“I thought you were in a hurry?” she prompted.
He grunted and turned to lead the way.
They walked - rather, he walked and she jogged, - in silence. Addie kept an eye on the shadows gauging if they were growing longer. The problem was, she hadn’t noted the starting point, and watching their length grow now was pointless. They would get to the sands when they got to the sands.
“What happened to the city?”
His question startled her, and she slowed down. “Wrennlins came in the night. It was… horrible.”
“How did you escape?”
“I didn’t. I was lucky. Sathe and I were together when they came, she got eaten and I didn’t.” Addie wished he hadn’t asked. She hadn’t been able to talk about her ordeal - there hadn’t been anyone to talk to. And now she was forced to remember all of it again, the sights, the smells, the screams. And the guilt.
“Why did I survive? Of all of them, why me?” She barely registered asking the question out loud.
Zoark stopped, and she almost walked over him. Well, she would have, if he were the size of a Truned. But he wasn’t.
He cocked his head like an owl and his dull eyes landed on her face. “Do you wish to have died?”
“What? No, I suppose not. But I didn’t want them dead, either.”
He searched her face for a moment longer before starting to move again. “You had men there. They should’ve done a better job at protecting their people. It is rare for an entire tribe to die in a Wrennlin attack.”
“They did fight!” Addie chased after him. “Hoban and Wynn, they tried to ward Wrennlins off. But there were so many of those snakes, and my gosh, they were massive.”
“Hoban,” he snarled the name. “You don’t ‘ward off’ Wrennlins. All you can do is provide cover to ensure strategic retreat. He should have planned for those things. He failed you.”
Addie looked up at him in surprise. “You knew Hoban?”
“I knew him.”
He left it at that. Not a fan of Hoban, Zoark was. Well, that made two of them.
Which made her wonder… “How long have you lived in the city, Zoark?”
“Longer than a full Roaring Thunder cycle.” He meant over two years.
“I see. You must have left before I arrived. I would’ve remembered you.”
He slanted her an unreadable look.
Understanding dawned, and Addie hastily dropped her eyes. She remembered well what things were like in the city. Anne’s reluctant acquiescence, and Janna-Beatrix’s throaty moans, and Iolanthe with her strategically bared body meant to entice. She remembered the hot, lusty looks in the males’ eyes, the smell of sex that lingered in the women’s teepees, and the constant cold dread that she might soon get a teepee of her own to receive those big male animals who seemed to have an insatiable urge to rut.
Her legs stiff all of a sudden, she fixed her eyes on Zoark’s straight back and tried not to imagine him there, one of them. But she failed. He had lived there, which meant he had to have partaken in the feast of the flesh. The loaded look he had given her pretty much confirmed it. All of the women, she wondered? Did he have a favorite? Hopefully not poor Anne.
Zoark’s pale appearance was a far cry from Hoban’s in-your-face virility, but Addie suddenly found him disgusting. He was no better than Hoban.
“What brought you to our land?”
“What?” She was so engrossed in not-imagining Zoark’s dick sucked by one of the women, as she’d once seen Dannica do on a male out in the open, that his question made her stumble badly.
“How did you end up here?” he repeated, exasperated, without bothering to slow down.
“Oh. I signed up to work as a traveling nurse - a healer - on a spaceship, a big flying house that my people can steer from one world to another. Good money, full benefits. Career prospects… Anyway, the ship malfunctioned. It broke. And we crashed into this land.”
“Were you the only survivor?”
Addie rarely thought about it anymore after almost a full year of thinking and dreaming of little else: the screech of metal against metal, the heat and chaos, screams of people, the smell of blood. Another disaster. Different pieces of her life to pick up and move on.
