A dark thought struck Kane suddenly. Humans were fragile. Maybe the female was sick. He hadn’t scanned her for anything, and there were all sorts of nasty things that could swap themselves between hasty Jotan and their humans.

Better late than never. Kane looked around for his pack, found it under one of the chairs, and took it over to his female. He had to calibrate it for human biology, and during that time, Kane studied her.

She was blonde, like him, but her hair was several shades lighter, an unnatural-looking yellow, and it was very short. She’d colored her face earlier, and her crying had made a smeared mask all across her eyes. Her blunt human claws were bright pink. She looked fit enough. She bruised easily, but then, so had every other human he’d ever known. Their skin was just too thin.

When the computer chimed, Kane brought out his scanner and gave her arm a pat. She didn’t open her eyes.

Patience.

“This is probably going to hurt,” he warned her, and shrewdly noted that her face puckered slightly. “I need to look at your blood.”

She made no response, not even when Kane pushed the sharp tip of the scanner into her arm. He drew out blood, rich and red, and fed it into the analyzer. The computer began to think.

“Where do you keep your food?” Kane asked, his eyes running over the screen. Not that there was anything to see until the timer finished counting down, but it made him feel useful.

She continued to ignore him.

Kane considered her, tapping his claws idly against his knee. “What’s your preference?” he asked at last, bluntly. “Arm or leg? No reason to let your male go to waste.”

It was a bluff. After half a day in the sun, the human’s meat was soured, but the threat had the desired effect. A trickle of water appeared at the corner of one eye. Humans did that, he knew, even when their eyes weren’t damaged. Finally, she looked at him.

“Food,” he said firmly.

She sat up, moving as though her bones had become brittle as straw, and slid onto her feet. She looked at him again, her face crumpling in on itself, and began to stagger toward the groundcar.

The computer chimed, its screen filling the results of the human’s scan. Kane read, well-aware that he’d been very lucky. Apart from a congenital sugar imbalance, some toxic residue (probably related to the canisters floating in the cold-storage crate), and a nasty bone-thinning disorder lurking in her future, the female was clean. She had nothing that could be passed along to Kane, but he thought he’d ought to fix her up anyway. That sugar imbalance could get to be a problem if he didn’t.

The female was returning, weeping openly now. She had a bag of dried meat in one hand and a package of biscuits or something in the other. She put these on the table before Kane and lowered herself shakily into one of the chairs, covering her face with her hands and rocking back and forth.

Well, at least she was moving. Kane chewed on the meat, which was very tough but extremely tasty, and began to construct a program to purify her of her detrimental conditions. After a while, the female rose from her chair and went to kneel by the male’s body. Kane let her; he was an old hand at designing nanozyme codes, but this was the first he’d ever done without Urak looking on. Besides, if it made the female happy to grieve, who was he to argue? At least she was doing it quietly.

Kane double-checked his program, ran a quick cross-filter reaction check, and when the gold light turned green, he loaded in the blank nanozymes and initiated them. It would take fourteen hours before the human’s problems were completely solved, but there was nothing wrong with her that he could catch, so he didn’t care. He had only to make sure she got enough water while the filters were working, and in the meantime, he could fuck her all he wanted. He filled his dermisprayer with the prepared nanozymes and turned to get his female.

She was gone.

So much for a gentle hand. When he found the bitch, he was going to hobble her.

Dermisprayer in hand, Kane started walking, his eyes picking out her tracks easily in the dry earth. He followed her away from the corpse of her mate, down onto the path he’d come by earlier, and into the forest. He didn’t hurry. The distance between the human’s footprints showed she wasn’t running, and anyway, there was nowhere for her to go. In a way, the fact that she was fit enough to wander off was almost encouraging. And even if it wasn’t, if Kane knew that if he had to run in this heat, he was likely to shear her damned head off when he caught up to her.

He hadn’t gone far before he realized that he could hear water, and after another hundred paces, he could smell it as well. When the path opened out, it had brought Kane to the bank of a little river. It was mostly dried up, if the steep sides of the empty bank were any indication, but still deep enough at its center for his female to be standing in it up to her waist. She was looking at him, her hands still cupped to her half-cleaned face.

‘Patience,’ Kane reminded himself, his hand flexing on the dermisprayer. ‘She just wanted to wash up. So do you, so be patient. She’s got days to find out how badly she can be hurt.’ He smiled at her.

She did not respond in any way.

“Come here,” Kane said, and snapped his fingers at the same time. It was never too early to start training.

She didn’t move.

Kane’s smile faded on one side. “Human, I don’t want to kill you, but you are making me want very much to hurt you. Come here.” He snapped again.

She lowered her hands, water spilling through her fingers and from her eyes. She took a step toward him and looked down at the dermisprayer in his grip.

Kane’s temper was starting to scratch at him again. He took a deep breath and held the instrument up for her to see. “This is for you,” he said. “There was a problem with your blood. I’m sure you knew that.”

She dropped her eyes, looked around at the water, and then met his gaze again.

“I can fix it,” Kane continued. “Come with me. We’re going to travel for a few days and then I’ll let you go, and you’ll never be sick again.” He gave her another smile, this one showing quite a few fangs, and told himself that Heat was coming…Heat was coming and she was the only game around.

She spoke for the first time, in a voice that was despairing, yet strong. “Fuck you,” she said. He had no time to wonder what that meant. She dropped beneath the water’s surface.

“You bitch!” Kane snarled. He leapt into the river, pushing against the weight of the current to grab her back, but he could see her chest working and he knew it was too late. Her body was heavy when he reached it.

She had escaped him after all.

Kane looked in disgust at the dermisprayer in his hand and then expelled its contents into the river in a silver jet. “Bitch,” he said again, and dropped her with a splash.

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Three

“Rise and shine, camper! Up ‘n at ‘em!”

Tagen jerked awake at once, his hand flying for his gunbelt and striking a tree instead. His first fractured thought was that his father had dumped him in the woods again. He was hot and hungry and thirsty and sore; this had to be some sadistic new brand of training. He could smell smoke. He had lit a fire the night before, and he could smell it still, mixed with the sweat that pooled on his skin. Every other scent that came to him was horribly unfamiliar. It wasn’t until he saw the human that he remembered he was on Earth.

Earth. Gods. How could a planet look so inviting and peaceful from orbit and yet be so dry and miserable once one had landed? Tagen had made his hundred kilometers hiking up a slope of crumbling stone, surrounded on all sides by towering trees. Everything was out to get him. Insects bit him, raising itchy welts wherever they could get at him. The roots of the trees protruded in crafty knobs and toe-catching loops, and Tagen had twice fallen. Even if he was lucky enough to grab a tree for balance, the bark of the things was rough enough to abrade his hands, and often was coated with a rancid-smelling sticky sap that never, never came off. The bushes here were nothing but thorns or burrs or grasping vines, which in their dried-out death-throes had become quite effective shackles.