Christine had no idea where they were running to. The light from the swinging tricorder gave her no chance to make out the surroundings, and eventually the movement made the screen slide closed and they were left in darkness. Spock's arm was about her waist, strong and insistent, not allowing her to move except for where he wished her to go. The debris on the corridor floor crunched beneath her feet and no matter how hard she tried to listen for anyone – anything – following, she could not be sure of what she heard beyond the noise of their own footfalls.
Finally Spock jerked to a stop, his arm slipping from her waist but his fingers almost instantly closing round her wrist, and she heard his other hand scrabbling against the wall. There was the click and then the wrenching scrape of a damaged door being opened and he pulled her through, pushing the door closed behind them and then standing, panting, against it.
'Do you think – ' she began in a ragged whisper.
His grip became vice-like on her wrist and his other hand pressed over her mouth, stifling her words. She could feel the trembling of his fingers as he touched her lips and she fell silent as much in deference to his panic as to any perceived threat. Her sides were heaving, and it was all she could do to breathe through the press of his hand. His apparent terror was terrifying in itself. An out-of-control and emotionally-led Spock was not something with which she wanted to do battle.
She waited, listening, certain that he was listening too. She could hear nothing from the corridor outside. She could feel the length of Spock's body pressed against her from behind, his heart beating against her ribs, his head alongside hers and his breath hot on her cheek. There was no sound but their breathing.
Slowly she moved her hand down to the tricorder and opened the screen. Spock started at the sudden light but, thankfully, he did not react more than that. The light shone off fallen beams and broken spars of wood only a few feet in front of them. This was one of those rooms they had judged too damaged to enter.
She tried to speak again and Spock's hand tensed over her mouth. She took a risk, and bit him.
Startled, he withdrew his hand. She could feel his shock at her action through the sudden jerk of his body against hers.
'If you won't let me speak, meld,' she said in a low, angry voice.
There was a hesitation, and then his fingers crept up again and touched hard against her face, finding the appropriate spots at temple and cheekbone.
A whirl of impulses. Hard, hard lines trying to catch and control. Fear. Rationality. Fear. Logic. Fear of the pain, fear of glittering eyes, fear of the coming, the coming…
Christine cut across those tumultuous thoughts with her own, the chill of her mind-voice acting like a slap.
Are they following us?
Unknown.
The image of their coming, their glittering eyes, iridescent coats shining, pressing near, too near. The pull of their thoughts like barbed wire through soft flesh…
Did you see them through the door? she asked, cutting over those loose and weaving thoughts again.
A hesitation. And then, I saw them. I sensed their minds. Both.
How many?
Unknown.
Images of them, bleached out in the sudden light, the turn of their heads toward the opening door, the sudden focussing of their thoughts, reaching out, tendrils of thought seeking to entwine with his. The opening of their mouth-things to begin the keening of their surprise and fright. The movement of them towards the door to the dark-place, to the old-place. The fear of them…
Spock. She spoke soothingly into his mind this time, trying to capture what there was of him that could still control. You need to calm and focus. We're alone. They're not here. There's no noise from outside. We need to work out what to do.
Hesitation… His mind working…
Unconsciously Christine thought of Spock standing on the Enterprise bridge, in control, confident, directing those under his command without faltering. And she felt Spock capture that image, drawing it into himself and remembering what it was to be Spock. Outside, in the physical world, she felt him straighten, his arm loosening from her body.
His hand was still on her face, his fingers still pressed against her skin. She could still feel his thoughts moving like mercury, entwining with hers.
There is no other way through, she persisted. We need to work out what to do.
We must go forward, he replied, the thought a steady intention floating above a maelstrom of doubt. There is no other way through.
His fingers began to slip from her face, the meld becoming more tenuous. And then they both heard it – a clatter from the corridor outside, and a quiet, odd keening that made no sense but instilled fear and sorrow simultaneously in Christine's chest.
Spock stiffened again, but he seemed calmer since the meld. Silently he took the tricorder from Christine and angled the light forwards at the broken beams and rubble before them. Near the floor was a triangular, almost impossibly small gap between three spars of wood.
