Nightmare journey

you, Melopina.”
    Again!
    “I love you!”
    Tell me with your power. Don't use your voice. Tell me again.
    He hesitated and…
    … lost her.
    She jerked away from him as she sensed his reluctance to make the commitment, rolled onto her back and swam away. At the steps, she pulled herself from the water and stood on the paved patio, squeezing the water out of her hair. Her nipples were dark blue, her pubic bush black. She was the most desirable creature he had ever seen.
    He stepped onto the patio and said, “Doesn't it mean anything…? I thought you felt something too, that you-”
    She tossed her hair back.
    Her neck membranes wavered, shone with droplets of water like tiny spheres of mercury.
    She said, ''I can't give my body to you if you won't have my mind as well. I couldn't be half a wife to you.”
    “Melopina, I-”
    She grabbed her clothes and walked off. At the bottom of the steps she dressed, looked back once, and went back up to the grove and the wagon where the others waited.
    As he watched her go, Jask wondered if this erotic encounter had simply grown out of her playful mood and her intense love of the water-or whether it had been carefully staged in order to break down his last defenses. Strangely enough, even if they had plotted against him, he could not be angry. What he had told Melopina was true, and more of a surprise to himself than to her: He loved her. He felt so strong about her, in fact, that the loss of her was like a physical pain as well as a spiritual agony.
    He was in love with a tainted creature, the Ruiner's handiwork. If he took her, if he surrendered to her demands that they share completely, his last untainted thoughts would become subject to her influence. He would change. He would be lost without hope. Yet he could not go on long without her. Either way, his situation had become a thousand times more unbearable than ever.
    He dressed and went up to the wagon.
    19
    ON the morning of their eighth day together, as the sun climbed over the snow-capped mountains and yawned at the world below, shreds of night mist still clinging to the ground, they reached the southwest corner of the Blight, a place called Boomer's Pass. They could see their avenue of escape from the Wildlands: an old, paved roadbed, now full of weeds, stones and a great many scraggly trees, leading straight through the foothills and finally between huge slabs of black stone at the base of the Gabriel Fit Range, which towered so high that the last third of it was swathed in fat, white clouds.
    We'll set out immediately after dark, Tedesco 'pathed.
    After that brief announcement he shielded all his thoughts from Jask Zinn.
    For the others the morning passed swiftly in silent conversation. For Jask, however, it dragged. Since the incident in the pool the day before last, they had all shunned him even more assiduously than ever. He was certain that Melopina had told them what had happened. He was bitter about her quick tongue, even while he understood that there could be no secrets between espers.
    They parked beneath a stand of enormous trees, whose branches were so tightly interwoven that very little sunlight passed through to disturb the forest floor beneath. Tedesco stood the first watch from noon until two o'clock. Chaney stood guard from two until four, turning over the post to Jask, who would handle it for another two hours before waking Kiera. They had all adjusted to sleeping by day and working by night, and in the heavy shadows of the trees, they had no problems with insomnia.
    Jask sat on an overturned log near the sleepers, but faced the open road up which they had journeyed and from which they might expect to get visitors of whatever sort. Occasionally he turned around to study the sleepers, most especially Melopina. She lay on her side, near the wagon, hands pulled up against her breasts, breathing quietly, her blue-green membranes trembling slightly each time she exhaled. When he was beginning his second hour on duty, he turned for yet another glimpse of her and saw-or thought that he saw- something hanging in the air above her.
    “Mellie?” he asked softly.
    No one replied.
    He turned away from the bright sun beyond the trees and stared hard at the air just above her. In a minute his eyes adjusted, and he saw that he had not been imagining things: a spiderlike insect, fully as large as a grown woman, hung from glistening gray-white threads, its ugly black legs pistoning slowly over the girl. From its bulbous