by JC Hay
“Red, in this case.” She offered him a mug, and he wrapped his fingers around it, relishing the almost uncomfortable heat soaking into his hands from the ceramic. “It should be steeped enough, but I don’t know how strong you take it.”
Javad paused, on the verge of making another inappropriate comment, and changed his mind. He needed to deliver his warning and go. His family needed him. Whether they knew it or not, they were counting on him. Still, he’d come all this way; the smart thing to do would be to check her wolf in full gravity. “Look, I don’t want to intrude on your time any longer than necessary, so we can put Nujalike through her paces as soon as you’re ready.”
Chen nodded. “Drink your tea first.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He resisted the urge to salute, mostly because it would have meant releasing the mug. Whatever tea she’d brewed was fantastic, a rooibos with notes of blueberry, coconut, and vanilla set against a robust herbal backdrop. He’d expected something heavy and earthy to be more Chen’s speed, maybe a pu-erh or a half-fermented oolong. There were depths to the ranger he hadn’t expected. In another situation, he’d want more time to get to know her. But his family needed him, and after?
He didn’t want to think about after.
He took another long, savoring sip. “This is fantastic.”
She shrugged. “The bio-fabricators can’t print anything close to real tea. I keep a stash of the good stuff down here so it’s a treat. Keeps me from getting spoiled on the Cry.”
Nujalik left his side, then returned a moment later to drop a sodden cloth ball in his lap. He stared down at it with a chuckle. “Why thank you, Nujalik! You’re right, I was ignoring you. Where are my manners?”
Chen chuckled uncomfortably as she glared at the blur of her wolf. “You know better than that. Let him finish his drink.”
He didn’t need to be wolfbonded to hear the unspoken so he’ll leave us alone that followed her request. He finished his tea, then set the mug on a nearby side table. “No, it’s fine. Actually, it’s perfect.” He fished the soggy ball out of his lap with a smile and held it up as he stood. “Is this what you wanted?”
Nujalik’s focus was laser sharp, studying his hand for the slightest twitch to indicate where he might throw the ball. He’d only been around umbra wolves for six months, but Javad doubted he’d ever get used to—or bored with—their amazing intensity and intelligence. None of the other canines he’d worked with were half as clever, and he’d worked with some frighteningly smart animals.
Now he was complicit in endangering one.
Javad shoved down the icy guilt twisting in his stomach. He’d come to warn them. He needed to do so and get out. Chen was smart and skilled enough to take care of herself. He took a step for the door, holding the ball out and watching as Nujalik dance-stepped along the floor to keep close. “You coming, Ranger?”
She nodded and set her mug down, and he tossed the ball into the kitchen. Nujalik bolted after it, and he tugged on his shoes while she retrieved it. He’d only gotten one on before she laid the ball at his feet like an offering.
“You’ll have to throw it farther than that,” Chen said.
He did, skimming the toy down the hall opposite the kitchen toward what he assumed were the cabin’s bed- and bathrooms. Nujalik took off eagerly.
“Now you’ve done it,” Chen said with a quiet laugh. “You’ve proven you can throw the ball. And you gave her food. She’ll never let you rest.”
Warmth filled his chest. He’d take that kernel of acceptance anytime. “I’m waiting for the downside.”
“I’ll point it out again when your arm aches and you’ve thrown it a hundred times. I guarantee you’ll wear out before she does. The wolfbond increases her endurance.”
“The rangers too, from what I hear.” The innuendo tumbled out before he could think better of it, and he felt the warmth in his blood change to heat in his cheeks.
Chen narrowed her eyes. “You’d better believe it.”
Not the response he was expecting, and even she seemed taken aback by it after the fact. Rather than spend any more confusion on it, he focused on Nujalik. The cabin was too small to really see her movement, but the people contacting him might already be waiting outside. Chen made the decision for him, donning her boots and opening the door. He hesitated a moment, then offered up a wordless prayer and whipped the ball toward the distant tree line.
