Chapter 3

"The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood,

For nothing now can ever come to any good."

'Trance will find him,' Dylan told himself. 'Trance will take care of him.'

And yet he couldn't help but feel guilty as he paced the comfortable hotel room, wondering where his two friends were. He had arrived in Ga'aul a couple of hours ago, and had immediately asked Andromeda to find Harper's last known location. He had then passed this information onto the authorities of that area, who had calmly told him that they would send a search party. But where? Andromeda had managed to narrow Harper's location down, but he could still be anywhere in an area of about two hundred miles.

'Dylan,' Beka said over the communication centre at the desk. 'You've done all you can.'

'I should have gone after him,' the captain said, shaking his head.

'Trance will take care of him,' Beka said, but she didn't sound completely convinced. 'Look, there's nothing more that you can do right now. Why don't you start picking up the spare parts for the Maru? We'll let you know right away if they find Trance and Harper.'

'I guess you're right. Dylan out.'

How could he concentrate on bargaining when his friends were lost and possibly badly inured, or worse. And yet he had to. He was a High Guard Commander. He had to be strong, even in the face of this. And Trance and Harper had got themselves out of worse scrapes before. They would be OK.

'…But I've got to disagree with Kurt there. I mean, with the lights out it's more dangerous. You get knees and elbows going everywhere and you can sometimes get serious injuries, like this one time when I…' Harper caught Trance's pained expression. 'Too much information?'

'A little,' she admitted.

'Sorry.'

Trance looked wistfully around her. 'This planet is so beautiful. Look at those flowers! I've never seen anything like them before.'

'Yeah. If the flowers look like that, I wonder what the women are like.'

'Seamus Harper, you have a one-track mind,' she scolded. She noticed that she was talking to thin air. Harper had stopped walking. She looked behind and saw him sitting on a rock, holding his stomach with a pained expression. She walked over to him.

'Shrapnel?' she asked sympathetically.

He shook his head. 'Magog.'

'Oh.' She suddenly noticed that his inhaler was missing. 'Harper! Where's your inhaler?'

'I lost it in the crash.'

'When did you last…'

'Only a few hours ago, just before the crash. They were playing up so I put them to sleep.'

'Then they should still be asleep. They haven't started to fight it yet.'

'They're fighting me, though. Can we rest here for a while?'

'Sure.'

They still had a few miles to go before they reached the settlement. Trance pulled a bottle of water and some food from her pack and handed them to her friend. He took a long drink but didn't touch the food.

'Harper, you must eat! To keep your strength up.'

'Trust me, babe, anything I eat will just come right back up. My guts aren't too stable right now.'

She looked at him worriedly. He was white as a sheet, and when she lifted up his shirt she saw that blood had seeped through the bandage.

'How far do we have to go?' he asked. Sweat was beading on his pale forehead.

'Nearly three miles,' Trance replied softly. 'Shall we start walking again?'

'Yeah.'

He stood up, but he was swaying a little, and he walked slowly and carefully. They had barely gone another half a mile before he simply collapsed against a tree, slid to the ground and sat there, eyes closed.

'Harper!'

His teeth were gritted against the pain. 'Trance, it hurts.'

She shook her head. 'I don't understand! The metal didn't pierce any internal organs, and your larvae should still be dormant!'

She lay him down on the ground and pulled his shirt up. Sure enough, she could see the larvae moving beneath the taut skin of his stomach. She had never seen them that active. More blood seeped from the wound. As she wiped it away, her furiously working mind produced an answer. The shrapnel wound and the larvae. On their own, neither could explain this. But put them together…

'What are you guys doing down there?' he muttered irritably.

'Harper, do you remember what I told you when you first woke up with the larvae.'

He winced. 'You told me it was OK. Is it OK now? Yay. Let's go home now.'

'No, Harper. I told you why I couldn't take them out. Do you remember? I told you … I told you that if they felt threatened they would … attack the host. They would … start to feed.'

