Challenged (Mates for the Raskarrans #8)

Chapter 15

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Rardek

M y Angie does not emerge from the hut all evening. Liv tells me she is trying to find information on the machines - answers as to when and why Mercenia left these trees. Lorna has been doing the same, but Liv is of the impression that my Angie is uniquely skilled at using the machines .

“She has a quick headspace,” I say. “I am sure she will be able to find your answers.”

“I hope so,” Liv says. “Then we do not need Dawes. Good to have her, but…”

“Better not to rely on what just one person is prepared to tell you.”

“Yes.” She grimaces. “And if Dawes frozen like Brooks… Maybe not have answers. Even if she want to speak.”

It pleases me to know my Angie does this for the tribe. The answers she seeks will be a weight off all of our shoulders. But her absence leaves me with little to do but ponder my own questions, my headspace growing ever more tangled as I try to understand what my brothers and I have found in the trees.

I know understanding it matters less than dealing with it. Many of my brothers would argue that once we have done the burn, we can forget about it. Burns have always worked before. We have no reason to expect it will not work now. But there is a feeling in my spirit that continues to poke at me - the same unease I first felt as we approached the Mercenia hut, but grown sharp and pointy. I do not think it will go away until I understand why the blight has spread so thoroughly and so far. Until I know how likely it is to happen again.

As conversation about the fire starts to die down, the new arrivals heading to their tents, I make my way to the Mercenia hut and my uncomfortable bed. It is too short for me to stretch out, my feet sticking out of the end of it, but too narrow to curl up without my knees doing the same. Not conducive for sleeping, though with my thoughts still racing so, I am not sure the most comfortable bed in the forest could coax me to sleep.

I try to push the blight out of my headspace, think instead on returning to the village. Bringing my Angie to her new home. I wonder what she will make of it. If she will admire the charms the village has, or if what she has lost will overshadow them. I think of her strange white home and wonder what I could find for her that might bring a small piece of that place here. Certain shells of the river creatures are almost white on the outside, and inside they have a substance that shimmers with all the colours when you hold it up to the sunlight. The smooth stones you can find on the riverbed are also sometimes white. I will have to ask Sam to help me find some.

I am so caught up in these imaginings, I do not at first notice that I have fallen asleep, that my environment has shifted as the dreamspace formed around me. My Angie does not notice either, her head bent low over the machine , eyes fixed on it. For a long moment I just watch her, admiring the way the light of the machine dances in her eyes. Learning the shape her features make as she concentrates. I linger on her mouth, memorising it with my eyes, while wishing I could memorise it with my tongue.

Then my linasha sighs, pushing a hand through her hair.

“God, I could murder a coffee right now,” she mutters.

“Again with this tendency for violence, linasha,” I say, grinning. “Are you always so full of wrath, or is it just the circumstances you find yourself in that have inflamed your ire?”

She jumps at my voice, scowling at me.

“It’s a figure of speech. It means ‘I really wish I had a coffee right now’. Coffee is a drink. It…” She trails off, her brows furrowing. “Wait, we can understand each other. I’m asleep?”

The fact that she did not immediately notice suggests to me that we are once again in the last room she remembers being in. She has fallen asleep here, sitting in the chair, probably slumped against the table.

“You are indeed.”

“Huh.” For a moment, her expression is just curious, then she closes her eyes, concentrating. When she opens them again, a cup of something steaming has appeared on the table in front of her. She picks it up, breathing the steam deep into her lungs.

“That smell,” she says, something almost like a moan in her voice. The sound makes my heartspace thunder, my cock stirring in my leathers.

She brings the cup to her lips, takes a sip, but frowns.

“It’s like I’m drinking it, but I’m not at the same time.”

“That is the way of the dreamspace. We can experience pleasures, but they are temporary. They do not linger the way they would in the waking world.” I step closer to her. “Tastes do not linger on the tongue. Heat does not linger in the belly.”

Her eyes grow wide, her cheeks darkening, and I think she has realised I do not speak only of this coffee drink that she has summoned.

“The advantage,” I say, taking her cup and raising it to my face, drawing the scent into my lungs. It has a rich, pleasant smell. I can see why she enjoys it. “Is that once the pleasure has passed, you can experience it all over again. Without impact to your… stamina.”

I take a sip of the drink, which rather ruins my attempt at flirtation. It is almost as bitter as djenti berry tonic. My expression twists, a disgusted sound escaping me.

My Angie laughs, then claps her hands over her mouth as if to contain her mirth.

“This is the drink you were prepared to commit violence for?”

“It’s an acquired taste,” she says. “You start drinking it for the pick me up effect, but then you start to enjoy the flavour.”

