A Drifting Wasteland (Peregrine x DotCom)

[Peregrine]

A few nights later, he woke in the middle of the night feeling like his insides had turned into insects, and all of them were trying to crawl away from him. He moaned slightly, rolling over, before skyrocketing into wakefulness. He knew this sensation. He knew it intimately. There was a voider near them. He didn't take the time to question the impossibility of it. He had scouted a wide circle around their sleeping spot before they had settled in for the night, making certain that there were no voiders near enough to them to drift into their location. He didn't question it because there was no question that they were near a voider. Even if the sensation of himself being drawn away from himself wasn't sufficient, there were visible indicators around him already. There was a large rock on the top of the hill that hadn't been there when they had fallen asleep, and spikes stuck out of the ground like a deadly grass. For whatever the reason, this voider had changed direction, and it had sped up. Now they were in danger.

He turned to Kaya, ready to shake her out of her sleep and get them running, only to see her sprawled out on the ground, arms flung wildly astray, back arching and collapsing, arching and collapsing. He had no idea what was going on, but it was obvious that Kaya was in the middle of some sort of fit. As the voider grew closer, her bucking seemed to only grow more intense. He wanted to kneel down, to hold her flailing head steady and wait for this to pass, but the voider was so close now that even a split seconds hesitation would be enough to get both of them trapped inside. Instead he reached down, scooping her up in his arms and turned to run. She was writhing so hard that he would have sworn he was only a moment away from dropping her, and he knew he had to be hurting her, so hard was he squeezing her against his chest to try and keep her still.

The voider had caught the taste of their existence, and was racing after them now. It was fast, so fast, abnormally fast, and unlike him it didn't grow tired. The weight of Kaya and her pack was sending burning shivers through his arms, but her spasms seemed to have faded somewhat, and he was able to lighten up his grip on her. He ran on.

It seemed to him, when he thought about it later, that it had been nothing but pure luck that had allowed them to escape getting drawn into the voider. Had he run into another one, or any other obstacle in the land that would have required him to slow or alter his pace, then it would have caught them. But in the moment all he thought about was running, as far and as fast as he could. That was all that mattered.

When at last he slipped out from within that strange, in-between land of voider and the real world he dropped down in the sand, heaving massive gasps of air. Kaya was sprawled out on his lap, but he didn't care enough to try and move her. Right now, all he wanted to do was breathe, and stop the shaking of his hands and the drowning tide of his heartbeat within his ears.

 

[DotCom]

It was the feeling of total dread that woke her. She could recall nothing else -- not who she was or where she was, or why she was, or even that she was, really -- but there was fear. Fear first, and then pain.


She opened her eyes on instinct and made a noise perilously close to a whimper and instantly became aware of two things: the first was that hers was not the only noise being made. The second was that she couldn't breathe.

Instinct took over again as she rolled, coughed, and spat into something -- sand? Yes, sand. Sand now stained red by a mouthful of blood and spittle. She frowned, shivered, and spat again, hating the taste of copper on her tongue. She could not remember where she was or how she had gotten there, but that much was clear. It was then she realized that her tongue was the source of blood itself, and bleeding badly all along one side at that.

She spat a third time, the taste of blood now making her nauseous. Or perhaps that was the booming headache. Or any of the pain. Her body ached. Her chest throbbed like someone had taken a sledgehammer to it, and there was an acute pain in her back. She lifted an arm in an awkward, jerky motion, half expecting to reach back and feel the hilt of a blade jutting from her shoulder, but the muscle cramps in her back and side only redoubled so abruptly, she gasped and froze, afraid to move. Instead, she shut her eyes and tried to will away the dizziness, the fatigue, the feeling that she was going to fall off the face of the earth. The feeling that something very, very bad was going to happen.

A sound somewhere close by had her opening her eyes again, half-lidded, as if that would protect her from the headache.

Someone...or something...was sat nearby. Very close, in fact, and it appeared to be watching her as she now watched him. Him? Certainly nothing about the gruesome looking thing said him, but the word sprang to her mind nonetheless. And indeed, there was something familiar about him, though she couldn't say what. Vaguely, she wondered whether he could explain the darkness and desert around them. It didn't seem to matter now. Now, she only wanted to sleep.

And yet...

She could not escape the feeling that she was forgetting something, something important. And as she sat and her mind slowly, slowly became less fogged, that feeling only grew. She was supposed to be somewhere. She was supposed to do something. And it was highly likely that this creature sat before her was supposed to help her do it. She couldn't remember what or where. She could hardly remember who, but she knew that much. She was supposed to be moving. She was supposed to be going somewhere.

Moving slowly -- it seemed none of her limbs wanted to listen to her -- she got to her knees and made it halfway to her feet before dizziness or exhaustion stole her legs out from underneath her. Vaguely frustrated, she tried again, to the same end. She was too tired, too hazy, to feel real anger, but the sense of dread had not yet left her, and the idea of sleep seemed at once the best and worst suggestion she could imagine.

Still moving without any real knowledge of what she was doing, Kaya -- that was her name, she recalled abruptly. Her name was Kaya -- reached out and pulled her pack to her chest. Yes, the tattered leather tote was as much hers as her name. This thing was important. She couldn't remember why, but that wasn't important now. Moving mechanically, she reached inside and pulled out a blanket she had somehow known she would find. She reached awkwardly behind her and wrapped it close around her shoulders, whimpering quietly as her back threatened to cramp and spasm again. She pulled the pack into her lap and wrapped herself around it.

She would not sleep. She wouldn't. She just needed to gather her thoughts for a moment.

 

[Peregrine]

He slept in fits and spurts throughout the remainder of the night, uncomfortable and uncertain. The faintest sound or change in the wind was enough to once more skyrocket him into consciousness, where he would sit for a couple moment, back straight and panting, before realizing that the threat was nothing but a small animal across the sand, or a minor change in the breeze. He would fall back asleep again, at least for a few moments, until something moved again. One time it was Kaya, waking up from her faint. He watched her struggle to get up, too tired to try and prevent her action, only for her to fail. She pulled out a blanket and curled up underneath it. The next couple times he awoke, she was still awake. The time after that, she was asleep, propped up against her pack. He considered laying her down gently and using the blanket to tuck her in, but before he could actually act upon the thought he was asleep again. The thought did not occur to him the next time he awoke.

It was a relief when dawn finally came. It gave him an excuse to stand, to move, to do something. He did exactly that, running loping circles around the camp in a quickly-growing radius, searching for the danger he unconsciously knew was coming their way, more through paranoia than through any real sensation. It brought him to a grinding halt when he finally found the edge of the voider. Something was wrong. He had felt as much last night, even though there had been no time for him to confirm it, but now he knew it. Unless a voider was on the brink of catching a living creature, they moved slowly. So slowly that it was possible for him to feat the entirety of a very large meal before it could cover as much distance as he could cover in a single step. Simply walking was enough to outpace a voider, as long as it was possible to tell where it was and in which direction it was moving. That was why he had never had any problems with voiders in the past. Sure, they might require him to alter his path, but since he could sense them there was never any real danger of him walking into one by accident, or even getting close enough that it might start to pursue him. Such was not the case now. Now the voider would pace him at a slow walk. It was moving so quickly it felt like it was already chasing him. Yet last night told him that it could go even faster.

They could not stay here. Something, he had no idea what, had caused the voiders to change. This place was not safe, not safe at all. If they stayed here, they would end up in a voider. He returned to the camp when the sun was only a finger or two above the sky, only to find Kaya still asleep. She had tipped over somewhat in the middle of the night, and the blanket had slid away from her shoulders. He did not want to wake her, fearing it would trigger another one of her seizures, but he had no choice. They could not stay here, and he could not carry both her and her pack the kind of distance they would need to cover today. He reached down, shook her, pushed her into a sitting position, helped her to her feet, rolled up the blanket ungracefully, and shoved it back into her pack. It took her an alarmingly long time to wake. Kaya had always seemed so vigilant. So ready. Now she seemed listless, stumbling and distracted, like it was a challenge to simply put one foot in front of the other.

They were not moving fast enough. The voider was moving faster than them right now. If they hoped to get out of here, they would need to, at the very least, maintain the same pace as it. He needed some way to wake her up, to get her focused. It took him a few moments to come up with the answer. He needed to get Kaya talking. He needed to get her defensive, and focused on protecting her secrets and the air she worked so hard to maintain, even though nothing in the desert cared one whit for any facade she might adopt. He needed to say something that would help Kaya return to being Kaya. It took him a few more moments to come up with something he could say.

As little as he liked to stop, he knew a brief pause now would ultimately save them time in the future, and he doubted Kaya would be able to focus on his words right now if she also had to focus on walking. He halted abruptly, spinning around to look at her. "What happened last night? Why were you spasming?"

 

[DotCom]

Kaya could have estimated they'd been walking nearly half an hour, maybe more, before it even occurred to her that they were moving. She'd made no complaint upon her too-soon awakening, if only because she hadn't really been awake at all. Her guide had roused her, hauled her to her feet, and shoved her pack into her waiting arms all before she could fall asleep again, and so she'd walked after him, if only to keep from falling over.

