Authors: Bernadette Gardner
dyed
alor
that Zara could use as a skirt, partly to make her
happy and comfortable and partly to spare himself the
embarrassment of having to turn up at the aerie without his
own shorts.
He'd known he'd have to get used to not wearing clothing,
but considering the depth of guilt he felt over his deception,
he didn't need anything else to make him feel self-conscious.
A cursory search of ten islands had finally turned up a
length of soft, beaten
alor
fabric which had been colored
purple. It was long and wide enough for Zara to wrap it
around her body and fashion a sarong. Proud that he'd
salvaged a small measure of his battered dignity, he returned
to the nest his symbion had claimed, eager to show off his
prize.
Right away he knew something was wrong. The place
didn't feel right, and Zara's alluring scent had faded. She
wasn't at the archway to greet him, and she wasn't in bed as
he'd hoped, waiting to share another vigorous round of
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lovemaking before they returned to what passed for
civilization on this world.
He called her name, and something moved in the dim
interior of the aerie. Arilani appeared, moving slowly as if in a
trance. Her dark eyes held terrible sorrow.
"Ari?"
"Caleb, what happened here?"
"Where's Zara? What happened to her?"
"She's gone. Caleb. What did you do to her?"
"Do to her?" Panic constricted his throat, and he began to
search around frantically for any sign of his mate. "I didn't
do
anything to her. She was here. She was waiting for me."
Arilani shook her head. "No, Caleb. I'm sorry. I just
arrived, and she wasn't here."
"She wouldn't have..." Dismissing the Icarian female, he
ran for the edge of the island and nearly catapulted over the
side. Footprints in the loose layer of soil there told him Zara
had run in this direction. "What happened?"
Arilani appeared next to him. "She must have gone looking
for you and fallen."
"No!" He didn't think, didn't consider. He just dove off the
side. Wings back, body straight as an arrow, he streaked
toward the jagged rocks below.
Only his symbion saved him from a crash landing, pulling
him up just short of the volcanic tumble and leaving him
hovering over the dangerous shoals. Here the surf churned
white, foaming against the rocks as it battered the roots of
the basalt column.
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The remains of symbion nests littered the rocks, and
tangles of seaweed,
alor
and droppings from other semi-
aquatic life forms made the boulders too slippery to stand on.
If Zara had fallen here, it was to her death. "No. No.
Zara!"
He screamed her name, flitting back and forth over the
battleground where the war had raged between water and
rock for centuries. How could she have fallen? Why would she
have ventured to the edge of the island before he returned?
Arilani swooped down next to him. With skill born of
decades of experience, she alit on a slick rock, steady and
surefooted as though she'd grown from the spot. "Caleb,
you'll never find her. The tide could have washed her body
away already."
"No. I won't accept that. She's not dead. We have to
search for her."
"No human could survive the fall."
Waves crashed around them, scouring the rocks and
nearly toppling Arilani from her perch. Caleb attempted to
land as she had, but a wave exploded between two rocks,
showering them both with hard pellets of water and knocking
him off balance. He plummeted, and Arilani lunged forward to
catch him.
"We can't stay here," she shouted above the roar of the
water. "We'll be injured."
"I don't care. I'm not leaving her." Caleb wrestled out of
Arilani's grip and launched himself into the air. He circled
around and dropped back, scanning the active nesting site for
any sign of life beyond the few adult symbions who remained
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to watch over the territory. The winged creatures watched
him from their conical nests. Neckless, they had to swivel
their oblong bodies to keep the intruder in their line of sight.
Fortunately, they didn't consider him a threat and remained
still while he swooped in to investigate the broken shell of a
symbion egg, which resembled a human head. Nearby, thick
ropes of
alor
vine looked, for a moment, like a tangle of tan
limbs, and pale seaweed could easily be mistaken for human
hair. Unfortunately nothing he saw led him to Zara. She was
gone.
Finally, at Arilani's urging, he let his symbion carry him
straight up to the edge of the platform. He dropped to his
knees, exhausted, cold and dead inside. "How could she have
fallen? She was too smart, too cautious to go near the edge."
"The wind is strong this time of day, Caleb," Arilani said,
placing a hand on his shoulder. "She could have easily lost
her footing."
"But where is she then? If she fell straight down—"
"The water is full of predators and the crevices between
the rocks are deep. Her body would not have remained on the
surface for long."
Caleb wailed in fury. He'd never felt this kind of grief in his
life. Not even when he'd received his fatal diagnosis had he
felt this raw or hopeless.
His symbion grieved as well, and the wound beneath the
creature's body where its siphon had pierced his spinal
column began to ache fiercely. He hadn't felt such intense
pain in more than a day, and he wasn't sure he could survive
it. "It's my fault. I brought her here. She had no way to leave
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and I left her alone for too long. She must have thought I'd
gotten hurt and tried to look for me."
Arilani stroked his back and his wings. The gesture, meant
to soothe, only irritated him, and he flung her hand away.
"I'm sorry, Caleb. Come back with me to the station, and
we can ask Jidar to send a team to search for her. We'll bring
her home, I promise."
"Zara ... God, I love you. I'm so sorry. Ari, I ruined
everything. I destroyed it all. Jidar should have me put to
death."
