Her Cold-Blooded Protector

by Lea Linnett

  Getting over this crush might be more difficult than she thought.

  11

  Kormak was relieved when the forest ended two hours into their journey for the day. The forest had quickly become cloying. He was used to the concrete jungle of the inner city, but the damp, earthy feeling of the actual wilderness was less to his liking. It didn’t help that the branches blocked out the warmth of the sun, and whacked him in the face more times than he felt was necessary.

  The area they’d come out in looked as if it was once the outskirts of a mid-sized town, although now most of it lay in crumbling ruins. The forest gave way to flattened, grassy meadows, and up ahead, Kormak could see the beginnings of properly finished roads and large buildings, all of it in disrepair.

  Beside him, Lena seemed less enthused by the change. She was evidently most in her element under the cover of the trees, and now she was looking around her with a wary eye.

  “Do you think they’re still looking for us?” she asked.

  “Probably.” At Lena’s discomforted look, he continued. “But if we’re lucky at all, they’ll have only just found the car. And if we can cross the river today and get back under the trees, they won’t be able to find us.” He grimaced at the thought of having to trek through more woodland, but there was no avoiding it. Much of the land between here and New Chicago was covered in forest.

  Lena seemed satisfied with the response, although she continued to worry at her lip.

  “…How do we cross the river?”

  “If I’m remembering right, there should be a bridge on the other side of this built-up area.” Lena’s eyes lit up, and Kormak smiled. “You swim?”

  “Hell no.”

  He chuckled. “Thought as much.”

  “Do you?” she asked, sounding affronted.

  He caught her eye. “Not even a little bit.”

  She looked away, unable to hide the soft smile that wormed its way onto her mouth. Kormak turned his gaze back to the approaching town, his chest warming.

  He decided to blame the warmth on the sun, even though he could barely see it. Free of the forest, Kormak could now see the large, dark clouds looming on the horizon. They blocked out much of the light, and appeared to be heavy with rain, sprawling across the skyline. There would be no escaping them. Kormak just hoped the rain didn’t hit before they’d reached the forest, where the close-knit trees could afford them some cover.

  It didn’t take them long to reach the more built-up inner area of the town. It had obviously been left abandoned for many years, the streets empty and cracking up the middle. The buildings had been bleached of much of their color, leaving behind a gray-and-orange cityscape, full of fissures and holes.

  Kormak looked around, recognizing the craters left behind by levekk cannon-fire from his old history books. This town was probably a frontline battleground once upon a time, the levekk settlers pushing eastward from the desert, and the humans using the river to protect the unconquered land behind it.

  His mind flicked back to the countless hours he’d spent poring over military strategy and recounts of the colonization of ‘CL-32’ at his father’s behest. It had been a long, drawn-out process from everything he’d read. The humans put up a fight. On the page, he’d never really understood it—not properly—but seeing the actual evidence of it now…

  “You okay?”

  Kormak blinked, looking down at the little human by his side.

  “Yeah.”

  Lena smiled, eyes turning back to the road. “This place is like a ghost town,” she said, voice small.

  “I guess the only reason to stay would have been the river trade, but with hover transports…” Kormak shrugged. Who needed water when you could move everything by air?

  “It’s sad.”

  Kormak looked back at her. “How do you mean?”

  “I dunno,” she murmured. “It’s like… This place—It’s just stopped. Y’know? The people that lived here either died or went elsewhere, and their city’s just been left like this. No one… cares about it.”

  “It has been a long time.”

  “That’s one way of putting it. You know, I don’t even know that much about what Earth was like before. It’s like everyone just… let it go.”

  “Does knowing help?” Kormak asked. He’d been forced to go over levekk history so much as a child that he thought he might never escape the claws of his ancestors. He felt no wistfulness about the past.

  Lena made a face, her brows knitting in consternation. “I don’t know if it would help. It might even make people angry. But I’d like to know. It’s frightening, though,” she added, glancing up at him. “I’m scared I wouldn’t recognize it. They were human, but they might not be like me.”

  Kormak nodded. “Maybe the others are scared too?”

  Lena barked out a laugh, rolling her eyes. “Scared of wasting credits, maybe. No investor would be interested in dredging up human history. I think anyone that would’ve cared never got the chance to. The kind of humans that make good money or get a good job? They tend to be assholes, I’ve found.”

  Kormak frowned, pondering that. It was true that he’d rarely seen a human—or any sub-species, really—within his parent’s circle of influence that wasn’t a servant of some sort. Members of sub-species could become wealthy, but it was within the confines of the districts that they lived in. He thought of Malcolm, making his millions off the poor people around him, and realized that what Lena was saying might be true as well. Pride in one’s heritage or species didn’t get you far in the underworld.

  “Is any of this stuff familiar to you?” he found himself asking.

  Lena looked around as they walked, her brow furrowed. “I mean, I’m sure a bed’s a bed and a door is a door and everything. It’s the other stuff I don’t get.” She pointed to a blown out store front as they passed. “Like, what the heck is that thing?”

