Evacuation

It took me a while to assess the entirety of the damage. My pack comes apart to a degree, and I had stashed the large main part in the cave since we’d moved to this area. I kept all my reagents and antidotes in the big pack, where they’d be safe. The smaller mini-pack has my daily tools like the computer pad, first aid kit, and my multi-tool.

The irony is that I had left the little pack hanging on a tree branch when we’d first gone to see the grass fire. It had been out in the elements for the entire time the tornado had ripped through the area, and somehow it was completely untouched. The big pack, which had been wedged near the entrance to my cave, had been drug out, bashed and battered, and then dumped into a patch of burning grass. That’s where Nandi found it.

It was the fire, not the tornado, that really screwed me over.

The chlorine reagents are the only ones that are in liquid form. They’re kept in packs of tiny individual dose-sized cylinders, made of a shatter resistant polymer (they come in clips, like funny little bullets, and I have to load one into the injection gun to administer them). If they had been through just a thorough bashing, they probably would have been okay. But the polymer isn’t resistant to extreme heat. I pulled a twisted casing full of melted plastoid slag out of my pack and glared at it. The casing had a picture of a flame with an “X” over it, and said “Keep away from fire,” in seven languages. I really hate you, Murphy. Ugh.

This was really bad.

I literally cannot survive on Minerva without the chlorine reagents. The thought made my throat close and my pulse spike. Itchy eyes and trouble breathing would be the least of my problems. While I was busy wheezing, my body would be, quite literally, corroding from the inside out. Not the way I want to go.

I sat on the ground, staring at the remains of the cylinder casing, dreading the next step. I’m due for a dose today. Without it, I’ll be itching and miserable by evening. In a week I’ll be dead. Nandi and Kohric were looking over my shoulders on either side. Nandi doesn’t really understand why I need all my pills and injections. He just knows they’re important in some vague way. Kohric, though, knows that his world is effectively poisonous to me. He sat down next to me, looking very, very solemn, and caught my gaze.

“Tee must go,” he said, very softly. It wasn’t a question, and hearing him say it made my throat close up again. I felt Nandi start from my other side, and he made a tiny keening whimper.

I felt sick. I would have to use the emergency com box to flag GZ Station and have a shuttle come for emergency evac; the ultimate statement of failure for a field scientist. It’s like going away to summer camp and then having to call your mommy to take you home after the second day. Doc Sutherland will never, ever, EVER let me live this down. Granted, I’ll only be away long enough for medical treatment and resupply, but I’ll probably still be weeks; weeks of time I’m supposed to be documenting. Weeks away from people who have become dear friends.

“Tee must go,” I whispered. My voice sounded thick and raspy. Kohric pressed his forehead against my shoulder, and I wrapped my arms around his neck. “But I will come back before the moons have turned.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~

It takes a shuttle three days to get to Minerva from Iapitus. Those three days were misery. I barely left the cave on the second and third days, and by the time I got a ping from the shuttle with an ETA, I had to have Kohric’s help to walk to the pick up site. My breath was rasping like an old lady, I felt nauseous, and I was so short of wind that it took us nearly an hour to walk there. My eyes were so irritated that I was having trouble seeing clearly. I was practically stumbling by the time the shuttle landed.

Nandi and Kohric were the only ones that accompanied me. I’m incredibly grateful for that. I don’t think I could have handled having anyone else there; it was hard enough saying goodbye to the two of them.

Azu-nah don’t weep; they don’t have tear ducts in the same way we do. When they’re particularly upset, their throats start to tighten involuntarily and they make a kind of keening wail. Kohric’s jaw was tight, and his throat was working furiously when he came to hug me goodbye; the equivalent of holding back tears. We bumped foreheads and I hugged him while he murmured words of safe passage, and asked me to “return home soon.” My eyes were already watering, but that started tears openly trailing down my cheeks.

Nandi told me that he would save an entire koh for me, and if I didn’t come back he would give it to Ikaylay or Sodo. I laughed weakly through my tears and hugged him.

