Big, gray hands appeared in front of her suddenly, peeling her own hands off of her harness and releasing the catch on her restraints. She flung the straps away from her body, nearly screaming when her elbow got momentarily hung up. When she was free, she surged from the chair.
Errol backed away from her as if she were a dangerous animal.
She sagged against the flight panel, heaving for breath. “Sorry,” she said hoarsely, going back to the Creole.
Errol eyed her warily. “We have to leave the shuttle and go into the city,” he said. “The fuel cells are depleted. It won’t be able to provide heat or clean water until they restore. We’ll take lodging in the city and I’ll find an aero mech who can build a differential to spec. If I can’t get the shuttle back in the air, I’ll find a safe vessel headed for human territory and arrange passage for you.”
Hadiza didn’t reply. She wasn’t thrilled by the idea of handing herself into the care of yet another group of anonymous aliens, but what choice did she have?
“It is the winter season on this planet. There is not much precipitation, but the cold will be severe.” Errol tossed a pair of boots onto her empty seat. They were Ravanoth ship boots--red synthetic uppers, and black soles made of a soft, gummy rubber that would grip ship decking well in the humid confines of a Ravanoth vessel. They were too big for her but they were better than nothing at all. She hiked up the hem of her silk gown and slid her feet into the boots. She ratcheted the bindings until the shafts clung tightly to her ankles.
Errol grabbed the long black jacket he’d worn aboard the traffickers’ ship and tossed it towards her. She caught it reflexively.
He pulled a different jacket from a utility compartment behind the pilot’s seat. The fabric was stiff and the color indistinct. As soon as he put it on, the fibers of the jacket shifted, reflecting the ship. If he’d stood against the bulkhead, his torso would’ve blended nearly perfectly.
While he waited for Hadiza to dress, Errol strode down the central aisle of the shuttle and knelt. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him messing with the floor. He pulled up a utility hatch, then slid apart two sets of shielding panes. Beneath all that, a long narrow chamber housed two shining tubes twisted around each other in a double helix. At the head of the tubes, a charred and still-smoking device was mounted in a small well, surrounded by frayed biocircuitry. It was the size and shape of a grapefruit, and beneath the char, a shining bright metal.
Errol pulled gloves from inside his strangely reflective jacket. With his hands covered, he removed the device. He dropped it onto the shuttle deck dismissively. It landed with a sound that said it was far, far heavier than it appeared. Errol ignored it and peered into the now empty well. He fingered the frayed biocircuits with a dismayed expression.
“Is it bad?” Hadiza asked.
He glanced up at her. “Put the coat on.” He looked back down at the empty socket. He stepped out of the chamber and pulled the shielding panes and the trapdoor shut. He picked up the differential and tucked it into one of his jacket pockets. “Hurry up,” he snapped. “We need to get moving.”
Hadiza slid her arms into the jacket he’d given her. “This thing is taller than I am.” She latched the engraved buckles from shoulder to waist.
The garment dwarfed her. She felt like a little kid playing dress-up. The cuffs hung nearly a foot past the ends of her hands, and the bottom hem pooled around her feet. The neck gaped so badly, it practically slid off her shoulders.
She stared down at herself, dismayed. “I won’t be able to walk in this thing.”
“Well I’m not carrying you,” Errol said coldly.
She glanced up at him. His strange, cat-like pupils were dilated, and he watched her with a predatory wariness.
Hadiza broke eye contact, suppressing a shiver. It came from fear, but there was something else mixed in. Something she didn’t want to think about. She pretended to be focused on rolling the coat’s sleeves up. “The Scaevens who captured us wore mentholated masks when they had to handle us. It blocked our scent.”
“How cunning of them.”
Hadiza ignored his sarcasm. As a corpsman, a military surgeon, and a shipboard doctor, she’d seen the entire multitude of ways in which people coped with suffering. Some wept. Some gritted their teeth and tried to stoic their way through it. Some became numb. And some… some turned into assholes. She was willing to overlook a certain amount of assholery in the face of pain. And while Errol might not be in physical pain, his reaction to her was still causing him distress.
