Part 45

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"I know it doesn't exactly look dagyo, but these four bamboo poles are pretty sturdy when you tie them together" Chiana assured a skeptical John Crichton. She held her hand out to help him up onto the balcony railing and follow her along the makeshift ladder to the balcony below and across.

"No no, interlocking them like this is pretty clever, and if this wood is near the same strength as the wood it resembles from home, it ought to hold me, or three or four of you ladies" he kidded. "It's me and this Tarzan thing, I think you ladies have the upper hand on the acrobatics."

"Follow" she urged as she started backwards along the ladder.

John sighed heavily, nearly groaning. There was no way he was going to try making the crossing on the ladder, except, that is, under the persuasion of her feverous eyes pleading for him to stay with her.

"I have another question" Sikozu posed, her arms folded as she stood sideways on the wall beside the ladder.

"No really?" John muttered.

"That's nice" Chiana remarked at the same moment as John.

"How exactly" Sikozu asked anyway "are you intending to get the unconscious Oshana across this ladder?"

"We'll strip her, oil her up and you can push her along it" Chiana snapped her head toward Sikozu. "One frelling wonder at a time okay? First we're gonna get the man with the rocks in his feet from there to there" she gestured from John to the patio she was inching toward. "T-then, well, I think if we can't solve the problem, it'll solve itself" she cast a fleeting glance to Sikozu. "Be useful, stickyshoes, and hold the frelling ladder."

The meaning of Chiana's expression was mysterious enough to Sikozu that the Kalish looked curiously at the Nebari. "Howso?" Sikozu asked.

"Well" Chiana glanced from under her overgrown bangs while shakily continuing along the ladder. "Mm-may not be Oshana when she wakes up."

"Umm maybe we better not leave her alone back here" John pointed over his shoulder to Oshana propped up against the wall.

"Nuuuuuuuuuugh" Chiana dropped flat onto her back halfway down the ladder. "I think Oshana is having enough. Finally. She'll come through. She knows what I'm doing. I think I know what she'll be doing. She knows I know what I'm doing. Maybe -I know what I'm doing. But Larran doesn't. Look, less talk, more action, right?" Chiana sat back up and walked the rest of the ladder on her knees. She dropped onto the patio, turned and urgently waved John to follow.

Under John's coordination and weight, the ladder shook and wiggled. "Uh oh, I'm sprouting ten thumbs" he grumbled, trying to look at the ladder without registering the drop to the ground. Sweat steamed at his palms and warmth was replaced by cold in his extremities.

Sikozu bared her teeth and glared at the shaking ladder. "I can't believe I have to stand here and watch you two monogravitational beings do this ridiculous-" she complained, but was cut short by a pulse blast striking the ladder.

Chiana shrieked, John dropped down and hugged the ladder and Sikozu grabbed onto the ladder the best she could with one hand and returned fire with the other. "A single Scarran" Sikozu reported "that refuses to die."

All of them stared as the ladder made a sudden crunching snap. The ladder gave out near the upper balcony. Chiana reached for John, grasping his shoulders, but he slipped from her hands. Sikozu ran down the wall trying to grasp him, but John stayed glued to the top of the ladder for dear life. It landed directly onto the Scarran below.

Takshaek yelled in surprise and pain, for the first time in her life. Damaged skin and flesh compounded the pain of the man and the ladder falling onto her. Trying to draw motivation from the pain, she cast the burden off of her. "I have John Crichton" she shouted up to Chiana. "Come down or I will kill him."

"Bullshit!" John burst out incredulously. "She knows who we are, so she probably wants me and Pip, right?" John walked up to the Scarran woman nearly snarling with his over-the-top frustration. "Last thing she wants to do is shoot me. Call her bluff, See cozy Shamu, the price is ripe, come on down." John bent at the waist and pointed with both hands to Sikozu. From Sikozu's expression, John got the impression that Sikozu didn't know much of what was going on, but she did raise her pistol to the Scarran.

"Your pulse weapon is little threat to me" Takshaek took a few proud steps forward, keeping her aim on John Crichton.

"No, but that one might ruin your day" John cued Takshaek to look behind, where Tannac was sitting on a tree branch with her multi-facility pulse rifle aimed at the Scarran. Takshaek could only sneer and lower her weapon. Sikozu appeared delighted. "Thanks, Tonic" John extended a thumbs-up gesture and walked to a nearby garden stone to sit down. "Saved me having to point a loaded finger at myself."

"Name's Tannac. And no problem" Tannac replied and whistled. "Clan, get your delicate little eema and your delicate little team out here, it's safe." Clan and the remainder of the militia unit crept out from the nearby bushes and trees to surround Takshaek. "So, John Crichton. Do you mind if Bursamen and I got back to what we were doing? I think he was just getting krew with it."

John waved her off to go ahead and muttered to himself. "Who am I to begrudge her a last smoke. Even if it is the roll-your-own kind." John gestured Takshaek to sit down. "Have a seat, scaly. You look beat. We're all beat really, it's just lucky we don't all know it yet."

