by Lauren Esker
"Are you really going to—" Claudia began, but it turned to a shriek when he jumped out of the airlock.
Her arms tightened around his neck and her legs wrapped around him too—strong thighs, he recalled from the other night, as he struggled to breathe. They were caught in the ship's slipstream, jolting and tumbling, and then they dropped lower and he managed to get straightened out and catch an updraft.
There still wasn't much lift, with the weight of two people dangling from his straining wings. The trees were coming up alarmingly fast. Skara steered them sluggishly in a wide circle, hoping to get closer to the Discordia before they lost altitude completely.
Claudia gasped, and Skara looked up to see the bounty hunters' ship trailing smoke. It wobbled over the trees and then arced downward, vanishing from sight. There was no explosion, but smoke plumed up over the trees.
"That ought to get them out of our hair for a little while. Lean right, would you?"
He was getting lightheaded from the strain. The Discordia had better not be too far away.
"So, those trees are getting pretty close," Claudia said in his ear. "Have you thought about maybe ... flying higher?"
"Thanks," he said between his teeth. "Hadn't thought of that."
They swept across a road and a small town, little more than a scatter of blocky houses in the rural landscape. Then there were fields and more trees, with glints of water underneath their leafy canopy. No chance of getting back to the Discordia before he lost too much altitude. The best he could do was find a decent place to land. Preferably not in this swamp, but he was starting to think he didn't have a choice.
"Sorry!" he said, and then he hit the trees.
The shield cushioned their impact in a flurry of green flashes as they knocked leaves and branches off the trees, ripping through the upper canopy. Skara wrapped his wings around Claudia and tried to shelter her, because the shield wasn't going to last long. It died just as they broke through the canopy, and Claudia gave a startled yelp as branches tore at her hair and clothes. Then they were in freefall, and hit the ground hard, with Skara trying to roll and take the brunt of the impact. There was no up and down for a moment as they tumbled through the brush and fetched up at last in a tangled heap.
There was a long silence.
"Are you okay?" he asked at last.
Claudia took a couple of small, gulping breaths and sat up. She patted at her wild fluffed-out hair, then at her arms and legs. "No thanks to you," she said at last.
"I rescued you," he felt compelled to point out as he wobbled dizzily to his feet. His wings remained unfurled, spread out around him in a limp mass. It was a good thing that healing broken bones was pretty easy for a shapeshifter who didn't normally have wings anyway. Ow.
"You're the whole reason I was in danger in the first place!" She looked up at the hanging branches, draped with moss and vines. "Where are we?"
"Somewhere on your planet," Skara said, irritation and pain and his general physical weakness making him testy. Exhaustion rolled through his limbs like thick cold syrup. He had a bad feeling that the stimulants keeping him going had begun to wear off.
"Thank you, that really narrows it d—" She turned toward him and stopped midsentence, her brows drawing together in a frown.
"What?" Skara asked. He felt too lousy to wait for her to spit it out.
"Er ... are you supposed to be that color?"
"What color?" he asked warily.
"Purple."
"Oh," he said. "Yes, that's normal." And then the light abruptly washed out of the world and everything telescoped to darkness.
Six
As Claudia stood in mute bogglement, the man who had just collapsed at her feet began slowly to melt.
She scrambled backward and pressed herself against the trunk of a tree. As she stared, he gradually morphed from some sort of bizarre winged hybrid of The Rock and a crab monster to a relatively normal-looking, handsome young man with purple skin.
Claudia crept nearer and poked him with her toe. He didn't stir.
He'd torn his clothes to rags with his shape changes, so she had a good view of a muscular, well-maintained body, compact rather than over-built. If he stood up, she didn't think he'd be more than a few inches taller than her own 5'7". His skin was a few shades too dark to qualify as violet, his hair a red so deep it looked almost black in the shadows under the forest canopy.
Like the shape-changing female bounty hunter in her violet-skinned form, his body was covered with swirling, pale patterns. Claudia had assumed they were body paint on the woman, but now she wasn't so sure. They covered his shoulders and back, even his (well-toned) buttocks. The only places he didn't have them were on the inside surfaces of hands and feet and forearms, the soft underside of his chin, and the softer skin around his lips and eyes and ears.
He had a pleasant face. It was handsome, though not dramatically so, with high cheekbones and thick lashes over his closed eyes. But more than that, he looked nice. It wasn't something she would have guessed from his rakish, devil-may-care attitude while he was wearing somebody else's face.
Faces could lie, of course. But she thought it looked like the face of a person who would be kind to dogs and small children, and help strangers in trouble.
Not that he'd done much so far except get her into trouble.
She looked up at the trees again. It was still broad daylight up above, somewhere in the afternoon if she were going to guess, but down here the shadows were so deep that dusk seemed to be falling.
She had never been in a forest like this. The overgrown backyard of her childhood home was nothing compared to these great trees, these deep silences. The humidity was so thick it seemed to choke her.
Louisiana? The Everglades? Hell, they could be in the Brazilian rain forest for all she knew. And she was starving, and her feet hurt, and she had leaves in her hair and mud on her clothes, and there were alien bounty hunters after her. She wanted to say this day couldn't get any worse, but so far there was no sign of a bottom to the runaway falling elevator her life had turned into.
