The Druid Gene

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  When she got back to the log she carefully avoided her trap, which she couldn’t see from that side. She cleaned up the rest of the area until it was pristine and took off at a run.

  This time she didn’t feel nearly as guilty.

  40

  The Lovek emerged from the tern and breathed deeply. A slow smile curled his lip. This world’s atmosphere was atypically oxygen rich, which would enhance his performance as well as the gildrut’s and was already imbuing him with a mild sense of euphoria. It also meant that the planet harbored megafauna in the form of insects and arthropods which, despite what one might expect if exposed only to the effete hymenoptera, could be quite ferocious.

  It was a fantasy made reality, everything he’d ever desired.

  He locked his prisoners inside. He could have disposed of them, but he might yet need them to motivate the girl, and at any rate the sauria and baryana were both still valuable and the hymenoptera was half dead.

  When Hain brought the Vermachten into orbit, he’d have the two prisoners put back in the general population, separated from each other now that he knew of their filial affection. He might have to punish the baryana for poisoning one of his best trading partners. Or perhaps he’d just eat the slug if he could find someone to prepare it properly. Their flesh was considered a gourmand’s delight. That would be adequate compensation for the loss of income. The druska should have known he’d overhear it prattling about the murder.

  He began the movements of the Sahventahl as the sun lightened the sky. He was in no rush. He was going to savor every moment of this undertaking. There was no better way to begin than with a limber body and a quiet mind. He reached out with all his senses, letting his subconscious drift while he gathered information with his body.

  When he finished he had already picked up her scent, still lightly lingering in the environment. This world was very different from his homeworld. It was damp and green, brightly lit, and rife with a variety of odors, but he could filter them adequately and isolate the ones he wanted. He had developed that discipline over years of hunting. Now he would prove his worth and earn his place among his ancestors as a true kappyr, a predator of the highest order among the lovek.

  She had followed the path the tern had taken in the crash landing, but in reverse. It was no coincidence that it led in the direction of the mining colony. So she didn’t necessarily believe the baryana’s warning. Savvy little bitch.

  An excellent start.

  He found her scent clinging to a primitive shelter and at the base of a tree some distance away. She’d crashed around without any care for hiding her trail. That disappointed him, but if she’d climbed the tree to scout the terrain, that was a good sign. If he happened to step on her tracks, his sensate feet could taste her signature, mixed with humus and rot and minerals.

  And then he lost her trail, briefly. She’d tried to deceive him. He chuckled when he found her path again upon retracing his steps and circling a tree delicately laced with her scent. Here she’d felt some fear. It lingered in places, heavier and more cloying than the rest of her trail had been. Did she really think that tactics like this would throw him off? She’d have to do better than that.

  Her efforts in the stream were more effective. It did take him some time to relocate her trail, but it was far from impossible and he was soon under way again, not stopping to eat or sleep. He carried only a self-regenerating water flask and a small communication device with which to signal Hain when this was finished. He could go weeks without food or more than minimal rest. That was what fat storage was for, after all.

  He snarled with glee as he felt a trip wire against his shin, even as he dived for cover and one of her wooden spikes penetrated his shoulder, shoving itself still deeper as he hit the ground. He picked himself up and roared as he pulled it free, thin blue blood running in rivulets down his arm and torso.

  He held the piece of wood in his hand and inspected her handiwork with the tree. Not bad. He had not anticipated this kind of cunning from her. It was a delightful surprise. He roared a laugh that made insects flee from the trees around him.

  He tucked the bloody spike into a deep pocket on his thigh and moved on, a little more wary, shrugging his shoulder to keep his range of motion intact, relishing the pain. It would take far worse than this to stop him.

  He was forced to reduce the speed of his pursuit when rain began to fall, adding to the complexity of the aromatic environment, but not by much. She’d picked a very dangerous route by following this spider trail. It was narrow and would offer her no shelter. It was practically a killing chute. Not to mention the hordes of venomous arthropods who used it frequently to forage and return with food for the spider queen and to tend the egg sacs upon her immense back.

  In addition to the rain, the secondary sun was eclipsing the primary, which would dim daylight for several spins. It would also hinder communication due to solar flares and coronal mass ejections, common during eclipses because of gravitational fluctuations around the twin stars. This tended to wreak havoc on technology and bathed the planet in deadly ionizing radiation. The local flora and fauna had adapted to this level of radiation but the miners would have elaborate shielding against it, which was only feasible on a small scale, and even then only because of the rare and valuable ore they harvested. It was one of many reasons why this planet, in a galaxy with need of colonizable worlds, could never be a viable place to permanently settle.

  By the time he felt his foot sink into her pit trap, his other leg was already raised to stride over the fallen log. He compensated by throwing his weight back to try to prevent his leg from being caught. He landed with his hip on top of the log, flailing as her spikes carved deeply into his calf despite his efforts. The wind was knocked out of him, and multiple tendons in his knee tore in the struggle.

