by Amber Stuart
But the two guards stood beside him the instant I let him go.
The first grabbed Nik’s arm, jerking him away from me.
The second caught hold of him on the other side, and between the two, they began to steer Nik back towards the promenade, where Razmun waited for both of us. One guard gave me a look, too, but he didn’t bother to drag me, presumably because he figured I’d follow Nik. Even so, he made it clear what he intended if I didn’t.
I had relaxed, though.
I could see from Nik's face, and knew from his words that he'd understood.
Maybe not all of it, but he'd understood enough.
28
THE TRUTH WILL OUT
I FOUND MYSELF standing outside the snug tunnels of Quisieri Settlement, decidedly less warm, decidedly wetter, and decidedly less filled with optimism... particularly about me and Nik’s aborted discussion about escaping these people.
Part of that last bit stemmed from the fact that it was looking less and less likely that we’d get any time alone... at least not any time soon.
Part of that was the weather, too.
I stood in full rain-gear, shivering alongside the cadre of morph huddled near me.
We'd all suited up together, in some kind of ante-chamber located by one of the metal double doors that led outside the underground complex. Then we’d all ventured out together, too, and into the heaviest, most impenetrable rains I’d ever experienced... and I’m from Seattle.
The intensity of the phenomenon wasn’t entirely lost on the locals, either, since going outside during the season of Rain constituted enough of an anomaly that it required special equipment, and a special changing room to don said equipment.
I’d watched in near-incredulity while the morph around me began pulling on what amounted to loose-fitting scuba suits, along with thigh-high boots, infrared goggles, hoods with their own rain gutters and long coats that appeared to be made out of some kind of water-retardant canvas.
At the end, they pulled on elbow-length gloves with fitted fingers, the material thin enough to allow for nearly a full range of motion, grip and touch.
The outfit still felt really awkward.
I couldn’t get the hang of how to wear it, maybe because it weighed me down and restricted my movement just enough to make me unsure of my ability to defend myself in the damned thing. Either way, I felt uncomfortable and half-blind pretty much from the second I put it on. I found myself tugging at different parts of the material and reminding myself how my hands worked inside the gloves whenever we stood still for more than a few seconds.
We’d left the underground city over an hour ago.
Apparently, little existed on Vilandt in the way of transport, at least during the Rain.
Nik and Razmun explained that above-ground trolleys ran to most areas of the planet during the time of Sun/Light, but too few people left the shelter of the city this time of year.
During the Rain, the primary forms of long-range transport consisted of sky ships and smaller vessels they referred to as “hoppers.” Both required registration with the human colonial authority to operate, and permission would certainly be denied to a group of morph so large, even if Razmun and his followers were okay with garnering that kind of attention.
Which, yeah... they weren’t.
The only other option consisted of riding erensyi, those giant black cats indigenous to the Vilandt lowlands. Erensyi didn’t require registration and from what I’d heard, most morph preferred to use erensyi to get around the settlement, anyway.
On the other hand, they also weren't particularly comfortable to travel on during the Rain.
They also weren't particularly inconspicuous, and the human authority had been known to monitor their usage, too. Any trek that required erensyi for eighty-plus morph and one human would be noticed for sure.
It also occurred to me that the morph could just transform into erensyi themselves, once we got outside of the zones covered by the colonial authority in their transport sweeps. When I raised the question quietly to Nik, however, he informed me that transformation by adult morph was even more tightly monitored than travel. Satellites were calibrated to pick up the energy signatures caused whenever a morph transformed into a new form. A new herd of erensyi leaving the main settlement at speed following thirty to ninety energetic signatures for transformation would definitely get at least some of them shot.
The remainder would be picked up within minutes and arrested for violating the unlawful assembly rules imposed on all morph.
So yeah, that wasn't going to work, either.
That left traveling by foot.
The human authority didn't have enough surveillance to watch every living being on the planet. Razmun scattered his teams prior to our leaving, deploying them in stages through multiple exits and heading in multiple directions from Quisieri Settlement to a rendezvous point well outside the city perimeter.
Nihkil and I went with Razmun. Oslep remained with our group, too... and another morph that I remembered from the ship, whose name I was reasonably sure was Tallo. Tallo was the one and only female present when Nik and I were picked up, and still one of the few I’d seen among Razmun's band of terrorists. It didn't make me like or trust her any more than any of the rest of them... especially since she’d also been the one to shoot Nik in the chest... but it did make Tallo more easily recognizable.
We walked for at least four hours.
The going was difficult.
The grasses reached as high as my waist once we got past the manicured areas closer to the city. Not only that, the blades were thick and could be as sharp as a knife.
The blue-green sheen of the fronds looked beautiful under the beaded rains, and when the wind moved the long expanse of grasses, it resembled a wild yet oddly perfect ocean. I could admit those things, sure... but navigating through it was a bit like trying to make my way through a field of heavy, wet, and flat barbed wire.
