Aftermath - Ann Aguirre [82]
“Have you slept?” I ask him.
“No. I moved to stand watch after you drifted off.”
So he only lay with me long enough to permit me to relax, as I wouldn’t have done alone. How well he knows me. That makes me smile despite the fact we haven’t survived our first night here yet.
“Then it’s my turn. You found a good vantage point above?” At his nod, I ask, “How far up?”
He directs me with an arc of his arm, and then I do something I’m sure he doesn’t expect. “Would you like me to stay until you fall asleep?”
Vel hesitates, his posture a clear Ithtorian expression of surprise. Then he simply answers, “Yes.”
So I lie down at his back, listening until his breathing steadies. I wonder if Adele suspected even before she saw the truth of him. Because he does not sound human at rest, even clad in faux-skin. His inhalations are too deep, slow and long, hinting at extraordinary lung capacity. I wait until I’m sure he’s out, then I slip out from under the thermal blanket and scramble up to the higher lookout position; it’s no more than a notch carved in a thick branch, but it offers a stable place to sit.
The rest of the night is quiet. I can only presume that the bodies at the base of the tree offered predators both an alternate food source and a warning. By the time the sun comes up, I’m tired again but glad of the light as well. Vel stirs as the day brightens, and we suck down packets of paste from my pocket. He swore once he’d rather die than eat the stuff, but we can’t cook up here, not even on his chemical burner, and we have no idea if we can safely eat any of the native flora and fauna. That problem is complicated by the fact that our technology is fried, so we can’t scan for local toxins. I don’t know what we’ll do when our food runs out.
“How are we for water?”
“We need to find a local source. I have purification tablets in my pack.”
“Of course you do. Just in case you get stranded on a class-P world with no functional technology.”
His amusement manifests in a quirk of his hidden mandible that almost resembles a smile when it pulls at his face. “Precisely so.”
“I’ll go down first. Warn me if anything’s about to swoop down on me.”
“Assuredly.”
On the ground, I note that the corpses have been gnawed while we slept. When he joins me, he slices off one of the beast’s legs with his knife. I don’t know if I can stand to watch him eat it; his people enjoy fresh meat. But instead, he pares the flesh away from the bone.
At my inquiring look, he explains, “I am making you a knife.”
After using his own blades to sharpen the bone to a fierce point, he lashes the blade to my shockstick with a thin, tensile vine, and then he cements them with resin seeping from the trees. I take the makeshift weapon and test it with a couple of swings.
“Thank you. We might live through this after all.”
“We will,” he says quietly. “Never doubt it.”
CHAPTER 27
We’ve spent seven nights without seeing anything capable of communicating with us. Ten different species have tried to eat us. This is our eighth day.
The jungle thins ahead, opening to a dark plain where nothing grows, all obsidian and basalt. Deep trenches have been cut in the distant land, though I can’t tell whether it was nature or machinery. I hope for the latter because that’s a sign of civilization.
“Good thing we found the river,” I mutter.
Vel’s purification tablets rendered the water safe to drink but we’re running out of prepackaged meals. Soon, we’ll have no choice but to eat local food and hope for the best. That’s a hell of a gamble, and not one whose odds I like. Though I haven’t said anything, the wound in my side isn’t healing like it should, and gray streaks web my skin around the wound. I’m running a low-grade fever constantly, and nothing in his pack can help me; I searched one night during my turn on watch. I’m not worried because I hope, in time, my nanites will work out a way to repair the damage from alien parasites. I just have to sweat and shiver through their learning curve. I hope.
Of course, if they don’t, there’s nobody to fix them,