She glanced around the ship. She didn’t know much about engineering, but she hadn’t failed to notice some of the similarities between the Scaeven vessel and the few Ravanoth ships she’d been aboard. “Do you have any biocircuitry inhibitor aboard?”
“Yes.”
“Make a mask out of whatever fabric you can and soak it with the inhibitor.” Biocircuitry inhibitor was a sterile solution used to prune the excessive growth of biocircuitry where it wasn’t wanted—the circuits tended to overpopulate around heat sources. The scent was powerfully astringent. It might make his eyes water, but it would block her scent.
Errol did as she ordered, ripping a length of linen from the bedding in the berth. Midship, he opened one of the utility compartments. A jumble of equipment spilled to the deck, disturbed from their moorings by the rough landing. Errol bent and retrieved a bottle of pale green solution. He doused the strip of linen and wrapped it around his face.
Hadiza looked up as he approached her. His nose and mouth were covered by black fabric, making the pale gray of his skin, the dark smoke of his hair, and the rich amber of his eyes all the more striking. His cheekbones were steep ledges above the line of the mask, his brows stern slashes.
“Better?” she asked.
He took a deep breath. His eyes immediately squeezed shut and he let the breath out in a hiss. He opened his eyes slowly, keeping them squinted against the acetic vapor of the inhibitor. “It’s a questionable trade-off,” he answered in a deeper gravel than usual.
“But you can’t smell me?”
“Either way, I’m still not carrying you. Are you ready to go?”
He hadn’t really answered her, but Hadiza allowed herself a little smugness when he kept the mask on. Indulging in a brief smirk, she flipped the collar of the jacket up and hoisted up the hem so she could walk. “Ready.”
Outside the shuttle, the land was flat and barren, whipped raw by a constant, jagged wind. The sky above was a thick, white haze, diffusing the light of the sun so thoroughly, it was impossible to tell where it was. Errol had warned her that it would be cold outside, but she hadn’t been prepared.
Winters on her part of Kepler were harsh, with heavy snow and biting wind. Deeply unpleasant, but something she’d dealt with since infancy. There was a certain mindset you had to embrace during the winter—yes, it hurt to breathe and your skin burned and the ground was a constant hazard. But there was a sense of impermanence to it. Just get inside. Just wait until spring. It will pass.
This was something altogether different. The cold cut through her in an instant. She felt it down to her bones. The coat fell from her nerveless hands, pooling around her feet. Her skin didn’t even get a chance to burn—it cut instantly to numbness. The metal of her lip ring was a single point of blazing agony. Her lungs seized, and for a second, she couldn’t get them started again. Panic edged at her mind, until finally, she managed to haul in a thin, ragged breath. It was like inhaling broken glass.
Errol strode past her, long strides eating up the flat, hard ground. He wore only the strange, reflective-fibered jacket. Nothing to cover his face or hands.
“This way,” he said, gesturing to the low skyline of the sprawling city on the horizon. His breath rose from his face in a cloud of steam. The wind lifted it, carried it away. He glanced back at her. “When we get closer to the city, you’ll have to cover your face.” He turned away, and moved onward.
Wait, she tried to
speak, but she couldn’t make a sound. Errol, she tried again. I won’t survive this.
She managed to set one foot in front of the other. Her joints screamed in agony. This wasn’t a habitable planet. Not for humans.
Errol was several meters ahead of her now. Was he ever going to look back? She managed another step. And then another. Errol’s strides were longer than hers. Even as she struggled onward, the distance between them grew. She could barely breathe. She couldn’t speak, let alone shout.
Is this how I’m going to die? She wondered. Not in battle. Not in captivity. Just steps away from safety and freedom.
Finally, Errol glanced back. It took him a second to find her, trailing as distantly as she was. She blinked, and her lids stuck together. When she finally managed to open them again, Errol was just in front of her.
