[02] Elite: Nemorensis by Simon Spurrier Page B

spore-bird-flopping-whale-whatnots, always lashed by rain, always chased by lightning, always shouting and protesting and shrieking like a child.
    At least,
he
was. She just kept blowing him. Glancing up to tweak the liminals now and then like she knew where she was going. Like (
oh NoGod)
like she’d planned the whole damn thing.
    And yes, thank you, obviously: he’d obediently orgasmed at the point of touchdown. Skull-breaking terror or not.
    Pathetic
.
    She pointed out into the jungle like she owned the place. ‘That outpost’s not far, sweetie. Looked pretty big on the scans. Couple of miles? We’ll get repairs there, don’t you fret.’
    She knew it was there before we even started to drop.
    ‘Hang on, we can’t just—’
    ‘Walk in the woods! Walk in the woods!’ She disappeared into the tangle of (
don’t look too close
) undergrowth, humming to herself.
    The worst part, Myq decided, gawping in the silence, the most revolting headache-inducing part of it all, worse than the sweaty pressure of endoclimatisation – the gravity aches, they called it – and the sticky wraparound alien sense-bombardment, worse than the annoying hoot-squawks of distant wildlife and the twitchy responses of the hair-triggered local plants, was this:
    She was right
.
    All that smashing and bashing around on the way down. All that chaos. All that crazed giggling inanity.
    Eminently bloody sensible.
    Avoiding pursuit.
    So why couldn’t she just have told him what she was up to? Why wait until the end? Why couldn’t she trust him enough to … to own up to her scheme?
    C’mon, Myquel.
He dragged a hand across his upper lip, dangerously close to a schoolboy blub.
This isn’t about the crash landing and you know it
.
    And, ohhh, it wasn’t. There was a bigger picture here. A macro to the micro – every bit as infuriating. A sneaking suspicion that had been settling over him for days, that down in the fuzzy abyss of Teesa’s rampage, down in the murky depths of her mercurial, spontaneous, vicious, unpredictable,
beautiful
self … there was a method behind the madness.
    The inkling had arisen drop by drop. The way she’d spoken to that reporter, back on Tun’s Wart. The way her voice changed sometimes, airbursting with innocuous-seeming wisdom (
the lifecycles of fucking shibboletti, for NoGod’ssake
). The things she mumbled in her sleep. The refusal to speak of the past. The way he caught her staring sometimes, out into the dark, lips moving, eyes wet.
    Something.
    Going.
    On.
    The kicker? The kicker had come just a few moments before, as they’d stepped from the
Shattergeist
and tramped out into the mud, stumbling through puddles of rainwater already gathering in the blast craters round its jets. He’d caught her just then, pausing at the ship’s consoles under the auspices of locking it down, dialling into Shibboleth’s rudimentary info-net.
    Checking the prices of shibboletti glands.
Smiling softly to herself.
    And the crazy part? He wouldn’t have minded if she just owned to it. If she’d just volunteered the information. It wasn’t like he was going to quit on her. Come what may, come what shenanigans, come what secret motives, he would’ve gone along with Teesa anyway:
good little puppydog
,
good little slave
. They both knew it.
    (
Weak! weak!
)
    So why couldn’t she just explain it all? Why not confess there was some … plan unfolding? Some design beneath the destruction? Something to do with those idiot fart-creatures … their priceless glands … and maybe (
surely!
) the man who’d once owned Teesa as a slave?
    ‘
A commodity baron, let’s say
,’ the dead reporter said. Sneering and sweating below his camera-eye. ‘
All above board. Someone in … ohhh … someone in the glander-trade.
’
    Why? Why wouldn’t she tell him?
    And worse: why couldn’t Myq just fucking
ask
about it?
    Standing in the clearing with the ship steaming and clicking behind him, rain soaking into his clothes, he made a