Wounds - Book 2 (3 page)

“Oh, shut up.” Arin’s face twisted. “Lie to yourself, but don’t expect me to bless you for it. You think this is a war? Do you know what they say about war?”

“What’s that?”

“The first casualty in war is the truth.” Arin gave Kahayn a hard stare. “That’s what they say.”

She was quiet for a moment. Fidgeted with a stylus. “When the time comes…”

“I’ll be there.” He sounded resigned. “I always have been.”

“No, Arin. I don’t want you to assist.”

Arin stared. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“Yeah, I just don’t believe it. Why not?”

“I don’t want you involved. Whatever happens, I’m responsible. Someone has to be responsible. That’s me. You understand?”

“But I’m
already
involved!”

“And I’ve appreciated everything you’ve done.” She was still playing with the stylus, then tossed it aside with a sigh. “But this far, and no further, Arin. You’re out of the loop as of now.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“No, I don’t.” She read his sudden pain, and waited for an explosion of anger. Maybe she wanted it. But it never came.

Instead, Arin blew out a breathy laugh that had no humor in it. “Well, this is a hell of a thing.” He paused, almost seemed to think better of what he was going to say and then changed his mind. “I’ve known you a very long time. I’ve been your friend. I used to think I was a little in love with you, even when Janel—”

“Arin—”

“No, let me finish. Janel was my friend, Idit, before he ever was your lover. But I…I respected both of you, and when he died, I stayed away.”

“No, you didn’t. You were always there for me, Arin.”

“But only as a friend, and I knew that. I still hoped that maybe, someday…Anyway, now I wonder what that’s like.”

“Love?”

“Hope,” he said. “Because here’s the hell of it: I’m your friend, Idit. I always have been. You need me more than you think, because you’ve the devil on one shoulder, and an angel on the other, and sometimes you need reminding of which is which. Janel’s gone, Idit. But I’m here, and I always will be, even when this is over. Because if you go through with this, you’ll hate yourself, and you’ll need me to remind you that, once, you were on the side of the angels.”

He turned away. The door snicked shut.

Kahayn sagged back in her chair and exhaled a long sigh, suddenly very weary. “I know, Arin. That’s just the problem.”

Chapter
3

A
lmost two months. She’d been here two months. And still counting.

Lense was filthy, and her clothes—blood-stiffened khaki pants, a khaki tee ringed with a necklace of sweat edged with dried salt—could probably stand on their own. Her mouth was gummy and dry, like she’d been marooned in Vulcan’s Forge for a month. But at least she’d acclimated to the low oxygen. No headaches or nausea in two weeks. Her sleep was still off, though. Dreams of fire, and Julian, always there, forever just out of reach.

She slumped on a rock slab outside a honeycomb of mountain caves about three days’ travel from that inland sea. That hazy orange ball of a sun was setting now, throwing rust-red bolts across a sky filmed with a yellow-brown smear. But better here than back in her ad-hoc recovery ward, a gray dank cavern reeking of old blood, stale urine, and fresh pus.

I just want to go home.
She slipped her hand into her right trouser pocket and fingered her combadge, tracing the familiar contours.
Please, I just want to go home.

She couldn’t get that near disaster this morning out of her mind. All right, maybe that was melodrama. Worst-case scenario, she would have revised the amputation up, kept cutting until she had enough artery to tie off. But she wasn’t doing anyone any good, hacking and tearing and cutting them up bit by bit. Who was she to think that she could?

She stared south. The terrain reminded her of Vulcan’s Forge, too, only flatter. Long stretches of pancake-flat, sun-blasted red desert shimmering with heat waves. But where the valley opened up, there were boulders edged with stunted trees and irregular swaths of scrub. The horizon wavered with heat, and the air wobbled like something alive. This high up, she could just make up the edge of the sea, black as the blood crescents beneath her nails.

Three, four days’ walk to that compound, probably. Even if she went there—if she didn’t cook on the way—what then? Would things be any different, better there? Probably not.

Besides, there was Saad. Good-looking. Okay, more than that; very…well, drop-dead gorgeous. Very nice eyes. Beautiful hair, all that brown spilling over his shoulders. Odd thing, though. No scars, at least none that were visible. Maybe, beneath his clothes, probably had a nice back…

Whoa, kiddo. You start thinking about some guy, you know what you’re really saying? That you’re stuck. That they’ve stopped looking for you…

“Elizabeth?”

