“That’s hurtful,” said Marx, slurping up the last of his beans with his cornbread. “Anyone’d think you didn’t trust us.”
“I am not trusting you. You are angry little man with too many surprises up your sleeve.”
Kez, her bowl empty of beans, looked around the leafy room with disapproval. “Wot I wanna know is why you’re all livin’ in trees like slipper-spiders.”
“It is suiting us,” said Perrin. His legs were comfortably crossed amidst the foliage. “And there are many creatures prowling the forest floor who are not so friendly. I am curious, also, little Kez. I am curious to know why Kez and Marx are on Thirteenth World again.”
Kez opened her mouth to make a disgruntled remark about twisted time, but Marx was looking straight at her, his eyes dark with warning, and she shut it again.
“The Other Zone’s a bit hot for us right now,” he said. He scooped up the last of his beans and wiped his stubbly face with one sleeve. “Time Corp are crawling over every second slip, and the WAOF are crawling over every second planet in the galaxy. We need somewhere to keep our heads down while Time Corp is um, persuaded to do something for us.”
Perrin looked faintly relieved until Kez grinned, sharp and knowing; and then his face took on a slightly green hue.
“What have I told you about that feral grin of yours?” demanded Marx.
“You said not to point it in your direction.”
“Flamin’ literal little mucker, aren’t you?” said Marx sourly. “We’re not going to blow up the planet, Perrin, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Kez, curious to know if Perrin could become any greener, said: “Not this one, anyway.”
He could, and did, but the pleasure wasn’t an unalloyed one: Marx seized her by the ear and hurled her into the kitchen with terse instructions to wash the dishes if she couldn’t converse without making veiled threats.
There wasn’t any water, so Kez contented herself with licking all of the bowls clean, and put them onto a table-like projection of the rounded kitchen wall. If there were cupboards, they were well-hidden.
The fire in the middle of the room was slightly smoky, but not irritatingly so: most of the smoke was swept up and away through a funnel in the roof. Kez, getting a little closer to the fire than was comfortable, found that the sky wasn’t visible when she craned her neck to gaze up the chimney. Silky slipper-spider web coated the insides of the funnel and continued up, glinting palely for as far as she could see. Kez thought of a chimney system connecting all the dwellings and crawling with slipper-spiders, and shivered. When she got bored with tossing leaves onto the cooking fire to see what colour the flames would turn, Kez poked her head around the spiny cascade of vines that seemed to be a back door, to see what there was to see.
What there was to see was another leafy corridor. Kez could smell the scent of fresh air and there was a faint breeze tickling her cheeks, but the sky was no more visible here than it had been in Perrin’s nest of a house. Leadened by a vague feeling of claustrophobia, she went in search of open skies and fresh air.
Kez didn’t realise that she’d come to the end of the corridor until there was a cable-formed balcony beneath her feet, the balustrade of which was only just higher than her knees. The change between warm, rounded corridor and open, frigid air was as sudden as it was startling.
Kez had a moment’s shock to take in the sheer amount of space between the gargantuan trees on Thirteenth World and the dizzying height at which she found herself, before it occurred to her with a surge of astounded rage that she still couldn’t see the sky. Far above her head the cabled branches twisted and curled, green and sable in serried ranks of leaves, and hovering in the empty space like so many birds of prey were camouflaged light surface craft. Flickers of brown and green teased Kez’s peripheral, but it wasn’t until she turned her head and caught a kite in the act of swooping through the camouflaged craft that she realised it wasn’t just foliage tossed in the hefty breeze. There were people out there, zipping around in the cold, open air; wafting high and dipping fast.
Kez gazed in open-mouthed, jealous wonder. As she watched, one of the kites skimmed along a branch opposite her, the navigator’s feet touching down and sprinting lightly across bark-and-cable until he was lost to sight behind a leafy outcrop. The bright, ballooning material followed, ruffles of green in myriad shades rippling against the rough brown of bark, and was swiftly reeled in.
