Breaking Brandi (15 page)

And what good was having the heart for
something when she didn’t have the knowhow? No training for this
kind of thing? No clue?

She swallowed with an effort against the
knot of misery forming in her throat. “Promise you’ll come
back?”

“I cannot ….” He broke off when her chin
wobbled and tears filled her eyes, looking horrified. “I will do my
best.”

Brandi sniffed and smiled at him with a
touch of relief. His best, she was sure, would bring him through
it.

She hoped.

Because she didn’t know what she was going
to do if he didn’t come back.

He didn’t want her to follow. She could tell
that, but she followed him outside anyway. She watched him
forlornly as he climbed atop the guak and turned its head so that
it was facing the path down the mountain and set out the way they’d
come. She watched him until he was little more than a bouncing dot,
shimmering like a desert mirage because of the tears that had
filled her eyes that she refused to shed.

Sniffing, she moved down the steps after a
little while and crossed the clearing that made up his yard. She
found a wall of rocks at the very edge and peered over the short
wall. The drop on the other side was steep but certainly not
sheer.

She would probably have rolled halfway down
the mountain if she fell, but she was careful climbing up on it and
when she’d settled she could see Ulrich, far into the distance now.
She sat straining to make him out against the mountain until she
was certain he’d gone into the forest.

Then she began to look at the world around
her and realized she could see almost into forever from the peak
Ulrich had chosen to build his place.

It made her stomach go weightless.

A sense of unreality invaded her. The view
was awesome. At the same time—alien without a doubt, so foreign to
her senses that it was impossible even to pretend for a handful of
moments that she was looking at a panoramic Earth view, regardless
of the familiarity of some aspects of the landscape.

The sun, setting behind a distant peak of
the mountain range, looked like an enormous fireball—far bigger
than Earth’s sun even at those times when it seemed huge. The
mountain range itself might almost have been one on Earth. The
valley it formed was covered with vegetation—shades of red rather
than shades of green—and not nearly as soothing to the senses.

She knew a lot of studies had been done on
the effects of color on the human mind. She wondered what living on
this red world would do—had done. And did it affect the
natives?

Dismissing the thought after a few moments
as it sank in that she’d sat staring at everything and nothing
until dusk was rapidly settling over the land, she clambered off of
the rock wall and headed into the cabin at a brisk pace.

Standing in the middle of the main room, she
studied it as she had the landscape outside … except with far more
purpose.

She wasn’t going to allow herself to
entertain the possibility that Ulrich might not come back, but he
was gone right now and she was on her own.

She moved from the middle of the floor after
a few moments and began to explore, examining everything
carefully.

The place wasn’t exactly filled to
overflowing, quite the opposite, in point of fact. Everything that
was there seemed to have been collected for beauty and or comfort.
Most of it looked virtually new—from the bed she discovered in the
upper loft to the tiny, and clearly recent, addition that held a
smaller bed.

For the woman he planned to buy?

Or the child—son—he hoped for?

She pushed the sadness that thought caused
her to the back of her mind.

A short hallway that opened off the other
side of the cabin, that also seemed like a fairly new addition, led
to a tiny, very strange … bath?

Joy!

There was plumbing! Somewhat crude but
effective!

It was sure going to beat the hell out of
squatting in the woods! Which was pretty much what she’d had to do
from the time she’d arrived on this godforsaken world!

Well, forsaken by any all powerful imaginary
magical friend that might have been willing to make things a little
easier on its inhabitants!

She relieved herself and headed back into
the main cabin to study the small area she thought was set aside
for a kitchen.

There was something that looked like a
pot-bellied stove that she realized after examining it must be for
both cooking and heating.

It was unfortunate that she was so
unfamiliar with such things.

A frantic search for something to make fire
came up empty.

Ditto something to make light.

When it became clear that she wasn’t going
to cook and she wasn’t going to even be able to see much longer,
she rushed around the small cabin locking everything up as tightly
as possible and then barricaded herself into the tiny bedroom.

She had cause to be grateful that she was so
exhausted. She didn’t think she would’ve been able to sleep
otherwise.

Starving when she woke the following morning
at the crack of dawn, her first order of business was to find
something
to eat.

She found that something in the garden
Ulrich had mentioned. It had been left unattended, undoubtedly, far
longer than he’d intended when he left to buy a woman. It was badly
overgrown, and a good bit of it dead from needs not attended, but
she gathered up everything that looked edible and, after a little
thought, headed to the tiny stream she’d noticed the day
before.

There was a tiny cabin sitting across it and
when she went inside she discovered Ulrich’s cache of food!

“Oh thank god!” she gasped, studying the
contents greedily and refusing to think about what she would have
to do to refill it or keep it from being completely depleted.

There were no grocery stores!

That thought almost inspired panic, but she
fought it down.

In the days that followed, she had to do
that repeatedly.

She’d never in her life cooked anything that
didn’t arrive in her refrigerator in a package or her pantry in a
box—mostly prepared—where she pretty much had nothing to do beyond
throwing the ingredients together in a sauce pan or microwaveable
bowl and adding a little water. She was on her own at the cabin
three days before she managed to actually cook anything and it was
a horrible disaster—half burned and half raw.

She was tempted to throw it out except for
the fact that she’d worked so damned hard to produce it. That grain
of reluctance was a good thing because it gave her time to consider
the limitations of her food supply.

She couldn’t afford to waste it because
she’d screwed it up. She threw the raw stuff back to cook a little
longer and cut the burned parts off and ate what she could.

She didn’t recognize the meat, but she was
glad she didn’t know where it came from. She needed meat. She
preferred to get it already butchered, cleaned, and packaged.