“Saad.” She swallowed, quickly knuckled away her tears, blinked the others back. “Just taking a break, but I’ve got to get back. My clothes, I’m a mess, I need—”

“You need rest.” Saad slid next to her. He’d changed out of his bloody tunic, and he smelled clean and, faintly, of musk. Beads of condensation dewed a tall gray mug he held in one hand. “I came to apologize.”

“For what?”

“Getting angry. I know you’re doing the best you can.”

“Hunh.” She gave a wan smile. “Best isn’t good enough. I thought I could pull this off. Back in my…country, there are stories about wars from very long ago. People getting all blasted to hell, and doctors operating with cleavers. I used to think that was heroic. Frontier medicine, you know?” That reminded her of Julian—how cruel she’d been and how much she wished she could take back everything she’d said—and she had to push past a sudden lump in her throat. “Winning against all odds, that kind of stuff.”

“And now?”

“Now, I think it’s vanity. Arrogance. Oh, a doctor has to be pretty narcissistic to begin with. Otherwise, you’d never pick up a, uh,” she’d been about to say
protoplaser,
“scalpel. A doctor’s got to believe in her hands and her head. On quick thinking and no room for doubt or error.”

“And what about this?” Saad flattened his palm over his sternum. “Is there no room for heart?”

“Not much. Compassion, sure. But the heart has doubts. The heart gets in the way.”

“Of everything?” He said it mildly enough but she was suddenly very conscious of how close he was, his scent. The way he was looking at her now, with a degree of intimacy she didn’t think she was imagining. She wasn’t entirely sure she disliked it.

“Most things.” She changed the subject. “Anyway, I’d do better with the proper equipment, more supplies.” Thinking:
I’d do better with tools I recognize in a world you can’t imagine
.

“Such as those in this…country to the north?”

“Yes,” she said. She wasn’t prepared for what she thought next: how much she wished he could have seen her in
her
world.
A world that’s gone.
“But I wouldn’t leave now anyway. You don’t just walk away from responsibility.”

“So you’ve
never
walked away, Elizabeth?”

“Never,” she lied, thinking that, of course, she couldn’t tell Saad the truth:
Well, see, there was this kid, only he was really old and he harbored this incredibly deadly virus and…
The point was she
had
walked away; knew there was no choice. No use telling herself that Dobrah would outlive her by centuries; that time would heal him in ways she couldn’t. “I wouldn’t mind leaving
here,
though.”

“Is
here
so very bad?”

“You know it is.” Again, she felt this tug of danger and steered the conversation somewhere safer. “Why is it that the Kornaks don’t just wipe you out?”

Saad blinked as if perplexed by her sudden jump. “Beyond the obvious? That there are stretches of desert and rough terrain and water so mucked with pollution you could practically walk over it? That we’d simply fade into the mountains and our caves?” He shrugged. “It’s a good question. Actually, I think the answer’s deeply psychological. Every power needs an enemy, even if it’s just a vague theory that there’s someone out there who wants to do away with your way of life.”

“You do want the Kornaks gone, though.”

“No, I want them
different.
I want them to see how perverse their reality is.”

“Yeah?” Her gaze skipped to the blasted desert, then to Saad. “That looks pretty bad out there. Just how much worse do you want their lives to be?”

“I didn’t say worse. I said different. The Kornaks need us as a distraction from their tyranny. So, they make us the enemy.”

“Everyone has enemies.”

“But not everyone
needs
them. The Kornaks see everything as a war. They fight us. They fight the planet with their prosthetics and grafts. But the planet’s not an enemy. It’s our home, very broken, but still our responsibility.”

“You’d turn your back on all technology?”

“Some
technology,” he said. A pause that was a beat too long, and long enough for Lense to wonder what “technology” Saad meant. “Some.”

“That seems fairly simplistic, Saad. What if the planet throws a terrible plague your way? You don’t want medicine?”

Saad shrugged. “Maybe that’s the planet’s way of thinning the herd. There must’ve been a point in this planet’s past when everything was in balance.”

“So why not work with the Kornaks, instead of against them? My experience, you get more done from the inside.”

“We tried that.” That too-long pause again. He looked away.

She let the silence spin out. Then: “What about negotiation? Anything’s got to be better than living like this.”

“What, you mean without prosthetics? In exchange for what? Ration credits for food, water, housing, clothes? Credits for loyalty, so you move up on the transplant list, or get better drugs to fight the cancers? No, thank you. I’m a flesh and blood man, Elizabeth, and I will live and die as one.”

