Page 100 of Starside

We eat the rest in silence. When everything is gone, I carefully fold the leaf into a square. I look up and am shocked to see him offering something to me.

His water.

For a moment, I just look at it. I blink. I consider refusing. But in the end, I take it. Eyes fixed on where his must be, I slowly raise it to my lips. Take a sip. Try not to groan at how good the clean water feels sliding down my dry throat.

I offer it back to him, but he stands. “Keep it,” he says roughly. And I know it’s not because of generosity or care for me. I just know it.

I repulse you, don’t I?

You have no idea.

He let me keep it because he doesn’t want to drink from something my lips have touched.

We don’t speak the entire next morning as the mud beneath our feet turns to dirt. Any hope of clean water withers as the crimson streams darken even more, to a thick metallic tar with an oily sheen. The sun is like an eye, staring me down, heat blazing. I make Raker’s canteen last most of the day, then I’m thirsty again.

Mid-afternoon, Raker drops his pack by another riverbank and wordlessly slips away to hunt.

“I’m doing okay, thanks for asking,” I say in his direction long after he’s through the trees. I sigh.

If only I had literally any other travel companion.

My body is aching and spent. My legs want to buckle beside this putrid stream, but I slide my sword from its scabbard. I take a deep breath.

Then, I do the same slashing move I practiced before.

And I don’t stumble. I keep my stance.

I keep my stance. I almost grin, realizing last time wasn’t just a fluke. A jolt runs through the metal, striking my blood.

I tense.

I could be losing my mind. But I swear my sword just … congratulated me?

It could be the dehydration. Or the loneliness. Or my metal is really communicating with me. Whatever it is … it’s the push I desperately need.

Time to see if I can do it while switching stances.

I can’t.

I almost slice through my thigh actually, the blade careening forward.

Again.

My muscles burn as I shift my feet and legs, knees bending then straightening, yet every time my sword moves in its slicing motion, I lose my balance. It seems impossible to do both at the same time.

But I mastered it once, with a lesser blade, moving from wooden practice swords to metal, as a child with Stellan.

I can do it again.

I’m so focused on my shifting stances, that I don’t even notice that the woods beyond the riverbank have gone deathly quiet.

I don’t even see the glowing sword—

Until it’s at my throat, casting a crimson light the exact shade of blood.

My breath catches. All my questions about how this sword is glowing come second to the fact that my pulse is currently beating against its metal.

I slowly turn my head to the side, only to meet a sparkling gaze. An immortal, whose skin is dry and split, like this is what happens to someone who spends too much time in this rot.