Cataract. Part 19

Wind blasted through the trees and lifted his hair as if it could be torn from his scalp. The scars on Tsia's cheek pulled tightly white against her skin. She dropped her hand to her side. Her voice was cold with a chill that seemed to pierce her teeth. "The one thing you do not know," she said slowly, "is who or what I am."

Tsia jogged blindly toward the head of the trail. She did not speak to Striker, or Doetzier. She did not glance at Kurvan. Her brain was filled with catspeak, and she could not get the claws out of her skull. She barely noticed the kilometers they moved. The storm, now steady, gave time no meaning at all. Her neck was greased with rain.

Doetzier and Kurvan traded their packs off to Bowdie and Striker; Nitpicker and Wren took their turn after that. Wren silently gave Tsia his slimchim pouch when they paused for a break on the trail, and she took two chims for herself, then tossed half the rest to Ruka. She didn't speak to the other meres; she could feel them like death on the trail. The nose of the cub seemed to flare with their scents. His eyes seemed to watch from behind. One of them was blackjack, she told herself with a chill. One of them was death.

Twice, she pointed out places for the meres to ease around. The first time, the sharp musk scent of the shapers rose from the path just ahead, and she froze. Behind her, the other meres automatically stilled their steps. This scent was not through Ruka's nose, but had come to her from her own. The shapers were close. Ruka's senses flooded over the faint detail of the heartbeats she sought, and she had to shush him with a snarl.

Faint... Sluggish... As if they slept. As if they waited. She stared to the side of the pocket of life till the rain rippled *ross the trail. A flicker of movement caught her eye. One edge s.h.i.+fted; the water dripped across. Had she blinked, she would have missed it. Had she looked straight at it, she would have thought it was her mind, not reality, that slid the rain from the trail.

She soothed Ruka so that he withdrew from his perch in the stones. Then, infinitesirnally, she eased her body back. No more vibrations on the trail to kick them out of their hole. No sudden moves to make them eager to follow. She was as careful with her feet as she was with her eyes, refusing to stare at their backs, as if they could feel the heat of her gaze through their dozing watchfulness. A moment later, she led the meres around the trail where Ruka had already gone, and where the scent of the cat lingered like paint on the rocks.

The second time she smelled the musk, it was through Ruka's nose, not hers. That time, the scent came from a place offtrail, to the right, and Ruka, his gold eyes gleaming, regarded the pocket as if he were a pointer whose line could be followed by Tsia's thoughts. She acknowledged the shapers and eased the meres on past.

When Ruka joined her again, she could feel the hunger in his belly grow. "Go," she told him then. "Go hunt on your own. Don't wait here with me."

He growled in return. She motioned sharply, as if to scare him away, but he knew her now, and the motion merely made his eyes sharpen, as if she herself might become his meal. She laughed at him and snarled back through the gate, then tossed the pouch with the rest of Wren's slimchims into the rocks. She did not have to see the paw that snagged the bundle before it hit the ground; she could feel him tear it open and gulp the contents so clearly that her own throat convulsed.

An hour before dawn. Doetzier and Kurvan took their packs back; Tsia still stalked at the head of the trail. Ruka, the low hum of his growling ever-present in her mind, climbed and leaped and padded so that Tsia's feet did not seem to feel the trail, but rather jumped from stone to stone and crisscrossed through the forest behind herself. She grew almost used to the feeling of double vision.

They climbed through the last cut and paused where the trail opened out onto the top of a cliff. This was the part of the trail she knew well, even in the dark. The wind, which curled and eddied along the rock wall, tugged at their balance as much as the mud that had sucked at their feet. Where the cliff dropped away, the rocks shot down like arrows and ended in a tumble of broken columns.

Tsia padded out to the edge of the wall, knowing it had no undercut. From behind, Kurvan yelled a warning, but she waved him off. Instead, she poised on the rim and rolled her shoulders till the tension left her arms. Gingerly, Kurvan stepped up beside her and looked down.

He gestured at their feet. "How did you know the edge was safe?"

She c.o.c.ked her head to hear his words in the wind. He was like a cougar just before it pounced, his voice low while his biofield crouched to attack. "I know this wall," she said flatly. "It's as solid as it is tall at this point."

His voice sharpened deliberately. "If you know this trail so well, how could you not know there was a lake beneath the gra.s.s back in the meadow?"

"It was night, and I can't wear darkeyes."

"Yes, but you're a guide."

She twisted to face him, and her rain-pale face was thin and sharp. The white scars on her cheek seemed to channel the rain to her lips, and she licked them almost unconsciously. "I'm a guide," she agreed with a soft snarl, "not a G.o.d. The middle part of this trail-I never hiked it before. Only the beginning and ends. With the node down, I had no way of knowing what was under the gra.s.s."

"As a guide," he snapped back, "your responsibility is to feel what is there."

