She untied his pants and surrounded his glowing cock with her small white hand. It quivered at her touch, and he sighed into her ear. She pushed his pants aside and squeezed the rigid member behind its pointed little head.
Ari kicked his pants off, and a moment later, their shirts followed. They caressed each other’s bodies, skin to skin, but he drove her mad by lying there, doing nothing. He didn’t climb on top of her or push her legs open or try to enter her. Could he be so far gone that even his body no longer knew what to do?
She pushed him over on his back and straddled him again—naked this time. Her font of nectar dripped life-giving honey onto his sleeping flesh. He pumped up and down until she couldn’t restrain herself any longer. She groped between her legs until she found the wayward creature. With expert accuracy, she held it up straight. He thrust upwards, and the dagger struck home.
Ari and Reina let out a simultaneous cry of astonishment, and at long last, Ari rediscovered the reason for all that pumping. At long last, he struck out with renewed purpose. He struck deep into her central core, and she cried out at each thrust. The harder he pumped, the more alive and awake he became. His eyes brightened, and his confusion cleared. He clasped her around the ribs and stabbed into her, harder and deeper than she could stand.
She craned her head back and yelped. He gazed up at her face in rapt attention, and the knowing smile spread and strengthened. Then a hard, fixed determination took the place of his smile. He clenched his teeth and pounded her with all his force. Her voice rose to a shriek, but he didn’t care. She remembered the sleepers in the rest of the apartment and buried her face in the bedding where she could howl to her heart’s content.
She climaxed once and collapsed on top of him, but he was nowhere near done. He let her flop onto the platform at his side, and the next thing she knew, he got hold of her hips and pulled her back, up onto her knees. His raging cock burned a fiery path through her insides. Her mouth hung open in mute shock, and the moment he started pumping into her again, she cycled higher into the filmy tissues of orgasm all over again. She tried to close her eyes, but nothing would stop her flying higher. She could arch her body this way or that. He kept tight hold of her hips, and his cock delivered its relentless message to her flesh with every thrust.
No sound came from her. She stared straight in front of her with her mouth open in a silent scream while her body rippled in wave upon wave of unbearable glory. Did he know what he did to her? She no longer cared. Just let it go on and on and never stop. Her delicate flesh swelled and ached and oozed until he thrust his shaft through a spongy mass of engorged gauze. Fragrant nectar squirted from her and bathed the smoking thing in majestic perfume. He possessed her. He fulfilled her. He wiped out all the trauma and hardship of months of deprivation in a single night, in a single hour. Not even his own hot eruption of vital juice could quench her desire.
He let go of her hips and threw himself down next to her on the platform. Only when he let her go did she fall in a heap where he released her. She didn’t even have the wherewithal to curl into a ball. Her eyes stared into the night without comprehension.
Ari let out a heavy breath and passed his hand over his eyes. He glanced at her and noticed her unmoving at his side. He ran his hand over her milky-white thigh and around her buttocks. Then he eased up against her back and curled himself around her. A breath of air blew through the room, and he tossed a blanket over them.
He stroked her arm, her back, her legs, even her neck, but she still didn’t stir. He kissed her neck and her ears. In the end, he rolled her over to face him and wrapped his arms around her.
They must have fallen asleep, because when Reina opened her eyes again, the aurora’s yellow light had changed to the blue-grey light of early dawn. Ari lay with his eyes closed, too, but his face twitched between smiling, frowning, and sometimes raising an eyebrow. He was awake.
He sensed the change in her and clasped her close. His warmth relaxed her, but waking up with him raised more questions than it answered. Would he remember anything from last night? If he remembered anything, would he keep it in his mind when the sun rose? What if everything she fought to gain last night proved in vain?
She extricated herself from his arms to study his face. His eyes drifted open, and before he had time to recognize the girl in his arms, he blurted out. “Sooss!”
She started back. “Sooss? Who is Sooss?”
His vision cleared, and his eyes darted around the room. “Sooss, I thought....”
Reina’s blood ran cold. “Is Sooss someone you met while you were....away?”
A tempest of emotion crossed his face, and he closed his eyes against it. Reina shook him by the shoulders. “Who is Sooss, Ari? Where were you, and where did you meet this Sooss? You have to tell me.”
His face contorted in agony, somewhere between a smile and a sob. “She’s gone.”
Her voice shook in her fruitless effort to control herself. “Sooss is a female? Is she a girl you knew?” Reina’s mind whirled. “Did you do it with her?”
He groaned. “She isn’t anywhere. I looked for her, but....”
She stopped short of beating him with her fists. “Tell me what happened, Ari. Tell me what happened to Sooss.”
His eyes popped open, and he fixed her with a gaze that set her hair on end. “The village....”
Reina froze. “The village? What village? Your village?” She clenched her fists around his shoulders so tight he winced. “You know where they are, don’t you? You know where the village is, don’t you?”
A light came on in his face, and he actually smiled at her. The clouds parted, and recognition flooded his mind.
“Where is the village, Ari?” Did Leroni hear her shouting at him in the next room? “Where did you see the village?”
He opened his mouth. “I.....”
