by Lauren Esker
"Skara! What's wrong?"
"Nothing," he gasped out, but one hand was fisted in the front of his shirt, over his chest.
"Skara!"
Fortunately at the moment they were alone in the corridor, because ripples of color were flickering over his skin, the Rhuadhi brown fading back and forth with waves of his natural purple. When Claudia caught hold of him and helped him sit down, she could feel him shivering. His heart was racing, pounding so that she could feel it when she held him.
"Skara, you need to lie down. I can portal us back to the ship—"
"Can't," he panted. "Portal block."
That's right. She felt suddenly, horribly trapped. No longer than she'd had the ability to teleport herself, being without it left her feeling lost and helpless and weak.
She knew in that moment that she couldn't give up the symbiont. She wouldn't.
Unless it was the only way to save Skara's life. That, she could do. Would do in a heartbeat, if she could.
"Skara," she said desperately, as he panted against her neck and clung to her, shaking with pain. "We should talk to them, tell them what's going on. Maybe they'll help."
"Maybe they'll throw us in prison," he gasped. "Or execute me. Damn it ... I'm going to have to ... help me get out the injector."
She pressed it into his hands, and watched nervously as he pressed it to his arm.
"That stuff's killing you, isn't it?"
"Withdrawal is killing me just as fast." He gave her a ghastly grin. "I only brought one dose, because one dose is all I can handle. After this, we'll either win, or not."
"Skara, please ..."
"I don't have a choice, sweet Claudia," he said gently, and pressed the injector's trigger. His body relaxed visibly, and his shivering began to fade. She continued to stroke his hair as the tension eased out of him and his shifted disguise stabilized again.
"Better?" she asked. He nodded and stood up, but had to catch himself on the wall. When he moved to put away the injector, it slipped from his shaking fingers and fell to the floor.
"You're not better," she protested, reaching for him. "It didn't do anything."
"I can move, can't I?" His voice was tight. He shrugged her off, scooped up the injector, and started off again—shakily at first, then getting his balance. "Come on. Let's find the symbiont chamber."
"What does it look like?" Claudia asked, hurrying after him. "It'd help if I knew what I was looking for!"
"Big room. Lots of symbionts. Very glowy."
"Not helpful!"
"The doors should be purple-and-white striped, if that helps any, and—shhh!"
There were rapid footsteps and official-sounding voices coming from the bend in the corridor just ahead of them.
"Damn it—" Skara tried the nearest doors, which were all locked. An instant later, two purple-clad guards came around the corner and paused at the sight of them.
Skara straightened up, his ill, wan look dropping away. No matter how many times she saw him do it, Claudia was still impressed at how well he could hide how awful he must be feeling. Not to mention the way his expression changed everything about him. She didn't think he'd shapeshifted his features at all, but suddenly he was wearing a look of wide-eyed, vacuous innocence.
"Hi!" Skara declared, waving his arms. Claudia tried to change her own expression to match, though she was pretty sure all she managed was a deer-in-the-headlights sort of look. "We're lost!"
"You sure are." The bigger of the two guards folded his arms and loomed ominously. "You can tell me who you're here to see. Patient's name, please." He scowled. "Now."
"Uh," Skara said, and whipped out his hand. There was a flash of green light. Both guards crumpled.
"Skara!"
"What? They're just stunned." Skara crouched and began stripping off their clothes.
"Oh, Skara, no."
"Oh, yes," Skara said, tossing her the uniform of the smaller guard. "This'll buy us some time."
The clothes, a loose tunic and pants, were ill-fitting and still warm from someone else's body heat. Ewww. But Skara was right; anything that would make them look less out of place was probably good. Claudia put them on over her regular clothes. She shed the winter coat—it was much too warm now—and draped it over the mostly-naked guard.
Skara pulled on the loose-fitting uniform from the larger guard. Looking down at himself, he bulked out strategically until he filled out the uniform. He was now more than a head taller than Claudia with massively broad shoulders.
