Chapter 889: Nova Manaus [Bonus - ]

Chapter 889: Nova Manaus [Bonus Chapter]

It was one long warm stroke of her tongue, right up the side of Kara’s cheek from her jaw to her temple like a big cat grooming a cub.

Kara froze, Aki froze, and even the silver-tipped otter froze with its nose still buried in Aki’s hair.

Lara pulled back, studied the stunned look on Kara’s face with deep satisfaction, then licked her own lips and smiled.

“There,” she said, sounding very pleased with herself. “Now you’re mine, handsome…”

Behind them, someone made a sound like a teakettle being stepped on.

Valeria Da Silva was standing ten paces away with a data-tablet in her hand and her mouth hanging slightly open, and her olive cheeks had gone a strange blotchy red.

“She… she licked you?” she said, pointing at Kara’s cheek with the tablet as though it were evidence at a crime scene.

“She did,” Kara confirmed, wiping her cheek slowly with the back of her hand. “Thank you for noticing, Valeria, I was almost worried I’d imagined it…”

“She only does that,” Da Silva said, and her voice came out much too sharp, “when she likes someone… A lot… A really, really big lot…”

Her jaw tightened.

“She licks the Starmanes, she licks her caimans, and I’ve even seen her lick a baby anaconda once, but in almost thirty years, I have never seen her lick a human being’s face… not once.”

’She’s never licked mine,’ Her thoughts added bitterly before she could stop them. ’I wrestled her caimans for her when I was fourteen and lost two teeth doing it, and she never once licked my face… and this one-armed menace carries a few eggs out of a truck and gets licked on the first day?!’

She caught herself and scowled, deeply disturbed by her own train of thought.

’Wait… Why am I jealous of being licked?’

Ever since Da Silva had seen Kara as of recent, her life had been full of quite a lot of confusion…

Aki had finally recovered.

She shot to her feet, sending the otter scurrying, then marched straight over and planted herself between Kara and Lara, glaring up at the much taller woman with her cheeks bright red and her small fists clenched.

“You can’t just lick people!” she cried, her voice cracking with outrage. “That’s not… You can’t just walk up to someone and lick their face like they’re one of your crocodiles, that’s not how it works with humans!”

“I just did, little thing,” Lara said, completely unbothered, and licked her own lips again as if savoring the taste. “And it worked out very nicely, if you ask me…”

“She’s… she’s not yours!” Aki sputtered, her fists trembling at her sides.

Lara looked down at Aki, then over her head at Kara, and her smile grew slow and lazy.

“Oh?” she purred. “And says who, little thing?”

Aki opened her mouth, closed it again, then turned slowly to look at Kara with an expression that very clearly demanded backup.

Kara looked at the furious princess on one side and the smug, glowing, centuries-old forest woman on the other, and wiped the last of the lick off her cheek with as much dignity as she could manage.

’Don’t drag me into it… I’m the one being licked without my permission.’

…

Dawn was just beginning to grey the sky over the river by the time the last of the prisoners was loaded.

The gunboats sat low in the water with their decks crowded with rows of bound poachers under heavy guard.

Carver Briggs sat at the very front of the lead boat with his hands cuffed behind his back and his face grey and sullen, flinching every time one of the caimans drifting alongside the hull opened its jaws, and the third gunboat had come back from downriver an hour earlier with the escape boat in tow and four more Columbians in chains.

The freed beasts had slipped back into the forest one by one.

The Starmane had pressed her head against Lara’s stomach one last time and padded off into the trees, her glittering mane fading into the dark like a constellation sinking below the horizon, while the eggs had gone with Lara into the forest for an hour, and when she came back, her hands were empty and her face was calm.

Now she stood on the riverbank with her staff in her hand, watching the soldiers make their final preparations, and Da Silva walked up beside her.

“We’ll take them back to Nova Manaus,” Da Silva said. “The tribunal will want testimony, witnesses and proof of what they took and where they took it from…”

She hesitated, then went on more carefully. “Your testimony would help more than anything else, Lara. Nobody in that courtroom could argue with the Forest Mother herself…”

Lara stayed silent for a long moment, gazing out over the water before she finally spoke.

“Then I’m coming,” she said.

Da Silva blinked at her.

“…To give testimony, you mean? I can have someone come out here and record it, you don’t have to…”

“To Nova Manaus,” Lara said calmly. “With you.”

