Crossing the Line Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Yeah, I think I know what happened the last time you did,” said Shan.
    â€œYou’d know more about Aras’s actions at Mjat than I would.”
    â€œLook, he’s not going to make a habit of this, is he? Let him go.”
    All the gethes seemed to worry about was Aras. Her protectiveness towards males almost made Mestin warm to her, but she decided to end the debate. She had a suspicion she was being dragged into a bargaining session. “You have been fed, yes? Now do you have everything you need?”
    Shan gave her an odd flash of her teeth: no wonder ussissi were wary of humans. She indicated her bag in the corner of the cell, a shapeless dark blue fabric sack with straps that attached to the shoulders very much like a wess’har pack. Nevyan was right. If it contained everything she owned, it was an oddly modest amount for an acquisitive gethes .
    â€œI always travel well-equipped,” she said, and her occasional blinking had stopped completely. Her eyes were disturbingly pale and liquid. “I’ve got everything I need.”
    Mestin held her fixed gaze for a few more seconds and thought for once that she had understood everything the gethes had said.
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    Aras had a dream again, of fire and of hatred and of angry sorrow. It wasn’t his own. It wasn’t even the inherited memory of the victims of Mjat, because that was a waking recollection, a real event from his captors’ experience that he could verify because he had been part of it. This was another sort of fire and emotion altogether.
    Dreaming was not a wess’har characteristic and neither were long periods of sleep. But when he dozed briefly, vivid dreams came to him from his altered genome, sometimes the almost-human face of an Earth ape, sometimes a closed door, and sometimes red and gold fire. And the alien emotion that accompanied it all was throat-stopping rage.
    This time he was looking through a distorted frame, like a heat haze or clear shallow water, and the fire came towards him in a great arc and filled his field of vision. There was no burning. But a gut-panic almost took his legs from underneath him. Then he woke.
    He was leaning against the polished wall of a chamber in Chayyas’s home in F’nar, where Mestin had brought him to await the senior matriarch’s judgement. The images and feelings were still vivid in his head and his throat. It was the anger that disturbed him most.
    This had to be Shan’s memories. He was behind her eyes. He had no sense of location, only a vague darkness, but he could feel a great racking sob fighting to be free of his chest and the pressure of something smooth and hard gripped fiercely in his hand— her hand—and a painful constriction in his throat and eyes. And then he heard a man’s voice.
    Are you going to sit there all fucking night or are you going to frigging well go and do something about it?
    They were angry, violent words but he had no sense of them being wielded to wound her. Then the pressure in his chest and throat burst and there was a massive rush of cold and energy into his limbs. Then, nothing. It left him feeling as if he had been jerked out of the world and dumped in a void.
    Aras had gone through this sequence, waking and sleeping, at least a dozen times since he had contaminated Shan and had in turn been contaminated by her. Whatever else c’naatat had snatched from her, it seemed to think this was useful. It was an angry and violent event. It was consistent too, and from what he knew of humans’ fluid, inaccurate, ever-rewriting memories, that meant she had replayed it many times to herself.
    He hoped he would be able to ask her about the events that had burned it into her. But the chances were that he would not see her again, and the thought left him aching with desolation.
    He straightened up and looked out the window onto the terraced slopes of the caldera that cradled F’nar. The sun had not yet