She'd come around slowly as she walked, and just like the previous night, the pain seeped into her consciousness first, though she was glad for it now, because it kept her on her feet and level-headed enough to think. Sort of. Her every thought was muddled, foggy, clouded around the edges so she could not tell what had been a dream, what had been hallucinated, what was real, and, on top of it, what had spilled from the voider.

Because there had been another one. She was as certain of that as she could be for having no recollection of it. That she hadn't actually seen the voider (had she?) didn't seem to matter, because the after effects were strong enough on her own. Like last time -- the last two times -- there was a sense of discomfort, confusion, and a bone-deep fatigue she couldn't shake. She wanted to understand what had happened, but she could not even begin to guess, because as far as she knew, she had fallen asleep, then woken that morning somewhere new. She wasn't sure how much time had passed between them, or whether the strange dreams she'd had were even dreams at all.

But she knew her body ached. She knew her head throbbed, and she knew that her guide seemed to be moving too fast ahead of her, impossibly fast, most certainly chased by something that filled her even now with a dread thick enough to make her ill.

Something had happened. Something was happening, and the fact that she didn't know what, couldn't even put words to it, deduce as she had been able to mere weeks -- years? -- ago was frustrating beyond comprehension.

She didn't realize her guide had stopped until she was toppling into the sand, an unexpected, if merciful relief, having run into him in her haze of confused exhaustion. His words didn't even filter through to consciousness until she looked up to see him looking back at her. She blinked slowly at him, wondering if they had stopped for a break, hoping, for the first time ever, that they had.

"What?" she said slowly. "We're stopping here? Now?"

Then she realized he'd spoken, initiating conversation for just the second time in her memory. She blinked again.

"Did you say something?" And then, as she realized what he'd said, frowning first, then blushing hotly, bright red from her hairline down to her collarbone.

"What?" she demanded again, her tone approaching something near indignation for the first time in weeks.She was surprised, and more than a little embarrassed at how petulant she sounded, like an over-tired child clinging to its mother's skirts. But it felt fresher, cleaner than the exhaustion. "No, I -- what are you talking about? We...we have to keep moving, it's not time to rest yet."

Shoving her pack from her lap and swinging it laboriously over one shoulder (it had only just occurred to her that she'd been carrying it since they'd woken), she struggled to her feet, a little unsteady, but defiant.

"I didn't -- I wasn't -- it has nothing to do with you. You're being paid to get me to Riven. My habits are my own."

She shoved past him as haughtily as she could manage, some small part of her disappointed that they still had some hours to go before sundown. But a greater part of her was taken up with frustration...and curiosity. Had she really had some sort of fit in her sleep? She could recall nothing of the sort, and yet...undoubtedly something had happened last night, and with her body as sore as it was, with strange bruises littering her ribs and back...she could not imagine she had only slept. And what else could explain the lapse in her memory?

Unbidden, a shape like a nightmare went through her mind, so abruptly she stopped and gasped. Then, furiously, went ahead, forcing herself to feel the exhaustion and fear as anger and excitement.

"Don't let us fall behind again," she snapped.

 

[Peregrine]

Even though his plan to reinvigorate Kaya had worked as well as he could have hoped, it was obvious that she did not really have the energy to maintain it. He adopted a steady pace, just barely faster than the memory of the pace he had needed to set to stay ahead of the voider that had been approaching their camp, while Kaya bobbed in front of him, pushed by his relentless pace. They settled into a rhythm. Kaya would put on a burst of speed, slowly but steadily drawing ahead of him, as though in an attempt to prove that she could move just as fast as him, if not faster. However, with every step she would begin to slow, until the extra distance she had put between them was once more lost, and he began to gain on her. She would not notice that her pace had slowed until he was right behind her, nearly running into her, and then she would force another burst of speed. He longed to stop, to allow her the rest she so obviously needed, but he somehow knew that they were not yet out of range of these unnatural voiders. They had to keep moving.

He kept them moving right through the heat of the day, giving Kaya barely enough time to stop and drink water. When they made it out of this area, they would stop and rest for several days, which would hopefully give her the time she would inevitably need to recover from such a strenuous haul. Their pace did not alter one bit until midday, when he suddenly lunged towards Kaya, obviously alarmed. He scooped Kaya up, pack and all, without any warning, before turning on a dime and racing off in a completely different direction. He could feel another voider in front of him, drawing him in, and the one behind them could not be that far off. If they did not hurry and get around the edge of the one in front of them, they would end up trapped between the two, and forced to enter one. He could not allow that to happen.

The voiders grew closer and closer together. It was one of the most uncomfortable sensations he had ever experienced, being pulled in two different directions at once, and it only grew worse the closer together the two grew. Figments began to appear at the edges of his vision, ghosts and misshapen forms that lunged out of the darkness at his heels. Only a short moment later, he felt Kaya begin to shake in his arms. It was not a tremble of fear, but rather a spasmodic lurching, similar, although smaller in scale, to the contractions she had suffered last night. He could do nothing but hold her tighter and hope her seizure would fade soon.

He made it around the edge of the second voider with only a couple minutes to spare. While he knew that he had time time to have made a mistake and still have recovered, it set his teeth on edge to know how close it had still been. He did not set Kaya down, even though her tremors had faded. They had to keep moving. Only when she began to struggle in his arms, not out of any sort of fit but in a desperate demand to be put down, did he release her.

He pushed them well past the edge of sunset, until it was too dark to see where they were walking. Only then did he allow them to come to a stop. They still hadn't made it out. It would be another restless night.

 

[DotCom]

Strangely enough, there was relief when they finally found the voider -- or rather, Kaya realized later, when the voider found them.

A large part of it was simply desperation. For maybe an hour, Kaya maintained a practiced, if somewhat forced, air of indignant frustration. But even that much was hard one, and she soon found herself longing for the too-often breaks their journey had begun with. Exhaustion gave way to soreness, then cramping, then headaches and nausea as the day went on. She hadn't had an appetite in days, but the heat leeched moisture from her body like so much steam evaporating into nothingness, and it wasn't long before the pack, and then her feet, and then even her eyelids felt too heavy to lift.

When they broke, all too briefly, at midday, Kaya sat abruptly, convinced not even his taunting could convince her to move. Frustration had ceased to mean anything. What she wanted now, all she could ever remember wanting, was sleep. She'd been sitting less than a minute when she found herself being roughly woken again, hauled to her feet to prevent the same from happening as he shoved a canteen into her hands and forced her to drink. She did so, lazily, eyes shut, and would have dropped off again if he hadn't pushed her to start walking once more.

By the time the voider came upon them, Kaya no longer felt anything, and indeed, she seemed to be watching their inexorable journey forward from some vantage point she could neither see nor understand, as though she'd been removed from her body for the sole purpose of watching it give out. She was not the same person who had left Crolis. Her brown skin was several shades dark, her brown hair lighter by the same scale. The bandage around one hand was the same color as the sand around them, save for the ugly mass of rusty brown that sat on her palm. The edges of flesh beneath were a striking pink. She had lost weight, her once athletic frame now closer to wiry, too brittle to be lithe. But the change that stuck out to her had less to do with her physical appearance than she'd have anticipated. She would not have guessed you could see something like hopelessness. But it was there.

The girl in the desert was dragging her feet, seeming to stay upright by a series of invisible and rapidly weakening puppet strings. Her eyes were nearly closed and her boots dug deep troughs in the sand. She would stumble every few steps and each time come closer and closer to falling. If she did not lose her balance on her own, the pack would tip her over the next time around. Then, abruptly, she stopped, a faint frown crossing her face. She appeared to taste the air, as if searching for something she couldn't see.

In that same instant, the behemoth behind her, leapt forward and grabbed her; she seemed almost to collapse into his arms, and Kaya would have guessed even the few moments off her feet was enough to send her to the other side of consciousness. Just before the pair disappeared from view altogether, Kaya saw the girl frown and turn to look directly at her. Then the tremors began and she remembered nothing else.

Kaya wasn't sure how long she'd been awake before he set her down, but she was getting used to that. The memory loss, the...spasms, the strange sensation of floating outside of herself. All of it, she was sure, had come with the voiders. She wanted to put together the pieces, finish the puzzle, solve the problem, all those things she had been good at once upon a time.

But it was all she could do to keep her eyes open, and she did not trust herself to stay awake so long as she was allowed the respite of being carried. Her pride could not take another blow.

She wrestled her way to the ground without a word, quite beyond them for the moment, and fought to keep her knees from buckling under her own weight. She could not hope to achieve the pace they had managed before the voider, and this time, when the sun set around them and he kept walking, Kaya held her breath to keep from screaming or crying, squeezing her wounded hand hard, hoping the pain would keep her awake.

She felt nothing.

When at last he did stop, it was not abrupt or hurried. He wasn't running, and he wasn't demanding anything from her, and had she the energy, she might have sobbed with relief. Instead, she continued only several paces past him, having not noticed he had stopped until she stumbled for the tenth time in as many minutes. She started to get to her feet without a word, then noticed, as she opened her eyes, that he wasn't in front of her. A bolt of panic went through her and she sat up, heart racing with an adrenaline she didn't realize she still had the energy for.