Christine registered his intention without him making a sound. She nodded and sank silently to her knees, beginning to slip her body through the gap. Her pack stuck and Spock's hands reached about her waist and unclipped the belt, and she carried on pushing through, feeling ahead into the darkness with one hand. There was space enough to continue and she wriggled her hips and legs through and shuffled as far as she could away from the gap. Spock handed the tricorder and pack through and she took them, trying to light Spock's way without shining the light directly in his eyes.
He was larger than her, and had no clothing to protect his skin from the shards of broken wood. Nevertheless he forced his body through the gap and crawled towards Christine without a sound. Christine closed the screen on the tricorder just as they heard the door scrape open.
A light shone, dazzling, into the room. The strange song grew louder as the beings entered the space, curiosity overlapping fear overlapping anger. Spock sat motionless, pressed against Christine, barely breathing. There was an emptiness, and she could not work out what it was, until she realised that all this time Spock had been barely shielding his thoughts and she had constantly felt a hum of his mind in hers. Now, however, his mind was almost imperceptible as he struggled to clamp down on his over-stimulated telepathic centre.
She sat, eyes wide, watching the moving light as it pushed shadows back and forth across their tiny hiding place. The light came closer, illuminating more and more of the wreckage around them until Christine could see Spock's hunched body beside her and the spider's web tangle of broken wood around them and the strange smashed remnants of everyday life scattered across the floor. Spock was immobile, his lips pressed together in a hard line, his eyes focussed rigidly on the places where the light shone through. There was blood and dirt on his arms.
And then there was a chitter of surprise and the song grew in volume, and suddenly Christine saw eyes, glittering and horrifying, peering between two pieces of wood. An arm reached in, or something like an arm, hooking close to them but not quite reaching.
Spock exploded into action, standing in a space that was too small to stand in, pushing out at the broken beams so that they began to career out towards the huddle of aliens. The light dropped and cut off and the constant song began to fill the air with more insistence, loud and panicked and infectious. Christine pressed close to Spock, determined not to lose him as he turned and began to rip at the debris behind them, forcing a way through the room as far from the door as they could go. She flipped the tricorder open again, giving them a tiny flash of light, and then closed it again before it could give the aliens any fix on their position.
It was enough. Spock had obviously seen enough in that fleeting wash of light to fix a course in his mind and he grabbed at her arm, pulling her relentlessly through the debris as unidentified objects tumbled and smashed to the ground around them. A continuous creaking groan had set up above them. The ceiling was finally giving up its fight and collapsing entirely.
Christine stumbled, following the Vulcan blindly, realising as the ground rose in steps before her that she was climbing spiral stairs. Somehow in that momentary glimpse of the wrecked room Spock had seen stairs! Her heart hammered inside her. Surely the stairs would peter out… Surely they would…
But they did not. They led upwards with amazingly little damage, seemingly forever. And then Spock stopped abruptly and she stumbled up after him and realised they had reached a landing and the stairs went no further. Spock let go of her arm and began to feel over the wall and then he wrenched at something, grunting with effort, and with shocking abruptness the door gave way and sunlight streamed into the stairwell.
Christine stumbled out after him into enveloping heat, her eyes completely dazzled by the full light of day. The air that was stirred by light breezes tasted beautiful in her lungs after so long underground. She blinked and blinked again, trying to make sense out of the jumble of bleached shapes around her – and then Spock pulled at her arm again, making her walk, taking her away from the small turret that the stairwell had ended in.
'They may follow,' he said in a rasping voice.
It was only then that she realised just how much dust and dirt she had inhaled and that her own voice was on a par with Spock's. She reached to her side for the flask of water, and swore bitterly.
'My pack,' she said at Spock's glance. 'I left it down there.'
Spock's lips tightened, but he said nothing.
'Are you all right?' she asked him, her eyes finally adjusted enough to look at him properly. There was blood running down his body from multiple cuts and scrapes, some of them seriously deep.