I walked behind larger morph to make the going easier, including one who employed what resembled a small machete to get through the worst of the heavy fronds. Even so, that razor-sharp grass managed to saw into my protective rain gear, leaving small and large cuts on different parts of my skin.
Worse, the rain gradually seeped through the exposed areas left by the openings, soaking the clothes I wore underneath. Mud stuck to and clumped on the soles of my thigh-high boots, sticky and heavy and impossible to dislodge, at least without stopping and using a knife... or maybe a spade. I got used to the additional weight after we'd been walking for maybe an hour, but still found myself gradually getting worn down.
That tiredness got worse as time progressed, partly because our trail continued its gradual slope uphill.
Still none of the morph appeared to be slowing.
Given that we were now climbing the foothills below those snow-capped peaks I’d glimpsed through the ship’s view ports, the landscape might have been stunning... if I could have seen it. As it was, I mostly saw dark, rain-soaked trunks through the low-hanging mist and torrential rain. Some of those trees reached a height that would have impressed the California Redwoods back home, but they were shaped more like giant jungle trees than conifers.
Most were covered with dark green moss, too, and sprouted long beards of dense ferns clogged with hanging vines and giant, palm-like leaves.
I wished I could talk to Nik privately again, despite the reassurance he kept trying to send my way. I wished I'd been more explicit around what I was thinking when we had those few precious moments alone.
If I had, maybe I’d know for certain now, whether he and I were on the same page, or if I’d just deluded myself into thinking we were.
Then again, on the off-chance Razmun had been listening more closely than I thought, maybe it was better if that plan remained vague, even between me and Nik.
Nik himself struck me as strangely calm.
It was as if he'd found some sort of p
eace between the time we'd first left the morph ship and when we left the protective walls of Quisieri. I didn't know if it was our conversation in that morph-made forest that chilled him out, or if his calmness had some other source.
In any case, Nik’s relaxed posture didn't really reassure me.
We walked the length of another valley filled with blue-green grass, then veered directly up into the forest.
The forest was easier on me, if only because the trees sheltered us from the worst of the rain. Even so, the path was steep, and though the ground was firmer, it was still mostly mud mixed with mulch and leaves and moss.
The combination nearly sent me sliding down to my face more than once.
The fog grew denser as we climbed higher, too, until we reached the top of a ridge and began descending into a smaller canyon. Like in my home state of Washington, water seemed to trickle from under every rock and boulder, pooling in crevices and creating small streams and rivers in every depression worn into the mud.
When we reached the box canyon's floor, we hung a right, following a broader stream deeper into the canyon's mouth. By then, four of the other teams had re-joined us, entering the canyon from the other side.
Within a matter of minutes, our numbers swelled back up to sixty or so morph, many of them from the original group I remembered from the ship.
I saw more females that time, too. All were dressed more or less like soldiers, and traveled by foot, in human form. All carried those black guns and wore identical rain gear.
More of the new ones carried satchels and backpacks, though.
I didn't make a lot of eye contact with different morph, but found myself studying faces surreptitiously, instead.
Most looked grim, even a bit sad. The overwhelming feeling I got from those clenched jaws and hard eyes, however, was a fevered determination. A number looked like they’d been fighting for too many years and were starting to get a bit strung out.
It was a look I recognized from some of Gantry's people, in Seattle. Gantry hired a lot of veterans, like him, and some of those guys ended up being the type who might be a little too willing to pull out their weapons and start shooting.
Without it being strictly necessary, that is.
I glanced at Nik, wondering what he thought of our new comrades.
I got the feeling he was studying the morph around us, too, sizing them up. I also saw him nod to a few of them, although I couldn’t get much of a read on the relationships there.
Again, I found myself wishing there was some way I could talk to him alone.
But he'd already warned me on the ship that Razmun would have our implants tapped, so I knew better than to try and talk to him that way. The thread we shared, the one I could still feel as a warm vibration in my chest, didn't give me specific enough information to be all that useful at a time like this.
"Are we almost there?" I asked him, my voice a murmur.
Even that, Razmun heard.
He turned his head, giving me a wry smile.
"We're close," he said. "Are you tired, Dakota Mayumi? Or simply anxious to leave our vibrant, life-drenched little world behind?"
I scowled a little, more because he’d obviously wanted me to know he would hear anything I tried to tell Nik. The message came through loud and clear, so I did my best to ignore both of them, focusing instead on lifting my mud-caked boots up and down as we walked up the slope through the fern and tree-choked canyon. I found myself watching the gushing and foaming stream that ran to our right, wondering if it would be better to try and walk up that, just to get the several inches of black earth off my feet.
Razmun answered that question, too.
"I wouldn't recommend it," he said.
I glanced at Nik, who nodded perceptibly in agreement with Razmun, his eyes a dark blue. I glanced at the stream again, and realized that it was moving faster than I’d realized, and that the rocks were covered in a layer of dark plant matter, likely as slick as greased glass.
