Heat

He stole a glance at her and found her frowning, not with irritation, but concern. With his hands still at his temple and his hair hiding his movements, Tagen took discrete stock of himself. He could see his chest, bared to the waist, pale and shimmering with a thin veil of sweat. So it wasn’t his imagination, after all. The last of the suppressants had left his system already.

Well, hell.

Daria came a small step towards him, half-raised one hand, and paused there. “Are you okay?”

Tagen grunted.

“Do you want a soda? Or some more ice water?” She sounded frightened.

Tagen turned his head just enough to roll one eye at her. She looked frightened, too. He sighed, returned to his previous position. “Anything,” he said. “Thank you.”

She popped out half a dozen ice cubes and poured cold water over them. “What’s the matter?” she asked timidly, as she brought it to the table.

Tagen sighed again as he closed his hand around the tumbler. For the first time, he considered the merits in a good, old-fashioned lie. He supposed he didn’t really know the human well enough to say for sure how she would react to a Jotan biology lesson, even if he had the means of lecturing her, but he suspected it wouldn’t be with overwhelming delight and acceptance, and he was too damned tired to handle her below-surface hostility. He settled for a half-truth.

“It is the heat,” he said finally. “There is nothing you can do, and I will endure.”

She only stood there, chewing her lip, with that look she sometimes got when she believed he was not being completely honest with her. “Tagen…it’s been hotter before today…and you look pretty bad right now.”

“It is the heat,” he said again, clenching his jaw. Of all the humans on this miserable planet, he had to find one with reasonably good powers of detection. “I’ve been taking something to help, but there is no more and now I will have to endure it.”

“Are you sick?”

“No.” But he hesitated before he said it, and Daria noticed, as Daria always did.

“Are you?” she demanded, alarmed. “Are you dying?”

“No!” He started to bare his teeth at her, drank his water instead. It helped a little, and he forced himself back into calm before he continued. “I will not die of it. It is not possible to die of it. I will be uncomfortable, but I will endure.” He thought a little, and smiled thinly. “And take grim comfort from the knowledge that E’Var must suffer as I do.”

He began to drink again, but paused as a new thought occurred. Curse Daria’s closeness to him; her pessimism was having an evil effect on him. “E’Var is a chemist,” he murmured, unaware he spoke aloud. “So perhaps he will not suffer after all.”

“A chemist?” Daria echoed, and he started and looked into her narrow, suspicious eyes. “You came all this way after a rogue chemist? You told me he was killing people!”

“He is.” Tagen drank again, eyed the cubes in the empty glass, and rose to add more water. “He is using your people to make his chemicals.”

She was still staring at him when he returned to the table, and he sat down and drank, watching comprehension sink into her eyes. She was naive at times, his Daria, and at times almost scarily fixated upon the darker motivations of both their kinds, but she was not stupid.

“You don’t mean chemist,” she said slowly. “You mean he’s making drugs. He’s using people to make drugs.”

“Yes.” He did not know the word, but he trusted to her definition.

Her mouth worked in silence for a few seconds, and then she slammed both hands down on the table and shouted, “How can you just sit there? Why aren’t you out catching this guy?”

Irritation drove a thin, hot spike down through his body. “How do you suggest I go about it?”

“The old-fashioned Earth way, asshole! Just look for him!”

Tagen felt his patience slip. “I am looking. And I will find him.”

“But only if he leaves a bunch of bodies behind him. I mean, that is your big plan, right? Just wait for him to kill a busload of nuns and you don’t even give a damn!” She worked herself up into a good seethe while Tagen mentally recited the Jotan alphabet backwards. He’d made it to leth when she exploded. “If he were killing your people, you’d call him a murderer and he’d be goddamn well caught by now, but no! He’s here on backwater Earth, so he can butcher humans all he wants and you send one fucking narc because that makes him just a drug dealer!”

“You humans have drugs and the men who make them, yes?”

“It is completely different!” she hissed.

Headache and Heat crept towards each other from the polar points of his body. “I see.”

“People don’t die when humans make drugs.”

“No? Earth has only peaceful chemists? The men who use the drugs do only kind deeds while seeking them?”

“That’s different, goddammit! I’m talking about people killing people just to make it, and I’m talking about you thinking I wouldn’t even need to know!”

Naturally. He knew this would become his fault at some point. “I did not design the drug or the means of its manufacture. I did not train Kanetus to hunt humans and kill them for Vahst. I did not help him to kill his guards and take his ship and give him the tools he needed to come to Earth and make his drug.” Tagen’s voice was rising. He heard it happening, and he knew exactly what words were going to come next, and he was utterly incapable of stopping himself. “Humans kill each other for reasons and in numbers I ca

She rocked back and then glared at him. “That’s what you thought, huh?”