  He grunted, reached down and grasped the spikes that impaled his leg, and with considerable effort shoved them deeper into the walls of the pit so he could ease his leg out. He kept a wary eye on his surroundings. She could be lying in wait to ambush him here, or something else might be attracted to the scent of his blood and come looking for an easy meal. He was ready to fight if need be.

  He couldn’t reach one of the spikes that impaled his calf near the ankle on the far side, so he pierced the soil with the stake that he’d kept in his pocket from her previous trap to dig it out, the whole time snarling curses. She was definitely more clever than he’d reckoned.

  She wasn’t just a doe-eyed prey animal. She was wily and scheming in fascinating ways. She’d come from a cushy world without want, with plenty of fat rounding out her flesh, and yet she was driven to best him.

  An arthropod scuttled out from the tree line. It stopped when it saw him. He continued to work at the soil with the stake. Another appeared and did the same. Then several more. He worked harder at digging his leg out.

  Then there were dozens. They encircled him. He removed the knife from his pack, though he knew it would do little good.

  They jumped on him all at once, biting and attempting to bind his limbs with sticky silk strings to prevent him from fighting back. He flung them off, tore them to pieces as he wrenched his leg free and rolled away, crushing a few of them with his body weight.

  He roared. Blue blood and arthropod guts littered the soil all around him.

  The bitch was better than he’d thought.

  41

  Darcy was on edge. Days had passed. She tried to stay calm but alert, to remain focused on her goal while maintaining vigilance, but inside she was panicking. The forest was closing in. She felt an urgency to get off the trail, and find, at minimum, something a little more open like the area where the tern had landed, but she had no idea where something like that was or how to find it.

  She climbed another tree to see if the view from above would help and found that she was a lot closer to the mining colony than she’d realized. She’d covered two-thirds of the distance there or more.

  The super spider was st
ill nearby. It was chomping on treetops, and the evidence that it had been feeding in the general area for a while was readily apparent. The tops of many of the trees in its vicinity had clearly been cropped, and some even showed signs of regrowth. That answered the question of whether or not it was animal or mechanical in nature. The white fluffy stuff on its back was still a mystery, though now that she was closer she thought it resembled mounds of glistening, transparent eggs. She’d never heard of anything like that, but that didn’t mean that wasn’t what she was seeing.

  The canopy was too dense to determine anything about the understory or which direction she should go in to seek more-open woodland. So she climbed back down and kept going.

  Sometimes she felt something she couldn’t put her finger on, a kind of presence, tingling just behind her eyes, coming and going. She instinctively thought it must be Raub closing in on her, remembering what Hain’s video had said about the druids having the ability to detect the unique electromagnetic brain signatures of different individuals. It made her feel even more paranoid than she already was.

  She heard ominous sounds everywhere she turned, and she was sure they were Raub ambushing her to punish her for daring to set the traps she’d left for him. Sometimes she found herself running flat out, blindly, until her shins ached, her leg muscles burned, and the stitch in her side wouldn’t let her go any farther. She would then fall to her knees, panting so hard that she couldn’t hear anything but blood rushing in her ears and her own ragged breathing.

  She didn’t want this, any of this. She wanted it all to stop.

  She practiced calling up her power and tamping it back down. It crackled like blue fire in her fingertips instantly and made every insect in the neighborhood flit away in panic. She felt full of energy, like it was all around her, soaking into her.

  That was somewhat reassuring. It would be there when she needed it. Although she still didn’t know the full extent of what she could do with it.

  In the back of her mind the memory of Raub saying he wasn’t as susceptible to her power as the hymenoptera echoed. What if he had some way of negating that power? What if he had some kind of power that he hadn’t revealed yet?

  What little of the sky she could see darkened and occasionally lit up with flashes of lightning. She’d always hated the way lightning made her feel, but now the sensation was stronger than ever—a weird itchiness, tinged with an inexplicable longing. And now, perhaps, she knew the reason.

  Rain started to fall. She could hear it pattering high in the canopy, but it took a long time for large, cold drops to coalesce among the leaves and find their way down to her. She thought that the rainfall was probably good. It would obfuscate any traces of her activity around the traps she’d set, and she hoped it would reduce the lingering scent of her humanity in those places, camouflaging them even further.

  The trail was now veering off in the wrong direction, and she decided to leave it behind. It had served its purpose, allowing her to travel faster for some time and funneling Raub into a couple of traps, but she couldn’t let it steer her too far off course.

  She found a break in the brambles and headed into the dense understory, meandering around thickets wherever possible, sometimes crawling underneath the prickly shrubs next to the damp, spongy, leaf-littered soil. That was where she rested when night fell, wrapped in the blanket in an attempt to stay drier, though it just overheated her due to the warmth of the climate. Sleep was difficult to find. She wanted to start a fire but didn’t dare. It would help him find her, and it would be impossible to control in a high-oxygen environment.

  The rain didn’t let up. It kept on at a steady rate, slowly soaking everything. It was difficult to stay dry. She modified the jumpsuit so that she had a deep hood that came up over her hair, shedding water. That helped.