“It has healing properties, then?”

“Caffeine. Gives you energy. Helps you not end up asleep with your face in a keyboard.”

She rubs at her neck and shoulders, grimacing in anticipation of the aches that will be building in them as she sleeps slumped over this table.

“Brooks mentioned something about medicines for aches and pains,” she says, glancing at me. “I’m going to need some tomorrow.”

I raise the cup in my hand before passing it back to her. “If that is your drink of choice, I think you will find our djenti berry tonic quite tolerable. It is what we drink to speed the body’s healing. It will take care of your aches. Though perhaps it would be better not to develop them in the first place.”

“Yeah, sure, great advice. Not a lot I can do about it now, though, is there?”

“Well, there is something.”

“What, we can just wake up?”

“It is possible to break the dreamspace from inside it, yes.”

Her brows furrow in thought. “Imagine ourselves on top of a building and jump off?”

“I was going to suggest cliffs, but I understand Mercenia has huts tall enough to be effective. Why not take us to one, my Angie?”

Her eyes narrow a little at my calling her mine, but she does not protest. Setting her drink down on the table, she rises to her feet, closing her eyes. Around us, the room shifts. Unlike the fade into her home before, this time the change is wild, dizzying. The air seems to spin and howl around us, a sensation like falling in reverse, ripping through my nerves. I reach out, grab something hard, cold, and grip it tight. Then the worst of the sensation dies down, our location coming into focus around us. I am holding on to a barrier that surrounds a small platform. It is not unlike our sentry posts, except it is impossibly high. There is no shelter around it, so the wind whips ferociously about us, lifting my linasha’s hair and tumbling it about her face. Her eyes are open now and remain fixed on mine even through the maelstrom of her locks.

“I came here when I was a kid,” she shouts at me, walking up to the barrier I am gripping and leaning over it.

I rally my nerves and do the same, looking down at the miniature humans walking around below us.

“School trip,” she says, quieter now she is closer to me. Then I realise the wind has vanished, a calm settling over the space. “That’s better. Wish I could have done that in real life when I was here.”

“They truly brought younglings up here?”

“It’s safe,” she says, rolling her eyes at me.

“Safe, perhaps. Horrifying, definitely.” I look down once more, my stomach spinning inside me. “It is not natural to be this high. As high as the trees, yes. But this place is taller than ten trees atop one another.”

“And some,” my Angie says.

“Why do humans need buildings so tall?”

“They don’t.”

“And yet, they still make them?”

My Angie shrugs. “That’s men for you. Always having to prove they have the biggest dick.”

This makes little sense to me. “Humans build monuments to their cocks?”

She snorts. “Something like that. It’s just this thing that humans do. They have to be the best. That means the biggest, the fastest. When they can’t be that themselves, they make something. A tower, a car, a rocket.”

“And only males with big cocks can do this successfully?”

“That’s what they want you to think.”

“Are cocks really so important to humans?”

“To the ones that have them.” She throws her head back and laughs, and though I am unsure which part of our conversation has amused her so, I am glad to see it. She laughs with her whole body, her shoulders shaking with her mirth. It is as beautiful as her fire.

“Oh, I needed that,” she says, a final few giggles escaping her. She looks at me, eyes glittering. “Thanks.”

“I would be more happy to accept your thanks if I knew what they were for.”

“For being ridiculous,” she says. “That’s not a thing many human men I knew were comfortable being. It’s refreshing.”

“Ridiculous is one of my main attributes,” I say, bowing a little to prove it.

She laughs again. “Are we really going to jump off this building?”

I hold a hand out to her, contain the thrill that races through me when she takes it.

“We really are.”

When we arrive back in the dreamspace, the room around us is a human one - large and as white as my Angie’s home. There is a table in the centre of it big enough to sit maybe ten raskarrans. At the edges of the room, there are tables with machines like the ones in the Mercenia hut underground.

“This is my office,” my Angie says. “Where I work.”

There is a hint of longing in her gaze and voice, but it is twisted up with other emotions. Sharper ones. After a moment, she shakes her head, takes a seat at the table.

“Wonder if I’ve brought us here because I’m still thinking about everything I’ve talked about with Liv, or if it’s because I’m going to miss this place.”

“Both, perhaps.” I watch her carefully as I speak. “Your conversation with the other females earlier seemed a little…”

“Heated?” my Angie says, arching a brow at me. The sharpness I expect to be in her expression and tone is absent.

“I was looking for a word that implied less anger. I could not understand what you were saying, but it did not seem like an angry conversation. Sally said you were discussing Mercenia’s business here. That you asked questions that they did not think to.”