She made a move to kick Dwayne for getting her into this, but he looked so vulnerable like that, limply sprawled on the muddy ground, that she reluctantly changed it to a pat on the shoulder instead. His skin was cool to the touch, despite the humid warmth. "Hey, uh ... buddy? Dwayne? Or whatever your real name—hey!" It had just dawned on her that she'd been able to understand him perfectly the entire time. "Were you lying about not speaking English? Oh, my God. We are having words when you wake up."
She decided not to consider the possibility that he might not wake up. The only thing worse than being stranded in the middle of a subtropical swamp was being there alone.
With reluctant gentleness, she dragged him into a less uncomfortable-looking position. All that remained of his clothes were the shreds of his shirt, a belt clasped around his narrow waist with some pouches on it, and the same wide gold bracelets he'd been wearing the other night. A few shreds of his pants still clung to his hips, but not enough to provide warmth or ... er ... cover anything. Not that it mattered, she told herself, her cheeks heating. She'd seen and felt every inch of that body a few nights ago.
And while he'd been a different hue, which was still weird, he hadn't been that different otherwise. She now realized that, although he had made himself look different, he hadn't changed all that much. It had mostly just been his face and hair. The body that had made love to her was the same body she was now carefully laying out on the moss at the base of the trees.
"I wish you'd wake up," Claudia said plaintively. "They could find us again, you know, however they keep finding us. And I really hope you know the way out of these woods, because I sure don't."
She wished she knew more first aid. There had been some Red Cross lessons at summer camp years ago, and that was pretty much it. She felt for his pulse on the soft underside of his wrist, just below the bracelet, and felt a quick flutter. Whether that was good or bad, she had no idea
. At least he had a pulse. That was a good sign. And it was all she knew to look for.
"So ... I'm going to go look around and see if I can find us some help. Um ... stay here, okay?"
Like he was going anywhere. Actually, if he went somewhere, that would be an improvement over his current condition.
She started back along the trail of destruction they'd left when they came in like a crashing WWII bomber. The ground under her feet was wet and overgrown, an obstacle course of mud and plants and snarled roots. She almost lost her shoe when a muddy hole sucked it off her foot. As she hopped along trying to put it back on, something rustled in the undergrowth and she nearly ran into a tree as she realized there could very well be snakes here.
Snakes, poisonous spiders, poisonous plants ... all the many reasons why she and Naomi were never allowed to go play along the bayou as kids.
She wished they'd been outdoorsy kids, instead of the kind of kids who liked to hide in the shed and play games of imagination. Maybe if they'd gone fishing and hunting instead, she would have a clue how to get out of here without being eaten by alligators.
"Hello?" she called. "Help! We're lost!"
A bright flash of color caught her eye. She waded toward it hopefully, only to find her scarf, now ragged and torn, snagged on a branch. She had to jump a couple of times before she caught its trailing edge and pulled it down. It was a brightly patterned yellow and blue scarf with a fringed edge that Naomi had given her a few years ago. She smoothed it down, desperately missing Naomi, and her apartment, and her life.
Was the real Barney okay? Was Naomi worried? Had her coworkers tried to call her when she didn't come in today? Had someone gone to her apartment to find the door broken down and all her things still there, except for her?
She squeezed her eyes shut, teetering on the verge of tears. And then she told herself to woman up. She could cry about it later. Right now she was lost in the wilderness, and she felt that people who sat down and started sobbing in the wilderness were probably not the survival type. She rolled up the scarf and tied it around her forehead to keep her hair out of her eyes, and brushed at the increasingly dense swarm of bugs flying around her head.
"Hello?" she called into the gloom under the trees. "Help!"
She took a few more squelching steps forward, but then she stopped. The farther she went into this moist jungle, the more likely she was going to get utterly and irretrievably lost. She was already nervous about finding her way back to The Alien Formerly Known as Dwayne, and she had what might as well be a giant arrow of broken branches and torn-up brush pointing in his direction. She could wander around in circles until she starved, or fell into quicksand, or got eaten by snakes.
She tried yelling a few more times. The echoes died out among the trees. She thought she could hear an engine somewhere, like a lawnmower or maybe a boat. But she couldn't pin it down to a direction.
Dejected, she slouched back through the brush to not-Dwayne. He was exactly where she'd left him, an immobile lump of purple manflesh with swirling white tattoos standing out in the green-tinted shadows.
"Hi again," Claudia said. "So I don't suppose you're planning on waking up anytime soon?"
She sat down next to him, patted his cool shoulder, and brushed off a couple of—ewww—ants that had gone walkabout on his back. She had forgotten how Nature seemed to consist entirely of things that buzzed and crawled and squished. Her toes felt slimy in her shoes.
She took not-Dwayne's pulse again, and then sat next to him with her arms wrapped around her knees, swatting at bugs. She was getting thirsty enough that even the moisture-slicked leaves were starting to look tempting. There was plenty of water around here; she could hear dripping and some kind of moist "plop" which she really hoped was a frog jumping into a pond and not, say, an alligator. If only she knew how to tell whether she could drink any of it without getting dysentery.
