11. Ryklin

The fire provided some warmth,but it didn"t make sleep comfortable. I"d survived the rugged tundra of the Detyen HQ, but Noelle shivered and scooted closer to the fire when she woke. She didn"t complain, but if I had a jacket, I would have given it to her.

I didn"t.

I hunted once more, and Noelle used her plant identification kit to gather some wild fruits. Flavor exploded on my tongue, tart and bright and enough to make my head ache. Soulless Detyens avoided strong tastes. The rabbit was just meat, nothing to strongly affect my taste buds. The fruit made my mouth water.

It was just hunger.

I studied Noelle"s map some more and planned a path for us that I thought would be easy enough. "We"ll need to pass this river soon." I pointed at the spot on the projection. "I"ve pinpointed a narrow spot. The water will naturally flow fast there, but we won"t truly know how bad it is until we get there."

Noelle nodded and yawned, smothering it with her hand. "Do you think we"ll make that crossing today?"

"Yes, in a few hours." We had the whole day ahead of us, and I didn"t want to waste sunlight. "We should go."

She ended the projection on her comm and slipped it into her pocket.

I watched her as she tidied the area where she"d been sitting. She poked at the fire pit several times to make sure not even a hint of smoke rose from it. She looked over at me with a smile. "Leave the camp cleaner than you found it, that"s the rule, right?"

"It"s a good rule," I agreed. I couldn"t look away from her. Fixation was supposed to be something violent, something terrible that would make me want to destroy.

But with Noelle I felt … settled. Calm. Nothing inside of me yearned for destruction—not that I could yearn at all. And if I was fixated, wouldn"t I have wanted to keep her completely to myself? Our entire mission there was to find a way to communicate and get back to Nebula Outpost.

I was deluding myself. I had to be. And I couldn"t even follow the sequence of logic anymore to make it make sense.

This meant trouble.

Under any other circumstances, I'd leave right then and put as much distance between us as I could. I'd already tried that, and it had only made things worse. If I hadn"t engaged with those drug dealers, they might have never approached Noelle"s escape pod, and she would have been able to climb out after they went away.

I was making things worse for her. I was the reason she"d fallen down to this planet.

We took off walking, and Noelle hummed a tune I didn"t recognize. It was distracting and strangely calming.

It should have had no effect on me at all.

I put the concerning thoughts aside; I had to. Survival was all that mattered now.

After several hours, Noelle was making tiny sounds of suffering in the back of her throat. She didn"t voice the complaints, but she must have been in pain. The gravity of Nebula was stronger than the artificial gravity of Nebula Outpost, and even I felt the strain.

"We"ll take a rest here," I said. I could dimly hear the rushing of a river in the distance and didn"t want to chance it without a break.

Noelle sank down onto a fallen log without protest. Her hair was plastered to her brow, and she let out a loud yawn. "This isn"t anything like hiking back home."

The opening was obvious for me to pick up on it. Under other circumstances, I would have ignored it, but I suspected that she felt the need to speak, and I was the only one here to listen. "Really?"

Something in my tone must have not been correct. "If you don"t want me to talk, you can just say so. I know I was annoying you with my humming earlier. It"s just too quiet down here."

"You weren"t annoying me." And it was, indeed, quieter than the station, but there were sounds of wildlife all around us, the wind rustling through leaves, birds chirping, and the threat of that water.

"I know when I"ve annoyed someone," she insisted. She rested one foot on a knee and slipped off her shoe, giving herself a feeble massage.

I dropped to my knees.

"What are you doing?" she asked, caution and alarm evident in her words.

"Your feet hurt," I said. "I can rub them better from this angle." I told myself it was the logical step, that she would walk better if she wasn"t in pain. But this was not something I would have thought to offer to any of my comrades.

Noelle eyed me for a moment, but then she offered her foot. I propped it up on some fallen branches and took it in my hand.

Pain radiated up my arm so fast I couldn"t stop the hiss of pain that escaped. I almost jerked back, as if I"d been hit by a blaster shot, but managed to control my response at the last moment.

Or so I thought.

"Is something wrong?" Noelle tried to pull back, but I tightened my grip on her ankle, ignoring the slice of pain.

"No," I lied.

There was no reason for this touch to hurt. There was no way it was some kind of electric shock, and even if it had been, that would have dissipated quickly. The pain faded a bit as I dug my thumbs into the arch of her foot, not completely gone, but bearable.

And the guttural sound of pleasure that came from Noelle caused a whole other kind of pain.

My head went a little fuzzy, and I had to take a deep breath as something like heat seared through me. It became my goal to cause Noelle to make another one of those noises, and then another. And by the time I pulled her other shoe off and started again on the other foot, my hands were nearly numb with pain and shaking a bit.

I didn"t stop.

But I did finish, and Noelle leaned back on her log, a satisfied smile on her face. "If you ever get tired of groundskeeping, you could make a fortune offering massages."

"I don"t want to touch anyone else."

It was only the truth, but Noelle looked at me as if I"d said something unforgivably strange.

"We should get a move on," she said after a long moment. She put her shoes on quickly and stood. Now there was no hint of pain in her stride, and I felt a strange sense of accomplishment in that.

The river was closer than I thought, wider too. A log and some large rocks formed a natural bridge several meters upstream, but the current around them was strong.

"Wait here," I said, grabbing the largest branch I could find and carefully hopping from stone to stone until I was about a third of the way across. The rock was slippery, and far enough to require a bit of a jump. I crouched down and speared the branch into the water. The current jerked it out of my grasp before it hit the bottom. I retreated and returned to Noelle.

"What was that about?" she asked. She drank deep from her canteen before perching at the edge of the river to fill it back up.

"It"s at least as deep as you are tall, I think. Can you swim?" Swimming from the start would be safer than falling in, though we"d need to find a way to dry our clothes.

Her face scrunched up. "Not well. And it"s been a long time."

"Then we"ll try the bridge. I"ll go first in case anything needs to be cleared. You"ll come after me. You"ll need to be very careful." The current could carry either of us away before we had a chance to recover.

I climbed onto the first stone and hopped to the second. I could hear Noelle curse as she found her footing on the first stone and looked back to make sure. One of her feet was wet, but she was standing.

It was little more than a long step to the third stone, and I waited for Noelle to make the hop to the second, braced for something to go wrong. But she landed with a wobble and shot me a slightly frantic smile.

It was becoming easier to read her expressions, but I didn"t have time to puzzle out why.

The next stone was the farthest jump so far, and when I landed on one foot, my ankle tried to twist, and I came down hard on my second foot, nearly toppling into the river.

"You okay up there?" Noelle called.

"Fine." My footing was stable, and my ankle was functional. I was nearly halfway, and from there I had to step onto a log somehow lodged in the river. It wasn"t particularly stable, but I didn"t think my weight would dislodge it. "Wait for me to clear the log entirely before moving," I warned as I took my first step.

Noelle made it to the fourth rock with a whoop of joy. I would have looked back, but every step was treacherous. At least the next rock was close. Once I was clear, I looked back at Noelle.

She was looking at the log, brows drawn down in determination, her lips moving, though I couldn"t hear her saying anything. I saw her shoulders rise and fall in a deep breath before she launched herself at the log.

She made it with a wobble, and I thought she had it. One step. Two steps. Halfway there.

Then she missed the third step, and the river rose up to swallow her.