Today's Reading
He went back into the hut, pulled a clean shirt on, and picked up his exosuit and his pack from where they had sat, unobtrusive and undisturbed, since he'd taken over the hut. Shaking out the accumulated sand and one squealing sandweebie, he slung his pack over one shoulder, not needing to check to know it was ready. It was a quick task to stuff cat food, his remaining supplies of tea, and his favorite cup—a small, bright-blue chipped thing easily a century old—in a bag, and then hand it and the small suitcase that was a portable litterbox to Qai, who took them without complaint or snark, which only deepened his worry.
"Come on, Mister Feefs," he said, coaxing his cat into his carrier. "The universe caught up to us at last."
The fire was already low, burning down for the night, all cups washed and waiting to be put away. Someone else would come along, as he had, and take his place. "You have a ship?"
"In orbit. I took a private shuttle down."
"Is Maha up there?" Fergus asked. Qai and Maha were two of the most inseparable people he knew. Partners, best friends, and probably more, though he never had felt any need to pry. The alt-human and the Dzenni were never far from each other.
"No," Qai said. "If she were, I wouldn't be here at all. You weren't easy to find, you know."
"I'd hoped to be impossible to find," he said. "Last I knew, there was a bounty out on me."
"Four separate bounties, and one is the largest I've ever heard of," she said. "If you're wondering if that's what brought me, understand it cost me more than three times the combined price on your head to find you."
"I'm flattered," he said. He was.
He began walking up the beach toward the low lights of town, gait uneven in the fickle, shifting sand. Qai walked beside him, her long stride easily matching his own. She'd trimmed her fur short again since last he'd seen her. "I'm not sure anyone else could have found you," she said after a while. "You don't look anything like you. No beard, you've changed your hair color, you're not pasty and thin. You even move differently. Even I wasn't sure you were you until I stepped up to your little grass house."
"How did you know, then?"
"Smell," she said, and at his pained expression, laughed. "I do have an advantage over the average hunter. I wouldn't worry unless another Dzenni you've known personally is hunting you. And your burning herbs were a good mask."
The beach was becoming quiet and empty, people drifting toward shelter in advance of the rain. Further down the strand, there was a boardwalk extending out into the churning surf, bright torches lit along its length, casting overlapping circles of orange on the undersides of the wide umbrellas and canopies overhead. Faint traces of a loud, happy crowd and louder music barely reached them over the low roar of the ocean he loved and was leaving behind.
"What if I didn't want to come?" he asked.
"Then I'd have stunned you, thrown you over my shoulder like a sack of meat, and brought you along anyway," she said. She grinned, showing her fangs again. "Isn't it nicer this way?"
"I suppose," he answered. They reached the upper boardwalk, and he could not help but stop and look back. The last remnants of sunset had faded into a line of mauve-gray at the horizon. His hut was a dark shape crouching forlornly in the fading light, the last few beachwalkers out on the sands heading toward parties like moths to a campfire.
Qai waited patiently beside him; whatever she made of the beach, the waves, the world, she did not say. She looked tired, wrung out, full of a long- simmering rage.
"A storm is coming," he said at last.
"You don't know the half of it. Are you ready to go?"
"I suppose I must be," he said, and forced himself to turn his back to the ocean and start walking again. This far up on the beach, there were a few low, white-stone buildings, mostly ice cream stands, rent-a-rooms, a comm station, and a tiny landing pad for shuttles from the larger islands. It was only stepping up onto the ridged alloy decking of the ramp into Qai's shuttle that he realized with shock that he was still barefoot. When was the last time he'd worn shoes at all, much less his space boots? And where were his boots? He couldn't even guess, but he didn't think he'd seen them in at least a season.
...
