Page 53 of Tharn's Hunt
I move my claw to her cheeks, her neck, the exposed skin of her arms where Ain has created an angry red. Each time my claw runs dry, I pour more water, ignoring the voice of my ancestors screaming in my head at the sacrilege. I am letting life itself drip onto the dust, all for the soft sounds she makes.
And Jah-kee allows this tending without protest, a sign of just how deeply the heat has taken her.
As I press my damp palm to the fast, frantic pulse at the base of her throat, it happens. A strange pulse of thought reaches me. It is not my own.
It is a warmth. A feeling of safety. And something else, a thought so clear it is like a whisper in my own mind:
—gentle… for someone so dangerous?—
The fragment slips in, gone before I can grasp it. My claw stills on her skin.
Did she...?
Is the mindspace opening between us? I stare at her face, but her eyes are still closed, her expression peaceful. She is unaware. The thought was hers, but she does not know she sent it.
I help her to her feet, focus on her face. Hoping for more. As we walk, slower now, more fragments come, brief flashes of her thoughts breaking through.
—wonder what Justine will think of him?—
—the way his muscles shift when he walks?—
That last thought is not just an observation. It carries a warmth that makes my member stir. She finds my form… pleasing? The thought is a strange, hot stone in my chest. I find myself suddenly aware of my own body.
The water from the ravine gives her strength. For a time. We walk for the rest of the sol, her steps more certain, her mind quieter. We camp in the shelter of tall rock formations. Jah-kee seems to be regaining some strength. I allow myself to believe the worst is over.
But the dust is relentless. And Ain is unforgiving.
Another sol of walking under the burning sky begins to strip away the strength she had regained. The water is once again a few precious, sloshing drops at the bottom of my waterskin.
I slow my pace, allowing Jah-kee to match it without strain.
"I'm fine," she vocalizes when she catches me watching her. "Just a little hot."
The barely there impression of her thoughts in the mindspace tells me what she means. But she is not fine. Her steps grow increasingly unsteady. Twice already this sol she has stumbled on perfectly flat ground. Her skin has taken on a strange flush, different from the reddening caused by Ain's light.And there is something else. A subtle shift in her scent that triggers an ancient warning in my hunter's instincts.
Something is wrong.
That dark, as she rests, I watch the too-rapid rise and fall of her chest. Her face appears flushed even in the darkness, and occasionally she mutters words I cannot understand, her head turning fitfully from side to side.
I press a careful hand to her brow, alarmed by the heat radiating from her skin. Not the normal warmth of her alien body, but something hotter, dangerous.
That fire beneath her skin is returning.
Is it the shadowmaw's poison still? A new sickness? Something in the water or meat I have been feeding her?
I do not know. And not knowing fills me with a fear I have never experienced before—not in the face of shadowmaws or dust storms or rival clans.
This fear has no target to fight, no strategy to overcome it. There is only Jah-kee's small body, burning with an invisible fire I cannot extinguish.
My dra-kir pulses frantically, reaching for hers across whatever strange connection binds us. I feel... something. A flickering response, weaker than before. Like a light dimming.
I do not rest that dark.
Chapter 16
I DO NOT WANT TO GIVE HER BACK
THARN
