Challenged (Mates for the Raskarrans #8)

Chapter 21

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Rardek

T he evening is giving way to night when the path we are following takes a steep turn upwards. Maldek stops, bending double a moment to catch his breath, before looking up at the path ahead of us.

“I do not think the camping will be so comfortable up there,” he says, looking at the rockiness of the ground. “What do you think, make camp here and continue in the morning, or take the risk and keep going?”

I grimace. A tent pitched on uneven, rocky ground is not going to grant us a good night’s sleep, and I dearly wish to be comfortable to maximise my time with my Angie. But the thought of stopping before the light has fully gone, before my energy is truly spent, chafes at my spirit.

“I think we have already travelled further than little human legs would be able to comfortably walk. Our destination cannot be far. Poisons that keep away the predators would not make me sleep easy in a tent if I was human-sized.”

“You think we travel to another hut?”

“I think whatever else we find, there will be some kind of outpost here. A place to rest.”

“A proper bed?”

“A proper bed for our feet to stick out of the end of.”

Maldek laughs. “Better than a rocky floor. Push on?”

I nod. “Push on.”

We walk, rather than run. The ground is uneven with rocks and quickly grows steeper. The trees were always going to be thin in a place like this, but the rot has only made that worse. I do not trust any of the branches ahead of us to take our weight, so we scramble, keeping our bodies low and using our hands to aid us. It is slow going, and for a little while I wonder if we will shortly be descending all the way back down again in worse light. But then things level off, the ground opening up before us, revealing a small hut and another tall structure next to it.

The hut looks very much like the other Mercenia hut, but raskarran hut sized. It has the same unnatural straight walls, made from the same grey material. The other structure is entirely different, and I cannot begin to guess what its purpose is.

It is certainly not a building made for living in. It has no walls. Just sharp bones that jut upwards, climbing as high as a tree. Atop it, several circular things are dotted about it, pointing in different directions. Much like with the pods, there are lights on it that flash every so often, all of them an angry red.

“Have you ever seen a thing so unsettling to the spirit?” Maldek says, his eyebrows raised.

“I wonder if it is the thing our linashas are expecting.”

“We will be able to ask them soon enough.”

The door to the small hut is locked, but it does not take much to barge it open. It is immediately obvious that no one has been inside the building before us for a very long time. The air smells stale. Dust has settled on every surface. There is no mark - on the floor or elsewhere - of another being having passed through.

I use my pack to prop the now broken door open and let in the forest air. Maldek walks through the first room to a door at the back.

“Beds,” he says after pushing it open. “They smell almost as vile as the ones Basran’s tribe were using.”

“I can tolerate dust and disuse better than another male’s dirty stink.”

There are two of the machines my Angie likes to use in the main room. I do not touch them, concerned I might trigger something to happen. Stacked against one of the other walls are some boxes. I lift down the top one and open it, finding a strange collection of things inside it.

“Looks like tools,” Maldek says, peering over my shoulder.

I take a good look at all of it, and everything else inside the hut, in case my Angie wishes to see it, then head back outside to light a fire.

We have climbed above most of the trees here, but there are a few hardy bushes around. I pull a couple up and squash them down with my feet, using my flints to set a spark amongst their tangled branches. They will not burn for long, their branches too thin to smoulder for any length of time. Fortunately, we are both tired and eager for sleep, and so will not be lingering at the fireside. I intend to be to my dusty, stinky bed as soon as I have finished my evening meal.

“We should probably scout around a little on our way back,” Maldek says. “Ensure that the rot does not spread out in any other direction.”

“If we each take an edge of the path, run back along it, we will see if there are any other paths branching off from it.”

“Tired of my company already?” Maldek grins.

“Never,” I say. “But it is not like we will have the breath to speak to one another.”

We boil up some djenti berries into paste and massage it into the soles of our feet and our aching calves. A waterskin full of djenti berry tonic each finishes the treatment, and should see us well enough to run all the way home tomorrow.

Home. It is strange to think of the Mercenia hut in this way. But it is where my Angie is, it is where Maldek’s Brooks is. And so, for now, it is home.

“This is the first time we have spent time together properly since before you left for Walset’s village,” I say.

“We spent the entire rains together.” But though Maldek arches a brow like he thinks I am a fool for having forgotten, his expression shifts immediately to regret. “I am sorry that I was not right in my headspace all that time.”

“It is not something you need to apologise for, brother. Continuing to carry your guilt after Sam was returned to us safe and happier than ever - that was the foolish thing. But I do not blame you for that, either. Headspaces are difficult things to control at times.”

