In his arms, the cat was irritably resisting captivity, so Tagen set it down with a stern admonition to behave itself. Grendel flicked its tail to show what it thought of stern admonitions, and then wandered into the near bushes. Tagen watched it long enough to make certain it was staying close, and then walked to Daria’s side. “You can exchange the wheel?” he prompted.

“I think so.”

“Then you had best make the attempt.” He glanced skyward pointedly. “It is too hot to do nothing for long.”

She looked up at the patch of sky visible between the flanking lances of Earth’s trees, and then stared back at him bleakly. “You’re going to go into Heat anyway,” she told him. “I can do this, but not that fast.”

“I can help.”

She looked doubtful.

“I am a soldier,” he reminded her dryly. “One thing at which I excel is following orders. Tell me what to do.”

She managed a smile that didn’t much touch her eyes and went to open the rear hatch. She pushed Grendel’s traveling necessities to one side, pulled up the carpeting, and revealed an extra wheel sunk into a recess. It took some doing to pull it out, as it was fastened down with metal bars, but when she had it freed, she kept the bars in hand. They folded together into a tool-shape and she brought it to the wounded quarter of the groundcar and knelt down again.

She was struggling to insert the tool underneath the vehicle, but with the tire utterly gone and the metal base sunk into gravel, it would not fit. Tagen watched her efforts as they edged toward panic, and then bent, took hold of the groundcar’s frame, and lifted it.

She looked at him, blinking rapidly.

“Do not ask me to carry it to town,” he said.

Hurriedly, she placed her tool. “Set it down,” she said, fitting a lever to the base she had placed. She pumped her arms furiously and the tool lengthened in short lurches.

A lift. A portable lift. Every so often, it struck Tagen all over again how completely un-primitive the people of this world were.

The front quarter of the groundcar rose slowly but steadily, and although the base of the lift sank into the soft gravel, it seemed secure enough. “Okay,” Daria said, once the metal round was fully freed. “Bring me the spare.”

Tagen went to the cargo hatch. He brought out the new wheel and, as an afterthought, a tin of cat food. He leaned the former against the side of the vehicle, opened the latter and placed it on the ground, and then stood back. Grendel came running, but Daria only continued to sit and look helpless.

“Do I have a…” She shook her head, striking the heel of her hand against her brow. “Christ, I don’t even know what it’s called. It looks like an X?”

“What is an X?”

She looked at him and laughed. It was an unhappy sound. She got up and went to check the hold for herself. He heard her rummaging in the groundcar’s interior, and then her quavering curse. “Damn. Just…just damn!”

Whatever it was she wanted, they did not appear to have one.

She leaned out to look at him, her eyes too bright. “I don’t suppose you can take those bolts off by yourself, can you?” She pointed to the hardware that held the wheel base to the vehicle.

She had a great deal of faith in him.

Tagen took off his jacket and, after a glance at Daria’s blackened hands, his shirt top. He returned them, neatly-folded, to the groundcar’s interior before kneeling to inspect the bolts. There wasn’t much to grip. Nevertheless. Tagen rubbed sand between his hands to roughen them, already knowing this was futile.

“Wait, I found it!”

She came running, a tool of slender bars set at crossing in her upraised hand, and Tagen moved back and left her to it. She fit the end of one of the bars to the angled cap of a recessed bolt, and the rest of the tool instantly became a lever for spinning them off. Daria fought to do just that for several seconds before Tagen took her place. The tightly-fit bolts were no match for a Jotan officer; he removed and held them while Daria exchanged old wheel for new.

“Almost done,” she said, spinning the bolts back on. “Are we in time?”

Meaning him, of course. Meaning Heat.

He felt no more than a faint discomfort, not even a true itching, yet, but he was tempted for an instant to claim more. All this day and all the last, there had been a heaviness between them. He knew it was his fault, his silence and his reserve, but knowing didn’t make it any easier to resolve. He couldn’t speak to her without the looming loss of her crowding at his thoughts, but he longed to hold her. He just wanted things between them to be as they were before the thought of leaving her had ever occurred to him.

But he was no seasoned liar and Daria would see through one even if he were. She might mate with him anyway, but sex without honesty was a dim thing. Even on Jota, where matings frequently had all the intimacy of a handshake, that much was so.

“Yes,” he said simply, and turned to gather Grendel, now basking in full sun beside its empty food tin.

“Oh.” Did he imagine disappointment? Her expression was unreadable when he glanced her way; she carried the ruined wheel to the hatch without meeting his eyes at all.

Tagen set Grendel in the rear of the groundcar and returned to his own seat, keeping his hands curled so as not to leave grime all across his reach. Daria harnessed herself, rubbing the grease that gloved her own fingers off on her pants, and started the engine. The vehicle moved smoothly back onto the road and neither of them spoke.

This was unbearable. Tagen moved his hand from his knee to hers, feeling the fabric of her clothing soft and warm between him and her firm flesh. She released half her grip on the guidance wheel to rest her hand over his, holding him there, and never mind the grease.

“Yours was the first house I came to after I had landed here on Earth,” he said suddenly, and then sat and wondered where to go from there.

“Well, I didn’t think you’d picked my name out of the phone book. I always figured I was just the first human you stumbled on.”

The weight of his plasma gun pulled at him; he could hear the crackle of crisping flesh, smell its phantom smoke. He said, “The first after I resolved to better know your kind, yes.”

“Lucky you.” There was sarcasm in her tone, but no venom.

“Indeed, I am. I anticipated battle—”

“And got it.”

“Ha. No.” He squeezed her knee lightly. “Difficulty, yes, but not battle. I have seen battle. You have been a remarkable host to me, more than ever I could have hoped.”

She returned her hand to the guidance wheel and Tagen shut his eyes to mask an open grimace. Host. A poor word. He flexed his claws on her thigh, thinking.

“I came to admire you,” he said. “Against my better judgment. And then to desire you, although I feared that you should know. Heat…came between us. I suppose I should be grateful. If not for this tar shu-rak weather, I would have never dared to show you my desire. And now…”

There was a reason Tagen had never been asked to give a speech, and this, he thought bitterly, was exactly why. He was stumbling blind in a mire and he refused to get any deeper in. Tagen took his hand from her and stared out the window at the rushing stream of trees that grew beside the road, wishing blackly that his father had, for even one season, allowed his son to be schooled in oration.

“Now?” Daria prompted.

He shook his head, not facing her. “I have made ruin enough of words for now,” he said bitterly. “It is your turn.”

She was silent a long time.

“I wish you wouldn’t do this,” she said finally. Her voice was very small, and yet still managed to push the air out of the groundcar. “You’ve been very honest with me about everything and…and I understand how things work. I’m not going to make things complicated when you have to leave.”