Dragon's Isolation - Miranda Martin Page 0,59

flash in Calista’s eyes. “You reach your man and bring him home.”

My heart leaps into my throat and tears fill my eyes. I nod, lip trembling, so I bite it. The pain forces me to focus. Barring a cure there’s no other choice. Jolie puts a hand on the small of my back. A reassuring touch.

“Right,” I choke out.

“Good,” Calista says. “We need to move. He’s going to be faster than we are. Traveling with Malcolm might slow him down. That’s our best chance to catch up.”

We quickly divide up the supplies between us, and in almost no time we’re heading out of the City. As we emerge into the heat from under the dome, I can see his fading tracks heading across the sand. My stomach drops seeing how faded they already are. Tracking him is not going to be possible by his trail for long.

“We’re going on your memory,” Calista says. “Is that the direction you remember?”

Closing my eyes I call up the memory of that trip. It’s been a long time, and it doesn’t help that there aren’t a lot of markers to navigate by on Tajss. As far as I can tell though, it seems right, so I nod.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, then we should move,” Calista says.

And we do. Hours pass. The suns move across the sky and drop towards the horizon. The trail has been gone for a long time, and we’re not completely dependent on my old memories of a trip I made once.

I’m exhausted, emotionally and physically drained. Every step burns, but it’s not only in my muscles. My nerves are fried. Walking, head down, it’s almost easier to believe this is some kind of nightmare. That if I keep on moving, sooner or later I’ll wake up, and it will all have been a bad dream.

I’m so lost in the blackness of my own thoughts, I bump into Calista. Only then do I look up and out of my own head. We’re standing on top of a pretty high dune. I can see for miles around us, out to the last rays of the suns clawing at the horizon as if they don’t want to set.

“What’s happening?” I ask.

“If we stop for the night, we’ll never catch him,” Calista says.

“But we can’t track him in the dark,” Jolie says.

“No,” Calista agrees. “But we’re not tracking him anyway. We’re going off Amara’s memory. If we keep moving, we have the best chance of catching him.”

I take a deep breath and close my eyes. I need a moment. I’m doing my darndest to not give in to despair, and it’s hard. Everything seems to be working against me. My legs hurt so bad I want to cut them off to make it stop, my lower back is a throbbing knot of pain, and I’ve got a pressure headache from unshed tears to top it off.

“Right,” I say. “We should keep going.”

“Can you tell the way?” Calista asks. “We don’t want to miss a sign in the dark.”

“I’m more worried about the sismis deciding we’re dinner,” I say.

“It’s a definite possibility,” Calista says. “But if we don’t do this, our only hope will be to make it all the way to the cave he showed you. That’s a long ways to travel.”

“The longer we’re out here, the greater the odds of running into something we don’t want to meet with,” Jolie adds. “I agree, we should keep moving.”

I nod, too exhausted to speak. Jolie slips her pack off and kneels beside it. She digs through and pulls out some chunks of smoked guster that she hands to each of us. I pop the piece right into my mouth. It’s tough and chewy, but it does have an invigorating effect.

Calista passes around the waterskin, and I pull out some carefully wrapped epis from my pocket. We each take a piece, then we shoulder our packs and continue our journey. The nightmare journey from hell.

The quest to save my son and my husband. If I can.

The dark on Tajss isn’t like dark on the ship. ‘Night’ on the ship was manufactured. A timer that dimmed the lighting so it would coincide with the normal cycle of a day. The entire point was to keep us used to being on a planet. Only it didn’t fully succeed, at least not for Tajss.

On the ship, night was never like this. Sometimes the suns on Tajss set before the moons rise, and for an hour or more, there is this pitch-black darkness