Kez was tempted further out into the open, caution warring against the desire to see more of the navigator, and found herself standing perilously close to the yawning gulf, an updraft tugging at her woollen jumper. Someone attached to a brown, silky kite was making figures in the open air above her, edging closer and closer to her balcony, and Kez thought hopefully that maybe this flyer would come scooting into her tunnel. The balconies she could see from her own balcony, each beginning abruptly from a similarly arboreal tunnel, suddenly made sense.
She heard Marx’s voice a little way down the passage, saying: “Where’s that little mucker got to now?”
“I’m down here!” she called joyfully, turning her back for a moment on the mesmerizing kite. “Marx, you gotta see this!”
Something went whump! on the balustrade behind Kez, forcing a gust of air up and around her. After the gust there was a sudden quiet, into which Kez’s voice fell, saying in what seemed to her to be a ridiculously surprised tone: “Ow! ’Oo did that!”
Something cold and sharp had pierced her neck. From the pinprick of pain numbness spread so quickly that Kez couldn’t even shout as the balcony fell away beneath her. She was rising, up and backwards, and her eyes didn’t want to stay open. She heard Marx yell, and saw him grimly sprinting from the velvet green shadows of the tunnel, but there was lead in her veins, and she couldn’t even rouse her talent to shift away.
She was dimly aware of someone’s arms around her waist, clinched nastily tight, and heard voices shouting. One was Marx’s voice, she felt sure. The other was unfamiliar, but there was a buzzing at her back whenever it spoke, and Kez came to the hazy conclusion that the other speaker was the person who had snatched her.
Kez dreamed that she swayed in the air, free and light like thistledown. Then there was the sense of impact, and yelling, and wild, terrifying descent that tugged at her face and her boots with impossible force. Above her head, someone screamed without pause for breath, high and hoarse, and the spiralling descent tightened into freefall.
Warm, rough hands were cupping Kez’s face, and a familiar voice said through the screaming: “C’mon, kid, wake up. Wake up, Kez. You’ve got to shift us before we hit.”
Kez tried to tell this warm, commanding person that shifting was too hard, but it seemed harder to make her lips move than it was to stir her sluggish talent. She pushed at it, feeling cold and slow and heavy, and felt something warm flare to life in the region of her stomach.
That’s Marx, she thought, her mind waking a little from its languor. That’s Marx holdin’ onto me, and we’re fallin’.
Hauling them both into the Other Zone was like slogging through a quick-lime pit. Kez vaguely felt herself patching in and out of Thirteenth World, sure that she was toting Marx only because she could still feel his hands cupping her head. The savage arms that gripped her around the ribs dropped away during one of the shifts, though Kez wasn’t sure which one, and she found herself wishing rather numbly that his screaming had gone away as well. She stayed in the Other Zone as long as she dared, but she wasn’t sure how much exposure was safe for Marx; and so, blind and half-conscious, she brought them back into Thirteenth World.
“Good girl,” said Marx’s voice, faintly; and then something green and hard walloped them both sideways.
Kez might have whimpered. Moving hurt. Breathing hurt. In fact, it hurt just to be alive. There was a whistling in her ears that seemed to be growing steadily louder, much to her annoyance, and her paralytic body was still refusing to function.
She tried to say:
“Marx,” but the only sound that came through her rubber-like lips was: “Mmmms.”
“I’m here, kid,” said Marx’s voice. His voice was pitched louder than usual, and it took Kez a few, slow moments to realise that the whistling was growing louder still, and that it wasn’t just in her ears.
Kez emitted an annoyed little groan that the whistling drowned out, then something made a loud, sticky crunch! far too close for comfort.
Marx said: “Stay here, kid,” which annoyed her so much that she made a concerted effort to shake off her malaise. She could hear his footsteps striding across what sounded like grass, and jerked her body toward the sound, fighting to open her eyes.
“Wan’ see,” she slurred.
“No you don’t,” said Marx. There was a certain inflexibility about his voice that made Kez certain that it must be something very bad.
Her eyes cracked open a slit and blinked slowly. A blurry picture of Marx skirting the edges of a pile of red and green muck came into focus bit by bit. Kez remembered the whistling, and that wet kind of thump.
“Soup,” she said.
“Well, close enough.”
“Wosse want?”
