We arrive at the space port five minutes before 12. Shazuul and Hazathel are not there yet, so I take the opportunity to ask him why he wants to take Hazathel with us on our search for Cassie. “As far as I can tell, he will be of no help to us. Or does he have special abilities in tracing missing persons?”
“No, I don’t think so. His strengths are his speed and the poison that he can pump into his enemy’s body with one touch.”
My eyes almost pop out of my head, when I remember that Hazathel shook my hand. Now I understand why he was so extremely careful and barely touched me. I was very close to death and didn’t even know it. “You could have warned me silently…”
“And miss out on the fun of this moment right now?” His eyes sparkle with amusement. “Calm down. It is a purposeful decision, not a reflex, with which he applies the poison. You just have to be careful not to anger him. Other than that, your life is not in immediate danger.”
“Let’s get back to the point,” I remind him. He looks pointedly at the clock above the departures counter. “Why is Hazathel coming with us?”
“Because it was the only way to get him to talk and guarantee his cooperation.” I roll my eyes as he falls into bureaucratic speech.
“Got it,” I respond with a hint of sarcasm. “It has always been Hazathel’s dream to see Earth.”
Johar looks up. The force in his cold eyes hits me in the face. “It is his wish, to see Earth again,” he corrects me. “He still has family there. While he was being modified in your father’s lab, his wife and brother were looking for him, he says. He hasn’t dared to go near them in his current state, because he is not the man he used to be.”
“Okay,” I whisper with a raw voice, and raise my hand. “I get it.”
“Do you really?”
This isn’t good, not good at all. I am either having déjà-vu, or we are returning to the same conversation we had last night. I put my hand on my forehead, which feels unusually hot. I feel Johar’ eyes on me, searching and inquiring. Something is tickling my neck. Probably a mosquito or some kind of other insect. I scratch at the spot. It feels like something is under my skin there, but I don’t have time for trivial things like that right now. Time is getting away from us.
“What is taking them so long?” I ask nobody in particular and search the huge terminal for Shazuul and Hazathel. Our two new crew members are taking their sweet time. I fidget around restlessly. They are already 16 minutes late, and I hate tardiness. I turn around to ask Johar if we should leave without the two of them, or if we will have to stay on Betania longer. I haven’t the vaguest idea where Cassie and her lover fled to. I haven’t told Johar this yet, but I strongly suspect that Cassie and her man want to go back to Earth. Everything points to that. The strongest argument for this, in my eyes, is the pregnancy. Women who are about to give birth have a strong urge to nest, and surely, she would want to bring them into this world on her home planet. The medical care, thanks in part, to men like my father, is excellent. The dangers of the birth are distinctly fewer there than, say, here. I notice that my thoughts are wandering and turn around again, to talk to Johar.
But he is gone. Damn it. Have all the men gone crazy? Where has that guy gotten to?
Not a man, my father’s voice whispers in my head, he is not a man, and also not a guy. He is a cyborg. I breathe deeply and count to ten, trying to reassure myself that I am not going crazy. It must be the stress, the unusual experiences.
Then, finally, I see Hazathel and the Sethari, both of them waving to me excitedly. They are half an hour late, but are grinning, and looking very proud of themselves. I have to turn away so they won’t see my relief – and also not the unexpected happiness that I am feeling, looking at their glowing faces. “At least two out of three are happy,” I mumble something unrelated and their effusive apologies, which are tumbling out of both of them in a duet, wash over me.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say through clenched teeth. Twenty to one. We are supposed to take off at one o’clock. We have less than a quarter of an hour to take care of all of the formalities. All it will take is one grumpy official, and we will have to delay our departure. In my thoughts, I weigh my options. I could grab these two creatures and fly back myself. It has been a long time since I flew a space glider myself, but that is something you never unlearn, after all. I would leave Johar behind. I am pretty sure that he would do well here, maybe even better, than back on Earth. He would be free. Nobody would ever accuse him of being only half-human. The Betanians would accept him for what he is, and not for what others made out of him.
The second option is to blow off the departure and to postpone it for a day or two. We do not have a set schedule, although I don’t know for sure how far Cassie’s pregnancy has progressed and how long she will continue to carry the children. Is it nine months like human children or twelve months like the descendants of the Qua’Hathri? Or more quickly, because the other father of her child had animal genes in him? I curse silently to myself, but Johar is still gone.
I scratch myself again, but this time on my stomach. The tickling moves down further. Now it is down by my right leg. What in the hell is it? Without any consideration for the other passengers, who are already looking at me strangely, I pull the skirt of my dress up. At least I don’t have to let my pants down in public.
Now I feel nauseous. No, I think I am going to vomit. Something is moving under my skin! It looks like an animal making its way through my body, using my arteries as an express way. I can’t take my eyes off of this thing that is flitting back and forth, as fast as a spider, leaving a prickling behind as its only trace. Instinctively, I smack my hand on my thigh when I can. It would be better to kill this thing dead inside my body, than to have it wandering around in there any long. I exhale, relieved, when nothing moves. No tickling, no prickling. Everything is fine.
Until I feel it again, this time under the skin in my belly. I punch my belly with my fist, and then I pinch myself on my upper arm. Please, I beg, leave my body alone. The thought that this tiny something could make its way into my brain and feast on me is too much. I rip my clothes from me, and beat myself up, without caring if I get hurt, like a woman possessed. I am aware of the pain, but only vaguely. But I welcome it, because it means that I have landed a good punch. From what sounds like far away, I hear a woman scream. Is that me? I pull at my hair, because if the thing really wants to get into my brain, it will only be in my way. The fewer obstacles that loom between me and the thing in my body, the faster I can catch it and kill it.
The screaming stops when two arms close around me from behind. I am barely aware that this is happening, and only because my ability to move is restricted. Who dares to hold me like this? Don’t people understand that I am going to die if I can’t catch the cute little animal and squash it? Someone says my name, again and again, but I am beside myself and don’t pay attention to it. When the man, who is holding me in his arms, says something different to me, I listen a little more closely. “A switch to turn you off would be really nice right now.”
Then the world starts to fade. I can tell that someone is putting me on the floor, so gently, that it doesn’t hurt. A rubber band holds my leather jacket under my head. The last things I see are gray-green eyes, looking at me full of sympathy and something else.
Then everything turns black, and I feel nothing else.