10. Noelle

My feet hurt.Shoes perfect for the harsh metal corridors of Nebula Outpost weren"t a match for the hard lakebed below my feet. Ryklin didn"t seem to be suffering, but maybe the head injury was blocking out any foot pain.

I wished there"d been some sort of analgesic in the medkit before everything got swallowed in fire. Not for my feet, though a bit of a break would have been welcome. Ryklin"s bandage was getting dark as some of the blood seeped through it. It couldn"t feel nice.

But there was nothing to do about it.

We"d walked for hours, the sun slowly moving over the sky, beating down on us until I was soaked in sweat and desperate for a break. We came across a petrified bit of driftwood, and I sank down onto it. "I need a minute," I said before Ryklin could march on.

The trees were getting closer, finally. I could see the shade stretching out from their canopy, but we still had another half hour or more of walking before we reached them.

I pulled my canteen out of my pocket and swirled the bottle around. I"d poured half of my supply into Ryklin"s container before we started walking, and my supply was getting low. With the heat of daylight and the long hike, my mouth was painfully dry. Still, I only took a sip. I didn"t want to run out yet.

Ryklin unwrapped one of the meal bars and snapped it in half, offering one piece to me. "You need to eat," he said. "Keep up your energy."

I huffed out a bitter laugh. I was running on fumes and grit; there was no energy left. But I could manage. I was about half Ryklin"s size and had to be burning less energy than him. "Eat the whole thing, you need it more." There. Good deed done.

Also, the meal bars all tasted like sawdust and old socks. It wasn"t that much of a sacrifice.

Ryklin still held it out. "We both need calories. Eat it."

I could fight him. Not physically, but I could be stubborn about it. And then we"d be stuck here fighting until one of us gave in. And I had a sinking suspicion that Ryklin might be just as stubborn as I was.

I snatched the bar out of his hand and shoved it in my mouth, my face contorting in displeasure as the flavor hit my tongue. This one was worse than normal. Ryklin ate his like it was nothing, face placid.

I washed the taste out as best as I could, leaving only a single sip of water in my canteen.

"Let"s keep going." I craved that last sip of water, both from thirst and to get the last remnants of grossness out of my mouth, but I let that temptation hang on my belt.

We had to find water soon.

It might have been easier to pass the time if we talked, but Ryklin was a moving statue beside me. He exuded an impossible calm that the situation absolutely didn"t call for. We were the only two people on the planet and could die at any moment. Calm was exactly the opposite of what I was feeling.

But walking next to Mr. Statue somehow helped me clamp down on the panic.

"Oh, thank you, sweet Demeter." I picked up my pace when we were close to the trees and rushed into the shade, letting out a groan of relief as the temperature immediately lowered by about a thousand degrees.

"Demeter?" Ryklin asked. He was slower in joining me under the leaves, eyes scanning the area for threat.

"Goddess of the harvest and a bunch of other stuff. One of the old gods back home. In the Consortium," I added as an afterthought. How would he know what my home was? "I"ve also heard she"s a goddess on Earth." I hadn"t met someone from the human homeland yet. The Consortium was made up of all sorts of people, but the humans there were mostly descended from people who"d been abducted from Earth and got abandoned along the way. It made sense we had their gods.

Ryklin just acknowledged that with a nod. "Do you know anything about life on this planet? Are there animals?" he asked.

"Some small rodents, cats, and rabbits. Nothing too big. Most of the animals were brought in by the miners. There are fish, too. Not from the miners. And," I pointed up, "trees and plants. That"s most of the life here." I pulled the plant ID kit out of my pocket. "This should help us figure out what we can eat."

"We"ll lose daylight soon. We need to find a place to make camp." Ryklin took the lead.

There wasn"t a path in the forest, but he cleared as much as he could with his own hands. It wasn"t long before a rabbit darted in front of our path, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. But the bunny was gone before I fully realized it was there.

Shadows encroached all around us. I wasn"t sure how long days were supposed to be on Nebula, nights either, but I thought it was pretty human-normal. Ten to twelve hours of light followed by darkness. At least I hoped so.

With no idea when in the day we"d landed and only a vague idea of how long we"d been walking, I didn"t know how much daylight we had left. And darkness would be absolute around us when night fell.

We came to a stream, and I wanted to cry with joy. Ryklin leaned back against a tree as I crouched on the muddy bank and used the water testing kit to make sure it was safe to drink. I had no idea how close we were to the mine or if the disaster there had contaminated the water. We needed to be careful.

But this water was clean.

I let some pool in my hands, the icy chill of it enough to make my fingers hurt. Then I raised my cupped hands to my lips and drank it down, uncaring that half of it ended up on my shirt.

