Page 71 of Challenged

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. Westopped 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.”

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