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“Or he could be completely made up by Oberon,” Chloe realized out loud.
Jubal nodded and continued to paw through the basket.
She couldn’t help but drink in the sight of him, his muscles flexing as he moved, a pleased expression on his handsome face.
“Oh, this is amazing,” he said, unpacking several cells of food. “Sandwiches, Ardoovian pudding, Vystian protein balls… wow.”
Chloe poured them each a glass of cold, sweet lemonade from the tumbler while Jubal piled their plates high.
Butterflies fluttered around the meadow, some of them escaping the little horse’s frog-like tongue, others not so lucky. Chloe found herself relaxed over another shared meal with Jubal.
And unlike last night, she wasn’t afraid of what the evening would bring.
Even out here in the uncertainty of nature, she couldn’t wait to feel his arms around her again.
18
JUBAL
Jubal looked around the darkening woods as they hiked on.
He and Chloe had enjoyed a very romantic lunch. It had taken all his willpower not to claim her right there on the picnic blanket when she was smiling up at him, those blue-jean eyes sparkling in the sunlight.
But they both had known the real goal was to get up to the mountaintop before full dark. So instead of peeling her clothing from her body, he’d cleaned up their lunch and helped her load the blanket and basket back into the hover cart.
But hours had passed since then, and they were still not at the peak.
And in the last fifteen minutes or so, the sounds of the forest had begun to change.
The birdsong was gone, replaced by scuffling in the trees, odd clicks, and even a few ghostly howls.
And the sound of water was growing louder.
He didn’t want to scare her, but they needed to get to their destination as soon as possible.
The real forests of Maltaffia were incredibly dangerous after dark. The nocturnal wildlife was extremely different from the sweet butterflies and squirrel-pigs that scampered the forest floor by day. Those who ventured out after dark without proper precautions often did not come home again.
Of course, they were still at the Midsummer Fertility Center, where any or all of their surroundings could have been populated by Oberon’s design.
It was entirely possible that they were walking a path that held the only physical manifestations of their adventure and everything else they saw and heard around them was manufactured by simulation and stagecraft.
But Jubal doubted it.
He knew a fair thing about the cost of simulation and stagecraft from a lifetime of negotiating how much he could push his tour productions into full experiences for his audience.
What they had seen so far would have been at a staggering cost, even if the only real things were the ones they had touched.
There was no way Oberon would recreate a Maltaffian forest when the Center was already on Maltaffia, where forests naturally occurred as soon as you got above beach-level.
At least part of this forest had to be real, Jubal decided. And no matter how small that part was, it was dangerous, especially for a small, weak Terran.
His need to protect Chloe was so strong, it almost made him shake. He longed to throw her over his shoulder and sprint for the top of the mountain.
The only way to keep moving at her measured, Terran pace was to remind himself that even he had no clue what lay ahead. It was better to move carefully and get where they were going in one piece.
He glanced over at her, curious as to whether her instincts were warning her, as his were.
But her face was set in a determined expression, and her focus was clearly on her footing.
