—and then was spun to the side in Skara's arms as the tree toppled and crashed in a cascade of branches, mere feet from where they'd been standing. Twigs and leaves showered them.
"Oh," Claudia murmured. Skara's arms were still around her. She stared at the tree.
"So you're not a lumberjack." He lifted her off her feet and twirled her. "That was great. Especially for your first try. Or should I say your first tree?"
She would have smacked him for the terrible pun if she'd been able to get a hand free. "Put me down! I—whoa—" Her hands were trembling, and she'd broken out all over in a sweat. "Am I okay? Did that do something to me?"
"It shouldn't normally. It must be because the symbiont is interfacing with the cuffs for you, and it's drawing its power from you." He set her down and looked at her thoughtfully. "It's so interesting. I wonder what it's been doing for me that I never even knew about."
"Great, now I'm a science experiment."
"So am I," Skara said, smiling down at her. "Welcome to the club."
She'd never seen eyes the color of his before. Green eyes on Earth weren't so vivid, let alone with those flecks of gold and blue and brown. His lashes were nearly black, and the swirling, pale patterns on his face and neck enhanced his high cheekbones and his mobile mouth. They were faintly tinted light purple from blood under the skin, a kind of washed-out mauve. It occurred to her that the purple in his skin must be some kind of melanin-like pigment.
"May I?" she asked, touching her hand lightly to the side of his face.
"You don't have to ask, my dear; you had your hands all over me the other night, I recall."
"Yes, but it wasn't you. I haven't had a chance to look at you before, I mean other than staring at you when you were unconscious, and it's not the same."
A strange expression crossed his face, the green eyes going wide for a moment, and he held very still as she traced the curving patterns with her fingertips.
"What are these? They're not tattoos or paint, are they?"
"No. They're natural to my people—well, as natural as anything about us, given that we were made from human DNA in labs."
"What makes these patterns?" She was captivated now, her fingers brushing along his skin and trailing goosebumps in their wake.
"They're like fingerprints. They just do that."
"But fingerprints have a purpose. At least, I guess they must have a purpose. They help you grip things. What do these do?"
Skara lifted a shoulder in a slight shrug. "Camouflage?"
His eyes danced, laughing. It was hard not to laugh back; a giggle escaped her, thinking of Skara with those swirling pale designs and that bright hair and skin trying to hide, even in this colorful forest.
"Camouflage for what? A Mardi Gras parade?"
"What's that?"
"Oh ... it's a thing in the place where I used to live. A Louisiana thing. People dress up in costumes and have parades in the street, and dance and get drunk."
"Sounds like my kind of party."
"Yeah, well, I was ten when I left, so I can't tell you what kind of a party it was. At least I'm old enough to have grown-up parties now." She grinned and then, feeling bold, leaned forward to brush her lips against the pale-mauve curlicue on his jaw.
She was unprepared for the intensity of his reaction. He'd been holding still, so still, while she inspected the designs on his skin, but now his whole body shivered.
"Are you—" she began, starting to pull back, but he blinked his eyes open from their half-closed state, and he shook his head.
"I'm fine."
"You're not sick again?"
"No, it's just ..." It was perhaps the first time she'd seen him truly at a loss for words. He shook his head again, took her hand and laid it back against his cheek.
She understood something important was happening here, even if she didn't understand exactly what. She leaned in, kissing his cheek again, and as her lips brushed across his skin, she felt him shiver and was aware of how tense he'd become only as he began to relax.
"I'm not used to ..." he began. She paused, her hand cupping his face. "I'm not used to people seeing me."
"Oh," she said. It was all she could say. "Don't you—aren't you you, much?"
"Mainly on the ship. Not like this."
His smile was sad and strange, not at all like his usual devilish grins. "Claudia, would you believe me if I told you that I've never made love as myself?"
Despite the seriousness of the moment, she could feel a teasing grin starting to creep around the edges of her mouth. "Are you saying you're a virgin?"
She saw him gearing up for a protest, but then he grinned instead. "And that's a sorry state of affairs for a man in my business. I could use a little help with it."
