Asier seemed to read her thoughts. “There was nothing you could have done for them,” he told her firmly.
She knew that. It didn’t help the guilt.
Asier carried her to a rocky outcropping, and crouched so that she could clamber off of him. Her hips ached so badly, she nearly toppled over.
“Ah, fucking hell,” she swore in her own language, folding over to stretch the tightness out of her legs. She looked absurd with one bare leg. Where the trouser leg had been cut away, the fibers of the flight suit frayed in a soft fringe around the top of her thigh.
Asier looked away from her, adjusting the bandana on his face, tightening the knot. “Can you walk?” he asked.
“Yes. I just need a minute.” She twisted and bent, arched and lunged, working away the soreness. Asier stood oblique to her, staring resolutely into the dense growth of the forest.
She tugged her bent knees up to her chest, one at a time, and finally ceded to the fact that her legs were going to ache for a while. Walking would help.
“Alright.” She touched Asier’s arm to let him know she was ready. Even through the tough weave of his jacket, a frisson of heat passed between them. Lyra resisted the urge to grab onto him, to climb him like a cat. Did some of his toxin still linger in her system? She couldn’t look at him without feeling a coil of desire wind through her.
She put some distance between them. The air was cool on her bare leg, but nothing intolerable. Yet. Asier had warned her that the planet had insane weather extremes.
“How far now?” she asked.
“Uncertain,” Asier answered. “We started at your pace, and then there was time lost when you were attacked…”
He trailed off as Lyra shuddered.
“Walk behind me,” he said. “I’ll break any loose ground.”
“So I should sacrifice you to the worms instead?”
He held out a heavy walking stick that he must have acquired while Lyra slept. He thumped it on the ground. “I’ve been cautious. And my skin is harder and thicker than yours. I don’t think they’d be able to injure me much.”
Lyra didn’t need much convincing. She fell into step behind him. His strides were far too long for her to step into each one of his footfalls, but she would follow in his wake. It was better than nothing.
Partly to distract herself from thoughts of the worms, and partly to keep herself from obsessing over the broadness of his shoulders and the strength of his big arms, Lyra said, “Asier. That name sounds Ravanoth.”
Asier made a rumbling sound from deep in his chest—Lyra was beginning to recognize it as a Scaeven yes. “My mother was Ravanoth.”
Lyra frowned. The Ravanoth were generally a little taller than humans, but only by a few inches. They were elegantly slender, with eel-smooth skin that ranged in shades from butter yellow, to shell pink, to pastel orange. Ravanoth were cold-blooded, which served them well on their hot, humid planet. Being aboard a Ravanoth ship was like being trapped in a sauna.
Asier, on the other hand, was the opposite of a Ravanoth in every way. He had to be at least eight feet tall, with a body as broad and brawny as a mountain. She knew for a fact he was burningly hot-blooded. His deep gray skin shone with a subtly metallic luster, contrasted sharply by his thick, silvery hair. Ravanoth eyes were round and owl-like, whereas Asier’s were sharp and vulpine.
The Ravanoth were so cerebral, as to seem not fully present much of the time. But Asier’s physical presence was so strong, Lyra could feel him even when he was standing several meters away.
So much for distracting herself. “You don’t look Ravanoth at all,” she said.
“I’m not.”
Lyra tilted her head, confused. “Was she an adoptive mother?”
“No, biological. Scaeven reproduction is… complicated.”
Her little sister would’ve jumped all over that, asking question after question, completely fascinated and uninhibited by social niceties. But Lyra could recognize that Asier was uncomfortable with the topic, so she let it drop.
“So your mom named you. What does Asier mean?”
“Anchor.”
Strong, steady, reliable. “A good name,” Lyra said.
Asier didn’t respond.
“Do you speak Ravanoth?”
He replied in the low, purring tones of a dialect she didn’t recognize. It reverberated in his chest with a resonance that Lyra could nearly feel. She had never heard the Ravanoth language sound so lovely.
She only had a basic grasp of Standardized Ravanoth—an administrative language that almost nobody spoke natively—which didn’t sound nearly so rich or softly flowing as the sounds coming from Asier’s mouth.
Speaking in Standardized, she asked, “What did you say?”
He replied back in the trade Creole, “I said, ‘my mother’s people are from the Fasham Islands.’”
Lyra had been to the Ravanoth home planet several times—twice as a military pilot participating in joint exercises with the Ravanoth Defense Force, and then twice more as a civilian pilot for different research missions. But she’d never heard of the Fasham Islands.
She asked him about the islands, and he told her what he’d learned from his mother, but he seemed reluctant to discuss the mysterious Ravanoth female who’d somehow birthed a Scaeven child.
So Lyra changed the subject. “What’s Scaevos like?”
“It’s a multi-body system. Ten different moons orbit the largest gas giant in our solar system. I was born on Varan, the largest moon. It is larger than Earth.”
“Your diurnal cycles must be very complicated.”
“Scaevens don’t keep time by light cycles like Humans and Ravanoth do.”
They lapsed into silence for a while, walking on. Lyra scanned the forest with practiced, methodical sweeps. Her peripheral awareness of Asier’s body and movement allowed her to forget about her path, and instead make a careful, detailed assessment of their surroundings.
She caught the movement of small creatures clambering along tree branches, scuttling through the bracken. Shrill calls and rasping chirps sounded all around them. Bright light filtered through the scarlet canopy overhead, tinging everything faintly red.
In the space of an hour, the temperature soared from reasonably comfortable to baking hot. Through gaps in the leaves, they could see flashes of heat lightning in fat, lavender-colored clouds.
Lyra was sweating inside her flight suit. She could feel the air pressure beating on her skull, threatening to trigger a migraine. One drawback to living within the perfectly regulated confines of a ship was that your body sometimes forgot how to acclimate itself to normal planetside fluctuations.
Before the migraine managed to take root, the air pressure dropped, and the temperature with it. A thin, misty rain pattered down through the forest canopy.
“So,” Lyra said, breaking their peaceable quiet. “You’re an Enforcer. Is that Scaevos’ police force?”
“In a way. Scaeven Enforcers don’t protect Scaevens from crime, though. We protect the rest of the universe from Scaevens.”
Lyra was about to ask more when Asier came to an abrupt halt. She nearly walked into his back. She managed to stop before crashing into him, and peered around his big body to see what had caused the sudden stop. Just in front of him was a circle of soil that looked a little softer, a little looser than the surrounding ground.