by Tarkin, Mika
For the second time in his life, Marko was facing down a Halian wild one. He didn’t expect that he would lucky enough to survive the experience a second time. Nobody wasted their time or energy trying to fire on Rakkan. The civilians huddled in their corners, and the warriors remained in cover, far more calm than they had any right to be.
Rakkan strode ever closer. His body was bulging and disfigured. He was hunched over into his knuckles, his elbows bowed out like an enormous ape. Although he was slow, he moved with graceful precision and unnatural fluidity. His third eye burned fiery orange. The rage and hatred that Marko had felt when the Watchers killed Kiran was present now, stronger than ever. It crushed his soul, leaving him in the deepest darkness he could ever imagine.
He turned to look at the warriors, their faces like stone. They struggled to contain the contagious rage that pulsed from Rakkan’s twisted form. Things were even worse among the rest of the tribe.
“Naeesha… what the fuck do we do?”
“That trick in the tunnels, what we did to the husks.”
“Yea?”
“Would it work on Rakkan?”
“I… I don’t know.”
It had never occurred to Marko to ask.
“Can you think of anything else to try?”
Naeesha shook her head. He couldn’t think of anything either. It was certainly worth a shot.
“Can you translate for me?” she asked.
Marko nodded, and listened for her next instruction. Naeesha climbed on top of the drilling equipment and stood in the center of the room where all could see her, including Rakkan. His glowing third eye locked onto her and he staggered forward, hardly moving at a walking pace.
“Friends, family. I need your ears and your hearts.”
Marko climbed beside her, shouting so that everyone could hear her words.
“It has been the greatest joy of my life to share the last few days with you, and I had hoped that perhaps I might be able to spend a little longer. Unfortunately, our time looks like it’s running out.”
Marko couldn’t help but wonder where she was going. He could feel the room growing increasingly somber.
“Before he turned, Rakkan asked me to take care of you all. I wish I could have done better. But as long as we’re still here, I think there’s one last thing that we can all do for each other.”
Marko watched her intently as she spoke. She turned and caught his eye as she finished, and he repeated her words in Halian. She reached down and took his hand, holding it tight.
“I believed that this tribe could do anything, anything, as long as we were all together. I still believe that. Because I’ve seen the love and compassion that you all carry, and I know how powerful it is.”
She paused long enough for Marko to repeat her words.
“If these are our last minutes, let’s live them the best way we know how. With song. With laughter. With dancing. With love.”
Before Marko could even finish the translation, one of the Halians split off from the corner of the room and picked up an instrument case. A small group on the other side of the room began to dance, tense and akward at first, but quickly finding their spirit.
“Instead of fearing what’s to come,” Naeesha said, “let’s celebrate everything that we have. All the joy and all the wonder. The rain and the moon and the stars. The birds in the sky and the fish in the rivers. Love. Hope. And most of all,” she said, squeezing Marko’s hand and raising it over her head. “Each other.”
He could feel the surge of emotion sweep over the room even before she’d finished speaking. He shouted her words over a merry din of music and laughter, and the feeling of love and togetherness blossomed even greater. The tribe no longer huddled in the corners. The skipped and played and danced, even as Rakkan’s hulking form crossed the room, still headed for Naeesha.
“We celebrate for ourselves. We celebrate for our loved ones. We celebrate for those that we lost, and for those that have lost their way.” Naeesha climbed down from the digging machine and walked towards Rakkan, who showed no signs of improvement. “For those that we lost in the mountains,” she cheered. “For those that we lost in the tunnels. For Jintak… For Kiran…”
Tears streamed down her face as she drew closer and closer to the wild one. Rakkan reached out one of his enormous hands as she walked within arms reach. Marko cringed in anticipation of the awful violence that he expected to follow. Naeesha reached out her own hand, and rested her palm on one of Rakkan’s extended fingertips.
He froze.
“For Rakkan,” she whispered.
The members of the tribe saw her standing there, and arms reach away from certain death, with no fear in her heart. They were drawn towards her. A crowd formed around Naeesha and Rakkan. Marko stood on the machinery, watching from above, too numb to move.
He watched through tears as the crowd closed in and reached out their hands, laying them on Rakkan’s monstrous body. He stood up on his back two feet, towering above everyone else in the room, and looked around. His eye still glowed with righteous hatred, but the feeling in his heart was greatly diminished. It faded, faster and faster, and it seemed like Rakkan too began to shrink.
A moment later, he was hardly any bigger than ever. The light in his third eye flickered and faded. The crowd backed away, forming a closed circle around him.
And inside, sat Rakkan, sobbing.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Naeesha had a plan.
It wasn’t a good plan, but it might have been the best one she’d ever had. Wild ones could be turned after all. Maybe not all of them, and maybe they couldn’t all be saved like Rakkan had, but now there was proof that it was possible.
The proof was sitting in front of her, grieving like she’d never seen anybody grieve before. The tribe closed back in around him, welcoming his return, forgiving his departure, and showing him their love.
Naeesha worked her way out of the crowd and found Marko.
