Cataract. Part 10

Cell membranes strengthened all across the graft. New ki-nases and cyclins burst into action. Cells became skin that divided and grew into a new, transparent layer, separate from the artificial graft. Skin bound to skin; cells became flesh. Dead blood in the open wound was broken apart, then swept away by her capillaries. Tiny phages acted as vectors for the proteins that spurred her blood vessels to grow. Within the hour, the graft would release its calcium and the other growth factors to the wound. The axons of her nerve cells would turn and grow toward each other, creating new pathways through which they could communicate. Within two days, the thin layer of tissue would develop to its full sensitivity and thickness. Within four days, the graft would die and flake off like a sunburn, killed by one of its own coded proteins.

She stroked the graft across her flesh, ignoring the broad pain that washed her leg while she sealed its edges with pressure. She placed the second graft below the first, covering the lower edge of the gouges. Ruka, his nose twitching, moved forward, and Tsia let him sniff. The cat's tongue licked out. Its roughness finally made Tsia flinch, but she held still so that the cub could taste the graft. "It will become part of me," she told the kitten. "Like new skin. In an hour, its smell will be more like mine."

It took a moment to use the seam-sealer on her trousers; when she was done, the only evidence of the tears was a slight irregularity in the iridescent cloth. She got to her feet and pulled on the rest of her clothes, stretching her toes hedonisti-cally inside the boot liners as she felt the warmth of the dry and grit-clean fabric. When she shrugged her harness back on, she fingered the flat slot where her enbee had been stored, then turned and searched for a replacement in the e-packs along the back wall. Her fingers were steady until she put the new enbee in the slot; then a wave of guilt swamped her guts like nausea.

She eyed the cub without expression, then motioned toward the door and built the image of the outside deck and the skimmer's shape in her head. Ruka's body became very still, as if the threat had returned with the pictures. Coaxing him to the door, she turned out the lights and stepped out of the hut. As the door slammed into the wall with the wind, Ruka bolted straight into the dawn. In her gate, she felt him skid around the corner of the hut as clearly as if he had taken her with him. She hesitated, then shrugged. He couldn't go where she could not now find him.

She shut the door and stood for a moment with only the wind in her ears. She could feel nothing of Tucker at all now. No scent. No visual memory from a room or piece of gear. His biofield did not exist, and his body was buried in jellies. She tilted her head to the sky so that the rain dripped from the eaves of the hut to her lips. Bitter, the taste of the sky, she thought. Bitter as her gate was sweet.

Where one of the flight-deck supports rose from the loose sponge ma.s.s, two shadows moved in the gloom, catching her attention. They had their backs to the hut, but Tsia felt them clearly. Nitpicker's shape was obvious from her voice, and the club-fisted Wren, with his overlong arms, could not be mistaken. "Tell me about Tucker," Nitpicker said quietly.

Downwind, Tsia heard her voice clearly.

"He drowned," Wren said simply. "His safety line was loose. It caught in the bloom and pulled him down. He drowned. That's all there is to it."

"That's all? There's nothing else?"

Wren hesitated, and Tsia could almost feel his uneasiness. "Van'ei," he said, using Nitpicker's real name,

"you know Feather. You know the way her biogate sits with her. She was a rogue gate ten years ago.

Her senses are even stronger now-if more controlled-than they were back then."

"You think Tucker's death had something to do with her link to the cats?"

He shook his head. "No..."

"Then what did she do?"

"I'm not sure she did anything," he said slowly, then added, "I don't see how she could have done anything."

Nitpicker's voice was dangerously soft. "Explain."

He hesitated again. "When we missed the weedis at the southern leg, she went up the lift before I could

clear the safety line and follow. She reached the middle leg a full minute before I did. But it didn't budge. Wouldn't go up or down."

"You think she locked it?"

"h.e.l.l, Nitpicker, she only had a minute. And she might know how to run a tight web in the node, but

she's still only a guide. She knows nothing about control codes for lifts."

"She's been a mere for ten years," the pilot returned sharply. "You know the odd information you can pick up just by doing your job."

"Yes, but this..." He seemed to shake his head again. "She was really angry when it would not go down.

She hit it. Almost hit me when I finally got there and couldn't get it down either."

"It wasn't a cover?"

"No. I'm sure of that."

"And Tucker?"

"He could have locked the lift to hold his line steady."

"You don't sound like you believe that."

"At the time, I thought that was what happened."

"But now?"

"Now, I've had time to think. Why he would lock the extra lift? It would have remained stationary

whether he had his safety line tied to it or not. Locking it in place would have been superfluous. But the kid was new to this planet-had never seen a bloom before, or a wild cat. Maybe he just wasn't thinking."

Nitpicker was silent for a moment. "Any chance Feather deliberately let him drown?"