When she finally located him a moment later, she stared at him long and hard, eyelids fluttering. She let herself ease back onto the sand, curled on her side like a cat. She didn't bother taking the path off. She was too tired. She was nearly asleep in all of about twenty seconds when her eyes fluttered open again, half focused on the figure in the dark. She needed to sleep. Through the night and probably through the next day. But...

"I..." she started, then stopped, coughed and winced. Her tongue tasted of blood and bile. "I need you to prove that you're real. Okay?" She felt herself dropping off again and shook her head a little. "It's...for your bonus."

 

[Peregrine]

He stared at her for a moment, dark eyes soft behind their partial covering of ragged bandages. In some ways, it was so very Kaya. Even in this state of weakness, even in a place where she was so incoherent that she could barely even keep her eyes open long enough to finish a sentence, she still wasn't willing to admit to any trace of weakness or kindness. It was for the bonus. Of course it was. She couldn't go giving her precious money, even if she still had any, to some figment of her imagination.

All the same, he knew the truth behind the traces of bitterness her comment brought in him. He knew the toll the past day had worn on her, had seen it in every step she took, had felt it as she had quaked against his chest as he ran. He knew she was dancing on the edge between sanity and madness, and looking to grab onto anything that might provide comfort. This time it had not been her pack, her plans for the future. This time it was to be him. He was to be her stability. It was almost unexpected. He wondered if she would even remember saying that in the morning.

All the same, he could not bring himself to leave her there like that, even though she was already asleep, even though she would never know whether or not he had obliged to her request. He stood, moving over to where she lay, and sat down above her head. He gently drew her, head and shoulders, upon his lap, before running his massive hands over her head. Her hair had been silky when they had started this trip, smooth and glossy from attentive care. For a time she had managed to keep it in that state as they had traveled, but now it resembled nothing so much as a rat's nest. He wondered if she would be able to untangle it, or if she would end up having to hack it off when she got back to civilization.

He stayed like that for many minutes, but finally he moved himself back out from under her, and lay himself down near her. He, too, had to try and get some sleep before the voider caught back up to them.

There was no telling what time it was when Kaya's arm suddenly lashed out, striking him in the face. He sat up wildly, prepared to fight off whatever beast had drawn near, only to see Kaya once more twitching on the sand. It was only then that he felt the twisting, tugging sensation in his gut. He had slept too long, let the voider get too close. They had to move again.

Without another word he scooped Kaya up from the sand, cradling her in his arms like a child, and set off running.

 

[DotCom]

She had felt it coming. She had hated it, been both desperately afraid, and desperately angry, had been utterly helpless to stop it coming, but she had known it was coming, and it was enough.

It had started as a sinking feeling, as if she were mid fall, the feeling she had (mis)interpreted as fear and panic the night before. It was enough to wake her from her coma-like slumber, that feeling that her stomach was rising into her chest, and if she had time to be surprised that her guide was lying so close, she wouldn't recall in the morning. She'd woken, one hand pressed over her belly, sleepy and confused, looking around for what had woken her. When her eyes found what she'd been unconsciously searching for since the night of the first voider, she froze and blinked stupidly. She could feel herself falling or rising out of her body, could feel her body going numb as her left arm started to seize and twitch. She could think nothing except that she hoped, would give anything to remember this in the morning.

She spoke without meaning to: "…Adi?"

Then the darkness had swept over her, and there was nothing until dawn.

The next day was simultaneously better and worse. She was groggy still when he woke her, too much to complain or do anything but stare dumbly when he tried to hand her her pack. He kept up his relentless pace, and this time not even his taciturn provocation could stir her to move faster. When they paused during the hottest part of the day – if their break could even be called that – he'd nearly had to force her to drink; she threw it all up not an hour later. There was no part of her body not littered in bruises, and even the pack seemed more trouble than it was worth for a short time.

But she had something else, finally, to occupy her mind. Her thoughts were slow and sluggish, frustratingly vague, soft as clouds and twice as likely to float away. It only made her more determined to figure out these fits she was having when the voiders drew too near. How close did they have to be before she felt anything? Why could she remember nothing of the fits, and nothing for several hours after? And how could she prevent them from happening? She thought she was beginning to recognize when they would occur, though that was difficult, because memories from before were hazy. Or so she'd thought. She could remember strange dreams whenever she woke, nightmares shapes in fever-bright colors.

And Addison. Last night, she had seen her little sister, she was almost sure of it. Had that been a dream? A side effect of the seizures? Exhaustion? Or something else?

It was all of it a mystery, and Kaya had never been satisfied with not knowing the answer.

 

[Peregrine]

He had granted himself the foolish optimism of believing they'd make it out. Even as the voiders seemed to draw closer and closer together, even as Kaya's strength, and his own if he was being honest, waned further and further, he convinced himself that they would make it out without having to enter one of the voiders. It was foolishness, and if he had been alone in the desert, not having to worry about someone else's safety, he would have realized it long ago and started looking, not for a means of escape, but for a relatively peaceable voider that he might be able to enter and survive. If he failed, if it proved too dangerous, he would be responsible for no one's death but his own. Kaya changed all that. He pressed on, desperate to make it out of an anomalous pocket when he didn't know where the edges were, or if it even had edges. It was stupid, foolish optimism, but he didn't realize that until it was too late.

It was as though the voiders had lured him right into a trap. They had started slowing down, and it had been easier and easier to race ahead of them. He thought he was drawing close to the edge, and for that reason he ignored the fact that he was starting to have to alter their path more and more because he was running into a second, or even a third, voider. But they were slowing down, so there were times that he wouldn't even have had to pick up Kaya and carry her away, if it wasn't for the fact that she would go utterly vacant or start to twitch whenever they drew too close to the edge. He thought they were almost out, and, who knew, maybe they were. But they wouldn't be making it out.

He had allowed them the luxury of a short midday rest, had made sure Kaya drank some water and ate some of the tough meat of the inside of a cactus, when he felt the voider drawing close. He got them up and moving again. The second one appeared an hour later. No matter. He changed their course, touching Kaya lightly on the shoulder to guide her feet in a new direction. The third appeared after another twenty minutes of walking. He felt his heart begin to beat faster, but forced himself to remain calm. It was fine. This had happened before. The voiders were moving slower still than they had for the past couple days. It was still fast, but now it felt almost manageable. He stopped Kaya with one large hand, before kneeling down, getting her to climb on his back. They would simply have to backtrack, and get around one of them from the other side.

When the fourth voider appeared in front of him, it felt like his gut dropped away from inside of him. He spun around, starting to move again, trying to convince himself that he had gotten turned around, that the heat and the lack of food and water had finally gotten to him and he had lost his sense of direction

Foolish, stupid hopes.

They were trapped. There was no denying it. And now, rather than finding a relatively safe voider where they would be able to rest for a time, he was going to have to pin his hopes on one of these four. One of them had to be safe. It had to.

He began to walk towards one of them, keeping his eyes out for anything that would give a hint as to what was inside, even as he felt Kaya go limp on his back. He watched as the sand turned to dust turned to ash, and he glanced up as the shadow of a bird passed over him. A massive eye stared out from the middle of its chest, bloodshot and full of rage. Not this one. The second one was a place of mist and whispers, which promised sweet things that he could barely understand. He felt himself take a staggering step forward, almost tipping over the edge, before he caught himself. Not that one. In the third, a mass of writhing black needles lunged out from shadowy recesses within stone walls, nearly running straight through his shoulder. Only instinct saved him from the blow, and he turned and fled the place. Definitely not that one. In the fourth, he saw a trace of green peek out from between two rocks. Green. Plants. As he got deeper, the plant life grew more and more dense, and the air grew rich and heavy with moisture. There were small signs of animal life, and the plants seemed still and benign. This one. This one was safe. Yet still he felt himself hesitate, felt some unknown thing inside him cry out in desperate fear of entering that place. He had no choice. The voiders were growing closer together. Around him the shadow of the bird grew, and silvery voices whispered in his ear. He took a deep breath, holding tight to Kaya's legs, and plunged into a world of dense vegetation and hot, humid air.

He set Kaya down gently once he found a reasonable clearing within the dense plant life. She was still unconscious, and he sat down next to her, willing, for once, to let her sleep. The jungle hummed quietly with life, and somewhere nearby he heard the sound of running water. Luck had favored them. They would be able to recover here, and wait for the voider to drift far away from that place of such anomalies. There was no telling where they would be in reference to Riven when they finally found a safe place to emerge, but at least they would be alive, and they would be able to find their way to a city. Once Kaya was awake he would carry her to the water, and then go out and see about finding them some good food.

A sudden, horrible scream ripped through the still air, hot with lust and hungry for blood, and Kaya's guide felt his blood suddenly go icy. His breath caught in his throat, and a faint moan escaped his lips. No. Not here. Anywhere but here. Better the place of whispering voices, promising sweet, deadly lies than here. Better the place of black needles that would tear his body to shreds than here. He could not be here.