Nujalik charged after her prey. He held his breath, watching the blur of her shape moving over the snow. In the sunlight, it was easier to trace the edge of the blur and study her gait. What should have been a single, fluid motion hitched every third step. Both back legs were popping together, a bunny hop that kept her full weight off the hip.
The cold that seeped into his blood had nothing to do with the weather. Not this too. It would be bad enough telling Chen she was in danger. Telling her that her wolf’s hips might fail would add injury to insult. The fist closing around his throat made it difficult to swallow, let alone talk.
He searched for solutions in the symptoms. Nujalik returned the ball, and he tossed it yet again. Now that he knew what to look for, the signs were easy to spot. Even with the wolf’s natural camouflage obscuring her shape, he could see how her hips were wider than her shoulders. How she rolled the leg out while sitting, if only slightly.
It was intermittent. He’d caught it early. They had time.
But he also had no doubt in his mind that the wolf’s hip was failing.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost. What’s going on?” Chen watched him with predatory focus. “It’s worse than you thought.”
“I won’t know how bad things are, or even if they are bad, until she gets some more time in gravity. This is a baseline. She could merely be adjusting to the heavier weight of her body.”
Chen growled skeptically, then noticed his hovercar and took two steps toward it. “Wait. Did you drive up here in this?”
“It’s what they had at the rental agency. Besides, it’s not like I needed it to be fancy. It only had to get me out here.”
She growled. “You’re lucky it did that. You should know hovers handle like shit on uneven ground. Drifting snow is the worst. And even if you didn’t know, the rental company should have. What idiot let you bring it up into the mountains?”
“I didn’t exactly tell them where I was headed.” He watched Nujalik to cover his confusion. Was she right? He tried to remember what he knew about hovers. Sadly, it wasn’t much. He hadn’t needed a vehicle since before school, first living close to campus, and then living on board the Hunting Cry. Walking served his needs better.
“Fuck.” Chen shook her head with one last frustrated look at the car. “At least it’s still early in the season. Another month and it wouldn’t have mattered because you’d never have gotten it up here in the first place. There’s no way you’d make it back down the valley if we got a big snow.”
Well, she was already upset. May as well compound her misfortunes. “There’s something else we need to talk about.”
She gave him a wary look, like he was about to grow fangs.
Javad opened his mouth to explain when Nujalik sounded a low, distressed whimper. He snapped his head around to zero in on the umbra wolf, who had lowered herself to the snow-dusted ground, limbs splayed wide. Confused by the unnatural stance, he started to step toward her. Chen hit him on his second step, knocking the air from his lungs as she hammered him into the frozen soil. He opened his mouth to complain when he felt the tremor vibrate beneath him.
His earlier confusion doubled. Someone must be digging nearby. Or blasting, maybe. But he didn’t hear any explosions. He pushed out of Chen’s grip and tried to stand, but she tugged him back down. “Stay down, you fool! It’s a groundquake!”
CHEN PINNED PRIDDY to the soil with her arm and forced herself not to yell at him. What kind of person would stand up while the ground was still bucking around them? Between that and his utterly useless clothing, she was beginning to t
hink he’d never been outside of a spaceship. Except that was a discredit to her squad leader—May was a deep-spacer, part of the colonial network on the edge of the belt that barely recognized the Three Systems, and they hadn’t had any trouble avoiding stupidity when they went planetside.
Nujalik’s presence dimmed, and Chen focused on keeping in touch with her wolf. The concentration required to feel along their wolfbond was concerning, but something she’d have to save for later evaluation. First, she had to make sure everyone was safe. The umbra wolf was surprised by the quake and the ground not behaving in the stable manner she was used to, but with four legs, she didn’t seem to have any concerns about balance.
Priddy still struggled against her weight, and Chen turned her attention back to him. She had to admit that under the lightweight, loose-fitting clothes, he apparently kept himself fit. In better circumstances, she might have even enjoyed being pressed against him, but right now he was panicked and trying to get back up.
