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And we’re back in the dream tent. Very similar to the real tent, now I’ve seen one, but lighter, brighter, bigger. Maldek is lying across from me, in much the same position as in the real world. The waking world, as he called it.
“You can understand me now?” I say, sitting up, but staying sat.
“Yes, linasha, that is how the dreamspace works. It joins our spirits closely so that we can understand each other’s meanings, even if we do not speak the same words.”
He sits up, leans forward, watches me with bright, interested eyes, a half smile curving up the corners of his lips.
“But you speak some of them. My words, that is.”
He inclines his head in acknowledgement. “I had to journey to another tribe with one of my tribe sisters. A human female called Sam. I learned a few of your words so that we had a way of communicating about the important things. I am afraid my headspace does not hold on to your words so well, linasha. I have very few that I remember.”
“Food, hurt, safe,” I say.
He shrugs. “Useful things to be able to say.” Then he grins. “You do not think the merka beast will be to your tastes?”
“I thought predators didn’t make good meals. There’s a reason we farm cows, not lions.”
He shrugs again. “It is true, their meat is tough and not as delicious as ensouka, or horkat. But it is better than an empty stomach. And easier to eat what we have than to try to catch fish, especially when we would have to make our own nets.”
He gives me a lazy sort of smile. One that turns him from pleasant looking to roguishly attractive. His isn’t a human-looking face, but apparently that doesn’t matter to me one little bit. That smile gets my blood racing.
You know the ways of mating?
I know, academically. I just didn’t ever see how it would be relevant to me. Military tier women aren’t bred to be attractive. Men just aren’t interested in us that way, and I never had a problem with that - I was never interested in them either. Then the Military Tier Breeding Program made the whole idea of physical intimacy repugnant. I don’t know what it means that this alien I’ve barely spoken to suddenly has me so interested.
“These humans that you know,” I say, bringing the conversation back to where I need it to be before my spiralling thoughts can get too out of hand. “You said - gestured - that they’re coming to the Mercenia base.”
“Yes, linasha. There were four of us at the base. Myself and one other took the paths along the stream to search for you. One remained to guard the sleeping females there. One travelled to the village to summon our tribe sisters. It is some distance, even for a raskarran with swift legs. I should think he will get there this evening. It will be another few days before the females arrive. Less, if they consent to be carried by their mates the entire way.” He grins at me. “They are not all so tall as you are, linasha.”
He doesn’t say this like it’s a bad thing, but the words sting at my chest all the same. I rub at the spot with the heel of my palm.
“I don’t recognise any of their names,” I say, once again reeling my emotions back in, focusing on the actual point of all this. “But I don’t remember getting here either, so maybe that’s not surprising. I was here with a research team. They’re gone. I need to find them. Find out what happened to them.”
Maldek nods. “Our chieftess, Liv, is much interested in this also. The females in our tribe are not your research team. They have come to this forest separate to you. They did not know you were here until we stumbled upon you by chance.”
“But they know about the team, or are trying to find out about them? They’re from some other team Mercenia has sent to recover our research, or…” Even as I talk, it doesn’t make any sense to me. When did Mercenia ever have a team entirely made of women?
Something about Maldek’s expression makes my heart drop. “What?”
“Linasha,” he says, voice gruff. And that word, even spoken with all the caution and concern that he uses now, makes the hairs on the back of my neck rise.
And not in an unpleasant kind of way.
“Liv and her sisters came to these trees a few seasons of the moons ago, falling from the sky in an egg. They were lost and frightened and did not know how to survive. My chief, Gregar, joined in dreams with Liv. And it is most fortunate that he did, for if we had not been running towards her, if he had not known how urgently she needed to be found, then she and all her sisters would have died on the sands. From hunger and thirst, or from attack by the same sort of creature that we have faced this day.”
Seasons of the moons? Months? Time likely won’t pass here in the same ordered structures that Mercenia uses to measure our own seasons back home, but is it too much to hope that they might be roughly equivalent? Months since these other women arrived. And if their trip here was triggered by some loss of communication by my team - add to that time the months of preparation it would have taken to put together a new expedition, to make the journey out here.
A year in cryostasis? It would be the longest stint I’ve ever done. It’s possible that spending so long frozen could have taken a chunk out of my memory.
But I’m hearing what I want to hear, I realise, as the words Maldek actually said start to sink into my brain.
They were lost and frightened and did not know how to survive.
“They… weren’t supposed to be here?” I ask.
Maldek shakes his head. “They were heading to some other world. They crashed here.”