The soldiers nearest them stopped what they were doing, and the words went down the dock like a spark down a fuse.

Within seconds, every soldier on the riverbank had turned to stare, and one young private dropped an entire crate of ammunition on his own foot without even noticing.

“Did she just say she’s leaving the forest?” one of them hissed to the man beside him. “The Forest Mother? Our Forest Mother…?”

“She’s never left the forest in her life, man, everybody knows that! My grandmother used to say she’d sooner see the river run backward…”

Da Silva stared at Lara as though she’d sprouted a second head.

“You’ve never once left the forest, Lara. Not in all the time I’ve known you, and not in all the time anyone’s known you…”

“I know,” Lara said simply, and her jade eyes drifted over Da Silva’s shoulder, past the gunboats and the prisoners, to the tall one-armed woman leaning against the railing of the lead boat with Aki standing guard beside her like a small, furious bodyguard.

“I’ve found something more interesting than my forest…” Lara said.

Then her eyes went cold, and her voice dropped.

“And someone on your World Council broke our pact, Valeria. One of their Elite put those machines in my forest.” Her grip tightened on her staff until the wood creaked. “I want to know who… and I’m not going to find out sitting in a tree.”

Da Silva followed her gaze to Kara, and her jaw tightened all over again.

Lara started walking toward the boat, still completely naked, and every soldier on the dock looked hastily up at the sky.

Kara watched her come and sighed.

“Lara,” she said, in the patient tone of someone who already knew exactly how this conversation was going to go, “you can’t walk into the capital like that, you know…”

Lara glanced down at her own bare body as if she’d only just remembered it existed, then looked back up at Kara with genuine unbothered confusion.

“Like what? This is how I always look, handsome. The forest has never once complained…”

“The forest isn’t a city of thirty million people,” Kara said. “You’ll cause twelve car crashes before you reach the first bridge, and poor Valeria will have to stand up in front of her entire parliament and explain why traffic stopped across the whole capital…”

Lara considered this for a moment, then turned to Da Silva and held out her hand.

“Give me your coat, then.”

Da Silva looked at her, then down at her own olive military coat, which would have ended somewhere around Lara’s ribs, and Lara looked down at it too and seemed to come to the same conclusion.

None of the soldiers’ uniforms were any better, since Lara was taller than every single person on the dock.

’Actually… is it just me or are they short?’

Kara sighed again, more deeply this time, then held out her hand and let the Inventory open, and out of it she pulled a plain black men’s shirt, long and soft and loose, one of Silas’s own from his closet at Grand Horizon.

“Here,” she said. “Try not to stretch it…”

Lara took it and held it up in front of her, studying it curiously, then lifted it to her face and took a long deliberate breath, and her jade eyes slid half-closed.

“It smells like you…” she purred, and breathed in again with her eyes shut.

“It’s clean, Lara,” Kara said quickly, with the slightly strained patience of someone who could already see where this was going. “It’s been washed and folded and it’s been sitting in storage for ages, so it can’t possibly smell like…”

“It still smells like you,” Lara repeated, sounding enormously pleased, and opened one jade eye to look at her over the collar. “The real you, handsome… Underneath the soap.”

She pulled it over her head, and the shirt fell long and loose around her body with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows and the hem brushing the middle of her thighs, the dark fabric draping over her shoulders while her gold-beaded locs spilled down over the collar.

She smoothed her hands down the front of it and turned her head to bury her nose in the collar again, breathing in deeply.

Aki looked like she wanted to set the shirt on fire with Destruction.

“How do you even know how to wear a shirt?” she demanded. “You live in a forest! You don’t wear clothes, I’ve literally never seen you wear anything!”

“Not in the forest, no,” Lara said, rolling up her sleeves a little further. “At home, I do sometimes. Big ones… I like wearing oversized clothes when I’m lying around.”

She smiled at Kara.

“And this one’s perfect.”

“You have a home?” Aki asked, so astonished she forgot to be angry for a second.

“I’m centuries old, little thing. Of course I have a home.” Lara stepped down onto the deck of the lead boat beside Kara, close enough that their arms brushed. “Don’t worry, you can come and visit it sometime…”

Da Silva watched the protector of the forest settle onto the deck of her gunboat wearing Lord Vespera’s shirt and sniffing the collar every few seconds, and something hot and very irritated twisted in her stomach.

