Page 84 of Alliance
His smile came back, loopy and warm. "Good job, gold star," he called out.
She gave him a nonplussed look from around the tree.
That night, when they laid with his front to her back on the bedroll, he snuck his hand around her throat and nipped at her ear. She pushed his pants down and let him in, silent save the mingling of their foggy breath.
He didn't need her to speak a single word to know that they were in perfect harmony.
29
The jungle creeped into Dawn's Razor like the passage of time in reverse. Where the permafrost moss had been an ancient crone with a bent back, overgrowing the rotted trees at the edge of the forest, Darameiza brought color and light to the coniferous trees. Bright pink veins of fungi and mushrooms grew first, bursting from the tree trunks. Then vines choked the proud boughs, weighing them down like pythons climbing for birds' nests. The cold dissipated so quickly that Fásach's underlayer of fur began to shed in fluffy clumps. He completely discarded his clothing, continuing on in his briefs and bare feet. Roz nearly followed suit in her undershirt, pants pushed up to her knees, and boots.
Fásach was still feverish, but the danger of heat stroke that the jungle presented had lessened significantly. His antlers were taller than his hand now, and his tresses fell like a mane down his spine. After the rut hunt, he'd tumbled headfirst as far down the predatory spectrum as his body was capable, but his rut would continue as long as Roz allowed, antlers growing more and more slowly over time.
Now, rather than pressing on the pedicles above his eyes, he pressed the pads of his fingers above his temples, wondering when—if—he would ever develop the second set his tadau had been blessed with. His booming bark of laughter echoed over Fás's symphony as he imagined him shaking his head. Perhapshe would remind his newly rutted son that such a development took years, not days.
Regardless, Fás felt a sense of pride. Not many yiwren could say they'd traveled the entirety of their own nature. Darameiza wasn't the forest he'd grown up in, but he breathed in the delicate balance of life and death in its soil, listened to its breezes and birds, and felt as if he'd come home.He hummed a quick prayer that the spirits of his homeworld would join him on Yaspur and thanked them for the daughters that taught him to be a caregiver and thethuaisthat taught him how to fight for a better life rather than accept his circumstance.
"Should we stop soon?" Roz asked, letting the needle's engine stall out. It had half a charge left, being an expeditionary model, and had cut their journey by weeks. Roz had been able to stick to service roads between research stations that were even paths that cut over or around the sponge of the jungle with its many cenotes and pitfalls. They were dangerously exposed if anyone came looking for them, but the speed outweighed the risks. "There's a station up ahead... Still has an antenna."
Fás squeezed her waist with encouragement, easing away the strain in her voice. "Let's go."
They unpacked the vital pods and settled them inside the little outpost with their gear while the girls stretched their limbs. Fásach pulled away old vines to reveal the food lockbox that kept unwanted predators from smelling anything fresh. But the building was useless otherwise. Just two bunks and a foot-pump sink, all overgrown withbiriaroots and mushrooms. Half the walls had collapsed under the weight of a steaming pile of rotting leaves from the canopy that would become rich jungle soil within weeks, and a hive of some sort buzzed in the far corner of the ceiling. The resident insects seemed uninterested in their business, however, and so Fásach left it alone.
But he did piss on the trees surrounding their site. Just to be sure. Thick, fragrant, and bearing the clear warning that anything substantial should keep away from his nest.
Two streaks of blue and grey flew past him as he latched his pants, giggling and screaming. He chuffed with amusement.
"No running," he said without any real intent behind the warning. Roz sat atop the snow needle with an uneaten ration block pinched between her fingers. She laughed, watching Safia and Misila as they swung from vines and clawed up tree trunks with absolute feral excitement, and she kicked her bare heels against the battery casing.
"Wow, they've got the zoomies," she awed as Fás sat down on the ground, leaning against the needle. She giggled as Misila jumped from a rotting tree trunk with a roar, tucked her knees to her chest, and fell butt first into a pile of wet leaves that sucked her in like mud. All three of Fásach's favorite tyrants threw their heads back and guffawed.
Chuckling, one side of his mouth pulled up in a smirk. This was their last chance to give the girls a breather before...
Before things could get very dangerous.
Sobered, Fásach gently took the ration block from Roz's hand and set it inside the lockbox. "No rations today." His smile fell as he pulled out the remnants of driedzaithat Gil had shared with them that first day at the Buoy. "The girls have never tasted fish."
"That smellsgood."
Roz and Fásach both blinked down at Misila, still covered in muddy leaves, one speared on the tip of the spire nub above her left brow plate. Fás's ear twitched at the glee in her voice, the glistening excitement in those eyes. Safia joined her, visibly swallowing, her mandibles open with the slack of hunger.
Roz cleared her throat and rotated the holowell in her eye forward. She displayed a rotating model of thezaifishswimming lazily through the air, its silver racing stripes and muscular, bullet-shaped body so different now from the dehydrated jerky in Fásach's hand.
"Our friend Gil hunted these in the sea of ice you guys slept through," she explained. "They're calledzaiand they're one of the only universal food animals on Yaspur!"
Both girlsooooo'ed as if on cue. Safia took it in both her palms, then licked it with a pleased vibration through her mouthparts.
"There are some bones, but they're soft. You'll like it, I promise," Fásach urged, trying not to oversell it.
Misila bit down on thezai'stail with a crunch. It disappeared with a roll of her lips. "Yum!"
"Thank you, Gil!" both girls said at once, remembering what manners their Auntie and mara had taught them.
"Thank you, Gil," Fásach echoed quietly. He brushed away a tear before it beaded on the velvet of his cheek.
"Come here." Roz split her legs open and patted the needle's fairing, inviting him to sit in front of her.
A pang of lust hit him, but it was calm and not terribly persistent. The afternoon was too comfortable to interrupt. His pups, histhuais...He hoped that more of this was what awaited them in Renata. And if it wasn't, then he'd sap every moment from this afternoon and cherish it. Fight for it. When the time came.