I was quickly bustled into the shuttle by two no-nonsense medics. They buckled me to a gurney and began setting up monitors before the shuttle door even began to close. My head was beside one of the small, oval windows. Outside, Nandi raised a hand and flexed his fingers in an imitation of waving goodbye. I pressed my hand to the window and tried to smile as my two friends seemed to grow smaller and smaller below.



”Before the moons turn,” I whispered.

---

Okay, before anyone freaks out, this is NOT the end of Tee's story or the Project.

There is, however, going to be a period without updates. Think of this as a season finale. The Project requires a lot of plotting, planning, and working on art. It's difficult to keep that up on a weekly basis indefinitely, and when I try to the quality begins to suffer. So I'm going to be taking a few weeks to do some behind the scenes type work; plotting things out, mostly, but I also want to get a bit of a dictionary up for you guys. If you have any questions, let me know!

ETA for the "season premier" (I use the term extremely loosely) is July 26th. Look forward to it!

Complications

I woke to myself again half way back to the caves. I had no memory of starting back. My face was streaked with the salty remains of many, many tears. I had no idea how long we had sung to the dead. It was late, though. The moons had traveled most of the way across the sky, and the clan members around me were quiet and subdued.

It took me a moment to realize that Kohric was on my left, his hand gently resting on the back of my elbow as we walked. Nandi was on my right, walking heavily on all fours and staring blankly at the ground. Kohric was murmuring to me, something about how the way one dies has a different ritual. The logical part of my brain latched on to this and compared tonight to the funeral for the dead hunter at the old clan site. The rest of me wished I never had to see another funeral of any sort ever again.

I must have lost myself again, because the next thing I remember is waking up the next morning. My eyes were gummy, my lips felt dry and cracked, and I wanted a drink of water more than anything in the world. I sat up and found that I had somehow wedged myself against Nandi in the night. I’d been using his flank as a pillow, which explained why I could barely turn my head straight. His feet were in my lap, and his tail had flopped across my shins. He was still sleeping, snoring gently with his head resting on his arms.

I slowly slid out from under his feet, careful not to wake him, and stepped outside in search of a drink. I felt numb, detached. Your brain has a way of distancing you from grief after a while. You can’t feel that kind of intense pain constantly for a long period of time or you’ll lose your mind. So it comes in bursts until you can handle it. I welcomed the numbness. It meant I could function without feeling like a vice had been clamped around my chest.

The clan was very quiet this morning. It was almost noon, actually, and only about a third of the clan was awake. Those that were up were subdued, and performed only the most immediately necessary chores. No one had even begun trying to piece together all the broken equipment, lost objects, deadfall, and other remains of the tornado’s destruction. The entire clan was reeling from yesterday’s disaster, and they hadn’t gotten up the strength to start picking up the pieces just yet.

Kohric was awake at the community fire, half-heartedly eating a strip of dried meat. He stared absently into the flames, the meat flapping against his cheek as he chewed. He looked like a cow. It would have been funny under better circumstances.

I found a drinking bowl and filled it at the spring at the back of the fire cave. I sat down next to Kohric and sipped at my drink, staring at the fire and thinking how odd it was that it was the same element that had wreaked such havoc on the clan just the day before.

Kohric began murmuring again, he was explaining something about how the clan had to find a new tsurandi-Kan, and they could not be from D’Keda. This was nothing like his normal lessons. He was simply reciting information, staring unseeingly into the flames. It took me a while to understand; this was Kohric’s anchor, his way of trying to find normalcy again after all that had happened. I leaned my head against his shoulder and listened absently as he went on and on.

He eventually stopped and we sat in companionable silence, taking comfort in each other’s presence. The clan slowly began to come to life. People came to eat or drink, or simply warm themselves by the fire. Others began slowly clearing the smaller bits of debris and wreckage away.

Kohric slowly turned and looked over his shoulder, seeming to finally register what was going on around us. I shifted away from him as he moved to stand, and joined him on my feet. He looked up at me and gave a small, tired gape grin.

I was about to ask him, “What should we do now?” when I heard my name called. Nandi came trotting up to us, his eye ridges furrowed and his mouth a small, thin line with worry. In his hands was my pack.

