The Bonding Page 21

  31

  Red like blood.

  Red like love.

  SOIL AS RED AS BLOOD crusted under Nissa’s fingernails, covering her arms up to her biceps. She’d never been so dirty in her entire life. She lifted a red fern from the basket and pressed it into the new hole she’d dug. Sweat dripped down her body.

  She’d never labored before like this either but it felt good. Or at least as good as it got now. In life post-Tam. She patted the soil around the base of the fern.

  The leaves of red ferns could be eaten in salads or boiled into soup and the roots could be cooked and mashed into a paste, stirred in with fat from the cattle. They were a solid source of sustenance.

  They would rebuild the Red Gardens, only now they would be useful instead of just beautiful. And so would she. Now they would help feed the population.

  “Water?” Slemani offered, her little face crusted with red dirt.

  “Please and thank you.” Nissa took the cup and swallowed half in a single sip, droplets running down her chin. Oh, how her tutors would have railed at her for the undignified behavior.

  Slemani took the glass back and finished it, holding it with both hands, wide black eyes on Nissa’s face. She, like many of the people on Triannon, was part Vestige. The Trianni had changed in all those years, some taller, stronger, paler, with darker eyes, like their captors.

  “Have you had anything to eat today?” she asked the girl in Vestige.

  Slemani nodded, and Nissa felt her heart open, just a little, at the girl’s sweet face.

  She spent her days working in the gardens. Everything had to be rebuilt. The farms that the Vestige had run on Triannon had been little more than slave holdings, in which Trianni had been forced to labor.

  The population hadn’t wanted to work them again, wanting to throw off the pall of the past. It had taken grim resolution and hours of meetings between them and her father to establish new systems for farming on a volunteer basis. Nissa had taken the orphaned children for her own. They spent their mornings with her, working in the gardens, and the afternoons in makeshift classrooms, where some of the other women from the pods taught them letters and numbers.

  Unlike adults, the children asked for nothing, but offered much. Only with them did the hard crust that had formed around her heart soften.

  “Are you hungry?” Slemani nodded again. She was always hungry.

  Nissa smiled. “Lunchtime then. Let’s wash up.” She called to the other children, who came running and skipping over to wash in the stream.

  The cool water felt like heaven. She’d browned in her days on Triannon. She wore a wide straw hat, in the fashion of the farmers, and the loose, short linen smock-dress that allowed for stray breezes to cool heated skin. She’d never shown her legs in public before her return to Triannon, but now she felt unspeakably grateful for the short dress.

  Slemani pulled at Nissa’s hand. Squeezing it. “Can we eat now, Lady?”

  “Yes, let’s.”

  They headed to the shadow of the arena, a massive circular complex where the Games had been held. It was one of the few buildings to have survived from before Nissa had entered the pod, probably because the Vestige had a use for it, and it had been made of dark-red stones, rather than quartz.

  The temperature dropped, in the shade. Modest food had been laid out for them, along with pitchers of water and tassitu juice.

  The children laughed and squealed, elbowing one another aside in their glee to feast.

  They were orphans. They had been slaves. Now they were free but still they had no one to love them. Nissa had taken them in and they lived with her in the long, low Vestige building and during the day, they worked with her in the gardens. It kept them out of trouble. It kept her mind occupied.

  “Lady?” Nissa turned to see Teanna, one of the women from the pods, gliding in her red dress, sadness in the lines of her face.

  Always though, beneath it all, she bore the confidence and comfort of a woman in love. Teanna had mated a Tribe warrior.

  Nissa shrugged off a familiar burst of jealousy. “Yes?”

  “There is news from the city.” Teanna pushed her hair over her shoulder, checking no children could overhear her.

  “They found six bodies this morning. In the street.” Nissa closed her eyes at the sudden, graphic image of a time before she’d entered the pods, when she’d seen the bodies piled in the street like garbage. Yesterday it had been eight bodies. The day before three. Every morning brought fresh carnage.

  “Who were they?”

  “Just people. No one specific.”