"Stop!" Sikozu tried yelling with her raw throat after Oshana, or Larran in Oshana. But she had already slipped back into the building.

"Nevermind whatever possessed Pumpkin to go, Shamu. Go with Chiana and keep an eye on things. Then get your low-fat rump roasts back out soon as you can, so we can get out of this stinkin' guilty cage soon as we can."

"My name is Sikozu Shanu" Sikozu insisted on correcting him despite her painful voice deteriorating even further "and Chiana is already inside!" Sikozu quickly hurried back up the wall and onto the patio Chiana had entered from.

"So" John turned his attention back to the Scarran. "How's the flies this season?"

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Larran emerged through a passage into the waiting room of the suite he had given her. Chiana stared out of the windows to the garden biodome beyond the porch, avoiding Larran's arrogant sneer that disgraced Oshana's features. "People will soon fill the grounds. The Enforcers are finally certain to act. Authorities and your stubborn struggle cost me much, but I will not destroy you. If you now accept what must be."

Chiana heard his lying smile leering through his speech as he walked up behind her. With a nod, she consented. Larran never saw the grin on Chiana's face as he placed Oshana's hands to her head to ease his transfer, taking complete control of her body. Oshana's body dropped to the floor.

Chiana swayed through a vast, unlit underground room filled with a forest of dangling bunches of long, blue glowing fiber wires. Her hands slid playfully through some bunches, choosing only the ones with a certain pattern of pulsing lights that sent pulses of tingling pleasure instead of the shock others could give. But now and then her playful swaying through the wires would make her brush one of the nasty wires. It would make a spark and sizzle on her skin, but she just smirked at the jolt. She never knew whether she'd brush pleasure or pain, but she loved being lost in here.

"Where are we?" Oshana spoke. Her voice came from a place in Chiana's mind that Chiana became aware of only now that Oshana spoke there.

"Nnnnnnnnthere" Chiana willed, slipping Oshana to be visible and separate nearly alongside. Oshana having been inside hurt Chiana someplace, but Chiana realized that she could let it go, since it was already beginning to fall into healing.

Oshana moved along with Chiana, brushing different wires. "Oooh Oow!" she sighed or recoiled from several. But soon her attention returned to Chiana, swaying along, reaching up and feeling one bundle and then another. Above the beautiful, teary eyed but smiling Chiana, a vague form of blue and red energy in a broad winged shape hovered. The fire and energy dragon dipped and flowed like a flying creature but never moved from being fixed over and behind Chiana's head, not seeming to have a mind of its own.

"What is it that has been already with you?" Oshana held a hand out toward it in wonder. "This is the divine energy?"

"No" Chiana sighed, heavily bending down to a low kneel on the floor. The fire and energy dragon seemed to nearly enfold her. "It came some time, I don't remember it. It doesn't remember" she whispered. "There's nowhere else for it but me." It suddenly stretched its wings and Chiana stood, stretched and resumed walking blissfully. It flexed like her shoulders.

"This place. It's someplace I used to go" Chiana whispered. "Under a building they'd left abandoned. No scorn. It'd scare everyone else away. I could spend arns, a whole night. I'd come alone or with Nerri or just a frell. My favorite pants then were loose, I was small, so they would slide down while I went around through these. Sometimes I'd go slow, or run. Nerri would call me farbot and rush after me. It's releasing."

"When?" Oshana urgently asked.

"He's almost there." With one hand, Chiana reached up to a bunch of the pulsating fiber wires and grinned at the current. Suddenly Chiana looked somberly past Oshana. "Now. Don't let me drown there...."

Oshana's thoughts turned to a chant and Chiana felt herself melting from the place in her mind back to the physical world of her own body. Her control, cultivated so intimately over her sensually connected life, crept under Larran's foreign control and uprooted it. He didn't notice at first, approaching the opened window leading to the patio.

Larran's anger flashed hot inside when Chiana turned and began walking away from the patio. Chiana felt him as his attempts to force control bled them together. This time she didn't try to stop the contact or the bleeding or the pain, only hold herself in control as if she were a skin stretched inside her own body. Oshana flowed like an oil over her skin, frustrating his grips.

Chiana felt uncertainty replace his anger. For a moment he was stunned to see the hidden door to the stairwell open.

"You betrayer!" Larran snarled in a rage at Oshana.

Oshana didn't hear and Chiana kept her thoughts unexpressed, further keeping him from narrowing in on her. His lust to control and impress fanned his rage at being confronted. Despite his efforts to force her body to stop, trembling legs pushed Chiana up the stairs and into the view of the great spa.

Chiana's eyes blurred white, but he could still clearly see a shadow of the room through her eyes. He became aware that he was able to see more than eyesight alone.

Spots in the vision wicked and trembled into forms. Faceless forms glowing with horror and revile writhed where they lay buried in a mass grave under the blue stained pavement around the great pool. A misshapen body stood above the pavement, suspended at the moment of its death in the beginning of a fall. Its blurred, twisted head had a face. It turned and saw him. Fear finally found him.

