Page 27 of Feral Tamed

Once he was secured, I hooked up the IV container to the outside of the door and looked up to see how Fierce was doing. The cages made a rattling sound, my body jolting as everything suddenly became ten times lighter than it should be. We weren’t quite without gravity yet, things hadn’t started floating, but when I moved, I tumbled over, and spun through the air before hitting the cages with a thud.

“Hina!” Fierce called out, I wasn’t hurt, just disoriented, and a little eeked out by hitting cages covered in shit. He was pushing cages out of his way that had tumbled down into a messy pile, scrambling to get to me, right as gravity suddenly shifted again. Everything felt heavy, my body thunking to the metal floor in an ungraceful heap. When I lifted my head, I was just in time to see him slide across suddenly shifted floor panels. It was as if a hole had opened up, and he went down it in a flash.

One moment, our eyes had locked, his yellow to my brown ones. Then his eyes went wide in shock as his footing disappeared. He was gone so fast that I struggled to comprehend what had happened. I frantically scrambled across the floor to the hole, noting that a whole section of panels had slipped to the side, revealing a borehole.

“Fierce!” I yelled, struggling to properly see when Fluffy was getting in the way of my face inside the helmet. My HUD was still signaling that the air was breathable so I clicked that helmet out of its lock around my throat, and shoved it aside. “Fierce!” I yelled again, my voice echoing in the huge metal room. My eyes were instantly assaulted with a stinging pain, my nose burning from the stench that filled this place.

At least Fluffy got out of my way, jumping from my shoulder to rush to the edge of the hole. For a moment I feared she’d leap down it, but she made an anxious mewling sound and looked back at me with her green eyes as if telling me to fix this.

With my heart pounding in absolute terror, I got on my belly to slide to the edge and look down it. “Fierce!” I yelled again, the hole was deep, and it was really dark. I couldn’t see a thing, so I yanked the emergency light from my belt and turned it on, the beam wasn’t strong enough to light the bottom, so with my fingers crossed, I threw it down the hole.

Snarl was whining, making anxious noises as he belly-crawled to the edge on my other side. Together we watched the shimmering, smooth rock walls going down, and down, and down even more. This shaft was hundreds of feet deep. When the light finally seemed to hit the bottom with a metallic thud, I couldn’t see anything in detail. I thought I saw a shape crumpled just inside the beam of light, was that Fierce? He wasn’t moving.

I looked up to see what I could do, I had to get down there somehow, I had to get him out. I tried not to think about the possibility that he was dead, that fall was so deep, how could he have survived? I tried to tell myself that the fluctuating gravity might have broken his fall. There had to be hope.

The crane in this room was my best bet, I was on my feet and running to it. The long arm wasn’t angled over this hole, and the machine was rusted, but a long steel cable with a hook still dangled from the boom. I had to leap up to get to it, but my body weight pulled it free, the winch rattling and groaning. I doubted this thing was safe to dangle my weight from but I didn’t see any other options, I had to get down there.

Just as I reached the edge, the hook at the end clipped to my spacesuit buckles I was startled when Da’vi stumbled into the room. There was a huge crack in his helmet and two pointed holes in his face plate. He’d hit his head, hard, so hard that his horns had broken through the protective plas front. “What are you doing?” he groaned at me, struggling to free the latch on his helmet so he could better see.

With my heart pounding anxiously, every second lost seemed too much, I needed to hurry and get to Fierce now. I explained, “Fierce fell down there, he’s unresponsive so I’m going to get him.” It was a good thing climbing and heights had never bothered me, that had helped me down on the planet with Fierce, and it was going to help me now.

Da’vi managed to get his helmet free and glared at the rusted crane full of mistrust. “Give me that hook, I’ll go.” I shook my head, sitting down on the edge of the borehole with my feet already over the edge. I checked once to make sure the hook was properly attached, “I’m lighter, I’m going. You need to get to that crane and control my descent.” He seemed a little blurry, but the clear task sharpened his focus.

He shoved fallen crates out of his way, thankfully empty or at least without anything alive in it, as he made his way over to the crane. His leap inside the operator’s cabin, clunking noises issuing forth almost immediately, and then a bright overhead light came on at the end of the crane’s boom. “Ready, let me see if this thing can spin so you are clear over the hole.”

With groans and creaks, the crane turned on its platform, the boom swinging out over the hole. I swallowed the excess saliva pooling in my mouth and tightened my grip around the steel cable in preparation for jumping down. I really hoped Da’vi could control my descent or this was going to be painful. I vaguely thought I might be able to use the tiny boosters in the suit, meant for steering in zero-g to slow my fall. But I was so not an expert on space suits that I was unsure where the controls even were.

