A resistance warship flies into battle against the Conglomerate, a mecha-company conquering planets for minerals and slave labor. When the ship crashes above the plains, the five people on board battle for survival across their world, pursued by th...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
He thought he understood hardship growing up in the wrong body, but physical and emotional and mental hardship are borne differently, all affecting the skin and heart and brain in different ways.
The cold wind and the monotony of their trek have lulled him into a meditative fugue state of memories He knows the Senator is here with him somewhere, but she's beginning to feel phantasmal, a hand he holds to cross another crevasse, a brief glimmer of color among the blank whiteness, but something that is beginning to disconnect from him, reality losing all of its crystalline edges. It's strange to fall back into memories to distract his mind from the deterioration of his body, especially when most of his memories are not kind.
Trudging through the snow and scree, he remembers the Plains where he grew up, Ra'bavay on the horizon as an iridescent blur lost in the morning mists. He remembers the way it felt to grow into a body that changed from the flatness of youth to a roundness of adolescence that he despised, days filled with tears. He remembers seeing her for the very first time on the holovids, so bright, so beautiful, so unafraid to challenge the other political leaders on what she thought was right. His family thought her naive, untried, a foreign woman from a small Ji'ambii tribe in the hills who knew nothing of the cosmopolitan maneuverings of the governing city of Saa'be. But he'd seen the glow in her eyes that seemed to come from some non-human source, perhaps divinity, perhaps spirituality, but a luminescence that shone despite every harshness leveled at her. She admitted to mistakes but never strayed from her convictions, protecting rights of all the people on Saa'be, proving to any traditionalist without a shred of doubt that the lines they draw between So'uan and Ji'ambii, rich and poor, he and she are arbitrary.
He remembers how much of a presence she was in his life even before he knew her.
Now, she is a pressure on his body, her own stamina flagging in the cold and lonely Peaks and he fears that even her tenacity will not be able to support both of them. He tries to shore her up even as his own eyes grow sluggish with fatigue.
The Recruit staggers under the Senator's weight, both of them shivering and trembling with chills. She tries to relieve the pressure on him but she is too weak and she barely manages to do more than shift her body on his shoulder. He gives her an admonishing look and bends his knees, lifting her feet off the ground and taking her full weight. She murmurs vaguely but lets her head rest on his shoulder, her hair a curtain waterfalling over his arms, her breath ragged against his cheek.
He manages about a klik before he has to take a break, gently sliding her to the ground. She barely moves, her eyes hazy and filmed with a desperate kind of pain as she looks up at him.
They stay like that, on the edge of a cliff, overlooking the blinding sunslight on the snow, all the colors reflected back at them in a blinding prismatic array. She lies back on the ground, weariness making her appear boneless. He leans back against a boulder, the chill of its stony surface barely registering against the frozen flesh of his back.
