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beneath their rock. Behind her, Doetzier watched her retreat with thoughtful eyes.
"Nice job, getting 'Picker out," Bowdie murmured.
"Thanks."
"Thought she was a goner when I first came down. Those eels were so thick on the scanner that I could
hardly tell you were in the midst of them all."
"Thought you were an eel yourself, the way you latched on to my arm."
He shrugged. " 'Picker was in trouble, and I didn't know what you were doing. Good thing you're a fast
firmer."
"Good thing you read it as fast as I send."
They fell silent, but Tsia regarded Bowdie warily. There was still a tension in his biofield, and it grew
when she was near him. Did he think she had shoved the pilot in the mud herself? There had been
someone else there before she went back for the pilot. A presence she had not read in her panic with
the mud. And Nitpicker was now as tense as the man&
To the north, Ruka picked up her restlessness and reflected it back through the gate. The tautness of the
bond between them stretched like the muscles of Nitpicker's shoulders, and Tsia shivered. Then the wind
ruffled Ruka's wet fur, and she realized that the knot in her stomach was partly from the ache in the belly
of the cougar.
"Go away," she breathed to the cub. "Go hunt if you're hun-gry. Don't knot up my guts with your need."
Yet he crouched and waited, as if she would bring him his meat. "East," she said impatiently. "Go toward
the coast. The beach. The smell of salt. Your family waits for you there."
Wren glanced up as her lips moved, and she caught his look. Without speaking further, she stepped out
from under the rock and tilted her face to the sky. Overhead, the purple-gray clouds streaked across in a
boiling, seething mass. Like horses that churned up the sky, they raced from behind the trees to the
rain-smashed tops of the hills. With mindless speed, they tore each other apart.
Bowdie gazed out at the lake, his brown eyes shuttered. His thick brown hair dripped onto his eyebrows
with rain, and he raised his hand to wipe it across his forehead. "Lot of rain for a single storm." He spat
his last seed and glanced again at Tsia. "Thought it was going to get tough down there. Thought Van'ei
was a goner." He turned and moved back in the cave.
Tsia glanced at Wren. The rushing sound in the wet leaves made a roar like the cats in the back of her
mind. Tiny hot points that rumbled in her head& That was what Bowdie felt like tiny sparks of light
that sharpened when she used her biogate like a scan. Tsia drew in a breath and let it out so that the
biofields were subdued, and only the sense of Ruka re-mained strongly in her thoughts.
She hesitated, then said quietly, "The cub isn't leaving me."
Wren chewed for a moment without speaking. Finally, he said, "Saw it in the lake. He swam in, then
went right back out again." He spat a seed to the side. "You called him?"
"He came back for me. He's there now, to the right."
"Does he know he's pushing you to work against the Land-ing Pact?"
She shook her head. "I think he's too young to read that from the minds of the other felines."
"Thought the knowledge was coded into his genes into his memories."
"It is, but he's also probably too young to trigger that part of his brain. When he goes back, his mother
will teach him be-fore they grow apart."
"Even if he doesn't know the Pact yet, seems like he ought to want to get back to his mother, rather than
hang around on your human heels, squatting in the mud." He popped another seed in his mouth. "He
ought to at least want out of the rain."
She stared back at the trees where Ruka's tawny form flick-ered briefly between the trunks. "Cougars
don't care much about weather," she said slowly. "They'll hunt in rain or sleet they'll track an elk
through a snowstorm. Not much seems to bother them. That's why they made such good scouts for the
First Droppers. They can live almost anywhere, eat al-most anything. They aren't so small that they
become a prey species, and they aren't so big that they can't hunt enough food from among the rats and
reavers."
"And he's not hungry now?"
"He's hungry, but he's& linked with me. He doesn't want to leave."
"Linked?" Wren's voice was suddenly sharp.
Stiffly, she nodded. "They're more open to it when they're young. It's part of their socialization."
Wren gave her a sober look. "You're playing a dangerous game, Feather."
"It's not as if I have a choice. The Landing Pact "
"The Landing Pact may be law, but even it has limits. And the guide guild has as long an arm as the lifers,
when they were in power. The guides watch the felines as if they them-selves were hunters. You're not
truly safe, even here with the meres. Remember that."
"I'm aware of my position, Wren'."
"Are you? The guides they know you have ten years' ex-perience; the mere guild lists you with thirty. A
new ID dot; a history that's not yours so far, the guides have never looked beyond the ratings to find
you, but that 'so far' is as much pro-tection as you'll ever have unless you make a deal with the
Shields."
"Sure," she retorted. "And what have I ever had that they want? I'm a guide, not a guilder. I've got
nothing but my past and a cougar dogging my heels. I'm not trained to follow a blackjack thread. I don't [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]