She imagined him snoozing in a bed—or a funky hammock—back in a city somewhere. “At dawn?”
“No later than that. He is punctual.” Jakatra shifted his weight to go back the way they had come.
“Wait, are you sure you don’t want help with them?” She surprised herself with the offer. It wasn’t her fight—they had brought her here, after all—but he might need help. And she didn’t want to lose someone who had spent the night keeping an eye out for her.
“They shouldn’t be your concern. You must return to your world with your weapon to protect your people.” Jakatra pointed to her sword scabbard. “And I believe you will do so.”
“But…” Temi stretched out a hand toward him, struggling to articulate what she wanted to say. “I don’t want to lose another coach.”
“I will see that this is not the case.” Jakatra gave her a solemn nod, then took off across the branches, maneuvering along them more easily than she would ever be able to.
More whining shots fired, and she winced, dreading the idea of him being killed. Especially if there was a way it would be her fault again. They may have brought her here, but they were doing it to help her world. And she had agreed to come, whatever her motivations had been. She was the reason the forest was burning.
Temi brushed her damp eyes. They were tears of frustration, she told herself, nothing more, nothing… weaker. Then she took off in the opposite direction, toward the dark forest night, putting the burning trees at her back.
She picked a route through the branches for minutes that felt like hours. It was hard to tell. Smoke filled the dark sky, and she couldn’t see the fire any more, nor the hovercraft. It was all she could do to concentrate on the trees, on running along the branches with legs and arms that grew ever wearier. Growls, yips, and yowls sounded from the ground from time to time. She didn’t know if they belonged to those cats or simply to creatures fleeing the fire, but she was afraid to drop to the forest floor to find out. So long as the latticework of branches provided a path, she would follow it. Ash coated her tongue, and she was so thirsty, her lips had cracked. Her skin felt flushed and fevered, and she didn’t know how much farther she could go.
When a light appeared ahead of her, Temi was so numb that it didn’t register to her brain at first. As soon as it did, she halted, grabbing a trunk with hands scraped so raw they were bleeding. It wasn’t fire; it was a headlamp again. The hovercraft. Jakatra must not have caught up with it. Or maybe there was more than one.
She leaned her temple against the rough bark, tired of running, tired of all of this.
The beam of light swept through the haze toward her. She tried to scoot behind the trunk, to hide herself. She gripped the hilt of her sword, but didn’t draw it. She was too tired to command the blade not to glow and didn’t want it giving her away.
The hovercraft drifted closer through the smoke.
“Artemis?”
She lifted her head. Was that…? “Eleriss?”
“Yes. I am here. We must return you to your home.”
Temi had never heard words that sounded so sweet, but it took a while before she could force her arm to release its death grip on the tree trunk. Not until Eleriss’s pointed ears and blue eyes came into view did her grip relax.
He pulled up, his craft hovering below the branch she stood upon. “Jump in, please. Time is a concern.”
Temi swung down into the seat beside him, banging her feet on her tennis bag. Eleriss must have guessed this would be her last night and she would have to leave. Had he also guessed this night of hunting could turn into something much different than she had envisioned? That the hunters would become the hunted?
Questions for another time. She sank back into the seat. She was so relieved to be sitting in something solid—as solid as a chair in a floating car could be—that she almost cried. But smoke still clogged the air, stinging her eyes and reminding her that they weren’t free of danger.
“Jakatra, have you seen him? He went back to confront the…” She waved vaguely in the direction she thought the fire had started, though she had lost track of much up in the trees.
“I will return for him, but I must send you home first.” Eleriss pressed his palm against a soft gel pad, pushing with his fingers, and the hovercraft pulled away from the tree. It zipped through the smoke, heading away from Jakatra instead of toward him.
Temi tried not to feel like she had left another coach to die, but the bleakness threatened to overwhelm her.
“As soon as we reach a clear area, I’ll open a portal,” Eleriss said.
“Will you be coming back? At some point? I’d like to hear about… if Jakatra made it.”
Eleriss gave her that polite smile of his. “Jakatra is extremely capable. I highly doubt a fire or a couple of our own people could trouble him overmuch.”
Temi wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not. “I feel cowardly running away from something that is… at least partially my fault, or a result of my being here anyway.”
