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She should get to her side of the room before she made a blubbering fool of herself.
But she hesitated.
When she finally spoke, it took all of her concentration to hide the cracks in her voice. She used the language of the ukkur, articulating every word very slowly and carefully. She used a simple phrase. One that the woman named Ika had taught her during her very first lesson.
“What is your name?”
Now it was the ukkur’s turn to hesitate. For a long moment, Serenity thought he might not answer her.
“Hruk,” he said at last. “What is yours?”
“Serenity,” she answered. “It’s nice to meet you.”
Then she retreated to the shadows at the far side of the circle.
CHAPTER 20: HRUK
They set out shortly after sunrise, just as Hruk had said. The sky was devoid of clouds, and within an hour, the sun was beating down on the barren badlands. The solar radiation was so intense, it felt like a physical pressure against Hruk’s skin. There was a slight breeze, but it provided no respite from the growing heat. Instead, it only kicked up occasional clouds of dust that clung to the inside of Hruk’s nose and stuck to his tongue with a dry dirty taste.
The ukkur did the running for both of them. With her short legs and weak muscles, the little human named Serenity would never have been able to keep pace with an ukkur warrior in his prime. And besides that, she was still suffering some effects from the nith drugs.
So Hruk carried the human over his shoulder, as he had done the night before. She weighed so little that she barely slowed him down at all.
Her body, however, was a distraction. As for Hruk, his wound had healed completely, allowing him to remove his loincloth from his arm so he could wear it again. But the little human was completely naked, and her round bottom was right beside Hruk’s face.
The ukkur raced across the wasteland.
And he berated himself every step of the way.
All of this was his fault. All of it. No matter how he tried to set things right, it only served to make matters worse.
He had wanted to protect the little dark-haired female, but his intervention had tainted her with his curse, and as a result she had fallen into the clutches of the nith. He had saved Serenity a second time, and their lives had become even more entangled. Now the whole canyon tribe was in danger, and with it the fate of the entire planet.
All because of Hruk and his stupidity.
It all started long before he had even set eyes on Serenity, of course. There had been his friends and pack brothers, now long gone because of his curse. He should have done the right thing long ago and wandered off into the wilderness to live alone. Or better yet, he should have ended his own life with the edge of his obsidian knife.
Hruk had thought he could help the tribe while still keeping his distance, never forming any friendships, never taking a female mate. But now he realized just how wrong he was. And this time his error might lead to thousands of deaths.
These were the thoughts that troubled the ukkur’s mind as he ran across the wasteland with the human draped over his shoulder like a sack.
All around him, the dead boulders and dry brown weed-tufts blurred past in the blazing sunlight.
They were making good time at least.
Hruk just hoped it was good enough.
The nith would need some time to prepare for their invasion. They had only received the maps of the cave tunnels last night. And they would likely not begin moving the soldiers and machines into place until after darkfall at the earliest.
At the rate Hruk was running, they would make it back to the canyon with plenty of time to spare.
Hruk made a silent agreement with himself in his mind. This would be the last time he intervened in the affairs of the tribe. He would return with Serenity to warn of the impending danger, and he would participate in whatever fighting was to follow. After that, if he did not die fighting the nith, Hruk would take his own life, so that no one else would come to harm because of him and his curse.
With his mind made up, Hruk shoved these thoughts back into the shadows of his mind.
Right now, he needed to focus.
It was daylight, and the sun was hot. Wavering ripples of heat were already radiating off the stony ground. That was good because it meant Hruk and Serenity would be all but invisible to the nith’s heat vision.