  “Do they know why?”

  “It looks a variety of reasons. Two of the men appear to have tried to defend themselves. Robbery maybe. Three look like executions.”

  “Gangs then?”

  Teanna nodded. The people had instantly splintered, half of them taking their freedom with both hands, grasping it like a lifeline and refusing all leadership. Gangs had formed that resisted the Tribe’s attempts to maintain order. Daily, people arrived at the commune established by Nissa’s father with the Tribe’s compliance, asking for succor from the violence.

  “The king thinks so.”

  Guilt washed over her afresh. They’d abandoned the people of this planet to the hands of fate. And fate was cruel. If the people hated the king, if they hated Nissa, if they hated every Tribe soldier they saw, even as they hated the Vestige, who could blame them? Some of the Trianni looked at them and saw nothing more than a new set of captors.

  “Thank you for telling me, Teanna.”

  The other woman would no doubt find comfort from her mate.

  Nissa turned away, to the children’s happy faces. Their clothes were covered in dirt from the gardens but the dirt was fresh. They’d been in rags when Nissa had found them. They’d been starving.

  Whatever her father’s crimes, they were making a difference here.

  She felt Tam, across their bond. Fear. Anger. Then nothing.

  SHE DRIFTED through the day. Grateful when night came, for night brought sleep. Easier, by far, than waking.

  Sleep offered solace, even when Tam didn’t appear. They didn’t always meet in their dreams and finally she figured out why. It only worked if they slept at the same time. Since that revelation, she’d timed her sleep to his. Only when she felt a deadening of his pain did she allow herself the sweet respite of sleep’s warm escape. It had been some time since it had worked. This time he found her, his dark form emerging from the odorless, intemperate mists of dreams.

  He always found her. His touch didn’t offer the same salvation in sleep as it had in life but at least the sense of physical loss abated, like a lost limb regrown. A peace of sorts. He opened his arms. Dream-Tam didn’t smell like real-Tam. He didn’t sound like real-Tam. He didn’t feel like real-Tam. But any Tam was better than no Tam.

  “Is this Paradise?” he asked, looking unaccountably sad. They couldn’t usually speak so clearly and sometimes they couldn’t speak at all. He traced his fingers over her brows, down her nose, with reverence.

  “We’re together. That’s a paradise of sorts,” Nissa answered.

  He looked around, at the nothingness of their dreamscape. “This isn’t what I expected. I’m glad you’re here, but it sucks.”

  She laughed. “What did you expect?”

  “Color. Birds singing. Flowers.”

  “You wanted the Fields.”

  “I wanted you. Forget the birds.” His fingers moved through her hair to cup the back of her head. He pulled her against him, kissed her hard. She felt his tongue, smooth and velvety, but no heat. No Tam-taste.

  “It’s nice to hear your voice,” she said and he nodded.

  “Never enough,” he growled against her lips, breathily. “I thought it would be more real now.”

  She didn’t know what he meant, but who cared?

  She couldn’t think when he pulled her against him, against his thick, hard length. She gasped. He ran his hands down her
back, lifted her with hands under each cheek of her bottom. She looked down between their bodies, at the fat crown of his cock, weeping and red.

  “Say it,” he said. “I want to hear you say it.”

  “Fuck me, Tam.”

  “Always, eyana, godsdamn. I love when you say that.” He switched her weight to one arm and used his other hand to guide himself inside her. Thick. Hard. Hot.

  He dropped them down, so her back pressed against a soft, nondescript floor. She pressed her feet down, lifting her hips, taking him deep. “Fuck me.” She repeated it as if it was a mantra, as if the words had the power to heal them, bring them back together, as if they could undo a hundred mistakes.

  And Tam did. He grunted and fucked her. They moved together for what felt like hours but as always in the dreams, no relief would come. He rolled her so they both sat, she astride his thighs.

  Sweat dripped down his nose. “Even now? Nothing? Why?”

  “What do you mean? It’s always like this in the dreams.”