“Fragile, weak creature,” he snarled, his voice thick with disdain. He grabbed the back of the coat’s collar and hauled it up and over her head. “Cover your face,” he snapped. “Your lips have gone blue.” She couldn’t see anything as he hauled her up into his arms. He clutched her body against his like a sack of potatoes, and he ran.
Even with his body heat radiating against her, the cold hurt. The painful clarity announced one thing: death. She had to get to shelter. She clutched at Errol’s jacket, pressing her face against his warmth. It didn’t help. Her breaths came shallow and painful. She couldn’t feel her hands. Her grip on his jacket failed. Her ability to control her own muscles failed. She lay limply in his arms as sparks flashed in her vision.
At some point, Hadiza must have passed out. Because the next thing she knew, she was being submerged into a tub of boiling hot water, fully clothed, still wearing her boots.
“Ach, too hot!” she cried in Espeurbaa. She tried to crawl out of the tub, but her limbs wouldn’t cooperate with her.
Errol crouched beside the tub, mask still in place, brow furrowed, staring at her. She gathered an impression of a dingy yellow walls, humid air and exposed pipes. But Errol was so close, his big chest and broad shoulders filled her field of vision. He’d removed that strange, mirroring jacket and was dressed only in the soft burgundy shirt he’d been wearing at the auction. It was slopped with water down the front, turning the heathered burgundy into the color of blood.
“Too hot,” she gasped in the Creole. Her whole body began to tremble.
“It’s lukewarm,” he told her. The furrows in his forehead eased. “Standard shipboard air temperature.”
That was a good start for hypothermia. Hadiza didn’t have the strength or the will to speak again. Her shivering worsened, turning into violent tremors. But that was good. It was when you weren’t shivering that things were really dire. She clenched her jaw so that she wouldn’t bite her tongue off. She closed her eyes and sagged back against the edge of the tub. Very gradually, the water did not feel so painfully hot.
She heard Errol move, his footsteps crossing the small room. A creak, a groan, and then the sound of water splashing into a basin. She opened her eyes and watched as Errol filled a bucket with water. He returned to the tub, and poured it in.
The water warmed back to an unbearable temperature. Hadiza hissed through her clenched teeth, but she didn’t object. She knew her senses weren’t reliable right now. If the water had previously only been at air temperature, she still wasn’t close enough to a safe human body temperature.
In stages, Errol kept warming the water. Eventually, her shaking eased to a chattering shiver, then a faint tremble. Errol touched a hand to her cheek.
“I don’t know what temperature a human should be at,” he said, peering at her face. “But your color is back to what it should be.”
Hadiza nodded. Little shivers still shot through her at intermittent intervals, tensing her body. She felt like she’d been rolled down a hill in a barrel filled with rocks. Everything hurt, and she was so exhausted, she could fall asleep in the tub. Which would not be wise. People could drown in an inch of water. This tub was big enough to swim in, and filled to her chin.
“I’m going to pass out,” she admitted. “And I don’t have the strength to crawl out of here.”
Errol’s big hands clenched on the edge of the tub. “You want me to lift you.” He said it in the same tone of voice he might say “you want me to swim through sewage.”
“What, not strong enough?”
He growled something in his own language, and rose to his feet, turning away from her. “Don’t drown,” he said in the Creole as he strode from the small room. “I’ll be right back.”
It was hard to stay awake, even for the few seconds he was away. When he stepped back in, the sound of his tread had her snapping her eyes open. For a split-second, she was disoriented, forgetting where she was, who she was with.
Errol’s arms were loaded with folded swaths of fabric. She wasn’t sure if they were towels, or blankets or both. He began laying them on the floor of the wet room. She watched him, too tired to ask what he was doing. He was making a pallet of some sort. Was she supposed to sleep on this hard, wet floor? She’d slept in worse conditions during her military days, but just now, she’d have happily committed murder if it got her a bed.
Suddenly, Errol was beside the tub again. He plunged his arms into the water, soaking the beautiful fabric of his shirt. He scooped her up. Water ran off of her body, returning to the tub in a loud splash. He deposited her on the pallet with a swift, graceless drop.
