She clamped her eyes shut and concentrated on breathing deeply: one breath, two breaths, three, four, the smell of the sea, the sound of the birds, thirty-two, the sound of the waves, eighty, one hundred, a hundred thirty, seventy …
When she raised her head, they had gone. She didn’t move. A few days ago, she’d thought they were gone and had been about to move when she realized they were hanging directly above her. She’d come that close to being eaten. Or transported. Or cat-and-moused like her mother. Whatever it was they did. Would do.
She risked a look up. Clear sky. Nothing. Nothing near the camp. Nothing between herself and the cliff. Still, one had to be careful. They could move with horrid alacrity. One minute they wouldn’t be anywhere around, the next moment they’d be present.
Maybe they knew she was here. Maybe all this was part of the ritual. Showing her what would happen to her.
She wouldn’t think that. Wouldn’t let herself think that. If she thought that, she’d run screaming right at them, out in the open, panicked. She couldn’t do that. She had to hold on, hold on …
For what? There was no one here. No one to protect, no one to talk to, no one to lie beside, sharing warmth, sharing comfort, even.
Untrue. Somewhere was a monitor. Seeing what she saw. Feeling what she felt. Somewhere on Dinadh was someone watching over her.
Though the monitor might not be the only thing watching over her! Sometimes in the night she woke to that flattened sound, that curtained feeling, that almost subliminal shudder, as though a mighty hoof had touched the planet, moving it slightly in its orbit. What was that? Did it know she was here?
“Lonely,” she whispered. “God, I’m so lonely! I’m all alone. Please. Help me. Come get me. Please!”
Late Dinadh daylight filtered chill through multiple windows, making puddles of grayed gold upon the floor. Three sat stunned, facing one another, only just returned from Perdur Alas, returned from fear, pain, hunger, cold. From weary loneliness.
“Well,” said the Procurator in an exhausted whisper. “At least we now know what they look like.”
They did not know whether they had been living Snark’s life for a day or two or three. Only when she reached the safety of her cave and curled into sleep had they turned off the retriever and let the Dinadh evening surround them once more. The Procurator’s words were the first intelligible ones any of them had made, though their experience had been punctuated by cries and grunts and indrawn breaths.
“Can’t we do something for her?” the ex-king asked, his voice breaking. “Send a ship or something.”
Poracious Luv arched her brows disbelievingly. “You? The King of Kamir, the practitioner of ultimate ennui? Touched by the plight of another human being?”
“She’s alone,” he blurted, flushing. “I’ve … I’ve been alone. It would touch anyone!”
The Procurator rubbed his forehead wearily. It ached from the battering he, Snark, had received. It had ached before, and now it was worse. He had, after all, sent her there. He was responsible for her.
He said, “Touched or not, right now there’s no ship to send. Even if there were a ship, we couldn’t risk it for one survivor.”
“Particularly inasmuch as we now have records of everything she’s picked up,” said Poracious Luv in a dry, cynical voice. “So there’d be no advantage to rescuing her.”
“Advantage,” Jiacare Lostre snarled. “Advantage!”
“Would you trade a hundred lives for one?” the Procurator said, looking him in the eye. “Surely you don’t think those … creatures would let us go to Perdur Alas and simply remove her? We’d have to send a cruiser at least. Would you trade a shipload of men on a gesture?”
“How do we know they wouldn’t?”
Poracious sighed. “We know what happened to ships in the Hermes Sector a hundred years ago. Any ship approaching a world that had been stripped was taken. They went, just as the people went. Gone. Whisk. Away. Nobody knew where. That’s what has happened to the evacuation ships this time, too.”
“I didn’t realize,” mumbled the ex-king. “Sorry. This is all … very new to me. I’ve tried not to care about anything for a very long time, but this … ”