Cataract. Part 13

She shrugged.

Striker barely opened her eyes. "No microbe would dare dig into a guide's flesh or bone. You know what they say: You can't kill a guide 'less you get one through his gate."

" 'Sightless without the biogate, and blinded when they use it,' " murmured Doetzier. He pulled his darkeye case from a slot in his weapons harness, gave Tsia a glance, then neatly slid the darkeyes into first one, then the other brown eye. The contacts turned his irises completely black, and he blinked twice to center them. Expressionlessly, he returned Tsia's gaze.

Tsia hid a s.h.i.+ver. The darkeyes the other meres used, which made motion and contrast so clear, made a guide claustrophobic. Without her link to the cats, which sharpened her vision of movement, she could never have worked as well as she did with the meres. Her night sight was only half as good as vision through the darkeyes. She eyed the other two packs in the cave. "Did we lose the rest of the gear?" she asked.

Striker grunted affirmation.

Doetzier eyed Nitpicker as she pulled the skin grafts from the medkit beside her. "What happened down there?" he asked quietly. "Wren said Feather came back for his enbee, then he sent Bowdie to help." Nitpicker shrugged. "I got tangled in the slide. Lost my enbee. Mud kept coming. Feather called the eels to dig me out." Gingerly she unsealed her trousers from her boots.

Doetzier eyed Tsia speculatively. "I thought eels were carnivorous."

Nitpicker rolled her trousers above the first bite mark. "They are." She glanced over at the other mere.

"Toss me that scame, would you? And get me some seam-sealer."

Doetzier complied. Tsia, unable to meet Nitpicker's eyes, got to her feet and pulled her blunter close

around her body. When she stepped out from under the overhang, Wren and Bowdie made room for her beneath their rock. Behind her, Doetzier watched her retreat with thoughtful eyes.

"Nice job, getting 'Picker out," Bowdie murmured.

"Thanks."

"Thought she was a goner when I first came down. Those eels were so thick on the scanner that I could

hardly tell you were in the midst of them all."

"Thought you were an eel yourself, the way you latched on to my arm."

He shrugged. " 'Picker was in trouble, and I didn't know what you were doing. Good thing you're a fast

firmer."

"Good thing you read it as fast as I send."

They fell silent, but Tsia regarded Bowdie warily. There was still a tension in his biofield, and it grew

when she was near him. Did he think she had shoved the pilot in the mud herself? There had been

someone else there-before she went back for the pilot. A presence she had not read in her panic with the mud. And Nitpicker was now as tense as the man...

To the north, Ruka picked up her restlessness and reflected it back through the gate. The tautness of the bond between them stretched like the muscles of Nitpicker's shoulders, and Tsia s.h.i.+vered. Then the wind ruffled Ruka's wet fur, and she realized that the knot in her stomach was partly from the ache in the belly of the cougar.

"Go away," she breathed to the cub. "Go hunt if you're hungry. Don't knot up my guts with your need."

Yet he crouched and waited, as if she would bring him his meat. "East," she said impatiently. "Go toward the coast. The beach. The smell of salt. Your family waits for you there."

Wren glanced up as her lips moved, and she caught his look. Without speaking further, she stepped out from under the rock and tilted her face to the sky. Overhead, the purple-gray clouds streaked across in a boiling, seething ma.s.s. Like horses that churned up the sky, they raced from behind the trees to the rain-smashed tops of the hills. With mindless speed, they tore each other apart.

Bowdie gazed out at the lake, his brown eyes shuttered. His thick brown hair dripped onto his eyebrows with rain, and he raised his hand to wipe it across his forehead. "Lot of rain for a single storm." He spat his last seed and glanced again at Tsia. "Thought it was going to get tough down there. Thought Van'ei was a goner." He turned and moved back in the cave.

Tsia glanced at Wren. The rus.h.i.+ng sound in the wet leaves made a roar like the cats in the back of her mind. Tiny hot points that rumbled in her head... That was what Bowdie felt like-tiny sparks of light that sharpened when she used her biogate like a scan. Tsia drew in a breath and let it out so that the biofields were subdued, and only the sense of Ruka remained strongly in her thoughts.

She hesitated, then said quietly, "The cub isn't leaving me."

Wren chewed for a moment without speaking. Finally, he said, "Saw it in the lake. He swam in, then went right back out again." He spat a seed to the side. "You called him?"

"He came back for me. He's there now, to the right."

