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Scott blinked slowly, wincing at the stab of light through his skull when he opened his eyes—and made a discovery that left him suspended between broken thoughts. His face lay tangled in the mesh of a hand-knotted net of some kind, which supported the weight of his head and left his nose mere millimeters clear of the water. How in the world had he come to be lying face down with his head in a net? Moving his arm left Scott gulping down bile, but his arm did work, even though the abused muscles in shoulders and neck shrieked their protest. He felt gingerly at his head, blinked stupidly as his fingers encountered rough knots and what felt like strips of cloth around his forehead and down the back of his aching skull. The netting was taut, looped, he discovered, over a low-hanging tree limb. When he brought his hand down again, it came away dark with blood.
At first, the low crooning sound didn't even register. He was lying there, trying to decide when and how he'd managed to tie bandages around his head during a state of concussed coma, when he realized that his fear was rapidly ebbing away. That was when the nearly subliminal sound that was sinking down through the pain in his head, soothing him, somehow, registered.
He blinked with a tremendous effort and managed to look up . . . and grass-green eyes peered anxiously right into his.
Scott came up out of the water with a convulsive yell. Then sprawled across the boulder, vomiting helplessly while agony lanced deep into his brain. He felt tiny, gentle hands touch his head, his cheek and brow, knew instinctively that the creature crouched beside him—whatever it was—not only meant him no harm, it was trying to help. He didn't know how he knew that; he just knew it, as surely as he knew he would die out here if he didn't get out of this freezing water and down the mountain and into the nearest available hospital. For all of humanity's medical miracles, conquering diseases and developing human cloning and other gene-manipulating technologies, even limited cybernetic enhancements, simple, stupid accident still accounted for an appalling number of deaths, particularly on new colony worlds like Sphinx. Scott lay there shuddering for long moments, huddled across the boulder, fighting the nausea in the pit of his belly, aware that he was quite probably going to be the next accidental death logged in Sphinx's official records.
At length, gaining sufficient strength, he groped cautiously at the net still tangled across his face. He could feel other hands moving deftly, as well, working at the back of his head and above him. Then the net came loose and he was free. He blinked slowly and found a long, sinuous shape of mottled cream and grey fur busily winding the net around its middle, using its four upper-most limbs in a graceful fashion.
A treecat . . . !
As the shock of that sank dimly through his aching head, it occurred to Scott MacDallan that if the treecat hadn't wound that net around his face and looped it over that branch, he would have drowned long before regaining consciousness. His throat ran dry at the realization that this tiny animal had deliberately and quite cleverly saved his life. The treecat huddled down, crooning softly, and touched its face to Scott's, rubbing soft fur against his cheek in a gesture clearly meant to comfort and reassure. Wonder seeped through the fear and pain holding him prisoner. It gradually occurred to him that he needed to start thinking about a way to survive this predicament. And to do that, he had to get out of this icy water.
Scott inched his way awkwardly higher onto the boulder, trying to drag more of himself out of the river's freezing clutches, then clamped shut his jaws and explored his injuries more thoroughly, finding blood-soaked bandages of some kind which the treecat had clearly tied in place around the gashes in his head. When he probed the back of his skull, Scott groaned. But when he touched his brow, a bomb detonated behind his eyelids and icy panic came up with the vomit as he spewed helplessly into the river, fighting a pain in his head that he knew would kill him very soon if he didn't get help and get it fast.
Even if his skull wasn't broken, which it might be, with hairline fractures, the concussion alone was bad enough that he might not even be able to stand up, much less hike down the river to the distant bend where he'd parked his air car. He tried keying in the code for the Twin Forks emergency operations center on his wrist com, but nothing happened. The com unit was damaged, its circuitry broken from the fall against the boulders. He had a backup com unit in his backpack, but that was several meters away, across a rushing stretch of boulder-strewn river and up a sloping riverbank and back under the nearest spreading picket wood tree. Unless he could get his injured self out of this river and all the way up to that pack, he couldn't even call for help.
Black terror lapped at his awareness, rising out of a bottomless chasm in a flood far colder than the river he lay sprawled in. And straight through that terror, a sudden, unexpected warmth enfolded Scott, nudged him back from the edge of that terrifying black pit, drew him up out of panic and back to an awareness of the sunlit river and the touch of tiny, alien hands on his cheeks. He caught raggedly at the air and managed to open his eyelids into the harsh glare of sunlight. The treecat huddled down in front of him, crooning in distress. A moment later, it nestled right against him, pressing its warm body as close to his heart as it could hold itself. Three pairs of hands and feet gripped his shirt firmly, as if saying, I'm not going to let you go. The warmth and love rolling through him drew a broken sound from Scott. His panic and fear ebbed away with the wetness spilling down his face.
With a concussion and shock and blood loss to overcome and a broad stretch of treacherous ground to cover before he could even reach his communications gear, the odds against his survival had gone up immeasurably . . . but he wasn't quite alone.
Swift Striker huddled as close to his two-leg as he could press himself and sank deeper into the healing trance. The two-leg's mind glow was similar enough to that of the People that he could, after a fashion, establish a bond, even though the two-leg clearly couldn't complete it. But he was able to drain away the ragged, cutting terror that rolled out of the two-leg's mind, aware of a not-quite-rightness that differed from the taste of his two-leg's mind-glow just before the disastrous fall against the rocks. Swift Striker had seen a youngling suffer damage to his head, once, when the youngling had mistimed a jump between branches. The disastrous fall hadn't been fatal, but the smashing blow of the youngling's head against the ground where he'd landed had left the youngling's mind glow crippled forever afterward. He'd been completely unable to form clear thoughts after that terrible fall. Less than half a season later, the youngling had quietly suicided.
The two-leg's terror and the broken taste of its mind glow reminded Swift Striker fearfully of that tragedy. He poured love and reassurance through the bond, determined to protect this wonderful, bright-haired creature, to get it safely back to its own kind. And he would stay with the two-leg, croon to it . . . to him, he realized, sinking deeper into the trance . . . would keep him from the despair the mind-blind youngling had felt, if it were in Swift Striker's power to do so. The two-legs were used to being mind-blind, after all; perhaps Swift Striker's constant reassurances would help enough, whatever was actually wrong inside his head?
Determined to succeed, Swift Striker steadied the frantic chaos in his two-leg's mind glow, eased his fright, soothed and crooned and drew away the physical hurting and the sharp emotional pain, as best he could. The two-leg's pounding heartbeat gradually relaxed into a less frantic, only slightly irregular knocking and his breathing steadied down and his muscles turned from stone back to pliant flesh again. His two-leg was still afraid, but the blinding, jagged terror had gone.