That wasn’t going to happen here.

She was going to have to get used to killing
things to eat—assuming she could figure out how.

She was tired enough, and sorry for herself
often enough, that she frequently burst into tears for no other
reason, but then she calmed herself, washed her face, and tried
some more.

One day, almost month after Ulrich left,
when she’d long since given up hope that he would come back, she
looked up to see a rider approaching.

Her heart swelled with such joy, relief, and
gladness when she recognized the figure atop the beast that she
felt like a hot air balloon. “Ulrich!” she cried, racing to greet
him.

He slipped from the beast and caught her in
his arms as she reached him and launched herself at him, laughing
and crying at the same time. “You were gone so long! I thought you
weren’t going to come back!”

His arms tightened around her until she
could barely breathe. “I thought for a time that I would not come
either,” he muttered.

Brandi fought her way free of him to look up
at him. “You got hurt?”

His expression twisted. “I have a few new
scars.”

She scanned his face worriedly. “But …
you’re alright now?”

“I am here.”

He wasn’t actually ‘alright’, though.

It was clear by the time they managed to get
inside that he hadn’t actually recovered from his wounds.

He dropped to his knees almost as soon as
they got inside and then fell forward like a toppling tree. He
shook every floor board in the cabin and rattled all of the
crockery when he landed.

Chapter Eleven

Brandi’s alarm gave way to deep anxiety when
she’d done what she could to make Ulrich comfortable.

There was no getting him off of the floor.
He would get up himself or stay.

She tried not to think about what that meant
if he didn’t recover.

Thankfully, despite the collapse, he wasn’t
completely insensible. She managed to bully him into helping by
lifting various parts of his anatomy and turning when necessary so
that she could remove enough of his clothing to make him more
comfortable and to examine him.

Not that she knew a damned thing about
medicine!

Of course, even if she had she didn’t know
how much help it would be when he was alien.

Which she wasn’t really inclined to think
about anymore, but did have to consider under the
circumstances.

He felt hot enough she thought he had a
fever and she was pretty sure that meant infection.

She felt a little sick to her stomach at
that thought because if he did have an infection she was pretty
sure he was a dead man if his body couldn’t fight it off.

She figured cooling him down couldn’t hurt
and might make him feel better so she filled a pot with some of the
cold water Ulrich had piped into the kitchen area from the stream
and settled on the floor beside him to bathe him until he was
shivering and his teeth chattering. She covered him with an animal
skin blanket then and got up to search for something to make
soup.

Not that she knew how to make soup with the
ingredients she was going to have to work with!

At home she would’ve just gotten out a can
and poured it in a bowl or pot.

Man! It totally sucked trying to do every
little damned thing from scratch!

She managed to make something that wasn’t
totally inedible and carried it to him.

“Do you think you can sit up and eat
this?”

He seemed to think it over—or maybe he was
just gathering his strength?

Finally, he struggled upright and examined
the contents of the bowl with an expression of disgust on his
face.

She felt like smacking him.

After a brief show of reluctance, shrugging,
he tipped it up and downed the contents.

“That was good,” he said. “More?”

Brandi studied him suspiciously. “Your
cooking must be worse than mine,” she muttered finally and headed
back to get another bowl full.

There was no medicine, but Brandi tried a
concoction she’d heard helped with some irritations—salt
water—which Ulrich was very unhappy about. He didn’t try to fight
her, though, and she was able to see that it did actually did seem
to reduce his soreness and a lot of the redness around his healing
wounds when she’d bathed the wounds a number of times.

And there were a
lot
of them!

Thanks, she was sure, to his constitution
not her doctoring abilities, he improved fairly quickly and began
to get up and move around before she really thought he should.

He said, though, that neither of them would
survive if he didn’t given that she knew pretty much nothing about
survival.

She informed him that
she
came from a
civilized world, damn it! Survival on
her
world meant
getting a job and paying other people to do all the things she
couldn’t do.

“That is helpful to you now?”

Brandi glared at him since his logic was
pretty damned hard to dismiss. “Smartass,” she muttered under her
breath.

“You are an impertinent slave!” Ulrich
growled, though it lacked much heat.

In point of fact, he looked almost amused,
but the comment still gave Brandi a jolt. She blinked at him. “I
forgot I was one.” She frowned and shook her head. “I don’t know
how to be a slave. I was born free—grew up free. I’m sorry if it …
makes you mad. I don’t want to piss you off, but I’m used to
feeling equal to everybody else.”

Ulrich stared at her for a long moment and
finally looked away. “I was engineered to be a slave and I have
been nothing else until only a few annums ago when I bought my
freedom.”

“Engineered?” Brandi gasped. She would never
have guessed that in a million years, despite what he’d said about
‘never born at all’. “No wonder you’re so awesome! They must have
picked the
best
genes to make you!” She chuckled. “I had to
settle for what my parents had on them. Which, unfortunately,
wasn’t anything too spectacular.”

Ulrich studied her suspiciously for a moment
and finally relaxed. “I had no parents.”

“Aww! Poor baby! That so totally sucks!” She
thought about it. “Not that me and my parents always got along, but
I thought they were pretty great most of the time—while I was a
child anyway. Later, during my teens, not so much. I felt pretty
persecuted, then, but we were starting to get along again … before
I got snatched away.” She sniffed, struggling with the abrupt urge
to cry. “I hope they aren’t very unhappy that I vanished. I don’t
like to think of them being hurt and unhappy—nothing I can do about
it, of course, but I really hate it.”

Ulrich moved closer, settling his arms
around her.

He seemed a little awkward and
uncomfortable, but she appreciated the fact that he’d wanted to
offer comfort.