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There’s a beacon on the horizon, its pale light warped by cryovolcanic emissions. An undersized sun flickers sickly through the low-hanging clouds; it provides little in the way of warmth, and nothing in the way of direction. It never sets. There’s no night on this planet of ice and emptiness. And no life beyond their own.
The lake cracks open under the force of Lex’s axe. She smiles. It’s clear; the bluish waters underneath fall away to unknown depths, but the ice itself is thick and ungiving. She nudges the handle of her axe into the hole she just made, then sits back on her haunches.
Safe enough, she thinks. They can attempt a crossing here.
“Single file,” she says, hearing in her own voice the old confidence, the echo of her seasons on the ice. It’s good to be in control again. Good to know where she stands. “You follow me, but keep your distance. Watch the surface. Move nice and slow. Imagine you’re…hunting the lake; you don’t want it to notice you’re there, right?”
Crouched at her side, Scar nods. He doesn’t tell her she’s going overboard on the safety briefing; doesn’t give her attitude like a lot of the young guys she’s trained. Though the mask hides his face, Lex feels his eyes on her anyway.
She hasn’t yet worked out if his kind feel nervousness. Like a lot of other things, it’s a question she’s trying to answer. Too many things still get lost in translation between them.
“I’ll go first,” she tells him, standing. “Follow when I signal. We don’t need to hurry.” She steps out onto the ice.
They do need to hurry, and that’s a problem neither of them has solved yet. Lex takes shuffling steps away from the shore, out onto the cold and frozen blue; her pack is a constant weight on her shoulders, and the mask adds a strange focus to her vision. She breathes in deep, oxygen hissing from her tank. They started out with enough for five days. That was two days ago. The beacon’s not looking much closer.
Lex turns back to the shore, where Scar hovers at lake’s edge like an antsy black bear. He’s the only point of darkness in the unending stretch of snow and snow-covered stone. The shape of him is only tangentially human. She wonders how she’d explain to him that when she turns too fast and sees him without context, without understanding, her body freezes before her brain can catch up. Prey response. Small fish in a pond full of crocodiles.
Lex raises a hand, beckoning. She watches him take the first step.
It’s been a strange few days on this cold and lonely world. No nightfall, no stars, no shadow of an alien ship above their heads. Lex has craned her neck up to look for it so many times she feels her bones ache in protest, and Scar shakes his head at her when he sees. Don’t bother, he doesn’t need to tell her. You won’t know until we want you to know.
Instead, she sets her eyes on the beacon.
She can’t judge the distance, and that’s starting to worry her. It’s the reason she pushed for a lake crossing instead of a long trek around a shore that stretches miles off into the white horizon. They’re chewing through oxygen. That wouldn’t be an issue if Lex had any idea of their route, but this planet defies her experience and her equipment is keeping its secrets. She doesn’t know how far they have to go; she just knows they haven’t gone far enough. She can read it in the set of her partner’s shoulders.
At least the lake is beautiful. The sun’s pale light lies at her back and Scar’s; under the surface their shadows dance, hers a leopard seal to his orca.
They walk. Time passes. Hours lost to a cold sky and the ice-encrusted line of the shore up ahead. They make no sound beyond their steady tread, her crampons crunching more gently than his. Lex has always loved the silence of a walk in the untamed wilds. There’s a true companionship to be found there, and none of it translates to words. She’s tried in the past; it’s a good way to get herself called crazy. But that was when she still went walking with humans.
The shore is near. Lex glances over her shoulder.
Scar is watching the horizon and the skies, the distant rock outcroppings whose overhangs hide secrets. He, at least, doesn’t think they’re alone out here. His tension catches Lex’s eye whenever she looks over, distracting her; she thinks about telling him to knock it off. She knows ice and icy waters, and she knows what life’s little candles need to keep burning in the cold. There’s none of it on this planet so far.
“Easy, big guy,” Lex calls to him. “I’m trying to focus. Can we save the paranoia for the other side of the lake, please? We’re okay. No one’s hunting us right now.”
