Her Cold-Blooded Protector

by Lea Linnett

  4

  Even taking the side streets, the journey out of town was a tense one. Kormak slouched low in his seat as they crawled along the pockmarked roads, barely seeing the dusty scenery pass by. He peered around buildings and street corners, his eyes darting around uncomfortably whenever they rolled up to a junction. The girl was also making herself look as small as possible, her eyes wide and her mouth blissfully silent.

  Kormak’s heart went into overdrive as they passed through an intersection and a Sweeper buzzed up to the adjacent road just as they passed. His lungs seized, and the girl went very still beside him, but no siren sounded, and the Sweeper’s lights stayed dimmed. It took years of practice to keep his foot from pressing down on the pedal like his instincts told him to, and they trundled sedately away from the Sweeper. Neither he nor the human relaxed until it passed across the intersection, disappearing behind a building far behind them.

  Kormak kept to that pace until the tiny crowd of buildings began to thin, and the highway crept into view. But as they turned a corner, the girl gasped.

  There was a blockade.

  Kormak cursed under his breath, automatically swinging into a gentle turn down a side road before the tiny collection of police standing around the blockade noticed them. He blew out a sigh as his eyes combed the street, thankful for the general incompetence of the local officers out in these smaller settlements. They weren’t enforcers—the levekk-only arm of the law that chased down big fish like terrorists and serial re-offenders. They didn’t have any higher purpose to fulfill or military supervisors to please.

  They snaked along the streets, passing tiny cottages and old red-brick houses with rusted steel garages. Kormak went slow, the motor barely making a sound as they crawled along. They were going in the general direction of New Chicago, but they needed to get on the highway if they wanted to make any headway. They’d be better off walking at this pace.

  They crested a small rise as the last dwellings thinned out, and the town fell away behind them. As they descended again, the pre-Settlement houses were replaced by a thin line of trees which sprung up between their side road and the highway, sparse branches only just hiding the occasional vehicle that trickled by.

  Despite their spider-like appearance, the trees were an effective barrier, and one that didn’t look like it was going to end. It soon morphed into a strange copse of trees that looked decidedly out of place in the dry, desert-like environment surrounding them, and he wondered if someone had spilled nourishing agent here once upon a time. The barrier between them and the highway thickened as they entered the wooded area, and Kormak was almost ready to drive straight through one when the human perked up in her seat.

  Her hand shot up, pointing at an old sign coming up on the left. It was half-rusted over and leaning precariously, and it sat at the lip of a tree-lined road that looked like it hadn’t been used in decades.

  “It says it leads to the highway,” the girl whispered, and Kormak squinted. It wasn’t in any language he knew.

  “Is that Yumin Tok?” he asked, voice low. He knew a couple of words in the human language, which mixed elements of Levekk Trade and one of the pre-Settlement human languages, but he couldn’t read it.

  The girl shook her head. “It’s in one of the old languages. I can only read part of it.”

  They rolled to a stop, and Kormak glared at the girl. “So you don’t know what it says?”

  “It says highway,” she repeated, her lips pressing together. “They probably built the current highway over the old one to save credits.”

  “It’s on the wrong side of the road.”

  “It’ll loop around!”

  Kormak narrowed his eyes, wondering how she could be so confident. He turned his gaze down the road, which was narrow and dark, and surrounded by more of those artificial-looking trees.

  The girl didn’t speak again; she only watched him carefully while he glared at the sign as if he could force the faint symbols to make sense in his brain. The roads were quiet, the only sound being the faint drone of vehicles passing by on the highway every so often.

  It wouldn’t hurt to check it out, he supposed, rather than draw attention to themselves by crashing through the tree-line.

  He eased his foot onto the accelerator and meandered up the side road, feeling claustrophobic as soon as the trees closed in around them. They were more visible out in the open, sure, but if a Sweeper wandered up here, there would be nowhere to hide.

