Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [78]
It beat with hope. It beat with tenderness.
It beat with regret. It beat with jealousy and self-pity and shame. With fear and despair.
It was no wonder she let no one see it, for she could barely stand to look at it herself. It gave her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.
As small as it was, as deeply buried and tightly held, that secret heart was strong enough to overwhelm her. She knew it.
And knowing was itself enough to make it stronger.
The morning after the soldiers came, Seven sat at the single rickety table in the shack and chopped vegetables for the day’s soup.
It was something she did well, though she could not remember ever having done it before in her life. Skillfully, she reduced each root and gourd to a pile of tiny, perfect cubes, all identical in size.
“I am sorry I did not bring you up from the cellar last night,” said Zolaluz, out of breath as she hobbled in the front door with a kettle of water from the well. “I was afraid that more soldiers would come.” Zolaluz was stooped and twisted between her makeshift crutches. Her golden, feline eyes were hidden behind thick glasses, and her skin was neon pink. Her short snout resembled that of an anteater-slender, tubular, and ending in a black button nose and down-curved lip.
Walking was a struggle for Zolaluz, so hauling the kettle required a titanic effort. Her left leg was gone from the knee down, replaced by a primitive wooden prosthetic, little more than a peg leg.
“Apologies are unnecessary,” Seven said evenly, dicing an orange pod with the knife.
“They come every night and every day now,” said Zolaluz. “They say that you are dangerous. Each militia thinks you are working for its enemy.”
Seven nodded. No one but Zolaluz had seen her, but the militias had guessed correctly that someone from the crashed shuttle had escaped into the jungle.
“The rumor is,” said Zolaluz, “what they really want is for you to show them how to use your sky-ship.”
Seven had crash-landed her shuttle while pursuing the Hazari bounty hunters who had kidnapped Captain Janeway from a research station in a nearby system. Though Seven had brought down the Hazari ship before crashing, her shuttle had been badly damaged. “What little is left of my ship,” said Seven, “is of no use to anyone anymore.”
“They do not know that,” said Zolaluz. “They will be back. I am afraid to bring you out of the cellar for even a short time now.”
“Do not be,” said Seven. “I am recovering rapidly.” Indeed, her broken leg would soon be repaired, thanks to the work of the busy nanoprobes that constituted her Borg heritage.
A day and a half, and she would be able to walk unaided again. Another day after that, and she would regain one hundred percent of the function in her leg.
Zolaluz, on the other hand, would never heal. At least, not with the level of medical care available on her technologically primitive world.
Afflicted in childhood by a ravaging illness, Zolaluz had been left permanently debilitated, her muscles withered and weakened. Not only had she lost her lower left leg, but the one that remained intact wasn’t so good, either; she had to walk with the aid of crude crutches, and even that was accomplished only with great difficulty.
Most of the time, when she was moving, she seemed on the verge of collapse. Painstakingly, she inched the crutches forward, then dragged her body after them, step by unsteady step. Her progress was like that of an old woman, though she was actually younger than Seven.
And yet, in spite of her limitations, Zolaluz had pulled Seven from the flaming wreckage of her shuttle. She had helped Seven, with her broken leg, to struggle across miles of jungle in the middle of the night to the safety of the shack. Watching her now, Seven was still surprised that Zolaluz had accomplished all that.
Crossing the shack, Zolaluz hefted the kettle of water onto the table with