Her voice gets his attention for a second; brusquely, he taps the cheek of his mask with two fingertips. He withdraws his hand, clenching it in a fist and then making a jabbing motion at her.
That one’s familiar. Lex has watched back the footage of the pyramid too many times; some nights she sees its carvings on the insides of her eyelids. Its monsters have a ring-side seat to her dreams. They climb on stage too often for her liking. She flinches.
Scar clicks at her. Laughing. Jackass. He likes startling her, for reasons she hasn’t yet worked out.
But he’s also trying to tell her something. Lex drags her attention off the ice and subsurface depths for brief, dangerous seconds.
“You’re talking about those things in the pyramid,” she says. “What, you think they’d make it all the way out here?”
Scar shrugs. He doesn’t know. That’s not the point he’s trying to make to her.
Or it’s exactly the point he’s making, and Lex needs to start readjusting her threat assessments. “Okay,” she says slowly. “Expect the unexpected, is that what you’re saying? Assume that everything you see has surprises waiting to kill you.”
There’s a ripple to the air above them, a warping of low-hanging clouds buffeted by jet stream winds of frozen sediment. The volcanoes in this place belch cold; their plumes jettison mist into the atmosphere. The mountains themselves are distant blots on the low white landscape. Lex has long since given up on trying to estimate their distance. She sees them and feels a familiar wild pang, the ache of a landscape unexplored. A peak not yet summitted. On this cold planet, everything’s a first.
Scar growls behind her. He’s a lot closer than before; Lex turns, careful of her footing, and tenses to see him not ten feet away. The shore’s not far, she thinks, her mind making calculations and exit plans to smother sudden panic. They’ve almost made it, and maybe he got cocky. It happens.
“That’s way too close,” she says, keeping her tone low, calming. “The ice is deep, but we have to tread lightly if we don’t want a really cold bath. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t bring my beach towel.”
Back off, she gestures with raised hands and open palms, registering the way Scar’s head jerks between her hands and the ice at his feet, registering-
A shimmer. It flickers on the surface of the lake they’ve just crossed, hazing the air like exhaled steam. Lex only sees it for a second, but something in her body language reads loud and clear to Scar. He turns, snarling at thin air. Freezing where he stands. The wary line of his shoulders says he’s scanning the horizon.
There’s nothing there, Lex tells herself, but a gnaw in her gut says otherwise. Could be paranoia. Could be some natural phenomenon she’s never seen before, on a planet never yet explored. Tiny steam vents in the lake, or crystalline chemical reactions.
Lex takes a slow step back, and then another. She doesn’t want to be on the ice anymore. It no longer feels safe under her feet.
“Scar,” she says.
She sees the cracks before she hears them, her heart giving an ugly internal jolt. They form under Scar’s boots like spiderwebs, like white dandelion fronds; like bacteria, multiplying. The largest and longest gives off a sudden retort like a gunshot. For a moment Lex thinks about the pyramid. It was the last time she discharged a firearm, and the first man she killed with one. The memory throws her off completely.
“Scar,” she calls out urgently, losing the calm she needs to convey. “Move it, now!”
Lex wants to tell him to go slow. He’s trusted her this far, though she can tell the lake gets under his skin like the pyramid did hers, and this is not his natural hunting ground. Still, he’s trusted her. She opens her mouth to tell him he needs to do it again.
She’s too late. Scar moves with all the speed and force of a rushing rhino, abruptly bearing down on her. Lex makes a dive to get out of his way. She’s misjudged her footing and his intentions; she sees him make a grab for her and realises that he’d meant to pull her with him, maybe carry her to the shore that’s maybe fifty feet away. The ice is cracked like a crazed broken mirror, snapping at Scar’s heels as he runs from it.
Lex slips.
She feels her feet go out from under her, the sky abruptly replacing the shoreline in her vision. The back of her skull hits the ice; its crack isn’t quite as loud as the snap of her oxygen mask as something breaks loose on impact.