Helplessly he gripped at anything to try to run. Her body trembled under conflicting stresses. Oshana screamed inside. Chiana forced her body to walk again, carrying them to the hidden stairs where the tormented bastardization of Chiana had spent secluded in its lonely madness. Its suspended shadow met them at the bottom of the stair and beckoned them inside. With each step, it came closer to inside Larran, quenching its maddened thirsts with his horrified denial.

The attic's dry, stale air was undisturbed except for the shuddering breath of Chiana's body. Inside, energies strained, blended, bled and burned. Finally Larran knew what he had done.

Chiana withdrew her tattered spirit, surrendering her body to the tormented energies of the wounded, the one who had wounded, and their medium. Sorrow, relief and joy poured over her wounds like refreshing water, but she was still too violated to care what was beyond the moment.

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Sikozu found Oshana laying on the ornate floor in front of the windows overlooking the patio. There was no immediate evidence of where Chiana had gone. She tried to rouse Oshana, but the Bannik appeared to be dead.

A sound like a burst of high pressured air mixed with a violent sigh echoed from another room. Sikozu put Oshana's body down and hurried after the sound. A grand entry room she had passed had a grand stairway to a loft. A door sized hole had blown open in the wall of the loft. Sikozu ran upstairs, cursing her complaining body.

When she saw in the opening left by metal panels that had blown from the wall, she recoiled with a strange instinct. An almost physical force was inside. It took force of her own to enter. It was a narrow chamber made into a very narrow walkway down its center by railing. The railing scraped her hips even while she stepped sideways along it.

Finally she saw Chiana, shuddering and struggling to walk away around a corner. Sikozu gravitated onto the wall and hurried behind her. She didn't intrude further, having the unmistakable sense that there was something powerful and delicate happening which she didn't otherwise understand.

Chiana struggled down a flight of stairs and emerged in a great spa room. Sikozu stared at the cavernous and grand room, momentarily in awe. The spas and pool could serve a hundred but there was no one else there and no signs anyone had been there. It was warm and humid inside yet everything from the spaciousness, the teal grime covering the massive windows in the outer wall, to the jagged blue green body of the ornate wall lamps gave an impression of cool. It appeared much older in style than any Nebari place she could remember seeing.

Chiana walked up to the edge of the great pool near the rear center of the spa. She shuddered and moaned and sank down onto her knees. "Just let me go" a voice slurred from her that wasn't recognizably hers. Chiana dropped forward into the pool and sank.

Sikozu quickly dove into the pool and pulled Chiana toward the side. It felt as though Chiana had been fit with much more weight than her body and wet fancy clothing could possibly explain. Sikozu struggled harder and harder. Her strength began to fail when she reached the side of the pool, but she kept struggling until Chiana was lifted onto the flooring beside the pool. Sikozu struggled out of the pool, collapsing onto her hands and knees alongside, her labored breath rattling over the noise of the spas.

Oshana fled in horrified shame, the oily resistance she'd provided between the other two seeming to drain. Larran dissolved away, taking the madness, the forced mingling of will and identity away, allowing Chiana to fill herself full and clean, even if wounded and torn. Like waking after breaking a delirious fever, awareness returned. A pure relief washed over her, and a release as if an unseen prison outside of her own skin had dissolved away. She couldn't now remember what had happened after she had forced Larran up the stairs, but she sensed all the people wounded by Larran's game had finally found peace and freedom. She was free.

Blue vapor seemed to draw from Chiana as she lay gasping on her back, almost like blood escaping from every pore. Sikozu scrambled backwards from Chiana on the stone floor despite the protests of her limbs. The very stone seemed to absorb the vapor. Chiana's body relaxed into a steady tension and her breath sighed out. Her white eyes nearly closed, slowly turning to normal. Sikozu pushed herself back to Chiana, fearing she had just died.

Chiana's body lurched to life, gasping for breath and choking from her half drowned lungs. Sikozu turned her to force the water out, then returned her onto her back and pressed Chiana's chest to stimulate breathing, until Chiana's breath evened out. Holding Chiana's head in her hands, Sikozu stared down at Chiana's face. She ran a hand over the Nebari's creamy gray brow. "Sister?" she whispered questioningly.

Chiana listlessly sat upright. Sikozu began helping her up, but Chiana could only stare mutely in a distant wonder why she was helping. Chiana couldn't think after the ordeal, or care what happened now.

Sikozu stumbled from the spa and down the stairs with Chiana to where Oshana laid. The Stakira looked back, but she was haunted. Only when Chiana lightly touched her hand did Oshana react. She burst into agonized tears.

Rolling her eyes at the incomprehensible ordeals going on, Sikozu started helping both of them up. It seemed to take an age for the three of them to stumble to the grand entrance room. Sikozu opened the doors to the adjoining wing and stumbled through the doorway with Chiana and Oshana, into the midst of the surprised Enforcers and Authority Guide Gulmac.

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