I turned to Ryklin with a grin. "We can drink it."

His gaze was intense, eyes snagged on the strip of water that darkened the gray of my top from chest to navel. He stared for several beats before pushing off the tree and stalking towards me.

I was frozen in place as he walked closer. My heart raced, and my breath hitched. There was something electric in the air, a spark that had my nerves buzzing. I don"t know if a man had ever looked at me the way Ryklin was right then. I wasn"t sure if it was a good thing.

But before he reached me, he tore his gaze away and knelt at the water"s edge a few meters away and filled his canteen.

I did the same. Whatever had just happened was all in my head. It had to be.

"We should make camp around here," Ryklin said. "Let"s see if there"s a spot where we can build a fire."

A part of me wanted to argue, wanted us to keep moving and find the mine as soon as possible. But we were losing daylight, and it would be too dangerous to move soon.

We found a clearing near the stream and gathered fallen branches that we could use for firewood. This I knew how to do. Mother and father had loved to commune with the wilderness when I was a child, and we"d spent several summer nights in the middle of the woods, sleeping under the trees and stars.

I set up a ring of stones and then came to a halt. "I don"t have anything to ignite it."

Ryklin took my place and grabbed two sticks, rubbing them together with a speed and determination I don"t think I could have managed. He had to be getting splinters. Or blisters. But he didn"t pause.

And several minutes later, long enough that my shoulders ached in sympathy, smoke started to rise out from the sticks. It took more time, longer than I expected, for the flame to catch, and Ryklin crouched there the whole time, gently coaxing it to life.

Handy.

"Keep the flame burning," he said. "I"ll hunt."

Before I could say anything about that, he was gone. I stared into the fire and wondered if this was what humans a hundred thousand years ago felt like, alone in the world and hoping for a survival that wasn"t guaranteed.

That lasted for all of five minutes before I got bored. I didn"t realize you could get bored while in a desperate flight for your life, but apparently you could. Or maybe I was just special.

With nothing else to do, I pulled out my comm. No signal, obviously, but there were a few games programmed into it I could play.

Then I remembered the map.

When I"d first come to Nebula Outpost, I"d wanted to learn everything there was to know about the station and its dead planet. It had been years, and I"d forgotten most of it, but I"d loaded a map onto my comm, telling myself I"d study the terrain someday.

That day was someday.

I projected the map out in front of me and tried to figure out where we were in relation to the mine. We"d walked north since we assumed we were south of it, and seeing just how far north the mine was on the map, I thought our instinct was right.

But the only landmark I had was the giant dry lakebed, and I couldn"t see it anywhere on my projection.

Maybe Ryklin would have more luck.

He came back with a dead rabbit clutched in his hands. "Do you have a knife?" he asked.

How had he managed to catch dinner with no weapons? Rabbits were fast. "Did you … How did you …?"

"I threw a rock at it." At my blank expression, he added, "I learned many ways to hunt when I was in the military."

"You were in the military?" That explained a lot about him.

"Yes. Do you have a knife?" His tone closed off that avenue of discussion before I could think of asking more.

I shook my head. "Maybe we can sharpen a branch?" We were living the stone age life down here.

"No need. You may wish to look away. This could be messy." He took a seat beside the fire and set down the rabbit, then he flexed his hand.

And grew freaking claws.

I must have made a sound, though I didn"t mean to. Ryklin looked up at me. "A knife would be more precise," he said.

Don"t freak out. Don"t freak out.

My weird, stoic stalker had claws. That he was using the disembowel our dinner.

Yeah, I was on the verge of freaking out.

I stared at the projection of the map while Ryklin worked. I just had to pretend this was normal. He hadn"t harmed me yet. If he was a stalker, at least he wasn"t a violent one. "I had a map of Nebula on my comm. When you"re done with … that … you should take a look, see if you can orient us."

"I can show you how to read the map," he said.

"I know how to read a damn map. Just not, you know, when we"re in the middle of the forest with no landmarks." What I wouldn"t give for a positioning satellite at that moment.

It took a few minutes for Ryklin to finish cleaning the rabbit and getting it set up on some rocks in the fire to cook.

He studied the map for several moments, and after scrutinizing it in ways I didn"t understand, pointed to a spot that looked much the same as any other. "I"m nearly certain we"re near here. We need to keep heading north. Another day of walking, perhaps two, and we"ll be within the mine territory. If we find an outbuilding, there may be communications equipment. It may not be necessary to make it all the way to the destruction zone."

Two days of walking for a maybe.

I let myself believe that we would find comms equipment. If I couldn"t believe that, I might as well just lie down and die.