Unfortunately for him, that was a dumb idea, and she was stronger.
“Will you stay still until the shaking stops? Have you never been through a groundquake before?”
He stopped fighting enough to look at her, his dark-brown gaze equal parts confused and alarmed. “No. They don’t happen much in space.”
“Well, down here they’re not uncommon.” Farhope’s lowlands, where the cities and spaceports tended to be, were geologically stable. Whatever sins had been committed to accelerate the terraforming process had left the mountainous northern regions more vulnerable to volcanic activity and the associated quakes. The freeholders, like her grandfather, had accepted them as part of life. It was a price they were eager to pay to not have people living on top of each other.
The tremors stopped. She noticed the absence rather than feeling them slow or end, and she rolled off Priddy and sat up.
He followed suit, combing pine needles out of the wavy mass of his hair with curled fingers. The doctor looked around, wisely checking his hovercar first. “Wait, is that it?”
She snorted. “Is that it, he says. Thirty seconds ago, you were panicking like Johnny Slicksleeves in his first firefight. Now you’re disappointed?”
“Who’s Johnny Sl—?”
Chen dragged her hand down her face. Civilians. “A fresh recruit. Basic ranks don’t have any arm insignia, so their sleeves...”
“Are slick. Got it.” He nodded. “It’s like its own language.”
“Says the person who literally went to school for almost a decade to be able to use Latin, Greek, and whatever other languages have been absorbed into his career.” Chen stood and dusted herself off, then took a quick walk around the cabin’s perimeter, checking for any damage to the foundation.
He jogged after her. “I didn’t expect it to be over so fast.”
“Said every hetero woman, ever...” Chen muttered, then hoped he hadn’t heard.
No such luck. “I’d argue that, but I was seventeen once, so...”
“Last week, by the look of you.” Teasing him shouldn’t be so damn tempting. Annoying him shouldn’t be so fun. She pushed the thought away and focused on the cabin. Fortunately, it had been solidly built. She didn’t see anything wrong with the outside. That meant the inside was probably okay but for a few dislodged goods. Clean up she could handle.
“And you? How’re you doing?” She looked back over her shoulder, prepping her answer, only to find Priddy on one knee, petting her wolf. Nujalik leaned into the attention, more than happy to flaunt her newfound friendship along the wolfbond.
Chen crushed the disappointment and annoyance, knowing it would only confuse her wolf if she sensed it. “Four legs are more stable than two. She’s just hoping you’ll throw the ball some more.”
“I see.” He peeled the ball out of her mouth and squeaked it once before flinging it into the woods. “It’s safe?”
She shrugged. “Define safe. That could have been a precursor to a larger snap. There could be aftershocks for days or weeks. A rogue meteor could slam into the surface on the far side of the moon and wipe out most of Farhope’s population in an eyeblink. Any of those could happen at any moment, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them. All we can do is prepare for them.” She finished her perimeter patrol and looked over at his hovercar. A sick sense of dread did a finger-crawl up the back of her neck. If the quake had been centered farther south, if it dislodged snow at the pass...
Chen stepped onto the covered porch and began taking her boots off. “Keep throwing, I just want to check something really quick.”
Her wolf seemed happy for the distraction, and Chen went into the cabin and grabbed the bright yellow emergency band radio out from under the sink. After cranking its generator for a minute, she flipped the switch, and it hissed to life.
“—il crews can get the pass cleared. Repeating. Avalanches and debris have closed the roads at Norgay pass and Wangdi pass. Emergency crews are requesting that no one attempt the roads or to cross the pass until crews can get the pass cleared. Rep—” She snapped off the radio and mouthed a quiet prayer that no one had been hurt.
“Shit.” Priddy stood in the cabin’s doorway. As if he could sense her annoyance, he headed off the question she was preparing. “I wanted to see if you needed help, so I headed into the cabin. That’s all.”