Lex sees the ripple as her vision starts to fade; a shimmer like heat haze below the grey clouds.
She forgets it moments after, when everything goes black.
Things are hazy for a while; Lex drifts. In her more lucid moments she’s aware of something being fastened over her head repeatedly, of clarity coming in cold as the air; it’s an oxygen mask in a size too large and strange for her head, though Scar gets the straps adjusted more quickly every time he replaces it. Something must be wrong with her own mask, Lex realises. Scar’s sharing his. Once she gets it, she can feel it in his claws. He moves fast to fit the functional mask on her face and force it around her softer human features; he’s duller when he goes to take it off her again.
Oxygen deprivation shows itself in fumbles and scrapes across her face. A light trickling sensation down one cheek suggests that he’s cut her. Lex can’t bring herself to care, or even to help. A chill is starting to seep through her suit; she feels snow crunch under her fumbling palm. They’re too exposed. They have to find shelter. If they can shelter then they can put up the tent, and her brain might start working again.
Her entire body is heavy. She doesn’t remember being like this at any time in the past, and the cold can’t be to blame here. It’s a kind of paralysis. Almost like a sickness.
Something in the air, she thinks blearily. Composition of the atmosphere. It seems worse for her than Scar, which means she’s fucked if he can’t work out why her mask’s not doing what it should be. She might be fucked anyway. It’s not like anyone else aboard his home ship can help her. If they even have doctors, they won’t be the kind who heal humans. They won’t have any idea what to do for her. Chances are they won’t care to learn.
She wonders if it’s normal for his kind to help their injured warriors, or if they’re more into a mercy kill philosophy. Considering the mothership didn’t bother uncloaking to help her and Scar stop the murderous monster queen, Lex is inclined to think that whatever’s happening right now, it’s not normal. Scar’s not normal. He’s…something. But not the same something as the rest of his people.
Lex can relate; she’s never been much for other humans herself. Too much ice on the brain.
“Just take it,” Lex tries to tell Scar the next time he removes his mask from her face, his claws catching on her hair, fumbling through his own oxygen deprivation. “Get moving, go find the beacon. You have to…you have to go.”
She hears the chitter of his mandibles muffling as the mask clicks into place, his breaths coming deeper and slower than her own. When he replaces her own mask over her head, Lex thinks she detects a soft hissing from one of the valves. It’s definitely not working right. Scar hasn’t managed to fix it yet.
“Go,” she says through the mask’s distortion, pushing with heavy futility at the solid line of his forearm. He ignores her, his claws tugging straps and fastenings behind her ears and beneath her jawline. The mask seals over her face. Air comes rushing in, though not enough and somehow tainted; Lex imagines she can taste metal, or maybe something sulfuric. She imagines she feels Scar touching her hair, tidying it around the confines of her mask. She imagines he almost says her name.
Something shimmers in the sky above his shoulders.
She loses consciousness again.
“Guilty.”
The ship in her dreams is warm; a jungle-like soup of an atmosphere, an overheated ecosystem prowled by creatures with tree trunk legs, lizardine claws, reptile-like in their love of heat lamps. Uneasy, Lex stretches her arms above her head, pressing back against the grey metal wall behind her. She doesn’t mind being warm. She just doesn’t trust it to last.
“Guilty,” she says again. And mimes, again. Lifting a gun, exaggerating her shaking hands, picturing Miller’s face. A good shot; she knows he suffered a hell of a lot less after her bullet, and less still than if she hadn’t shot him. She knows that. She feels something else.
“When I think,” she points at her head, touching her temples, then once again lifts her imaginary gun, “about shooting my friend.” A silent bang, a memory of an ending. Trembling hands she only slightly exaggerates. Lex touches her chest. “I feel guilty.” She turns her head.
At her side, Scar is watching.
He’s not going to get this one, Lex thinks, but she knew that before she started trying. She wouldn’t have bothered to begin with if Scar hadn’t been having a bad day. They’re rarer than they used to be, but they happen. Recovery’s a slow process for humans and…other people alike. Some days the pain just gets bad.
