Icarus Rising

by Bernadette Gardner

  "He's nearby. He should be back soon."

  Arilani's clinical stare raked down Zara's body, lingering on

  the portions of her anatomy not covered by her flimsy shirt.

  Uncomfortable under the winged woman's stare, Zara tugged

  at the hem of her shirt and squeezed her knees together.

  "You wouldn't happen to have a spare pair of pants in your

  pack, would you?"

  Arilani ignored Zara's half-serious request and stepped

  closer. Tall and slender, she towered over Zara who, for the

  first time since Caleb had spirited her away, felt short and

  unattractive next to the stunning, naked brunette.

  "Dr. Abbott, I'm so sorry this occurred. I'll be happy to fly

  you back to the research station myself, right now."

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  "I'd rather wait for Caleb. He can take me. We've decided

  the best course of action will be to go to the royal aerie. Caleb

  is concerned that—well, his symbion is afraid of Dr. Danson."

  Arilani blinked. She tilted her head and her lovely features

  morphed into a curious expression. "The symbion is in charge

  then?"

  "Well, it was. He seems to be fine now, but—"

  Arilani lowered her voice. "It won't last. I'm sorry to tell

  you this, but Dr. Danson has reviewed the blood chemistry

  analysis he did on both Dr. Faulkner and the symbion and he

  found a minute discrepancy he missed before. He's

  devastated by the error, as are we all."

  "I know about the problem."

  "Do you?"

  "I know there's an additional factor Dr. Danson hadn't

  taken into consideration because he didn't know about it."

  "Then you know unless the symbion is removed

  immediately Dr. Faulkner will die."

  Zara stiffened. No! No. She couldn't deal with any more of

  this. "Please, Ari, oh God. What else could go wrong? We've

  been trying to convince the symbion that it's safe to go back

  to the station because no one will remove it."

  "I'm sorry, Dr. Abbott. It's the only way to save Caleb's

  life. He could suffer a massive cardiovascular episode at any

  given moment. I believe Dr. Danson used the term 'stroke'."

  Zara wobbled, and Arilani reached out to steady her. "This

  can't be."

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  "I'm afraid it is. We must get him back to the station, but

  we cannot trust him to carry you. He could suffer this episode

  during the flight and drop you. It's not safe."

  Zara crossed her arms over her chest and shivered. This

  couldn't be happening. Her blissful fantasy was crumbling

  before her eyes.

  Arilani offered her hand to Zara. "Come with me. I'll take

  you back safely and return with Jidar. He will be able to carry

  Dr. Faulkner back to the station."

  "Oh, Arilani, can't we wait for Caleb to return? He should

  be back any minute."

  "He may have already had this 'stroke'. What if he doesn't

  return? We need to bring others who can help him."

  Zara's eyes stung. Caleb had been gone for a while. What

  if he was lying injured at the base of an island and dying

  alone with no one by his side? What if he was already dead?

  She swiped at her tears and nodded. "Fine. I'll go with you,

  but we have to look for him before we go back to the station.

  I can't abandon him."

  "Of course." Arilani grabbed Zara's hand and pulled her

  toward the archway. "Let's hurry. The sooner I can tell the

  others where Dr. Faulkner is, the sooner we can bring him

  back to safety."

  Zara hurried to keep up with the Icarian healer's long

  strides toward the edge of the rock platform. She hadn't

  given much thought to how she would feel about being

  whisked off into open air again and now her fear hit her full

  force.

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  She'd have to close her eyes for this and just hang on until

  Arilani set her down on terra firma. She prayed Caleb would

  understand that she was doing this for him, for both of them,

  so they could make the most of whatever time they had left.

  "Arilani, should I—" A sharp pain shot through Zara's body,

  radiating outward from a point just below her jaw where

  Arilani had jammed the point of a medical syringe.

  Electric ice burned its way down Zara's neck, racing

  through her limbs at the speed of blood, pushing farther with

  each frantic heartbeat. She went down on her knees, scraping

  them raw on the rough stone. Her muscles went limp. No

  longer able to support her bones, they seemed like flaccid

  ropes, tying her body together but offering no structure to

  help her move. She fell like a rag doll into Arilani's arms, dead

  weight.

  Each breath became a monumental effort for her, so she

  was unable to scream or even gasp when her assailant lifted

  her off the ground, carried her over the churning water so far

  below, and dropped her.

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  Chapter Thirteen

  Caleb would have returned sooner. He should have, but

  when his search for Zara's missing shorts turned up nothing,

  he decided to be creative.

