Beyond the Next Star

by Melody Johnson

  The ice must have fractured from the force of her fall, and the blood, still pouring from her wounds—being pumped by her beating heart, Torek hoped—was dripping into and seeping through those spiderweb cracks. It was possible that they were only surface fractures, that her blood would remain on the ice and not drip into the Zorelok River itself. Even if drops of her blood did seep through to the river below, the zorels might not be sufficiently awake from their hibernation to notice or care.

  It was also possible that, even if they weren’t awake now, the scent of her blood would bring them out of hibernation.

  The waterfall at the mouth of the Zorelok River had been gushing this morning and every morning for the past couple weeks, indicating the end of Rorak. The ice was already melting, enough so that the river was raging beneath it, feeding the falls. It would continue to thin, then completely melt, and Genai would be upon them along with another zorel season.

  Torek suppressed the spike in his heart at the thought. As the world turned, there would always be a Genai following the Rorak and another zorel season. Whether it came early or late, it would still come. Minimizing mass casualties when it came, not saving individuals, was his sole concern.

  But Genai hadn’t quite come yet.

  Torek rushed forward to the ladder of lorienok and began the descent down the ravine.

  “Commander.”

  “Commander.”

  “Commander.”

  Torek nodded acknowledgment to each one, but not slipping took most of his concentration. He couldn’t think of the worst, of someone breaking their hold, of the entire chain of lorienok from that person on—twenty-five, maybe thirty lor and lorok—falling down the slope and pounding into the ice. Reshna and her meager weight had cracked it. They would shatter completely through it. He couldn’t think of the loss of not just Reshna but the strangers who had banded together to help her. To help him. They were the civilians he’d risked life and limb to protect for ten Genai, but unlike his guard, they were under no oath to serve him or their country. But here they were, risking life and limb for him in return.

  Torek’s right boot found a particularly slick patch, already bare from someone else’s footfall. His right leg shot out from beneath him, and his left leg, bearing all his weight, followed. He lost his grip on the waist of the lor anchoring him, fell on his side, and started to slide down the ravine. He flung out an arm and hooked his elbow around someone’s ankle. The lor gave a pained groan as he strained to keep hold of his neighbor’s hand. A chain reaction triggered up the line, groan after groan, each straining to hold the additional weight.

  But they were two dozen holding one. They held strong.

  Torek glanced down the steep, jagged terrain of the ravine and blew out a shaky breath. Reshna had scraped and lashed and bled her way down the entire treacherous slope. He stared at her for a moment—still on her back, the puddle of blood around her either growing or simply appearing larger the closer he got—and took strength. He had to reach her. These people, Lorien bless them, had given him the means unasked, and he could reach her. The boy would contact Brinon Kore’Onik, and Reshna, no matter how broken she was now, would be alive for Brinon to heal her because they’d all acted swiftly. He’d get to her in time, and she’d be fine.

  Torek found purchase in a patch of rocky terrain beneath the snow. He climbed carefully up a leg, then gripped a hip and finally a pair of shoulders to pull himself to his feet.

  The strain on the chain of lorienok eased as Torek once again supported his own weight.

  “Are you all right, Torek Lore’Onik Weidnar Kenzo Lesh—”

  “Yes, yes. Just Commander, please,” Torek interrupted gruffly. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, Commander. It’s my honor.”

  The lorok next to him was gaping. “You just saved Torek Lore’Onik Weidnar Kenzo Lesh’Aerai Renaar’s life!”

  The lor beamed.

  Torek squeezed his shoulder. “And I thank you.” He cleared his throat and raised his voice slightly. “I thank all of you.”

  He continued down the ravine, slower and more cautious of his footing, testing his next step before transferring his weight. The pace was agonizing but steady. Eventually, he reached the river’s edge.

  The last link in their lorienok chain was a young lor who hadn’t grown into his ears yet but was past adolescence, sporting a fully curved set of horns. His eyes widened, revealing the whites all around his brown irises as he took in the fact that Commander Torek himself was before him, and not just before him, but gripping his shoulder.