“We need to get everyone to the surface. Fighters first. The Watcher have troop transports, a lot of them. We need to borrow them.”
Marko didn’t ask any questions, he just started rounding up the warriors and their weapons and went to the hall to wait. She gave him directions to the landing pad and sent them on their way.
She went to Rakkan, and as soon as he was back on his feet, called on him to lead his people.
“Tell them to take only what they need,” she said. “We’re traveling light.”
Rakkan looked down at her, tears still in his eyes. “Where are we going?” he asked.
“To the capital.”
***
Watcher troop transports are designed to carry up to two hundred soldiers and to load and unload them in as little as ten seconds. They couldn’t have been more perfect for what she needed them for.
The military had been kind enough to leave nearly a dozen of the ships behind. Naeesha didn’t know if she’d have a chance to use all the seats, but she didn’t see any reason to leave them behind.
She had Rakkan lead the people onto the ships while she showed some of the warriors how to fly the ships. She wasn’t sure that the telepathic controls would work on a Halian, but she was pleased to find that the ship’s computers understood commands no matter what language you gave them in.
In less than an hour, they were in the air, flying fast and low over the treetops. It was a four hour flight back to the capital, and Naeesha used every minute of it to try and figure out what the situation there was.
The first sign that things were looking bad was the lack of radio chatter. She tuned in to dozens of frequencies that should have been full of day-to-day operations, the basic information that keeps the military running. They were all quiet.
Only the emergency signal was active. It warned all Watchers to evacuate the city, and gave a list of coordinates to avoid at all costs. She smiled, and ordered her ship to head to the first of the coordinates on the list.
As they flew ove
r the last of the wilderness and into the river floodplains, she saw absolute chaos beneath the ship. Watchers fleeing en masse, utter panic running through the churning crowds. As the ships passed over the crowds, she could see the people below settle under the calming effects of the Halians above. She wondered if they knew why they’d felt such a sudden rush of serenity.
She watched her viewscreen intently, looking for some sign of a wild one. As she scanned the screen, she saw two of her ships break formation and fly out over the floodplain. Just as she was about to radio in and ask what the hell the pilots were doing, she saw the tell-tale colorful tents of a Halian tribe. They’d taken shelter in a small valley, and it looked like they’d done alright.
Both ships rejoined the fleet after a few minutes, and the pilots reported that the’d picked up over three hundred more Halians. Naeesha smiled. Every little bit would help.
Marko radioed from one of the other ships.
“I’ve got a lock on one,” he said. Naeesha didn’t need to ask what he was talking about.
“We’re following you,” she said.
The ships veered hard right and flew along over the top of the wall around the southernmost side of the city. On top of the wall was a wild one, tearing out bricks the size of shuttles and hurling them hundreds of feet into the city.
“Keep moving, watch out for those rocks,” she warned. “Bring us in close, let’s try to get some people onto the wall.”
All seven of the occupied ships went in closer to the hulking monstrosity on the city walls. Two of the ships landed on either side of it, offloading their cargo of Halians before taking off to make room for the other ships.
They needed to get as close as possible. The Halian’s emotional aura was more effective at close ranges, and they needed this to work, for everyone’s sake. Naeesha’s ship stayed up in the air. She would have liked to be down on the wall, but she would just be taking up space down there. Instead, she watched through the viewscreen as the Halians crept along the wall towards the enraged wild one.
It didn’t pay them any mind, at first. It was perfectly content to rip up the wall and throw the remains into the capital. When the first of the Halians got within reach of its arms, it spun around startled. For a second, Naeesha thought it was going to swat the Halians off the wall, but then it sat down, its arms limp at its sides. The Halians surrounded it, and the wild one disappeared into the crowd.
Three minutes later, the fleet moved onto the second location carrying one more soul than they had when they approached the wall.
***
They found and rescued sixteen wild ones like that. Not every operation went as smoothly as the first. They lost four brave souls, all told. Three of them to Watcher fire, and one to a wild one that accidentally fell into their crowd.
All four were heros, as was every single member of the tribe that stood up and saved the capitol that day, creating a permanent reminder for the people of Alderoc that love is stronger than hate.
Flying through the city was one of the hardest things Naeesha had ever done. Fires had gutted entire neighborhoods. A wild one had brought down a skyscraper by ripping apart the foundation one pillar at a time. Not all the Watchers or humans had been able to evacuate in time.
She knew it would take them ages to rebuild. She only hoped that they would realize how lucky they were to have a chance.
As for the cleanup itself, Naeesha had no plans to stick around. A few of the Halians did. They saw an opportunity to spread their teachings in the destroyed city. Naeesha feared that they would be attacked by people who blamed them for the destruction in the city, but she knew that fear wouldn’t stop those that chose to stay behind.
Most of the tribe, however, chose the same path as Naeesha. They took the transports and flew them out far away from the capital to a place where they would be left in peace.
Chapter Fifty
Naeesha moved silently through the underbrush, longbow in hand. She watched carefully as a splendid buck picked through the leaf litter on the forest floor, fattening itself up before the winter.
