Earthrise (Her Instruments Book 1) (35 page)

At the top of the cliff they stopped to rub feeling back into aching muscles before hauling up the boxes. It wasn’t until all three boxes had safely arrived that Reese turned toward their goal, set a-fire by the light of their lanterns. The top of the rise was encrusted with long columnar spikes, faceted so sharply they seemed to cut wounds that bled bright red onto their planes. Eye-watering blues and shocking purples flickered in the corners of the crystals, broken beams of light fractured against their edges... hundreds of them, some as high as her own waist.

“Blood and Freedom,” Reese whispered.

“Nice,” Bryer agreed, an observation that caused both Reese and Sascha to start.

“Seems a pity to have to hack at them,” Sascha said.

“Yeah, well, that’s why we’re here,” Reese said. “Let’s get to it.”

Bryer opened one of the boxes, withdrawing the three pairs of tongs. He took one and applied himself to the nearest specimen with his customary detachment.

Reese shrugged, took up the second pair and went to work. It took her several tries to figure out how to use them to apply enough pressure on the narrow bases of the crystals to separate them from the ground, and her muscles ached by the time she’d cut a half dozen.

“We should have brought lunch,” Sascha muttered.

“Fill the boxes and you can eat,” Reese said, bringing her armload to the first and setting them carefully inside. The instructions had included a stacking diagram and a scale to weigh each specimen. There was nothing her employer hadn’t thought of... excepting the pirates.

The day—night?—wore on and her arms and hands throbbed from her labors, but the boxes filled until at last Bryer closed the last one. Reese tapped her ship telegem.

“All right. We’re ready.”

“On our way,” Kis’eh’t said to the intercom and set aside her cards. “She’s just in time to save me. You’re too good at this game.”

“It’s luck,” Hirianthial said.

The Glaseah snorted and gathered the brightly colored cards before sliding them into the box. “You never say that about playing Pantheon.”

He laughed and stood. “Right. Iley might show up and laugh at you.”

“Better the Tam-illee deities than the Harat-Shariin,” Kis’eh’t said, sealing her parka. “I notice there’s no Eldritch god or goddess in the deck.”

“Of course not,” Hirianthial said, grinning at her. “That would be telling.”

She laughed. “Let’s go take care of Reese’s boxes.”

They suited up and trotted to the base of the cliff and squinted up into the dark. Kis’eh’t shone her lantern up the wall and spotted the bottom of the first box. “I’ve got the rope. You steady the box when it gets in reach. Your reach, not mine.”

He chuckled.

Inch by inch the box lowered into view until finally he could stretch up and tickle the corner with a gloved finger. A few moments later and he could flatten his palm against the bottom, so he did.

The hair along his neck rose. He shivered.

“Cold?” Kis’eh’t asked.

“No,” Hirianthial said. “Just a reaction.” He steadied the box as Kis’eh’t position the sled under it, then guided it onto the bed. “I’ll just take this to the lock.”

“All right.”

He pushed the box back to the
Earthrise
, leaving it just outside the airlock, before going back for the second. By the time the third hove into view and settled onto the sled, he had dismissed the chill.

“I’ll wait for Reese to get down,” Kis’eh’t said. “I know you want to get back to where it’s warm.”

“I wouldn’t mind it,” Hirianthial said with a smile.

All three boxes fit in the airlock, though there was little room to spare. Hirianthial sealed the external door and watched what little atmosphere existed on Selebra flush out and the
Earthrise’s
warm air fill it. The sigh of relief escaped him before he could stop it, and it was nice to be able to hear it properly with the mask off.

He dragged all three boxes into the bay before stripping off his gloves, then crouched in front of the first to check the seal.

The moment his fingers lit on the box’s edge the shivering returned. He observed the symptoms in himself with clinical interest—no fever, no dizziness, no doubled vision... nausea, though. And the shaking wouldn’t stop.

