Page 69 of Alliance
“Roz,” Fásach murmured against her ear, coaxing her quietly. Gil couldn’t see her like this. He licked his lips and they tightened with the cold as he tried again. “Please,” he whined, desperate for time. “Look at me. Please.”
When he pressed his shoulders against the tower and used both hands to move her head, her eyes remained glued to the horizon, even as he forced her face away. Her pupils disappeared beyond the pinch of her eyelids, exposing an intricate map of gold and copper wiring intertwined with capillaries in the whites of her eyes. Too disturbed to push her further, he let her turn towards the horizon again and covered her hands in his with a pleading whimper.
“Fás—” Gil pushed.
“She’s okay!” he called down on a broken yell. “Just give me a minute. She… She’s scared.”
He caught Gilladh’s eyes and nodded with a tremulous smile. The operator watched with a stitch in their brow, mane collapsed against their neck and roiling in a slow pattern to keep the cold rotating around their tendrils. They looked pensive, worried, but waited.
Fásach blew out a breath and pressed his forehead to Roz’s frozen hands. He reached behind her head and felt around her charging port for any signs of damage, trying to make it look like he was lifting her cowl around her neck.
A drop of lubricated blood fell on his brow and dribbled onto his cheek. She shifted and his face sprung up, lit by hope.
Then she opened her mouth in a wide, silent scream. Black beads—her parumauxi—rimmed her teeth and pulsed beneath the glistening pad of her tongue. Her mouth stretched open wider than should be possible, straining the corners of her mouth until they were white, pulling her cheeks vertically until the clear ridges of her cheekbones stood in stark contrast to the hollows of her jaw.
Fásach’s hackles stood on end, and he leaned back on instinct, eyes wide and terrified. Whatever she was doing was horrific, emitting a sour, toxicsomethingthat warped their harmony until it snapped apart, unraveling and corrupting within his senses. It was unnatural,not Roz.Fásach had never experienced a loss like this, one that ripped his mind apart until he was bleeding, disintegrating from the inside out.
Then it stopped with a thick, meaty thud and a sharp pain in his rib.
Fásach looked down, shell-shocked with ringing ears.
A harpoon bolt was lodged in Roz’s puffy polar coveralls, red-stained batting poking out and caught on the sharp head like fake cobwebs where the tip pressed against his diaphragm.
Time suspended between beats of Fásach’s heart. He stared at Roz’s face as her parumauxi swarm retreated from hermouth like the snap of a rubber band. Her jaw went slack, and her eyes rolled back. Her head lolled, upturned to the antenna as she listed sideways off the rungs of the ladder.
“No!” Fásach roared as she tipped out into the open air. Another bolt from below sliced the space between them and Fásach caught her arm just in time, his claws cutting her sleeve and skin to red ribbons. He held onto the soft flesh as she dangled a hundred feet in the air.
Then his feral rage landed on the operator. Gil was reloading with a deadly glare, eyes locked on Fásach.
“She’s not actually human, is she?” they called up, cranking back the bolt. Their voice was all wrong. Righteous, true, honest as always, butresigned.
Fásach snarled, his nose bunching up viciously as he extruded his fangs to their full bite force. He licked them, trying to buy time even as lava heat ran through his veins. “She is,” he insisted, hoisting her up by her ruined forearm. He hugged her against the ladder and tied her in place with his climbing ropes, looping her to the ladder as best he could while Gilladh aimed.
“No, my friend,” Gilladh said with duty-bound remorse. “She isn’t.”
Before they could fire again, Fásach leapt from the ladder feet first, taking a gamble. Gilladh shot wide in surprise, their mane puffing up to its full size. As soon as Fásach hit the shil’s shoulders with his heel, they careened off the ladder together in a mess of ropes.
Gilladh had been hooking themself into the rope system as they climbed, and now it pulled taut, jerking them both with a whiplash to the head that discombobulated their brains. Fásach couldn’t tell up from down as he grappled, digging his claws into the fabric of Gil’s jacket. They swung as the world righted itself, and Fásach found them nearly upside down, his claws clutching the operator’s hip and shoulder for dear life.
“If you give us a chance, we—”
“She’s a doll, Fás!” Gilladh barked, heaving for air and baring their dental ridges in pain. They flailed, trying to get hold of the ropes holding them both aloft.
Fásach snarled, scrambling to keep himself from falling off Gil’s dangling body. “No! You don’t believe that. I’dknowif you did.”
“You’re right, I didn’t,” Gil panted, gripping Fásach’s hackles and biceps. Not trying to fling him off, but to save him from falling. They held onto each other, swaying in the arctic wind. “Her pheromones don’t scent synthetic. She must have fooled you, too—”
“I know what she is—”
“Then you know dolls like her are dangerous! You have to let her go!”
“If anyone calls her a doll one morefuckingtime, I’m going to rip their throat out,” Fásach snarled, his tongue lolling at the prospect. “I’m not ever giving her up. She’s alive and we canprove—”
Gilladh got their hand on their bandolier, ripped open a pouch, and sliced at Fásach’s palm on exit. He roared as the wind tossed them again, slamming them against the tower. His hold slipped and he fell forward over Gil’s chest, feet dangling over a crushing fall to the steel-plated tarmac below. The operator pulled a disruptor puck from a chest pouch and Fás batted it out of his hand with a swipe of his claws that nearly upended them both, his heart in his throat. That puck would have overloaded Roz’s systems. It would have killed her with just the touch of a button.
Gilladh grabbed Fásach by the scruff and, with more strength than he could fight, lifted his head away as they plunged their knife towards his neck with a hiss of frustration. It caughtin what was left of Fás’s dewlap, ripping the flesh open. The shilpakaar’s yellow stripes flashed as they tried again.
As strong as Fásach had become over the last several days, it was nothing compared to the strength of a shilpakaar that had been encoiled with a mate for as long as Gil had been. Every tendon strained against the operator’s hold, but it was almost no use. Without a full rut, Fásach couldn’t win a contest of strength that didn’t involve his jaws. The whites of his eyes rimmed his ungulate glare in terror, Gil’s hissing a sour warbling vibration in his senses. All wrong, so wrong.
