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Tara K Harper - Cataract
dawn," she yelled above the wind, "you'll have your rain, and then some."
She moved on, and the cougar paced her in the brush. With a narrowed gaze, she accepted Ruka's sight
to look beyond the fork that split the trail. There was a blurred sense of trees, which bent with ponderous
grace. Then she felt the wind that ruffled her fur. The left trail petered out in a box canyon, she realized.
The right went on to a meadow.
"I understand," she breathed.
Ruka's growl seemed pleased.
The images faded; the cat feet in her skull became fainter. She rubbed her fingers together. She had been
able to read the felines for ten years, each year with greater sensitivity. But Ruka had just pointed out the
trail to the freepick stake as clearly as Tsia did for the meres. As if the cub understood her goal. To
partner with that kind of intelligence& To move through the mountains with two sets of eyes& Daya,
but what had the Landing Pact given up for guides like her?
She guided the meres across a creek, then into another meadow. One creek ran beside the wide clearing;
another gray line of water glinted across the expanse of two-meter tallgrass. The grass flowers, tightly
closed against the wind, were small gray flags, which would flare yellow after dawn. Soon the flowers
would be ripe, and the wind would tear them open so that their seeds blew out like static-charged foam
and clogged the branches of the shrubtrees around the meadow.
The meadow itself was like a lake, and Tsia could feel the shadows of movement beneath the puddled
ground. To her left now, Ruka slunk into the meadow, but between the gloom and the grass, his body
was just another motion of the wind, invis-ible to her eyes. Behind her, Wren, then Bowdie, then Kurvan
filed through the grass. They began to fan out as the ground grew too wet to follow exactly where she
stepped.
Her foot sank up to her knee, and she struggled to pull it out. Her biogate distracted her from her path.
She stepped for a clump, missed it in the dark, and sank into the puddle beside it. Phosphorescence
swirled like tiny sparks. It took full sec-onds to struggle free.
"Daya," she muttered. The sense of life in the meadow was strong enough to make her frown. Behind
her, the other meres formed a long line in the grass. The steadiness of their bodies looked odd
surrounded by the whipping stalks. Wren, the clos-est, staggered heavily, and she moved back into knee-
deep roots to give him a hand and check the settings on his pack. Neither tried to speak in the wind.
Ruka was already across, waiting, hunkered down on a rock. His golden eyes watched the meres
unblinkingly. Only his ears and tail twitched as he crouched; and Tsia judged the distance between them.
Where the creek between them flooded out into a small pond, the meres would have to wade -or swim
in the dark, she admitted with unease. She glanced down and scowled at the water pooling between the
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Tara K Harper - Cataract
clumps of grass, then jumped ahead again.
The earth shimmied beneath her and, startled, she jumped ahead to a more solid clump. Even that grass
shivered with her weight, buckled. Ahead, the flooded gray creek grew wider, until it seemed as if the
sky lay down in the meadow to sleep out the storm on the ground. Tsia grinned at the image. She put her
foot down. Into nothing. And toppled forward.
Cat feet leaped abruptly in her head; someone snarled in her ear. "Daya " She twisted frantically before
she hit the water. Her legs and hips slapped the lake with a flat splash. Her arms flung out as she grabbed
at the grass. Her torso hit the edge of the mat, and she clung to that flimsy raft like a gale net spread on
the sea.
For that was what she lay on, she realized. A weedis on a black sea of water. A raft of grass. There was
no meadow be-neath her feet it was actually a lake. And not a temporary lake that had flooded from a
simple creek, but the water that had lain, still and dammed, for years behind the ridge of earth that
blocked its lower end.
Infinitely slowly, she dragged herself back up on the mat. The thin island trembled; its root system
shredded beneath her weight. In her head, the cougar paced and clawed at her skull until she snapped at
him to leave her alone. Easing back in a long-body crawl, she shifted her elbows, then hips past her
footsteps where the traces of herself were left in phosphores-cent, sparkling pools among the grass.
As Wren caught sight of her, he quickened his pace.
"Wait " she shouted. "Don't come any closer "
He didn't hear her clearly. Heedless of the swirling lights, he waded knee-deep through to help her. And
sank up to his waist in the brash. "What the hell "
Tsia cursed under her breath. His pack seemed to drag him down in a cloud of phosphorescence. Before
she could climb over to help him, he was up to his chest in night-gray weeds that sparkled with greenish
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