Chapter 4
Anna and Leroni sat on the platform in the main room. Leroni drank from a wooden bowl, and Anna ate with her fingers from another. “What do you think?”
Anna chuckled. “I think Leflin’s going to have a heart attack if this goes on much longer.”
Leroni frowned. “Don’t joke about that.”
“I shouldn’t.” Anna tossed a handful of dried meat into her mouth. “I’m sorry. I can’t stop myself. I see the funny side of things.”
“I wasn’t talking about Leflin, anyway,” Leroni told her. “I was talking about Sooss.”
“You mean Ari,” Anna corrected her. “I know you were. That’s all you’ve talked about in weeks.”
Leroni bent her head over her breakfast. “Sorry. It must be getting pretty tedious.”
“It’s nice to see you care about him so much,” Anna replied, “but it looks like he’s found his family. I’m sure they’ll take him home with them.”
Leroni nodded, but didn’t answer before Leflin came in. He banged the door shut.
“Would you mind keeping it down?” Leroni asked. “The children are still asleep.”
Leflin didn’t hear. “Can you believe those colonists? After everything we’ve done for them, they have the nerve to come back to me and complain about the size of the rooms in the new apartments. Can you believe that? They say they had more room in the old city.”
“So what’s the big deal?” Anna asked. “They moved. They’ll adapt to new conditions.”
Leflin waved his hands in the air. “Oh, that’s not the least of it. They say that, now that we’ve made peace with the other factions, they should be allowed to move back to the old city. They say it was pure caprice on Aquilla’s part to make them move, and now that Piwaka is in power, they should move back to the old city. Can you believe that?”
“But then moving was the only concession we ever had to make to any faction,” Anna pointed out. “Don’t they realize moving back to the old city could put the whole peace agreement into jeopardy?”
“Not only that,” Leroni added, “but Piwaka won’t b
e in power for much longer. Roshin always doubted the wisdom of the peace agreement. If we go back on it now, he could change his mind about going along with it. Then we’d really be in trouble.”
Leflin paced the room. “Oh, those are all minor concerns. As part of our concession to make peace with the Avitras by abandoning the old city, we agreed not only to remove all the Felsite from that part of the territory, but to demolish the old city and erase all evidence of its existence. Renier agreed to return the territory to its original state so the Avitras could use it. That’s our binding obligation under the peace agreement.”
Leroni stared at him. “But the colonists will never agree to that. They’ll fight you tooth and nail to stop you destroying the city they built with their own sweat, blood, and tears.”
Leflin laughed out loud. “They already are. The leaders are already talking about taking up arms against the rest of the Felsite faction to stop us destroying the city.”
Anna and Leroni exchanged glances. “I hope to high heaven you haven’t said anything about this to Roshin.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Leflin snorted. “He’ll never find out, if I have anything to say about it. Even if our faction fell to civil war over this, I would never let any Avitras find out we doubted our word.”
A voice answered him from the door. “It’s too late. An Avitras already has found out about it.”
Leflin spun around. “Aimee!”
Aimee strode into the room. “Don’t worry, Leflin. I heard every word.”
Leflin narrowed his eyes at her. “What are you going to do? Are you going to tell Roshin and Piwaka?”
Aimee patted his arm. “Even if I did, you wouldn’t have to worry over the peace agreement. As long as they both know the Felsite Alpha is working to uphold your part of the agreement, they’ll wait and let you handle your own people.”
Leflin shifted from one foot to the other. “I wish I could be as certain of that as you are.”
“As long as I belong to the Avitras faction,” Aimee told him, “I’ll make certain of it.”
At that moment, the sleeping chamber door burst open, and Reina flew into the room with her cheeks flushed crimson.
Leroni held out a bowl of the white milk to her. “Good morning, Reina. Here’s your breakfast.”
“Ari knows where the village is,” Reina blurted out. “He knows where the Lycaon village is.”
The others whirled around. “What?”
Reina nodded and laughed out loud. “He knows where his parents are, and where the other Lycaon and the ambassadors are.”
“Did he tell you that last night?” Leroni asked.
Reina paused. “Well, not exactly, but he gave me to understand that he’d seen them. He knows where they are.”
“Then where are they?” Aimee asked. “Tell us.”
Reina hesitated. “Well, he can’t exactly tell us, but he knows. It’s all in there, in his head.”
Leroni set down Reina’s breakfast bowl. “This is exactly the problem I told you about last night. Him remembering it doesn’t help us find them. If he can’t tell us, he might as well not know where they are at all.”
“But he knows,” Reina insisted. “Don’t you see? He will remember eventually, and he’ll tell us. Don’t you realize what this means? They’re alive somewhere. They haven’t vanished off the face of the planet. They’re....somewhere.”
“Where?” Anna asked. “Where could he have been that he could have seen them? Where could they be that the Ursidrean tracking devices couldn’t detect them anywhere on the planet’s surface?”
Reina waved their objections away. “I can’t explain it, and he can’t, either. I only know he’s seen them, and they’re alive and well. Wherever he was, that’s where the rest of the village is. That’s where my parents and Faruk and Emily and all the rest of them are.”
