Adverse Effects

by Alicia Nordwell

  “Some doctors changed Dade against his will. He doesn’t like to talk about it, and asking such personal questions is rude.” Yaseke’s hum was gently reproving. He walked back and stood in front of me. His hands landed on my shoulders and massaged the muscles tensed by the memories I refused to remember. “Breathe with me,” he said.

  He took one hand and held it to his heart space, letting me feel his chest moving up and down. I focused on his eyes and the warmth of his chest under my hand. That brought me back from the memories enough to focus on sharing his rhythm. Yaseke slid his hand down my neck to my chest.

  “Good,” he said. “Keep going. In and out.”

  I needed to get it together. We had to stay alert. Pira had asked an innocent question, and I was falling apart. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re fine,” Yaseke said softly. He stood on his tiptoes, leaning into my chest. Our hands were trapped between us. “Nothing to be sorry for,” he murmured. I leaned down and kissed him. I ignored the small pain from my chapped lips, needing him. I licked at his abraded flesh, and he opened for me. I sank my tongue in his mouth, pulling him close to me with my free hand. Nothing penetrated but the taste and scent of my tziu, and I swallowed the small whimpers he made as I aggressively claimed him.

  “Shhh,” Maerit said. “They’re busy.”

  Their little voices brought me out of my fog of desire. As tired, dirty, and thirsty as I was, I still wanted to take Yaseke against the nearest rock. If we had been alone….

  “Younglings.” Yaseke rolled his eyes.

  “The same everywhere,” I agreed. My lips throbbed, and I licked them, tasting a little blood. I pressed my forehead against his for another moment. “Thank you.”

  “I will always give you what you need.”

  The one thing I truly needed was him. I’d find a way to make do with what we had to keep us safe. Then I’d get us home.

  “All right, the entertainment is over,” I told the kids. “Let’s get moving.”

  By the time the sun began to peek over the edge of the horizon, we were exhausted again. The dust rubbed between my toes, building up with the sweat, until it felt like my feet were raw. Yaseke was carrying Maerit; I’d managed to create a tiny nest in the center of the drawer, away from the weapons, for Pira. She’d been close to tears when I picked her up and placed her inside.

  Her eyes were dull. Her slight weight felt so insubstantial in my arms. Pira snuggled in my arms, resting her head on my shoulder. I hugged her close, then lifted her face so I could see her pale yellow eyes. She blinked slowly as I tried to send her waves of comfort and reassurance. She slumped against me with a sigh.

  I put her down in the nest of the blankets and covered her before we walked on in the dawn light. “We can stop when it gets hot, if you can keep going for now.”

  The light showed the dark smudge clearly for the first time. There were no heat waves obscuring it.

  “Look at that,” Yaseke said. He gestured at the shape with his chin. “What do you think that is?”

  “I’m not sure. The shapes are too regular for natural formations.” They were too far away to be clearly outlined in the rising light, but there were right angles at the edge of each one. It was too exact to be coincidental. “I did notice two of those big birdlike things flying toward them.” They were lost in the darkness, though, before I could see what happened.

  “Do you think someone or something could be living here?”

  I’d been worrying about that since the sun rose. “There might be.” We had weapons, but there was no telling who, or what, we might find. “I’d like to get closer and do some surveillance. Tomorrow we should be close enough to find a safe place for you to hide with the children while I do some recon.”

  Yaseke shook his head. “No, no way, Dade. We need to stay together.” I stopped walking. His disagreement threw me for a second. I’d been issuing orders, and so far, Yaseke hadn’t balked at them.

  I sighed. “If it were just us, I’d agree with you, but we have the children to think of. We cannot take Pira and Maerit on a stealth mission to gather intel. It isn’t possible. I have to go alone.”

  My tziu had a very stubborn look on his face. “We shouldn’t separate.”

  “I don’t want to leave you alone, either, but there isn’t much choice. I’ll be careful, but it’s necessary. This is something I’ve been trained for and done many times in the past. You have to keep the children safe. You know I’m right.”