If she had a phone, she could Google for "how to find potable water in the jungle."
Of course, if she had a phone, she could call Naomi and have the National Guard send a helicopter to rescue them. Or whatever agency handled people lost in the wilderness.
On top of all their other problems, the longer they stayed here, the more risk of the bounty hunters finding them again. Claudia wasn't going to wager her life on those two having died in a fiery crash.
"You know, I'm not really an expert in rescues, but I can't help thinking this isn't a very good one," she told not-Dwayne.
She rested her hand on his shoulder. It wasn't much help, but it reminded her that she wasn't alone here. Then, hesitantly, she lay down beside him on the moss and put an arm over him.
That was nice. He wasn't as warm as she would have liked, but he was a solid human ... well ... human-feeling presence next to her. She could feel the slow rise and fall of his rib cage against her torso. When she turned her face into his neck, she found that he had a pleasant smell, spicy and masculine, vaguely familiar from the other night. Having had quite limited experience with men, she wasn't sure if they always smelled like this, but she liked it.
"Wake up soon," she whispered, her breath barely stirring the wisps of dark red hair straggling damply along his neck.
Seven
Waking in a beautiful woman's arms was a vast improvement over most of the places Skara had previously woken up when he'd passed out inconveniently. Jail cells. Back alleys. The Box ...
The memory of that utter blackness, the confines of those narrow walls pressing on him, sent a brutal bolt of adrenaline through him. For an instant he was that child again, clawing at the walls, screaming to someone, anyone, to let him out—
And then he was lying rigid with someone's arms around him. Claudia. He recognized her perfume and the warm musk of her skin.
His first instinct was to push her off, his second to roll over and hold on tighter, but then she took the choice out of his hands by stirring and sitting up.
"Are you awake?" she asked.
"Uh, yeah." He rubbed a hand over his face, noticing in passing that it was his hand, the right size and the right shape and even the right number of fingers. He didn't seem to have wings anymore. He must have reverted back when he passed out; it tended to happen when he hadn't worked hard to fix the form beforehand.
"Good!" Claudia said, and smacked his shoulder. "That is for getting me in danger and then rescuing me in the all-time worst rescue I have ever experienced."
"How many times have you been rescued?" he asked, rubbing his face again. He felt awful, muddle-headed and weak and achy. And now his shoulder hurt. The woman had a good hitting arm on her. "Do you make a habit of it?"
"Shut up."
He couldn't help laughing a little as he sat up. It was growing dark beneath the trees, and through the canopy of branches, the sky was an unusual pink color. What planet had a sky like that—? Oh, right. Planets' skies changed colors at dusk. They'd crashed through the trees on Claudia's world. Right.
"Not that you deserve sympathy," Claudia said crankily, "but you ... um ... you look pretty bad." Her voice gentled a bit. "Are you hurt?"
"Not really." And then his eyes flew wide as the rest of recent events came crashing down on him. "You stole my symbiont!"
"What?" Claudia snapped. "The stupid symbiont again! They want it, you want it—what is it and why did you give it to me?"
"Why did I what?"
They stared at each other in the gathering gloom under the trees.
"Well, I certainly didn't have it before!" Claudia said. "Whatever it is. What is it? It's the thing that makes holes open up in the air, right?"
"I thought you said you didn't know how! Are you telling me we could have portaled out this entire time?"
"No!" Claudia retorted, pointing at him with a hand swatched with drying mud. "I don't know how! I've done it twice, both times by total accident. Are you going to answer any of my questions or just keep asking new ones?"
"If you can use it, then you can get us back to the ship
," he mused aloud.
"I guess that's a 'no' on the answering questions, then."
"I will answer all your questions," he promised. "But first let's get back to my ship, where we can get clean and dry and I can get—damn it," he interrupted himself. "You can't take us there. You haven't seen it. You can only portal to a location you've seen."
"Well, that sounds pretty useless."
"Not at all. When did you use it before? I'm going to guess it was in a moment of danger or alarm, and it took you to a familiar place—correct?"
"Yes," she said reluctantly. "Those guys were chasing me—I mean, guy and girl, or whatever she is. You're like her, right? Are you working with them?"
"No," Skara said. "I mean, yes, she's one of my kind." Which was a question that demanded its own answer. Iustrans were rare; the odds against running into one of them here at the back end of the galaxy by pure chance were astronomical. "But no, I'm not with them. What, the fact that I rescued you from them didn't tip you off?"
"For certain values of rescued," she muttered.
"Claudia. Listen." He rested his hands lightly on her upper arms, holding on loosely enough that she could easily pull away if she wanted to. "We can talk about this later. First, I need you to find a location near my ship that you can portal to. That warehouse ought to do—"
"And that's another thing!" She jerked away from his grasp. "Not only do you turn into other people, but you were, what, trying to get into my pants by pretending you couldn't speak English? You know my name, but I don't have the first clue about yours, Dwayne."
"Dwayne ...? Never mind, tell me later. It's Skara. My name, I mean. But I wasn't pretending. You didn't have a translator then. You do now."