  Kormak raised his brow, studying the worn advertisements that had mostly peeled away after years of weathering. The image Lena gestured at showed a drawing of something skinny and pale, with a large head on its shoulders and huge black eyes that took up almost all of its face. It had one hand raised, as if it were trying to reach out of the wall towards them. He frowned, bemused. “I don’t get it either. You think it’s a self-portrait?”

  She laughed at that, looking at him sidelong. They spent the next few minutes pointing at random things along the path, trying to come up with a backstory for each.

  They were just crossing the halfway mark down the wide main street when Lena stopped abruptly. “Wait a sec…” She stepped off the path, hesitantly approaching one of the overgrown store fronts lining it.

  Once, the store had probably been covered in glass, but now only the metal frames remained. It was dark inside, and Kormak could see grass poking up through much of the floor. The walls were thick with moss, and rubble littered the ground.

  Lena stood in the doorway. When Kormak neared her, she turned disappointed eyes on him.

  “This looks familiar. Augusta used to have an old ‘music record’,” Lena explained, flexing her fingers in the air as she said the foreign words. When that only garnered a confused look from Kormak, she grinned. “It’s this black disc, about the size of a dinner plate. It’s got these grooves on it, which somehow store data? Kind of like storage drives do now. But you need a special machine to play it. Augusta had one, but it broke. It took me months to fix it. But just before I’d finished, we had a bunch of stuff stolen.” Her face turned sad. “The record was taken. It would have been great if I could find one like it left behind here, but…”

  She gestured into the store, and the rows upon rows of empty shelves. Everything had long since been snatched up, probably as personal heirlooms or for sale on the black market.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured, and Lena smiled. His stomach flipped, and the most peculiar urge to reach out and cup the human’s face washed over him. His hand was halfway up before he could stop it, and he cle
nched his claws into a fist, the blunted tips digging into his palm.

  He could not touch her.

  No matter how much he might want to.

  “It’s okay,” Lena said with a smile, not noticing his dilemma. “I dunno if she would have appreciated it anyway. She’s always telling us not to get bogged down by the past.” She chuckled softly. “Wanna keep going?”

  Kormak nodded, and followed her from the shadowed eaves of the store. He looked back once, half-wishing that a ‘music record’ would pop into existence before him, but knowing already that the notion was ludicrous.

  12

  They reached the river a bit before midday, and the sight of it made Lena’s eyes bug out. At first glance, it looked like a great pane of glass, stretching out in both directions, north and south. But when she looked more closely, she could see the speed at which debris floated down its length. The water wasn’t blue, like she’d imagined—it wasn’t even one color. In places, it was the same muddy brown that she expected the riverbed to be; in others, it reflected the sky in varying shades of gray, blue, and green—even purple.

  She wasn’t aware she was gaping until Kormak spoke up next to her.

  “We better cross now,” he said, and when she turned she found him watching the sky, expression troubled. She turned her gaze to the massive bridge a few minutes’ walk upstream. The bridge spanned the entire width of the river, disappearing into a smudge of green forest that was so far away she could barely make it out.

  As they drew closer, she studied the giant construction. It looked like a giant slab of dull, gray concrete, and it was supported by rows upon rows of pillars made from the same substance, which dipped beneath the muddy surface of the river to the bed below. Most of them were intact, she noticed with a small sigh of relief, and the bridge looked steady. Huge metal poles spiked out of the concrete, reaching up into the sky at varying heights and gently curving to form a huge wave that enclosed the bridge like a cage. These decorative arches were in slightly greater disrepair than the bridge’s supports, but they didn’t look like they’d fall. The whole structure was remarkably whole—at least as far as Lena could see.

  There was just one small problem.

  The bridge was above them, easily fifty feet off the ground, and those pillars that extended into the water kept going, raising the bridge over the empty bank that they now stood on. There was no entrance ramp nearby, and Lena’s heart sank, fearing that they’d have to backtrack.

  “H-how do we get up to it?” she asked, turning back to Kormak.

  The levekk was staring at something under the bridge, face impassive. She was starting to wonder if anything ever took this guy by surprise.

  He glanced at her, before nodding back to the bridge. “See on the other side there? Someone’s made a path for us.”

  Lena frowned, squinting at the bridge. Her frown only deepened when she realized what he was talking about. They approached the bridge, rounding one of the pillars, and Lena looked up at the largest stack of boxes she’d ever seen in her life.

  “What the heck are those?”

  Kormak chuckled, rapping one with a knuckle and producing a metallic echo that rang through the silence. “They’re shipping containers. River trade, remember?”

  “But why are they stacked like that?” she wondered aloud, eyes skimming over the huge metal containers. Some much smaller crates had been stacked on top of them in certain places, creating a makeshift staircase up to the bridge above.

  “They were probably trying to get around that,” he said, pointing a bony finger at a spot about fifty feet inland, where most of the bridge had been blown away by an explosion. “It was probably built by scavengers. Maybe even before hover-tech was accessible to sub-species. The bridge would’ve been the only way to head east.” He grimaced. “I don’t even want to know how they lugged cargo up this thing, though.”

  Lena’s gaze trailed the full height of the stacked boxes, and she made a face. She didn’t want to imagine it either.