Scar likes games, she’s found. Even when the tension from his half-knit ribcage, his sealing skin, is written in every flex of his mandibles, he’ll play with her for hours. Puzzles; guessing games, signing games, drawing games, gestures. Mimicry’s a mutual favourite. Sometimes she brings a hand up to cover her mouth, fingers splayed outwards, and wiggles them like Scar’s mandibles. He makes these chittering sounds in response; clicks like little insect legs, which Lex has decided mean laughter.
The games continue. Today’s one feels like a loss, but most of the time they get somewhere. She’s taught him happy. He’s taught her bored, and Lex responded with be patient, you big baby, you need to heal. She’s learned that seven-foot monsters will sulk like kids, and that the silent treatment is a universal form of non-communication.
‘Monster’ doesn’t seem like the right word for him anymore. Lex leans her shoulder against his, the bicep so large she can’t encircle it with both her hands; she’s tried. Scar is stronger than she is, colder than she is. He likes heat lamps; she tells him he’s an oversized reptile, practically a dinosaur, and knows he doesn’t understand why she laughs, just as she knows he likes to hear her laughing anyway. He laughs too; there’s a rippling click to his mandibles that she feels in her guts like a quake.
The first time she laughs, Scar touches her chest. His claws web out across her left breast, and his palm finds a valley in her sternum. The back of his hand is like snakeskin; smooth, pebbled, shiny. Lex finds herself hypnotised, halfway to charmed. She watches Scar’s eyes dart from her chest to her face, as his hand presses light into her laughter.
It’s his second day awake after the coma. She’s still not sure how he made it.
Morning.
Lex blinks haze from her eyes, coming back to consciousness as sleep clings like a winter, a frost not yet ready to melt. There’s stone above her and under her back. She stretches, stiff. A thin, sickly light filters in from the outside, grey and weak, polka dotted with snowflakes. Even through her thermals, both human and alien, Lex shivers. It’s going to be a cold day.
Her vision focuses on Scar’s shadow, his body blending into the stone. Like her, he’s staring out past the confines of what looks to be a cave. The snowflakes speckle his braids.
Groggy, Lex remembers the beacon. She heaves herself up onto her elbows.
“Scar?” she asks. “Is it bad?” The muffle of her voice reminds her of the broken mask, and she fumbles for the seals and the pipes feeding air into her system. Two green lights glow on the panel at her wrist; the hiss of escaping air has vanished. She draws deep lungfuls to test their durability. The equipment holds out for her. She’s back in the game.
Scar glances her way. He holds out a hand; tiny white flakes, floating like pollen, ghost through the spaces between his fingers. Lex sees him twitch when one of them makes contact with his skin. Must be freezing, and she knows how he feels about the cold.
Snowstorm on an ice planet, where the air is poison and the tourists are starting to stumble. Lex shivers.
“Okay,” she says. “That is bad. Guess we should’ve checked the weather report first. How long is it going to last?”
Scar shrugs. He points at the cave’s entrance, the pale grey light and the weather that weakens it, then shakes his head. Lex glances back down at the panel on her wrist, this time stopping to process what the two green bars are telling her. Two days’ worth of oxygen left in the tank. And she doubts they were supplied generously. Whatever the point of this crazy adventure, it wasn’t intended to be easy. Nothing about Scar’s people is.
Standing, Lex makes her way to the entrance to see for herself. She feels the cold from outside before she gets there; it’s a bitter, biting cloud that finds cracks in the seams of her suit, spaces between stitches, pores in her skin. But cold is a sense so familiar to her; Lex feels it settle and finds that it still feels like home. Gives her a little more confidence.
The view of the outside shakes it up right away.
The snow rolls across ice-stricken plains, white clouds on grey, surging like a wild storm at sea. It crashes like waves over every exposed bit of rock and iceberg. The wind is strong enough to stagger; Lex grabs Scar’s elbow to steady herself. She can feel him brace to support her weight and his own. They’re still mostly sheltered. If he’s struggling already, they won’t have a hope out on the open ice.