Fifteen
He thought he might have taken it too far that time, but then she broke into a grin and surged forward to take his lips with hers, tangling her hands in his hair.
They kissed and kissed under the softly rippling forest canopy, with wildflowers around their feet. Skara had never really been a "planets" kind of guy, but he had to admit it was an awfully scenic spot. He could imagine laying her down in the wildflowers, making love to her in the sunshine with petals all over her gorgeous warm brown skin.
Just as his body was deciding it was all in on this idea, Claudia broke the kiss and pulled back, with a tiny, disarmingly cute frown pulling her brows together.
"What's wrong?" He nipped at her lips. "Forget something? Leave the plasma cannon powered up?"
"No, no." She touched his face with a light hand. "Skara, I want this, but—can you answer a question for me?"
"Yeah, sure, anything." Especially if it got him closer to her, with less clothes in the way.
"What are your intentions here, exactly?"
"Laying you down in the wildflowers and making sweet, passionate love to you," he said promptly. At least that was an easy question to answer.
"I mean after that."
"... huh?"
"Yeah. That's what I thought." She frowned more deeply. It was less cute this time, and more troubling, especially when she made a move to break his hold on him and turned away.
"Hey—did I say something wrong? Do Earth women have taboos about making love in the woods? We could do it back on the ship—"
"I'm serious." She turned around, nibbling on a fingernail. "I don't know what you want, Skara. The sex was great, don't get me wrong. I mean, not that I have anything to compare it to. All joking about being a virgin aside, did you know the other night was my first time?"
"Really?" Now he was just flat-out shocked. He hadn't known. Although suddenly her shyness and inexperience made more sense. He'd assumed it was just because she'd never had the full Skara Experience on her little backwater planet. "I didn't mean to—if I'd known, I would have—" Done something differently? He'd wanted to make it as nice for her as possible. He always enjoyed pleasing his partners.
Not made love to her at all, probably. Her first time shouldn't be with someone like me, a dark voice inside him said.
But it had been. And here they were.
"Oh, now you're having second thoughts. See, this is why I didn't tell you."
"It looks to me like you're the one having second thoughts!" he protested.
"I'm trying to figure out if you just want to get me into bed, or if there's more. I don't know what you want, Skara!"
"I could maintain a minimum ten-pace separation at all times if it'd make you feel better—"
"Skara! Dammit! Be serious for five seconds. Can you manage that?" She kicked at an innocent flower that happened to be in her way. "Can you please just give me a straight answer? If we mak
e love here ... what then?"
He teetered, for a long moment, on the edge of telling her the truth.
You're brave and clever and fun. I've enjoyed every minute of the time I've spent with you, even the part of it where I was sick and we were running for our lives.
I think I might be falling in—
No.
There was no place in his life for love. This was business. There was nothing but heartache in getting tangled up with a woman who had a life back on her home planet. And if Skara knew one thing, it was that not loving at all was better than loving and being hurt. He'd had far too much of the latter in his life already. He had loved, and look where it had gotten him.
"What do you want?" he countered, not liking the edge to his voice, but unable to hide it.
"Me?" she asked, looking surprised.
"Yeah, I think it's a fair question. You're going with me to Rhuad to help me get the symbiont. What's in it for you?"
"Helping you not die, for one thing! Why is that so hard for you to believe!" She flung her hands up in the air. "And getting this one taken out, if it makes you feel any better. Right?"
"Right," he said, feeling on safer emotional ground. He tried not to let it ache. It was good to hear her admit that she was in this for herself, not for him. "We go to Rhuad, and you get yourself fixed if they know how, and I either get a second symbiont, or yours if we can find a way to get it out of you. Right?"
"Right. Yes. This is—just business, then, is it?"
"Isn't that the simplest thing?"
"Simple." She started to bite her fingernail again, noticed she was doing it, and put her hand down quickly. "Simple. Yes. That's exactly what this is."
He hated the look of hurt on her face. It made him want to take her in his arms, and he tried to do that, but she pulled away.
"I'd still love to make love, though," he said hopefully.
"For business reasons?" she said, removing his arms for a second time.
"Because you're a very beautiful woman, and you're smart, and you're fun—"
"For business."
