Page 68 of Alliance
Fás put on the climbing harness with shaking fingers, then rushed for the door, remembering Roz’s first nosebleed, how she climbed to reach an echo he couldn’t hear, and felt an urgency prickle his hackles like the world was splitting beneath his feet. Gil hauled him back by the neck and he snarled. The shilpakaar’s mane hissed in turn.
“Listen, friend, her blood doesn’t mean much. There’s no struggle in here and she hasn’t lost much of it. She might just be looking for a medikit. Nose bleed, or a shallow cut.”
“We have a medikit,” Fás snapped, shrugging them off. Their hand snapped right back into place, holding him still again. For the first time, Gil flashed their colors in warning. Neon yellow stripes that raced vertically along their tendrils and cheeks, bright enough to leave spots behind Fásach’s eyelids.
“Her prints are almost gone, and the snow swallows the heat of the blood,” they gritted, forcing him to look down by grabbing at his ear. His lips shivered with a snarl, but his eyes fixed on pockmarks in the snow. “We gotta go slow, or else we’ll lose her trail.”
Fásach nodded once, licking his lips back into place as he refit his teeth into his mouth. He didn’t need to follow a trail of sunken blood in the snow to know where she’d gone. She’d been staring at it ever since they arrived.
He glared up at the relay station with a doomed sense of hope that he was right.
?
“She’s not in the control room or the medilab,” Gil huffed, falling in beside Fásach as they met back up on the relay station’s massive tarmac beneath the central antenna. Whateverhad been bothering Gil was gone from their voice, replaced with golden chimes that Fás fully trusted. They worked as a team, eliminating room after room, splitting the search to work faster.
Looming directly overhead, the antenna’s disc was too large to see without panning one’s head, a sensation that made Fás feel as if a string was tied to his belly button and someone was pulling him back and back, trying to widen the aperture of his eyes.
And he hated it. Not the sensation, but the disc that took up just as much of the sky as Big Blue. For reasons unknown, it made the hackles rise on his shoulders, the straps of his climbing harness cutting into the fur. He didn’t even like having the back of his neck to it, as if the great basin might fall and split him in two.
He cut his claws through his tresses with an aggravated growl and turned away from the looming giant to cup his voice against the howl of the wind.
“Me too,” he snapped, having just swept the supply sheds and an old transpo garage filled with miscellaneous parts. “Maybe we– maybe we missed her.” He clenched his fangs shut, holding back a whimper of concern. “Maybe she just took a walk.”
Gil grabbed his forearm with a pitying look on their wretched face. Fás peeled his upper lip away from one of his greater fangs in warning before the operator could insinuate that she might be lost or worse.
“Hypothermia confuses people, Fás,” they said over the wind. “We should look for her clothes. I’ve got nocs in the control room. You comb over things again and I’ll look out over the cove, see if I can—”
Fás stumbled, the wind screeching desperately in his ears again. He covered them as the vertigo tossed him to his knees like a novice on the deck of a ship at sea. His symphony wasscreaming at him, rising above him at such a pitch that he couldn’t hear Gil as they shook his shoulders. He lifted his face to the operator’s wide-eyed shock.
Then his eyes went wide at the sight over their writhing mane.
A grey silhouette, buffeted by the wind, so small that she must be high above the tarmac now. Her tresses whipped the air like ropes in the twists he’d redone for her in the time since they’d left the warmth of theMummer.
Roz was climbing.
Fás pulled himself up by the straps of Gil’s climbing gear, pointing towards the ladder, unable to form words beyond the desperate chuckle in his chest. Anxious, viciously angry, terrified…
They both sprinted for the ladder but Fás was quicker, even if his claws made the climb difficult at best. A shilpakaar from the shallows might have been faster, but Gilladh was from deep waters where they had evolved to dive, not to swing from the great forests of Dharatee.
And lucky too, because something was wrong.
Unnaturallywrong.
“Comm Roz.Roz! Roz, stop!” Fásach bellowed. He knew she should be able to hear him. His linguitor connected with her systems just like they’d set up in the Pipes back on Huajile an eternity ago. She wasn’t more than twenty rungs away now and had stopped. Was now hugging the ladder with bare, red hands and her face hidden from the cold.
He started, pausing in confusion.
She wasn’t wearing her boots. Just soggy neoprene socks.
Her coveralls were haphazard, as if she’d been preoccupied while she latched them up. Ice collected in her tresses and across her shoulders, in the fine hairs along her cheeks.
“She okay?!” Gilladh called from below. Fásach leapt up the rungs without answering, his grip slipping on the damp metal, then swung to the wrong side of the ladder so he could shelter her from the wind. His heart clenched, nervous about the damage. Still, all he could think was a chorus of gratitude that she was alive and they had mediplasma.
But when he found her face, his hope froze over like hell.
She stared out at the mountains, an eerie green light blinking from the back of her eyeballs, murky through the fluid visible within her pupils as it lit up the interior of each orb. He shook her, yelling her name in her ear, but she remained transfixed, even as her lips and ears and fingers turned blue. He glanced at what she watched, dread gathering like lumps of coal in his gut, but there was nothing there. Just a sliver of the red jungle beyond, where the light was strong and warm.
“Is she okay?” Gil called again, smart enough to be careful on their ascent, hooking themself into the rope system one carabiner at a time.