  But to Kormak’s surprise, the road did loop around. It climbed up and over another small rise, the lower road disappearing somewhere beneath them, and suddenly it was dumping them out onto the highway before Kormak was ready. The highway was empty apart from a freighter eclipsing the horizon up ahead, so Kormak put his foot down.

  Within minutes the tiny town and the strange crop of trees had vanished from view. Kormak breathed a sigh of relief to be out of the confines of the settlement. He’d grown up in the city, surrounded by skyscrapers and tightly-packed roads with more side streets and alleyways to steal into than one could count. The town had felt like a petri dish under a microscope by comparison, and the maze-like lines of trees gave you nowhere to hide.

  By the time they were far enough from the town to feel comfortable it was past midday, and Kormak had no intention of stopping the vehicle for rest breaks. The reddish desert was slipping past them at a satisfying rate, and he could feel a knot of tension unwinding deep inside him at the thought of finally getting home. Not that he had much to welcome him back there.

  But that’s not what this escape was about, anyway. He didn’t need a welcome.

  He never bothered to inform the human of his decision not to stop, but as the sun slipped further downward in the sky behind them, the girl seemed to understand, and pulled out a box of breakfast bars.

  Despite their savory appearance, he could smell the cloying aroma of the sugar syrup that held the bars together, and it made his nose wrinkle. The girl took that opportunity to tentatively hold one out to him, and he leaned away from her to keep the stink out of his nose.

  “You don’t like them?” the girl asked, seeing his distaste.

  He kept his eyes on the road as she bit into one. “Too sweet.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “It’s not because it’s human food?”

  Kormak shrugged. “I’ve eaten human food. It’s not terrible.”

  The girl seemed even more surprised at that, but when he glanced over at her, her face shuttered. He couldn’t peg her. She seemed to swing back and forth between terrified, curious and cautious whenever she looked at him, and he was struggling to keep up.

  They rode in silence for a while, but something niggled at him.

  “Am I your first levekk?” he finally asked, even as he kicked himself for opening up the conversation. Didn’t he want her to be quiet?

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her cheeks turn bright red, and watched as her shoulders rose up around her ears. He took a moment to run back over what he’d said, and rolled his eyes. Minds always on sex—that was what he was used to from humans.

  “Y-yeah,” she managed. “I mean, I’ve seen them on ads. Or maybe from a distance, but…”

  “Not up close,” he surmised, and saw her nod.

  Again, a silence settled over them, to Kormak’s relief. He’d satisfied his curiosity and was happy to keep his eyes on the road. But the girl grew more and more fidgety, alternating between staring out the window and sneaking covert glances at him as he drove.

  Finally, she broke the silence. “So, have levekk got names?”

  He frowned, the phrasing making him pause. “Er, yeah.” He glanced over, and while she looked embarrassed again, her mouth was set. Kormak blinked bemusedly back at the road. “Are you asking for mine in particular?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Kormak.”

  “Lena.”

  “Keep an eye out for Sweepers, Lena.”

  The girl’s eyebrow twitched in confusion, but
she sat back nonetheless, her gaze flicking to the side view mirror and the desert rolling by.

  Kormak bit his lip, his gaze on the road. He should feel glad that she wasn’t pursuing the conversation, but as they sat in silence again, he felt a strange wave of awkwardness wash over him. He didn’t know how to talk to this human, and it irked him that he felt he had to try.

  In the circles he’d run in, he’d encountered many a loud, violent thug of a human looking for a fight. He’d seen how they tended to flock together, always touching and making noise. Even the one he’d worked for—and he felt his lip curl at the thought of him—had had a frantic tension about him. Humans had one of the shorter lifespans amongst the different species in the Constellation, and so they sank their nails deeply into the things around them—titles, people, dreams—as if someone would yank it all out from under them if they didn’t hold on tightly enough.

