Part 16 (1/2)

Tsia eyed her for a moment. The tiny lines around her eyes deepened with her uneasiness. ”The webs are

on my old ID line,” she added. ”The one I had before I joined the meres. They're not on my current traces.”

”I understand,” Nitpicker said more sharply.

”And?”

”That's all.”

Tsia stared at her. ”No questions?”

”No.”

A spark of anger grew in Tsia's gut. ”That's it?”

”Yes.”

”Just 'Yes'? No discussion? No questions at all?” No trust in what I say? she wanted to snap.

Nitpicker turned finally and met her eyes with a cold look of warning, then turned and walked back along the trail.

Tsia took a half step after her, then halted. Her hand went halfway to her throat. She could almost feel Nitpicker's fingers against the flesh of her neck. Could almost feel the fear in the woman beating against her own ribs. Her jaw set abruptly. The pale scars along her cheek went whiter as she held her tension with fury.

As Nitpicker pa.s.sed Kurvan, the other mere said something, and the mere leader nodded with a faint smile. Kurvan glanced up and met Tsia's eyes, and she could taste the satisfaction that flushed through her biogate. He hated her, she thought. Had hated her since Tucker's death. He wanted her to fail. She could taste it like dung in her mouth. Kurvan looked once more at her face, then turned away to the cave. Tsia, left like a stick in the rain, merely stood and stared, her eyes unfocused, and her biogate taut as her jaw.

She stared at Ruka where he crept down to meet her. Never in the ten years she'd worked with Nitpiker had the pilot provoked her so deliberately. Had that been an act? A test? And if so, who had she been testing?

An old ghost cropped up in a node that was supposedly down. A pilot choked out one of her meres. A biochip s.h.i.+pment was not expected for weeks, but a group of meres was so jittery that their tension cut through Tsia's biogate like a laze. She pressed her hands against her temples and climbed off the trail till she could crouch in the shelter of a fissure, far above the cave. She could still hear the meres, their voices floating up through the crack in the stone, but Ruka was too close to her mind, and she could not focus her thoughts.

The cub rubbed his head on her fingers. Wet hairs stuck to her skin, and she stared at them as if they were tiny lines of the node. Her stomach growled. Or his. Absently, she pulled a slimchim from her pouch and handed it to him. ”You're like a fluke on the heart of its host,” she told him sourly. He gulped the slimchim quickly, and she let him take another. ”You create a hole, through which you suck my thoughts.” She watched him chew on the chim and said slowly, ”Yet without you, I think I would bleed to death.”

She stared at the rock crack from which the other meres' voices rose. Resolve seemed to settle in her guts. Deliberately, she got up and carefully, silently, followed the fissure down until their voices were clear and sharp.

”... so why shouldn't she tell us?” Kurvan was demanding. ”A guide linked with marine life does us no good out here. Look at what almost happened to Nitpicker. We might as well be trying to follow a broken scanner as her.”

Striker's voice returned. ”How do you know she's linked with a fish? Why not a reaver or hawk or pipeplant?”

”She called the eels to help 'Picker. A guide linked with a tree or digger couldn't do that.”

”Give her a break, Kurvan,” Striker said sharply. ”It's tough enough to get a guide into the mere guild without making her miserable while she's on contract. Beside, she got 'Picker out of the mud. She's earning her credit as much as any of us.”

”I still want to know what her gate is.”

”Why?”

”Did you see her expression when Doetzier caught up to her an hour ago? She didn't exactly help him up that rock. How can we expect her even to do her job when she's that uncontrolled? She's just a guide, and not a good one at that.”

Nitpicker's voice cut in quietly. ”She's a genetic ecologist, Kurvan. A skilled terrain artist. If being a guide makes her a little wild too, that's only to be expected. What guide, so changed by viruses, is ever completely human? Look them up in the stock charts. They're M-three, not M-one. Mutants, twice-removed from our original genetics.”

”And just as unpredictable as any alien. For our own safety, we need-”

”To know no more than we do.” Nitpicker cut him off in a calm voice. ”Hand me that seam-sealer, would you, Wren? I've got another hole to patch.”

Thoughtfully, Tsia sat back. She stared at the fissure, as if more words would float out, but only the wind made sounds.