She grimaces. “I worked with people on science tier. People like the ones who ran this base here. I know stuff the others don’t, that’s all.”

“That is a good thing, though?”

She shrugs. “I don’t think anyone really cares about the answers to my questions. They just want to know that Mercenia isn’t going to come back.”

“And were you able to find that answer for them?”

“Yeah, pretty quickly. I just checked Farrow’s emails. Uh, like messages that can be sent to another person using the computers.”

I do not fully understand, but I understand enough.

“And what did his messages say?”

“Not a lot. It’s funny. Farrow was messy as all hell with his files, but his emails were tidy. Suspiciously so. God knows what he deleted to cover up his incompetence, or maybe even his corruption. But there was a memo that had been sent all-to-all sitting in his inbox. A message to everyone at the base, that is. It was announcing an emergency evacuation and lockdown. For the last three days they were here, no one left the base. They were trying to avoid exposure to the disease that was killing raskarrans at the time.”

My stomach churns at the mention of it. “They saw us dying and were afraid they would die also?”

“Yeah. I don’t know if you know… certain diseases - how they spread.”

“I know that being close to an afflicted person can cause you to become afflicted. The humans here knew this also and hid in their huts until they could leave?”

“Basically.” She grimaces. “I hate to say anything about the sickness that killed so many of you is a good thing, but this is good news. If they were looking to resume operations here, they would have come back after a year, maybe two. It would probably have been safe for them again by then.”

It was not long between the first raskarrans passing and the last. Once a tribe had it in their village, it spread amongst them rapidly.

“The sickness was gone inside of a season,” I say. “And we have not suffered its like since.”

My Angie nods as if she expected this. “It’s the same in human populations. A flu or some other virus crops up once every few decades that’s more dangerous, more deadly than regular illnesses. For a while, things are awful, but then it calms down again. Goes back to normal. Science tier would know that, would expect similar to happen here. If they were going to come back, they would have known they could after a year or so. There’s no reason they would have waited nearly twenty. They aren’t coming back.”

Joy fills my heartspace, bright and fierce, but I do my best not to show it on my face. News that delights me could well be difficult for my Angie. I know she longs for the home she can never return to.

“I am sorry that there will be no rescue for you.”

Surprise fills her expression, her lips parting, brows rising. But she shakes it off quickly, gives me another shrug.

“Liv’s right, you know. If Mercenia came back, they would take the kids. I’m sad to be stuck here, but I’m not sorry. If it means the kids are safe, I can’t be sorry about it, you know?”

There’s something a little defiant in her manner as she says this, as if she expects me to challenge what she is saying. I only smile. Reach across the table and brush my thumb across her cheek.

“Fierce little female,” I say, allowing some heat to slip into my voice. “Already you protect the tribe.”

She snorts dismissively. “I don’t think not being evil counts for much.”

Still, she blushes, and when I sit back in my chair, her hand goes to her cheek, fingers tracing over the place I touched her. I wonder if she realises she is doing it.

“You found this information quickly,” I say. “So why did you fall asleep at the machine ? You were looking for answers to your questions?”

“I know I should have gone looking for Liv.” The defensiveness is back, as is her scowl.

I shrug. “Liv will be as pleased to hear your news in the morning as she would have been to hear it this afternoon.”

“I probably still should have told her, rather than wasting all evening looking for answers to questions that only bother me.”

There is a furrow in her brow as she speaks. Her headspace spins, I think, just as mine has been doing.

“Would you speak to me of these questions and the answers you seek?”

The furrow deepens. “You want me to bore you to death with science stuff you don’t understand?”

“I know there is probably little I can do to aid you in your search for answers, but I have always found that talking through a thing out loud can help straighten your headspace.”

My Angie blows out a sigh. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that you’re stupid.”

I grin at her. “You did not. You just know as well as I do that human things are beyond my understanding. Just as you would not know the best ways to hunt an ensouka.”

“No, I definitely do not.” Concern fills her features. “Is that something I’m going to have to learn to do?”

“Only if you desire it.” I put some tease into my next words. “You are mated to a very skilled hunter. He will always provide for you if hunting is not a thing you wish to do.”

She huffs, but I think there is some amusement in it, her lips twitching at the very edges. Looking down at the table, she traces her fingers over the surface. Everywhere she touches, she leaves a trail behind her, as if she has painted on the table with light. At first, her movements are random, but then she presses her palm flat to the surface, swiping it across the light trails she has made, wiping them away. The next marks she makes are deliberate, and though I cannot interpret what it says, I have watched the females in their lessons often enough to know that it is writing. She stares at this writing for a long time.

Then, as if the stopper has been pulled out of her, the words come flooding out.