  The young lor glanced at Torek’s hand and seemed to puff up, only an inch or two shy of Torek’s height. He looked up and met his gaze directly.

  “What are your orders, Commander?”

  His orders. Had he been with his guard, he’d have ordered a two-kair cadet onto the ice to rescue her. A two-kair had enough experience to pull it off and wasn’t so experienced that the Federation would lose an essential leader if he didn’t. To a teenage civilian, what were his orders?

  “Stay here and be ready.” With any luck, readiness wouldn’t be needed.

  “Stay. Here?” The young lor blinked at him. “You can’t be serious.”

  Torek crouched down on all fours.

  The lor grabbed Torek’s shoulder. His grip was surprisingly strong. “Commander, no! You can’t! To risk losing you when I could—”

  Torek glared at the lor and then at his staying hand.

  The lorok next to him leaned in. “You dare give Torek Lore’Onik Weidnar Kenzo Lesh’Aerai Renaar a command? Petreok, you shame me.”

  The young lor—Petreok, apparently—immediately released his hold, stung. “My apologies, Commander. I meant no disrespect. I didn’t think. But you can’t—”

  Petreok pursed his lips and turned to the lorok. “He can’t go on the ice.”

  The lorok glanced sternly at her son, then at Torek, and opened her mouth. But she froze, the words unspoken. No one here had the power or rank to argue against him, and more importantly, no one would.

  Torek flattened himself on his stomach. The ground was hard and cold, but not as cold as the ice was sure to be. He spread his arms and legs as wide as possible to distribute his weight—usually an unneeded precaution in Rorak, but the spiderweb cracks beneath Reshna’s body indicated otherwise. And there was no gauging their depth. He pushed off the edge of the ground with the toes of his boots and slid over the ice on his belly to Reshna.

  The tension that descended over the ravine could have cut glass.

  The shadow of the mountain’s overhang shrouded him as he reached her. The ice didn’t break. The fractures didn’t splinter further. Her blood did seem to have dripped rather deep, but there was no telling if it had reached the running river beneath the solid ice.

  By Lorien’s horn, could a body lose this much blood and still live? She’d fallen with her entire weight on her back and over her leg, so her knee was angled unnaturally beneath her. Her coverings were wet from the inside out, stained at her knees and punctured at the abdomen, but his greatest concern, the one injury that would supersede the rest if it couldn’t be healed, was to her head—the epicenter of all that blood.

  Her face was pale, as if all the life had already seeped from her. Her lips were nearly blue, and the skin under her eyes was smudged a dark gray. Torek glanced over her uninjured nose, chin, cheeks parted lips, and forehead, taking in the sight of her smooth, baby-soft skin like a balm, but nothing could ease the ache constricting his chest.

  Torek reached out to grip her hand, knowing he couldn’t pet her head without hurting her, and stopped short. Her palms were scraped raw. Three of her blunt little claws at the tips of her fingers had ripped off, exposing the torn skin beneath.

  He touched the soft curve of her cheek instead, the only place he could see that wasn’t bleeding or broken.

  She didn’t move.

  The pressure in his chest crushed the fragile sprouts of hope before the
y could take root. He balled his fingers into a fist, and the fist trembled.

  No. This is not happening, not to me and not to Reshna. Not today.

  Torek unbound her coverings and placed his palm on the center of her bare chest. For as pale as she appeared and as chilled as her cheek was, her body was warm. He took a deep breath, trying to calm the frantic thunder of his heart so he could feel hers beating. And he would. It would be strong and steady, and no matter her current injuries—Brinon Kore’Onik could heal nearly anything—she would live. She just needed to be alive now and stay alive until he came.

  His heart wouldn’t slow. Even the silence of the ravine had a deafening quality, as if everyone’s collectively held breath had consumed sound. But as he watched her, he realized something about her face that he’d been too distracted by the sight of her injuries to notice. A small cloud of warm air puffed from her mouth. And then another puff several seconds later. And then another, several seconds after that.