“Snowball’s chance in hell, huh,” Lex says, smiling under her mask. She can’t help herself. She’s at her best when she stares into the impossible.
They move deeper into the cave as the wild winds close in and the cold starts to verge on unbearable. Lex gives Scar the lead while she unclips the unfamiliar glowstick she was supplied with the rest of her equipment. Not for the first time, she wonders about the fact that Scar wasn’t given one. His helmet is kitted out with vision enhancement; infrared maybe, or some kind of tech to enhance his night vision. As much as Lex is grateful for tools that do the job she needs them to, she has to wonder if she’s been given a torch as a subtle insult.
There have been a lot of those since she left Earth. Allowances made for her smaller frame, her relative lack of strength, the fact that every piece of equipment and clothing has to be adjusted to fit. The communal mess hall where she’s pointedly not given certain foods, after discovering they’ll make her sick. The ship-wide training rooms, spanning the length of small islands, where seven-foot strangers hand her spears, point her towards metal and rubber dummies, and ignore her after that. Silence, when there isn’t laughter. And Scar’s kind have a laugh like little insect clicks; there’s a pitch to it sometimes that makes Lex’s skin start crawling, and she knows they’ve noticed that too. Some of them do it on purpose. The rest pretend she’s not there.
Scar’s never mentioned any of it to her. Lex wonders when they’ll have that conversation. If he’s avoiding it in the same way he won’t tell her why they’re chasing a beacon across an ice world, as their oxygen levels hiss away like sand in an hourglass.
In her lower moments she wonders if he regrets Bouvetøya. If he ever has days when he wishes he’d left her to die in the pyramid with her people.
They reach the back of the cave far sooner than Lex would have liked; she’d hoped to be far enough from the storm to avoid the creeping chill that nips at her ankles as she retreats from it. She doesn’t know how bad it’s going to get. That bothers her. A lack of preparedness is the biggest killer in a wilderness, second only to panic. The latter is something she knows how to manage. The former is out of her control.
She hasn’t felt this insecure since the pyramid.
Scar growls in the back of his throat, a rumble like an irritable lion. Focus, please, Lex interprets. He has a point, and she nods to him.
“I hear you. Let’s get the tent up and work out what we’re doing from there. We’re going to have options, I’m just not sure what they are yet.”
The tent is Lex’s favourite piece of equipment; the first time she saw it tested out on the ship, she freely admits to geeking out in excitement. It’s a miniature habitation pod; the kind of thing she fully expects NASA to produce at some point over the next few decades, though it’ll be a long time before they get anywhere near as efficient as this. Lex marks out the perimeter in tiny robotic tent pegs that drill themselves into the ground she directs them to. Between them, she and Scar stretch a canvas more durable than any material Lex has encountered on Earth. The edges of it clip to the pegs like they’re magnets, but it takes some skill to line them up.
Lex is twice as fast at it as Scar; he’s learned not to grump at her when she comes over to help him with his side. She nudges his shoulder with her own and he clicks at her, raising his hands in a very human gesture of surrender. Lex doesn’t remember teaching him that. She wonders if he picked it up from her at some stage. It keeps happening; the more they each learn, the more they want to know. Their hybrid, half-baked language grows more complex by the day.
Together, they lay out the top of the tent, hook it up to the base and get the airlock sealed. The pressurised hiss is a comforting sound. The airtight tent drowns out the storm’s imminent rumble.
Surrounded by dirt-coloured canvas, Lex finally removes her oxygen mask. Her cheeks sting where the straps have been cutting into her, and there’s a new graze on the side of her jawline. Scar, she thinks. A bit too careless while trying to get the mask back onto her face.
“Hey,” she says. “Thanks for the rescue earlier.” She watches him strip off his own mask, flexing his mandibles in the same way Lex stretches. He shakes his head at her and starts gesturing. Mimes out a lake, a crack in the ice, an uncertainty.
