Page 58 of Enslak

She fell asleep within minutes. I stayed awake a long time, listening to the night sounds of the forest, holding her with the care of someone who understood the weight of what they were holding.

Every night since, we'd slept the same way. Her body tucked against mine, her breathing the thing that finally let me close my eyes.

I was careful, during those nights, to keep the line clear between comfort and something else. She'd given me warmth and presence and proximity. She hadn't offered anything beyond that, and I wasn't willing to presume. The wanting was there, real and constant, but wanting and taking were different things, and she had been generous enough with what she gave that I had no interest in reaching past it.

My mind continued to clear in those seven days. Slowly and unevenly, like a path emerging from snow.

Fragments surfaced. A woman's face, older, with gold eyes. A deep voice that had taught me the names of stars. A place with tall structures and ships and a crowd of people who knew my name. The memories dissolved before I could hold them, slipping away at the edges, but they came. More of them each day.

One morning she praised my hunting and I felt something shift, a door opening somewhere inside me. The memory of my father's voice came with sudden clarity, not the words, but the tone. The particular quality of approval. I reached for the words to tell her and couldn't find them, could only press my hand briefly to my chest and hope she understood that the memory had come back and that it mattered.

She watched my face when I did that and nodded slowly, like she'd followed the whole thing.

"That's good," she said quietly. "Hold onto it."

I intended to.

The afternoon sun was warm across my shoulders when I heard the sound.

I was at the flat stone near the cave entrance, working through the day's catch with the blade from the ship, when the distant rush of the river told me she'd arrived safely and the splash of water followed. She'd been humming for the first several minutes. I'd been tracking the sound without thinking about it, my attention half on the work and half on her, the way it always was.

Then the humming stopped.

I looked up.

The forest was quiet in the wrong way. The particular silence that wasn't absence but held breath.

Then she screamed.

I was already moving.

Chapter 13

Niki

The river was perfect.

I'd been coming here every afternoon for the past week, and each time I still felt a small, involuntary moment of wonder at the water. How clear it was. How it caught the alien sunlight and broke it apart in patterns that didn't quite follow Earth physics but were beautiful all the same, prismatic and strange and entirely their own.

I set the soap and cloth on a smooth rock at the water's edge, then reached for the hem of my oversized tunic. The pale gray fabric had become my uniform on Avalon, salvaged from the ship's emergency supplies, hanging loose on my frame with the sleeves rolled multiple times to keep them from swallowing my hands. I pulled it over my head and folded it carefully on the dry rock.

The air touched my bare shoulders and back, cool and faintly humid. There was something that never quite stopped feeling exposed about standing half-dressed on this alien riverbank, the sky a color that was almost blue but not quite, the vegetation a shade of green that was slightly too saturated to be Earth-green. My pale skin looked startlingly fragile against all that vivid color.

Next came the pants. I stepped out of them carefully, added them to the pile, and waded into the current in my bra and underwear. The water slid around my ankles, my calves, my thighs. The temperature was just cool enough to be pleasant, the river bottom smooth stone worn by centuries of current.

Back at the cave, Enslak was working. I could picture him clearly without looking, his hands moving with that quiet efficiency over the day's kill, head tilted to track the sounds of the forest. He would have watched me walk to the river path. He would have tracked my footsteps until they faded, and then he would have listened, and some part of him would have stayed fixed on the sound of my humming as long as it reached him.

I had given him a hard time about that, early on, and I didn't regret it. He'd needed to understand the difference between protection and surveillance, and he'd actually listened, which said something significant about him. He'd backed off to the agreed distance with visible reluctance, but he'd done it.

I didn't think it was comfortable for him. I thought he probably hated every minute of those twenty feet between us.

But he did it because I'd asked him to.

George's voice drifted through my memory, something he'd said during one of our late nights on the Bardaga about the way Vaktaire attached to people.

I ducked under the water before the thought could finish itself. Surfaced with my hair streaming down my back.

I wasn't ready to examine that. Not out here in the open on this alien planet with no one to talk it through with and no clear answer at the end of it. Whatever was happening between Enslak and me, whatever the shape of it was, I needed it to develop at its own speed without me trying to categorize it prematurely. He was still healing. I was still figuring out who I was in this universe that had eaten my old life whole. Neither of us was in a position to be definitive about anything.