  Torek rested his forehead against his extended forearm in weak relief. Reshna was breathing. She was alive. For now, in this moment, Reshna was alive.

  Thump.

  Torek jerked up sharply. The entire frozen Zorelok River quaked. He waited, holding his breath, but the spiderweb fractures in the ice didn’t crack. Nothing and no one had moved, not on the ravine’s slope and not on the ice, but he knew what he’d heard. He recognized what he’d felt. The noise wasn’t coming from the ravine or above the ice.

  Her blood must have seeped through to the river beneath the ice.

  Thump.

  The ice twitched under his body again. On the ravine, snow jumped up from tuanok bush limbs and fell to the ground. A line of gasps and guttural groans echoed down to him as half the lorienok lost their footing. The chain swayed like a wriggling snake as everyone scrambled for purchase. If the tremors didn’t cause an avalanche, the lorienok would.

  “Commander?” Petreok asked. “Was that—”

  “We’re going to keep steady and calm. And move swiftly,” Torek interrupted before the young lor could incite panic. Positioned within the valley of the ravine and under the concave curve of the slope overhead, his words reverberated in a slow echo. “Once I’m ashore with Reshna, we climb back up the ravine one at a time from the bottom up, the reverse of how we—”

  Thump.

  Crack.

  Torek whipped his head up, surprised by the height of that second noise. The ice wasn’t fracturing under him. He wasn’t at risk of falling through, but—he squinted at the mountainous overhang shadowing half the river—Rak! A thick fall of snow was about to crush him.

  He found some traction with the toes of his boots, gripped Reshna’s arm, and slung her body in an arc over the ice. She slid across the river to shore at Petreok’s feet. Torek’s right boot slipped as he released her, and he slid in the opposite direction, completely beneath the overhang.

  “Commander-der-der!”

  “Take Reshna. Lead everyone off the ravine. That’s a command. Go! Now!”

  A solid wall of snow pummeled him flat, smashing his face into the ice and crushing the breath from his lungs as it buried him. Its weight was incredible. He tried to breathe, but the air was thick and spiked. He waited for the ice to finally give, for his body to plunge into the river and come face-to-face with the zorel in its natural habitat for once. The zorel would have to race the cold and current to take credit for his death.

  He waited, but the ice didn’t give. He tried to inhale air where there was only snow. The silence was more than just the absence of noise. It was the devouring of noise. The devouring of light, scent, and warmth. And the taste of blood.

  Twelve

  Delaney jolted awake to the horrible, consuming sensation of being burned. Her left knee, the right side of her stomach, the palms of her hands, and several of her fingertips were on fire. She tried to remember where she was, why she was burning, how she had slept through whatever was happening, but her mind was sluggish. The fragments of memory that she did have were of being cold and slipping down a slope of ice and snow. Which only made the fire more confusing.

  She tried to jerk away from the heat and couldn’t, not because she was restrained—although she was fairly certain that the pressure around her ankles and wrists was restraints—but rather because no matter how hard her mind strained to control her body, she couldn’t move.

  “Her heart rate is climbing.” A high feminine voice growled and hacked in a stilted, harsh language that wasn’t English. Delaney recognized both the language and the voice, but she couldn’t quite place how she knew either.

  The apprehension constricting her throat didn’t make any sense. She hadn’t experienced such a terrible soul-crushing weight in years, not since living in the Todd household. Had she?

  “Should we give her something more for the pain? A nerve blocker?” That same girl. That same language.

  “What do you think, Joennel? What is your recommended course of treatment?”

  Joennel. The name was vaguely familiar, and that new voice even more so. Its cadence somehow made her feel both at ease and wary. How could she experience such opposite feelings in reaction to the same person?

  She tried to struggle against the restraints. She tried to scream and thrash against the flames. She tried to curse them, whoever they were, and fate and God, but she should have known better. He’d turned a blind eye to her pain years ago.

  A weak, nearly imperceptible moan emerged from her throat, the only outward evidence of her inner battle.