I panicked, Lex reads off him. And you got hurt because of my mistake.
“Everyone panics sometimes,” she tells him gently. He might not catch every word, or recognise every gesture, but she knows by now he can understand her tone. “You learn how to manage it. And if I’m taking the lead on the ice, it’s on me to make sure I teach you.”
They settle in, stripping off crampons and boots, breaking out their dehydrated rations for breakfast, sharing her glowstick for light. It’s impossible to know how the weather is outside both tent and cave, but Lex taps at the little computer panel strapped to her wrist, finding the setting she knows stands for time. She’s not sure what the various symbols are called, let along how to pronounce them, but she’s worked out what order they appear in, and at what stage they cycle back around. It’s as close to a clock as she’ll get.
They might be trapped in the tent for a while, she thinks. That’s not a disaster; it recycles everything she and Scar exhale, filtering it back as air they can both breathe. The airlock lets them come and go as needed. They can stay here for days if they have to, barely having to touch the oxygen supplies in their portable masks.
But that won’t get them any closer to the beacon, and Lex isn’t sure how long the mother ship will wait for them in orbit. There are a lot of things she isn’t sure about on this…adventure. Mission. Whatever it is.
Scar clicks to draw her attention away from gnawing at a sour fruit jerky. He points at his mandibles.
Talk to me, Lex translates. Or maybe, you have something on your face. She feels herself smile, despite everything.
“Sure, we can talk,” she says. “What do you want to talk about?”
This mission is different, Scar signals, and Lex leans forward a little. It’s about time she got some answers out of him, though she’s already unsure of her footing. The gesture for ‘mission’ is a common one back on the ship; it’s cultural, she’s decided, this indelible aspect of life that sees Scar’s people skipping galaxy to galaxy, soaring past stars, dropping ships off on desert planets and ice moons and then coming back for the corpses. Or the victorious warriors. Though as Lex watches Scar touch the hilt of the spear he’s never far away from, she wonders. Maybe it’s not ‘mission’. Maybe ‘hunt’ is closer to the meaning she’s looking for.
This hunt is different.
“I noticed,” she says. “The only thing that’s tried to kill me so far is the environment. Where’s our…I don’t know. Target? I haven’t seen any tracks. If we’re the wolves, where’s the rabbit?”
She remembers teaching him scared in her early days on the ship. Not right after her departure, though the sight of an Earth shrinking like a ship sailing over a horizon gave her gut a twinge she’s never felt before. Still, the beginning was an adventure. Learning her new environment, learning her new limits, learning how far she could push her wounded monster while he healed. She thinks it was weeks before I’m scared was a concept she needed Scar to know about.
It took him a while to get it, she remembers. Days of guessing games aborted in frustration, picked up again when the need grew as pressing as the fear. Miming, gesturing, pulling video from old files aboard the ship’s barely comprehensible databases, poring over shaky cam footage from the helmets of the hunters. They’ve killed a lot of humans in their time, she found. A hundred, thousand people through history, chased by nightmares they could barely see, killed and strung up like carcases for curing.
The videos didn’t help, except that in a way they did. Lex remembers sinking into the stream of them, immersing herself for an evening in memorialised gore. A level of brutality she’s only seen in the animal kingdom, elevated to ceremony in ways that make her heart ache. Celebrated slaughter that left little room for her to fit a new life into.
She remembers Scar finding her hunched over the screen. Clicking for her attention behind her back; she turned to see him maskless, mandibles flicking, his skin and spines suddenly unfamiliar to her. And whatever he saw on her face, it must have been equally alien. She thinks they lost time, staring into each other’s uncertainty, avoiding sudden movements. She thinks they must both have frozen in place. Strangers.
“I’m fucking scared,” she remembers telling him in a voice that cracked, and finally seeing him understand, nodding. And slowly, like he was worried she might rip his arm clean off, he lifted reptile-cold fingers to her cheek. Touched her scars. Found one of her limp hands on the console, lifting it to his forehead in turn.