  Yaseke looked away from me, shifting Maerit in his arms. The little boy murmured and put his arms around Yaseke’s neck before he went limp again.

  “You trust me to be careful, right?” I knew the answer to that question, and it was mean to manipulate him with it, but I knew Yaseke would have to agree when I put him on the spot.

  “Yes,” he said reluctantly. He turned to face me again. I expected anything but the anger I saw on his face. “But if you let anything happen to you, I will hurt you.”

  That was an oddly sweet sentiment in a violent wrapper. I liked it. I grinned. “Promise.”

  He narrowed his eyes and glared at me. “It wasn’t a joke, isit.”

  “I know.” No one had ever really cared if I got hurt during action before, except for my commanders who needed my skills remaining unimpaired during a battle campaign. Yaseke really cared, and I knew his threat was his way of showing that.

  We walked on until sweat began to drip in my eyes. I rubbed it away with one arm. “It’s too hot. Let’s find a spot to rest.”

  The only place we could find that would shelter us from the sun most of the day was under a rock coated with the black bands. “Just don’t touch that stuff again.” I could just imagine the pale tendrils curling around Yaseke’s hands and pulling him in. My imagination had help from a memory of a campaign early on in my career where a mass of vines, seemingly just waving in the wind, snagged a soldier marching to my left and drew him in. The tendrils from that plant melted into his skin all the way to bone in seconds, until he fell into a mass of parts that were pulled in to the center of the plant.

  I’d still been young enough on that mission to puke at the sight of death from the dangers of a strange world. Not much could shock or nauseate me now, but I wasn’t marching with fellow soldiers. The people standing beside me were my tziu and two small children who relied on us to keep them safe.

  Maerit and Pira woke up hungry. We fed them before the heat from the sun burning down mercilessly wilted all of us into puddles of sweaty, lethargic flesh.

  “You sleep first,” Yaseke said. I sat sideways so I could keep an eye on the rock at our back and the land around us, using a blanket as a pad. Yaseke sat at my back. I leaned against his knees for a short time until the sweat between us was too much. He ran his fingers through my hair over and over. My eyelids grew heavy as I stared out at the dark shapes on the horizon. “Close your eyes.”

  I sighed and let go, for just a little while. I was so tired.

  The night found me leading this time. The closer we got to the monumental black shapes, the tighter I wound up. An eerie calm fell over me, my emotions draining away as I faced my objective. I studied them, at the darker areas at the top. I couldn’t tell if it was a color variation or deeper holes inside the structures.

  It was early, the moons not quite at the horizon, when I found the right place to leave them. “We need to stop here.” One of the squat piles of stone I found had a deep hole, almost a cave. “You can hide in here while I’m gone,” I said. I quickly set up the camp with Yaseke, then began to separate out what I’d need. I took a bottle of water and two of the weapons, putting them in the bag Yaseke had been carrying.

  I sat with them as we each ate part of a ration bar. “Don’t be gone too long.” Yaseke handed me his bottle of water. “Here, drink it.”

  “No, I don’t want to take your water.”

  He dropped it in my lap. “You only took one bottle. You drink half what we do. Take a few more drinks befor
e you go so I’ll worry about you less.”

  I sensed arguing with him would be a bad idea. I drank half the water left in the bottle, washing down the tasteless brick of my ration bar. I let one last swallow trickle down the back of my throat slowly.

  “Are you leaving us, Dade?” Maerit asked. His eyes were huge, and he clutched Pira’s hand.

  “Just for a little while.” I carefully screwed the lid back on the bottle and set it down on a shelf of rock where Yaseke had smoothed out his blanket as a cushion against the hard stone, however slight.

  “Will you come back?” he whispered. His little fingers were clenched tight around his sister’s. “Our father never came back.” He looked down at his dirty feet, rubbing them together.

  I crawled over to him in the low space. I cupped his chin in my hand and made him look up at me. “I will come back. I already promised Yaseke”—he flicked his gaze to my tziu, who was watching us silently—“but I promise you too.”