"I can't sense things as clearly in a storm-no guide can. There's too much movement. What I sensed in the meadow-lake," she corrected, "was life that made sense for the movement of the wind."

"You said there were eels, sucker fish. If you could feel them, how could you think it was gra.s.sland?"

Ruka's fur had bristled with Kurvan's tone, and his hostility became Tsia's aggression. She had to clamp her lips to keep them from snarling. "Just what are you getting at?" she asked slowly, fighting with her throat to make the human sounds.

"Seems like you feel only what you want to feel through your so-called biogate. You come out with barely a scratch each time there is an accident; but Wren and Tucker? Nit-picker? It's always someone else who pays for your mistakes. And with the scame gone down with Wren's pack, how could we fix a more... fatal accident?"

She took a step forward, Kurvan took a step back, and Nitpicker materialized from the wind. The pilot gave Kurvan a meaningful glance, and he withdrew without a word, though he cast a cold look at Tsia's hand, which clenched the hilt of her flexor. Nitpicker did not watch him go. She merely stood in his place and looked out from the cliff as if she did not notice the flash of Tsia's eyes.

Tsia struggled with her breathing. Her eyes seemed blinded by the movement of the woman's clothes in the wind. She was focused like a hunter, she realized. She was taking in Ruka's will as if it was her own. It was like the heat of a fire: all-consuming, all-surrounding. She shuddered visibly, and Nitpicker noted it out of the corner of her eye. The pilot's darkeyes caught movement the same way that Tsia did through her gate, and the shudder that Tsia fought to control was as obvious to Nitpicker as the wind that rippled through Tsia's hair. The pilot had seen the guide like this before-when fire had called Tsia as strongly as her gate. When she had been drawn to the flames as strongly as she was sucked in by the cats who crawled in her mind. How did she really think anymore? How far could Tsia be trusted? Nitpicker shot a glance at Tsia's throat, and tightened her lips at the bruising. The blackness of her finger marks was as dark as the whiteness of the claw marks on Tsia's face. The swollen flesh as thick as the anger that seeped from Tsia's muscles. The pilot balanced like Tsia against the wind and tried to feel the currents as if they were heat instead of chill air.

"I suppose this seems like fire, not rain, to you," she shouted.

Tsia nodded.

"Still crave it?"

She shook her head. She knew what Nitpicker asked, and the pilot seemed intent, but not intent on her.

"I'm ten years out of my gate," she answered, expanding her gate to search where Nitpicker focused.

"Only new guides have a physical need to dance in the flames."

"You don't need the fire at all?"

"Not need, no," she returned. "But desire, yes. The heat on my flesh... The smell of ash in my sweat..."

"Then it's the biogate, not the firepit, that calls you now?"

Slowly, Tsia nodded. "I can feel the cats as far away as that mountaintop." She gestured with her chin.

"Strong gate. Too strong, perhaps?"

Tsia turned her head and met Nitpicker's eyes, and her gaze had a wildness beneath the dark blue that was not fury, but eagerness. "You and the others," she said softly, "you're right not to trust me. A tarn can call me to it just as easily as I could call that same cat to me."

"Your mutation was not supposed to stay so wild, Feather. You were supposed to become controlled. To be able to control your gate like you do your ghosts in the node."

"I did. I can."

"Yet you say they call you, too?"

Tsia closed her eyes. "As easily and strongly as the node calls you through your temple link." Cat feet skittered across her skull, and she rubbed at her temples, then threw back her head and screamed the cry of the cougar into the wind. Behind the two women, the other meres leaned against the wall of rock and watched.

Nitpicker eyed her for a moment. "You've lost yourself, Feather. You've given yourself up to your gate."

When Tsia opened her eyes, they glinted. "My hands don't shake; my thoughts are clear. I'm not controlled by this," she said flatly. "There's only myself inside me; and the gate-it's a door, not a void."

"I look at you and see a cat clawing its way out of the human skin which surrounds it."

Tsia's lip curled. "You're the one who doesn't see me clearly, if you see only the gate in my mind."

"I see more than your gate, Tsia. I see a guide so lost she knows only the trail she treads, not the life she wishes for herself. I see a Feather so buffeted by the wind that she has no path of her own. I see you accepting your biogate as if it was your only view of the world."

"I'm a guide. I can't help but see through the gate."

"See through it or live through it?" Nitpicker studied Tsia for a long moment. "If you were threatened- if you were told the gate would be taken away, what would you do to save it? How far would you go to protect yourself at the expense of those around you?"

Tsia's eyes narrowed. "You think I'd betray you to save myself? That I'd trade your life for my gate?" She nodded slowly. "That's what you think has gone on here, isn't it? You think I've been working against you."

"Have you?"

Tsia's jaw tightened. "There's something you're still not saying, Van'ei."