  He shook his head. “But I died.”

  Her heart lurched and waking threatened. She shook her head. “No. No, Tam. You are not dead. I know you aren’t. I’d have felt it.” She would have, wouldn’t she?

  His cock pulsed inside her. Voices pulled, sucking her inexorably into the vacuum of her life, pulling at her the fringes of her sleeping mind.

  Tam slipped away, disappearing into gray mists.

  “Tam, find me,” she shouted, even as he disappeared. “Come to Triannon, Tam. Find me.”

  He was gone.

  She woke, dripping between her thighs and pressed a hand to her chest. She felt him. Tam. He was alive but was he injured? Why did he think he was dead?

  She never knew if she felt reinvigorated from the hours spent in his false presence, or if the pall had grown in strength, but now she had a new worry.

  What if Tam died?

  32

  No cold substitute will do.

  DAYS LATER, after another unsatisfying night with dream-Tam, in which they’d been unable to communicate at all, her eyes opened to a shaft of the soft rosy light of the Triannon sun. It stretched across her chamber, over the crumbling floor of the Vestige housing they’d commandeered, climbing the pallet on which she slept. It offered no succor.

  Triannon, once the foundation of her every dream, was nothing more than a massive ball of spinning rock, liquid on the inside, solid on the outside, with an atmosphere of gasses that gave breath to life. Lovely, surely, but a cold substitute, a weak bedfellow. She closed her eyes, hoping to drift back to Tam.

  It didn’t work. It never did. Voices sounded in the passageway outside, echoing off the plasticized walls of endless corridors.

  She’d been back for seventeen days. Seventeen days of flissa-flies and Splirantu, red ferns and balmy sea breezes. And no Tam.

  Thirty-three days, and worse, thirty-three nights, had passed since Tam had whispered in her ear, in the Healing Bay of Sierra-Six. I love you.

  His gruff and parting words, as much a promise of love as a curse of misery. She understood now why he’d answered her the way he had, with, fuck you.

  As she always did, she closed her fingers around the vial in her pocket and took what strength she could from the knowledge that she carried a piece of him with her. Always.

  A knock sounded at the door. Teanna entered her room on hesitant feet. She always looked so happy. Nissa died a little every single time she saw her flushed cheeks and dimpled chin.

  “Lady?”

  “Good morning, Teanna.”

  The girl paused in the doorway, a vibrant, fluttering silhouette. “Can I help you bathe or dress?”

  They always asked the same questions, the Trianni women from the pods. They clung to the old ways. Nissa didn’t need their service. She didn’t want it. She bathed in the cool river, just as they did. But always, they asked.

  “No, thank you.”

  The girl paused, unsure.

  “How many dead this morning, Teanna?” She asked the same question every morning. Every day since her father, King Himnor, and the Tribe had established new order in Trian, the day had greeted them with bodies piled in the streets like strewn rubble. The discarded garbage of a night of flagrant lawlessness. The vacuum of Vestige law had called to the populous, turning neighbors against one another. Former slaves, having never known freedom, balked at a new ruling class.

  No matter the food, shelter, and provisions the king offered, no matter the constant presence of the Tribe guards, the gangs prevailed. They wanted anarchy and who could blame them? There were innocents to consider as well. The women, children, the good men who simply wanted to live in peace with the promise of shelter, food and clean water, the hope for freedom. They were the ones who suffered, whose supplies were stolen, the ones who were raped and left for dead, bleeding out in the street. It could not continue. The Tribe patrolled but the gangs knew the streets. They had slave networks, underground tunnels that they used to move throughout the city.

  Teanna shook her head, a strange smile spreading over her face. “Many, Lady, but not what you’d think.”

  Nissa frowned.

  The girl continued. “The elders say the bodies this morning were of gang leaders. Four of them. They were dead in the square.”

  That got her attention. “Who?”

  “The people are whispering. They call him Chingassa. He is one of them.” The girl didn’t hide the glee from her voice.

  “What does that mean, Chingassa?” she asked.