Another scream. Echoed by another, and another. He felt a scream building within his own throat, hot and primal, and when it emerged it was near impossible to distinguish it from the screams of the creatures that filled these dense woods. Every thought left his mind, except for a burning hot desire that filled his chest to the brim and left him panting, desperate for the taste of sweet, sticky blood. Blood. He smelled it near him, rich with fear and suffering. He clawed desperately at the strange rags that covered his body, desperate to remove the things that restricted his motion, all the while turning around to face the smell of blood, flesh, and sweat.

No. No. Not that. It was blood and hot flesh, but he would not... could not eat that. Not that. Anything but that. He screamed in frustration, scratching at the dirt and throwing aside the things on his body in utter torment. Not that. Not that. With another scream he turned, and fled into the woods, swallowed up after only a second by the dark, savage foliage.

 

[DotCom]

She remembered the guilty relief of clambering onto his back. The last few days had been hellish, but Kaya was not so optimistic as to believe he might have been unaffected by long, hot, tired days, several without food or sleep. She felt as though she spent most of her time sleeping or unconcious, and still she could not seem to shake this fatigue from her shoulders. Whatever he was, for it was beyond clear he was not entirely human -- these last few days in the desert had shown her that much, in their own way -- neither was he beyond exhaustion.

Not that it mattered, of course. He was being paid to see her from this place, and she could not hope to better her situation by lamenting his. Still. She recalled, vaguely, feeling she ought to say something as he stooped for her to climb atop his shoulders. But Kaya hadn't been able to settle for more than a minute at a time without drifting off since they'd entered this dangerous new place, and this was no different. She remembered blinking dumbly at him, obliging, as had become custom, without a word, then watching the desert fade to darkness, one cheek pressed against his neck.

Kaya had also grown used to waking up with no memory of what she'd been doing last, or, in most cases having fallen asleep at all. That made this occassion no less harrowing, and certainly no less frustrating. That she could only half remembering having seen Adi before she'd gone under didn't mean much. It was not her first time having fallen into one of her episodes while fast asleep, and she was certain now she could safely say it would not be her last.

What was unusual, though, was her method of waking. The last several days, it had been to rough and repeated shaking, or more accurately, the strange sensation of being drawn to her feet while still half asleep. Her guide would remain at her side, gently prodding her into action, until he was sure she could follow on her own, that she would not simply curl up in the sand again. It was a strange custom, but it was virtually the only one she'd been able to establish since the strangeness had started in earnest, and so it was vital.

This was not that. At first, she could not say what had woken her. Even when the carnal scream sounded a second, then third time, she wasn't aware of having woken, or what had woken her at all. The screaming might have been going on for several seconds before Kaya opened her eyes, frowning. She was used to not knowing where she was, or who she was, or what time of day it was, or how long she had been asleep. She was used to feeling weak, shaky, cold, confused.

She was not used to waking without his admittedly comforting presence beside her, the one constant in the last few weeks. And she was not used to the screaming.

As the sound came again -- closer, she realized vaguely -- Kaya sat bolt upright, more alert than she had been in days.

She was not in the desert. She was not in any place she'd ever seen before, didn't know how to describe what was happening around her, and would not, even had she the words to do so. The air felt sticky, almost heavy around her, nearly smothering with its closeness. Everywhere, the sky was pockmarked with unfamiliar trees, tall, sweeping lush things that hung with strange fruit. She felt something move over a hand and looked down to see what looked like a snake, only much, much brighter than the brown ones she'd seen all her life. Everything tasted, smelled sweet.

And Kaya was terrified.

Even before the next scream came, she knew something was wrong. These were not the wastes. This was nowhere near the desert, nowhere near Crolis or Riven or anything in between. And worse, this was nowhere near her guide. Had they gotten separated? She had virtually no memories of having gotten close enough to the voiders to see anything, so she didn't know whether it was possible that she could have fallen into one and he another. It was entirely possible it didn't matter. Could she find him before she lost herself here? Could he find her? Could either of them find another voider, find their way back to the relative safety of the wastes? If Kaya drew near to one on her own, she would be useless, and the thought that salvation could be so close and yet literally unreachable...

Her heart in her throat, Kaya started to stand, stumbled, wrenched the pack from her shoulders, and tried again. The screaming continued all around her, seeming to echo and then weigh more heavily on her than the sticky, fragrant air itself. Her hands were shaking, and her mouth had gone bone-dry, an odd juxtaposition compared to the cold sweat that now drenched her.

She had to move. She did not know this place, but she knew it was unsafe to be out in the open like this, alone, exposed. She ought to find high ground somewhere, from there she could at least begin to get her bearings, she could --

Something snapped behind her, a twig or branch. It was a sound she knew, intellectually, would not even have occurred to her if she'd been in any other state of mind. But here, now, dancing along a razor blade of nervous, terrified energy, it sounded like thunder in her ears.

Without turning, without thinking, she dropped to her knees, fumbling through her pack for her knife, then, on second thought, one of the new pistol prototypes she'd packed. She didn't know if it was loaded, if she had the rounds, or if she'd lost them in the storm, or even if the stupid thing was made to fire. But she'd been filled with a rising sense of dejá vu, and she refused to find herself helpless again.

Her fingers had just closed around the cold barrel of the gun when she felt something cold break the line of sweat on her neck.

 

[Peregrine]

The denizens of these woods were not normally silent. Normally it was possible to hear them coming from far away, and therefore avoid the inevitable bloody fate that would be waiting in their jaws. But when the smell of Kaya on the breeze reached them, the howls and shrieks suddenly cut off, to be replaced by a silent, desperate panting. Something exotic had entered their forest, something that they could no longer recognize through the haze of their mind, but which sent bursts of craving instinct racing through their bodies. As one, they turned and moved in, with barely more than a rustle of leaves to mark their progress.

Trigger Warning: Near Rape

The lickers surrounded Kaya's clearing, cutting off any route of escape in an unexpected burst of intelligence, before moving in as one. One hissed slightly in irritation as a bright ray of sunlight slashed its way through the forest, revealing a short, crude form, covered in skin like hard, red leather, and a bulbous, malformed head with nothing on it but a massive, jagged slash of a mouth and a long, ropy tongue that reached out far into the air, desperately seeking in the direction of the woman.

When they entered the clearing the panic filling the air became almost tangible, and it was like sweet syrup to the swarming creatures. From the shadows of their gut another limb unfolded, hot and hard in response to their desperate need. The gun went off, striking one of the lickers in the shoulder. The bullet seemed to leave barely a mark on the tough skin, but it did stagger the thing, and a trickle of tar-black blood oozed down its shoulder. The gun did not get to go off again. One of the tongues lashed out, circling around her hand and tugging viciously, dropping her to the ground. The gun clattered to the earth from her limp fingers, as the sticky goo on the creatures tongue sunk into her skin and weakened Kaya's control of her own fingers.

Other tongues flew forward in a mirror of the first, and the hands followed only moments later, thin and bony, with long claws designed for slicing open flesh in a single blow.

They pressed into her, rubbing against her, panting and licking her damp, sweaty skin. Greedy fingers grabbed at her clothes, tearing away the fabric, catching skin and opening small furrows. The smell of her blood seemed to only incense them further, and they did nothing to try and stop her screams or halt her wiggling as the moisture from their tongues slowly paralyzed her body. Rather, they enjoyed it, poking and prodding, rubbing a licking, seeming to grow more and more lustful with every moment that passed.

Only when Kaya was completely still on the ground did they release her, leaving her folded limply on the ground. Then they turned to each other for just a moment, snapping and biting, growling and hissing, before the others retreated slightly, moving towards Kaya, grabbing her hands and legs and drawing her out, spreadeagled, across the forest floor. The massive licker moved forward, tongue waggling as he panted, pawing with one hand at his own groin as his other reached for the woman.

From the shadows of the trees another vicious shriek arrived, but rather than being pressed forward with enthusiasm by the arrival of another companion, the lickers seemed to hesitate. One of them even released Kaya, turning to the woods, wicked teeth gnashing and a warning, guttural bay emerging from between its fleshless lips. The creature that was drawing closer at near reckless speed, crashing through the forest without heed to what knew it was coming. Something emerged from the forest, twice again the size of even the largest of the lickers, legs elongated and not able to fit comfortably under the thing's body. But it still had the same muscle-red flesh, and the same jagged maw that seemed to rip its way across the entirety of its face. From the top of its head a wild, tangled mane of familiar raven-black hair tumbled down to its shoulders.

He had heard Kaya's screams from somewhere far off. They had brought him to a halt, something confused and protective building up within his own chest. He knew the rest of the lickers were in that direction, longed to flee the other way, to keep running until he found the edge and was able to slip back out into the wastes he barely remembered, longed to flee the harsh, bloody memories of this place and the creatures that dwelt within it, yet he found himself turning around, moving back the other way. At first it was hesitant, barely more than a couple faltering steps, but the longer he moved the faster he found himself moving, until he was racing through the forest at a breakneck speed, dodging trees and bushes by near instinct, gripped with a base need to reach the clearing before it was too late.

He saw her in the middle of the clearing, naked form nearly buried under the forms of the lickers. Her eyes met his, and he looked at her for a moment. Her eyes were hazy and wet with the tears that streaked the side of her face.

