by Lea Linnett
He fiddled around with the wires as soon as he got back to the car. There was no point in waiting around for the girl to wake up. He pulled the cluster of wires from the keyhole, disentangling the ones he needed and unwinding them. Within seconds, he’d copied what she demonstrated the day before, and the vehicle grumbled to life, obviously disliking the cold as much as he did.
The girl woke with a gentle start, blue eyes blinking up at him from where she was hunkered down in her jumpsuit.
“Shit, wait,” she mumbled groggily. “Need to pee.”
He held back an unbidden snort of laughter as she flopped out of the car. He then frowned at himself. Usually, human antics and clumsiness made his skin itch with frustration, but now he was almost finding the girl’s behavior… endearing? He shook his head. That was ridiculous. She was holding him up. He should be angry. Shouldn’t he?
He wrestled with the strange reaction, his hands on the steering wheel, but he was interrupted by Lena’s return, her jumpsuit now situated as it should be. Despite himself, he noticed that her nose had lit up bright red from the cold, and tried not to stare.
What was wrong with him today?
He cleared his throat and cracked his neck, waiting for her to close the door behind her.
She mumbled something in garbled words that he couldn’t understand, until one familiar word in Trade poked through the nonsense: “Freezing!”
He willed himself to stay silent as he put the car in gear and turn the car back towards the highway. The girl had settled with her arms crossed, not looking as if she wanted to talk, but Kormak’s curiosity got the better of him. “That was Yumin Tok.”
The girl blinked up at him, shock evident on her face. “How’d you know?”
“Hung around humans a lot,” he said, trying to sound neutral. “They chatter.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “You seem to know a lot about humans for a guy that hates us so much.”
Kormak clenched his teeth, the accusation cutting at him despite the truth of it. “Humans have a habit of making themselves the center of attention,” he muttered.
Lena’s eyes widened, her mouth opening as if she wanted to snap at him. Instead, she growled. “You’ve got a lot of opinions too, huh?”
“Yep.”
“About Dusters.”
Kormak’s brow plate rose, her ire suddenly making sense. “Ah. So it is that word.”
He’d have to have been an idiot to not notice the way she shut down the day before upon hearing it. Her reaction had made his skin crawl, though he couldn’t quite figure out why.
Lena turned to face him fully, her small, hairy eyebrows dipped dangerously low. “What do you mean?”
Kormak flicked his eyes back to the road. “Duster. Doesn’t seem to be a favorite of yours.”
He watched her from the corner of his eye, and saw how she curled inward, attempting to mask it by placing a foot on the dash. Her face softened though, and she didn’t turn away.
“It’s a slur,” she finally said. “It’s not exactly pleasant to hear.”
“Ah.” Kormak tapped the steering wheel, watching the concrete disappear beneath the hood ahead of them. “Where I’m from, it’s just what humans from Manufacturing are called.”
“Well, where I’m from, it’s what my cicarian boss screams at me from across the room, or whispers in my ear when he’s standing too close.”
Kormak’s stomach churned as he filled in the blanks.
“Well, then I apologize,” he added, and shut his mouth with a snap.
Where had that come from?
Lena was also looking up at him with wide eyes, blinking slowly.
“I… might not be overly fond of your kind, but I didn’t mean to cause offense.”
The girl looked even more shocked, if that was at all possible. Kormak grit his teeth, keeping his eyes studiously on the road before them.
“Th-thank you,” she said, in the same manner she had on that first night, when he kept her out of sight of the Sweepers. Kormak nodded stiffly.
They fell into an awkward silence, and Kormak tried to focus on how far it was to New Chicago, or whether his contact, Brando, would actually be waiting for him when he got there. But he found his attention wandering back to the girl.
She seemed to have relaxed, her arms crossed more to keep out the cold than out of any frustration. Kormak’s mouth opened again before he could stop it.
“So what’s it like? Living in the outer districts?”
“Difficult?” the girl replied. He sent her a wilting look and she glanced away, raising a hand to block out the harsh rays of the sun as it cracked the sky ahead of them. Kormak reached over instinctively, flipping down the visor even as he cursed himself.
Lena sent him a cautious look, but her gaze quickly fell down to the dashboard again. She paused, considering his question. “It’s… about what you’d expect,” she finally said, sighing softly. “You get up, go to the factory, stand at a conveyor belt for hours and go home in the dark. Shifts are badly scheduled and if you get one you’ll probably be there for a few hours longer than is healthy.
“Sometimes,” she added, voice brightening artificially, “you even get a surprise—like being told to fix a production machine for no extra pay!”
Kormak frowned. “…And you don’t get to say no.”
“Nope.”
Kormak tapped his finger against the steering wheel again, something in his chest twisting with sudden anger. Human or not, it bothered him how she seemed so resigned to that kind of treatment. He would have ripped her boss a new one by now. Literally. “So why do you want to go back?”
The girl’s expression turned pained, but determined. “…My sister’s there. She’s training to be a seamstress, but she’s wanted to head to the big city for years now.”
“And she can’t?”
“No, she can, that’s the problem,” Lena said, looking uncomfortable. “She… She doesn’t know how dangerous it can be in the city. How dangerous the people can be.”