There was too much brush between her and her prize to make a good shot, so she waited and watched, always moving to stay downwind. A twig snapped under her foot and the buck snapped upright and looked right back at her. She could see its heart pounding as it stared right at the bush she was hiding behind. A tense moment went by, and the deer went back to grazing.
She crept around the bush, drew her bow, and fired.
An explosion of laughter burst out of the forest as her untipped arrow sailed through the air and connected with the buck’s side, causing it to rear up on two legs and jump from one hoof to another.
A dozen Halian children sprang from their hiding places in the bushes and swarmed the buck, wrapping their arms around its spindly legs and climbing onto its antlers.
The deer shifted back into Marko, and he collapsed onto the group, surrendering to his tiny attackers.
Naeesha walked of her hiding place and sat down on a rock across from Marko and the children, unable to hold back a smile.
“Alright,” she said in Halian. “What did we learn?”
“You have to put heads on your arrows!”
“But only when we’re not shooting our friends, Takra,”
Takra made the same suggestion every time Marko and Naeesha took the children out into the woods to learn to hunt. It was slightly unnerving, but she chocked it up to youthful enthusiasm.
“Don’t step on loud sticks,” another child suggested.
“Bring a snack so your belly doesn’t rumble!”
“Go to the bathroom before you leave!”
Marko threw back his head in laughter. Naeesha buried her head in her hands to hide her own. It was incredibly difficult to teach when you couldn’t keep a straight face.
But it was alright. The young ones had plenty of time, and the forests here were bountiful. By the time the tribe would come to rely on them, they would have already been through a dozen biomes, and learned how to find food and water and shelter in all of them.
It was hard to imagine all of the giggling, round faced babies fifteen years later, fully grown and providing for their people. But then, Naeesha never would have imagined that she’d ever find her way here.
Marko lead the class back to the village, answering the same questions about what it was like to shapeshift for the thousandth time. She went back to their tent to put the equipment away and to relax. Kids were… not her strong suite. She’d been terrified that joining the tribe would mean taking on some responsibilities with them.
In the end, she turned out to be a better teacher than she thought. The tribe’s structure made it possible for her to help out however she could, and to leave the rest of their parenting to the people better suited to the task.
She was just putting the bow away and stripping out of her camouflage robe when Marko opened the flap of the tent and came inside.
“Mmm.”
“Oh shut up,” Naeesha teased, greeting him with a kiss.
“No, they’re doing a pit roast tonight. I can already smell it.”
“Gods you’re the worst.”
He sat down on their bednest and reached up for her hand. She relinquished it to him and let him pull her down onto his lap.
“Do you have to do anything before circles?” he asked, stroking her cheek with his thumb.
“I was going to take a little nap,” she said, pulling her robe off her shoulders.
“Mind if I join you?”
“Only if you’re going to make it worth my while.”
She leaned in and kissed him, holding him close and running her fingers over his hair.
“And what can I do to be worthy of your presence, oh magisterial one?”
She laughed. “You made that word up.”
“And if I did?”
“Then I’d say you’d have to make it up to me,” she said, letting her hand trail down to his belt, pulling it open.
“Would kisses be enough?”
Marko didn’t wait for a reply before giving it a shot.
“Hm, it’s going to take more than that.”
“What if I did this?” he asked, running his fingers down her neck and over her shoulders, teasing her breast as they slid agonizingly downward, stopping just shy of her cunt.
“Mmm, that’s a start, but I want more.”
“More?”
She pulled his robe open and grabbed his cock.
“Oh, more.”
Naeesha silenced him with kisses as she stroked him hard. As soon as he was ready for her, she lifted her hips and pushed him inside. Marko was done with the jokes now, his attention diverted entirely to her pleasure. She braced herself on his shoulders, keeping her lips locked to his as she rode him nice and slow.
He pulled her robe away and tossed it aside, running his hands along the full length of her curves settling on her hips and urging her faster and deeper. She resisted, setting her own pace, always choosing to leave her lover wanted a little more. It was all in the wanting.
But he was well equipped to play that game too. He pushed her back just far enough to take her nipple into his mouth and lavish it with playful licks and tender kisses, backing off just as she was starting to enjoy herself.
“Oh don’t stop,” she cried, even as Marko started grinning. He was smiling because he knew what Naeesha was going to do next, and he liked it. He leaned back in, just long enough to give her a cruel lick that left her wanting. She caught his head at her chest and held him tight, not letting him pull away.
Marko rewarded her with the pleasure she so much desired. But that wasn’t what he was smiling about.
The slow riding, Marko’s sweet attentions, they were nice, but they weren’t enough. Naeesha pushed her lover onto his back and leaned over him, inching her knees forward for better leverage and bringing her hips down hard against his.
“Fuck,” Marko plead as his hands sought out the curve of her waist. She started rocking her body against his, using his full length, grinding her clit against his mound. He pulled her faster and faster and her legs clenched and her breath caught and her toes curled as she pushed closer and closer to the edge of release.