Empyrean Iris

Chapter 16

The human's cheers faded off into the distance as their slow jog was soon outstripped by the captain's much longer stride, and their lights were slowly lost in the distance.

Krill was tugged along after and forward and into darkness.

Overhead, the cloud cover had dissipated washing the shy with an array of stars that stretched from one infinity to the other unmarred by light pollution.

The human had opted out of the flashlight, saying that infrared vision from his mechanical eye augmented by his natural night vision would be more than enough. Krill on the other hand could see nothing, nothing except the stars above. Otherwise, it was as if he was being tugged through a pool of blackness. It was a surreal feeling, and he couldn't fathom how the human was able to see where he was going, much less navigate the uneven ground with such poor depth perception afforded by infrared and the darkness surrounding it.

But then again humans were born from predators, creatures that probably hunted under the cover of night.

His footsteps were sure and even below them demonstrating, though Krill could not see, the mastery at which the human navigated through the dark landscape.

Feet thudded on the ground, a driving rhythm that lulled Krill into a half trance, broken only on occasion by the sudden break as the human skirted around a particularly tall bush or rock.

At first, Krill was skeptical about his running abilities, but as the minutes wore on, the human did not stop.

In the quiet, lulled by nothing but the human's powerful breathing, Krill couldn't help but marvel.

Here was a creature crippled twice over and yet, instead of seeing him as a weakness, the others had taken it at a strength. With a replacement leg, he could feel no pain, and with a replacement eye, he could see in the dark. It was almost as if his injury had afforded him upgrades rather than the status as a cripple.

If the Captain had been Vrul, they would have terminated him and simply started over again with someone new.

They kept moving, at what krill would have considered an astonishing pace. Not as fast as a Rundi, but surely for longer than a Rundi could ever have run.

He couldn't have counted the minutes, just like he couldn't have counted the stars overhead; the pounding of feet below him became a strange background to the night melding in and out of the darkness becoming a part of the abyss in which he floated.

He could no longer feel his limbs.

The human's lungs became his lungs, and he could feel the great rushing gusts of air expanding inside the chest cavity, pushing out on the ribs, and then contracting down again. He could feel the blood pulsing through the heart issuing warmth and vibrancy out from the chest and into the limbs, till even the tips of the fingers were warm. The powerful pump and bellows continued their work pounding away through the darkness and the night.

All other functions had stopped.

The digestive system lay dormant as hormones flooded the body keeping it working like a machine through the night.

They had been traveling for some time now. Krill could no longer distinguish the beating of feet, from the pumping of lungs, from the throbbing of the heart that is until the beat was broken. There was a dull thud and he was suddenly jerked forward.

Overhead the sky tumbled and roiled.

The human cried out in pain, and the footsteps stopped.

"Is everything alright." Krill demanded turning on his thermal vision for long enough to see that the human was on his knees.