He nodded, obviously making the same appraisal of her. She glanced down at herself, seeing that her tights were so full of holes they were barely worth wearing, and her uniform dress was severely torn in multiple places. Blood was seeping through the fabric on her right arm and somewhere above her hip, but she was too filled with adrenaline to feel any pain.
'I'm fine,' she said quickly.
Spock dropped to his knees almost before she heard the noise, his hands clutching at his temples. Her head jerked up and she whirled to see an assembly of a dozen of the Talasees, their song low and steady and determined, their eyes shining and fixed on Spock. As if hearing words faltering through a hubbub of interference she realised that she was understanding fragments of communication not aimed at her.
Escaper … Truant ... The thing was needed …
Disgust. Return. There-below. Unsafe here-above.
Christine's eyes widened, realising that slowly the Talasees' thoughts were becoming clearer in her own mind. Spock was shaking, his forehead pressed against the rubble on the ground, his hands clenching so hard at the sides of his head that she could see blood starting up under his fingernails.
'No!' Christine snapped, unable to suppress the instinctive need to verbalise her demands. 'Speak to me, not him!'
Spock retched abruptly, the shuddering setting up violently throughout his body. Screams began to lurch out of him as the mental words from the aliens multiplied and ricocheted through Christine's mind.
Impossible. No mind sense. Impossible. It has no thoughts.
'I can – ' Christine began indignantly.
As their song expressed outrage and Spock's screams grew she bit her lip into her mouth and forced herself to think her rebuttal instead of voicing it.
I have thoughts. I can hear you, you can hear me. Speak to me, not to him. You're hurting him.
She almost clamped down on the moan of frustration she wanted to give, but on an instinct she allowed it, letting it be as wordless and tonal as it could be, and she sensed a slight relaxation in the creatures' glittering, iridescent bodies.
It hears through the other, she heard in a tone of dismissal. It believes it speaks alone. It does not.
Why are you hurting him? she pressed. Please, can't you try –
One of the aliens stepped forward, coming so close to her that its eyes were only inches away. Its song shivered through her skin and she suddenly felt ice cold despite the pressing heat of the sun. She could feel its breath brushing her skin, hot and staccato like the quick breaths of a small mammal and its hand moved upwards, clawed and curious, to trail across the fabric of her dress. Its song became soft with intrigue.
It wears cloth like the other did. Wears cloth like the sick. Disgust. Wrong. We cannot communicate.
Other voices chimed in as if, perhaps, an argument were ensuing.
The other was useful. The other healed the computers. The other has knowledge. Take them below. Need them. Use them. We are barely holding on. Make them help. Take them.
Christine became aware of them closing in, moving closer in a circle about her and the shuddering Vulcan. Her awareness seemed to be swaying, moving between the sights and the sounds around her and the conversation that was entirely within her own mind. Talking to these beings was like rendering oneself half blind and extracting meaning from their thoughts was as alien as reading Braille. No wonder Spock's mind, with its extra sensitivity to telepathy and its aversion to chaos and emotion, could not cope with the contact.
She tried to muster calm and clarity, lifting her head to stare straight into the eyes of the alien closest to her, trying to ignore Spock beside her on the ground.
We will not help you if you continue to hurt him. Where I come from there are many others who can help. Let us go, and we will send assistance.
There was a pause and then an increase in their scattered thoughts. The song became curious again, shot through with tension and disagreement. As their thoughts turned to each other she knelt by Spock and put her hand on his shuddering back. She could feel the vibration of his screams through ribs and flesh.
She spoke as quietly as she could, not daring to project the thought of her words for fear that it would be understood.
'Spock, can you run?'
He stiffened, his hands loosening somewhat from the sides of his face and his eyes staring at her with some kind of ragged wonder. His thoughts filtered into her mind.
They are fast. No hope. Cannot outrun them.
'Then what can we do, goddammit?' she hissed.
He flinched, and then his thoughts reached her again, dull and flat.
Nothing. Nothing at all.