The guard groaned and stirred. Skara stunned him again.
"Skara! Come on! Stop that!"
They hurried off down the corridor. At the next locked door, Skara waved a badge clipped to his new uniform and the door opened onto a stairwell.
"Yes! Now we're getting somewhere."
As they stepped into the stairwell, an alarm went off somewhere in the facility, a loud wailing sound.
"Either Ilyx sold us out, or they just found the owners of our new clothes," Skara said.
"Where are we going?"
"Down. At the other place, the symbiont facility was underneath all the patient levels." He looked up at her. His face was drawn, the burst of artificially enhanced energy starting to fade. "Can you sense its direction at all?"
"Should I be able to?" She focused inward, concentrating on the symbiont, but there was nothing. She shook her head.
"Ah well. Worth a try."
They started down again, only to have a door slam open below them. Skara grabbed her arm and hustled her out of the stairwell into another corridor, a level below the other one, just as purple-clad guards poured into the stairs below them.
"Do they know where we are?" Claudia gasped.
"I don't—"
Footsteps pounded in the stairwell, and the door started to open. Skara kicked it shut and aimed a blast from his cuffs, sealing it.
"Or maybe they do!"
"Could Ilyx have sold us out, maybe?"
"Maybe. But—oh, damn it," he snarled, and ripped off the badge that he'd been using to open doors. "This. They must have some sort of tracker in these."
The door at the other end of the hall slammed open and guards charged through.
Skara moved in front of her, flinging up his hands. A green shield blossomed around them.
But they were trapped. Guards behind them in the stairwell. Nowhere to go.
Despite having been told it wouldn't work, she tried to open a portal to the ship anyway. Pain stabbed through her skull, and she reeled.
They couldn't teleport out. But, she thought wildly, could they teleport inside the facility?
She tried to picture one of the more distinctive places they'd passed through, an empty waiting area with windows looking out on the snowswept city.
And it worked. The portal blossomed in front of her.
"Yes!" She turned around. "Skara—"
She was just in time to see him crumple, the shield winking out. The cuffs' energy drain had apparently been the last straw.
At least the guards were as startled as she was. She had an instant to grab Skara—he was still moving weakly, not completely unconscious—and scrambled through, half-carrying and half-dragging him. They stumbled out into a hallway that was, for the moment, blessedly pursuit-free.
"This ...." Skara mumbled, touching the badge clipped to her stolen uniform.
Shit. Right. If that was a tracker, guards would be here any moment. She yanked it off and dropped it on the floor.
"Sorry," Skara gasped, and slid off her shoulder, wilting to the floor.
"Skara!" She crouched beside him. Where could they go? She had to get them out of here.
She tried one more time to open a portal to the streets outside, to the ship, anywhere. All that happened was a sharp, hot bolt of pain between her eyes.
She could portal somewhere else in the facility. But she could feel the energy drain from opening two portals in quick succession. She wouldn't be able to keep it up for l
ong.
Escape was so near and yet so far. She clung to Skara and stared out the window, where snowflakes swept across the rooftops. If they could just get out there somehow ...
The cuffs, maybe? She stepped back and pointed a fist at the window, and concentrated. A thin beam speared from her cuff ... and was absorbed by the glass.
"Oh, come on!"
Skara had said the cuffs could blow a hole in the side of a spaceship, but even at full power, it did absolutely nothing to the window. It clearly wasn't glass; it was some high-tech stuff that looked like glass.
And anyway, even if I get it open, how far outside the building does the portal block extend? Am I going to have to jump?
With Skara conscious, they could make that work. He could grow wings and fly them somewhere. But she didn't want to take her chances of jumping from this high and trying to open a portal in midair.
From somewhere nearby, there was a slamming door and the sound of running feet.
We're running out of time.
And anyway ... she looked down at Skara's sweat-damp hair. If they couldn't get another symbiont, it wouldn't matter if they got away or not. Not for him, anyway.