  Teanna shrugged.

  Nissa rose, clutching the vial like an amulet, and went in search of her father.

  It didn’t take long. He was where he usually was.

  SHE HESITATED on the edge of the tent that had been established beside the forest, where the quarry trailed off and the flat cliffs merged with scrubby trees. The sea spread green in the distance and crashed against stone below. A familiar memory of Tam, on his back on the cliff as she rode him before they were attacked, stole her breath. She braced her shoulders.

  Her father stood with a group of men, not unlike the day long ago that she’d run to them, bleeding and panicked, before they’d entered the pods.

  They’d been discussing defense. No one believed for a second that the Vestige wouldn’t regroup and return at any moment. The Tribe had installed several satellites but defense was a constant concern.

  He met her eyes with a wary nod. They had barely spoken since she’d arrived on the planet.

  “Daughter,” he said, drawing her forward to stand among them. She nodded politely to the two freed slaves who had become advisors to the newly established government her father had created. Pinoton and Shanchoton, both small and pale, with curling red hair. Pinoton was fat, which had made Nissa instantly distrust him. In a land of thin slaves, a fat one stood out.

  Shanchoton had a tiny mustache curling around his mouth.

  “Pinoton has come up with an idea for selecting your husband.” Her father said it as if he thought this would bring her joy. She sketched a nod and a half-smile.

  It was Pinoton who spoke, his fat chin wobbling with barely concealed enthusiasm. The translation devices that the Tribe had provided offered up words she could understand, though everyone who lived on Triannon spoke in the language of the Vestige. She’d been learning, slowly, loathing the sounds, detesting the people. They deserved more than a queen who couldn’t love them.

  “The people need focus. They need excitement. Entertainment will distract them and help them learn to trust us. So, we will hold a competition. Five separate games. The winner will become the future-king.”

  She forced herself to smile, stroking her hand along the vial. A sudden craving raged through her veins. She could open the vial right now. Release the serum on her tongue, savor the final orgasm, wash away this future-king. “What will the competitions entail?” Her voice was cool.

  Shanchoton spoke now, smiling at her. All she saw was the grinning Trianni male
who’d licked her face on cliffs not far from here. “The Games. A revival of the Games. We had them monthly under the Vestige. They had us fight to the death. The people loved it.”

  “No,” Nissa said, fury stilling her heart.

  The fat one held up his hands in front of him, gaze dropping to her curled lips. “Not to the death. We will have contests, as I understand you used to have. No one will die.”

  Nissa inhaled sharply. Criamnon had won her hand in such a manner.

  “We will start with a test of battle that will require teamwork. Followed by strength. Then endurance. Then prowess at hunting, because this demands intelligence.”

  Nissa nodded at him. “Was that four? Or did I miss one?” He shook his head. “The final will be hand-to-hand combat.”

  She glared at her father. “A fighter.” I had a fighter. The best fighter.

  He nodded, holding her gaze, stoic and resolute. There was a glimmer in his eyes that said he understood and more, he was excited about it. “A Trianni fighter.”

  He stressed the word Trianni but Nissa knew what he refused to accept.

  The people weren’t Trianni anymore. They spoke Vestige. They had new rituals and customs. If her father managed to lead these people, it was through sheer force of will alone, not because they belonged to him.

  “When will this begin?” she asked, looking into the distance.

  Her father smiled at her. “The day after tomorrow. The games will take five days. We will have feasts each night. It will accustom them to working together, give them a united hope.”

  Her vision tunneled. Seven days. She’d be given to a stranger in seven days. She’d thought she’d have more time.

  She’d be offered up to a fighter. She already had a fighter.

  Cheers of Chingassa echoed across the tent.

  “That sounds perfect.” She smiled at them, polite and grim. Her father caught her eye, suspicious maybe, concerned always. She let her gaze slide past him. He asked too many questions.

  There were no answers to give him. There was only one way to fix things. Give me back my Tam. Release me from this wretched planet. Give me back my time with him. Undo my wrongs.