He lifted his hand. The shivering stopped. He rested it on the top of the box again. The nausea re-doubled. He leaned on the dolly as a wave of sweat broke through his skin. Was it covered with some toxin? Surely not, but his medical equipment wasn’t distant. He could fetch it. Hirianthial turned and took a step, and the world spun. Looking back, the boxes doubled in his vision, and then rose into the air—no, that was himself, sliding to the ground.

He fumbled for something to help him stand, and his hand caught on the box seals. The nausea nearly overpowered him. What could possibly be the problem? Something inside the boxes? He had to look. He had to know. The seal clicked open beneath his fingers and he looked inside.

Corpses. The boxes were full of corpses—no, dying bodies. Their screams crowded out the world in his ears and smeared his vision with a kaleidoscope of ragged black and searing red.

“Where are the boxes?” Reese asked as Bryer spiraled to the ground beside them.

“Already inside,” Kis’eh’t said. “Hirianthial took care of them.”

“Good. Inside sounds good, too.” Reese switched to the telegem. “Irine? We’re on our way back in.”

“Yay! I’ll have hot chocolate for everyone when you get back.”

They chatted companionably on the way to the airlock. The boxes were inside the bay as promised. Reese was still peeling out of her suit when Kis’eh’t stopped alongside one of them.

“Aksivaht’h! Reese,
help
!”

“Help what?” Reese said as Sascha darted past her to the Glaseah’s side. She joined them and stared at the body of the Eldritch, having a flashback to that moment she’d imagined him, graceless and vulnerable at the feet of a slaver. Of course, in reality he couldn’t even sprawl without grace. She managed to get angry with him for that.

“What the—?”

“One of the boxes is open. Maybe he touched one. Are they poisonous?”

“Of course not!” Reese said testily. “If they had been, my tome of instructions on completing this job would have mentioned something about that.”

“He’s out cold,” Sascha said. “I mean, really cold.”

Bryer scooped up the unconscious Eldritch, pausing as Sascha lifted the man’s hair and tucked it into Bryer’s arms so the Phoenix wouldn’t trip on it. He had just finished when Irine appeared in the door with a tray of steaming mugs. Her mouth gaped open at the sight.

“Angels! What happened? Will he be okay?”

“Of course he’ll be okay,” Reese said. “Since obviously his sole reason for being in my life is to be a victim we have to constantly rescue.”

Irine set the tray down and hovered, blocking Bryer from carrying the Eldritch any further into the
Earthrise
. As she watched the Harat-Shar coo, Reese’s initial surge of anger faded. She
looked
, as Bryer had insisted. The Phoenix seemed comfortable with the Eldritch’s weight but Hirianthial was far too tall to be easily held that way. His legs and arms draped over Bryer’s feathered arms, and strands of his hair had fallen over his slack face and glided over Bryer’s wings. Irine was shifting from foot to foot, her hands a few inches away from Hirianthial’s body, as if she was desperate to touch him and afraid to. Did one touch an unconscious Eldritch? Was it okay because they weren’t awake to notice? Or worse because their minds weren’t on guard against you?

The tableau was haunting because of its very wrongness. People didn’t carry Eldritch in their arms. Forcing normal people to fight between wanting to stroke them and not wanting to touch them was just as bad.

“Irine,” Reese called. The Harat-Shar looked at her guiltily. “You and Bryer get him to the clinic, okay? Bundle him up in something.”

The Harat-Shar nodded and pulled Bryer after her.

She, Kis’eh’t and Sascha worked in grim silence. When every last crystal had been checked for damage and the final box secured to the cargo axle, Reese straightened and pressed her hands against her back.

“Should we lift off now?” Sascha asked.

“Check on Hirianthial first,” she said. “I need you to be able to concentrate in case those pirates come after us and I’m sure you want to know what’s wrong with him.”

Kis’eh’t was already through the door. Sascha paused at it. “What about you, boss?”

“I need to call to find out where we’re going,” Reese said. “Go on.”

