“He could be lying. He wants to take you away. Claim you.” He spits the last two words.
“When you have lived without change for two hundred years, tell me how you feel. You would take the first chance you have to make a change. Any change.” Eskar glances at me.
I don’t know which he wants more, me or death. It’s not reassuring. Nor is the thought of being stuck here forever, of changing into something else. I push the thought aside. I have to deal with right now, before I can worry about the future. “We need to find Ava and Wraight.”
“Maybe they’ve taken off together,” Harding says.
I doubt it. Besides, I saw Wraight get bitten. “Where would they go?”
“There’s a whole planet to explore.” Eskar adds. “She could be anywhere.”
“She wouldn’t have gone far, she was following the lights.” I turn away. “Ava! Wraight!”
I move away from the guys. Ava can’t be dead. I stumble over something. The med kit. While I’m too late to help Calloor, I might be able to help the others. I call out again.
Eskar strides over. “Stop shouting. You will attract others.”
That might be a good thing. “So? I need to find my friends.”
He puts a hand on my arm. “I broke the rules.”
I spin and stare at him, all pale and shimmery in the starlight. He’s flesh, but his skin gleams like ice. “What rules?”
“No one is supposed to interfere in the first hundred days.”
I stare at him. I’m supposed to be dead at the bottom of the dark lake. While I wouldn’t care because I’d be dead, I care now, because I’m alive. I always expected to die in space, and that was fine. This is something else. “What were you planning on doing? Helping until your shift at the ship was up and then leave me?”
“I didn’t really think it through. I just knew I couldn’t let you die.”
“And now I’m stuck on this world, and I’ll be alone with only Harding for company forever if you die.” I step in close and jab his chest. “I don’t even know how I’m supposed to complete the mating thing.”
Eskar grabs my hand and kisses my knuckles with his cold lips. “The same way most matings are completed.”
My body pulses with need at the thought of getting naked. While I can’t force the lust away, I refuse to be a slave to it. “If you want sex, why didn’t you sting one of the Paohl crew?”
He drops my hand. “I am young, with low status. I am at the bottom of the list for mates.” He lowers his gaze to the ground. “I didn’t expect to live for so long.”
“What will happen now?” I walk around the edges of the clearing looking for Ava and Wraight. Everything is swathed in shadows. Every minute counts if they’re bleeding and I’m wasting time chatting to Eskar. But no one has answered my calls. Not even a groan.
“That depends on you.”
“Let’s pretend that I do…mate with you… What then?” I step out of the clearing. I’m sure this is where Ava ran after the lights. What had she seen that made her give chase? Had there been something else that I hadn’t noticed?
“Then I finish my rotation here and return to the Paohl village upstream.”
“Ava.” I call, my ears straining to hear anything. The insects and other wildlife are too loud. I turn to Eskar. “And what happens to me?”
“You follow at the end of your hundred days?”
“That’s a dumb plan.” I could be eaten in that time. Or die of a hundred different things.
“Yeah.” He considers me for several heartbeats. “But if I take you with me, there’ll be trouble.”
“Because you interfered.”
He nods.
I grin. “So we don’t tell them.” Then we can live in a village that knows what to eat and hope that human rescue finds us. I imagine everyone will be glad to leave. Or will they die because they are too old and too changed? I don’t want Eskar to be studied in a lab.