It was like a memory from his imagination, something he had never seen but he knew had to have existed at one time. He had never heard her speak of it, had never heard her say a single word as she followed the lickers mutely, silently succumbing whenever they approached her. He had never heard her say a single word until the day she had finally found a fragment of knife-sharp stone and torn out her own throat, but he knew that it had to have happened just like this to the woman with the dead eyes who had born him. But Kaya's eyes, they were still alive, still hot with panic, desperation, and a futile hope that salvation would fall from the sky and deliver her from this situation.

Salvation might not have fallen from the sky, but it threw itself from the forest. The lickers abandoned their prize, scattering to the edges of the clearing. Their tongues lashes out and his hand moved by reflex, grabbing one the things, protected from the paralytic venom by the same thick skin that covered the lickers. He heaved, and the licker flew forward across the clearing, only for him to lunge at its throat, jagged teeth snapping together and piercing through the hide that had protected it from the blunt trauma of the bullet. The licker shrieked, a cry of pain and desperation utterly foreign to a forest where nothing touched the apex predator, scrabbling desperately with sharp talons that tore through his weaker hide. But he shrugged off the blows in the way that the lickers never could. They knew nothing of wounds, of pain, of bearing torment. He had known nothing else for the entirety his life, first at the hands of the lickers who had turned the pup in their midst into a chewtoy and plaything, batting him around between them, then the unthinking cruelty of the wastes, and finally at the hands of people who spent their whole lives working to develop better means of harming each other, and turned against anything they could not understand.

The sight of one of their comrades dead upon the ground was nearly sufficient to cause the other lickers to flee, but the paralysis was starting to wear away from Kaya, and her twitching gained their attention again. They growled their displeasure at being interrupted, before turning as one against him. He lashed out wildly, using his human size and strength against them, blocking out the pain as their claws and teeth sunk into his flesh, ripping away chunks, coating him in dark blood. He grabbed one in mid-leap, throwing it to the ground and caving in its skull with a foot. He grabbed another one by both arms and pulled with all his might, detaching one arm right from the shoulder. The licker collapsed to the ground, unable to move from the pain as it slowly bled out.

He didn't know how long he fought, how many wounds he suffered, how many lickers lay dying around him. He couldn't dare keep track of it all. All that mattered was that he had to keep fighting, had to keep them away from Kaya. If even one survived after he gave out, it would have all been for nothing. He couldn't even tell for several moments after the fight had ended, after it was all over.

It was impossible to tell what of the blood covering both him and the clearing was his own, and what belonged to the lickers. He knew, though, that more than some of it had to be his, because he could feel the dizziness in the back of his head, and could see the corners of his vision going dark. He dropped heavily to the ground, moaning slightly at the pain of his countless wounds as they struck the ground. He couldn't see Kaya anymore. Where had she gone? Where was it all going? The forest had vanished from around him, leaving him in nothing but an infinitely dark void. He was drifting, floating further and further away.

Come back...

 

[DotCom]

These were the things that had to be done:

They needed to build a shelter. Kaya had seen that much the moment she returned to the clearing, face tear-streaked and set in a grim mask of determination, no other thought in her mind save for the to-do list she had been building. She'd stopped there at the edge -- and it had nothing to do, she reminded herself -- with the sticky-cold puddle of dark blood she'd put her bare foot into -- and frozen, just a moment, just to take it all in. Kaya was nothing if not efficient, and there were things to be done. She'd looked around, seen countless corpses, his -- his? -- among them, and known there was work to be done, and he wouldn't be doing any of it.

That was alright. He --

had come racing out of the forest like shadow torn from a nightmare, and she had known, known it was him the moment she saw him. Had she really been traveling with one of these creatures the whole time? And he had never...or had he? Or had he meant to? She had hoped, wished for him, and now he was back, bearing down on her, nearly on top of her and he

-- wasn't being paid for this bit, anyway.

So, she had to clear some sort of shelter, raise something against the night, against the humidity, maybe build a fire. That much, at least, she could do.

Then again, she'd said that before.

They needed to find food and water. Kaya wasn't feeling particularly hungry herself. She wasn't feeling much of anything, except a bone-deep need to keep moving, keep doing, because she had to. Because if she didn't, she might have time to stop and think. Because if she stopped, even for a second, even just for a minute, to rest, to breathe, to make sure he, it was still alive, she might --

never scream again if she had any voice left at all. They had been on her, all over her, squirming like maggots, slick with sweat or saliva or neither or both, writhing with short, hot, hard bodies -- and she couldn't scream anymore because how had she let this happen again how could it be happening again how was she in this place again helpless hopeless trying to fade

-- fall asleep, and there was no time for that. They were already far behind schedule, and this little detour wasn't helping anything. She needed to put things back on track. She needed to get to Riven.

She needed to find food and water. She remembered that much from her first run in with him, back in Crolis. Food and a few days' rest would set him right. She would have to dock the extra time from his bonus, but he was reasonable. He would understand. And afterwards, they would be able to move that much faster. That was good, because Kaya had things to do. She had plans. She had to keep living.

She tried to make herself believe that.

Shelter. Food. Water.

Space. They needed space. He needed to rest, to recover, and she needed...she needed something to do. And she needed to stay nearby. Near as she could bear. This was where he had brought them, so this was where she would stay. But the bodies, the half dozen or more red leather corpses --

like gazing into an abyss if that abyss was lined with teeth, dripping spit that burned and froze until even the screaming didn't matter. Like she was staring into a night sky where the sky was hot and wet and pressing down on her hard. Her clothes were gone. She couldn't move but she could feel that, could feel them spreading her legs, would be able to feel them, each and every one of them pressed close, close, closer still, taking and heaving and grunting until there was nothing left of her she had been stupid to think it to think there was nothing left she could lose she had tempted fate and now she would lose everything

-- those would need to go.

There was a sudden sound, sharp as a knife as it pierced the cold quiet. A cry almost. Somewhere between a moan and a yelp, a prolonged whimper of pain, vaguely catlike. Something dying?

It took her a long moment to realize the sound had been her.

They needed shelter, a fire. Food and water. A cleared clearing.

It felt good to have something to do. It would have felt good, if she could feel anything at all, if she could wait, stop, breathe, scream --

He hadn't touched her, had hardly even looked at her, maybe didn't see her. Maybe he was saving her. Or maybe he was saving her for himself. She didn't, couldn't wait to see. She was crying, then screaming, then wiggling her toes, and then she was up and running, away from the leathery things, away from the wastes, away from the storm and her dead horse and her lost pride and him. she fell, once, twice, a third time and went sprawling. blood on her elbows, knees, legs, hands. spit and other bodily fluids on her neck shoulders face. she looked down at herself in horror, disgust, tried to scream again, couldn't. wanted to be clean. now. as clean as she could be as soon as she could be. raised a hand and dropped it and drew blood and did it again

-- shelter. Food. Water. Space. What else?

Time. Rest. They both needed that, even she could see. She would go back and wait for him. He was her guide, he was her only key to Riven. She would see to it that he stayed alive. He owed her a trip back yet. His bonus was not all gone. He still had something to try for. Something to live for.

She...she had plans. If she had lost everything else, she would not lose in this.

It was nearing dawn by the time she was finished. She wore only the tattered remains of the tunic she'd been able to find. It did nothing to ease the fevered shivers that racked her body, but she didn't mind. They kept her awake. For the rest, she dug into her pack and tore her blanket into wide strips. One of these she wrapped around her bare hips. Another around her thigh. The rest she used to bundle an assortment of bright, oddly colored fruit, wondering idly whether anything here would try to kill her. Or maybe just to break her. Wondering whether it was worth the risk, or if there was a risk at all.

She filled a canteen without looking at herself in the river's dark reflection. She left it, the fruit, the strips of blanket there in the clearing. She left the bodies in the dark at the edge of the trees.

She did all of this, and then she went back to the river. She climbed in, sat until the cold burned, drank until her belly swelled and she was sick. Rid of the red forest creatures inside and out. Hidden from the one she had left behind.

She could not be there when he woke. She did not want to see what he was.

She did not want him to see what she had become.

 

[Peregrine]

He had never been afraid of the edge in the way the others had. It floated before his eyes now, elusive and mysterious, a line of absolute power that even the branches of the thick jungle trees dared not cross. By this point, he knew the entire world that existed within that edge, had wandered past every tree, bush, and blade of grass at least a hundred times. He knew every type of plant and animal, knew what they all tasted like. Once upon a time the known world had seemed impossibly large, a place of infinite bounty that would never grow old or tiring. Now he knew better. Any limited space would eventually grow confining, no matter how large it had seemed at the beginning.

The lickers hated it when he went near the edge. Whenever he wandered too close they would lunge out to grab him, sinking wicked sharp teeth into his shoulder to drag him back, before turning the entire group away from such a dangerous location. The lickers knew instinctively that it meant death to cross the edge. They held no curiosity for what was beyond it. But the curiosity burned inside him, and it seemed to grow stronger with every passing day. The lickers would have none of it. There was no way they were releasing their little plaything, even if he was now almost as large as they were. It seemed that having something always accessible to abuse was something too sweet for them to ever dare to resist.

