Yet, as the thought formed, it drifted away into the blurring daze of no-time that gripped her. With a little puff of despair she knew she was drawing them all with her into premature death—helpless to Dissolve. Grisnilter was right. I shouldn't have tried the Oliat.
She had no strength to impart this insight before it drifted away. Darkness encroached. She stopped breathing. Her chest ached, but it was too hard to draw air. They couldn't prevent themselves dying with her. Dissolution/death, a bottomless void.
She felt Jindigar's panicked sense of helplessness as on-rushing darkness swallowed them all. Without warning his strength flooded upward, wrenching, ripping the Oliat from her grasp, relegating her to Protector. A twist, and he Inverted the entire Oliat. Spinning, bruised, stunned, personally violated, she watched as he shifted to another Office and Dissolved. It was a desperate scramble for life that left them all pummeled, bruised, mindblood oozing from every thought, cutting her loose to drift alone into nothing.
Krinata/Takora felt his hands on her face, wet with her tears, cold as death. He was lying half on top of her, a gray armored body pinning his legs as he'd protected her. She felt no stir of breath in him. Her hair stank, blaster-singed where her scalp hurt. Behind her eyes, occluding the shadowed scene around her, Desdinda's features shimmered, a grotesque mask of hate.
Jindigar's panic in the moment of Takora-death saturated her nerves, the same feeling as when she/Krinata had stolen -the triad from Jindigar's control and Inverted to help the hive fight the Troopers. She'd meant only to save innocent lives as he had saved her Oliat, helpless through no fault of their own.
Jindigar had said it. My decisions limit your options; your decisions limit mine, Grisnilter had wanted him—and Takora–to avoid that. Each renders the other helpless.
A hard knotted ball of emotions inside her melted away, leaving relaxation where she hadn't known there was tension. She was consumed with a vast sorrow that she hadn't had the fortitude to Dissolve her Oliat properly so they wouldn't die with her. Knowing her guilt and her weakness, she forgave him and became him, the walls of identity blurred beyond repair. Tears flowed softly from her eyes, and her breath came in little spurts halfway between laughter and sobs. Before Krinata's eyes the visage of Desdinda evaporated to mist, swirling away into limbo. Gladly Krinata followed Takora into dissolution/death, sure her life was over.
There was cool air on her naked skin. The pink dawn tinged the grayness. The beaten earth was tufted with grass under her bare back. Her legs lay across cold, dew-damp, napped skin. Ignoring the searing throb in her head, she pulled herself up to look. In the gray dimness of predawn she saw Jindigar's slack face, felt his toneless muscles, frigid skin, utter stillness where there should be breath, and remembered accepting his death—and her own—but was that a memory of a dream or a memory of reality?|
Mind swimming, she was mildly surprised to find her" skin to be pale white and almost hairless, her hands too small, her vision too limited. But she was also Krinata Zavaronne, sitting naked on a ravaged battlefield amid a hostile plain, staring at the body of the one she valued most in life.
Her future rang with emptiness, the present hollow and black. A sharp cleaver had divided her life into before and after Jindigar, and from the cut end flowed all the warmth, spirit, laughter, and tears that gave life true meaning.
She knew now why she'd rescued him, throwing away career and even life itself, to keep him from the Emperor's hands. And she'd do it again, in a second. But it was too late.
Her heart opened up, ruptured with the pressure of emotions that choked her. Oh, Jindigar, I forgive you for everything you never told me. Raichmat's did right, protecting this world. I'd have done the same. I'd never have understood before–
Paralyzed with flooding memory of the horrors the hive had evoked, she sat over Jindigar, transfixed by images, unable to blame the natives for what they'd done. It was a while before she realized it was only memory—devoid of emotional impact. Desdinda's face was just as horrible as ever, but not horrifying. She felt only a great sorrow for a valiant woman who'd died for what she believed in, which only added to the intolerable grief at loss of Jindigar.
Her diaphragm unknotted and heaved, squeezing a great sob out of her wide-open throat. She didn't recognize the groaning voice as her own, even when it came again and again. She knew only that this was Dushau grief for that which will never be again. She had been riven in two by loss of a part of herself. There could be no healing, for no scar could fill the rift. She needed the mercy of death.
His eyelids fluttered.
Shock throttled a sob half spent in her throat. She grabbed his shoulders, shaking him. "Jindigar!"
There was no further response, and she could find no pulse. She put her ear over his nose and thought she felt the slightest movement, the barest warmth. He could be dying in shock! It was the first time she'd noticed the predawn chill that had turned her own flesh to cold putty.
She swallowed panic and looked around. A sleeping bag! Where? Her impulse was to start tearing at the tarps that covered the sleds scattered about. She hadn't stowed the gear, had no idea what was where. Storm!
She staggered to her feet, shaking from suppressing frantic haste. The sleds were scattered amid broken flyers and dead troopers, the refugees slumped here and there like discarded toys. How' d the natives get the sleds out of there?
She dragged herself to her feet, touching the two naked Holot, Irnils and Terab. She noted they were alive with the detachment of the Dushau for an ephemeral. Something inside her would always see as a Dushau now. She didn't know who she was, or what was real, what mere phantasm or nightmare. But Jindigar's life depended on her.
She found Prey's body. Not all a dream! Had she killed him, seizing the triad? Had that really happened? She was too drained to grieve again. Beyond him were two amorphous lumps, odd amid the armored bodies, discarded energy weapons, and debris of crashed flyers. Must be Lehiroh.
Weaving and lurching, she made it to them and found the piols curled up between the bodies a strange human male and an emaciated Dushau female. She knew the Dushau—she'd glimpsed her in the triad, when Jindigar had tried to read the sandstorm, and had found them the dry wash and the cave. Her image had set Jindigar's face glowing.
An irrational pang of jealousy seized her, and she turned to search for Storm. Suddenly Rita and Imp raced past her, chittering and squealing. Following, she saw Storm picking himself up near a sled. Weakness banished by adrenalin, she ran to him, shouting, "Storm—where are the sleeping bags? Jindigar's in shock!"
By the time she reached the Lehiroh, he had focused on her, and trained reflex had taken over. He surveyed the field, picked a sled, and attacked the lashings, saying, "Give a hand!" Then he climbed up and began heaving down piles of warm bedding and clothing.
Krinata dragged two fleecy bags to Jindigar, rolled him onto one and covered him with the other, folded double, and was about to climb in to warm him with what little body heat she had when a strange voice behind her asked, in awed wonderment, "That's Jindigar?"
She gasped, whirled, and blurted, "Who're you?"
"Cyrus Benwilliam-Kulain, Senior Outrider to Avelor's. Are you Jindigar's Outrider? Do you have any inidran?"
She shook her head. "What's inidran?" The stranger had a mop of sandy curls standing out in spikes around his head and was clad, as the rest of them, only in smudges and grime. Her head was barely shoulder-high on him. She looked up into a craggy, weathered face with a high forehead, aquiline nose, and an engaging smile that now mixed disappointment with a kind of stunned admiration that embarrassed her. She dared not let her gaze fall below his chest for fear of discovering the physical evidence confirming the meaning of that look.