I’m with you.
She remembers how startled he was when she hugged him. They’re still working on translations for that.
Now, inside the tent, Lex clings to that understanding, refusing to let herself feel alone.
“Tell me,” she says. “Where’s the prey?”
He points at her. Inside her chest cavity, fear starts to germinate. I’m scared, she thinks before she can crush it completely.
“Me, huh. What, did your folks upstairs run out of alien murder queens-” Lex cuts herself off as Scar gestures to himself as well.
You’re the prey, and so am I.
“So it’s a test? All that shit back in the pyramid, at the whaling station, none of that was enough?” She’s going too fast; she can see it in the tightening around Scar’s eyes, narrowing as he tries to follow her. Confusion on him is an almost human expression.
But it’s not quite enough. Lex is angry.
“My crew died in there,” she says, forcing down remembrance. A bullet to the brain; a creaking, shifting landscape; a monster with two jaws. Acid drool melting through the jacket over her heart. “You and me, we got through that nightmare together. What else is there to test? We’re alive.”
She doesn’t understand what Scar is telling her. The gestures are disjointed; Lex, then the sky, then a growl she knows means frustration, but no follow-up to tell her why. She watches him try to talk to her. The skin on the back of his hands is pebbled. Lizard flesh. Crocodile hide. He has something he’s trying to tell her, but Lex just can’t follow where he’s leading. She shakes her head. She doesn’t get it. Tired, she points at her head and makes a gesture they both enjoy: her hand explodes like a bomb.
My brain is fried.
Scar responds with the same, but his ‘explosion’ is pointedly bigger, taking both hands to sketch out. Lex starts laughing.
It’s crazy, she thinks. Home is so far away. The luminescence from her glowstick throws fire-like shadows across the tent walls and floor, across her face and Scar’s. He’s listening in that way he has, intense and unblinking, his mandibles twitching in patterns she can’t parse. He lifts a hand to her chest and presses it there as she laughs.
Are you scared?, he asks when she settles; with his hands, tapping her chest, forming the gestures they’ve turned into language.
“I don’t know,” Lex says honestly. “Are you? Should I be?”
Scar points to the tent’s airlock. Go see for yourself.
He might be messing with her; he does that sometimes, and Lex never holds it against him. It’s familiar. So few things about his people are, but she recognises teasing just fine. She thinks she understands the place it comes from. Neither of them would begin to know how to flirt in a way that’ll translate. Teasing, at least, is universal. Look at me. Respond to me. Pay attention.
It’s the one thing that doesn’t scare her. Like all the acts of nature that have never managed to kill her (her first avalanche at eleven, her second at fifteen, the others that followed; the earthquakes, the bears, the pyramid), this has a sense of inevitability about it.
“Okay,” Lex says, grabbing her mask from the ground at her side. “I’ll go check on the storm. Stay here; I know how you get when it’s chilly.” She grabs Scar’s shoulder, pushing off it to help herself stand, smiling when he clicks at her in a way she recognises. Be safe, she thinks, or whatever his equivalent is. Kill it before it kills you might be closer.
She makes her way alone through the cave, reflexively touching the seals on her mask. The ground is fuzzed with the snow that’s drifted its way in through the entrance. Lex leaves footprints in her wake. She treads her way towards the outside world.
The storm’s too strong to stand in the cave’s mouth longer than she needs to; Lex feels her chest tighten against the chill, her fingers going numb. She trusts in her mask to shield her eyes. Squinting, she looks for the lake.
It’s farther than she’d expected; she wonders how long Scar carried her, and how many stops he had to make to swap her oxygen supply as she died on him. He’d have known she was slowing him down. From what she’s seen up on the ship and back on Earth, his kind don’t tolerate the slow. It’s one thing to give a weapon to a promising fighter in a pyramid. Carrying a broken, helpless guide to safety is different. Humans think like that. Scar’s people don’t.