  There were hundreds of abandoned aeries nearby. Some of

  the larger islands had several multi-room dwellings that had

  once belonged to large, extended families of Icarians. Many

  had left belongings behind. Though they didn't wear clothing,

  he hoped to find a decorative blanket or tapestry woven of

  dyed alor that Zara could use as a skirt, partly to make her

  happy and comfortable and partly to spare himself the

  embarrassment of having to turn up at the aerie without his

  own shorts.

  He'd known he'd have to get used to not wearing clothing,

  but considering the depth of guilt he felt over his deception,

  he didn't need anything else to make him feel self-conscious.

  A cursory search of ten islands had finally turned up a

  length of soft, beaten alor fabric which had been colored

  purple. It was long and wide enough for Zara to wrap it

  around her body and fashion a sarong. Proud that he'd

  salvaged a small measure of his battered dignity, he returned

  to the nest his symbion had claimed, eager to show off his

  prize.

  Right away he knew something was wrong. The place

  didn't feel right, and Zara's alluring scent had faded. She

  wasn't at the archway to greet him, and she wasn't in bed as

  he'd hoped, waiting to share another vigorous round of

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  lovemaking before they returned to what passed for

  civilization on this world.

  He called her name, and something moved in the dim

  interior of the aerie. Arilani appeared, moving slowly as if in a

  trance. Her dark eyes held terrible sorrow.

  "Ari?"

  "Caleb, what happened here?"

/>   "Where's Zara? What happened to her?"

  "She's gone. Caleb. What did you do to her?"

  "Do to her?" Panic constricted his throat, and he began to

  search around frantically for any sign of his mate. "I didn't do

  anything to her. She was here. She was waiting for me."

  Arilani shook her head. "No, Caleb. I'm sorry. I just

  arrived, and she wasn't here."

  "She wouldn't have..." Dismissing the Icarian female, he

  ran for the edge of the island and nearly catapulted over the

  side. Footprints in the loose layer of soil there told him Zara

  had run in this direction. "What happened?"

  Arilani appeared next to him. "She must have gone looking

  for you and fallen."

  "No!" He didn't think, didn't consider. He just dove off the

  side. Wings back, body straight as an arrow, he streaked

  toward the jagged rocks below.

  Only his symbion saved him from a crash landing, pulling

  him up just short of the volcanic tumble and leaving him

  hovering over the dangerous shoals. Here the surf churned

  white, foaming against the rocks as it battered the roots of

  the basalt column.

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  The remains of symbion nests littered the rocks, and

  tangles of seaweed, alor and droppings from other semi-

  aquatic life forms made the boulders too slippery to stand on.

  If Zara had fallen here, it was to her death. "No. No.

  Zara!"

  He screamed her name, flitting back and forth over the

  battleground where the war had raged between water and

  rock for centuries. How could she have fallen? Why would she

  have ventured to the edge of the island before he returned?

  Arilani swooped down next to him. With skill born of

  decades of experience, she alit on a slick rock, steady and

  surefooted as though she'd grown from the spot. "Caleb,

  you'll never find her. The tide could have washed her body

  away already."

  "No. I won't accept that. She's not dead. We have to

  search for her."

  "No human could survive the fall."

  Waves crashed around them, scouring the rocks and

  nearly toppling Arilani from her perch. Caleb attempted to

  land as she had, but a wave exploded between two rocks,

  showering them both with hard pellets of water and knocking

  him off balance. He plummeted, and Arilani lunged forward to

  catch him.

  "We can't stay here," she shouted above the roar of the

  water. "We'll be injured."

  "I don't care. I'm not leaving her." Caleb wrestled out of

  Arilani's grip and launched himself into the air. He circled

  around and dropped back, scanning the active nesting site for

  any sign of life beyond the few adult symbions who remained

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  to watch over the territory. The winged creatures watched

  him from their conical nests. Neckless, they had to swivel

  their oblong bodies to keep the intruder in their line of sight.

  Fortunately, they didn't consider him a threat and remained

  still while he swooped in to investigate the broken shell of a

  symbion egg, which resembled a human head. Nearby, thick

  ropes of alor vine looked, for a moment, like a tangle of tan

  limbs, and pale seaweed could easily be mistaken for human

  hair. Unfortunately nothing he saw led him to Zara. She was

  gone.

  Finally, at Arilani's urging, he let his symbion carry him

  straight up to the edge of the platform. He dropped to his

  knees, exhausted, cold and dead inside. "How could she have

  fallen? She was too smart, too cautious to go near the edge."

  "The wind is strong this time of day, Caleb," Arilani said,

  placing a hand on his shoulder. "She could have easily lost

  her footing."