  But there was something different about Lena. She was scared of him, sure, but there was a quietness about her. She watched more than she spoke, a trait her species was sorely lacking.

  He shook his head, focusing on the road again. A cautious nature didn’t make her special. Knowing how to hot-wire a transport didn’t immediately make her useful. He still had to practically babysit her to get her this far, and he didn’t want that kind of responsibility going forward. He’d spent too much of his life protecting ungrateful humans.

  And following them.

  He sat up further in the driver’s seat, pushing that thought back down where it belonged.

  ---

  The big levekk—Kormak, she reminded herself—shifted in his seat beside her, and Lena glanced over at him. He wasn’t completely bent out of shape by the position of the driver’s seat, but he didn’t look all that comfortable either. His long legs were bent, even with the seat pushed back as far as it could go, and his knees brushed the exposed guts of the steering column.

  It was surreal, being this close to something she’d only ever seen from afar. She was struck again by how huge he was, how he filled the already ample space in the vehicle almost to bursting. His head brushed the ceiling of the car, his shoulders spilling over the sides of his seat a little.

  His hands rested in a lax grip around the steering wheel, and the skin that peeked out from beneath his cuff confirmed Lena’s suspicions. He was covered in scales. True, the levekk were obviously reptilian at first glance, but seeing the minute creases between each shingle-like dot of skin was a whole different kind of fascinating. The scales shifted fluidly over bones and muscle as he flexed his hand, tapping his fingertips against the plastic wheel.

  She gulped imperceptibly when she studied those fingers in more detail. The tips were enclosed by the same bone-like substance that covered his head. They weren’t quite claws though, more like particularly dangerous-looking thimbles, a natural extension of his fingertip. Lena had to tamp down a shudder as she thought of the damage they’d caused to the wall back at the prison.

  Kormak shifted again, and she dropped her gaze.

  She focused instead on the levekk’s feet, a safer target than his face or neck. The jumpsuit ended about halfway down what would ordinarily be the calf on a human, but on Kormak, the hem stopped just short of the strange, heel-like turn of his leg. Even though she’d seen other species with a similar bone structure before, she still watched with interest as Kormak’s foot straightened out just behind his toes to press down on the pedal. He’d shucked off his sandals, revealing bony claws just like the ones on his fingers—although these looked more formidable. They were almost double in size, but blunted.

  It was late afternoon, the sun dipping low enough to throw light across the dashboard from behind as they headed east. The drive had been mostly silent since they left the town, with Kormak focusing on the road and Lena watching the rocky dunes and sparse tufts of scrub race by her window.

  She could tell the guy didn’t like to talk. But even so, she couldn’t shake the urge to strike up a conversation. He probably wanted her to stay as still and silent as possible, and she would probably never see him again once they arrived in the city, but despite all of that her lips were forming words ahead of her brain’s say-so.

  “Are we making good time?”

  Kormak glanced down at her for a long moment. She hadn’t really taken notice of his eyes outside of how terrifying they were, but now that she was sitting in close proximity, she could finally see them in more detail. His pupils were cat-like and slitted, and still very off-putting, but she noticed now that his irises were a bright sea-green—or at least, that’s what the color was called in her sister’s fashion zines. Lena had never been to the ocean herself.

  His eyes cut away. “Yeah.”

  “Are you from New Chicago originally?”

  The levekk took a while to reply, and Lena worried for a moment that she’d overstepped his patience, tension knotting itself in her chest.

  “Grew up there.”

  She blew out a slight sigh of relief. “Same here. New Chicago Manufacturing District.”

  Recognition dawned on Kormak’s face. “So you are a Duster.”

  The knot in her chest turned chilly and tight at hearing the word, and she averted her gaze.

  “Where does a Duster girl learn how to steal transports?”