"It's not only the rocks," Nik said quietly. "There are animals in there. They send out electric shocks... to catch land prey for food. You could easily be knocked out. They would likely be upon you before we could pull you out in time."
Swallowing, I glanced at the deeper pools of dark water by the shore.
Remembering again that I wasn't on Earth, that this world contained entirely different dangers and wildlife, I nodded again, to myself that time.
It was a good reminder.
It would be too easy to die accidentally here, just from stupidity.
When I looked away from the river that time, I saw Razmun smiling in my direction. He chuckled when I caught his gaze, shaking his head as he looked away.
I chose to ignore that, too.
"We are almost there," Nik told me quietly, taking my fingers in the pause.
It was always easier to feel him when he touched me. I found myself relaxing slightly at the reassurance that flowed through him via the thread.
“...I am sure Razmun will tell us what we are to do then," he added softer, tugging my fingers closer, so that he held my hand against his side.
Hearing the message behind that, too, I just nodded again.
* * *
IT SEEMED ONLY minutes later that our entire party came to a stop.
We'd traversed the length of the canyon and now stood in a clearing housing a meadow filled with short, fine grasses, closer to the ones I knew from Earth. Flowers dotted the vibrant green blades, along with other, softer plants with dark fronds, which looked like water lilies floating across the grass.
On the other end of the clearing stood a stone archway, made of a white, marble-like substance that looked familiar.
Seconds later, it hit me why.
That stone looked exactly like the material I remembered from the high, ornate archway on Trinith, where Nik and I first landed.
Other than its somewhat rougher edges and lack of hieroglyphics, this archway looked pretty much identical, both in height and just the general vibe of that whole “door to nowhere” thing.
It had to be the gate.
I noticed more details on the arch this time, probably since I wasn’t on the verge of passing out... including a faint, ghostly light that shone from the archway itself. It created a faint distortion that reflected against the falling rain and leaves, the latter of which shimmered a lighter green the closer we got to the gate's entrance.
Other morph waited for us there, by the entrance to that door.
I looked around at faces that struck me as decidedly more civilian-looking than the group that accompanied me and Nik across the rain-soaked fields. I felt something from Nik that indicated he thought there were “too many of them,” but again couldn’t get enough details through the link to know why that might bother him.
Directly behind the gate, a waterfall cascaded down black-rock cliffs.
The waterfall was wide enough and high enough that the sound drowned out all other ambient noises, creating a strange silence in the meadow by the gate. The pond beneath the waterfall looked deep and churned such a pale blue that it looked to be made of ice.
My eyes followed the white foam up the cliffs. I realized the waterfall must be the product of an underground river, since its source disappeared into a cave-like opening halfway up.
Really, the place was beautiful. Breathtakingly so.
So much so, it almost didn’t look real.
I remembered reading somewhere that real beauty blanks out our minds, causes our brains to stammer. I felt a bit like that as I looked around at our fairytale surroundings.
Below the waterfall, another cave stood, that one seemingly dry, although I could see the edges of the pond creeping up to its main entrance. Only a narrow path led into the darker depths beyond where the daylight reached. Green plants hung down over its entrance in a thick curtain. I might not have seen it at all, if not for the bonfires burning inside, illuminating yet mo
re bodies huddled by their warmth.
It struck me suddenly, that Nik was right.
A heck of a lot of people had come with us on this little jaunt.
As soon as the thought hit me, I turned to Nik again, my mouth pursed.
He caught my gaze warningly, though, and I firmed my lips still more, swallowing what I'd wanted to ask. I saw him looking at the same things I’d been noticing, though, and realized he'd already come to his own conclusions about the small morph colony that lived by the gate.
I rubbed my goggles with gloved hands, gazing up at the gate itself.
The inside arch stood at least twenty-five to thirty feet high on its own. The outer edges probably reached closer to forty. The stones all looked roughly the same size and were flat and smooth, making the gate appear like a giant, smooth-skinned puzzle.
I was still staring up when Nik approached me on my other side.
I rubbed my goggles again to get the excess water off, feeling my worry intensify when I saw the determination in Nik's expression.
"Are you ready?" he asked softly.
Before I could answer, Nihkil made a subtle gesture with one hand, squeezing my shoulder with his other. Without understanding either thing specifically, I definitely got that he didn’t want me to answer aloud. Frustrated, I nodded shortly, catching Razmun staring at the two of us in the same set of seconds.
He walked right up to us before I could decide what to say to Nik.
"Yes... are you ready, Dakota?" Razmun said, his words a mocking echo of Nik’s. Even so, I heard the irritation underneath. “...I, too, would like to know.”
"I might be," I retorted, letting my own irritation be audible. "Maybe you could tell me exactly what it is I’m supposed to be ready for.” Clenching my jaw, I looked between Razmun and Nik. "What are you planning here, exactly? Send Nik through the gates to find your new morph paradise? Or does that come later? After you've used his maps to taunt the humans a little longer, maybe blow up a few more of their cities?"