"Does he know he's pus.h.i.+ng you to work against the Landing Pact?"

She shook her head. "I think he's too young to read that from the minds of the other felines."

"Thought the knowledge was coded into his genes-into his memories."

"It is, but he's also probably too young to trigger that part of his brain. When he goes back, his mother will teach him before they grow apart."

"Even if he doesn't know the Pact yet, seems like he ought to want to get back to his mother, rather than hang around on your human heels, squatting in the mud." He popped another seed in his mouth. "He ought to at least want out of the rain."

She stared back at the trees where Ruka's tawny form flickered briefly between the trunks. "Cougars don't care much about weather," she said slowly. "They'll hunt in rain or sleet-they'll track an elk through a snowstorm. Not much seems to bother them. That's why they made such good scouts for the First Droppers. They can live almost anywhere, eat almost anything. They aren't so small that they become a prey species, and they aren't so big that they can't hunt enough food from among the rats and reavers."

"And he's not hungry now?"

"He's hungry, but he's... linked with me. He doesn't want to leave."

"Linked?" Wren's voice was suddenly sharp.

Stiffly, she nodded. "They're more open to it when they're young. It's part of their socialization."

Wren gave her a sober look. "You're playing a dangerous game, Feather."

"It's not as if I have a choice. The Landing Pact-"

"The Landing Pact may be law, but even it has limits. And the guide guild has as long an arm as the lifers, when they were in power. The guides watch the felines as if they themselves were hunters. You're not truly safe, even here with the meres. Remember that."

"I'm aware of my position, Wren'."

"Are you? The guides-they know you have ten years' experience; the mere guild lists you with thirty. A new ID dot; a history that's not yours-so far, the guides have never looked beyond the ratings to find you, but that 'so far' is as much protection as you'll ever have-unless you make a deal with the s.h.i.+elds."

"Sure," she retorted. "And what have I ever had that they want? I'm a guide, not a guilder. I've got nothing but my past and a cougar d.o.g.g.i.ng my heels. I'm not trained to follow a blackjack thread. I don't know any alien zeks. I'm the one on the grayscale, Wren. h.e.l.l, why don't I just call them myself and show them just how badly I've broken the Pact?"

"You might as well," he snapped back. "Running scared of your demons-that's the fastest way there is to lose your grip."

Her lips tightened. "And you're not afraid of your past? Of your demons?"

"Afraid? No." His voice was flat. "They don't own me. Not like you: you're letting your fear move you without direction."

She smiled bitterly. "The mere guild gives me direction with every contract And it is they, not my demons, who own me, Wren-as much as I allow it." She stared out at the lake. It looked like a piece of sky, fallen between the hills and trapped by the wind in the valley. She rubbed at her wrists again, chafing the skin on the cuff of her blunter. "The meres--they own my future, too," she said, more to herself than Wren. "But only because I haven't figured out how to get it back for myself."

His cold eyes flicked to the set of her face. "You tried for twenty years to fit the mold of the guides, and it got you only chains." He motioned with his chin at her wrists. She stilled her hands abruptly. "You try now to fit the mold of a mere, and your inner self fights that as much as you deliberately guide us. Look at you. You hide your wildness in motion- constant motion. You dance in every firepit you see. h.e.l.l, Feather, you dance in the wind when there aren't any flames for the oils of your skin. I look at you and all I can see is that your biogate is always open now." He nodded at her automatic denial. "The cats- they move in your mind. I can see it, Feather-in your eyes, in the movements of your body." He spat a seed over the lip of the trail and watched it whipped away by the wind. "You can't always hide in action, Tsia-guide. You run too far forward before your past steadies up, and you fall off the edge of your life." The stillness of his expression seemed somehow brutal on his birdlike face. "If you're not more careful, someday you'll wake up with your demons staring you in the face."

"I wish they would," she whispered. Demons, dreams, and memories... There were people in her past. A sister who had fled to the cold depths of s.p.a.ce. An old friend, lost to the tradelanes... There were the cats around her, forbidden to her by the guides whom she defied with every breath. She clenched her fists inside her blunter and stared up at the sky, ignoring the rain on her face.

Wren followed her gaze. His voice was quiet. "You think about the things you've lost. You hang on to your memories like a tiny spider, tugging on a wind-torn web."

Her eyes were tight with pain. "What else do I have?"