Harper closed his eyes. 'Do they want ketchup with that?'

She glared at him. 'How can you make jokes at a time like this?'

'Why, will being serious make it all better?'

She looked down at his stomach and gasped as she saw angry purple blossom across his stomach. Internal bleeding. It was followed by a cry of pain from Harper, and she quickly reached out and squeezed his hand. He squeezed back with as much strength as he could muster.

'Ow,' he muttered quietly with tears in his eyes.

'Oh, Harper…' Trance said helplessly.

'So, I'm dying, huh? That sucks.'

'You're not dying.'

'You're a terrible liar. Hey, remember we promised each other that whichever one of us died first would come back and tell the other one what to wear. I mean, if the afterlife is full of people in dinner jackets you'd be pretty embarrassed if you showed up wearing your day clothes. Looks like I'm … gonna be giving you … fashion tips … ow.' He shuddered from the pain.

'I'll get help. It isn't too far to the settlement.'

'Trance, you can't … ah crap get your stinking teeth off my liver, you asshole!'

'Harper!'

'Don't worry, babe, I wasn't talking to you. I was talking to Turdbrain. He's really … going wild in there…' Harper cried out again, clutching at his stomach. Trance slipped her hand under his back and pulled him closer. He looked up at her, the light in his eyes dying.

Trance's mind was racing. She had never in her life been this panicked. This was, after all, only a human. Just a human. Her people destroyed whole worlds full of these simply because they had nothing better to do. Personally, she liked humans. In fact, humans were probably her favourite species in the whole universe, which is why she had chosen to look and act like one. But at the same time this wasn't just a human. This was Harper.

Harper's vision started to dim. In front of him was a blur of purple. From his chest down there was just white-hot pain. He couldn't even identify exactly where it was any more. It felt like a bunch of baby Magog were trying to eat his guts, which was hardly surprising. Trance. Poor Trance. She had to watch him die. He squeezed her hand as tightly as he could. At least he wasn't alone.

Tell her, his mind whispered. Tell her now, while there's still time. Tell her you love her.

He opened his mouth to obey, but at that moment one of the larvae decided, on the spur of the moment, to tear a hole in one of his lungs, and suddenly he was drowning in his own blood.

Harper was dying in her arms.

She told herself that there was nothing that she could do to help him now, and because she had always been good at lying she almost believed herself. Ignoring the nagging thought at the back of her mind, she tried to distance herself from the man in her arms. She reminded herself that this was, after all, only a human. He may be a talented engineer, a genius even, but compared to the things she had seen he was really nothing special. Just another human.

He coughed raggedly. Blood foamed at his lips and trickled down his chin.

Of course, there was one way that she could save him. One single, glittering molecule in an ocean of futures without Harper. She tried to turn away from it. There were very few things that she was forbidden to do, fewer still that were expressly forbidden. But to do this was unthinkable. Impossible.

Harper was dying in her arms.

A teardrop fell from her cheek and onto his, but she doubted if he even felt it. She reminded herself of who she was, and told herself that the pain of losing him would not last forever. It would barely last for a second in the enormous span of her lifetime. It was unfortunate that he would not live to build the tesseract machine which would have saved him, but there was nothing she could do, without breaking the laws that held the fabric of the universe. And even if she did, the risks were far too great. Most probably it would end with both of them wishing that she had just let him go.

Harper was dying.

The young earther could feel the pain starting to leak away. There was still the dull ache in his body that told him he no longer had any oxygen to keep him alive. Trance's face blurred in front of him and he held her gaze for another second before closing his eyes. He was barely conscious, but he was awake enough to feel Magog teeth burrowing further up inside him, and the moment of icy pain as one of the larvae began ferociously attacking his heart.

Trance saw that he only had a few seconds left to live. She closed her eyes. 'Forgive me,' she whispered.

She plunged her hands into his chest and a strange golden light filled the clearing, shining off the leaves. She closed her hands around what was left of his heart and let instinct take over.