Leflin sat down next to Leroni. “So how do you plan to get the information out of him?”
Just then, Taig and Tara appeared in the apartment door. “What’s going on?”
“Reina says Ari has seen your parents,” Anna replied. “She says he knows where the village is.”
Tara rounded on Reina. “Is this true? How can you be sure?”
Reina seized her by both hands. “Isn’t it wonderful, Tara? Ari can tell us where they are. We can bring them home!”
“Slow down,” Aimee interrupted. “He can’t tell us where they are. That’s exactly the problem.”
Reina tossed her head to one side. “That doesn’t matter. He’ll get better, and then he will tell us where they are.”
“He’s been here for weeks,” Leroni pointed out, “and he’s barely regained the ability to talk. He could take years to regain the ability to tell you anything about what happened to him out there.”
Reina smacked her lips. “This is the most important thing that’s happened to us since the village disappeared, and all you can do is throw doubts and obstacles in our path. Can’t you see this is the most wonderful thing that could happen to us?”
Tara peered into her eyes. “Are you absolutely certain he told you he’s seen the village? He couldn’t have meant anything else?”
Reina blinked. “Well, he didn’t exactly say he’d seen them. I said that after he said something about the village....”
“That could have meant anything,” Anna countered.
Reina spun around with flashing eyes. “I’ll prove it to you. He can tell us where he’s been and where the village is, and I’m going to prove it to you.”
She stormed across the room, back toward the sleeping chamber. Leroni called after her, “Come on, Reina. He’s been through enough.”
Reina vanished into the sleeping chamber without a backward glance. Taig and Tara looked around at the others. “Was she always like this?”
Leroni blinked. “I’ve never seen her so headstrong. I never would have believed she could act this way about a man. It’s totally unlike her.”
Taig shook his head. “All these months, she kept her feelings for Ari hidden. She showed no emotion at all when Roshin threw him over the cliff.”
“I knew,” Tara murmured. “Don’t you remember the way she kissed him in the cave? She never felt this way about anybody before or since, and she couldn’t exactly show it with you and me and Aeifa devastated by grief. She had to keep her feelings buried. That must have been torture for her.”
“It’s not good for him,” Leroni added. “He’s fragile. She shouldn’t push him so hard. He could break under this kind of pressure.”
“Maybe it’s better for him than you think,” Taig suggested. “Ari never broke under any kind of pressure. If she could get this kind of information out of him in one night, maybe you didn’t push him hard enough. Maybe he needs to be pushed hard to bring the memories to the surface.”
“And maybe,” Aimee added, “he needed to be pushed by someone he knew, someone he loved. Maybe he needed to be pushed in a different way.”
Chapter 5
Aeifa surveyed the steamy forest with its slow, greasy river twining through the crooked trees. “Just exactly what are we supposed to be doing here?”
“Reenacting the day Leroni found Ari on the riverbank,” Taig told her.
“We’re not reenacting it,” Leroni shot back. “We’re not acting anything.”
“Recreating the circumstances, then,” he replied. “We’re going back to the scene of the crime.”
Tara groaned. “Will you stop it? This is serious.”
“I don’t see what taking him back to the riverbank will prove,” Allen added. “His brain is scrambled.”
“His brain is not scrambled,” Leroni told him. “He’s experienced something we can’t understand. That’s all.”
“It was scrambled enough that he couldn’t say anything but ‘Sooss’ for weeks on end,” Allen pointed out. “That seems pretty scrambled to me.”
“Can we use another wo
rd for it besides ‘scrambled’?” Aimee asked. “We’re not talking about an egg breakfast. We’re talking about a man’s brain.”
“I’m not convinced the word ‘Sooss’ is nonsense, anyway,” Reina chimed in. “I think it’s someone’s name, someone Ari met in....that other place.”
“See?” Allen retorted. “You can’t even talk about where he might have been. He’s so scrambled, he’s got us confused, too.”
“Who is Sooss, then?” Roshin asked. “Who could it possibly be?”
“I think it’s a girl,” Reina replied. “He got close to a girl there, and her name was Sooss.”
“What makes you think that?” Tara asked.
Reina blushed and shook her head. “Never mind about that. Let’s take him down to the sump grove.”
“And then what?” Taman asked.
Reina shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out when we get there.”
She led the way through the trees. The Lycaon made disgusted faces at the strange forest. Only Ari strode through it with certain steps. He’d seen it a million times before. Reina pushed ahead to keep the others behind her. If she couldn’t see them, she could hold their doubts at bay and block their remarks from infecting her mind. She could hold onto the certainty that this hair-brained scheme might actually work. She rounded the corner of the sump grove and stopped. Ari stopped at her side, and the others spread out in front of the stagnant pool. Aeifa shuddered.
For the first time, Reina saw her beloved forest through Lycaon eyes. It couldn’t be more different from their home forest if they’d transported to another planet. The scraggly trees, the heat waves billowing off dry, brittle grass, the murky, fetid water—no Lycaon would want to stay here. What did Ari think and feel when he found himself here? He must have thought he’d died and gone to hell. He must have really believed he’d lost his mind.
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