Desert World Allegiances (26 page)

“I’m a priest. I should counsel you against seeking revenge.”

“You don’t even believe that,” Temar said. Shan didn’t disagree. He did spend a lot of time studying Temar, and Temar bridled under the tacit judgment.

“I’d welcome the help,” Shan finally said. Reaching out, he patted Temar on the shoulder, just as he probably had a dozen times before when Temar visited the church. This time, Temar jerked away, and Shan froze, his face a mask of horror.

He could handle it as long as no one touched him, Temar mentally added. “So, when do we leave?” he asked.

“As soon as we get supplies together?” Shan asked, looking to Temar for approval. Temar knew Shan was probably doing that simply to avoid making Temar feel helpless again, rather than out of any uncertainty. He still appreciated the gesture.

“Sounds good.”

Chapter 20

T
HE
sand bike started slipping down the dune face, and Temar’s breath caught in his throat as he clung to Shan. The man leaned back, his weight added to Temar’s on the back of the cycle, and Temar had a flash of panic as he felt trapped, pinned by Shan’s weight.

Then the bike shifted, and Shan moved forward, gunning the engine so that it whined, and then they both lurched forward. Temar barely avoided decorating the back of Shan’s neck with vomit. Finally they headed down a long trough between two of the slow moving dunes, and Temar could feel his stomach unknot at the long, straight path ahead of them. Before this, Temar hadn’t really understood how Shan could have survived, riding a sand bike through a canyon while people shot at him. However, Shan controlled the bike with a confidence that allowed him to make impossible turns.

Shan leaned forward, and because Temar held on, he was pulled down so that he was almost lying on Shan’s back as they sped across the white sands. Temar had watched Shan pace the front of the church many times, but until this moment, he’d never felt the power. He’d never noticed Shan as a sexual being. However, pressed up close while Shan’s strong body shifted with the bike, Temar could think of little else.

Temar’s sexual experiences were limited to two boys from school that he’d played with. Each time, they’d pretended to understand their own bodies and each other’s bodies, even though the lie was comically transparent. They’d fumbled, pulled too hard, put knees in awkward places. They’d gotten as far as fingers up the backside before pulling back, each sure that nothing bigger than a finger would ever get up that hole. Back then, sex had been exciting and confusing and fumbling. Now that Temar had seen Shan controlling a sand bike, he figured Shan wasn’t someone who’d ever fumbled.

The way Shan moved was closer to Ben. What Ben had done to him wasn’t sex. Temar couldn’t think of it that way. It’d been payment… fear… it’d been survival. But Ben’s body moved with a confidence and surety that reminded Temar of Shan’s movements. They understood themselves and their world, and they moved into it with strength. Before being slaved to him, Temar always thought Ben had a quiet strength, but now he could see that described Shan, not Ben. Ben liked to show off his power. He just kept that preference behind closed doors. Even behind closed doors, even drunk, Shan didn’t use his strength.

Before riding on the bike, Temar hadn’t known that Shan had such strong arms under the robes. He’d lost weight from his time in the desert, but his muscles gathered under his skin as he moved with the sand bike, holding its weight as they skittered down the side of a dune or slid down a dune face.

Temar leaned into that body and closed his eyes as his mouth went dry. The feel of another’s heat pressing into him was too familiar. The sound of another’s heart beating frightened him. But he’d never wrapped his arms around Ben. This was Shan. The bike tilted as they started climbing the side of a dune, sand crumbling under them and cascading down to the bottom of the valley. But Shan leaned into the dune, his knee creating a gash in the sand mountain as they climbed.

“Almost there,” Shan shouted. Temar didn’t know if he meant that they were almost to the top of the dune or almost to the relay. His stomach rolled, either way. One meant enemies ready to kill them. The other meant having to go sailing down a dune face on an out-of-control bike. Temar figured he’d spend more time freaking out about being this close to another human being if he wasn’t busy being terrified in general. If Shan was right, this conspiracy went way beyond stealing water from his father. Circuit boards and water were two of the most vital resources on Livre, and hoarding either was an offense that could get a person exiled.

They crested the dune, and the Livre Communications Relay was laid out in front of them, a long, silver snake set into a stone canyon so narrow that a decent-sized house would touch each side.

“Won’t they see us?” Temar shouted over the wind that whistled past. He would be afraid of someone in the valley hearing his shout, only the bike engine rumbled, and a storm was starting to make dust devils swirl into the air. The wind hit the rocky canyon on either side of the relay’s small canyon and whistled loudly.

“That’s the original landing site,” Shan shouted over his shoulder. “No wind-safe glass. They used solid ship sheeting. They won’t hear or see anything.”

Temar didn’t answer. He pressed closely to Shan’s back and held on as Shan fishtailed the bike down a steep slope toward where the canyon petered out to sand. Large crags of rock rose up from the sand, like icebergs Temar had seen on old vids from Earth. Shan pointed the bike right at the field of rock, and Temar sucked in a breath and hung on more tightly. They were going to end up splatted on the side of a crag, their broken bodies food for sandrats.

The bike turned so sharply that it threw up a curtain of sand, and then they slid to the side before Shan leaned back, and the bike lunged forward, right between two of the largest rocks. A small cry slipped out before Temar could stop it, and the bike’s engine powered down with a low, rumbling hum.

“You okay?” Shan asked as they threaded through the rocks at a much slower speed.

“Not really, no. I think I just peed myself,” Temar said, and he was only eighty percent sure that was a joke.

“These things don’t have effective brakes. I can lose some speed fishtailing it, but if I try to actually slow the wheel rotation, I’m going to lose all control.”

“It felt like you did lose control,” Temar pointed out. He had to order his arms to loosen up before he squeezed the life out of Shan.

