“I take it summers are shorter on Jota?” she said, with a false lightness he nevertheless appreciated.

“Much,” he replied sourly. “Ninety days. Chok.”

“Well, actually, we’re in the middle of the season, so there’s only about forty or fifty days to go—”

“Chok-se y vok!” he amended, closing his eyes.

“—and it’s not usually this hot, not in Oregon. It’s almost never this hot. It…probably won’t stay this bad for much longer.” She finished with her pinchers, dabbed his palm clean, and began to peel and apply small brown bandages. “I have good news for you.”

He doubted that, unless she was about to strip away her coverings and tell him she felt like taking a naked thrash on the cool kitchen tiles for the next forty or fifty days of Earth’s miserable fucking summer. Tagen bared his teeth, covered them again, and finally sighed. “Tell me.”

“I think I may have found a good site. It’s called Deathwatch Northwest, and it’s run by a whole bunch of greasy college guys with wa-aay too much spare time. They keep a record of every single death in Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and California., and they have search filters for date, state, and cause. It’s going to take a while for me to glean anything useful from them and I’m sure there’s going to be a whole lot of false leads, but it’s something, right?”

“Yes. Something. Thank you, Daria.” He tried to sound more encouraged than he felt, but his eyes had a way of going to the window, where Earth’s sun was staring in at him.

Forty or fifty more days.

‘I cannot do this.’

The thought was bad enough, haunting and utterly without hope, but he was unaware that he had spoken the words aloud until Daria’s hand closed over his. He started violently, but somehow managed not to shake her off. He looked at her. Her eyes were filled with concern, and they were cool eyes. Green and blue and white.

“How can I help?” she asked.

He wanted to answer her. He could feel his entire body on the edge of a tremor from just the effort of not telling her exactly how he wanted her to help. But she was looking at him with such honesty and feeling. He could not stand to watch those eyes fill up with fear. And they would.

Tagen pulled his hand gently free of hers. “You cannot help,” he told her. “I will endure. It is only heat.”

Tagen pushed his chair back from the table and got up. He could smell his sweat thick in the air. He could smell hers, dizzying with the female scent of her.

Only Heat.

He returned to his room and locked the door.

*

Deathwatch Northwest. Dedicated to accurately reporting the casualties of mankind on the Pacific Coastline and beyond. Hoping to go nationwide in five years. How admirable.

Every death, every single one, was listed, along with whatever details were available. Some entries had photos or even video accompaniments if they were newsworthy. Most were just one-liners with name, age, and place and cause of death listed. There was some confusion—deaths listed under the deceased’s place of birth instead of death, and once in a while, the same dead person was listed by more than one volunteer ‘reporter’—but all in all, it was a pretty solid site. Morbid as all hell, but solid.

Fortunately, it came with its own search engine. Unfortunately, ‘massive head trauma’ appeared to be the In thing for folks to die from these days, and it covered everything from car accidents to shootings. Daria sifted through dozens of homicides, suicides, accidents and even one genuine God-smite (Jerry E. Weems, age 54, dead in a corn field in Succotash, Oregon, with a meteorite the size of a golfball smack between his eyes), and finally gave up and printed everything off. She’d sort through it later, with Tagen’s help. If he was in the mood to help. He’d been in kind of a weird mood lately.

Daria found the hem of her t-shirt and tugged it down selfconsciously, not that it was riding high or even that Tagen was in the room at the moment. And not that he was always staring at her when he was in the room. And not (even she would admit this) that it was particularly unpleasant when he did stare at her. Startling, yes. Unnerving, sometimes. But not entirely unpleasant.

She picked up her printed pages and headed out to find him, crossing her mental fingers that he would be moderately cheerful.

He wasn’t in the living room and the TV was off, but when she switched it on, Law & Order was playing, proving he’d been here last. Daria stood at the bottom of the stairs, tapping the rolled-up printouts into her palm. He’d taken to hiding out during what he called the ‘worst hours’, which were for him anytime between 10 and 4, and she was loathe to interrupt him. He didn’t look like he was sleeping well these days.

But finding the bad guy seemed more important than Tagen’s nap. Hesitantly, she moved upstairs and down the hall to hover outside Tagen’s door. She waited there for a stifling stretch of time, but even pressing her ear to the door betrayed no sounds of life on the other side. She didn’t want to just barge in on him, not when things were already so strained between them. On the other hand, she didn’t want to stand out here for the rest of the day, either. After a while, feeling faintly ridiculous, she knocked.

Behind her, the bathroom door opened and Tagen emerged, frowning his ‘Can I help you?’ frown. He wore exactly one towel and nothing else and he was beaded liberally with moisture. ‘Wore’ was perhaps a generous word. ‘Draped’ would be more accurate. He was holding it on with one hand, and it hung alarmingly low on his left hip.

Daria found a spot on the ceiling to stare at. “I brought you the first bunch of dead people,” she said loudly. “All head trauma cases, although it looks like lots of them actually have other injuries in addition to the head stuff. The search engine’s pretty good, but it doesn’t have a lot of advanced options.”

“What are you looking at?”

Daria risked a glance. He was searching the same spot on the ceiling she had been fixed on, and he couldn’t have looked more bewildered. Or wet.

“Nothing,” she said. “Look, I’ll come back when you have more clothes on.”

Tagen looked down at his towel and then glanced up through the black curtain of his hair. Something in his stoic expression—God knew what—made her blush.

“Here,” she said, thrusting her pages at him.

He didn’t take them. “I do not read N’Glish,” he said patiently. “If you will wait, I will dress and join you downstairs.”

“Okay.” She shuffled back a few steps to allow him to move past her and into his room. He brushed at the door as he went through, but it didn’t close. It struck the locking plate and then slowly and silently swung back open.

Daria backed up toward the stairs, biting at her lip. Then, hardly able to believe she was doing it, she crept forward and peeked into his room.

He hadn’t lost the towel yet. Not entirely, anyway. He was using it to briskly dry his hair and it completely covered his head and nothing else.

He was lean and he was muscular. He was fit in a way that never came from deliberate sculpting at a gym. He was a soldier, he’d seen combat, and the scars that proved it somehow enhanced his perfection instead of detracting from it. It solidified his reality, firmly removing him and his amazing body from movie-star fantasy and putting him back in her house. Back within reach.

She’d never seen a body like that in real life. She didn’t think people had bodies like that in real life, not without heavy chemical interference. Broad chest, ripped abs, bulging biceps, powerful thighs, athletic and rippling muscles, and a butt you could bounce a quarter off of. She could see the shadowy indication of his essential maleness. If he turned just a little, she would be able to see it all.