The only other thing she could think to do was throw themselves on the mercy of the Rhuadhi, but Skara was right. They were criminals here. It wouldn't work on Earth either.
No, they had to find their way to wherever the symbionts were kept. If she could somehow get another one for Skara, then they could turn their attention to getting out. And he would be able to help her.
But I don't know where it is! I could run around this place forever and not find it.
She tried desperately to picture the symbiont room. Purple-striped doors, Skara had said. Maybe it was possible to teleport there if she could imagine it clearly enough. But she couldn't even imagine such a thing. What would it look like?
Footsteps and voices rang in a nearby hallway. They were running out of time. Skara, especially.
I have to go somewhere! Pick something!
Of course that was the kind of thing that made her mind go totally blank.
And then she thought: Okay. She couldn't teleport to the symbiont storage room because she didn't know what it looked like. She'd never been there.
But you have, she thought, hesitantly, at the alien being inside her.
She still hadn't figured out how much it understood, if it even understood anything. It was easier not to think of it as a separate entity apart from herself. It was like ... a finger, or a toe. Not something truly alive.
But didn't some people believe that every part of your body contained all the knowledge of the whole? And even if you didn't believe in the metaphysical aspects of it, on some level it was simply, scientifically true. Every fully grown human being started out as one tiny cell, and each cell in your body had every bit of DNA that it would take to grow a whole new you.
And I know it better than most people, Claudia thought, touching the case at her belt where the blood sample was stored.
Somehow, the symbiont allowed her to open portals to anywhere she could picture clearly. Was it possible she could portal to places it had been? Maybe not anywhere, but surely if such a thing was possible, the symbiont storage facility was the one place it would know better than anywhere else. If not in this sanctuary, then in whichever one it came from.
Take us there, she thought at it. Please.
It was a similar feeling to when she'd first learned how to open portals or use the cuffs, that sensation of reaching into herself, trying to find the mental button to push to activate an unfamiliar muscle. If it could access her memories, did it have memories of its own?
She didn't quite feel as if there was an another intelligence inside her. But there was something. It was like ... a helpful dog, maybe, or an advanced computer. She could sense it, somewhere at the edge of her mind. It wanted to help her—or, no, that wasn't quite right, any more than a computer assistant wanted to help you install your programs, but it was responsive in the same way.
There's a door. A purple-striped door. Find me that purple-striped door—
And a portal blossomed in front of her. On the other side was a door with narrow, diagonal white and purple stripes.
"I hope this is the right door rather than the door to the garbage disposal or something," she murmured. She hauled Skara's arm over her shoulder, and half-carrying, half-dragging him, she stepped through.
The portal winked out; her knees wobbled. She looked around quickly, but there was no one else here. It was only the two of them.
She touched the door. It opened under her hand, bathing the corridor in soft purple radiance.
The inner room was almost uncomfortably warm, hot and humid as a Louisiana summer day. As Claudia stepped inside, she discovered that the purple glow came not from artificial lighting, but from rows of glass tanks, each about the size of a five-gallon gas can and shaped like an old-fashioned milk jug. They reminded her vaguely of water cooler tanks, and they were stacked in racks on the walls, going all the way up to an unexpectedly high ceiling; they must be stacked ten or twelve rows high. And they went on and on and on. The room was huge.
Claudia was barely aware of the door closing behind her as she gazed around in wonder. She couldn't make out anything specific inside any of the containers; it looked like they were filled with glowing purple smoke. When she stared at any of the containers for more than a few seconds, it seemed as if there were sparks within the smoke, shifting and moving, but it was hard to say if that was real or merely an artifact of her eyes.
She couldn't tell if it was just her imagination, but it seemed as if something fluttered inside her, as if the symbiont was responding to the presence of its own kind.
"I wasn't expecting them to be so beautiful," Claudia breathed, looking up and around. "And I wasn't expecting so many."