“And I think I was correct to do so, as you sit there and tell me you have not seen…how did you put it…? Anything unusual about the way your kind is dying. E’Var is not killing busloads of nuns. He is clever enough to kill only those your kind never notices anyway. He is harvesting that vast wash of u

She slapped him, not hard, but fast enough that he never saw it coming, much less have time to block her. It made a sound that, for just an instant, he thought might be his own restraint snapping. The urge to knock the table across the little room and seize her by the throat was so strong that he could actually feel the faint resistance of her flesh in his grip.

Tagen closed his eyes. Took a breath. Took another. Opened them and said, “I am going to bed. I am sorry you think badly of me. Perhaps on your world, your police are allowed to set their own policy, choose the criminals they seek when and how they wish it, but that is not the way of things on Jota.”

He stalked from the kitchen, leaving Daria alone at the table to watch his ice cubes melt.

*

Daylight and back on the road. Kane dozed, riding in the passenger seat of the groundcar with his hat pulled low over his eyes. Raven was an exhausting companion when she was drugged. He hadn’t done much sleeping the last few days.

No, not much. He should really be more irritable, but it was hard to work up a good steam with so many fond memories.

A smile tugged at the corners of his lips even now. He had no idea how much Raven remembered of her lying-in. Every so often, he’d catch a puzzled kind of expression dashing across her face, but she never gave him a clue as to what her thoughts were. Too bad. She was fair enough when she was free and sober, but she was a force of fucking nature when she was under the blanket of that painkiller. Kane had worked and reworked the combination of chemicals six times in the last four days, and he had yet to discover what had made her so merry…and mouthy. Gods, her mouth…

Never mind. Her mouth was good for plenty of other things, and she’d probably bite just because he told her to, anyway. Although…half the fun of it had come from her spontaneity. From her wanting to bite, and from the obvious pleasure she’d taken as she’d done it. Sure, she’d obey him if he gave her an order, but it wouldn’t be the same.

It’d be something, though. Fuck it, he’d tell her to bite.

“Oh shit.”

Kane turned toward Raven, but before he could ask what the trouble was, he felt the car lurch and then slow. The engines sputtered and cut out. Steam billowed from beneath the hull’s fore-panel and the smell of hot oil and rubber filled the interior.

Raven cranked the wheel, guiding the vehicle with apparent effort off the road and onto the soft side. The car ground to a halt there, hissing as it died. She stared straight ahead, pale and frightened-looking. Her jaw was tight, as if expecting a blow.

Kane drummed his fingers once on the top of his pack. “Trouble?” he asked mildly.

“I…I can’t fix cars.” She still didn’t look at him, and her hands on the steering wheel clenched white.

“Do you know what’s wrong with it?” Hell, he could have a look. Engines were engines.

“It’s the heat,” Raven said. “I probably ran out of radiator fluid or something.”

“Let’s have a look.” He took the keys from her by habit and got out. The fore-panel popped as he walked around front and it only took a second or two for him to figure out how to open it. The panel was hot as a hard fuck; Kane shrugged out of his long coat and wrapped it around his hand to touch it, and then studied the grimed interior of the groundcar’s guts.

Internal combustion engine, fuel accelerated and electrically supplemented. As straightforward as they came. Kane could see the problem. He didn’t know what it was called in human, but the coolant tank had run dry. He supposed they could refill it with water for a stop-gap, but they’d still have to wait for everything to cool down before he could touch it. Besides which, they had only one bottle of water between them in the car. He wasn’t sure that would be enough to even get them to a repair bay. Not to mention the fact that a mechanic would want to be paid.

Another groundcar pulled onto the roadside at Kane’s back as he considered the situation and a male voice called, “Need help?”

“Nope.” Kane slammed the fore-panel shut. “Shot to shit.” He turned around, unwinding his coat from his arm, and smiled at the human who had addressed him. The lone human. In a decent-looking groundcar. He strolled over. “Hi,” he said.

“Rotten day to have to walk fifteen miles into town,” the human remarked with a sun-ward glance.

“True.”

“I guess I could be persuaded to give you a ride for a few bucks.”

“I don’t have a few bucks.” Kane heard his groundcar’s door open and Raven’s footsteps crunching on gravel. He watched the human look past him as she approached. The human seemed a little unpi

“Ah, what the hell.” The human gave a wave to the inside of his groundcar. “Hop in.”