Sascha nodded and left her alone in the bay. Finally. Reese dropped onto the floor and pressed the base of her palms against her closed eyes. Her stomach no longer felt like it was being etched with acid when she was under stress, but it could still tie into uncomfortable knots. It wasn’t just the pirates. It was having someone be sick when they were so far from known space and its hospitals.

Reese took a long breath through her nose and let it escape slowly through her lips. Then she picked up the tray of mugs Irine had forgotten and stopped by the galley to drop them off before heading for the nearest comm unit, in her quarters. After entering the code from her instructions and waiting, a thin, almost cadaverous man appeared on her screen.

“I have the delivery,” Reese said.

“I am sending you the drop-off coordinates in a coded packet. Use the encryption key attached to the contract to unlock it,” the man said so brusquely she knew he was about to cut off contact.

Before he could, she said, “There are pirates in this system. Are they after this stuff?”

“Don’t bother us with your problems,” he said. “Just make the delivery.” The screen blanked.

Reese stared at it, eyes unfocused, until the machine pinged and an encoded packet popped up in the corner.

“Reese?”

She leaned to the intercom. “Yes?”

Kis’eh’t sounded fretful. “You’d better come down here.”

Reese sighed. “All right.”

As she stood, she caught movement in her peripheral vision: her hammock shifting where she’d left Allacazam to sleep. She detoured there and pulled him into her arms.

A muzzy veil of lavender drifted past her eyes.

“Not quite awake, are you?” she said. “You will by the time we get to where I’m going.”

A bruised peach aroma: not quite a question, but close. “You’ll see.”

She headed for the makeshift clinic-lab and found it crowded with everyone else. The bunk had been folded out of sight and Hirianthial swaddled with blankets and then tucked into a nest of comforters on the ground; he was covered in so many of them she couldn’t see his face. When Reese stopped at the door, Irine said, “He was too long for the bunk.”

Kis’eh’t was the closest, tucked into a tight loaf-shape with her hands pressed onto her ankles. “I ran the diagnostic from the first aid kit over him, but it doesn’t come up with anything. He’s barely breathing.”

“And I loosened his collar, but it hasn’t seemed to help,” Irine added, wringing her hands.

Reese joined them at the Eldritch’s side and set Allacazam down on the ground before leaning over and folding an edge of fabric down. Her breath hissed through her teeth.

“Is that—he’s crying,” Irine said, eyes wide.

“While unconscious,” Sascha said from the stool, sounding uneasy.

“He looks awful,” Kis’eh’t said.

Allacazam rolled past Reese and attempted to scale the ziggurat of blankets. When she noticed him trying, she picked him up and set him on top near Hirianthial’s chest. The Flitzbe rolled over it and nestled against Hirianthial’s ribcage, tucked against the armpit like a second heart. The Flitzbe’s colors flared through orange and yellow to a dull, ugly maroon.

“What does that mean?” Irine whispered.

“I don’t know.”

“He’s still not breathing well,” Kis’eh’t said, “And he’s too cold. What do we do, Reese?”

“How do I know?” Reese replied, her irritation erupting out of nowhere. “I’m not the doctor... he’s the doctor! The doctor’s not supposed to be the unconscious one!”

They stared at her with wide eyes and she sighed. “Sorry.”

She reached to the Flitzbe instead, rested her hands on the soft fur of neural fibers. She swallowed and composed herself.
Allacazam
?

The faintest sense of reassurance.

What’s wrong?

Her eyes opened and settled on Hirianthial, saw a gaping wound the size of her joined hands over his breastbone pulsing the same dull maroon as Allacazam’s fur. She snatched her hand back.

“Reese?” Sascha said from behind her.

“I... I don’t know. Kis’eh’t, you and Irine can watch over him while the rest of us get out of this system.”

“This isn’t the time to be thinking about business!” Irine said.

“I’m not thinking about business,” Reese said, balling her fists. “I’m thinking about the fact that there are pirates crawling around this system and we’re a weaponless freighter. I’m also thinking that the faster we get out from under their guns, the faster we’ll get to the Core and a real hospital and a real doctor.”