“I know.”
“Where do you live? Can you help us?”
He glances away. The sun catching on his pale blue skin. The tips of his pointed ears peek out of his hair, which isn’t solid white the way I’d thought, but ribboned with blues and greens like he was made of ice. Ever changing, cold yet beautiful.
“I can’t. I’m sorry.” He turns, and I see a delicate ridge of spines running down his back, then his tail, and he is gone in a glimmer of light.
I stare for a moment longer. Impossible. And yet…the Paohl are distinctive in their physiology. But the Paohl don’t live anywhere near this planet, this system, and they certainly didn’t breathe water. But in looks he matches their description.
“Leah!”
I blink and shake my head, then glance over my shoulder. Ava has crept closer to me. “I’m coming. Stay back. The ice is cracked and slippery.”
I take one last look at the water then walk across the ice as quickly as I dare. It doesn’t move under my feet.
Chapter 4
In the cave,which is more of a depression in the rock-face, I review our supplies while Calloor tries to raise someone via the tiny comms unit from the emergency bag. When we reached the cave, he climbed up the mountain and set off another emergency beacon.
Tomorrow, Ava wants us to move on and find a better place to make camp. She’s determined that we’ll head upstream. We’re in a valley at the moment and the mountains at our backs are jagged and snowcapped.
It sounds good to me. Though I’m not finding it too cold. Maybe there is something wrong with me. My temperature is a little low when I check it, but that might be an aftereffect of my near drowning in the frigid water.
Calloor mutters a few curses, then pushes it all aside and leans against the rock. I’m guessing no one has replied to the distress call. The survey ship missed its routine check-in, twice. Their beacon never activated—did ours? We were sent to retrieve the ship and the valuable data. Is the mining company looking at our beacon signal and putting together a team, or have they decided to cut their losses and run?
I stare out at the trees; they alone are worth sending a ship and crew to collect. Then there're the minerals and metals in the ground. The mining company could send a whole set up and turn a profit in days.
My gut tightens. So why has no one else come and stripped this world bare?
I don’t want to believe that it’s cursed, but…
To distract myself, I make a neat stack of the food. There isn’t enough. Even if we share three tonight and three at breakfast, they’ll all be gone and then we’ll be hungry. The bottled water is already gone, and we’re now melting snow in the bottles. Surviving is going to be grim.
Even if the main ship is aware we are down, or they start to worry today when we don’t make contact to tell them we’ve got the survey ship and the crew, that doesn’t mean they’ll leap into action.
It takes six days to get here. So that’s at least six days until we are rescued. We’ll run out of purification tablets, but that’s okay as we can boil the water. I look at the neat stack of ready to eat rations. Even if I convince people that we share only two tonight and two for breakfast, that only buys us one extra meal. We’ll have to find food. Eating anything here will be a risk. The plants might be toxic, the animals might be poisonous.
I close my eyes and sigh. It might have been better to drown.
Ava sits next to me. “Give me the rest of the bad news.”
I glance at her. “Um…what have you heard so far?”
“That we can’t raise any help or receive any signal. Calloor thinks it’s the mountains or the electrical storm. He wants to go up.”
“We have basic medical supplies. I can fix cuts and burns and minor breaks, but that’s about it. There’s no food, and only enough tablets to purify the water for a week.” I shrug, but there’s no way to pretty up the truth. “We’re damned.”
She nods. “Yeah, I figured. I just wanted your expert opinion.”
“You’re in charge.”
“That means knowing who to talk to and making a plan. It doesn’t mean I know everything.” She stands. “Let’s eat, build up the fire and take turns in sleeping and keeping watch. Fuck knows what lives here.”
Us now.
We eat in silence, sharing the two heating blankets between the five of us. We huddle against the back wall with the fire between us and the night.
I don’t sleep well, it’s almost a relief to take my turn keeping watch just before dawn. At least I don’t have to fake rest. I sip hot water and pretend that it’s coffee, or one of the stim substitutes available.
