Doctor Who_ Beyond the Sun - Matthew Jones [111]
Damn. She’d been so busy thinking of herself that she hadn’t spared a thought for the boy.
What should she do? What was the Sunless thing to do? She was all too aware of the guard ahead of them. Watching them closely.
Helping him was out of the question: they didn’t go in for basic human kindness around here.
But if she abandoned him to the winter blizzard, he wasn’t going to be able to get up on his own.
She thought all of this in the few short steps it took for her to catch up with him. Without quite knowing why, she grabbed hold of Emile under his arms, and pulled him roughly to his feet. His large brown eyes were glassy and unfocused. His mouth hung open. The shark teeth she had carved out with eyeliner had already smeared hopelessly. He looked like he’d been chewing on a leaky pen.
She’d never seen him look so young.
Grabbing hold of the collar of his uniform with one hand, so he wouldn’t fall, she slapped him hard around the face with the other.
He gave a little cry which was swallowed by the hungry wind.
‘Baby, you gotta move,’ she begged urgently. And he wobbled slightly, like a string puppet in the hands of a drunk, before nodding vaguely and marching on with new determination.
She didn’t take her eyes off him until he reached the ship.
By the time her boots clanked against the metal of the ramp, Tameka was pretty sure that she was suffering serious oxygen starvation. The pressure in her head was so intense that she felt as if she had been holding her breath underwater for a month. The veins must have been standing out on her forehead like worm casts in wet sand.
She was halfway up the slope, when she heard the guard call out.
Damn. She had been beginning to think that they had got away with it. Bernice and the others were on board now. Only Emile was still in view. Just in front of her.
She paused for a second, and then decided to risk walking on.
The voice came again, harsher this time. This was one Sunless who wasn’t going to be ignored.
She took a deep breath of nothing and fixed her face into a neutral expression before turning to face it.
It marched over to her and pointed at Emile, who like a fool had also stopped, and then started speaking to her in its strange guttural language. It was quite old, tiny wrinkles cut into its angular face. She didn’t understand a word it was saying of course, but the meaning wasn’t hard to fathom. She shouldn’t have slapped Emile out on the rocks. Tameka had no idea whether it thought that she’d been too lenient or too harsh. But the fact remained that it didn’t approve.
Emile was standing next to her as still as a statue.
She was wondering exactly how she was going to handle the situation, when the Sunless gave up with words and smacked her around the face.
This was no ordinary smack. The cold only made the pain worse. Like when someone steps on your toe when you’ve been out in the snow. The blow left her doubled over. For a moment, she thought the bastard had broken her jaw.
She screamed out in outrage, screamed in anger, screamed in pain. Cursed the wrinkly Sunless with all the swearwords she’d ever heard. The vilest and ugliest ones. Then she kicked him in the bollocks and stamped on his head.
But only in her mind. On the outside, in the real world, she just pulled herself upright and averted her eyes. She had to fight an instinct to nurse her face with her hand.
The Sunless said something else and then returned to its post, missing the first whimper which she had been unable to contain. Tameka paused to let the violent trembling in her legs subside before she trusted her ability to walk and could climb the ramp and enter the ship.
On the bridge Iranda watched the violent encounter between the Sunless.
She found it strange that the female hadn’t responded to the direct questioning of the other.
Weakness is death. So why had the female helped the child? And that was another thing: why was there an adolescent on board? That was unusual