“Ow,” she grumbled, eyes already fluttering shut. She felt the weight of more towels being piled on top of her.
“Don’t succumb to death just yet,” Errol’s voice cut through the haze of lethargy. “I have to go out to get dry clothing for you. I’ll be back as fast as I can.”
Hadiza didn’t respond to him. Darkness was calling to her, and she answered.
Chapter Five
Coma Cluster, NGC 4874
Daalinalikiniri-din-kaal
IG Standard Calendar 236.46.14
When Errol returned to the rented rooms, he found Hadiza exactly as he’d left her. She was so deeply, unnervingly unconscious that he had to crouch beside her and make sure she was breathing. He touched just above the cupid’s bow of her upper lip. Warm breath skirted over his fingertips. He trailed his touch across the sweep of her cheekbone, over her temple. He laid the backs of his fingers against her brow.
Warm. Warm and breathing.
He stared down at her for a long moment, his hard gray fingers laid gently against her smooth brown skin. He wanted to trace her entire face. He wanted to feel the edges of her lips, the soft fringe of her eyelashes, the velvety curve of her cheek. He wanted to peel the linens back and trace the slender column of her neck to the gentle dip of her throat, follow the straight line of her clavicle to the curve of her shoulder.
And more. So much more. All of her. All of her softness, every lush curve and swell. And taste her. Fuck, but he wanted to taste her.
He jerked his hand away, recoiling so hard that he fell backwards. His back thumped against the wall. His breath came in shallow pants. Even with the mask, even with the acrid scent of the inhibitor blocking the lure of her pheromonal signature, he wanted her more than he’d ever wanted a female.
He gripped his thigh, digging his thumb into a sensitive pressure point. Pain exploded through his leg like a hammer strike. Still he pressed, digging his thumb in harder, deeper, until he tore a jagged cry from his own throat.
It was what he needed. His mind cleared. The pain lingered on, a dull ache that would make him walk with a limp for a little while. He winced as he eased himself to stand.
“Human,” he said, prodding her shoulder with the toe of his boot.
She didn’t so much as twitch.
“Human,” he prodded again, harder.
No response.
Errol stared at her, at a loss. After a moment, he turned to the spigot on the wall, and ran the water as cold as it would get. He filled his cupped hands and held them high over her sleeping face.
“Apologies,” he whispered in Scaeven. He opened his hands, and let the water drop. The splash sounded like a slap, and he flinched when it hit her.
Her eyes flashed open and she gasped, jolting beneath the heavy, damp covers. Her gaze was unfocused, her expression confused.
“Human,” Errol barked the word as crisply as he could.
Her eyes flashed to him, slowly gaining focus. Irritation replaced the confusion on her face. She let out a sharp stream of her strange human language—all staccato little tongue sounds.
Don’t think about her tongue.
“Get up,” he said. “You need to put on dry clothing.”
She muttered some more in her own language. When she wrestled her way out from under the covers, the blue silk gown clung to her damp body so intimately he could see the exact shape of her breasts, down to the ruched points of her nipples. Her navel was a thin little divot in a taut stomach. Her hips flared like the curve of a bell before parting into plush thighs.
He couldn’t tear his gaze away. She sat up slowly, the effort obviously taxing her. And still, he could only watch the shift of her legs, the sway of her breasts.
Several long moments passed before he realized she’d asked him a question—asked it twice, actually.
He gripped his thigh again, digging his thumb into the already agonizing pressure point. His knee nearly buckled, but the sharpness of the pain cut through the hazing desire. “What?” he asked thickly, staggering back from her.
She looked down, seeming to recognize what the state of her clothing was doing to him. She pulled one of the linens up so that her body was covered.
He made himself look her in the eyes, not sure what he could say or do to assure her of her safety. He couldn’t even assure himself. But when their eyes met, there was no censure in hers. Just bone-deep exhaustion.
“Even with the mask?” she asked in a weary rasp. “I thought if you couldn’t smell me, you’d be fine.”
Moon Struck Page 6