"Look at you," Nitpicker returned harshly. "Your eyes are wild. Your fingers curl like claws. You look like a stormwitch, not a guide. I can see you dancing in this as if it were fire, not wind that whipped your hair. As if your blood burned the same way as your anger. I see death in your footsteps, Tsia-guide. I see it when you're threatened-when you're angry. And I see it when you connect with the cats." She eyed Tsia with a cold look. "You never left the cub behind, did you? You drew him here with us, and all along this trail, he's been clouding your mind so that you can't even remember that you're human."

Tsia could not answer, but the expression in her eyes was enough for Nitpicker to tighten her lips in fury.

"So. I'm right." She stared out into the valley blindly until she saw the points of light that marked the freepick stake. "Zyas dammit," she swore finally. "No cats as scouts; no obligations; no calling by the humans: that's the Landing Pact that the cats themselves negotiated. But here you are, taking advantage of a cub who's been engineered to link with you if you want it. And you want that badly. Don't deny it, Feather. It's in your eyes." She cursed again under her breath. "You disobeyed my orders. The platform stunt was one thing; this is something else. Here, you're deliberately breaking the Landing Pact that you of all people should honor. Sleem take it," she said in disgust. "There's some kind of irony in the fact that we're protecting you from the guides, while the guides protect the cats from you. Neither you nor the cats obey the Pact that everyone else is keeping."

"He wants this link as much as I do-maybe more," Tsia returned harshly. "I can taste it in his field. Every time I send him away, he just refuses to go."

"Do you really expect him to withdraw from what is as strong to his nature as hunting? He's been engineered, Feather, to link with you as a scout. He has no choice in this. You do. And if you let this continue, he could bond with you for life. He could become as much a slave to your gate as you are to the ID dot that protects you from the guides."

"Van'ei," she said softly, "I can't hate him enough to drive him away. He saved my life in the lake. And if he hadn't done so, I wouldn't have known to come back to help you. He-not I-is the reason that you're alive, too."

"Perhaps." Nitpicker turned back to the freepick's valley. "When I was trapped in the mud, there was someone else nearby. Someone who ripped the enbee from my face. You were there. You bear the marks to prove it. You were with Tucker when he died-it was your idea that drowned him. You almost dropped Doetzier on that stretch of rock. You did drop Kurvan on the bridge-it was Bowdie, not you, who caught him and kept him from falling. You led Wren right into the water."

"I didn't know it was a lake-"

Nitpicker cut her off coldly. "I accepted Wren's word about Tucker. I gave you the benefit of the doubt about myself. But Kurvan-we saw it, Feather. It was deliberate-your letting go-as if you just threw him away to the rocks."

"Daya, how can you say this? You know me-"

"Ay, I know you."

Tsia stared at her. "You provoke me, then defend me. You joke with me, then push me. We've never been close, but at least we could work together. Now there's something else in your mind. Something you're not saying."

"I want truth, Feather-guide." Her eyes flicked to the swollen ring of Tsia's neck. "I want to know what you see in your gate-if you obey the cats of this world, or if you follow another voice. Something foreign perhaps? Or alien?" She watched Tsia closely.

"I don't understand."

"I want to feel for myself the truth of what you tell me."

"I don't know how to give you that."

Nitpicker said softly, "But you do know how to choose, don't you? Between an ethic and the desire that

floods you through your gate? Striker will fight to the death to defend a lifer's rights, even if she hates what the lifer stands for. What ethics in you are stronger than your desire for the cats?"

Tsia's eyes narrowed. The pilot's questions probed like a scalpel for the rotted tissue of a pressure bruise.

Nitpicker watched her carefully. "How far are you controlled by your gate?" she demanded softly.

"How much are you directed by the guide guild you claim to have left? Or directed by something else?"

"I left the guides when the guides left me. I owe them nothing."

"I've heard that a ten-year guide should be able to pinpoint the organic circuit of an antigrav in the clutter of a s.h.i.+ptech's lab."

"You know my link," Tsia returned with vehemence. "And it's to the cats, not to a bacterium. I have no

such resolution."

"You don't have to be so linked to feel such detail. All gates should have the potential of that sensitivity.

Linked to the felines or linked with the fish, you should be able to feel a biochip within a dozen meters."

Tsia stared at her for a long moment. "I thought you understood," she said slowly. "I thought you knew."

"Knew what?"

She glanced at the other meres, but they were to the side, not downwind. "I was taken from the guide

guild," she said, "before I was trained to my gate. I never learned how to use it." Her hands clenched with growing frustration. She couldn't blame Nitpicker for her distrust, but she could not help her anger. "Everything I know," she said in a low, vehement voice, "I've learned by myself or through Forrest, and I've got almost no resolution outside the link to the cats."

Nitpicker regarded her strangely for a moment. "When you detected the shapers, what did you feel?""I smelled them first-I didn't feel them.""And once you knew they were there?""I isolated them through the gate."

The other woman nodded.

"It wasn't easy," Tsia said flatly.

Nitpicker stared out over the black valley till she located the faint lights from the freepick stake in the

distance. "Your sister works in customs, doesn't she?"