’Where did she even get a man’s shirt?’ she thought, frowning. ’And why does Lara keep saying it smells like her…? The real her…?’

The thought nagged at her until the gunboat engines roared to life, and then she let it go.

The boats turned downriver, and the forest slid away behind them as the sun rose.

Somewhere around the second hour, the long sleepless night caught up with everyone at once.

Kara ended up sitting on a coil of rope near the bow with her back against the railing, and within ten minutes, Aki had fallen asleep against her right shoulder with her mouth slightly open and one hand still clutching Kara’s sleeve, as though she were afraid someone might steal her away while she slept.

Five minutes after that, a heavy warm weight settled against Kara’s other side.

Lara had sat down without asking, folded her long legs beneath her and laid her head against the empty pinned sleeve of Kara’s left shoulder, with the black shirt bunched around her and her gold beads clicking softly in the wind… her eyes were closed and she was smiling faintly with her nose pressed into the collar.

Kara looked down at the two of them, one on each side, and sighed through her nose.

’This is going to be a problem…’ she thought, and found she didn’t mind.

At the stern of the boat, Da Silva stood with her arms crossed, watching the three of them and refusing very firmly to acknowledge the tight feeling in her chest.

She was too confused…

They rode for hours down the wide brown river as the jungle thinned and the banks opened up, past fishing villages on stilts and lonely river stations, until the river widened into a vast shining channel as broad as a lake.

Aki was the first to see it.

She stood up slowly at the bow with the wind whipping through her blue hair, and her eyes went very wide.

“E-eh…?”

Rising out of the morning haze on the horizon, with tower after gleaming tower climbing into the sky above the water, was a city.

…

Nova Manaus rose out of the river like something from a dream.

It sprawled across both banks of the shining channel and out onto the water itself, tower after gleaming tower of glass and white stone climbing hundreds of feet into the morning sky, and many of them were built directly over the river on massive concrete pylons so that the water flowed between them like streets.

Elevated highways looped and curled between the towers on slender pillars, crowded with traffic, while wide river avenues below carried barges, ferries, water-taxis and sleek private boats in endless glittering lines.

Hanging gardens spilled down the sides of the buildings in cascades of green, and the whole place was so full of trees and vines and flowers that it looked as though the jungle had decided to build a city instead of being cut down for one.

Aki stood at the bow with both hands gripping the railing and her mouth hanging open.

“It’s so big…” she whispered. “It’s even bigger than the pictures, and the pictures were already huge…”

“Thirty million people,” Da Silva said, coming to stand beside her with a quiet unmistakable pride in her voice. “The largest river city in the world… When the monsters came, the old cities along the riverbanks were overrun, so we built this one on the water, where the land beasts couldn’t follow us. Every tower stands on pylons driven into the riverbed, and every bridge can be raised in an emergency.”

She nodded toward a ring of squat grey fortifications along the outer edges of the city. “And every one of those is a gun battery, in case anything tries to swim.”

Aki turned to look at her with shining eyes.

“You built all of this?”

“My predecessors started it,” Da Silva said, and the corner of her mouth lifted just slightly. “I’m the one who finished it…”

As they drew closer, the river traffic began to part around them, and the military channel opened up straight through the heart of the city, a broad lane of dark water marked off with glowing blue buoys.

Patrol gunboats like their own slid back and forth in tight formation with their cannons gleaming, heavier river monitors sat at anchor near the city walls, squat and armored and bristling with turrets, and further down, Kara could see a column of huge amphibious tanks crawling out of the water and up onto a concrete ramp with their treads churning the shallows into foam.

On the docks and walls and bridges, soldiers in olive uniforms stood at attention in perfect rows, and every one of them saluted as the High Marshal’s gunboat passed.

Kara watched it all from the railing with her chin propped on her hand, and she let out a low thoughtful hum.

’So this is the Amazonian military,’ she thought. ’Disciplined, well-equipped and very, very big… No wonder the Council’s always been so careful around Valeria.’

She glanced sideways at Da Silva, standing straight-backed at the bow with her ponytail snapping in the wind while her soldiers saluted her from every wall and every bridge and something about the picture made the corner of Kara’s mouth curve.

’Not bad, Valeria… Not bad at all.’

Da Silva felt the look and turned her head, and for a moment their eyes met across the deck, Kara’s lazy and amused and Da Silva’s sharp and guarded, until that same irritating heat started climbing up the back of Da Silva’s neck again, and she looked away first.