They swarmed around him now, tongues lolling, holding him down with clawed hands before lifting him into the air and tossing him from licker to licker like a ball. He was so small again, small enough to stick his head whole into one of their leering mouths. Only the vacant-eyed, soft-skinned lady had any sympathy for him. She would pick him up after the lickers were done with him, pull him aside and use large, soft leaves to clean his wounds. She could never look him in the eyes. Always they would be drifting away from his face, as though something there caused her physical pain. He had, at times, longed to comfort her, and he reached out and touched her face as she gently picked him up, wiping a tear away from the side of her face with one rough finger. The lickers might have treated him like a toy, but they treated her like an animal, herding her from place to place, never letting her out of their sight. Unlike him, the lickers did not bite or scratch her, or at least not seriously. She was too fragile for that. But whenever she got out of control their long tongues would fly out, wrapping around her naked form until she fell limply to the ground. There was no escape for either of them.

The edge had gotten closer, or perhaps he had simply gotten larger. It was hard to tell, when the trees were all so tall and the clear, cloudless sky was so far away. It felt like the edge was calling him, drawing him forward with a burning in his chest, a desperate longing to know what lay beyond the edge of the world. Because something had to be there. Didn't it? Where else could the lady have come from? She certainly hadn't come from here. He didn't care that the lickers thought there was nothing beyond that edge, that crossing it meant death. Maybe, if he was quiet, they wouldn't notice him creeping forwards. He took a step, slow and hesitant. before tensing, waiting for the feel of sharp fans sinking into his shoulder, arm, or leg, to drag him away from that abyssal edge. Nothing came. He took another step, waited.

The edge floated before his nose, and he could see things on the other side. He could see a world o dry harshness, far below his feet. He stepped back, fearing that plunge to hard sand and earth, before glancing over his shoulder, looking for the lickers. There was none in sight, simply a red stain on the ground, and the taste of blood in his mouth. His back stung, almost as though he had been bit, but there was nothing there. He took a step forward. The ground had drawn closer. He waited in silent, tense and fearful, for the lickers to return, but there was nothing in those woods. When at last the ground was jumping distance away, he stepped over the edge.

Hot air, painful in its dryness, struck his lungs, sending him staggering. He could feel the edge behind him, trying to draw him back in, and for a moment he turned around, racing back, watching as the familiar sight of the trees began to surround him. He could feel the tugging, the desperate longing of the edge to put him back where he belonged, but just before he tipped back over the edge he hesitated. He could hear the panting of the lickers, and the crying of the woman. He could feel the sharp claws digging into his back, and the desperate pain that each breath brought. There was nothing waiting for him in those woods but torment. The edge reached out for him, longing to grab him, but he turned and fled, putting all of his power into racing away from it. The edge let him go. He slumped to the ground, panting from the heat and the exhaustion as the hard grains of sand rubbed against his skin.

Was he free? If he was free, why couldn't he move? Why did the sand seem to be getting darker, spreading with a dampness of tar-black blood, thick as oil. Why did every part of his body hurt?

If he was free, where was Kaya?

 

[DotCom]

She didn't know how long she stood there in perfect silence, towering over him for once, as she trembled with cold or something else. She did not know how long, either, she had spent by the river, waiting to sleep or to die, waiting for the things from the forest to come back. The water that dripped from her hair was dirty, leaving flesh-colored streaks down her back and shoulders caked with sand and sweat. The water that dripped from her impromptu loin cloth ran red down one leg. She folded her arms across her belly on instinct, felt her flesh rise and prickle in the cold.

He hadn't moved. He hadn't moved, and looking at him, she knew he wouldn't move without her help, and that alone was near enough to undo her. All at once, she was pinned again, lost, alone in some place like a world she'd never seen, and not caring at all, because there were bodies, all over and around her, foreign as the world that had made them, thronging like maggots or locusts or rats. Only these pests were intent on something else, she knew that even before she felt her body start to go numb, even before the largest one stepped forward, bared to her like some great, dark beast. If she hadn't been screaming before, she had started then, her desperate, panicked fighting back -- she had told herself, promised herself this would not happen again; she had trained for it, had killed lesser men for even dreaming of it -- ceding to frantic bargains, then pleas, then wordless screams. She felt helpless and furious all at once, and then, when she finally realized she no longer had control over her body, she had tried to leave, to fade away again, and if it ended in her death, so be it.

She'd thought he had saved her from that, but standing over his prone figure, the slow realization that she would not be escaping this place unless she touched him, unless she moved close enough for him to touch her...she knew she had never really left the desert at all. Not since that day all those years ago. She had lost herself then and vowed never to allow her perfect control fall away again.

And she had failed.

She had failed in reaching Riven. She had failed in securing her hard-won (stolen) goods. She had failed in her perfect trip through the sands. She had failed every time they had gotten too close to a voider, and now she had failed in crawling through one. How could she have ever thought she was strong enough to exert her will over anything, let alone herself? She was still no better than that girl who had been dragged out of the desert all those years ago. She was nothing more than the frightened, shivering lump of a pathetic child who had begged for her life nightly to no avail. She had painted a pretty picture these past years in Crolis. She had lied so well, grown so hard, she had even fooled herself.

And a moment in these woods had undone it all. She was not making it to Riven. Not without help. And this was help she could not accept.

She stared down at him, her face, her stance, her entire body betraying nothing of the chaos inside, save for a small whimper caught in the back of her throat, struggling against a tide of fear and self-loathing.

He had brought her this far, and she no longer had the funds to pay him, doubted she ever would. Could not believe she had ever thought there might be. Whatever he was, he had held up his end of the bargain as best he could, and so she could not let him die. As she stepped nearer, her mind filled with visions of him -- throwing himself from the forest, bare to her like the leader had been, for once freed of the dirty rags he had worn -- the similarity had driven her nearly beyond panic at first, thinking he was coming to join them. Even after, when he began to pull them off of her, she watched, frozen, terrified, trying to will herself away -- failing -- convinced that once the predators were dead she would fall prey to a thing she had nearly learned to trust.

What would happen when she made him well enough to fend for himself again? She could not think of that now. She doubted she would be much around for it, anyway. Not if she had anything to say about it.

Now, she had one last debt to pay. Kaya had lost confidence in herself. There were many, so many, utter failures in her life. She would not have these last two follow suit. She would see him out of this place.

And then she would see herself somewhere much, much darker.

--

Once she had decided that she was going to save him, the process was easy. She had always done best when she had a task, a goal, and, at least where this old, false Kaya was concerned, she was not to be turned from her prize. Kneeling beside his body, she quickly and efficiently set aside the bandages she had made from her own clothes, almost fully suppressing the shudders when she touched them. She separated the cleanest from the dirtiest, then soaked those she wanted to use, before gathering the driest bits of wood she could find to build a fire and boil water.

She was neat and clean with it all, and it was not long before a pattern began to emerge: boil fresh water from the stream, soak a rag, gently wipe away the blood-like-tar from limbs she shivered to touch. Quell the rising of bile in her belly as she tied cleaner, drier strips of clothing around the worst of the wounds. Rinse the dirty rags; try not to notice that her fingers were dry and sticky with his blood, or the blood of the dead creatures. Try not to notice how alike they were. Walk back to the stream, trembling all the way, but quietly impassive besides. Fill her canteen. Watch her reflection in the water for a moment too long, then turn away from dark temptations before starting the process all over again.

It was getting light as she finished, sitting back, shivering and sore, covered to her elbows in black blood, but faintly proud of the job before her. The worst of bleeding had stopped, just as the worst of the wounds had been cleaned and covered. There was nothing to prevent against infection, but she could only do so much on that front. Her own hand twinged in a pleasant reminder of what waited in Riven. If she ever reached Riven. A new anxiety began to build in her chest. What now? She could not sit still any longer, she knew that. She had already retrieved a number of fruits. Did this world have other food to bear? Fish or fowl? She could find both, she was certain, if only because she had to. She was going to die here, she knew that. But it would not be alone.

 

[Peregrine]

A part of him hadn't expected to wake up. Even after everything that had happened to him in his life, all the things he had endured, all the wounds his body had sustained and from which he had subsequently recovered, a part of him still hadn't expected to wake back up. He'd felt it in that moment, when his legs had given out from underneath him, when the ground had rushed up to meet his heads, and had clung so tight to his limbs that he couldn't move them even an inch. He had known then that he was not going to be able to stand back up. And if he couldn't stand back up, if he couldn't find food and bind his wounds together, even his blood wouldn't be able to prevent itself from leaking all over the ground and soaking into the earth until everything that should have been inside him instead watered the roots of the greedy jungle plants. He couldn't save himself, and no one was going to save him. Even if one of the lickers had survived, they would sooner eat him than save him. And Kaya... Kaya had fled. She was gone. That was all there was to it. She wasn't going to be saving him either.

Yet when the world began to resolve around him once more, when he began to feel the dappled sunlight on his skin and the cool earth under his back, he did not imagine that it was some afterlife that greeted him. Such thoughts would never have occurred to him. He knew, in the nature of all wild things, that it was necessary to fight so hard for life because there was nothing other than life. Which meant every faint sensation that came for his body, the tightness of fabric wound around his chest, arms, and legs, the feel of some small insect crawling across his face, the smell of dark earth and plants, was indisputable proof that he was still alive. Somehow, he was still alive.