Wren did not hesitate. "No. She was hysterical when I pulled her up."

"That could be faked."

"Not like this." He hesitated. "You ever looked into her eyes when she's got her gate wide open? She

wasn't faking anything. If you ask me, I think she felt his death as he went through it. There was a blank horror in her eyes that was very... realistic. She could not have helped trying to save him any more than she could help being caught up by the cats themselves."

"What about the enbees? They're not made for salt water, but they should have worked for a while- long enough to keep him alive."

"He lost his enbee the first time he went into the brash. Probably tangled in the weeds and jerked it out himself. Feather took mine and hers down when she went in after him. Tucker had one in his nose when he came to the surface after she reached him. After that, it either clogged, or he lost it in the jellies."

"And Feather's?"

"She had hers for a while, then lost it. She was half-drowned when I pulled her back up. Did you catch the sting marks along her cheek? Kind of hidden by the scars, but they were there. I think she lost it to

the jellies that hit on her face and neck."

They were both silent for a while. Then Nitpicker said, "All right, Wren. Thanks."

Their shadows were silhouetted in the skimmer hatch for a moment before they climbed in. Behind them, at the hut, Tsia touched her cheek. She could still feel the burn of the jellies in her nose. She could still feel the tearing surge of the sea in the wrenching ache of her muscles. And she could hear the pilot's voice, like an echo in her mind, accusing as a judge.

Tsia forgot the burn that ate at her nostrils. Forgot about the cougar. Ignoring the storm that slashed her face, she stood for a time in darkness.

When Wren came to get her, it took all of Tsia's will to coax the cub to the skimmer. The shadow of the s.h.i.+p frightened the cat even while it caught his curiosity. The smells, the movements in the lighted cabin -they were too much. Between his fear and distrust, there was no way he was going into the s.h.i.+p.

Letting him go for a moment, Tsia stuck her head in the hatch. The other meres, wet from spray that had blasted in as they waited, stared back coldly. Striker looked from Tsia to the cub that paced out in the gloom. The woman's voice, when she spoke, was derisive. "That the cat you traded Tucker for?"

From beside her, Wren's quick, birdlike eyes flicked to the woman's closed expression. "Tucker did his own trading," he said softly. "And he did it for the Landing Pact, not for her. Feather did no less than you or I could have done to save him."

Striker continued to watch Tsia, her black eyes as unreadable as ever. "Like to hear her speak for herself," she said.

The wind gusted, and Tsia s.h.i.+vered before she could answer. When she caught herself, she gave the other woman a steady gaze. She was unaware of the glints that gave her icy eyes their wildness. In her head, the cub's fright was hike small hammers pounding at her brain. "I did my best," she said flatly. "I nearly drowned to save him."

The woman eyed Tsia for a moment, her black gaze unread-able. Finally, she nodded with a curt motion and leaned back in her seat.

Cold, silent waves of blame seemed to flow from each mere, and the line of Tsia's jaw tightened. She knew what she felt could not be real. If they thought she had murdered Tucker through either action or inaction, she would have been left behind on the platform, and no one in the skimmer would have looked back twice. But that knowledge didn't change the guilt she created in herself. Nor did it s.h.i.+ft the shadows she saw in the eyes that stared back at her own.

She hesitated, then said tersely, "Don't move for the next few minutes. He'll be frightened and wild. He could lash out at anything that s.h.i.+fts. Should settle down in a few minutes."

Kurvan snorted. "The way a tornado settles down on a hut?"

"Can it, Kurvan," Nitpicker snapped from the pilot's chair.

The mere's eyes flickered, and Tsia s.h.i.+vered in the wind. There was a chill in Kurvan's gaze that she had not seen before-a kernel of ice that seemed to coagulate in the hot eagerness of his field. She closed her senses to the meres and turned back to the storm.

Ruka was still having no part of it. He growled and paced back and forth as if Tsia's will were a leash that kept him from backing farther away. His back was arched and his tail twitched; his head swayed side to side. He approached the skimmer, then backed away, then approached the s.h.i.+p again. "Easy," Tsia murmured, coaxing and cursing in alternate breaths as she urged the young cat forward. "This is the only way," she breathed, "to get you to the sh.o.r.e."

Still, the cub balked. She shoved at him through her gate, but he refused to budge. She tried to pull him with her will. It was like trying to move a gla.s.sy, heavy wall toward her, she thought, using only the friction of her fingers against its smooth, vertical surface. "It is not as if I can just lift you and carry you in," she snarled under her breath at the cub.

Ruka swung his head and stared at her with unblinking, baleful eyes.

