“Good,” I tell her.
Meanwhile, the leader’s face glows an unsettling color — something like pale pink and yellow and a much darker red. She opens her mouth and says something, but the sound is immediately swallowed by the gates creaking as they open. They slide to the side, stone on stone, sounding very much like thunder. A shockingly white world assaults my senses and I step through the crowded females, going to meet it head on. I bark out a few last orders before gathering the leader and the green one and taking off into the white.
We run and as we run, I understand a new pain. The wind whips my face, cutting into it in a way I’ve never felt wind cut before. It hurts whatever this cold white is, spearing me like the pointed blades of miniature warriors. My whole face feels like it’s bleeding. My lips are swollen, my nose doesn’t stop running. I can taste the disgusting flavor of my own snot whenever I lick my lips. My feet are weighted stones. My lungs burn. I can’t get enough air. This atmosphere is too thin for human lungs and the gravity feels greater. I’ve never felt so heavy.
The leader looks at me worriedly several times, but I refuse to slow our pace. I thought I was a warrior, but I’m realizing that even if I could outfight either of the females with me, they were born in this place. Or at least they know it like a parent, and they treat it like kin. Even when the white powder falls in our path and we sink into it up to the knees, they just calmly wade through it, like the cold white is nothing more than dry leaves dancing in a summer breeze. It doesn’t seem to matter to them that we’re going uphill and we’re always going up a fucking hill.
They call it a Run of the Mountain for a reason.
The mountain is a bold and treacherous thing, knobby and stark. Mostly cold layered atop stone. There are no trees to be seen in the haze of the thickening storm. It just gets thicker, until I can see less and less of the world around me. Until only the dim vision of a far horizon remains.
But I can feel the calm of the females beside me, marred only by their excitement when the sky starts to darken and they’re sure the males are on their way. My heart is a spike in my sternum, punching and clawing and biting and shredding as I imagine being caught by him…I promise myself that I’ll fight — that I’ll die — before I let him laugh at me like that again. The memory only amps up my frustration and my determination. I set the pace. I lead them in the direction the leader dictated on the map and for all my human weakness, I am the first of us to reach the mire.
It looks like a living thing — the only thing we’ve come across that isn’t white. Instead, it’s pink, a color that on the human colony would be considered unnatural. Moving slightly, it bubbles in some places. I avoid those as I wade into it up to the waist and am pleasantly surprised that it’s warm.
“What is this?” I say, scooping up a handful of the stuff and letting it plop from my gloves to rejoin the rest. Steam spits from the thick mud around me in some places, while around the entire mire, it rises to meet the cold white to create a white world with no end. There is no sky. Nothing beyond this mire, this moment.
I try to keep my arms out of the pink goo. The effort is useless and reminds me of something. Helping my grandfather knead dough as he tells me a story. It’s hot by the ovens, even under the shade, but I’m enrapt as he tells me his tale about a man who once tried to push a boulder up a mountain only to keep slipping back again. The boulder was too heavy for him.
I was too young then to understand the point of the story, but I was horrified when my grandfather told me that eventually the man got his insides pecked out by crows, or maybe he was burned by the sun, or maybe that was somebody else. All I remember is that I never, ever wanted to be like him.
I release my arms and sink into the mud real slow and when I surface, it’s to the sound of laughter — the leader and the green one both. Only the leader looks at me though, while the green one tries to cover her mouth with her hand. I squish pink gunk back from my face, feeling so much heavier for it as it sticks to my hair and coats my fur coverings without penetrating. The edge of my mouth tilts up threateningly, but I quickly remember where I am and squash the sensation.
I wrap my mud-wrecked hair up in my fist and knot it at the base of my neck and as I work, I feel myself starting to slow. My mind skips, like a rock over packed sand, and my ears cock back. It sounds like thunder. I turn, but everything is the same. Just white, even if a strange smell is calling me forward. That startling fauna is back again, bringing an oasis with it. Minerals and rich, fragrant earth. It smells like something ancient. Like something known.
“Xhea,” I hear the leader call. Known, but not by everyone. Known by me alone. “I think we have gone far enough. Soon we will be out of the mire and on the tundra. We may be too far for even the most fearsome warriors to follow…”
“I thought you said we were supposed to be far.”
She considers her answer. “There is far and then there is dangerous. It is expected that we want to live, and since we do, we should act accordingly. We shouldn’t go onto the tundra. There are creatures there far more fearsome than a few males.”
There is nothing more fearsome. I plunge ahead without answering.
She tries again. “There is a place we can rest…” Her voice cuts off. She hears it. I heard it a few seconds before. The sound of pounding. There’s a scream — no, not a scream, a cry of rage. A deep, booming cry. A resounding decree that makes my toes curl and my tailbone tuck under. It’s a roar that hearkens only death and demands. He’s here. He’s coming for me. And I’m supremely fucked.
I don’t know who I am anymore, all I feel is my bones start to unravel. Jaxal wanted me to be strong but he didn’t prepare me for this. For seeing him again and the horror that it would bring because right now it’s washing over me like a frontal assault. I can’t stand. I can’t fall either. The mud holds me in place and I feel carved into it now and I don’t dare move as the mist to my right shifts and parts.
I duck down lower, quickly trying to kick up into a horizontal position so that the top of my head doesn’t stick out of the mud. I kick and stroke the mud, but I must make too much noise because I can hear the male roar, his cry different and more imminent than the last had been because he’s right here, right on us.
The green female squeals, giving away our position entirely and I hear thrashing in earnest now. It feels like eternities pass in less than a heartbeat. I lie there, still, hoping not to be found. Hoping he doesn’t find any of the others either. Where did that thought come from? Just leave them. They’re aliens. They’ll probably enjoy it anyways. But when the leader lets out a shout and I hear the sounds of struggle return in earnest, my whole body is propelled into motion.
I come upright to see the leader just a few paces from me, though the mud made it feel like she was so much farther. There’s an alien — a male one — curled over her. He has a strip of my fabric in one hand and seems to be staring between her and it in confusion. I feel lightning rip up my spine at the understanding that I’m what he was looking for, but I also feel an equal lightness. His skin is blue. Not red. A little balloon bursts just below my lungs and suddenly I can breathe again. And if I can breathe I can fight.
The male isn’t armed, which sucks because I’d been counting on being able to take his weapons away from him. Doesn’t matter. I wade closer towards him and see that he’s got the same idea, only he hasn’t let go of the female even though he’s looking at me. Like he thinks he’ll be able to take the both of us. Fat chance.