  “And me?” Pira tugged at my arm.

  I smiled at her. “And you.”

  I wasn’t as focused on my mission, but I was glad I wasn’t. I pulled Yaseke close, one hand on the back of his neck as I kissed him softly. Then I left without looking back.

  Hours later, I was as close to the monuments as I dared to go. They appeared huge, and were definitely native stone, but they were not natural. They were made of multiple blocks, and the three I could see had a huge black hole in the exact same spot. I found a place near an outcropping where I would have some shade during most of the day, then dug into the sand. I slung the blanket over the edges of my shallow trench and sprinkled some of the pervasive orange dust on top of it.

  One of the great flying beasts came close as I hunkered down underneath it. Its wings were like great black sheets blocking out the last of the light from the setting moons. The body was massive, long, and sinuous. The head was wedge-shaped. I saw all this from underneath the beast as it flew straight at the black maw of the center monument’s hole.

  I goggled at it when it landed on the edge, holding on with bone-white claws stark against the stone. They must have been as long as I was tall. Damn things were huge! A squat shape stepped from the flying animal’s back and spread wide four appendages from its sides just as a shaft of sunlight broke the darkness. Its body was pale green, but there was a vibrant semicircle of flesh coming down from the open arms with dark bands along the edges.

  A cry echoed out from the rocks, bouncing across the landscape. It sent a shiver down my spine.

  There were animals here, and some form of intelligent aliens. There were straps along the flying creature’s back that the alien had held in its hands, probably to guide the great beast.

  The question was simple. Would they be friendly?

  Finding the answer to that question would probably not be as simple.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I sipped at my water, grimacing at the warm, flat fluid. It barely eased the tight thickening of my tongue and didn’t even come close to slaking my thirst. The alien that had arrived had disappeared inside the hole, but the great flying beast stayed stuck to the rock. I could barely make out its outline, except for when it shifted and resettled, once the sun was no longer shining on the rock face.

  Moving from my hole would be a bad idea, no matter how much I wanted to hurry back to Yaseke and the kids. Knowing there were aliens here made me feel like they were vulnerable without me, even if my tziu had weapons to protect them. But I couldn’t move until I could be reasonably sure I wouldn’t be seen. The pitch-blackness of the hole in the massive rock would hide anything that was standing there watching the dusty desert terrain. Without foliage to provide cover, I’d stick out like a sore thumb.

  I’d have to wait.

  My exhaustion slowly grew and dragged at my eyelids like weights, pulling them down. Food would help keep me awake, but my mouth was too dry to even try it. Eating would make my thirst worsen, and the desire to drink everything I had all at once already pressed on my mind almost more than my training would allow me to deny. Roasting heat filled my small depression as the sun shone directly down on top of me. I wasn’t sweating that much anymore, so the dust wasn’t sticking to me, but I knew that was a bad sign.

  We had to get help soon. If only we knew whether or not Seral got our message!

  Maybe the aliens would help us. They could be friendly. I winced as I chewed on my cracked lips. Maybe I could make them want to help us, even if they weren’t allies of the Caeorleian people. My ability had changed somehow, and now it was a weapon I could project, it seemed, just like the doctors had wanted.

  If it was necessary, I would try to use it on the aliens to make them help us.

  Resting my head on my folded arms, I strained to penetrate the darkness of that hole. What were these people like? If only I could see more of them. I blinked, yawned, and then blinked again.

  I woke up suddenly when a chill breeze swept over me and dislodged my blanket, blowing fine dust over my scalp and into my mouth. “Ugh!” I spit the particles out and rubbed at my face.

  I froze. There were trilling calls above me.

  The sun had set and the moons were rising. The dim light did nothing to hide the dull white claws a scant arm’s reach from my face. My weapon was in my hand, and I rolled backward, crouched, and took aim before I took another breath.

  One of the flying beasts had nearly landed right on top of me.