There was really nothing to say to that. So she didn’t. The day gradually slipped away. The air cooled. A brassy glow to the clouds to the south: the Kornak city or complex or whatever it was. The rest of the sky shaded from a yellowish-brown to a kind of dark beige smudging to a solid brown along the eastern horizon. Odd, but she hadn’t stopped to look at the stars since coming here. Were there any to see? She didn’t know.

And she was conscious of Saad by her side, and that didn’t bother her. She didn’t want to speak or do anything to shatter the moment: this small, fragile bubble of peace. So she let her mind drift; she thought of nothing at all. That was all right.

In the end, Saad spoke first. “Rain coming.”

She roused herself as if from a trance. “How do you know?”

“I smell it.”

“I don’t smell anything.”

“You have to be here awhile to know. And the clouds have been heavier these last few days. So, maybe, a week. Two at the most.” He paused. “I’ll be gone in a day or two.”

“All right,” she said for want of anything else to say. “Where are you going?”

“I am following up on some…intelligence.”

Whatever
that
meant. “Okay.”

“Elizabeth…”

“Yes?”

“If things were easier for you, do you think you’d stop hating this place so much?”

“Easier how?”

“Supplies. Equipment.”

“Well, yeah, that would make my job easier. But I don’t know about the rest.”

“Staying here, you mean.” He waited a beat. “With us.”

Or do you mean, with you?
She was surprised that this pleased her, very much. “I already said I don’t walk away. But are you giving me a choice?” Saad’s face was shadow, and the gathering twilight threw blades of darkness over his hard, lean features. “Am I free to go?”

“If you want. I won’t stop you.”

She was so stunned, she almost blurted it out:
And go where, exactly?
Instead, she said, “Do you want me to leave?”

“No. I can’t promise I can make things better. I’d like to try. But I need time.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I need time,” he said again.

Her gaze flicked to the horizon behind his shoulder. She couldn’t see any stars, but maybe it wasn’t dark enough yet. “Okay. Then we’ve got a deal.”

“Good,” he said. Then she felt his hands close over hers. She started. “Relax,” he said. “I brought something for you.”

Her fingers closed around something rough and very cool. Moist. The mug. “Thank you,” she said, mystified. Well, she was thirsty. But this water seemed…different somehow. It smelled clean. So different from what they called water here: triple filtered but still gray as ash and with a chemical smell.

He must have intuited her bewilderment because he said, “When people bind themselves in a relationship…”

“Relationship?”

“Or a partnership, a friendship, whatever you want to call it. It doesn’t have to be romantic.”

“Of course not,” she said, feeling like a complete jackass. Then, wondering why she felt so let down.
You idiot, this is one of those alien culture things.
“So you bind yourselves…?”

“With a gift of something valuable.”

“Water.”

“A very precious commodity here; this is from someplace deep in the mountains. If you want, I’ll take you there. Bathing is quite refreshing.”

“Ah,” she said. “Well, thank you. But what are we promising?”

“Not you. Me. A month ago, I gave you back your life. You’ve kept your promise. You work hard. I admire that.”

“Could be ego,” she drawled. “Could be I’m stupid.”

“Well, then I applaud your blind egotism.” The glint of a smile. “As you said, doctors are narcissistic. But it seems only fair that I try to level things a bit.”

“But what—?”

“Give me time.” He cupped her hands with his, a touch that made her pulse stutter. “Now we seal the bargain.”

“Okay.” There was a startling, wild heat in her thighs, her skin. She was a little out of breath, too, and not from bad air.

He drank first. Then it was her turn. She inhaled that deep fragrance of still green forests and misted ponds, and her heart hurt with longing. She closed her eyes; she drank. The water was very cold and made her teeth ache and tasted very good. She drank it all down. Then she lowered the mug. His hands still cupped hers. “It’s all gone,” she said.

“No,” he said, and then she felt his hand on her cheek, and then his fingers skim her chin, linger over the bounding pulse in her neck. “No, it isn’t,” he said, and then his mouth closed over hers.

Lense felt some knot deep inside loosen and come undone. It was a kind of letting go. Of restraint and inhibition, yes, but also of her past: her life in Starfleet and on the
da Vinci.
Commander Selden. Julian Bashir. Dobrah. And why not? They were gone. She couldn’t change the past, and she had to stop wishing for a better one. So she let it all go. She slipped her arms about Saad’s waist and then cupped his shoulders and just…let go.

And if there were stars in that sky, Lense didn’t see any that night. But she didn’t care.