“Stop twitching, Kez. It’ll probably wear out by itself.”
“Pft,” muttered Kez, flopping her arms. “Dunno wot’tis, doyer?”
“Neither do you, you silly little mucker!”
Obstinately, Kez repeated: “Wosse want? Grabbed me.”
“He said I killed his brother.”
“Didjer?”
“I don’t think so,” said Marx shortly. Despite his protestations, his arm slipped beneath her shoulders to help her sit up. “Not yet, anyway.”
“Pity. Ju’jump on him?”
“Something like that. He grabbed you and took off, and I was pretty sure you could shift us both if you needed to.”
“Pft,” said Kez again. “’N’they think I’m the crazy one.”
“They’re right.”
“Me face feels funny, Marx.”
“You should see it from where I’m sitting. Oh, are you trying to punch me? Looks like the drug hasn’t worn off yet. What a shame.”
Kez forced her face to scowl. “Nex’ time I’ll leave yer t’splat.”
“Glad you’re alive, too, kid. Reckon you can shift us back to the Upsydaisy?”
“Bleah,” said Kez, and clicked her teeth, very pleased to find herself with jaw motion again. “Dunno. Went too deep into t’Other Zone with you before. Should wait ‘till I can do it proper.”
“All right,” said Marx, and stood up. “I’ll get you some water: it might flush the drug out a bit quicker. If something big and dangerous comes along, play dead.”
“Wot’ll you do if something big and dangerous attacks you?” demanded Kez, annoyed to find that she was just barely sitting under her own power.
“Hope it eats you first while I jump in the river and swim away,” said Marx, and vanished between a curtain of tall, slender waterweeds.
Kez grinned around at the surrounding verdure. She felt unaccountably better. Besides, it was nice to be on the surface of Thirteenth World, even if the tiny planet didn’t have any real claim to the name. From her balcony light years away, the surface had seemed smooth and uncluttered, with vast areas of grass between the giant trees. Once on the ground it was easy to see that the distance had misled her. The trees were hundreds of metres apart, erupting massively from the ground in giant twists of cable and bark, but the space between them was thickly thatched with bushes, saplings, waterweeds and a spiny kind of grass clump that Kez was glad not to have landed in.
She played with her fingers while she waited for Marx, trying vainly to snap them until she saw the waterweeds tremble and part again.
“Took y’time!” she said, and then: “Oooh. You ain’t Marx!”
The creature pacing through the waterweeds was almost familiar. It looked as though it should have been a tiger, but had been given a mohawk in tiger-stripe from its nose to the tuft of its ridiculously long tail by way of a joke. Those wiry legs looked far too skinny to hold it up, but they were muscled enough to tear the head off her shoulders, Kez decided.
“Sit still,” said Marx, from the other side of the clearing.
“Thought you were gonna swim for it,” said Kez. She could see Marx in her peripheral, a slightly less important figure than the mohawk tiger that was commanding most of her attention.
“Shut up, Kez.”
“Run fast. I can shift us.”
“Shut up, Kez.”
“Wot you doin’, Marx? You ain’t s’posed to walk t’ward it! Marx!”
“Shut up, Kez!”
Kez scowled angrily. The mohawk tiger was stalking Marx, its tail lashing and its head low; and it looked as though Marx was stalking the tiger in return.
Shoulda listened to me, she thought fiercely. Coulda shifted us both if he’d’a made a run for it. Gotta be a flamin’ hero!
The mohawk tiger made a dash for Marx, and Kez yelled, lurching to her knees. Marx ducked low and rolled, emerging clear on the other side and closer to Kez than he’d been before. Kez stretched out a hand to him, a fixed grin creasing her cheeks, and saw Marx brutally batted away by a thin, powerful paw that seemed to come out of nowhere. He tumbled into a white-flowered bush in a spray of dark red droplets, and the mohawk bounded after him, its tail humming through the air faster than Kez could see.
She grabbed the closest thing she could find and threw it as hard as she could.
“Hey! Hey! C’mere, you great ugly pussycat! Hey!”