Snarl nudged my shoulder, from his maw dangling the medkit I’d used on the animal I’d tried to help earlier. Grateful, I snagged it from him and hung it back around my body by its straps. I hoped I wouldn’t need it but I feared that I would, I feared even more that I was going to be too late.

“Ready, I think I got control of this. On three,” came Da’vi’s gruff voice. He spoke in subharmonic tones, the dual sound lending an even deeper bass to what he said. I wasn’t exactly comforted by what he’d said, but there was no time to dally, if Fierce was down there bleeding out, I had to hurry to try to stop it. I did not intend to lose him after I’d just found my place with him.

I looked at Snarl’s anxious face, “You can’t reach him either can you?” I asked the hound. He didn’t offer any kind of response, as if he didn’t want to dash my hopes. So I counted to three out loud and leaped into that hole, doing for Fierce, what he’d done for me once.

*

Fierce

With a groan, I came awake. My head was pounding and my body ached like it was one big bruise. At first, I couldn’t figure out where I was or what had happened to make me hurt like this. There was a bright light shining directly into my face but it was a lot of effort to lift my arm and swat it aside. My gloved palm made contact with an emergency light, the metal casing clattering across the floor as the light spun away.

I was in a hole, a deep one. Above my head, I saw the circle of light from the room with the cages. Adrenaline shot through my body as I remembered that Hina was up there. Now I clawed myself into a sitting position, fighting to get to my feet. Everything spun around me, waving and dancing, my head pounding. I felt like that time that huge Hoxiam punched me in the head, one of my only losses in the arena. A concussion was not good, but at least I was fairly certain nothing was broken.

“Hina!” I yelled, but the sound was weak, my ribs aching from the effort. Okay, so maybe some things were broken, after all. Was she alright? Had the gravity shift hurt her? The last I’d seen her she’d slammed into a pile of those crates and then took a nasty tumble to the metal floor. I hadn’t seen Snarl, had he gotten hurt?

I tried not to let those thoughts chase me into a panic, but it was hard because this hole I was in was entirely sleek and smooth. The huge drill they’d used to make this shaft had smoothed out those edges with extreme precision. I could never climb this, not even when I was uninjured. What now? My friends could be hurt up there, Hina could be hurt. And Luka was missing, there was some unknown threat, what if it got to her too?

I picked up the light and examined it, that wasn’t mine, mine was still clipped to my belt. So someone else had thrown it down this hole after me, that had to have been deliberate. Was Hina working to get me out of here? Had she thrown her light after me?

My eyes snagged on the com dutifully strapped to my wrist. I was better at using it now, and Hina and I had deciphered and memorized some of the symbols together. Should I try to call her? I knew we were supposed to be on what Hina called ‘radio silence,’ so that the Aderian authorities wouldn’t notice us. Luka had told us they wouldn’t want us to interfere but they were so bureaucratic (whatever that meant) that any action they took would take forever and a day.

Deciding to risk it, because I really needed to know that Hina was alive, and that help was coming, I tapped my com and then the symbol sequence that was Hina’s name. I remembered vaguely that Akri had said that if we did need to use our coms, short range was a low enough risk to take. Didn’t stone dampen the signal? Maybe I couldn’t even reach her.

“Fierce?” her voice came over my com in an anxious, breathless tone. “Are you alright? Are you hurt?” she demanded, her voice crystal clear as if she was standing right next to me. I tilted my head to look up at the light spilling down this borehole, wondering if I was imagining the shadow in the center or not.

“I’m alright, I’m fine,” I assured her, “And you? Are you hurt? You took a nasty fall when gravity changed.” She’d just tucked that injured Riho into a crate, I hoped that meant the poor guy was at least secured enough not to get further injured. I’d been so proud of seeing Hina confidently work on him, giving him the medical attention he needed.

“Fine, Snarl too,” she responded, “I’m on my way down, hang tight okay? I’ll have you out of there in no time.” There really was a slight shadow blocking out the light coming from above. My heart rate spiked anxiously when I realized Hina was coming down this hole, she was following me so she could rescue me. The reversal of our situations wasn’t lost on me, and I felt both extremely worried that she’d hurt herself, or fall as I had, and joyous knowing she was taking such a risk for me.

“Fierce,” she said over the com, “I love you. And we are never going to come near holes ever again, you hear me?” I laughed, elated at her declaration and wholeheartedly agreeing with her. She loved me, my mate, she was stuck with me now. I hadn’t needed the words though, the fact that she was climbing down this hole to rescue me had said it all.