It took a long time for him to remember how to open his eyes, and even once he did for an indefinable amount of time he simply lay there, watching the sunlight that filtered through the emerald leaves, lighting them up from behind and making their veins stand out dark against that glow of life. He listened to the sounds of the small mammals that rustled among the greenery, free forever from the predation of the lickers, and the faint babble of a far-off stream. He breathed, quietly, feeling the pressure of the fabric wrapped around his chest and the faint burn that accompanied it.

When he finally stirred, the first thing he saw was a pile of ripe fruit, slightly soft from being left sitting on the ground for at least a day. It didn't matter to him. They could have been rotten, and he still would have eaten them, quickly and with relish. It was not enough food for him to completely heal from his wounds, but it was sufficient to allow him to not worry about falling asleep again while fearing he might never wake up. He was not concerned. He knew it had to have been Kaya who had brought the food. Kaya who had tended to his wounds. But where was she? Where had she gone?

Once the fruit she had brought was gone, skin, pit, seed, stem, and all, he sat down, intending to wait for her to return. Perhaps she had gone to find more food, knowing he would need it when he finally woke. Perhaps she had gone to the stream, to bathe herself clean. It would not have been a surprise. She deserved it, after so long in the desert without any proper form of water, and after what... after the lickers. Yet, as he waited, he found his eyes getting heavy, his body desperately crying out for the sleep it needed to heal. He longed to wait, but long before she returned he found himself laying down on the water-rich ground, eyes closed, and drifting back to sleep.

 

[DotCom]

The next three days passed in a blur. But this haze was in many ways distinct from the numbed apathy that had consumed her after the first seizure, and from the third, and the fifth.

Kaya had always hated routine. She found it tedious, almost dangerously mundane. Even the idea of casual repetion bored her nearly to madness. But for the first time in her life, she did not know what to do, and she was terribly, desperately afraid to stop. Stop moving, stop planning, stop fixing, stop doing. That much remained the same.

She spent her mornings searching for food. Mostly fruits and nuts, because both were plentiful enough that she need not fear running out of something to do, and because she had no desire to be near any living thing. Weeks, or even days ago, she'd have been well beyond boredom and frustration. The task of hunting out a new cluster of berries, of digging for a palatable root, of hauling herself up and down tall trees to carry away a thing she might not even be able to crack open...al seemed endless. The work was surprisingly difficult, though whether that was fatigue or lethargy, she couldn't guess. The idea that she had nowhere to start, hardly knew what she was looking for, would have been grating to say the least. Now, she found it almost pleasant. It kept her mind wandering, if not uncharacteristically quiet. Her bare feet gradually grew accustomed to the new terrain, be it soft moist earth, rough tree bark, or sometimes, the stony bottom of the stream nearby. Her fingers developed blisters that swelled, popped, bled, then stopped hurting altogether. She told herself she was getting stronger.

She knew it was a lie.

In the afternoons, after she had left new mounds of fruit and nuts and roots and whatever else she could find, she would wander, too restless to sit, too tired to get very far. She spent most of her time at the stream. After so long in the desert, the water seemed almost too much, daunting, even. She could spend long hours just staring into it. On the third morning, she went swimming, trying half-heartedly to grab at the small quick fish that loomed at the shallow edges of the stream. When one drifted away into deeper, darker, colder water, she followed without thinking and it was only when she found herself back on the shore, shivering and coughing wretchedly, that she realized what she wanted.

She did not go into the water anymore after that, though she spent even more time staring into the depths, her fingers trailing in the gentle wake.

When it grew dark, Kaya drifted back into the trees at the very edges of the clearing where he slept, as far from the dead and rotting bodies of his mutilated brethren as she could manage while still able to see where he was. She curled in the branches of the trees and watched until the darkness took her away. She never slept through the night. She did not want to sleep at all, but sometimes she could not keep her eyes open. On the second night, she woke to something large and heavy striking her, driving the air from her body, sending stars spiraling in her vision like small comets even as she struggled to pull breath back into her lungs. Her vision cleared and she made out tree branches over her head. The dead things lay on the other side of the clearing, his body in between.

Kaya pulled herself back into the tree so quickly, she did not feel any pain until she had been sitting there, breathless and trembling, for several moments. After that, she found heavy vines and lashed herself to the branches.

Most times, the nightmares woke her before she could fall again.

And so time passed. It was strange, this quiet vacation, after having had only Riven and her new business on her mind for so long. Both seemed impossibly far away now, something to ponder or imagine, never see. Like the dark side of the moon. She would hunt in the morning, swim -- or near enough -- in the afternoons. And every night, she would crawl as near to him as she could bear and watch until exhaustion took over. She drank only when the heat made her feel woozy. She ate even less. She checked his wounds morning and night, and if ever he stirred, she would bolt, real terror singing in her veins. One time, she imagined him awake, reaching for her. She turned to run, heart in her throat, and went sprawling when she felt his tongue wrap, vinelike, around her ankle. She screamed and scrambled blindly for a weapon, coming up with a rock which she smashed down on the offending appendage until he released her.

She spent that night by the stream, her ankle bloody and swollen, the last bits of vine having rubbed away under the stone she had left in the clearing.

Whatever part of the Kaya who had been still existed turned away in disgust.

 

[Peregrine]

Time passed in a half-coherent blur as his wounds healed. Whenever he woke enough to look around there would always be food, sweet, rich, perfectly ripe fruit, crisp plants and tender mushrooms, the fresh flesh of fish and small animals. It was food that would have been suitable for Kaya herself to eat, not the scraps of intestines and bugs he was used to subsisting on at this point. The high quality of the food did little in reality to help his healing process, but the thought certainly did. Kaya was taking good care of him. Even after what had happened to her. He was grateful.

He always tried to wait up for her after he was done eating. It bothered him that he had yet to actually see her since that moment, and he wished he could, if even for a moment, to thank her for what she was doing for him. Whenever he woke, the bandages were carefully cleaned of his thick, sticky blood, and the food and water he needed to heal would be right there. Yet she never returned in time before his body demanded sleep once more, and he always consoled himself with the thought that maybe, the next time he woke, she would be there. She never was. So he held his thoughts close to his heart, to offer to her later. How no one had ever seen him before and still decided it was worthwhile to care for him. How he was glad to have finally found someone who trusted him, despite this appearance. It was a relief to know that actions still meant more than impressions, even after she had learned that he was a child of the lickers.

He knew the moment he woke up fully, the moment when all his wounds were healed and he would be able to start caring for himself again. The knowledge was brought to him by a clarity of mind and moment that promised he was done with the healing sleep now. He stripped off the bandages, revealing nothing but his own dark, leathery skin, the scars invisible in the thick hide. He piled the bandages, which he now recognized as scraps of Kaya's clothes, into a neat stack, just in case she wanted them back. Or something. She still wasn't here.

For a moment he considered getting up and going to look for her. The voider of the lickers was a lush place, full of food and life, but it was quite small, just barely large enough to sustain everything that lived in it. It would not be too much work to track her down, not when he was so familiar with these woods. Instead, he moved across the clearing, away from the rotting forms of the lickers, partially digested by fungus, insects, and small carnivorous animals, to press his back against one of the large trees that encircled the clearing. He would wait for her, wait for her to complete whatever task she was doing and come back. It was only polite.

Then he would finally be able to thank her.

 

[DotCom]

In the hours before he woke, his sleep was not as still, not as deep as it had been, and Kaya, even as far gone as she was after days of maddening inaction, knew what was happening.

She had been watching him from her tree waiting for a sign she could sense more than see to make her daily rounds. Checking his pulse, checking his bandages, checking his wounds. Retreating to the forest for berries and nuts, to the stream for water and fish. Leaving all within reach just as soon as she was certain he wasn't going to wake suddenly and try to -- try to --

She told herself often that he had saved her. More often now, though, a quiet, sinister voice whispered he had saver her for himself.

More disturbing than the whispers, though, was her waning desire to argue with them.

She had set herself a goal on the first day he hadn't woken, because moving forward was all she knew how to do. Even in the desert, after she'd lost her cart, after the first seizure, she had had a goal, even one so simple as keep going.

She did not have that now. She had told herself she would keep him alive to repay her debt. Now he was alive and her debt was paid and there was nothing else.

Riven was too far to reach. It seemed laughable now that she had ever thought she might reach it, ever thought, even with years of near obsessive planning, that she could start her own business, overtake her competitors in a matter of months. She would have the power she had strived for her entire life.

Power had done her no kindnesses in the desert. It had reduced her to less than a person, just like it had when she was a child. How could she have ever hoped to come out of it unscathed?

In a last, desperate attempt not even to escape, to find Riven, to build her business or save herself, but only to do something right, Kaya had left her guide, left the rotting corpses he had made, left the sticky dark of the jungle, the cool, tempting respite of the stream -- to find her way back to the desert. The desert would not bring her what she wanted. She knew that now.

But it would kill her more efficiently than the forest could, and if she had nothing else, she still had a strong respect for being efficient.