"No!" Arilani dropped to her knees beside him and wrapped
her arms around him. She was wet and her body was cold.
The contact was no comfort to him, but he didn't have the
strength to resist her fierce hug. "Jidar will not do that. He
knows you are the last hope we have for a breeding program.
He'll find a way to make this work for us."
Caleb shook his head. He would have argued, but forming
words was too much effort for him. He didn't care enough
anymore to make her understand all the reasons why he'd
single-handedly doomed her race to extinction. Instead, he
fell silent and sullen, lost in his own misery while she rattled
on about how she would fix everything and solve all his
problems.
Besides his overwhelming grief, the next sensation he felt
was a sharp stab of pain in his neck. Frigid heat raced
through his veins and out to the tips of his wings. His link
with the symbion extinguished like a flame, leaving darkness
where there had been light. For the first time in days he was
alone in his own body, alone in his mind.
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Numb obedience overtook him, and he sat nodding as
Arilani explained how his symbion had led him to violently
assault Zara and throw her battered body over the edge of
the island.
Next she entreated him to never tell another soul about
what he'd done and that she would keep his secret forever
because she loved him and couldn't wait to bear his child.
After that, he was airborne, flanked by Jidar and Namara and
sailing back to the research station where they carried him
into the lab and strapped him to a bed. There, his tortured
mind went blank and finally, he slept.
The world spun around Zara in a dizzying array of colors
and images. Her last foggy memory was of terrible pain and
the sickening sensation of falling from a great height.
Now she lay looking up at a dark tumble of rocks. She was
wet and cold and her body ached all over. She tasted blood
and salt, and in addition to being slightly numb, her tongue
seemed too large for her mouth.
"Cleb ... cay-leb!" Her cry came out as little more than a
whisper. He would never hear her over the relentless
pounding of the surf.
Where am I?
A frightening realization hit her then. Arilani had dropped
her. Had it been an accident? No. The sore, bulging muscle in
her neck told her she'd been drugged. Slowly her memory
returned of slipping from the Icarian female's loose grasp and
plummeting to the roiling water.
Miraculously, she'd missed the rocks and slid into a crevice
between two boulders. She recalled looking up at the jagged
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basalt and realizing she didn't have the strength to claw her
way out of the surf. Inch by inch she'd descended until the
water began to seep into her mouth and nose.
Then there had been nothing.
Am I dead?
No. Death couldn't be so painful. She was definitely alive,
injured, groggy and amazingly, no longer trapped between
the broken rocks.
Who could have rescued her then left her ... where?
Moving gingerly, she attempted to sit up. The surface on
which she lay rolled and quivered, and she reached out in
panic to clutch thick braids of
alor
vines.
A net? She was lying in a net that stretched across a small
alcove of boulders. On either side of her, rising like small
volcanoes from the flat tops of the rocks, sat symbion nests.
Perhaps a dozen of them dotted the treacherous beachhead,
some bearing well-camouflaged symbions with blue and green
plumage. Others were empty.
The rotting net on which she lay had likely been placed
decades ago by an Icarian family who used it to provide
offerings of food to the creatures nesting at the base of their
island. Zara recalled from Caleb's research that Icarians often
fed the huge birds fruit rinds and crabs in order to forge
relationships with them that would facilitate joining.
With so few Icarians left, Zara wondered if the symbions
thought their once loving and attentive hosts had abandoned
them. Then she wondered if the carnivorous animals would
consider
her
an offering since she lay in the net where the
sacrifices had always been placed.
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She struggled to gain her bearings and sit up, but every
movement left her gasping in pain. Her head pounded with
the rhythm of the waves. Her back ached from lying for God
knew how long in the cold, creaking net. The salt spray stung
the vicious raw patches on her knees and she figured at least
three of her toes were broken, possibly her left wrist and
more than one rib. Breathing was agony.
She would never have the strength to call for help.
Caleb!
Another wave of panic pumped adrenalin through
her ravaged body. Had Arilani done the same thing to him?
Would the Icarian healer have tried to sabotage the breeding
program?
Right now, Zara was the only one who knew of Arilani's
treachery, and if she didn't find some way back to the
research station, no one would ever know what had happened
here.
With steely determination and tears streaming down her
ocean-dampened face from the excruciating pain, she rolled
over and began to crawl toward the frayed edge of the
alor
net.
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"I see no reason why he cannot mate. Dr. Danson insists
the symbion is able to control this strange human disease
he's contracted. It will not be passed to his offspring, and it
will not kill him as long as he remains joined." Arilani paced
the great room of the royal aerie, her wings twitching in
irritation. After all she'd done to ensure Caleb would be hers,
Jidar had decreed no mating would take place.
"Arilani, Dr. Faulkner is suffering. He has confessed to
killing Dr. Abbott during a mating frenzy. He cannot control
his symbion, and Dr. Danson fears that the illness, though it
won't kill him now, may prevent him from ever being able to
suitably regulate his biochemistry. He is in no position to rear
offspring." Namara's soft voice served only to anger Ari
further. She had no desire to be cajoled and coddled with
logic.
"I told you, Caleb was delirious when I found him. I know