He had a very rudimentary kind of pants for me, too. They were clearly handsewn, and possibly created in a hurry. Since he did not have legs, he must have crafted them specifically for me. As he took up all the floor space, I had to wriggle into the pants while lying down in the stasis pod, in an awkward shimmy—made all the more awkward by his tail still lingering against my neck, and his avid stare as I moved around.
“This would be easier if you could let go for a minute,” I suggested as politely as I could. I thought it might be rude to touch the tip of his tail, so I only vaguely gestured at my neck, where the slender curl had slipped into the collar of my oversized tunic.
He hissed, for the first time sounding anything but amicable and sweet. His head shook firmly, no, and something tapped against the low ceiling. Horns, how had I not noticed the pair of horns rising from his hair? They were a spiraling, antelope kind of affair, sharp and big; very impressive.
“No, if I don’t touch you, we can’t speak,” he said firmly. He reached out with a hand and touched a finger to my knuckles, and his tail slid away from my shoulder. He waved it between us, all aglow with those intriguing bioluminescent lines, and very demonstratively raised his finger from my flesh. The lights winked out, then back on as soon as he touched me. Whoa, that was kind of cool!
The light show did not explain the ability to understand one another, but I wasn’t going to question it. He hadn’t healed me with some random hand-waving, but used an actual device, so there had to be more to it that I simply didn’t understand. At least he coiled the tip of his tail around my wrist now, and that made things a bit easier when moving around.
Pretty soon I had extra furred boots on over my own military-issue boots, and a hood and an extra scarf wrapped around my head. He was fussing with a very crude kind of mittens, tying them around my wrists now. They wouldn’t allow me to do much at all, but I was beginning to think the weather outsidetheFuturewas really bad. That feeling only got worse when he started wrapping more things around his head, too.
“How bad is it?” I asked with a hint of trepidation. I was a bit too used to sunny weather and air conditioning. Even if I’d been trained for extreme weather conditions, that didn’t mean I liked it. This was an alien world, to boot; I didn’t know what to expect once we stepped outside.
“It’s…” he shuddered, “very cold. Very cold, but then, I am used to the Serqethos desert, not Serant’s North Pole.” Hang on, North Pole? We were on a planet’s icecap? I lifted my eyes to the domed ceiling over the pilot area. It appeared fogged with white pressing against the thick glass. My stomach clenched, not with the aching of stasis sickness, but with fear. Was that ice? Was theFutureburied beneath a thick sheet of ice somehow?
Levant unhooked a small device from above our heads that I hadn’t yet noticed. He tucked it into one of the pouches on his belt, and instantly the temperature inside the ship began to drop. It was very immediate and dramatic, and now I was extremely happy he’d made sure to bundle me up first. Whatever that object was, it had to be a very nifty space heater of some kind.
“We must hurry,” he said, and he leaned down to a panel in the wall just behind the pilot’s chair. To my utter horror, he lifted it and began pulling furred things from the hole, crusted with ice. A gap was revealed that couldn’t possibly be big enough for Levant to fit through, and beyond it, a dark cavern. He’d cut a hole in the hull of my ship to get inside; I was beyond livid at the discovery. Humming with fury, words rattled through my head,and I fought to keep them inside. They wouldn’t help, and it was too late anyway.
The furred things he’d pulled from the hole turned out to be garments he could slide over his tail. It took some doing to get each segment onto his long body and laced together so they couldn’t slide. It was time I spent counting to ten over and over to rein in my temper. It wouldn’t help, I kept saying to myself, and he might have had no choice. Ice, remember, there might be ice pressing down onto the canopy of the ship. It couldn’t open if that was the case.
It turned out to be true. Levant slipped out of that hole first, and then he very carefully assisted me through the gap and down to the ground, which was shockingly far away after a slide through a narrow tunnel of ice. Once I stood on solid ground—or rather, solid ice—I could see the true extent of what had happened to my ship. Levant held out a light for me so it was properly illuminated, as if he knew I needed to see this.
My ship was stuck behind a three-foot-deep wall of ice, one I’d crawled and slid through via a narrow tunnel. Levant must have carved that himself, but I did not believe he’d cut the circular tunnel we were now standing in. It was very precise and very big, stretching on into the dark in either direction. TheFuturewas only visible as an outline of the ship, her bulky form strangely warped beneath the thick wall.
“How deep?” I asked, my voice hoarse. His tail tightened a little around my wrist, a sympathetic squeeze perhaps. His eyes were kind as he tilted his head down toward me. Then they flicked to the ice, along the tunnel, and then to the supplies piled on a sled he must have brought. I didn’t think he knew the answer, but hesurprised me by pulling another device from a pouch on his belt. A scanner of some kind, this one I recognized, but only vaguely.