I think of my Angie, desperate to return to a life where she was ill treated and would never be happy. Because it was familiar, all she had ever known. At least the shape of her thoughts changed faster than Maldek’s did.

“There will be few long evenings, just us two, now,” Maldek says.

I know why the elders put Maldek as a warrior, and me as a hunter when it came time for us to train in our skills. Maldek could have been a hunter - his build was always caught somewhere between the ideal for the two paths. Warrior’s training made him stronger, bigger. If he had trained in stealth and stillness, he would have become leaner. But we were trouble when we were together back then. The elders did not wish to have the constant battle to keep us from distraction, and so they separated us.

Understanding a thing is not the same as appreciating it, though. Sometimes, I wish we had both been trained in hunting ways. Long days, just the two of us, looking for a horkat or an ensouka to feed the tribe. We could have still had that, even with linashas at home.

Of course, when we did our training, no one thought there would be linashas again. I never assumed I would do anything but go back each night to the hut I shared with my brother. Being separated in our work mattered little.

“I will have to move out,” I say. “You will not want me and my Angie intruding on the space you share with your Brooks.”

Maldek grimaces. “It is not just my space.”

“It is your hut. Gifted to you by the elders, not to us. I was just the fool who did not wish for a hut of his own when he came of age. Never thought I would need one.”

“I never thought of it as mine.”

“I know.” I grin at him. “I should think my Angie would like the luxury of a brand new hut that she can choose for herself. Choice is important to her.”

“I do not think choice is a thing any of the females are overly familiar with.”

“When you have less of a thing, it grows in importance to you.”

Silence falls between us for a long, peaceful, but melancholy moment.

“All this change is good for the tribe, and for us both individually,” I say. “But I will miss this. The quiet. The two of us. We should make a promise to each other now that, whatever happens in the next few seasons, we will find a way to make time for this.”

Maldek smiles. “I would like that.”

The dreamspace welcomes me in almost as soon as I lay down in my musty bed. We are in the tent, my Angie reclining in the pelts, wearing a soft, light dress that flows over her shape, making it appear as though she is bared to me, even though she is not.

“Linasha,” I say to her, heat suffusing the word.

An answering heat fills her cheeks, and I love the way it looks on her. But I sigh, biting back my desire.

“I hate to speak of anything other than all the things I wish to do to you this night,” I say, sighing like I have never been more disappointed in my life. “But we found the end of the path.”

My Angie’s eyes light up, but it is not with her usual vigour. Something is troubling her, I think.

“You didn’t have to go much further than Jaskry went, then?”

“He turned around in the midafternoon. If he had continued until nightfall, he would have found it.”

“What did you find?”

I close my eyes for a moment, call the location from my memory. When I open them again, we are no longer lounging in the tent, but around the small fire I built. It burns more merrily in dreams than it ever managed in the waking world. I rise to my feet, reaching for my Angie. She takes my hand, allows me to pull her up.

“Do you know what this is?” I say, indicating the strange, boney structure.

“Yeah, Deborah was right. It’s a radio tower. Something the humans here would have used to send their messages back home. Guess the base wasn’t high enough ground - are you on top of a hill?”

“We had to almost climb to reach this place.”

She nods. “Okay. That all makes sense.”

“Well, that is a relief,” I say, allowing a little tease to slip into my voice.

I expect her to smile, or perhaps roll her eyes at me, but instead her expression drops.

“What troubles you, my Angie?” I ask, guiding her back to the fire.

She grimaces, and I dislike her reluctance to talk to me.

“You are still thinking on your puzzles? Your questions without answers?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Except now I have a new one.”

Her fingers twine through mine, her hand giving mine a little squeeze.

“I didn’t know the sickness your people suffered killed all the female raskarrans.”

“Ah, I failed to mention that? The sickness is a difficult thing to discuss, even after all these seasons. Forgive my oversight.”

She shakes her head. “Liv actually told me within the first half an hour of me being awake, I just wasn’t listening properly.”

“And it is this that troubles you, that the females were affected worse?”

“Yes. It just feels wrong to me. It shouldn’t have so disproportionately affected women. You’re sure none survived? It wasn’t just bad luck in your tribe?”

I shake my head. “It was all tribes. Back then, there was a lot of travel between tribes. We had closer ties. So we know everyone was affected the same.” I grimace. “All that travel. We stopped it as soon as the sickness started to spread, hoping to isolate it. But it seemed to be in all the tribes all at once.”

