Plus, she had protected it for me and given it back to me.
And I had thought about leaving her… a pang of guilt wove into my heart, and I hissed through my teeth… It certainly would have been easier…
What is happening outside? Have the speeders left? Have Aimer and the others gotten away? Have they been captured? Killed? Why is no one speaking to me?
I stood up and paced in the dimly lit cave. The bat guano did glitter like stars, and the slight shifting of the dormant bats made the guano glitter like stars, as it hid them from sight occasionally, but her delusional ramblings were just due to blood loss. Her pulse was strong, but her pants were ruined. They were stiffening up from the drying of her blood, but I wondered how much she had lost. Probably not enough to need a transfusion, but if she didn’t wake up naturally in the next thirty minutes or so, I was going to have to pinch her a bit to wake her.
I dug around in my pack and got out a patch of gauze. I soaked it in a pain reliever salve and applied it to her forehead. She let out an immediate sigh of relief. I looked at her a moment longer, brow furrowed, and bit my lip. Which made me think of biting her lip… which made me think of biting her other places…
Dammit… why couldn’t I stop thinking about her in that way? She was a soldier in my army, that was it.
I rubbed my fingers where they had touched hers and the ring. They still tingled. That zing, those sparks, that had been awe-inspiring.
And she was so goddamned gorgeous… I brushed her hair back behind her ears and made sure the gauze was secure to her head. I poked her shoulder and grinned where my name was printed in the red blood of the spy we had been interrogating from where Cassala had punched Vania in the shoulder. It stood out starkly on her light brown tunic. Hilarious…
A sudden rustling in the tunnel made me sink back into the shadows, away from the geode light rock, and my dagger was immediately in my hands, Vania’s knives unsheathing and untethering themselves with my telekinetic powers, pointing straight down the tunnel’s mouth.
A Bordash soldier appeared in the dim light, a shield held before his body as he inspected the dimly lit cavern. There was no other rustling from within the tunnel.
I tiptoed behind him as he slipped up beside Vania. He stood over her, sword raised to bash down into her sleeping skull. I slipped around him, bracing one arm across his chest and slicing his jugular cleanly with my dagger, once from side to side, and then clean up through the neck under the chin to pierce through his mouth into his nasal cavity and into his brain. He dropped his sword and grabbed at my arms, pawing at the escaping blood, falling to the ground, gurgling in the bubbles of his own death.
The dagger made a sucking sound as I pushed him out and away, arterial blood spraying out over Vania. I caught every drop before it could fall on her and redirected it with a telekinetic shield and slid his body magically over to the other side of the cavern.
I wondered if this soldier had other men or women waiting outside the cave for him to return. I had better go find out…
I crawled forward through the tunnel, finding my way in the dark, afraid to use the geode stone, and waited at the end of the tunnel for my eyes to adjust to the night on the outside. We had been in the caves for a few hours since the crash. It was likely close to midnight. My worry was starting to claw in my chest like a mad animal, not having heard anything from reinforcements, from my Crew, from my Trio, even from my enemies.
There didn’t appear to be any Bordash at the foot of the mountains. I could see our transport in the distance, still smoldering, and there was the glow of a few lights dancing off the rolling hills not too far away: Tarsine’s camps? I would have to go inspect that. But not until Vania awoke.
I sat down on the mountain and breathed in deeply, rooting myself to the world around, sending my mind out to branch into the telepathy around me… Suddenly, my mind was assailed with messages.
“Alpha Jase, please respond. We have been trying to contact you for five hours now. This is a Code Blue. Alpha Jase, please respond to your Trio. Alpha Jase, This is a Code Blue. Please respond to your Trio. Please respond. Alpha Jase, We have been trying to contact you for five hours now… This is a Code Blue…”
The message repeated itself. Just a lower soldier, assigned to send out the telepathic message, over and over.
I looked at the mountain and scooped up a handful of the dirt. I held it close to my face. I smelled it. I tasted the dirt. It tasted faintly of salt. It must be