"You have nothing." His voice was flat and abrupt. "Nothing," he repeated harshly, "that you don't make for yourself. You made your past, but no one else's. Take your sister: you hang on to her as though you could fix her life, but you didn't make her problems. Your problems are here-now-in getting us to the freepick stake. In dealing with that cub. Your sister's problems-they're not yours, but hers, to solve-" "No, Wren-" Tsia cut in. "We're family. Her problems are as much mine as hers. She didn't ask to be caught by whatever or whoever trapped her. And somehow, she was persuaded to give up everything that had ever been important to her." She shook her head. "Every com we had, there was denial in her voice of what she was doing to herself. I could hear it. Feel it in every word she spoke."

"She abandoned you. You owe her nothing."

"You've never spoken of your own family, Wren," she retorted. "What is it you reject in them?"

"I gave them up a long time ago."

"I gave up my past, my guild, and my life," she said softly. "I refuse to do the same with my family."

Wren glanced over his shoulder to see if Nitpicker was finished sealing the holes in her trousers, then spat his last seed. "Seems as if, with your gate and all, you'd be able to tell just how strong your sister's rejection is. Just how futile it is to fight it."

"I can tell," Her voice was low. "Sometimes, I can almost feel her. As if she were close enough to touch. As if, were I to scream her name loudly enough, she would answer through the wind."

Wren glanced at her face. He could almost see her stretch through her gate. See the animal snarl that shaped itself on her lips. " 'O tiger's heart,' " he murmured, " 'wrapped in a woman's hide.' "

Slowly, she turned to face him. One hand rose to his chest, her fingers curled like a claw. She rested it on his sternum till she felt the cold power of his biofield like the rain that slashed her skin. Slowly, her eyes cleared of the glints that sparked in their dark blue depths. She said nothing, but when he turned to go back to the cave, she followed without a word.

"The freepick stake is just over the ridge," Striker said to Kurvan as Tsia stepped back in the cave. "Why not hike it?"

Kurvan frowned. "We lost every scanner but the one Bowdie was carrying on his harness. How do you expect to pick up a trail? The node's still down, so we can't call up a map overlay. And with this storm, it's not as if the paths are clearly marked."

Striker pointed at Tsia with her sharp chin. "We've got a guide. That's part of what we pay her for- pathfmding. You got a guess, Feather? About how far it is to the freepick stake on foot?"

"As the crow flies, about twenty kilometers," Tsia forced herself to respond. 'Thirty-eight to fifty by trail."

"It's only midmorning now," Striker said. "We could make the stake by tomorrow's dawn."

Nitpicker got gingerly to her feet, wincing as the movement pulled on the fresh skin grafts. "There's

more than one trail?"

"Five," Tsia returned. "Three will be impa.s.sable-there's been six solid days of rain-and most of the cable bridges will be under water, if they haven't been torn away by snags."

"You've hiked these trails yourself? You know them in storm conditions?"

She gave the pilot a faint, twisted smile. "Daya has always d.a.m.ned the fools who hike trails like these in

storms."

Doetzier gave her a speculative look. "Not that you haven't done it yourself?"

Tsia shrugged. "Fifteen, sixteen years ago, I spent a few months out here, working with a friend. I know

three of the trails in this area well; one trail somewhat, and the fifth trail I crossed only once."

"Fifteen years is a lot of time for change," he remarked.

"I ran each of those main trails over a dozen times. Mud can't hide my landmarks."

" 'Brush grows and snags burn, but the peaks remain the same,' " quoted Striker.

Doetzier regarded Tsia curiously. "Why run a trail so many times?"

"I had a Gea contract to track the shaper swarms as they came across the ridges."

Bowdie raised his brown eyebrows. "I've been on this world two years now and I've never seen any

chameleons, let alone a shaper."

"A mere who sees a shaper is in a world of hurt," Wren commented. "Better to keep your eyes closed and miss them by a mile." Tsia nodded. "If you're not out in the right weather, it's not likely you'll see them unless they're attacking for food, or you're in the path of a swarm. Remember when SarabCo came out with their new e-wraps- the kind we use now for camo? Power and sensor strips sewn in; configuration threads, blunter fabric... Lots of advertis.e.m.e.nt-new technologies, new materials. People here on Risthmus just shook their heads. An e-wrap that changed shape, not just color, to match your terrain? Shapers have been doing that kind of camouflage for millennia." She glanced outside at the rain. "In this weather, they'll be hungry. You'll probably stumble over a few on the way."

"Just what we like," Striker muttered. "Venomous scenery."