Lifting it above his head for a moment, he rotated it as if he were making sure he had all his data correct before he answered. “At least a hundred feet. Does that measurement translate to something that makes sense to you? I haven’t studied the extent of our translating abilities between humans and Naga yet.” What a scholarly thing to say; it caught me by surprise in such a way that I found myself smiling despite the horrible news. A hundred feet? Thirty meters? That didn’t happen overnight…
“It did,” I said to him. I stomped my feet to encourage circulation, but the extreme temperatures were already beginning to get to me. It was really freaking cold, and if we were on a pole, that made sense. Wrapped up as I was, I still felt it, and I knew I wouldn’t last more than an hour or so if it stayed like this.
Levant flicked the scanner my way and hissed. “Humans are so fragile, you’re already too cold. We must hurry.” Fragile? Excuse me? I wanted to protest, but the fact was, without proper thermal gear, he was right. His furs weren’t enough to keep me warm out here.
He hurried me toward his sled, rushing to rearrange some of the supplies strapped to it. He was making space for me, I realized. Part of me wanted to object, I could walk myself, and the movement would help me stay warm. But even if I wasn’t nauseous or stiff anymore, I still felt weak and tired. Once I was seated, he piled furs around me and strapped them down with thick, purple rope. Iwaswarm that way. Okay, I’d let him do his thing. I hoped his camp wasn’t far.
Chapter 4
Levant
The camp seemed miles too far, and I worried with every passing minute that Felicia, my mate, would get too cold. Humans were fragile, I knew that, but I had not yet appreciated how frantic that made a male to ensure her health. I relished the anxious feelings anyway. My mate. She was my mate, just like I’d known! I wanted to shout with happiness, dance across the snow like a male possessed, and I wanted to sweep her into my arms and try the mouth-mating humans seemed to like.
Felicia, it was such a beautiful, melodic name that my tongue curled around with pleasure each time I whispered it under my breath. So pretty, just like she was. I tried to see her face, but she was curled deep into the furs and almost entirely obscured. Pale hair, I recalled, and skin dotted with tiny spots across the bridge of her nose. A bit like the gold and green dots that decorated my scales.
Getting her and the sled lifted from the hole to the surface had been tough. My shoulders ached from the strain of pulling on the ropes to raise her, even with the help of several pulleys and cogs to lighten the load. The climb up had been tough too, but I’d felt such urgency to get to her that it had only taken a short time. Now I was dragging the sled across the ice back toward my tent, each gust of wind, each rush of snow into my face making me anxiously peer back at Felicia to assure myself she was fine.
I breathed a deep sigh of relief when we reached the tent at last. More snow than usual had begun falling from the sky, and it hadpiled high against the tent walls in drifts, covering most of the sensors. I’d have to dig those out before I went to sleep later, or we wouldn’t have advance warning if that Revenant came back. The Burrowing Revenant had not attacked my shelter but had passed it without harm, though I didn’t believe we’d be so lucky a second time.
Felicia was awake, her eyes huge, but her energy was clearly flagging. I unstrapped everything on the sled and then hurried to lift her, blankets and all. She needed to get warm in a hurry, and my tent was kept pleasantly heated at all times. She might have tried to say something, but I was not touching her skin, and the wind whipped her words away. The flap was frozen stiff and briefly didn’t budge when I pulled on the closing ties with my tail, and then we were through.
The front entrance was still cold, but here there was no snow and no wind. It was imperative I secured the flaps again before I unsealed the second barrier into my domain. When Felicia bit back an obvious whimper, I ached with the need to throw out that rule, but it wouldn’t help her in the end. It was only a handful of seconds anyway, and then I was carrying her inside, snow drifting onto the thick carpets from our clothing and melting into wet spots right away.
“Holy Hannah, it’s warm in here,” Felicia said. Her crystal-clear voice was easy to understand without the wind and snow interfering. It immediately reminded me of another fact: I’d installed my own translator implants when Artek had shared the human language database with me. I didn’tneedto touch Felicia’s skin to understand her, but she needed to touch me to understand what I said.
I did not want to let go of her, but we needed to strip off our wet layers. She was very wobbly when I lowered her to her feet, the perfect excuse to keep a loop of my tail curled around her. She was so sweet and pretty, already trusting me to care for her. Her face turned up to mine as I undid the knots of her hood and slipped her scarf from around her slender throat. I lingered with my fingers against her skin and told myself it was to check she wasn’t too cold.
“I always keep my home heated. A male could get hypothermia in a hurry out there. If it is too warm, I will adjust it, of course, but I’m used to the deserts of Serqethos normally.” Oh, that was skirting a little too close to the subject of my banishment. I worried she’d ask why I was on the northern pole now, but she didn’t. Perhaps that was because she was exhausted; she wasn’t just a little unsteady on her strange, human feet, she was beginning to sag.
“This is fine,” she said faintly, but she sounded anything but fine. I ignored the thick and somewhat wet layers I was still wearing and hurried to sweep her back into my arms. Laying her down on my nest, I swept the tunic over her head and nudged the footwear off her small feet with my tail. My healing device hummed as I slid it over my hand and raised it over her head. “I’m fine,” she told me a bit more firmly. She wasn’t; her eyes were drooping shut, and then she was out like a light. Asleep, or something more sinister.