“You don’t want her taken advantage of?” Kormak had seen plenty of young sub-species get chewed up and spat out in his line of work—it wasn’t an unfounded fear.
“She’s all I’ve got,” Lena said, her voice small. “I’d put up with a thousand Boss Silicks and Warden Garrosses if it kept her safe.”
“Garross?” Kormak’s lip curled. “I’ve heard about him. Gooey motherfucker.”
There was a snort beside him, and Kormak glanced down. The girl had a hand clamped over her mouth, stifling a laugh.
“S-sorry,” she managed once her laughter subsided. “It’s just—I’ve been waiting for someone else to say that for months.”
Kormak smiled. “He tried it on with a xylidian in max. She damn near ripped his dick off—or whatever the hell you call that thing Calideez’s have.”
Lena’s smile twitched. “My friend Libby called it a, uh… Proboscis.”
Kormak made a face. “Ew. Aren’t those meant to be on your face?”
Lena laughed out loud at that, her knee folding up towards her chest and Kormak had to force his eyes back onto the road. The girl was so expressive, her emotions radiating throughout her whole body and changing from moment to moment. He wondered why humans bothered chattering so much if they could communicate just like this.
“Thanks,” Lena said, biting her lip.
Kormak’s heart skipped just a little faster. “For what?”
She shrugged. “Lightening the mood? It’s good to… laugh about that stuff.”
“Yeah. I guess we both know what it’s like to get kicked while we’re—”
Bang!
Lena shot up in her seat, her wide eyes flying to Kormak’s. He reeled, looking for Sweepers or the glint of a gun muzzle, but his attention snapped back to the wheel as it spun in his grasp, and the car buckled beneath them.
The car was out of control.
---
Lena gripped the edges of her seat as the
car swerved dangerously. Kormak’s eyes were wide and the scales across his knuckles were stretched tight as he grasped the steering wheel.
The car jolted under them as the tire ran out of air, and Lena feared they’d lose control. But Kormak hunkered down, his muscles bunching beneath his jumpsuit as he wrestled with the wheel, forcing the car off the highway and easing on the brakes. It was a good thing he did; they hadn’t seen any transports for a few miles now and Lena didn’t like their chances of being rescued if they rolled the vehicle and were hurt.
But the car came safely to a halt on the dusty shoulder, and Lena sat dumbfounded for a few moments as she willed her racing heart to slow down. Kormak was out and circling the car almost immediately, his claws clacking against whatever surface he touched. She waited until the dull scrape of his fingers over the paint came to a halt, and clicked her door open, following at a more sedate pace. But she didn’t have to search far to find the problem.
The back tire was soft and deflated, and the levekk standing beside it was anything but.
He radiated tension, his shoulders set in a straight, hard line even as his neck craned forward to inspect the damage. He crouched down on his haunches, prodding at the tire with one bony finger. Lena watched nervously as Kormak shut his eyes, his face carefully blank.
She was about to ask if he was okay when his arm yanked backwards, and his open palm smacked down on the corner of the vehicle, the metal ringing in the silence. He stood, barely looking at her, and opened up the trunk, lifting the fake bottom and searching around inside the car as if he’d owned it all his life. He was still for a moment, and then he threw the flooring down again, slamming the door shut.
She shrank back as the levekk aimed a kick at the car, denting the rear fender deeply in the middle. His hand came down again on the back door, though he must have been holding back, for no hand-sized gash was left behind in the metal as it had been in the wall back at Kharon.
Lena stood ramrod straight, her shoulders up around her ears as she tried to look as inconspicuous as possible. She didn’t dare speak, the alien’s anger too palpable for her to even consider approaching.
But despite the tension in the air, the levekk’s body had already relaxed somewhat. He looked out toward the horizon, to the thick swathe of trees that lined it, and worried at his lip.
“We could have made it to my contact by nightfall,” he grunted, finally catching Lena’s eye. His cat-like slits were thinner than needles, contracted in anger, although it didn’t seem to be aimed at her. “Now it’s going to be days of walking.”
Lena breathed in deeply, processing the information. “I take it there wasn’t a spare in there?”
“No,” Kormak replied.
Lena sighed, eyes raking over the vehicle. “If it had been something in the guts of it, I might have been able to fix it, but a busted tire?” She shook her head, palms out at her sides.
“It’s fine,” he barked, as if in answer to her unspoken apology. He glanced up and down her where she stood, cataloging. “I hope you can handle traveling rough.”
With that, he turned away, slamming the open driver’s side door shut as he passed it. Lena stayed rooted to the spot, frustration chipping away at her nerves. The implication had been apparent, no matter how he tried to mask it. He didn’t think she could survive out here. Again, she was the liability—the damsel that needed carrying over the threshold.
Fuck that.
She stomped up to the car, snatching her backpack from where it had sat at her feet. It was weighty, but nothing she couldn’t handle, and it would only get lighter as they traveled. And it wasn’t as if she didn’t have stamina. She may have gotten a little lean on muscle while she was stuck in Kharon, but she’d always been active, ever since she was small. She could walk along a road with a backpack just fine.
