20 · ???
The pitch black of Anlyn’s unconsciousness was shattered by a brilliant flash of light. She awoke to find herself lying flat on her back, the same tumultuous war from earlier roiling above as darting ships and blooming explosions popped in the distance. Nearby, the gleaming and curvy ship that had rescued her from the vacuum of space began to rise up, pulling away from some sort of a landing pad that Anlyn had been left to one side of. The Bel-Tra’s ship lifted in complete and eerie silence, and noticeably without the flare of chemicals belching from any sort of thruster. It just floated higher and higher, departing as mysteriously as it had appeared.
The stomping of heavy boots thundered all around Anlyn, chasing away the quietude. Figures appeared in her peripheral. A group of men—Humans!—garbed in dark suits formed up around her. One of them shouldered a large weapon of some sort; he raised it up toward the departing ship and Anlyn heard something click.
There was a swoosh and a spit of fire before a lozenge of metal popped out of the weapon. The projectile paused, seeming to struggle against gravity, then took off in a flash, spiraling up after the Bel-Tra’s ship. Beyond the craft, Anlyn could just barely make out the shimmering curve of a dome of some sort, whatever material was holding in the atmosphere around the landing pad. Even in her dazed and confused state, she felt a pang of fear for the Tra as the craft seemed to be pinned between a hard barrier on the one side and a dangerous projectile on the other.
And then, with what was either a miraculous display or a desperate and suicidal leap, the Tra’s ship disappeared. It winked out with all the suddenness of a hyperspace jump, despite the threat of matter and gravity all around.
One of the men above Anlyn shouted something—something in a tongue that was alien and yet familiar. The rocket continued to chase after the missing ship, finally slamming into the dome and erupting in a ball of orange hellfire.
“Gotammeet,” one of the men said, as phonetically as Anlyn could place it. As the fire drained away and the smoke cleared, she could see the dome itself hadn’t been scratched. The men in the strange cloaks—with clinging bottoms fitted to each leg and tops that met in vertical seams left open—turned from the dissipating fire and looked down at her.
Their reactions were sharp and immediate. All four men jumped back, eyes wide. What were obviously weapons became trained on her, and the men began shouting back and forth. Anlyn couldn’t tell if it was her they were shouting at, or each other.
She tried her best to sit up, but her stomach felt like one giant bruise. She raised her hand. “Sheesti Looo,” she said in Drenard, knowing it would be ineffectual.
One of the figures pushed the others back. He fiddled with something on his belt, and suddenly the fabric of his suit began to shimmer like a tunic made of honeycloth. He came forward with his arm out, his palm reaching for Anlyn’s outstretched and much smaller hand.
“Sheesti Looo,” she said again, this time with more relief than fear as the weapons were returned to the folds of the strange and open cloaks. She sat up further and pressed her hand into the Human’s—
Something electric jolted through her body with the contact. A burning fire shivered up her arm, into her chest, and down through her thighs. It filled her with a trembling power, a surge of agony higher and harder than any pain she’d ever known. Her body became paralyzed, her muscles seizing up.
It wasn’t until the jolt rattled her brain, knocking Anlyn unconscious once again, that she found some sort of escape from the pain.
?? Drenard ??
“I can’t feel anything.”
“That’s because there’s nothing there.”
“Let me try one more.”
Anlyn blew out her breath, but the gesture was lost among the stiff wind and the shrill howl of the Wadi canyon. She watched as Gil removed his egg graspers from the small hole and inserted them into one further down.
“Gil, I’m telling you, no Wadi in its right mind would lay its eggs in there.”
Gil reached in as far as his thick boyish arms would allow and fiddled with the trigger. It was obvious he’d never practiced with a set of graspers.
“How do you know where they’d lay them?” he asked.
Anlyn leaned away from the canyon wall and looked back to the dayline. It was still visible in the distance. “Because it’s too close to the nighttime,” she said. “This would all be in the shade during the slightest of cycles.”
Gil ran his tongue across his lower lip, concentrating. After a pause, he pulled the graspers out and shook his head. “Okay,” he said. “You’re in charge.”
Anlyn pulled out her map. “Our best bet is to go to the end of this canyon. It terminates in a pocket several thousand paces from here, and that’s where the females would most likely go to lay their eggs. There’s plenty of shade on this side.”
Gil moved to her side and peered at her map. Anlyn pointed to the spot where their canyon dead-ended.
“See? The rock on the other side gets a full blast of heat from both Hori’s, which means plenty of condensation inside for the eggs. There’s probably a lot of convection currents and watering holes in there.”
Gil scratched his neck and wiped his hands off on his shimmering Wadi suit.
“Alright,” he said. “Lead the way.”
????
They walked in silence. Anlyn left her graspers clipped to her sunshield and strolled along by the edge of the shade, marveling at how hot the air blowing through the canyons felt. The high-pitched wails on all sides seemed to resonate with the deeper groans echoing from further ahead—the sounds of larger Wadi holes.