But there were enough for an entire world, weren't there? Skara had said that only a few percent of the population had one, but even so, if this planet was anything like the size of Earth, that was still millions upon millions of people. This room alone must contain thousands of symbionts, but of course it would have to.
And these were just the ones who didn't currently have a host. This planet had millions of people who could open portals. A portal-opening army. The reality of that had never hit her until this moment, staring around her at thousands of unhosted symbionts and realizing that this was only a tiny fraction of the whole.
No wonder the Galateans stayed out of Rhuadhi space. If the Rhuadhi decided to invade Earth or any other planet, Claudia thought, there would be nothing anyone could do to stop them.
In her arms, Skara stirred, turning his head weakly to the side, and she abandoned all thoughts of portal-opening Rhuadhi. Everything that mattered was here in her arms right now.
"Skara? We found it. We're here. Do you understand?"
He jerked in her arms, and helplessly she guided him to the floor as he writhed in the grip of another seizure. It passed almost immediately and he relaxed, but his face was still twisted in pain.
"Skara?" She touched his face. His skin, too hot earlier, now felt chilly. "Skara!" She looked up desperately at the walls, at all those thousands of jars filled with their glowing, glittering smoke. "What do I do? How do I get you to bond with him?"
She stood up and went to the nearest rack. Up close, it was even more alien, a jar full of infinitely many, infinitely tiny particles of glitter, swirling endlessly in patterns unguessable. It drew the eye; she felt as if she could stand here forever staring at it.
She put her hands lightly on the jar. There was a faint tingling, like static electricity. It was slightly warm to the touch.
The jars didn't seem to be anchored in any way. She could just pick it up off the rack and take it with her. That must have been what Skara had done. But she hesitated. There was no visible way to open it. Every part of it was smooth and sealed. Were you supposed to break it? Smash it on the floor? But what if that w
as the wrong thing to do? She couldn't bear the thought of killing the beautiful, fragile creature inside it; the idea was terribly wrong, like crushing a butterfly. And if she did do that, and it was the wrong thing, would it stir up the wrath of the others in the rest of their jars, and completely destroy Skara's chances of ever getting another one?
"Whatever you're trying to do, it won't work."
The voice behind her was a stranger's. Claudia jumped so violently that she almost wrenched the jar out of its rack and smashed it without meaning to. She took her shaking hands off the jar and quickly turned around.
The door had opened again, whispering unheard, and a woman stood there. She was Rhuadhi, tall and dignified, with a calm, age-lined face. Her green hair was gray-shot and wrapped around her head in a set of elaborate braids. A purple robe covered her completely, falling to her feet.
She wore no obvious symbols of rank, but Claudia didn't need to be told that this woman was in charge—of the sanctuary, of the planet; it was hard to say.
And there was a whole troop of guards behind her.
"Well, well," the woman said. "It looks like we've found our thieves."
Twenty-Two
Claudia tried to open a portal—to anywhere, it didn't matter, as long as it wasn't here. The pain was like slamming her head into a board.
"There's a portal block on this room, so don't even try," the woman said calmly. "Search them for weapons."
"Stay away from us!" Claudia had fallen to her knees at the pain of the thwarted portal attempt; now she scrambled to her feet and started toward Skara, but the guards moved to block her.
Stun! she thought, and fired two quick bursts from the cuffs. The guards went down. She ran toward Skara, raising a shield around both of them as she went.
She hadn't realized that she had gotten this good at using the cuffs. She knelt beside Skara and looked up through the wavering green light as the guards surrounded them.
"Interesting," the woman murmured. She walked fearlessly into the room. Dignity surrounded her like an aura of tangible confidence, as if she had not the slightest concern that Claudia could possibly harm her. The robe made it hard to tell if her feet were moving, and Claudia had a brief, creepy thought that she wasn't even real, that she was a manifestation of the symbionts themselves.