She had wandered for hours, circling the same places over and over again in a way that would have frustrated her a week ago, but just felt natural now. Her skin was flushed, clammy to the touch under a layer of cold sweat. She was near naked save for the few scraps of clothing she had saved from those things. Even those hardly mattered. They had bared her to this entire world -- what was left to see what she had become?

She found the voider almost on accident, when days of feverish anxiety began to exact quiet revenge, and her aimless wandering turned into unsteady staggering, and then excessive stumbling, and then the thought that maybe she could just sleep here.

The haze of confusion found her just a few short minutes later. Kaya looked up and saw her sister in the desert and she smiled and whispered through cracked lips: "Hello, Adi. I'm almost there, love. Almost."

When she woke moments or hours later, her body ached and she'd bitten almost completely through her tongue. She rolled to her feet, wondering if she'd have the strength to make it to the river to rinse her mouth.

Instead, she crawled into her tree and did not move until he awoke.

His waking was not a surprise, though it roused something that might have been relief if she were not so suddenly, desperately afraid. For a moment, Kaya could only watch, hardly daring to breathe as her savior and captor sat up, looked around...and finally moved nearly to the base of the tree where she was.

So he had known.

Of course he had. Why had she expected anything else? He had been far too good a companion in the desert for a creature who so clearly didn't care for her money. But she had known, or she should have, that everyone had their price.

Had it been his plan from the beginning, she wondered? To lure her hear, wait until she was weak, vulnerable to take her? Had he enjoyed it, watching the challenge trickle out of her with each new disaster? She thought back to the afternoon she had woken to find him gone. Had he been there to watch her panic? Watch her self-destruct as had always been her shameful little secret? Had he known then what he had to do to her, how best to break her to win his prize?

Well, then let him win no more from her. They would see how much he enjoyed his win when it was so freely given. If she could take nothing else from him, if she could do nothing else for herself -- she would do this.

Kaya started down the tree on shaking limbs and was still a few feet from the ground when her arms simply refused to hold her up anymore. She tumbled to the forest floor ungracefully and immediately rolled to her feet, watching her companion with hooded eyes, though she had just resolved to give herself to him. If this was to be her last instance of control, she would not have it stolen from her just because she was feeling a bit shaky at the moment.

She stared at him for several moments, swaying slightly, one hand tense at her side, as if ready to pluck a weapon from the air. She had spent so long tending to him, all but bared himself, it seemed strange to recall he had ever worn bandages. For what, she wondered? Had he been to this place with other young, clueless women before? Had he coaxed his makers out of hiding to seemingly dispatch of them, making himself a more appealing attacker?

Or...had he simply wanted to protect himself from human eyes?

She wanted to believe it. Oh, how she wanted to believe that he was good, that she might reach Riven. That she could perhaps recoup any of these losses, make something of the nothing she had become, or always been.

But she could not find a new goal for herself. What else did she have left?

"I don't have any money left for you," she said hoarsely. "It's all gone. If you want money, I can't give you any. But I kept you alive. My debt is repaid. Nearly. Almost."

She swallowed hard and dropped her eyes, shying from a challenge for the first time in a very, very long time. When she looked up again, her eyes were resigned, if not desperate. And maybe, just a little afraid.

"I know what you want. I saw what it...what they -- "

She forced herself to hold her arms at her sides instead of curled over her stomach as had become custom in the days since the attack. Kaya had never been beautiful, but this time in the desert and the forest had not been kind to her. Her short brown curls were a gnarled rat's nest sitting over dulled green eyes. Her skinny was sticky with sweat in most places -- blood in some others. Everywhere else was a mottled tapestry of bruises, cuts, and mud she hadn't yet washed off in the stream.

The stream. Sometimes, it felt as though it was the only stability she had left.

When he takes me, she thought, eyes closed, I will picture myself at the stream.

She opened her eyes and looked at him again, her expression wary, but also somewhat smug, knowing.

"I know what you want," she said again, sounding more confident this time. "I listened and I waited and I watched from my tree. You weren't supposed to know where I was, but I saw you move here. You knew. You always knew. And now I know. I know what you want. If you leave this place when you're done, I won't...I won't fight you."

 

[Peregrine]

He flinched when she fell out of the tree from above him, certain, for one horrifying moment, that he had missed one of the lickers, that it had waited, hid, until he was awake again, so that its punishment would be all the sweeter. It had taken him a tense moment to actually recognize Kaya, and when he did he was able to relax. She'd been in the tree. Perhaps waiting for him to wake up. He had missed her because he hadn't been fully awake, hadn't been fully aware. But now she was here, and he would finally be able to thank her properly.

Only, before he could start speaking, work the words out around the sharp teeth and long tongue that had always caused him problems when it came to anything other than guttural howls and screeches, Kaya started speaking. Her words were clipped and hollow, almost painful to hear. He tried to think back to the way she had sounded when they had first ventured away from the city of gunpowder. She had been so cheerful then, and it hadn't been the forced cheerfulness that she had exhibited in later parts of their journey. It had been honest and true. He wondered if she would ever be able to feel that way again, or if the lickers had stolen that from her as well.

He listened to what she was saying, with his head tilted slightly to the side. At first he didn't understand what she was trying to tell him. He thought she was asking for an apology. An apology from him, for leading her here. For forgetting himself, and abandoning her to the lickers, and not getting back in time to save her. And he was prepared to give it. She certainly deserved it. She deserved so much more than an apology.

Except then... he suddenly understood. He understood what she was implying, what she expected him to do.

It felt like someone dumped something painfully cold inside his head, and it trickled down through his chest and settled into his stomach. So that was what she thought.

A snarl crossed his face, and he reached out, grabbing her harshly before pulling her up into his arms. It was almost identical to the way he had carried her whenever she had succumbed to the voiders, and the had been forced to flee. He wondered if she would remember that. He wondered if she would remember that she had been safe there. Probably not.

He ignored Kaya, just as he always did whenever she ended up in his arms. Whenever she was in his arms, something needed to happen. He didn't have time to care about her protests. He tried to ignore her lack of reaction, and what it might mean. Instead he focused on running through the trees, bobbing and weaving along a half visible trail at near inhuman speed. When he came to a halt it was sudden and abrupt, and he released Kaya, sending her flying forward. But, rather than colliding with the ground, Kaya would suddenly find herself completely submerged in water. In the middle of the jungle, hidden by a large collection of trees, the source of all the various streams bubbled up out of the ground. It was a surprisingly deep, clear, warm pool, and such large quantities of water would be even more astonishing to someone who had grown up in the dryness of the wastelands.

"Clean up," he barked at her, frustrated. "You are a mess. Then we go."

 

[DotCom]

He lunged toward her, and, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, Kaya did not flinch away for the first time since she had come to know him. She had, she realized, expected this, even anticipated it. So, what did that mean for those other times he had lunged for her, each and every time to carry her -- and himself, of course -- out of a voider's path? That was baffling, in and of itself. She still couldn't understand why he had waited so long to let one of the mystery worlds swallow them. Unless he had known exactly what he was looking for. Unless this had been his plan the whole time. That would certainly explain his lack of interest in her money.

And yet even as she let herself go limp in his arms, her mind already floating away amidst a feverish haze, she realized she didn't find the idea all the convincing.

But what else could it be? He didn't care for her. Why would he? How could he? He had seen her for everything she was, laid bare and crying like a child at the end of their journey. Everything she'd ever built or planned or saved for was gone. Everything else she might have held on to had been ripped away from her. Even her clothing was no more than rags.

You lost, a voice whispered viciously in her head as she shut her eyes and let her cheek rest against his bare chest. You lost. She tried not to think about the days she had spent cleaning tar-thick blood from that chest, from his arms, legs, head, back, all without really looking at him, terrified that if he woke, he would finish the job…or worse still, leave her alone.

You lost. You lost. You lost, you lost, you –

She had guessed he was whisking her away to some lair, though for what purpose, save maybe his comfort, she couldn't guess. She was glad enough to be away from the rotting corpses he had left, even into a part of this world she had yet to discover. What she couldn't have anticipated, though, was leaving his arms quite abruptly, returning briefly to her sense to witness the last place she might see – and then finding herself submerged.

She'd thought herself beyond surprise and so came up coughing, sputtering, and wide-eyed.

The spark of anger surprised her, too, and while it did not leap to flame as it might have a few short weeks ago, it was enough to warm her when she had not been able to stop shaking in days.

"Go," she repeated hollowly. It was true she could die quite content never seeing this place again. But neither was she prepared to return to the real world. Especially the desert. "Go where? I've just said I can't pay you, and – do you even know where we'll be? How we'll find our way back? Out? We – I mean…I…I…"

She trailed off, equal parts stunned and shamed. She had promised herself she would give him no pleasure in this. And she had promised she would make it easy on herself. Why was she asking questions about the future like it mattered?

She dropped her eyes to the water and saw her own murky reflection staring back, hollow eyed. She looked away again.

He had brought her to an oasis. Even to Kaya, even now, it was breathtaking.

Why?

She raised her eyes to him, at once cautious and icy.

"Do you plan to watch, too?" she asked coldly.