  Kormak stepped up to the base of the tower, using an old black-tired trailer as a stepping stone to grab the lip of the first container. He pulled himself up without hesitation, stepping carefully on the metallic surface. Wherever he walked, the metal groaned, and Lena realized with a gulp that the boxes were hollow.

  Kormak paused, crouching down at the edge. “Can you reach my hand?” he asked, gaze softening when he saw the stricken look on her face.

  Lena reddened, but she stepped up onto the trailer nonetheless. She had to jump to reach him, and he caught hold of her wrist just in time, taking her entire weight and hauling her up onto the container. She was reminded of how easily he’d picked her up at the prison, leaping over the wall with her as if he did it every day. That night, it had been a complete shock—to both of them, she suspected—that he’d assisted her. Now, as he helped her scale the various crates, boxes and metallic walls above them, it almost felt natural.

  She was still a little frustrated that she was having to rely on him again, but she couldn’t pretend his help was unwelcome.

  “I’m sensing a pattern here,” she said, trying to divert attention from her own embarrassment.

  “Oh?” Kormak’s cat-like eyes cut to hers as they grasped each other’s hands and he hoisted her up next to him.

  “We always end up climbing unclimbable structures when you’re around.”

  He huffed out a laugh, scaling the next couple of crates ahead of her. “Unclimbable for you, maybe.”

  “And yet,” she managed, pulling herself up onto a smaller crate and catching the lip of the next level by herself, “for some reason, you keep helping me make it to the other side.”

  Kormak paused to look down at her, a rare grin on his face. “It’s all about appearances, little human. See, I have to help you—otherwise you’ll get yourself over and make me look useless.”

  Lena’s mouth snapped open in disbelief, but it quickly morphed into a smile when she saw the levekk biting his lip against a laugh. “Yeah, right. Because I can climb concrete and jump up stacks of huge, metal boxes without breaking a sweat.”

  “That’s right,” the levekk hummed mirthfully, taking her hand when she reached out and pulling her up to stand beside him without prompting. He paused with his claws tucked gently around her wrist, gazing down at her. “…Maybe I kind of like having you around as well,” he murmured, before releasing her and rocketing up to the next level.

  She blinked after him, her heart beating entirely too fast. She felt the urge to make a joke, or to say something to mask the hint of red now climbing onto her cheeks, but her mind had gone blank. The warm feeling of butterflies flitting around in her stomach didn’t make it any easier to come up with a retort, so she settled on an eye-roll for now and pressed on. She made a point of throwing an arm over her forehead and begging the levekk for help the next time she couldn’t reach something, and was delighted when he obliged.

  At one point, she heard a metallic shriek, the sheet of metal beneath them trembling under their combined weight. Within seconds, an arm wrapped around her waist, lifting her up to the next level above the levekk’s head and out of harm’s way. The movement was so swift she almost didn’t know what to do when the ledge came within reach.

  But she came to her senses, pulling herself up and turning to hold out a hand to the much heavier levekk without thinking. He took it, and together they managed to get him up onto the same level as her. She insisted on helping, even though her arms were doing a worse job of taking his weight than the metal below had done.

  It took only minutes to get to the top of the crate stack from there, and when they finally reached the summit, Lena dropped to the concrete, exhausted.

  The bridge was made of the same hard and coarse human cement that many of the outdated roads near her home consisted of. It stretched out around her slumped form, gray and mostly unbroken, and even as its rough surface bit into her knees through her jumpsuit, she was glad to be on solid ground ag
ain.

  She glanced toward the river, and saw the bridge reaching off into the distance. Thankfully, it still seemed intact from this angle, and the hard part—climbing up to it—was over. Now they just needed to get to the other side.

  She sighed with relief, chuckling tiredly.

  “Good work,” said Kormak, smiling at her, and she felt her already rapidly beating heart skip a little.

  “You too,” she said, voice wheezy. The levekk laughed, the sound coming out rather high and thin due to the exertion but sounding genuine nonetheless.

  But his gaze soon turned up to the sky again, to the clouds amassing in a thick blanket above them now, and they decided to press on.

  ---

  The trip across the bridge should have been a short one. The river was wide, but the bridge was smooth and sturdy, with no broken-down vehicles or other debris blocking it. For the first half of the crossing, it seemed as if it would be as painless a trip as Kormak suspected. That was, until the opposite shore crept into view, and the rest of the bridge along with it.

  It was then that Kormak realized they wouldn’t be free of the river as soon as he’d thought.

  The bridge was practically in pieces on this side of the river. The north side of the bridge had undergone significant damage, and all of it had been invisible from their southern approach.

  They stepped up to the edge of a gigantic chasm in the middle of the bridge. It was as if a huge hand had struck it, removing ragged circles of concrete with each fingertip and leaving nothing but unstable catwalks in between.

  Kormak looked northward, further up the river, and saw a small island situated in the middle. His mouth thinned. One of the many things his father’s books had taught him was the general trajectory of cannon fire, and the distance between the large island and the bridge they now stood on was well within the realms of possibility for a ground-based attack.