Page 384 of Gladiators of the Vagabond Boxset

Jenny

My thighs were sore from sitting on a hoverbike for two hours straight, but my spirits were high.

We’d made it out. Akri had known exactly what route to take to get us to that garage we’d hidden in before.

He’d only had to manage two scuffles along the way, the biggest of which was the elevator fight, as I’d dubbed it.

I was still impressed with how he’d managed that, especially considering what he’d been through the past few hours.

“The battery is almost depleted,” Akri announced grimly, his finger tapping the small display on the steering bars of the vehicle.

We’d known that would happen and that we wouldn’t make it all the way back to Akrod in this vehicle, but it still sucked.

We had a hike of a good hundred miles left to make through a desolate desert with minimal supplies.

If we hadn’t had to dump our comms, we could have called Akri’s ship for help.

He was certain that they had arrived at Ov’Korad and would be able to assist immediately.

Too bad we had no way to reach them, so hiking through this inhospitable place it was going to be.

Good thing I had survival training and had done many long hikes over the years; I knew what to do, even if this was an alien planet. The rules hadn’t changed.

We’d taken this hoverbike as far as we could, when the depleted batteries forced us to land near a rocky outcropping with some scraggly trees.

Here, the desert wasn’t so much giant dunes of sand as it was one big, flat plane of nothingness, with the occasional pile of rocks.

We hid the bike under a rocky nook as best as we could, covering it up with some of those poor little trees.

Akri was watching the two suns track across Ov’Korad’s sky, calculating our direction—if I had to take a guess. The suns were supposedly purple, but something in the planet’s atmosphere filtered the light beaming down on us, making them appear as orange as Earth’s sun.

I knew which way we had to go at a glance; I’d made it my business to know that kind of thing.

I had felt unsettled being on this planet, not knowing how to find my place on this globe.

I’d always been able to figure out where I was or where I had to go.

I would have felt helpless if I hadn’t learned to do the same here, on Ov’Korad.

Drova hadn’t stopped me, but he’d scoffed at my desire to know such a thing; he couldn’t imagine that I was ever going to leave the city.

“That way,” Akri said, pointing in the direction of Akrod with one of his tentacles. It was the direction we’d been heading with the bike, so a logical assumption. It was cute how happy he was that he’d figured it out based on something as primitive as the position of the suns in the sky.

I nodded. “Yeah, but I think we should allow ourselves a slight detour by heading along that ridge.” I pointed at the sharp spine of stone I’d seen to our left, snaking along the sand in the same direction we needed to go.

On it, there were signs of plant life, and there was the possibility of shelter in the form of a cave.

Right now, the suns were sinking below the horizon, and a chill was starting to fill the air.

Tomorrow we’d have to find shelter during the worst of the heat, or we would dehydrate within the hour.

Arki looked like he wanted to disregard my suggestion, so I explained my reasoning to him, and that was all it took. Walking along this kind of desert was not as tough as the loose sand that surrounded the research base, but it was still exhausting.

I looked back over my shoulder a few times as we walked, but I could no longer see the plumes of smoke; we’d traveled too far.

Neither of us knew what had caused them, just that, only twenty minutes into our ride, a sonic boom had rocked us, nearly causing us to crash.

The smoke had appeared afterward, and since that base was the only building for miles, it could only mean something had happened there.

Akri was starting to stumble, and he lagged behind a little when we began climbing the flank of the ridge.

I wanted to keep moving now that the temperatures were manageable and get as much distance in as we could before the sun forced us to hide.

It was clear that Akri wasn’t able to sustain that kind of strenuous walk right now.

He said he was fine each time I asked, or rather, he said he was performing within acceptable parameters.

Clearly, he was fooling himself into thinking that was true.

Actually, since we’d left the base behind us, he’d been extremely withdrawn and quiet.

Each time I asked him a question, he’d answer—that was it: one-syllable replies, no eye contact, and a dark expression on his handsome face.

Something was up, and it was more than just the exhaustion and the pain of whatever torture he’d been subjected to.

When I spotted the opening of a narrow cave in the ridge flank, I warned Arki to stay put while I checked it out, carefully shining the light from the datapad inside. When I saw no signs of an animal making its home there, I waved him over. “We’ll rest here.”

It didn’t take us long to set up camp, though we had no lights, and I didn’t want to risk making a fire.

I checked the water we had left: two full bottles, not enough to make it through an entire day tomorrow.

So I went back outside to improvise a little water collector with an empty bottle, some sticks, string, and a bit of cloth.

When I hiked on my own before on Earth, I’d always had good gear with me to do it, but I’d still learned the basic tricks in case anything broke down. It was always good to know how to get more water; without water, you were dead, no matter where you were.

I returned to the cave to find that Akri had made his way through several ration bars, the silver wrappers neatly folded in a little pile in front of his crossed legs.

He was using the small first aid kit, which was part of my supplies, to patch up an oozing cut at the base of his right Liades.

He had refused any assistance with it before, saying we should focus on putting distance between us and the base.