"Come," she urged. "Now." She reached out and edged for-ward until she could, carefully and slowly, touch him behind the ears. Softly, steadily, she began to press. Lightly, she added pressure, as if to draw him forward. Ruka's growl grew. She did not crouch to his level. Neither did she release her pressure on the cub with her hand or her mind. The minutes grew to two, then five.

Finally, in her biogate, she felt a lessening of tension-like a rope that goes slowly slack-and, as if he glided without moving, the cub began to ease forward. She tried to build a picture of a den and project that to his mind, and his paws crept faster across the deck, but still, he moved like a snail in glue.

"Feather," Wren said in a low voice behind her, "the winds are growing. We have to take off. Nitpicker's giving you two minutes more. If you can't get the cat through the door by then, we're raising anyway." Tsia started to protest, but he cut her off. "When the node comes back on line, we'll send a vetdarter down to anesthetize the cat and take it to sh.o.r.e."

"No." Tsia's curt response was immediate and unthinking. "He's moving on his own. He'll get in by himself."

"You haven't got much time left."

"I don't need more. He's coming in now."

"Not quickly enough to show movement," Striker muttered.

Kurvan nodded. "Why waste your time-and ours? You can't expect an animal to follow your directions as calmly as if it were a man."

Her face tightened with the effort of speaking through her mental projections. "This one, I can." She forced the words out.

Kurvan's eyes sharpened. "Why? Are you linked with the felines?"

Though she kept her voice low, Tsia laughed outright at his question. "Now, that would be a useful gate."

Wren's eyes flickered, but he chuckled as well. "About as useful as a desert digger in the sea," he added.

Tsia glanced over her shoulder. "If I were linked with the felines, this cub would be in and seated like a mere in a soft, and I'd be asking him if he wanted a slimchim for a snack while we flew."

Bowdie eyed her warily. "Let's just hope he doesn't snack on us if he joins us."

Tsia forgot that the motion of her nod was more frightening to the cat than her voice, and Ruka spun and leaped away. Instantly, she jammed him to a standstill with a blast of emotion even she could not identify. He froze, crouched to the deck. Tsia felt a backlash of fear and danger turn her bones to stone. She tried to uncurl her hands from her sides-attempted to turn her head and make a sound other than the harsh breathing she choked out through her teeth. Between her mind and the cat's, a cord of emotion stretched. It was as if her brain made a stab at the signals Ruka could understand, and hit for the first time on the combination that worked, like the first time she had imaged the node and it responded. It was as though she somehow understood in a single instant a language she had heard all her life as garbled music.

She became aware of the claws that pierced her mind. No longer did they tear at her thoughts. Instead, the cat paws seemed to pick out pieces from her mind. Like a set of words recognized in a book, those thoughts alone were clear. Ruka clung to those images. In the gloom of the gale, where the light from the cabin flashed in his eyes and blinded him to the meres, while his nose made him choke with their scents, the cougar sought the only safety he could see: Tsia.

"Come," she commanded. "Now. With me."

Blue shadowed eyes stared into gold. Nostrils flared in and out. Ears flicked in the rain. Ruka crouched more tightly to leap forward. And Nitpicker chose that instant to start the skimmer's motors.

Sail slats flared along the sides of the craft. Tsia cursed. Ruka bolted. Tsia lunged after him, caught one of his hind legs, and as the cat jackknifed, twisted and clawed with his forepaws, she slung him through the hatch. The silent howl that shocked her mind was deafening. She rolled to her feet and skidded across the deck, throwing herself after the cat. Wren slammed shut the hatch.

Ruka hit the door like a madman. Wren jerked out of the way. Ruka yowled. He turned and leaped across the cabin, desperate for escape. The meres cowered in their seats. Ruka's paws. .h.i.t the arm of a soft, and the cat recoiled at the strange fabric, striking out so that Doetzier scrambled over the seats to avoid his tearing claws. Caught for a moment against the bulkhead, Wren flinched as the tawny beast hissed and spat at his boots.

"You going to control this thing?" Bowdie yelled, jerked back as the cub's heavy paws landed on his legs and shoved off in a ma.s.sive leap.

"Feather-should I wait?" Nitpicker shouted over the noise.

"No. Go!" Tsia grabbed Ruka's scruff in pa.s.sing, and was dragged two meters on her knees before she slowed him down. Snarling and twisting, he fought her as she forced him toward her seat. Doetzier, caught in Wren's soft, s.h.i.+fted as far to the side as he could. Tsia ignored him. She strained with the cougar's wildly writhing weight. If her lean arms had been thicker-if her body had had more ma.s.s-if she had been Bowdie or Kurvan or even Doetzier, she would have sat on him to hold him.

"Doetzier," she snarled, "your blunter. Quickly-" Her voice broke off in a hiss as Ruka raked a claw across her thigh. With a wrench, she shoved him back down.

"Can you hold him-"