  An alien, maybe even the same one, slid down the leathery hide of the animal’s side and hit the ground with both squat legs effortlessly taking the impact of the fall from at least thirty body-lengths up.

  I narrowed my eyes and jerked my weapon to train it on the dull-green alien. The trilling noise came again, pitched high and then low. An ache started in my head right below my ear in my shypsoid bone. I ignored it, studying the—person, alien, whatever it was, in return.

  “Stay back!” I warned it. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to.”

  He or she—hell, it could have been an it without a sex for all I could tell—wore nothing like clothing. This close, I could see all it had was an extremely small hole where I’d look for a mouth. The sound of the trilling seemed to come from a sack under its throat. It had a strap around its waist with a flat, metallic-looking object hanging off one side. I was prepared to fire if it moved any of its four hands near it, but what it did instead shocked the hell out of me.

  The trill became a croon, much softer now, and it held up all four arms, flaring those brightly colored fans underneath, and then slowly linked its open palms together.

  An unmistakable gesture, used by several alien species I’d come across in the galaxy, to indicate they meant no harm.

  Thank fucking God.

  My hope was so great at that small sign of peace that it almost drowned out my caution. Almost. It could’ve been a trick. But if it wasn’t…. My shoulders slumped, and I lowered my weapon so I wasn’t pointing it at the alien anymore. Just in case, though, I kept my fingers on the trigger.

  “Friendly?” I asked it stupidly. Like it could answer me.

  It cocked its head to the side and stopped crooning. The great beast shifted its legs and flared its wings a little. Then I realized some of the sound coming from the alien was from the black thing hanging from its side on the black strap.

  One set of hands came apart, and the alien slowly touched the black plate, its big, dark eyes on me the whole time. It only had two digits on each hand, and where it touched the plate, two pale circles began to glow.

  I brought my gun back up, narrowing my eyes.

  “What are you doing?” I focused my will, focusing my desire for the creature not to attack as I tried to capture its eyes. It had to stay calm, it had to be friendly. I was not an enemy. I repeated the phrases in my head and tried to project the emotions, but I wasn’t sure if it was working.

  It slowly raised its hand back up. “Easy,” it said. “This one was just turning on the tr
anslator. This one’s name is”—the trill didn’t become anything I could understand, so maybe it was the alien’s name—“and you one can relax. This one will not harm you, or the ones you have hidden.”

  Shock made me dizzy, and my weapon tip wobbled. I’d never lost my bead on a threat before, but this was too much for me to handle after everything we had been through.

  The alien seemed friendly, and it could speak human. I licked my lips nervously, my mind spinning. Had I done that or was it friendly on its own? How did it know my language? What was the black metal thing doing?

  How did it know about Yaseke and the kids? I was cold instantly, as if a bucket of water from the icy planet Mig Delta 3420 had been dumped over me.

  “Shit. How do you know about the ones I’ve hidden? Did you do something to them? Where are they?” I brought up my weapon once again. My voice was hard as I demanded an answer. “I won’t hesitate to shoot you if you hurt them.”

  The beast shook out its wings and called out, a harsh cry across the empty desert. I jumped and nearly pressed the trigger the rest of the way, but I stopped at the last minute when it backed several steps away and settled down into the sand, stretched out on its stomach.

  “No, no. This one would never harm a living creature. This one does not believe in hurting. You one’s people are safe, hidden in the little cave. This one’s eyes are very keen, saw you hide before the light of the day.”

  “Why are you speaking human?” No species we’d ever encountered had spoken our language. “How did you learn it? Are you allies with the humans?” I prayed it would say no, because that would hardly be better than the humans themselves having me again, or the Vlrsessiums.

  “This”—the alien tapped the screen gingerly, moving slow and keeping its eyes on me the whole time—“device is a machine that translates for this one’s people. This one’s ancestors found the things hidden in a temple, long ago.” It pointed at the great stone monolith. “Like there. It knows many languages, but this one has never heard you one’s before.