The hovercraft had come into clear air, air that seemed a touch lighter, promising dawn’s approach, and Eleriss brought it to a stop and faced her in his seat. “You will not be running away from something. You will be running toward something. Another jibtab has appeared in your world. Your comrades need your help.”
Temi let her chin droop to her chest. If Simon and Delia would be in trouble soon, she had to go back to help them, but she struggled to walk away from this… unfinished business. For all she knew, neither Eleriss nor Jakatra nor anyone else would ever return to her world, not now that they had retrieved the sword and trained a human to use it.
“You will go to them and help fight it, yes?” Eleriss asked, his blue eyes scrutinizing her.
She wondered if he had known about her thoughts from the week before, her notion that she might take the healed knee and return to the tennis world. Forget the jibtab and being Earth’s warrior. But that would have been if she had failed the training, if they had been forced to look for someone else. Thanks to Jakatra, she hadn’t. She didn’t know what the next jibtab would look like, but she had practice fighting terrifying predators now. He’d said she was competent. And that had pleased her, even if it condemned her to… whatever fate awaited her back home.
“Triumph and disaster,” she muttered.
“Pardon?” Eleriss asked.
“Yes, I will fight them.”
“Good.” Eleriss hopped out of the vehicle and pulled a device out of his pocket. He pressed it, and the blue portal flared to life, as it had a week ago, on a dark deserted logging road in the mountains of Arizona.
Temi gazed toward the trees, back in the direction they had come from, where smoke hugged the canopy, tendrils bleeding up into the sky.
“It is the middle of your nighttime,” Eleriss said, “so I have not placed the portal exit far from the city, but you should go through soon, lest someone else notices it.”
“Yes, that would be hard to explain.” Temi sighed and started to turn away from the forest, but something stirred the smoke, and she paused.
A tall lean form strode out of the haze, walking soundlessly across the leaf litter and pine needles, the hilt of a sword poking up over his shoulder. The light from the portal shone across Jakatra’s features, his face smudged by soot and grime, and marred by more than a few bruises.
“Greetings,” Eleriss said. “It is good that you have come to say farewell to your student. She was most reluctant to leave while your fate was unknown.”
As tired and numb as she was after the night, Temi found the energy to blush at this statement. It wasn’t as if she was some pining lover. She just hadn’t wanted to leave without knowing if he lived or died, that was all.
Jakatra gave her a curious look, though he didn’t comment on Eleriss’s words, instead going straight to business.
“I caught up with those who were shooting at us. I convinced them to fly away,” Jakatra said coolly, a lot left unsaid, Temi was certain
. “They were unwilling to speak openly to me, and I was not inclined to interrogate anyone—” he gave Eleriss a long look that Temi couldn’t decipher, “—but I construed that Artemis was only part of the problem. That she has that sword is another part. We are another part.” His eyes narrowed, never leaving Eleriss’s face. “People know now that we have been helping humans.”
“The sword is a problem?” Eleriss asked, ignoring the other issues. Maybe he had already known about them. “But it came from Earth, where it had been buried for centuries. Why would anyone here care about it or even know of its existence?”
“I don’t know,” Jakatra said.
Eleriss frowned at Temi’s scabbard. What would she do if he asked for it back? A week ago, she would have offered it to him freely, but after going through so much with it, she would be reluctant to part with it. “Your friends who like to do the research,” he said, “perhaps they can learn more about the weapon. Perhaps it has a history we do not know.”
“I’m sure they’ll be willing to do that.” If they hadn’t already. That first night, Simon had taken a few thousand pictures of the sword and scabbard from different angles, with Delia nearby, looking up historical weapons on the Internet.
“You had better join them now.” Eleriss cast a nervous glance back toward the woods, maybe wondering if Jakatra had done anything more than buy them a little time.
“I will.” Temi hid the sword in her bag and hefted it over her shoulder. Hoping for a hug or a pat on the shoulder from Jakatra was probably too much, but she gave him a nod, like the one he had given her before going off, before stepping up to the portal.
“Don’t forget,” Jakatra said. “Momentum can solve a lot of problems.”
Certain he was talking about more than running across branches, she nodded and said, “I’ll remember.”
Temi gave them both long looks, then strode through the portal.
THE END
Lindsay Buroker, Destiny Unchosen
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