She shut the door, glancing up to locate the levekk. He was already a fair ways ahead, his broad back hunched and unmoving as he walked. He hadn’t bothered to wait for her, evidently, but she didn’t need him to. She was as desperate to get back to New Chicago as he was, and she wasn’t going to let him act like she was a burden.
She set off after him, sending up angry little clouds of dust as she walked. It was still dry and dusty here, even though they’d passed from the desert into yellow-green scrubland earlier that day. Looking around, the trees were growing thicker here, and she hoped they might reach the thick belt of forest that sat on the horizon that day. Walking out in the open when they were still dressed like inmates made her nervous, and it wasn’t like their jumpsuits helped them blend in. The dark fabric soaked up the sun as well, and Lena could feel herself sweating already.
But the trees at least helped her gauge their speed, and as she walked along in Kormak’s dust trails for the next few hours, she could feel them making progress.
She wished she could say the same for the… truce she’d struck with the levekk.
She couldn’t call it a friendship—she thought the huge alien might scoff at the thought, anyway. But the way they’d been chatting earlier was so… easy. Which was ludicrous when she thought about how quiet Kormak was. He was definitely a person of few words, so much so that she’d been scared to speak at all at first.
And he’d called her a Duster. That hadn’t been so fun.
But he’d also apologized for it, and that made his sudden anger baffling. He’d helped her get this far, he’d let her travel with him, he’d even given her the sneakers that were keeping her feet from blistering, but now she was back to being a nuisance?
Maybe he’d simply been whiling away the time, and using her as a distraction from the monotony. That was probably it, she mused, and smiled wryly even as something inside her withered with disappointment. That was all she could expect though, really. He hadn’t wanted to take her on this journey.
So she’d have to prove that she could be useful. Or at least try not to slow him down. And she was up to that challenge, she told herself. She’d dealt with assholes underestimating her before, so what was one more added to the list?
She hiked her backpack up higher and quickened her pace, her shoulders set.
6
They walked into the night, Kormak keeping ten to twenty feet ahead of the girl the entire time.
It wasn’t her fault, and a part of him felt guilty for taking it out on her, but another part reveled in the anger. He would never have allowed her to accompany him past the town if he knew there’d be rough travel involved. Humans were soft and small, and they weren’t built to travel long distances like this. She was going to slow him down, and every extra second placed between him and his destination ate at him.
It almost sounds like you’re worried about her.
The voice was deep and smooth, and Kormak knew who it was within seconds, despite the years that had passed since he heard it.
Malcolm.
He grit his teeth. Malcolm wasn’t here. He had no business hearing his voice in his head. So he stamped it out, focusing on the silent horizon.
He wasn’t worried about her. She’d followed of her own accord. If she slowed him down, he’d simply have to leave her behind.
And if she thought him a monster by the end of it, then so be it. It had been a long time since he was anything but.
He couldn’t afford to pass up this chance. He’d been imprisoned for three years by the time he managed to find a guard malleable enough to help him get out. It helped that he’d known the guard before—or at least, known of him. It was exceedingly useful that blackmail material never reached its expiration date.
But he couldn’t be sure that he’d have the same leverage if he was imprisoned again, and that was why this was his one chance.
This was his last opportunity to get back to New Chicago and wrap his fingers around a certain someone’s neck.
So he pressed on, striding past copses of trees and tufts of scrub at a quick pace. He could see clearly in the darkness, even with night falling around them, the moon
lighting the way as well as a torch to Kormak’s eyes.
When he finally allowed himself to glance behind him, he found that the girl was still there, trekking along at a steady pace. He had no trouble picking her out in the darkness, despite her jumpsuit’s best efforts at hiding her. She looked calm and unruffled, and Kormak had to crush a warm flutter of admiration that sparked in his chest as he turned back to the horizon.
Maybe this girl wouldn’t be as much of a nuisance as he’d thought.
After another hour of walking, he pulled away from the road without warning. He crested the steep incline that had risen up beside the highway and moved to settle under a small patch of trees that hid in its shadow. For a few moments, he thought he may have finally thwarted the little human, but then he heard a scuffle and a grunt of exertion, and she was climbing up the hill after him. She paused, her head whipping around as her eyes struggled to locate him in the darkness.
He snorted. He couldn’t work out how humans had survived as long as they had on this planet. But he supposed weapons and houses went a long way.
Hearing him, Lena turned in his direction. She picked her way down the slope, quickening her pace when he raised a hand half-heartedly and called out, cutting her just a little bit of slack.
“You kept up,” he murmured as she slumped down beside him, visibly out of breath. It didn’t lessen how impressive the feat was. She was more than a foot shorter than him, and covered a hell of a lot less ground than he could with the same amount of exertion.
“Yep,” was all she said in reply, and Kormak hid a smile. Not that she’d see it.
He heard the creak of a zip, and the sound of Lena rustling through her backpack. “Want food?” she asked, voice clipped.
“No thanks.”
There was the sound of crunching grains, and that sickly sweet smell invaded his nostrils once again.
“So what turned you into a rage monster?” she asked as she munched on the breakfast bar, the walk apparently hard enough that it had banished much of her trepidation.