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suppose.” Tyree
took the drink away, tossing the dregs out a window. “We won’t tell Saba you
didn’t finish it.”
    Ryder wanted to be polite. Hell, he
wanted to at least sound grateful but his eyes were closing.
    “You drugged me.”
    “No. There was no drug for sleeping
in it. I prepared it myself.”
    “Poison?”
    Tyree laughed softly. “Go to sleep,
my friend. We’ll talk when you wake. Trust this.”
    Ryder was sure they would talk. The
jumbled memories of the last few hours flashed behind his closed eyelids. He’d
gotten in the life pod as his ship had crashed, and he still didn’t know what
planet he was on, or what toxin had made its way into his bloodstream.
    His heart lurched in his chest. He
washed cold. What if that horrible tea he’d just ingested interacted with the
snake venom? It was too late to worry about that. Much too late.
    The gold coin. Damn. It had been in his pocket. He needed a closer look at that
coin.
    There were soft voices nearby, a
man and a woman. The man wasn’t staying. The angel-demon was sending him away.
He was too hot, too close to the fire. A cool hand touched his cheek.
    “You’re fevered. Try not to worry.
It’s the titiyi bark. It cleanses the blood.”
    His voice sounded far away,
slurred. “Tell me now where I am.”
    “You are with the Ramalho. You are
as safe as any of us.”
    Ramalho? Had he heard that
somewhere? There was a familiarity about it. Something, something, but what?
    “What planet is this?”
    “You are on Adena.”
    Adena. It all crashed together inside his skull. He remembered all of it.
    It was hopeless. He was well and
truly dead. No one lived on Adena. The atmosphere was toxic. All the exploratory
probes had brought back air samples laden with carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide,
methane and a strange flesh-eating bacterium. No one could survive after
breathing in that mixture. It ate a person from the lungs out.
    It seemed the probes were
incorrect. Someone did live on Adena, after all.
    He let the blessed blackness take
him.

Chapter 5
     
    Saba watched the stranger sleep.
The titiyi bark was doing its job. He slept like the dead, the fever
washing what toxins it could from his body in rivers of sweat. She’d have to bathe
him again tomorrow. Her cheeks warmed as she remembered touching him.
    He was tall, at least as tall as
Tyree. His legs were long and muscular, straight and well formed. She hadn’t
seen any wounds that gave any indication of what had happened to his legs, but
something had. The nerves in his back had received some sort of damage, which
had affected his manhood as well. There had been no response there as she’d
washed him.
    She’d not been surprised. His
condition had certainly indicated that he had lost feeling from his waist down.
But it wasn’t total, and that was perplexing. He’d screamed in agony, when
they’d moved his legs. Whatever had happened would take a lot of healing, if it
could heal at all.
    Saba reached out and took his hand
again. There was a shallow, jagged abrasion on the outside of his palm that
oozed nasty-looking yellowish-green pus. Never had she ever seen infection look
like that. She gently laid his hand on his stomach and went to her meager
apothecary and selected an assortment of dried herbs and began working them
into a thick paste with a small amount of purified tallow. Once she was
finished, she carried the small bowl over to him.
    Whether or not the paste would
help, she didn’t know. In some regards it didn’t matter, but she had to do
something for that infection. At the very least, it would not make the cut any
worse. She wrapped a long length of clean cloth around his hand not bothering
to tie it off. If he woke and was curious to see what she’d done, she wanted
him to be able to remove the cloth without ripping it. Cloth was precious, and
she would boil it and use it again, although not on an open wound.
    She wiped his face again and then
started to work the tangles out of