  Her feet were constantly wet. Some kind of fungus or bacteria took hold on her feet, starting between her toes. Every night her immune system would fight it and reduce its coverage, but every day it crept back a bit more until her feet were itchy and painful and covered with a sickly yellow-brown fuzz that she could rub off, but still see traces of under her skin. Eventually she fiddled with the jumpsuit until she discovered a way to modify it so that it fit like tight stockings over her feet. It helped but didn’t eliminate the problem. And it stretched the garment so much it became sheer and filmy. She didn’t care about modesty as long as it kept her drier.

  She ignored the discomfort and kept going.

  The humidity was so high the water flask no longer had any trouble keeping up with her needs. She was able to stay hydrated and moving, though she was now slowed significantly by the crowded vegetation. The pack got lighter as she gnawed on the nutrition bars to keep her energy up.

  She constantly wondered when Raub was finally going to catch up. It frayed her nerves, which were already in shreds.

  Her heart never stopped pounding. Her nerves thrummed under her skin, and every sense was on alert. She felt more desperate by the day, sometimes traveling well into the night because she wasn’t sleeping well anyway. She experimented with holding out a hand and pushing a small amount of energy into it until she created a soft glow that illuminated her immediate surroundings. She maintained the light until her hand got too hot, then used the other hand. It was enough to walk by, but not to let her run. She couldn’t decide whether it made her feel safer or more at risk of being targeted by a hungry bug. It did seem like all of them were generally avoiding her, though. She frequently noted insects of all sizes and types taking flight when she came near, even before she’d noticed them.

  Gradually the forest changed in character yet again. She started seeing trees with long, drooping, feathery blue-green needles that were soft to the touch. The ground underneath them was more comfortable for the catnaps that she stole between marathon sessions of running and jogging.

  Still Raub didn’t come.

  He was toying with her, wearing her down.

  It was working.

  42

  It was about midday, but the sky had been growing steadily darker instead of lighter for hours as the rainfall grew more intense. Faint flashes of light penetrated into the dank copse. Thunder rolled seconds later, rumbling in Darcy’s chest wall.

  She could sense Raub. He was near.

  Panic rose in her throat and she bolted forward, ignoring everything except putting one foot in front of the other. She saw snatches of pale, reflected light indicating something solid beyond the trees. It had to be the wall around the compound.

  The sense of Raub’s proximity grew stronger. He had to be right behind her. Her heart whomped against her rib cage and she picked up more speed.

  She’d made it. Now she just had to find a way into the belastoise compound before he caught her. She waded through the thick undergrowth at the tree line, barely registering the branches holding her back in her rush to get out, to get free of the forest and to sanctuary. Lightning flashed nearby, searing her retinas.

  Her eyes adjusted to the difference in ambient light. She stopped in her tracks. Her stomach lurched. Raub stood in the clearing between her and a solid wall in the pouring rain.

  He was waiting for her. He leaned forward slightly, his expression wolfish. Despite the rain, dark blue wounds stained his jumpsuit on his shoulder and one calf.

  Her traps had worked, but they hadn’t stopped him.

  Her nostrils flared. She shook her head. Dammit.

  She took out her flask, drank deeply, then let it fall to the ground along with her pack. Energy crackled under her skin. Lightning flashed over the compound, and as the sound of thunder reached her, she felt a wave of energy roll over her. The lightning was calling to her.

  Raub strolled forward, a predatory smile slowly quirking his lips.

  She tensed and looked around, taking in all the details she could about the lay of the land. She considered darting back into the trees and using her camouflage ability to hide from him.

  “I’ll find you, L
eebska! I’ll always find you!” he shouted above the rain, as though he could hear her thoughts. Could he? Or had he guessed based on whatever bleak and desperate expression had passed over her face?

  He broke into a run, barreling straight for her.

  She put herself in a fighting stance, weighing her options as she watched his long stride lengthening. His intent seemed to be to slam her bodily into the massive tree behind her. He didn’t slow, and in the last split second she decided to try to use that against him.

  She sidestepped and swooped down to grab his leg to pitch him off-balance and hopefully throw him, but even as she moved he was seizing her hair and twisting. She swung around violently in his wake and they fell into the scrub in a tangle of limbs and branches.

  She was arched on her back with something hard and sharp projecting up into her shoulder blade. The air had been knocked out of her. She struggled to breathe and to right herself.

  He recovered faster and rolled on top of her, pressing her down into the brush painfully, a handful of her hair savagely clutched in his hand. One of her arms was pinned beneath her and his weight made it impossible to get it loose.

  If she didn’t get out from under him she was as good as dead.

  It couldn’t be over this soon.

  She tried to use her free hand to claw at his eyes. She had to do some damage. She had to break free.

  “You make it too easy,” he growled, grasping her flailing hand and pressing it brutally into a knobby tree root.

  She head butted him so hard she saw stars.

  He laughed.

  She bucked under him with everything she had, pushing him up with her hips, and twisting under him until she could hook and sweep his leg. Once she had wriggled partway from beneath him she viciously stabbed one foot into his groin.