Spherical Harmonic Read Free Page B

the surface in a wild spray of water, coming out of the lake all the way to my chest, sputtering. Air.
     
     
As I fell back, the treeman caught me in a deadly embrace that crushed out what little air I had managed to inhale. His muscular arms circled my torso. I tried to keep fighting, but my body wouldn't respond, drained by too many hours of hiking with no food, water, or rest. My fists uncurled and my palms slapped the water. My legs dangled. I tried to kick free and my foot grazed his leg.
     
     
We stared at each other, our faces separated by a hand-span.
     
     
I felt his reaction, just as I had felt his hostility before. Seeing me this close forced him to acknowledge he was murdering a human being, one less protected than himself. He treaded water and we floated, staring. What he expected to find, I had no idea, but this much I picked up, as sharp as the chime of a crystal bell: he hadn't expected the humanity he saw in my face.
     
     
My mind couldn't absorb that I was about to die. The situation took on a diamond clarity, as if it were etched in glass, disconnected from me. I watched from beyond the glass, protected from the full impact of the events.
     
     
With no warning, he rolled me onto his hip. My trance broke and I gasped in misty air. My hip scraped against the rough cloth of his soaked trousers. He swam with a sidekick, holding me in a cross-chest carry I had learned long ago. No, learned about, in a holo on water safety. I knew many things, but only in theory. My life had been protected with almost fanatical thoroughness. Why?
     
     
Our legs dragged through the muddy lake bottom. The treeman heaved me to my feet and we stood in the shallows near the shore, the water lapping in low gravity breakers that swelled to our knees. As I gulped in air, a stitch of pain jabbed my side. My whole body felt the pounding of my heart. The treeman stared at my face, his hands clenched on my upper arms. Whatever he saw, it stirred in him a disquieting mixture of fury, desire, and confusion.
     
     
Twisting hard, I jerked free and sprinted for the beach, a thin strip of eroded rock next to the promontory. The lake whipped around me in languorous swaths, swirling up to my head and drifting through the air in sparkling lassos of water.
     
     
The treeman caught up in two steps. As he yanked me to a stop, I socked his jaw. He dodged the blow, but lost his balance in the process. In a surreal silence, we toppled to the beach, only half out of the lake. The slow fall kept my head from cracking open when it hit the rocky ground, but it still struck hard. My ears rang with a hollow clang, like a cry of desperation. I didn't feel pain yet; I couldn't take in the sensations flooding me, all tangled in fear.
     
     
The treeman pinned me on my back, my legs and hips in the water. He held my arms clamped to the ground, kneeling over me, straddling my hips, his body silhouetted against the gas giant that smoldered in the sky behind him.
     
     
He had such a strong reaction to what he saw that the image burst from his mind into mine. I lay below him, breathing rapidly, my eyes huge from terror, my skin pale. Rips showed in my shift where the cloth had snagged on plants in the forest. One of my nipples poked through a ragged hole. Soaked with water, the cloth had become translucent. I didn't need the empathic skills I apparently possessed to know what he intended next.
     
     
Except he didn't move. I caught only threads of emotion from his mental turmoil; the barriers that protected his mind were even stronger than those that most people instinctively raised to shield their thoughts. But I picked up enough. He couldn't go through with it, neither the assault nor the murder. He longed for vengeance with an intensity that burned. I had no idea what he thought I had done, but even now, when he believed he had a long-desired revenge within his grasp, he could go no further.
     
     
I swallowed. "Don't kill me."
     
     
He