Rather, the remains of my pack. One strap was gone, and the other battered until the padding had begun to show through the cuts in the fabric. The bag portion was torn open, and an ominous dark stain at the bottom suggested that several of the bag’s contents had ruptured. My brain slowly put two and two together, and I reached for my bag with a growing cold feeling spreading through my stomach. The only liquid items I had with me were the chlorine antidotes I need to survive on Minerva. There wasn’t a single one still intact.

“Oh shit.”

Aftermath

I have no memory of how we got back to the caves.

I probably should have been disconcerted by that. I’m really not the type to zone out. But I wasn’t exactly in my right mind, either. I woke from the worst of my grief to find myself in the middle of a cluster of Azu-nah. The clan was very active, and I slowly began looking around to figure out what was going on. It felt like my grief had wrapped around my thoughts, making them sluggish and distant. I wasn’t terribly interested in what was going on around me. It was almost like I was along for the ride and my training and instincts were all that was left to pilot my body.

One of us, Nandi or I, must have carried Oshtik back. She was lying on the grass nearby, looking so tiny and delicate. It was hard to reconcile this with the vibrant, intelligent person I’d known. I tore my eyes away and swallowed hard against the lump rising back into my throat.

Next to her were other still forms. It took me several minutes to get up the courage to look. I didn’t know if I could bear further loss. I sucked in a breath through my teeth, scrubbed my eyes with the heels of my palms, and forced myself to face the other casualties.

The first was a small grey female I’d known only by name; A’shen, one of the young hunters. My first thought was relief that I hadn’t known her well enough to feel further wrenching grief from her death. I felt a sharp stab of guilt and turned away. I was not going to think about the loss of a chance at getting to know her. Next to A’shen was an elder, a deep green male, his skin coarse and pebbly with age. I recognized him as one of Kohric’s friends. I didn’t even know his name. Thank the listening deities it wasn’t Kohric himself. The guilt stabbed at me again.

The fourth and last body was To’odir, the Kan’s apprentice. My heart sank. She was the one, even more than the Kan, who had helped Nanahan recover from her injury. She was one of the few clam members who wasn’t born and raised in D’Keda. She would often tell stories to the children about her clan in the deep forests where she grew up. The clan had been certain she would make an excellent Kan. Her death seemed horribly unfair.

I stood there for a long time, trying to wrap my brain around everything that had happened. Everything had turned upside down so fast. Had it really only been this morning that I’d been teaching Eyani and Oshtik English? It felt like a lifetime away.

The clan eventually gathered around the dead and began to carry them away. I assumed that they would take them to a pyre or bury them. But instead we struck out onto the plains. The sun was very low now, staining everything a burning orange. The lingering smoke and ash in the air reflected the light too. It would have been pretty if I hadn’t felt so awful. It slowly seeped into my head that the clan was singing a low, mournful chant. I couldn’t focus enough to make out more than a few words, and simply stumbled along with them.

We walked close to a kilometer away from the caves, to an open area with short cropped grass. The four bodies were laid out several meters apart, reverently posed in a sort of loose fetal position, with their tails curled around their bodies. The Kan pulled up a handful of grass and twisted it into a kind of brushy wand. He paced around the nearest body, To’odir, circling her, his lips moving in silent prayers. The clan was still chanting softly, watching solemnly.

Then the Kan reached down to To’odir and flicked one clawed finger down to the little notch where her neck met her chest. To my horror, he neatly severed her flesh with his claw and green blood began to ooze from the wound. He dipped the grass brush in her blood and began to draw a circle on the ground around his apprentice’s body, using the same careful reverence I’d seen when he had prepared the funeral fire back at the old clan site. This was apparently how they prepared the dead. When he had completed his circle he brushed a line of green down To’odir’s muzzle and tucked the brush into her hands. One after another, the Kan twisted a brush, spilled blood, and painted the funerary circle around the dead, finishing with the brush tucked into the hands.

The sun had fully set by the time the Kan was finished. The few stars visible in the fading sun were joined by the full blazing night spectacle, with both slowly moons rising on the horizon.

The clan gathered around the dead and sang to them long into the night.

---

This week's cameo was submitted by Ashenraptor with her character A'shen. She was a good sport and let me make her character into a red shirt. :P