Raven conceded the point with a nod and rubbed at her temples, trying to shake a thought free. “Okay,” she said finally. “We’ll keep going this way. We’re not that deep into the woods, we might run into a crossroads. If nothing else, it’ll get dark and we can find a house or something. Kane…how did this v’kai guy know where to find you? Are you wearing something?”

“Wearing…what?” Suddenly, his frustration washed out and he stared down at her, showing the whites of his eyes for the second time in as many minutes. Then they were gone again and Kane gazed away into the trees, his face closed. “I don’t know,” he said quietly. “It’s possible. I didn’t think they did anything like that, but…they keep prisoners unconscious to control them.”

There was no expression whatsoever on his face as he made this calm admittance. Somehow, that was the scariest she’d ever seen him look.

“It’s probably nothing,” she said. “It’s easy enough for someone to follow a trail of bodies.”

Kane grunted and adjusted the pack strap that lay over his shoulder. He started walking and she followed. “What made you even think of something like that?” he asked sourly.

She tried to avoid an answer with a shrug, but when he frowned at her, she said, “Your v’kai guy came to the fair before anyone knew we’d been killing people there.”

He spat out one of his alien curses, looking baffled and furious. Mostly furious. “But if that were true, he’d know I was here now.” He let that hang in the air for a while. “I shot his ichuta’a. With any luck, she’ll die. Hopefully, that’ll slow him up, even if he does have some kind of sacrat sunk in me.”

“You’re assuming he’s the only one.”

Kane shot her a third white-ringed stare. Without another word, he scooped her up and over his shoulder and started running.

*

There was a tube of dermal restorative among his medical gear, and Tagen applied it in a thick layer to Daria’s wound after determining the pellet had indeed passed completely through her thigh. There could be any amount of damage done; although soldier’s sense told Tagen it was not serious, he was no expert in human anatomy. He did not trust any of the pain medications provided by vey Venekus to work on humans, but he could prepare a dose of nanozymes to speed her healing and so he did.

She stirred when injected and Tagen stroked her cheek anxiously in case she wakened fully. It was unreasonably important to him that he be the first thing she saw when the neural stunner’s effects finally wore off.

But it was the blonde female who began to wake first, groaning and clutching blindly at her surroundings before falling back again. E’Var’s female. His prisoner, perhaps. Perhaps his accomplice. But a distraction now, in either case, from his injured Daria.

Tagen touched the soft hair that fanned out behind Daria’s lolling head for one last, lingering moment, and then he gathered up the other human and pulled her from the hold of the car. He lay her down in the dry grass and waited on one knee beside her, his hands clenching rhythmically on empty air, watching her fight her way out of stupor.

The blonde’s eyes opened. She stared slackly around for several seconds. Confusion sank in first, and then panic. “Kane?” she called, and looked at Tagen for the first time.

He saw recognition of his kind enter her, along with the awful understanding that she was caught. He had no sympathy for her. Prisoners do not call their keepers by their familiar names.

“Kane!” she shouted and tried to lunge away.

Tagen sprang after her, bringing her down with considerably more force than was necessary. She struggled, but she would be no match for a Jotan male even if she were not groggy from the neural stunner. He pulled binders from his gunbelt, flipped her facedown, and pinned her arms, wrist to elbow, behind her back. In seconds, he was rolling her onto her back again and snarling into her pale face, “Where is he going?”

She screamed. It was a harsh sound, a cry of pure frustration and rage, utterly devoid of fear. Her head rocked, her face purpled, and her heels gouged impotently at the earth. She screamed and gasped for air and screamed again.

Tagen had sedative, of course, but no time in which to indulge the erratic effects it provoked in humans. He elected instead to slap her.

Her lip split, not for the first time by appearances, but it did silence her immediately. She stared at him with tight-mouthed hatred, her breath shaking through her in violent pants.

“Where?” he said coldly.

“How the fuck should I know?” She made herself laugh. It was a bitter attempt. “You won’t have to follow him anyway. He’ll come for me. And he’ll rip you in half.”

“Come for you,” Tagen echoed. He stood up, solely to take his curled hands out of reach of her. “He left you, human.”

She sneered at him, mocking him from the cold place of her convictions. “He had to get away but now he’ll come—”

“He kept the female he wanted,” Tagen told her, very softly. “He is not coming back for you.”

It took a long time for that to sink all the way down to the place where her thoughts were made. With every new breath she took, the truth caught a more hurtful hold, and when she opened her mouth again, there was no sound. Tagen watched her struggle to speak, and then he watched her eyes well with furious tears.

“Son of a bitch,” she whispered finally, raggedly. “You son of a bitch. He…He was going to fix me. He promised. He—”

“Where is he going?”

“You son of a bitch!” she screamed.

Daria moaned.

Tagen turned from the interrogation at once and went to the open hatch of the groundcar where Daria lay. Her lashes fluttered and her eyes opened, calm at first, then perplexed, and then flooding with baffled pain.

“Ow,” she said. She clutched at him, missed, and gripped the side of the groundcar instead. “Oh owww! Oh, what’s hurting me? Owww!”

Her hand dropped to her wounded leg and came away fast. She stared at the blood marking her palm and said, “I was shot,” in wondering tones. “I remember now. He shot me.”

“Can you stand?” Tagen asked.

She looked past him to the other human still scream-sobbing her obscenities at his back. “Is that…one of his? Where’s the other one?”

E’Var’s human arched kicking off the ground to bellow, “Bitch!” at the top of her lungs. Her voice broke in the extremity of the curse. Tagen had swung around to order her to silence, but he found he did not need to; she lay with her lips pressed pale, glaring at the sky with wet and baleful eyes in seething silence.

“He took her with him,” Tagen said, returning his attention to the answering of Daria’s question.

She gazed up at him then, her brow beetling. “You mean he got away?” Her expression continued its slow slide past confusion into dismay. “You let him get away because of me?”

There were a hundred ways to answer that, a hundred excuses, a hundred reasons, but in the end, he simply said, “Yes,” and silently dared her to argue with him.

“Oh Tagen.” She sighed and rubbed at the place just above her wound. She did not meet his eyes. In the tee-vee programs, males who saved the lives of females were frequently rewarded with adoration and affection. The tee-vee misrepresented many things.

“So now what?” she asked finally.

“If E’Var reaches his ship before we…before I reach mine, it will be over. But there is a chance that I could overtake him yet. He is on foot for the moment…” His voice failed him. He stared down at Daria’s pale hand where it lay atop the blood-soaked sleeve of her pant leg. E’Var and pursuit were suddenly of ridiculous unimportance to him. “…but I doubt he will remain so for long.”

“Where are we?” Daria asked.