Forgotten Suns Read Online Free Page B

her so quickly her knees buckled. She
did not need the medbot to tell her the fever had broken. There might be brain
damage; he was probably insane. But as far as the bot could tell, he would
live.
    ~~~
    He slept for a day and a night. The bot fed him a glucose
drip, but not—cautiously—anything pharmaceutical.
    Khalida woke at dawn. She was restless and irritable and
ready to claw the walls, but she could not bring herself to leave the patient
alone. She curled up in the corner with a reader and a box of databeads,
running through expedition files.
    She had most of the finds from the southwestern quadrant of
last season’s dig organized and catalogued when something made her look up.
    He was watching her. He seemed perfectly calm. As far as she
could tell, he was sane.
    “Good morning,” she said.
    “Good morning,” he replied.
    “You’ve been sick,” she said, “but you’re getting better.”
    “How long?”
    He said it quietly, but it seemed to matter a great deal to
him. “Four days,” she said. “I made a mistake. I gave you something I shouldn’t
have. I wasn’t trying to kill you.”
    “Four days,” he said. It was a sigh. “No wonder I’m hungry.”
    Probably she should not have laughed, but he actually
smiled, which was a relief. She preferred that to being blasted where she sat.
    “Breakfast,” she said. “Let me see what I can find in the
kitchen. Promise you won’t go anywhere.”
    “I promise,” he said without irony.
    She was ravenous, but she made sure to feed him first. Not
much, and nothing solid—not yet. He obviously was not impressed with the mug of
liquid ration, though he drank every drop.
    “Good,” she said. “A meal or two more and we’ll try you on
something you’ll like better.”
    “I do hope so,” he said, but he sounded more wry than
annoyed.
    She kept a close eye on him, and kept the medbot running. He
showed no sign of a relapse. Toward noon she fed him again. By evening she was
as ready to feed him solid food as he was—and she was beginning to believe that
he had come through intact.
    ~~~
    Next morning when she woke from an entirely unplanned and
nearly nightlong sleep, he was gone. The bed was neatly made. The clothes she
had found for him were gone.
    Part of her was purely and whitely panicked. Part knew
exactly where he was. She could feel it the way she felt her own hand,
twitching at the end of her arm.
    It was part of what he had done to her. She was not ready to
think about that yet. She scraped the sleep out of her eyes and the hair out of
her face and stumbled into the early-morning light.
    He was cleaning the spotted gelding’s stall, slowly, with
frequent stops to rest. Aisha had done the whole of the opposite row and
started on the end of that one. Khalida swooped down on her like the wrath of
Spaceforce. “What are you doing? How could you let him? He almost died!”
    “I made her show me,” he said behind Khalida. “If anybody’s
earned a whipping, I have.”
    “He already knew how,” Aisha said. “I showed him where
things were. The horses like him.”
    That was obvious. Jinni was wrapped around him, nibbling his
hair.
    “Back to bed,” Khalida said. “Now.”
    “No.” There was nothing defiant about it. He simply refused.
“I’ve had enough of beds and sleep. Let me finish here. Then let me lie in the
sun. That will heal me better than any pill or potion.”
    He was amazingly hard to argue with, and not because Khalida
had seen what he could do when he was out of his head. He was so very
reasonable, and so very sure of himself.
    She threw up her hands. “Do what you like. Die if you want
to. I don’t care.”
    He bowed, which nearly tipped him over. The gelding propped
him up.
    Khalida turned her back on him and left him there.
    ~~~
    He lay in the sun of the courtyard all morning and part of
the afternoon, basking like a lizard on a rock. Any unmodified human would have
burned to a crisp. He bathed in light.
    “He’s