Surviving Skarr

But once I get to the designated potty bush, I keep on going. I follow the side of the cliff, heading deeper into the night. I tell myself just a little farther and then I’ll sit and collect my thoughts. Every time I consider stopping, though, I hear the laughter from the group, or someone shouting something, and it makes me keep walking.

Then, the clouds clear overhead and the moons come out, and the tight, narrow canyons of rock open up. The stars unfurl overhead, bright and endless, and I stop, awed by the sheer beauty.

I don’t know which one is the North Star, or if it’s even visible from where I’m at. But looking at the stars eases some of the anxiety racing through me.

“Vivi!” Skarr’s voice. He’s followed me.

The anxiety returns.

I hurry on. The snowy path slopes and I follow along, my footsteps crunching in the snow. There’s an icy layer on top since there was no fresh snow today, and I pause when I see tracks illuminated in the moonlight. New tracks, heading toward camp.

Crouching, I study them, determined to make out what sort of creature it is. In my memories, there’s a bit of knowledge about tracks, about the angle of the feet and how they strike on the snow. I’ve tracked before, and the knowledge fills me with a giddy warmth.

These are strange, though, because one side of the tracks are crisp footprints, and the other side is a smear. Are there animals here that have only one set of feet on one side? Or is it injured and coping? I get to my feet, dusting off my pants and looking around for a likely culprit. I take a step to the side—

 —and immediately flail.

In the moonlight and shadows, I misjudge a solid-looking pile of snow, only to have it collapse under my feet. I sink into a crevasse, my hand smacking hard on the ground and the bones crunching as I try to stop my fall. I let out a gasp as white-hot pain lances up my arm and it buckles.

“Vivi!” Skarr races to my side, and he hauls me out of the crevasse.

“I’m fine. I’m fine.” I try to push off his hands as he holds onto me. “Really. It wasn’t that deep of a crevasse.”

“Are you hurt?” His eyes glow in the darkness, sca

“No,” I lie, ignoring the pain throbbing in my hand. The last thing I want is to show weakness to this guy, who makes everything a competition. I’m worried he’s going to think an injured Vivi means I can be easily “conquered.” “I said I was fine.”

He frowns in my direction and gestures at my arm. “You say you are fine, but I am reasonably certain that human fingers do not bend in that direction.”

I glance down at my hand…and want to throw up. My pinky is sticking out at a weird, broken angle about halfway down, just past the first knuckle. I must have landed on it trying to break my fall.

Before I can contemplate what I’m doing, I reach out and straighten it.

Bones crack and grind against one another. Hot pain sheets through me and I stagger, whimpering, even as the world gets dark around me. Somewhere nearby, Skarr grunts and puts a supporting arm around my waist.

“Blink it away,” he says in a solid, reassuring voice. “The pain can make you vomit, or pass out, and neither are good for a warrior. Blink it away. Focus on something else. Shall I tell you of the time I bit another gladiator’s fingers off and one got lodged in my throat? I nearly choked on the sands and died. It was quite embarrassing.”

That’s a horrifying story, made all the worse by the casual way he speaks of it. The man’s insane. “Please…please don’t tell me more stories like that.”

“Alas, those are all I have. If it makes you feel better, he punched me in the gut with his good hand and dislodged his fingers from my throat, and I went on to win the battle.”

Why…would that make me feel better?

“Here,” he says, grabbing the edge of his tunic. He rips off a long strip and holds it out to me. “Bind your wounded finger to the one next to it. It will help it heal straight.”

I take the strip from him, but when I touch my hand, pain flares through me again. I shake my head, holding the makeshift bandage back out to him. “You do it for me. I don’t think I can.”

“You can,” he reassures me. “And you will do it yourself, because you are strong and capable…and because if I do it wrong, you will blame me.”

Despite the pain, a laugh huffs out of me. He’s not wrong. I eye my trembling hand and hold the strip over it. “Distract me, then.”

“I once fought a full-blooded ssethri male,” he says immediately. “And I never want to do so again.”

“Why?” I ask even as I take deep, steadying breaths, preparing myself to wrap my fingers.

“He was a good fighter,” Skarr muses. “That was not the problem. I grabbed him by his tail, because it seemed like a smart way to use leverage, and it fell off. Did you know that ssethri can discard their tails? I did not, and I found out the hard way. So there I am, holding a useless tail while he scrambles across the sands to get to the weapons laid out for us.”

“But…you…won?” I begin to wrap my hand, whimpering through the pain. I want to stop, but I know I can’t. The pain is awful, but I also know there’s no other choice. I can’t have a bad hand in this landscape. I need to be able to use all of my limbs. I need my finger to heal properly.

Skarr makes a scolding noise in his throat, his gaze on my hand. “Do not ruin the story for yourself. Let me continue. Good, keep wrapping.”

Through a haze of pain, I wrap my pinky to my good ring finger, and all the while Skarr continues with some story about fighting a gladiator with a snout and razor-sharp teeth and a tough hide. How they were neck and neck, trading blows and breaking weapons.

When I’ve completely wrapped my fingers, I tuck the end in and then sag, all of the adrenaline in my body vanishing in a heartbeat. Skarr catches me, letting me lean against him. “Very good. And do you know what my opponent did next? After he broke his staff upon my arm?”

“No, what?”

“He spat poison in my face. Shocked the kef out of me. Not only does my tail not fall off, but I do not have poison venom. I feel very cheated.”

I laugh despite myself. Not at the poison spit, but at Skarr’s indignant tone.

His hand cups the back of my neck, his fingers cold. “And you have done very well, my Vivi. I knew you were strong.”

He says the words like a caress, and I should probably shake his hand off so he doesn’t get any ideas, but I’m tired and in pain and for some reason, I actually appreciate the reassurance. A broken finger won’t stop me. I can handle everything. I can.

So I push him away, gently. “Why did you follow me, Skarr?”

He tilts his head, and it’s clear he’s puzzled at my question. I can’t help but notice how un-lizard-like his features are compared to the opponent of the story he was telling me. He has no snout full of jagged teeth, for starters. His features are strong and broad like the other aliens, but still vaguely human. The most alien thing about his face is perhaps the color, or the line of ridged scales that goes across his brow and down his nose. Out of the men dropped here—well, other than Jason—he’s truly the most human-looking, especially with his soft, wavy hair.

“Why did I follow you? Because you are my mate, of course. I was worried I had offended you in some way.” Skarr seems frustrated at the thought. “I do not know what I did wrong.”

My hand throbs dully, and I remind myself that he coached me through wrapping it. That he’s here, supporting me instead of crowing about how amazing he is over by the fire. I need to be understanding. “I don’t like it when you keep calling attention to me,” I tell him. “It makes me upset.”

He tilts his head, and for a moment, he looks very reptilian. “Why?”

“Because I’m not any of those things you say!”

He blinks. “Yes, you are.”