Finished smoothing the plasfilm bandage in place, he finally met my gaze with his beautiful, starry night–sky eyes. His Liades drooped over his shoulders, limp and tired, and I wondered if they would still respond to me if I got close.

Picking out a single ration bar for myself, I carefully sat down on the spread blanket at his hip. I tracked the nearest Liades from the corner of my eye, waiting with bated breath to see if it would move, but it didn’t.

“Okay! Enough,” I said, a bad feeling bubbling in the pit of my stomach. “What is up with you? Why are you so withdrawn? What happened in there, Akri? Talk to me. Please.” I hated seeing him like this, so closed off and so sad.

His head tilted, chin pointing toward the back wall of the small cave.

“You were right. I should never have risked another day at the mercy of Lekri to get the information I wanted. It put you at risk too, and that was the wrong choice.” I scoffed.

So I had to get in on the action; that didn’t matter to me.

It had been kinda fun to super-spy my way down to those basement levels.

“Did you get what you needed?” I asked. Scared of the answer, because I already knew what it was going to be, I reached up to touch his Liades myself, relieved when it curled around my hand and held on.

“I got his notes…” Akri said, breath hissing out from between his teeth.

He turned his face to mine, finally letting me see the anguished expression he wore.

“But… it wasn’t… there’s no…” He faltered, unable to put into words what he wanted to say.

I understood. He had hoped there was an answer there to help him handle the feelings he struggled with, but there was none, just like I had known there wouldn’t be.

“There’s nothing in it to help me control my urges, to help me understand why I feel the things I feel!

Why? Why is there no answer, Jenny? How do you do it?

” There was a shiny wetness to his beautiful eyes, tears he was refusing to let fall.

The pinpricks of light that dotted the black were shifting, swirling, hinting a little at orange and yellow.

I turned, sitting on my knees so I could cup his face and hold him, refusing to let him look away. “Do you remember that moment in the lab when I tasered and pummeled that scientist?” He nodded, his mouth quirking into a faint smile.

“Don’t you think I was a little out of control then?

That was violent; that was a lot of rage…

Are you scared of me after seeing that?” I asked him, already knowing the answer, but needing him to say it anyway—to admit it to himself.

He shook his head again, the smile dropping, but something eased in his expression.

“No, of course not, because you know me—because you know that that’s not all I am, and that I wouldn’t just do that without any kind of provocation.

Right?” I was relieved when he nodded much more firmly that time, so I lifted one hand from his cheek to jab him in the chest. “How’s that any different from you? ”

His mouth dropped open, then closed again when he seemed unable to answer the question.

That was okay; he probably needed to mull that one over with that clever mind of his.

“Nonetheless, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell your friends what I said, okay?

Good first impressions and all that... In exchange, I won’t tell them you let that scientist bonk you over the head because you forgot he was there.

Deal?” I hoped that would make him smile, and it did.

“Those terms are satisfactory,” he agreed.

Finally, he let me crawl into his lap, allowing me the closeness that I’d come to crave.

I could see that the corners of his mouth turned up as he kept smiling.

“You’re something else, Jenny. Because of you, I won’t give up, and I won’t re-upload myself to the Vagabond. I want to stay a man.”

I shivered at the announcement; that had been an option?

I understood that he had once been a machine—a spaceship—something that existed in the databanks of a computer.

It hadn’t crossed my mind that he might want to return to being something like that.

I clutched him tightly around the middle, holding him close, as if he were about to disappear right in front of me.

“Good. Don’t leave me, Akri.” I wanted him to be by my side for as long as he wanted to be by mine. I wasn’t done having crazy adventures with him yet. Not when I’d let him into my heart after protecting myself for as long as I had. I wasn’t losing him, not now.

“No, I won’t. We mated, remember?” he said, sounding more like his normal self again.

His arms came around me to hold me to his chest. “It’s going to be okay.

I just need to find a different way to control myself.

I researched Aderian meditation; I could try that again…

or maybe Rummicaron emotion-suppression techniques. ”

I hoped he wasn’t serious about that last one.

I hoped he would learn that he didn’t need to find more control; he wasn’t doing all that badly at being a person of flesh and blood.

I just needed to convince him to see that too.

I was too tired, too frazzled right now, to figure out how, so I settled for making him smile.

“Please, no. What if you won’t enjoy this anymore if you do that?

” I said, and before he could ask what I meant, I rose up and pressed my mouth to his—happy when he eagerly responded, his tongue sweeping into mine and his tentacles curling around my shoulders.

It didn’t take much coaxing at all to get him to lie down with me, and then clothes were being shed and things really started to heat up.

Yes, perfect. Now he wasn’t thinking, just doing.

I’d remind him of all the reasons why he liked having this body.

Afterward, I fell asleep curled up against his chest, my body sated but my mind heavy with worry for tomorrow.

Tomorrow didn’t arrive quite the way I would have liked.

A sound jerked me from my slumber in the early morning hours.

I started to move, but something clamped down over my face, a strong scent swirling up into my nose.

I was just coherent enough to recognize it as a date-rape drug common on Ov’Korad, something Drova sold under the table.

I recognized it because I had smelled it before.

Then, it was lights out for me.