She looked around. “Everything here seems sound. Apart from the obvious.” The planetoid in the room kept sitting there, and neither of them seemed able to address it. “I need to run the water to make sure the pipes are solid, but they were built for this, so I assume they’re fine. And I haven’t checked the bedroom to see what got knocked over.”
The bedroom. Singular. She slammed a wall over those thoughts like a bulkhead. That wasn’t a thing she even wanted to think about right now.
“So...” he started. “How long will it take them to clear the pass?”
The crews were pretty efficient, she knew from experience. “A day? Maybe two at the outside. They should be able to get at least one lane open. Until then...”
Until then she was stuck with him.
“I can’t stay here that long,” His voice was more of a plea than a statement of fact. “I need to go.”
“Remember what I said about things being out of your control? Here an example.” The sympathy she felt trying to take root in her chest annoyed her, but Chen couldn’t bring herself to crush it out. “Like I said. It’s no more than a couple days.”
Nujalik padded into the cabin and dropped the ball at Priddy’s feet.
Chen shook her head. “Just because he’s stuck here doesn’t mean he’s going to throw for you the whole time.”
The umbra wolf snorted quietly, picked up the ball, and moved to curl up near the warmth of the stove.
“Is she pouting?” He sounded more amused than surprised. “Or was that more of a ‘we’ll see who’s right?’”
There it was again, like the vet had been able to understand her wolf. Like he could eavesdrop in on the wolfbond. The way it seemed he could almost see her, even without polarized light. It wasn’t perfect, but at this point neither was her bond. She resisted the urge to give Nujalik a dirty look. “It was definitely the latter. She has her own feelings on the subject.”
Priddy smiled sheepishly, standing in the doorway and letting the heat out into the wilderness. She hadn’t asked him to shut the door yet, but she supposed she’d have to soon. He pinched the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses. “I’m sorry. I hadn’t intended to horn in on your leave. I just wanted to check on Nujalik and get out of your hair. I’m sorry that I’ve suddenly created a problem.”
Which, to facilitate, he’d clearly interrogated Akomi and pressured her CO. But he felt he was doing it for the right reasons, and she found it hard to disagree with the intent, even if she didn’t love the result. “If I thought you had the power to create earthquakes, you’d have reason to apologize. It just is. I’m going to go make sure the bedroom and plumbing are okay, and then I
need to take stock of our supplies. I hadn’t been expecting a guest.”
“What can I do to help?”
“Inventory the chiller unit. I don’t have a fabricator out here, so what we have is what we have.” Chen took a deep breath. “And keep Nujalik entertained, but you’ve agreed to that already.”
“Can do,” Priddy said. He knelt next to the umbra wolf and raked his hand through her coat.
Chen could feel the smug satisfaction radiating off her wolf like a second stove. She had to force herself to remember that, attractive or not, the doctor was absolutely off-limits. She distracted herself with checklists the way she usually did. With another person in the cabin, they’d need more firewood. That meant another trip out into the forest. She walked to the short hallway and turned back. “I don’t suppose you brought anything like a sensible cold-weather outfit.”
Six
Her grandfather’s faith had been unwavering, even at a time when everything seemed to indicate that whatever supreme powers existed in the universe were at best indifferent to humanity’s struggle. One hour into having Priddy in her cabin, Chen was rethinking the atheism she’d adopted in reaction to her grandfather—not only was there one or more deities in charge of her fate, she’d clearly offended them with her lack of prayer and they’d decided to take revenge.
She crushed her eyes closed as though she wouldn’t still sense him in the cabin with her. Trapped with a man who interested and annoyed her in equal measure? It was like something out of a holodrama.
When she opened her eyes, the bedroom still wasn’t disheveled after the quake. The heavy quilt on the bed was the same one that had been there the last time she and Elena had visited, and her recollection of how they’d spent their time on that scratchy cover left Chen all too aware of how long she’d gone without someone to share pleasure with. Plastering over those old, painful memories with some new experiences wouldn’t be the worst idea...