The stick missed, but the stone she scrabbled for next grazed the mohawk tiger’s ear and stopped it mid-bound. It whirled so quickly that Kez was taken by surprise, though she’d expected it. She wasn’t sure whether her legs gave way from fear or from the drug, but she found herself on her backside as the mohawk tiger leapt for her, claws extending.
“Ah heck,” said Kez, and punched it in the nose.
The mohawk tiger vanished.
“It worked,” Kez panted, cradling her fist. “Flamin’ heck, it worked! See how you like the Other Zone, you stringy, overgrown pussycat! Marx, you okay?”
There was no answer from Marx. Kez determinedly surged to her feet and towards the white-flowered bush that overhung his legs.
“Marx. Marx, you gotta get up. I sent the cat into the Other Zone without goin’ in meself an’ I think I’m finally gettin’ a handle on it! Marx, you gotta get up!”
There was blood on the grass in a sticky trail that ended at Marx’s feet. Kez looked at it, her eyes black and shiny, and doggedly continued on. Her legs gave way again a few feet from the bush, but by then her outstretched hand could grasp Marx’s boot by the ankle, and she shifted them both back to the Upsydaisy with a sense of sick relief.
Wrestling Marx into the medi-pod took a little more effort, and by the time Kez managed to shove his left leg up beside the right, she wasn’t sure that he was still breathing. Panting, she swiped her hand through the DNA lock, and had the satisfaction of hearing the mechanical hum that meant the medi-pod had kicked in.
Kez peered at the liquid glass display with its barely comprehensible figures and graphs. Marx was breathing, but shallowly, and there were three parallel gashes tearing across the back of his shoulder to his hip.
“Flamin’ cat!” said Kez savagely. Still, the medi-pod showed a reading of non-vital tearing injuries, and that meant that Marx should wake up before long. Already the gashes were showing signs of patching. She gave herself a dose of adrenaline and went back into the cockpit to wait it out.
When she came back to the medi-pod it was still humming. Kez, frowning, looked at the mostly-healed cuts and then at the display screen. Eventually, she rapped at the glass.
“Oi! Wake up! You gonna sleep all day?”
Marx didn’t stir, but the medi-pod dinged, and said in its toneless voice: “Process complete. Please remove the patient.” It hissed open with a breath of aggressively antibacterial
air, turning Marx onto his back with felted paddles.
“It’s not flamin’ complete!” said Kez, punching at the control panel again. The medi-pod closed obediently, but only for an instant. Then it dinged, said: “No injuries detected,” and opened again.
Kez stared at it in speechless rage, and rammed her boot into the pod’s side.
“Please do not interfere with the medical pod system,” the medi-pod said.
Kez kicked it again. “I’ll interfere with you, all right. Fix him up!”
This time when she jabbed at the control panel, the lid didn’t even close. Kez gave it a few more kicks for good measure, then shoved Marx’s shoulder.
“Wake up, Marx. Your shoulder’s fixed. Stop playin’!”
She prodded him again, her face feeling tight and hot, and thought that Marx’s shoulder was stiffer than it should have been. His cheeks were stiff when she poked a finger into the stubble, too.
“Flamin’ cat!” she said. “Reckon it’s poisoned him.”
Kez tapped her fingers against the side of the medi-pod, absently noticing that they were no longer numb. The medi-pod would be no use at all if Marx was poisoned: it was good for serrations, bruises, missing limbs and basic physical trauma. Diagnosing poison was a medical officer’s job.
Perrin arrived quietly a little after Kez managed to haul Marx back out of the medi-pod.
“You are back,” he said; a self-evident statement that made Kez snarl at him. “The others are searching the surface, but I am knowing that you always return here.”
“’Course we did,” she told him scornfully. “One of your lot just tried to kill us! Think we’re gonna be daft enough to go back to you?”
Perrin looked troubled. “Kez, we are not knowing about this attack. Thirteenth World and Kez are good friends.”
“Coulda fooled me,” muttered Kez. “An’ now Marx is dyin’ and won’t wake up.”
She allowed Perrin to push past her and examine Marx, but watched with a jealous eye as he lifted Marx’s eyelids and checked his pulse.
A Time-Traveller's Best Friend: Volume One Page 7