The cub's ears twitched as he regarded Tsia with the patience of a hunter. Against her fingers, his slick, waterproof hair felt almost greasy, not sticky, as the sponge mucus had felt. She sniffed her fingers. She could still smell the turpen-tinic scent of the sponges on her skin. She rubbed her slim, strong fingers together and felt again those other steel hands at her throat. Unconsciously, she touched the swollen flesh. ”Did you feel it?” she asked slowly. ”Did your throat choke with her fingers?”

Ruka growled, and Tsia laughed, a short, bitter sound. ”I'm so desperate for someone to talk with, I turn to you-an animal, for Daya's sake-as if you were my family-”

Abruptly, she stood and began to stalk back to the meres. ”d.a.m.ned idiot,” she cursed herself. ”Talking with an animal. Your brain can't take in my words,” she snarled. ”You think in catspeak which I barely understand; and I project emotions which you don't even have.” She turned and stared at him as he paced her in the brush. ”What do you really sense? The hunger in your stomach? The smell of the hare in the gra.s.s? Could you sense a biochip? Or tell a freepick from a zek?” She stared at him, letting the sense of his hunger gnaw at her guts. Then she dug out the last of her slimchims and, with a sharp motion, dropped them in the mud. Deftly, he snagged them in his teeth, gulping them as quickly as a wolf takes a piece of meat.

Tsia glanced at the hill where an older cougar watched her move, and wiped her face of expression. Then she made her way back to the trail, where Doetzier could spot her from the cave.

Curtly, she waved for him and others to rejoin her. Doetzier motioned for her to wait for Wren before she took the lead. A moment later, Wren came abreast of her and said quietly, ”Bowdie ran some scans on the trail. He found nothing, but we all had the sense we were being watched. Is it you?”

”No.” She half snarled the word, and his hand flashed to her arm before she could wrench away. His thick fingers clenched her jacket. ”Just the cougar,” she forced the words out. ”It's not hunting. Only curious. The trail is clear.”

”Like your mind?”

She shrugged away. ”My mind is clear,” she said sharply. Her lips twisted in a bitter smile. ”It's only my heart that's clouded.”

”The link is getting stronger,” he stated, more than questioned.

She nodded.

”Dammit, Feather,” he said harshly, his voice almost a whisper. ”You have to get rid of him. Push him away. Think of him as alien, as an Ixia, if you must. Or are you so desperate for your sister that you subst.i.tute the cub?”

She snapped back. ”I see little difference between them, Wren. Ruka is here, now, climbing into my brain, and I can't seem to stop him. Shjams was always there, and I can't cut her out.”

”So tell yourself that she's no longer part of your life. If you must, tell yourself that's she's dead.”

She stared down the trail. ”But I know she's alive. And knowing that-and not being able to see her or talk to her- not being able to connect... It's like having a sister with a terminal illness. One which has taken her to the lip of the grave-but refuses to push her in. As long as she still lives, I can never finish grieving, and I can never quite give up. It's like a death that has no resolution. A death that has no proper end.”

”You said once that she was searching for herself. Can't you just give her the distance she wants and get on with your life?”

”If that was what she was doing,” Tsia returned shortly, ”then, yes. But we know it's not. She's lost, Wren. She's up there in s.p.a.ce running-sprinting-from her demons, and all she's done is run right into their hands.”

Wren gave her a speculative look. ”You of all people should be able to understand that.”

The catspeak drummed in her head, and Tsia's lips thinned. ”You have to face your demons, Wren. You have to destroy them before they annihilate your self. Something happened to Shjams in the past. Something that caught her in a cycle of fear as securely as... as I was caught before. But Shjams never moved out of that cycle. She's still running. Like a reaver who can't find its way out of its own dike, she is digging her own grave.”

”And you have found your way out of the grave? Away from your nightmare-demons?”

She looked at her wrists. They were tanned and weathered like the rest of her skin, but she always saw them white, marked with the same iron-chafed circles that Wren bore on his. Her face was so still that only those dark blue orbs seemed alive in the toughness of her scarred and weathered skin. She smiled suddenly, and the expression did not seem to touch the muscles of her face.

His sharp eyes noted flecks of b.e.s.t.i.a.lity that glinted from her eyes. He dropped her arm and motioned to the trail. She stared at him, then led the others on.