Pathways - Jeri Taylor [17]
Closer he drew, and the glow began to take form: it was a woman, dressed in white, with hair so light it looked like a cloud of milk. She was standing where Nimembeh had, looking directly at him. Was she the drill instructor’s simulacrum? His gaze blurred and he shook his head to clear it; perspiration ran into his eyes, stinging them with salt. At that moment he completed his twentieth lap.
The impact on his feet changed suddenly as he ran off the track and onto the grass that surrounded it and felt, rather than saw, the difference in the surfaces. His knees buckled under him and he sprawled headfirst onto the grass, which was cool and yielding. His fingers clutched at the earth in a spasm as his feet howled with fire.
He breathed in the damp aroma of dirt and cut grass, a comforting balm that gradually appeased him. He rolled over on his back and saw the cloud-woman standing over him.
She was probably his age, with skin that was impossibly white. Her eyes were almost colorless, and he realized that she must be from another planet.
“Here,” she was saying, with just the hint of an accent he couldn’t identify. “I thought you might like this.” She was tipping a cup of cool water into his lips, and he slurped at it hungrily, like a baby at its mother’s breast.
“Thanks,” he said, but his voice emerged as a kind of hoarse growl. He realized he hadn’t hydrated before making that run, and might be suffering from electrolyte depletion. He struggled to a sitting position, wincing as the blisters on his feet protested any motion.
“You should get those shoes off,” the woman said. “Better to go barefoot.” She let him take the cup and drain the water from it, then sat back and gazed at him implacably with those impossibly pale gray eyes.
“Who are you?” he asked, as he began the uncomfortable process of removing his boots.
“Svetlana Korepanova,” she replied. “Sveta for short. I’m a first-year cadet, too. From Ekaterinburg, Russia.”
So she was human. He was surprised, and tried to reconcile that fact with her unique features and the almost mystical nature of her appearance on the edge of the track in the place where Nimembeh had been.
“Was my prep squad officer here before?” Chakotay asked, drawing off a sock and seeing two bloody smudges on his toe and heel.
“Yes. He stood there for almost the entire time you were running. Then he left just before you finished.”
“Couldn’t stand it that I lasted the twenty laps,” said Chakotay with a hint of sullenness that Sveta immediately noticed.
“You think he was disappointed to see you persevere?” she asked. “What a curious attitude. He has no reason to want you to fail.”
Chakotay had removed his second boot and sock, and he studied the blister on that foot before he replied. “That’s not the feeling I get. I think he’d enjoy it thoroughly.”
“Would you like to walk in the arboretum tonight?”
Her words took Chakotay completely by surprise. The arboretum was traditionally the location of romantic trysts of various levels of intensity, and as such the source of much titillation and curiosity by the entering cadets. It would never have occurred to Chakotay that a female might invite him on such a dalliance after having exchanged no more than a few dozen words.
“Well?” she asked quietly but with determination. “Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll meet you at the entrance at nineteen hundred hours.”
Chakotay had forgotten the pain in his feet, and the walk back to his quarters was euphoric.
If Chakotay had thought that there was nothing more in store for him than a romantic interlude, he had miscalculated. Not that Sveta wasn’t passionate, for she was, in a straightforward, unabashed way that left him breathless and awed. But she turned out to be a complicated young woman, possessed of many aspects, some of them seemingly contradictory. Affectionate and compassionate,