Heat

Kane woke to the sound of incessant screaming. Even before his eyes had opened, he reared up and balled a fist to knock whoever the fuck was responsible silent if not completely senseless. The movement brought out a flare of agony all down his back. He snarled out a curse and carefully sat up.

Earth’s sun had really done a number on his bare skin. His arms were stinging, red and shiny, and if the pain was any indication, so was his back and his face. It wasn’t a serious burn, he knew, but it was going to get that way soon if he didn’t find a better way of traveling than on foot.

He was inside the human’s shelter. Flimsy as it was, it was still protection from the brutal sun. He could even remember, very dimly, dragging the female in here with him. And there she was, lying on her back beside him and staring straight up into space. She wasn’t screaming.

But something sure as fuck was. Short, hoarse, relentless screaming, each one a spike straight to Kane’s brain. He crawled to the mouth of the shelter and looked out, shading his eyes against the brilliance of mid-day.

There was a bird on top of the table. A big, black bird, and it was shrieking like all hell.

There were no birds on Jota. Kane could remember a time when he’d thought that was a pity. One of Urak’s So-Quaal contacts kept a collection of birds, many of them from Earth, and as a young boy, Kane had been allowed to look at them while his father and the So-Quaal scientist talked. Some of them could even mimic speech. Over several of these visits, Kane had managed to teach one of them to say, “I’m going to kill you in your sleep,” in So-Quaal. He still thought that was pretty fu

Moving slowly so as not to spook the shrieker facing him now, Kane reached out and found a nice palm-sized stone. The bird saw him well enough, and even cocked its head to acknowledge him, but kept right on ripping the woods up with noise.

Kane bared his teeth in a hard smile and threw, his arm producing a shriek of its own as it cut through the air. The stone struck, shattering the bird’s breast, and it flopped over with a final cry, slapping its wings against the ground futilely until it died.

Kane grunted and lay back down beside his human. He was awake now and he supposed he should get up, but it was too damned hot to think about travel. Still, he had the female, and that was something. Heat would be on him again in an hour, but once he’d fucked it out of his system, it would probably be well on to evening and cool enough that it would not return until tomorrow. He could travel tonight and take the human with him.

Kane raised himself up on one elbow and looked his female over, thinking. If she could pilot the groundcar he saw outside, so much the better. Although he’d never had trouble finding humans in the woods when Urak had brought him here before, the blistering weather seemed to have driven them all away. If he was going to fill forty vials with Vahst, he needed to find some in greater numbers.

“Hi,” Kane said. It had been a while since he’d last spoken N’Glish, or any of the human languages for that matter, but he spoke it pretty well, and he knew that was the right word.

The female closed her eyes.

Ah well. He wasn’t keeping her for company’s sake.

Kane got up and went out of the shelter, picking up the dead bird and tossing it on top of the dead human male as he passed. He had left the cold-storage crate open, and he cursed himself for a fool because now all the ice was melted and there was grit and tree-needles in the water. Kane drank it anyway, relishing the way it sluiced down his throat and throughout his body. The crate’s actual contents, metal canisters containing human beverages, glinted enticingly at him but Kane ignored them. Previous experience told him they were likeliest to hold either toxic fermentations or concentrated sugar syrups. Water was what he needed now.

As an afterthought, Kane sucked up an extra mouthful and went back into the shelter. He knelt, turning the female to face him, and then put his mouth over hers and poured water into her. She dribbled most of it out, but swallowed at the end. That was a good sign.

“I need to eat,” Kane said, mostly to re-accustom himself to the language. “Where are you keeping your food?”

The human did not reply. She lay motionless, her eyes still shut against him. She hadn’t even wiped her mouth where she’d drooled.

She wasn’t sleeping, Kane was fairly sure of that. She was choosing to ignore him, escaping him the only way she could. He had a choice now. He could let her lie there and hide from him, or he could bring her out of it.