  "But where is she then? If she fell straight down—"

  "The water is full of predators and the crevices between

  the rocks are deep. Her body would not have remained on the

  surface for long."

  Caleb wailed in fury. He'd never felt this kind of grief in his

  life. Not even when he'd received his fatal diagnosis had he

  felt this raw or hopeless.

  His symbion grieved as well, and the wound beneath the

  creature's body where its siphon had pierced his spinal

  column began to ache fiercely. He hadn't felt such intense

  pain in more than a day, and he wasn't sure he could survive

  it. "It's my fault. I brought her here. She had no way to leave

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  and I left her alone for too long. She must have thought I'd

  gotten hurt and tried to look for me."

  Arilani stroked his back and his wings. The gesture, meant

  to soothe, only irritated him, and he flung her hand away.

  "I'm sorry, Caleb. Come back with me to the station, and

  we can ask Jidar to send a team to search for her. We'll bring

  her home, I promise."

  "Zara ... God, I love you. I'm so sorry. Ari, I ruined

  everything. I destroyed it all. Jidar should have me put to

  death."

  "No!" Arilani dropped to her knees beside him and wrapped

  her arms around him. She was wet and her body was cold.

  The contact was no comfort to him, but he didn't have the

  strength to resist her fierce hug. "Jidar will not do that. He

  knows you are the last hope we have for a breeding program.

  He'll find a way to make this work for us."

  Caleb shook his head. He would have argued, but forming

  words was too much effort for him. He didn't care enough

  anymore to make her understand all the reasons why he'd

  single-handedly doomed her race to extinction. Instead, he

  fell silent and sullen, lost in his own misery while she rattled

  on about how she would fix everything and solve all his

  problems.

  Besides his overwhelming grief, the next sensation he felt

  was a sharp stab of pain in his neck. Frigid heat raced

  through his veins and out to the tips of his wings. His link

  with the symbion extinguished like a flame, leaving darkness

  where there had been light. For the first time in days he was

  alone in his own body, alone in his mind.

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  Numb obedience overtook him, and he sat nodding as

  Arilani explained how his symbion had led him to violently

  assault Zara and throw her battered body over the edge of

  the island.

  Next she entreated him to never tell another soul about

  what he'd done and that she would keep his secret forever

  because she loved him and couldn't wait to bear his child.

  After that, he was airborne, flanked by Jidar and Namara and

  sailing back to the research station where they carried him

  into the lab and strapped him to a bed. There, his tortured

  mind went blank and finally, he slept.

  The world spun around Zara in a dizzying array of colors

  and images. Her last foggy memory was of terrible pain and

  the sickening sensation of falling from a
great height.

  Now she lay looking up at a dark tumble of rocks. She was

  wet and cold and her body ached all over. She tasted blood

  and salt, and in addition to being slightly numb, her tongue

  seemed too large for her mouth.

  "Cleb ... cay-leb!" Her cry came out as little more than a

  whisper. He would never hear her over the relentless

  pounding of the surf.

  Where am I?

  A frightening realization hit her then. Arilani had dropped

  her. Had it been an accident? No. The sore, bulging muscle in

  her neck told her she'd been drugged. Slowly her memory

  returned of slipping from the Icarian female's loose grasp and

  plummeting to the roiling water.

  Miraculously, she'd missed the rocks and slid into a crevice

  between two boulders. She recalled looking up at the jagged

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  basalt and realizing she didn't have the strength to claw her

  way out of the surf. Inch by inch she'd descended until the

  water began to seep into her mouth and nose.

  Then there had been nothing.

  Am I dead?

  No. Death couldn't be so painful. She was definitely alive,

  injured, groggy and amazingly, no longer trapped between

  the broken rocks.

  Who could have rescued her then left her ... where?

  Moving gingerly, she attempted to sit up. The surface on

  which she lay rolled and quivered, and she reached out in

  panic to clutch thick braids of alor vines.

  A net? She was lying in a net that stretched across a small

  alcove of boulders. On either side of her, rising like small

  volcanoes from the flat tops of the rocks, sat symbion nests.

  Perhaps a dozen of them dotted the treacherous beachhead,

  some bearing well-camouflaged symbions with blue and green

  plumage. Others were empty.

  The rotting net on which she lay had likely been placed

  decades ago by an Icarian family who used it to provide

  offerings of food to the creatures nesting at the base of their

  island. Zara recalled from Caleb's research that Icarians often

  fed the huge birds fruit rinds and crabs in order to forge

  relationships with them that would facilitate joining.

  With so few Icarians left, Zara wondered if the symbions

  thought their once loving and attentive hosts had abandoned

  them. Then she wondered if the carnivorous animals would