“Yeah,” my Angie says, looking devastated. “These things tend to have an incubation period - a period of time where you have the disease but don’t know it yet. Even if you thought you were perfectly well, you could have been carrying it and giving it to others. I’m so sorry, Rardek. I don’t want to make all this worse for you. But…”

“But your heartspace needs to understand.”

She looks down at the fire. “I want to believe it’s not just that. I want to believe that this unease I feel is because I’m on the cusp of discovering something important. I’ve spent all afternoon and evening trawling through Farrow’s computer again because of this nagging feeling inside me that something isn’t right. That there’s something in all of this that needs to come out.”

“I did not mean to make it sound like it was only to sate your curiosity. Your heartspace is troubled by what all this means for a reason. We raskarrans would call that Lina’s guiding hand, and wise males listen to such guidance.”

She sighs heavily, looking exhausted, despite the fact that we are asleep.

“I also kind of hope it is just because I’m a nosey cow. I’m afraid of what I might find if I keep pulling at all these threads. Nothing good, I think.”

“Better to be armed with knowledge than protected by ignorance.”

She shuffles round to my side, resting her head on my shoulder as she tucks herself against me. It makes my heartspace glow with pride to know she seeks comfort from me now. That my closeness eases her spirit.

“I hate asking you this, but could you tell me everything you know about the sickness? Everything you can think of. I know you were very young when it happened.”

“Most of us were,” I say. “Younglings survived the sickness better than those full grown. Elders, also. You will see of our tribe that most of us have less than thirty seasons or over sixty. It is a small number of us that exists in the middle. Anghar is the only one in our tribe who was raised by his father and not his grandfather.”

My Angie immediately frowns. “That usually goes the other way.”

“Sicknesses take the very old and very young.”

“The most vulnerable.”

“That is the way it always was for us before, though we are rarely so badly sick that the forest cannot provide something to aid us. That made the sickness strange, also. Nothing our healers did helped.”

“Forgive me for saying this, but you can’t have the most advanced medicine.”

“Compared to the things humans can do - we cannot freeze each other in pods for endless seasons, no.” A hint of a smile graces her lips. “But we are blessed to have djenti berries to speed our healing. Grace and Rachel have said that humans have nothing like that. We use them to help with all manner of injuries and ailments. But the sickness - they did not touch it.”

“So nothing about it behaved like any sickness you had ever encountered before?”

Her expression is grim as she says it.

“No, it did not.”

She is silent for a long moment.

“I don’t like it.” Her voice is heavy. “A new sickness unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before feels so much like it ought to have been brought here by Mercenia. Especially with the really high mortality rate.”

“But Mercenia was running from it also.”

“Yeah,” she says, her voice empty of the confidence it held only a sunset ago.

“You no longer believe this to be true?”

“I believe it’s either true or they wanted anyone looking to think it was true.”

She sits back so she can look at me properly. “It’s the emails. The messages on Farrow’s computer. The guy saves every document he has on his desktop, like a complete idiot, but his emails are immaculate?”

“You questioned before what he might have got rid of to cover up his incompetence.”

“Or his corruption.”

“Which would be the simplest?” I ask, thinking of how we made my problem as simple as possible and, in doing so, found the answers.

She makes a frustrated sound, then collapses back onto the ground, staring up above her at the sky before covering her face with her hands, massaging at her temples.

“You have an ache in your headspace from all this thinking and fretting,” I say, moving to sit at her head.

“I’ve had a headache since I woke up, pretty much,” she says.

“I think that is normal when the headspace has so much to process. Speak with Lorna in the morning. She will help Shemza get you the right treatment.”

“I will do.”

Gently, I touch my fingers to her forehead, applying the lightest pressure as I begin to move them back through her hair, massaging her scalp.

“Mmm, that’s nice.”

She lowers her own hands, looking up at me and smiling before settling herself into a comfortable position, her eyes closing.

“I do not know if it will help your aches in the waking world.”

“It’s helping me right now.”

“Good.”

Her hair is so silky beneath my fingers. My headspace flashes back to gripping at it, tilting her head back to kiss her neck. The memory almost makes me groan.

“Would you like me to take us back to the tent?” I say, my cock starting to stiffen in my leathers.

She opens her eyes again, biting at her lip as she looks back up at me. But as she opens her mouth to speak, her expression changes, and she looks back up at the radio tower above us. Her brows furrow, and she bolts upright.

“Is that red light flashing on the tower in the real world?”

Before I can even answer, the dreamspace shatters around us.