His first thought was to stand her up and give her a good slap. In his not-inconsiderable experience, humans responded best to pain. But as he ran his eyes over her bruised body, he realized that he appeared to have been pretty harsh with her. Heaping abuse on top of that might only push her further into her own mind. If he wanted to keep her, and if he expected her to do any groundcar-piloting in particular, it was time to show a little restraint.

Kane slipped his hands under her sides and pulled her up and onto his shoulder. She did not resist.

“I really don’t care what you do when I’m gone,” he told her as he took her out into the light. “But I need you here with me now. Behave yourself—”

Sudden warmth flowed down his chest and the smell of ammonia pierced the air. Kane gave the female a sour look, but she only stared slackly into space.

“Behave yourself,” he repeated darkly. “And you’ll live to see the back of me. Piss on me again—” He set her on the table and tried to slap the wet from his body. “—and I’ll carve you a new face to see me off by. Bitch,” he added in his own language, and stomped over to the cold-storage box to clean up.

There was no point in punishing her. She probably couldn’t help it. Probably. He was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, at any rate. He needed to take care of her if she was going to get him through this rotten weather.

Would she come out of it on her own? He could whip up a stimulant if he had to, but he didn’t want to use it unless absolutely necessary. Humans were fragile.

A dark thought struck Kane suddenly. Humans were fragile. Maybe the female was sick. He hadn’t sca

Better late than never. Kane looked around for his pack, found it under one of the chairs, and took it over to his female. He had to calibrate it for human biology, and during that time, Kane studied her.

She was blonde, like him, but her hair was several shades lighter, an u

When the computer chimed, Kane brought out his sca

Patience.

“This is probably going to hurt,” he warned her, and shrewdly noted that her face puckered slightly. “I need to look at your blood.”

She made no response, not even when Kane pushed the sharp tip of the sca

“Where do you keep your food?” Kane asked, his eyes ru

She continued to ignore him.

Kane considered her, tapping his claws idly against his knee. “What’s your preference?” he asked at last, bluntly. “Arm or leg? No reason to let your male go to waste.”

It was a bluff. After half a day in the sun, the human’s meat was soured, but the threat had the desired effect. A trickle of water appeared at the corner of one eye. Humans did that, he knew, even when their eyes weren’t damaged. Finally, she looked at him.

“Food,” he said firmly.

She sat up, moving as though her bones had become brittle as straw, and slid onto her feet. She looked at him again, her face crumpling in on itself, and began to stagger toward the groundcar.

The computer chimed, its screen filling the results of the human’s scan. Kane read, well-aware that he’d been very lucky. Apart from a congenital sugar imbalance, some toxic residue (probably related to the canisters floating in the cold-storage crate), and a nasty bone-thi

The female was returning, weeping openly now. She had a bag of dried meat in one hand and a package of biscuits or something in the other. She put these on the table before Kane and lowered herself shakily into one of the chairs, covering her face with her hands and rocking back and forth.

Well, at least she was moving. Kane chewed on the meat, which was very tough but extremely tasty, and began to construct a program to purify her of her detrimental conditions. After a while, the female rose from her chair and went to kneel by the male’s body. Kane let her; he was an old hand at designing nanozyme codes, but this was the first he’d ever done without Urak looking on. Besides, if it made the female happy to grieve, who was he to argue? At least she was doing it quietly.

Kane double-checked his program, ran a quick cross-filter reaction check, and when the gold light turned green, he loaded in the blank nanozymes and initiated them. It would take fourteen hours before the human’s problems were completely solved, but there was nothing wrong with her that he could catch, so he didn’t care. He had only to make sure she got enough water while the filters were working, and in the meantime, he could fuck her all he wanted. He filled his dermisprayer with the prepared nanozymes and turned to get his female.

She was gone.

So much for a gentle hand. When he found the bitch, he was going to hobble her.

Dermisprayer in hand, Kane started walking, his eyes picking out her tracks easily in the dry earth. He followed her away from the corpse of her mate, down onto the path he’d come by earlier, and into the forest. He didn’t hurry. The distance between the human’s footprints showed she wasn’t ru