The noise gave her chills, even as she reminded herself that male Wadi would be rare in an egg-laying canyon; supposedly, the smells and pheromones were enough to keep them at bay. Anlyn tried to picture all those scents traveling up and down the dayside on the heavy winds. She wondered what the world must look like to a Wadi. It must be so different from how she saw it, mostly through sights and sounds. She wondered if the Wadi ever pondered in kind just how the world appeared to these silly Drenards stumbling through their canyons in their silvery suits.
As she walked along and pondered these things, Gil lagged a dozen paces behind, despite his longer legs. Her cousin seemed wary of their journey into the deepening canyon, preferring to hang back and to stick close to the canyon side of the shadowpath. Anlyn glanced back periodically to make sure he was still with her. They’d walked a few thousand paces already, and Anlyn had consumed roughly half her water. Then again, if she read the last bend in the canyon correctly, the map showed them almost to the dead-end. Once they rounded the next curve, they should be able to see it.
The next curve, unfortunately, proved to be one they couldn’t just walk around. On the other side of the bend, the canyon wall arched back the other way, putting its face in the full sunlight of the two Horis. There was a shade bridge crossing to the other side, so Anlyn waited for Gil, testing her sunshield while he caught up.
“You didn’t say we’d have to cross a bridge!” Gil said.
Anlyn turned to see him resting by the wall, one hand clinging to a hole in the rock. He still had his graspers out, his fingers working the trigger over and over without seeming to realize he was doing it.
“I think we’re almost there,” Anlyn told him. She looked to the bridge. “Besides, it’s a wide one. Just stay low and keep your shield ready.” She turned back to see him probing a Wadi hole with his graspers.
“Gil, seriously, we need to keep moving.”
“Fine,” he said.
Anlyn shook her head. She wished—and not for the first time—that she’d gone with Coril. She held her shield out and pushed the deploy switch a quarter of the way down its glideline. The top and sides of the shield immediately grew, the overlapped panels sliding away from one another. She adjusted the switch until the shield was wide enough to cover her in a crouch but not too big to catch excess wind. Once she was satisfied, she stooped down and crept out onto the bridge.
They were called bridges, but of course she walked across bare rock hardly different than the last thousand paces of stone. The actual bridge was a metal column embedded in the canyon walls much further ahead. That column spanned the canyon horizontally, positioned in just the right way to throw a shadow back to the exact spot a path was needed. On the other side of the canyon from Anlyn, the bright sunlit wall ended, and another shadowpath began right at the bend in the rock. Anlyn knew that in most cases, the shade bridges were situated at turns in the canyons just like this one. The shift in angle brought an end to the shadow on one side of the valley just as it began creating a new one on the other. The bridge simply allowed them to move across the boiling hot wasteland in between.
Once out on the beginnings of the bridge, Anlyn waited for the wind to pick up a little more. It was dangerous to cross during the lulls, for the lulls never lasted for long. All they would do was make her complacent, causing Anlyn to relax her muscles before the gusts came. She waited until the howls sounded about average, then shuffled out, keeping the sunshield sideways to the wind ahead of her.
Anlyn had practiced with the shields on windy rooftops where the force was steady, but had never operated one in such unpredictable gusts. She had very little warning before a stiff blast of wind hit her. There was a slight increase in pitch from the shrill calls upwind—just enough to make her adjust the angle of the sunshield—and then the mighty breeze wrapped itself around her. Anlyn fell to one knee and placed a hand out on the rock; she angled the shield to provide suction, just like an atmospheric flyer’s wing, and used the flow to pin herself in place. Behind her, she heard Gil curse. She glanced over her shoulder to see that he had already started out on the bridge with her.
One at a time! Anlyn yelled in her head. But of course, without their D-bands, he couldn’t hear her.
The distraction of him crowding the bridge caused her to lose focus for a second, and she felt the stiffening breeze claw at the edge of her shield. Anlyn got it back under control as the wind passed, the breeze dropping down into a dangerous lull. Before she could steady herself, preparing for the next gust, Gil thundered by. He ran, fully upright on his long and powerful legs, knocking Anlyn out toward the sunside.
She fell, off-balance. She nearly threw her hand out onto the sunrock to stop her fall, but some innate sense of self-preservation won out over her instinct to brace herself. Instead, she swung her sunshield out, digging its edge into the floor of the steaming rock. Her hands and arms went into the full fury of the Horis, but the suit easily reflected their sunshine. It was the rock in the always-heat that could hurt her.
Pushing off with the shield, Anlyn threw herself back into the shade of the bridge. She heard a cry from the canyons, heralding the arrival of more wind. Her legs, already shaking from the near-fall, kicked off, responding in fear just as Gil had. She retracted her shield and ran. She ran like a fool Wadi being chased by a pack of males.