34 Tovis
Jessa shielded hereyes from the bright morning light and smiled at me as we helped Jiith from his sick room and outside.After our long night of interrupted sleep and hours of gentling, she had dark circles under eyes but had refused to go back to sleep when I’d come back with Sal.
The baby percer was full of energy and she wanted to give him a chance to run around and check on Jiith.The syto was moving stiffly but had jumped at the chance to leave his cot and I let him lean on me as we slowly walked through the center of camp and toward the open ground past the tents.
“I want to say you look better,” Jessa said, eyeing Jiith as he hissed out a breath and winced with each halting step.
“I feel better,” he rasped, tentacles flaring weakly around his shoulders.The two missing appendages were still scabbed and swollen where they’d been ripped off and the stumps didn’t react like the rest of them.
“Do you?”she asked.“Because you look like death.”
Jiith let out a harsh laugh and closed his eyes.“My body may be irreparably damaged, but I feel lighter than I ever have.I think I may even be happy.”
“You could have a good life here,” I said, pausing when his grip on my arm tightened.“But it will take time for you to be up for anything more than this.”
“Hobbling a few steps at a time?”he asked.“I begin to wonder if I’ll ever walk on my own again.”
“It hasn’t even been a week,” Jessa chided.“Give your body some time.Rest, food, lack of torture, all great healers.”
“If I was in a cruiser, I would have been recycled already,” he confided.“Any injury that required more than a quick bandage and a med pack was a death sentence under the Kwin.”
My mate let out an unhappy sound at that.
“She’s a monster,” she muttered.“She told me she’s lived hundreds of years and she wouldn’t even give her own people time to rest?”
“She doesn’t see us as her people,” Jiith said plainly.“The Elite consider themselves separate, the rest of us were easily replaceable.”
I looked out over the flat ground, awed as always at the vast open space.The years I’d spent in the cruiser, cramped and locked away had been torture even without the beatings and constant threat of death.Turochs were meant for wide plains and fresh air.
Sometimes I wondered if this planet was a fever dream created from my longing for freedom.A strange shape caught my attention, a blur on the horizon that hadn’t been there yesterday.
I stiffened as I scanned the terrain, wondering if I was imagining the shape in the distance.
“Do you see that?”I asked, pointing it out.
Jessa and the syto followed my gaze.
“The dark spot?”Jessa asked, squinting.“Is it a car?”
“I see it,” Jiith said, confirming my worry.
I tilted my ears forward, staring at the shimmering horizon and slowly the growing smear of blue in the distance.
“The Kwin?”Jiith asked, his voice resigned.
“Sytos,” I confirmed.“I doubt the Kwin would risk going into battle herself.”
“She wouldn’t,” Jiith said, his shoulders tensing as we stared at the approaching threat.The camp’s location had been carefully chosen.There was little cover for miles unless you approached from the city.The mass of sytos was too far for me to guess at their numbers, but close enough to confirm they were headed this way.
Jessa slipped her hand into mine, Sal squirming as she pressed him to her chest.
“How long until they get here?”she asked.
I looked down at Jiith and he grimaced.“We’ve never engaged an enemy on the ground, but we don’t have the stamina to run that distance and still fight.”
“Without the scout ships they lack the advantage,” I said, knowing I had to warn the camp but loathe to turn my back on the incoming threat.
“They have stunners, and shock sticks.”Jiith offered.“The stunners won’t be effective against turochs at a great distance, but it gives them more space than hand to hand.”
