Time passed. Summer became autumn, then changed to winter. The cold was biting and harsh and cut through their yak furs.
One day Shan hiked along the valley floor on her way back to their cave after a successful hunt, the rocky ground was mottled with swirls of fallen snow that accumulated in the recesses. She had a yak carcass slung over her shoulders along with her bow and quiver of arrows, her pace slowed with the encumbrance, her breath fogged in front of her. Worse, the soles of her boots had split and the patching she had done had started to come loose and now her feet were wet where the snow got inside and melted.
Winter sucked.
She passed a familiar fold of rock. She was close now. She set the yak on the ground and climbed the rocky butte to the crashed alien scout ship. She brushed icicles from the partially open hatch and squeezed her way in. The way was familiar to her now. She had made the trip fifty times (maybe more than that) throughout the summer and autumn and into the winter.
In the cockpit she brushed snow flurries from the console and checked the status of the transmission. Still scrolling numbers. Still working. Still there was that spark of hope, meager as it was, despite the long wait.
Maybe she had expected a rescue before now. Maybe it was the uncertainty that was killing her.
For a time she watched the numbers scroll, incredulous that it still worked. Then she left and retrieved the yak and returned to the cave.
*
The first chamber of the cave was their storage room. Sheet metal with slabs of yak meat kept on ice. Here she dropped the new carcass. It would stay good awhile in this temperature. No need to tend to it now. She checked the drying rack and the pelt that was being stretched.
She pushed through a door of sheet metal and yak pelts and entered the middle chamber of their cave home.
The ceiling and floor were draped in yak pelts, the accumulation of seasons. There was a firepit in the center, smoldering now with the glowing embers left from lunch, soon to be rekindled for dinner. There were utensils made from bones, plates made from scrap metal, all on a shelf. Against the back wall there was sheet aluminum on stilts, piled with more pelts. A bed for two.
Jadhar wasn't there. She had gotten back first. So she stoked the fire and boiled some water and drank to warm herself.
Then she lit a candle and went into the third room, the smallest, down a short narrow tunnel in which she had to duck her head to pass through.
Inside that deeper room, she stood and held the candle above her to get an unobstructed view. On a small stone slab at the back of the room was a votive figure. It was made of metal from their fighters and wood gathered from the plain. It was a dirz god, a minor god, Sin Assyris, but he was important to them. He was the god of weary travelers.
Shan set the candle on the alter and said a short prayer, as she always did after checking the alien scout ship. The words were in the dirz language, some of the few she had memorized. It was more meaningful that way.
Some time later Jadhar returned. He had with him a massive sheet of aluminum. It looked to have been taken from her Gargoyle fighter, but with the abrasions from wind and sand, she wasn't positive. He had flattened it and cut it to an appropriate size and crimped the edges so it could be handled safely.
His plan was to build a door at the entrance to the cave. He set the aluminum door against the wall. He'd hinge it another time.
He was a builder. He liked using his hands. He liked doing things in incremental stages that accumulated to something meaningful. Like arrows, like a door, like a votive figure of a god.
On the other hand, she liked doing things that required attention. She was restless and needed to move and needed to stay focused on things that were immediately necessary. She was a great shot.
It was a good partnership. He liked making arrows. She liked shooting them.
She gave him a bowl of piping hot water and let him drink it and warm himself. Then she reheated the stew from lunch. She took a small bowl of it back into the shrine room and left it for Sin Assyris and then she returned to the bed room.
Together they sat by the fire and ate a dinner of yak meat and vegetables.
A long time later, after the sun set and the fire died down, Shan spoke, breaking the silence. "Do you love me?"
The suddenness of the question caught him off guard. He nodded, said, "Of course."
"When did you notice it?"
He thought a moment, but this was something he had thought about before, his answer was succinct. "When I woke after the crash. I had just recovered from a fever. I think it was our third day here."
She blinked. "That's just lust. That's not love."
"Yes, it is."
"How?" What she meant was, what does love mean if it happens so quickly?
"I was in your metal shelter you had built." He said that as if it explained everything. When she frowned, he struggled to explain what was in his heart, "You built that home, and you shared it with me. You let me inside your personal space. Being close to someone is to love them."
She understood. The dirz were a territorial species. Jadhar had already commented on the violation of his man cave back home and the pain that caused. It was a natural thing for him. Unknown to her, when she had brought him in and shared her shelter, she had bridged the gap between them as readily as anything else she could have done.
Then Jadhar turned the question back on her. "Why do you love me?"
"Who says I do?"
He smiled a small smile and was patient for her answer.
"I don't know." She half shrugged. But of course that wasn't true. She knew the reason. She just hated talking about her feelings even more than Jadhar. "Dayna, Brandon, Kwesi, Li Cong. All my relationships, they all got bad when I tried pushing them away, when I needed my space and they resented it. But with you its different. When I go off alone, you don't take it personally, you don't take it as a threat or anything. You just let me go." She smiled. "And I always come back."
"Because you have to."
She wasn't expecting him to say that. Jadhar rarely said anything so biting. She moved over and sat beside him. She leaned against him. "At first, yeah, I guess that's true. But not now. Now I come back because I want to." She took his hand and put it on her leg.
They looked at each other. Her eyes bright and clear. His dark and gold and brooding. She had found them so alien at first, now they were the most natural things to look at.
He used his other hand to move a lock of red hair from her face. He leaned over and kissed her. It was soft and gentle. The kind of kiss meant to make her feel like the most precious thing in his life.