Falar and Uret were taking it in turns to attack another sleeper tree with the axe, the thuds reverberating through the crisp air. More boys were dragging bushes back to the rapidly expanding blaze. Dellian looked up at the invitingly empty sky with its flotilla of artificial stars. “Why can’t the skyforts see us?” he murmured.
“Why fill Juloss with alien predators?” Yirella said. She’d risen to her feet, wiping jelly-strings of clotted morox blood from her hands. “I mean, seriously! Sure, keep some in orbital xenohabitats, and store their genetic molecule for study. But release them into the wild? That makes no sense at all. Our ancestors put in a century’s effort just terraforming this world up to habitable status so a whole civilization of humans could flourish and expand. Now we can’t even set foot outside our clan compound, it’s so dangerous.”
“Dangerous to the enemy, too.”
“Like they’re ever going to set foot here. The only landing they’ll ever perform is with a dozen apocalypse-event asteroids.”
“So what, then?”
“So I don’t know!” she shouted bitterly.
Dellian was surprised. It hurt him to see her like this, so wound up and frustrated. Close to tears, too, if he was any judge. Yirella was always the cool, rational one. But then this situation was extreme. Without thinking, he put his arms around her. Her whole body was held as rigid as steel. “I remember someone telling me there are always answers; you just have to know where to find them.”
She nodded, slowly and very reluctantly. “I know.”
“Did you find anything in the morox’s brain?”
“No.”
“What were you looking for?”
“Not sure. Something that would make it act the way it did.”
“They all behaved the same.”
“I know. And that worries me. I’m scared, Dellian.”
“Me too,” he said softly. “But we’ll get through this.” He kept hold of one of her hands as he turned to face the sleeper tree, which was now a giant column of flame, burning with the aggression of rocket exhaust. The boys who’d lit it were having to stand well back, the heat was so strong. “The skyfort sensors will think we’re zapping them with a laser when they pass over, the infrared emission is so strong.”
“Yes.” Yirella bent down and kissed him again. “You know what I’m thinking?”
“What?”
“This place is our Zagreus. So you know what that makes us?”
“Up shit creek without a paddle?”
“No! You and me. Look at us. You with your red hair, you’re Saint Callum.”
“And you’re my Savi.” He laughed. “Yes!”
“They escaped, didn’t they? They got back home.”
Dellian heard the urgency in her voice, the desperation. “Yes. They did. They even lived happy ever after for a couple of decades on Nebesa.”
“If they can do it, so can we.”
“Callum was always my favorite Saint,” he confessed.
“Really. Yuri’s mine.”
“How come? I’d have you rooting for Kandara.”
“Oh, no. She used violence to solve everything. Not as bad as Alik, though. But Yuri used to think through his problems. Remember the missing boyfriend story? He investigated properly and made decisions based on facts, and he never stopped until he finished the case. That’s what I aspire to.”
“He could be pretty ruthless, too. A lot of people died when he was hunting for Horatio.”
“That wasn’t his fault—well, apart from the matcher. And people like that deserved to be sent to Zagreus.”
“Yeah—” He frowned at the latest outbreak of shouting, glancing around to see the boys yelling his name and pointing wildly. Xante had brought up the knife pole he was carrying, pointing it toward Dellian and Yirella. But the expression on his face…Dellian slowly turned around, fear turning his skin to ice.
Standing on top of the flyer’s fuselage was a cougar. It shook its head, staring down at them. A small growl emerged from the back of its throat. The forelegs bent, taking it down into a pre-pounce crouch.
“Move back toward the flames,” Dellian said, barely moving his lips, shifting slightly so his body was between the cougar and Yirella.
“Del—”
“Now!” He began his own slow backward creep, pushing her along, eyes frantically scanning the ground for a loose stone like the one Yirella had used, anything he could strike the lethal beast with. He knew it was hopeless, but he wasn’t going down without a fight.
The cougar leaped, powerful muscles flinging it vigorously through the air toward them. Then it exploded. One instant a perfectly evolved killing machine…the next a cloud of flame and tatters of meat. Stinking steam belched out. The charred mess splattered down two meters from a paralyzed Dellian.
He dropped to his knees and vomited hard. Yirella was screaming. Clanmates ran toward them en masse, yelling and shouting.
A shadow fell across all of them. A shivering Dellian raised his head, watching in total incomprehension as the big flyer descended silently out of the clean morning sky.
THE ASSESSMENT TEAM
FERITON KAYNE, NKYA, JUNE 24, 2204