  Lena flinched, but the alien beside her only stared out the windshield. She shouldn’t be surprised to hear it—it was a common enough slur after all. She looked down at her hands in her lap, at the tiny, golden speckles that had dyed her fingertips. Other species were left untouched by the strange dust that came off levekk industrial machinery, but human skin was particularly absorbent. Lena was lucky; she’d worn gloves while she worked whenever she could and had kept her skin fairly clean of it, but her sister could only darn the material so many times before it wore through for good. The dust was harmless, but it marked humans from the Manufacturing District forever. And the Manufacturing District was not a glamorous place to come from.

  “This Duster girl doesn’t steal transports,” she bit out. “I work on them.”

  The plating over Kormak’s brow arched as Lena watched, betraying his surprise.

  “Factory work’s hard and pays next to nothing,” she clarified, teeth grit together. “I’m pretty good with machines and stuff so I’ve been fixing up people’s transports since I was fourteen or so.”

  Kormak frowned. “Kinda young to be working.”

  Lena shifted uncomfortably. “Not in the Manufacturing District.”

  The levekk didn’t respond, just continued staring out the window, but Lena still felt the insult hanging between them. She hadn’t expected being called a Duster again to upset her so much. She’d heard enough of it in prison. There, the slight golden sheen on the pads of her fingers seemed to mark her out for scrutiny from a mile away. Garross had been especially enamored with them.

  “I steal transports,” Kormak said, cutting through her thoughts. Lena glanced up at him in confusion. “It’s not that bad.”

  “You steal transports? A levekk doing petty crime?”

  He nodded.

  “That why you got sent to Kharon?”

  Kormak’s brow dipped dangerously, and his gaze cut to hers. “No.”

  Lena snapped her mouth shut, although she was still fuming.

  They drove in silence after that, Lena occasionally snacking on something out of her backpack. Kormak never asked for anything, and Lena didn’t bother to offer. If he didn’t need food as she suspected then he’d be fine, and if he did, then he could swallow his pride and beg for it.

  The desert flew past them as they sailed down the highway. There were other vehicles on the road, but they were few and far between, and the only Sweeper they saw was one sitting on the top of a ridge just off the highway. It made no move to chase after them, and Lena hoped that the people whose car they’d stolen hadn’t yet arrived home to discover it missing. If anyone was looking for them, they may still expect them to be on foot, and search cl
oser to the town and prison for a little while longer.

  They kept driving after sunset. Lena wasn’t one hundred percent sure where they were at this point, but they’d been driving steadily east, so she knew they were on the right track at least. She didn’t bother asking Kormak, still sore from their conversation earlier.

  It was dark all around when they finally pulled over, Kormak giving no indication that he was going to do so. He simply pulled off the highway and up over a gentle rock-slope. They drove a little way away from the highway and then the levekk pulled the handbrake up, already handling the car with ease.

  They each tilted their seats back, laying back without speaking a word to each other. The stars were bright out in the middle of nowhere, and they cast enough light for Lena to see the awkward position the levekk had to take up to fit in his sculpted seat. It was a hell of a lot easier for Lena to curl up in the passenger’s side, but she still didn’t think she had an easy night ahead of her.

  The desert air turned freezing after the sun went down, and Lena belatedly realized how close to winter it was. Even with the doors and windows closed, the cold crept in, and Lena withdrew her arms from the sleeves of her jumpsuit, wrapping them around her torso beneath the fabric and wincing at how cold her hands were.

  She did manage to sleep, but she woke herself with shivers more than once. She didn’t bother to look over her shoulder at the levekk behind her. And if her thoughts strayed to him in the night, she was quick to shake them loose.

  5

  Kormak woke early, shivering in the chill morning as he left the car to relieve himself. The cold had settled deep into his skin overnight, and as he looked up into the clear, pinkish dawn sky, he hoped the sun would chase some of it away.

  It may have been a mistake, hatching his escape so late in the year. Traveling in the cold was seldom a good idea for levekk. But they had a vehicle. They could make it to the outer limits of New Chicago before nightfall, if they really pushed it.