Page 86 of Alliance
If Renata didn't accept her humanity...
He stared at the trees, their silhouettes purple in the night, watching the stars where they peeked through the canopy in the breeze. He carefully moved his forearm from beneath Safia's face, depositing her on his chest.
He brought up his comms.
Still quiet.
"Vin," he murmured into his holotab. "My..." He closed his eyes, deleted the message, and started again. "Vin, we're in the jungle now. Close, maybe. My..." He stalled again but kept the message running. She could reject him later. "Misila, Safia, and my mate are with me. I don't know if you'll recognize me anymore—" Misila squirmed, nearly rolling off his leg. She dug her baby talons into his thigh, then settled back into a gentle snore. "So here's a snap."
Fásach widened the view on his holotab, getting all four of their faces in the frame. The holoscreen pulsed, adding light to the scene with a glow that went completely unnoticed. He stared at the aerial image with hope.
Then sent it off into the void.
30
Roav flexed his hands, missing the feel of his usual choice of weapons as he stared at Jharim's back, walking in silence along the service tunnel beneath Home Tower 01.
It was straight with conical walls and a deep, lazy stream of sewer water that emptied into the Saphed River in the valley below. It had already been filtered, so the stream smelled fresh. If it was murky, it was because of the mangrove roots and algae inching its way in.
Every sound bounced off the walls, including Roav and Jharim's footsteps as they walked in single file along the narrow bank, clicking code to each other from time to time by rapping their knuckles against the stones rather than emitting any bodily noise. They'd turned off a majority of their functions, limiting the data halo they'd emit for when the security team checked on their empty cell in the morning and began their search.
It had taken them several days of intense listening to choose the right time of night to actually escape their cell. No longer privy to the security team's rotation, they had to assume that their last schedule was obsolete. So they reconstructed it, listening for transmissions, vibrations in the soil through the rock walls, murmurs from above the door hidden beneath the break chairs outside the hangar. Any time Vindilus or Imani paid a visit, they recorded the data halos surrounding theirholotabs for scrutiny, piecing together an admittedly spotty patrol schedule.
Then it was a simple matter of execution. Biognostics excelled at action under stress.
But Jharimwasn'ta bog. When he said he could get them out, he hadn't expected for his partner's casing to open likethat.How much of him was still intact? Was his body a suit? A crypt? A pair of biological arms had been pressed into the space between his ribcage and his hips had dehydrated to the point of mummification. Two fingers, talons longer than a living...
"Venandi," Roav murmured into the echoes of the tunnel. He and Jharim stopped in sync, and the older bog—man—looked back at him.
"Yes."
The memory of that hand flashed across Roav's memory as it reached through the bars of their cell to press the "meal" button on their access panel.
"You have no plates," Roav challenge. "And there is no example in my xenobiology database of venandi with brown coloring."
"All leaves bow to the soil when they rot." Impatience skittered across Jharim's face, but Roav's was more incessant. Yes, he knew they needed to hurry, but there was time. He needed answers. The fixation was all-consuming.
More quietly, Jharim added, "I was an unremarkable shade of dark blue in my youth."
"How did you—" Roav stalled, unsure where to take his hasty question. Jharim's expression darkened.
"Immense personal sacrifice. Come."
As they walked, Jharim spoke softly.
"I have precious little of myself left," he said as they climbed over roots. They passed a small camp littered with rusted rations and a bedroll. "But it is enough. My secondarydiaphragm, my primary heart. Most everything else was replaced by my parumauxi swarm." He jumped down from the root system without a sound, nimble and athletic. Not the corpse housed inside his thoracic cavity.
"Parumauxi are relatively new technologies."
"As they are now, yes. When I was given mine, they were experimental and unregulated. My swarm is wild and acts on my whims as it pleases."
"I do not sense one in you."
"It rarely spends timeinme anymore."
Jharim glanced over his shoulder and the facets Roav had come to read as his face pulsed like a ferrofluid. The phantom of a venandi face pressed against their surface, making eye contact with Roav before it dissipated into nothing. It was a fraction of a moment, but Roav's dermal mesh zinged with shock. He tripped over a seam in the walkway, joints whirring to make up for the lapse.
Then Jharim's face was his again. Or theirs, perhaps.