Looking over his shoulder, Shan grinned. “I haven’t wrecked a bike since I was a kid.”

“I thought you drove your last one over a cliff.”

“Someone shot at me. That’s not the same.” Shan guided the bike into the shadow of a long, flat rock taller than a house and powered the engine down. The machine shuddered and then fell silent. “I should check the fuel lines. Old bikes like this get temperamental.”

“Tell me it isn’t going to break and leave us stranded out here.”

Shan patted the part of the bike where the handles went into the frame. “This old girl is built to last. She’ll be around long after us.”

“Hopefully you’re trying to compliment the bike and not suggest that our life expectancy is growing shorter by the minute.”

Shan gave him another of those worried looks.

“Just a joke,” Temar said with the best smile he could muster. It didn’t convince Shan.

“You could stay here with the bike.”

“If you get killed in there, my chances of riding out are about the same as your chances of trying to blow a serviceable bowl the first time you pick up a blow pipe.”

A frown crossed Shan’s face. He remembered school when they’d all gotten to practice at the various trades, and glassblowing had been one that Shan clearly had no talent for. “That’s not good.”

“No, it’s not. And if I try and ride that sand bike anywhere, you’re going to be picking pieces of my hair and bones out of sandrat nests. So we go together, and we come back together.”

Shifting his weight, Shan swung a leg over the front of the bike and slid off. Temar had to put out his feet to keep from tipping over with the bike, but Shan used his foot to extend the long sand stabilizers so Temar could climb off. “You surprise me, Temar Gazer.”

Temar wasn’t sure how to take that. “Why?”

“You’re a strong man.”

“And that surprises you?” Now Temar really wasn’t sure how to take that.

“Maybe a little,” Shan said with a shrug. He had to come around to Temar’s side to extend the sand stabilizers on that side. “I knew you were a good man. I knew you’d survived a lot with your father. I knew you were an attractive one, and God forgive me, I’ve struggled to remember my vows more than once. It hadn’t occurred to me that you couldn’t drive yourself out of here if I ran into trouble, or that you were the kind of man who would come anyway.”

“Which is why you’d better not get killed,” Temar pointed out.

“I’ll do my best.”

“Yeah, well just remember, if you don’t, you have to live with the guilt of it up in that heaven of yours.”

“Trust me, I know that.” Shan suspected he would carry his guilt with him to the next life if he failed Temar.

Temar hadn’t intended to poke at Shan’s guilt button again. He opened his mouth to explain that the last thing he wanted was to inspire more guilt, but Shan was already moving away from the bike and toward the edge of the rock. Not sure what he could say to alleviate the guilt he’d unintentionally inspired, Temar followed behind. Near the edge of the rock, Shan held up a hand, and Temar stopped, his heart already rising in his throat. The last time he’d been this scared, Cyla had gotten them both arrested, and look how well that had turned out.

“It looks quiet.”

“Is it supposed to look like that?”

Shan nodded. “It usually is. When I first started my apprenticeship for mechanics, I came out here a couple of times. It’s one family that controls the communications relay. There aren’t that many people out here.”

“Is it just me, or is that a pretty bad plan? I mean, one family running the communications relay? I love my family, but if it was my family left in charge of the communications relay, there would not be a lot of communicating going on,” Temar pointed out.

Over his shoulder, Shan gave him a crooked grin. “The family’s required to keep it open for inspection by any member of any council from any of the valleys or cities. They run the equipment, but this valley isn’t big enough for any sort of food production or terraforming.”

“Are they the ones who get the quotas, the crop quotas at the end of every season?” Temar had never really wondered about the quotas much. Their farm had barely produced food for the three of them, which exempted them from quotas… at least Temar thought it had. Ben suggested that his father would have lost the land a long time ago if anyone had pressed a complaint with the council.

Shan nodded. “For the most part. Doctors have access to some of the quota stores for patients who can’t work anymore. Families can apply for it if they have some sort of temporary hardship. But a lot of the quota does go to them. They’re out here taking care of equipment, hoping that the rest of the universe will—”

“Live up to their end of the deal?” Temar asked. Everyone who grew up on Livre knew that it was a slowly dying planet, because the inner worlds hadn’t finished the terraforming.

“They’ll call eventually. The government will need something from us, and they’ll call. If we don’t have our communications relay open, I don’t know what would happen.”

“Do they even know we’re here anymore?”

That answer required Shan to think some. “I don’t know,” he admitted finally. “I know the relay sends out its required reports. I know that the family who mans this place is listening for any sort of signal. I also know that the relay keeps track of all of the original infrastructure designed by the terraforming crews. The water reclamation systems, the irrigation systems, communication systems—they have blueprints and tracking systems for all of it.”

“So what do we hope to find?”

“Hopefully something that I’ll recognize when I see it.” When Shan said that, Temar gave him a worried look. Maybe Shan could read his expression, because he moved slowly, putting a hand on Temar’s shoulder. “I’m not your sister. I’m going to recognize motherboards if they have them sitting around. And I won’t break anything.”

Temar nodded as he looked toward the long building. “Do you think they’re in on it?”

Shan gave a small sigh and took some time before answering. “I don’t know. As a priest, I’m supposed to assume the best of people. I’m supposed to offer absolution and forgiveness. I’m supposed to be Div.” Shan paused long enough to emphasize the fact that “supposed to” didn’t mean anything when it came to what happened in reality. Pulling his sand veil off, he rubbed his hand over his mouth. “Right now I’m a lot more suspicious than he ever dreamed of being. The relay should have tracked every single motherboard coming off the ships. If they had extra motherboards, they should have offered them for medical diagnosis or for the schools. We stopped training students on any of the higher maths because we didn’t have the computing power to show the models. One motherboard could run a computer network that was able to do jump ship simulations or teach multidimensional calculus.”