She sees what she’s looking for when she stops truly looking, already turning back towards the cave’s safety and warmth, the comfort of Scar’s company. The cracks on the lake are made vivid by the snow slowly piling around them. Lex can track the place Scar stood too long, and the path he took to the shore. The detour he took to hoist her upright; their weights combined almost sent them both swimming.
Farther out on the lake, though. Past the point where they stopped, there are marks. Different cracks that Lex has never seen, and an almost-circular hole where something large broke through entirely, smashing into the water.
Could have been human, but Lex would bet it wasn’t. For a break that large, she’d put her money on something heavier.
“We’re the prey,” she murmurs. She wonders how Scar’s kind fare in waters as cold as they must be on this planet. The lake shows no signs of anything dragging itself back to surface. The cracks by the shore are her own and Scar’s. Whatever fell in, it didn’t climb back out again.
Shame you didn’t bring a guide, she thinks with a coldness that’s rare to her. That’s what happens when you try to muscle your way through everything. The ice doesn’t care. It’ll get you in the end.
Behind the mask, her eyeballs are starting to ache. Lex makes her way back to shelter.
“I saw the lake,” she says as the tent’s airlock seals up behind her, laying her mask gently down by her sleeping bag. Scar offers her a piece of dried fruit as she settles at his side. It’s greenish, custardy, one of both their favourites. Lex nudges his shoulder with her own. Gifts are another form of language they share. “What was it? Did you kill it?”
You did, Scar tells her. You set the trap.
“I walked across a lake.”
I followed you. The hunter did not, so the hunter died.
“So what happens when we get to the beacon?”
Then they will know. Scar points upwards. Lex closes her eyes for a second, picturing the ship cloaked in orbit. Hiding among the clouds. She opens her eyes to Scar watching her in that way he has, like her every breath and movement interest him.
Again Lex thinks of their early days up on the ship. The heat, the stares, the hours she spent at Scar’s side, waiting for his wounds to knit. She’s had a lot of time to think about her choice to follow him. Plenty of time to reconsider. But the decision has never stopped feeling right to her. The only places she’s falling short is getting everyone else to understand.
“What happens if they don’t get it?” Lex asks. “I’m human. You know that. I’ve seen what your people do to humans. I saw the bodies at Bouvetøya; everyone died back there. Back on the ship, your people look at me, and they see prey. They could just kill me.”
Scar shrugs. He points at Lex’s chest, and then his own. Draws a croc-scaled finger across his own throat and waits for her to get it.
You could kill me if you wanted to.
“Sure,” Lex says wryly. “Let me just go find another lake to push you into.” Still, she grabs Scar’s closest arm, draping it over her shoulders. His mandibles tickle her hair. He clicks at her. She doesn’t know what that means just yet. But she’ll get there.
“You ever think about sending me home?” she asks. She feels Scar shake his head right away; he’s understood her quickly, then. Maybe he was waiting for the question. “Why not?”
His claws press lightly into her forearm; she can feel them denting her skin through the fabric of her thermals. Firm enough to reassure. She thinks about him carrying her unconscious body across the snow, knowing they were both being hunted. She thinks about his surety that she could kill him if she wanted.
She thinks about shoving him onto the tent’s rough canvas and pinning him between her thighs.
He’d let her, she thinks, and feels her guts squirm with heat. That’s a first.
She’s not afraid.
“Why not send me home?” Lex asks more insistently, twisting to look him in the eyes. She watches for his tells, the flex of jaw, the bared inner teeth. She leans in close; his upper mandibles stretch to scrape her cheekbones.
Scar touches her chest.
You, he tells her, and then hesitates. His next gesture is wide, all-encompassing. It covers the planet, the skies, the spaceship and beyond. Everything.
Lex closes her eyes. Yeah, she thinks. That’ll do. That’s something worth surviving for.
“We,” she says, opening her eyes. “You and me.” She slings a leg over his thighs, settling into his lap; presses her palm into his chest until he gives way and lets her push him to the ground. He looks at her the way she looks at mountains.
“You and me,” Lex says again, and gives in to the storm formed between them.