  “She needs the nerve blocker now.” The girl’s voice was certain this time.

  “You don’t know that!” A third voice. Its timbre had a man’s depth and gravel, but his tone was panicked, giving his words a whiney quality that sounded distinctly immature.

  “I do too!” The girl.

  “Just because she moaned doesn’t mean—”

  “Actually, it does. She’s finally cognizant enough to not only feel pain but express it. Her brain function is completely restored. See? So, she is probably experiencing the full agony of healing without being able to express it.”

  “Very good. You’re correct, Joennel. Please prepare a dose.”

  “Of course, she’s correct,” the boy—he was definitely a boy—muttered. And then more clearly, “Can I administer it?”

  A pause. “Where would you administer it?”

  Silence.

  Jesus Christ, give me the nerve blocker already!

  “No, Joennel, give Roerik a chance.”

  Someone was tapping something, thinking, as Delaney bore her agony.

  “Her neck?”

  A sigh. “Joennel?”

  “The inside of her elbow.”

  “Correct.”

  “As if that’s a surprise.”

  Something stung the inside of her right elbow, and nearly immediately, her heart tripped on itself and then slowed. Her lips started to tingle. Her body somersaulted, and her head floated away from it all. She could technically still feel the pain of her burning hands and knee and wherever else, but she simply didn’t care. How could she when her head wasn’t even attached to her body anymore? Like a released helium balloon, her mind drifted high and away, leaving the people still growling and hacking through their stilted conversation over her body, where they belonged.

  Delaney drifted back to herself some time later. The room smelled different now, or rather, she actually noticed its scent, since she wasn’t being consumed by flames anymore: sandalwood and spiced vanilla.

  She inhaled the scent on a deep sigh and snuggled deeper into the fur blankets around her. She could move. She wasn’t restrained. She wasn’t burning. She wasn’t freezing.

  A good day.

  “Go. Now!”

  Delaney’s eyes sprang open. She was nestled in the furs of her pallet beside Torek’s bed, which was strange enough considering she hadn’t slept through the night in her own bed since that first night. What was even stranger was that
full-on midday light was pouring through the window. Had Torek added “nap time” to their schedule? Unlikely.

  Strangest of all was the man standing at the foot of Torek’s bed. He was staring and blinking at the bed with a pained expression. If Delaney didn’t know better, she’d think he was about to burst into tears.

  “Commander, please. See reason. You weren’t this sick last night. You had a simple fepherok, and now—” He shook his head, perplexed. “Geraevon Kore’Onik charged me with your care. I beg you. Let me care for you.”

  “Keep calm.”

  Lying prone on the floor, Delaney couldn’t see over the sideboard to the raised mattress. Torek was just a disembodied voice. He must be on the bed.

  Torek still in bed. At midday.

  “I’ll calm when you take some broth,” the man pleaded. “You’re not well, Commander. You must—”

  “Move swiftly! Take Reshna and go!” Torek thundered.

  The man cringed. “She shouldn’t be moved either. Please, you both need rest, and above all else, you need to eat.”

  “That’s a command.”

  The man’s expression crumpled. “Yes, Commander.”

  He stepped toward Delaney.

  “Go! Now!”

  The tears did fall then. Big drops the size of quarters rolled from his eyes and soaked into the fur of his cheeks. He placed the broth on the bedside table, touched his hand to his heart, and left the room.

  Delaney turned to stare at the bed, but it was useless. She didn’t have X-ray vision. She’d need to stand to see him.

  “Take Reshna. Lead everyone off the ravine. That’s a command. Go! Now!”

  She glanced at the door, then back to the bed, confused. What did he mean, lead everyone off the ravine? And besides which, who was he talking to? The man was still gone.

  Her stomach clenched tight with dread as memories began to filter fuzzily through her mind. The morning of the endless run. Falling in snowbank after snowbank and lagging behind. Getting lost. Running from the lor with the knife, and the lorienok chasing her. And finally, tumbling headfirst down a mountain.