Walk a lonesome road

Part 1

Dek wakes with his heart pounding out of his chest, mouth open in a silent scream, his arms rigid at his side and his hands clawing at the sheets. It’s one of the bad dreams again. One where he’s choking, suffocating, legs held down by chains in the dirt. Where he’s drowning in his own blood, and a white-hot sun above him sears the skin from his face. In the quiet darkness of his own bedroom, he can still hear the crackle and hiss of scorched flesh as it peels back along his cheekbones. He fights back the nausea and stares at a crack in the ceiling until it’s no longer curtained by fire and floating ash of human bodies, and the metallic sweetness of burning blood fades in his nostrils. One of these days he’s sure he’s going to wake up dead from a heart attack.

He has no idea what triggered it this time. Maybe nothing did. The days he thinks consciously about the things that really scare the crap out of him, are actually the nights he sleeps the best. But if his head made sense to anyone, then he’d still be in the army. He’s not so crazy that he doesn’t know that much.

His body’s stiff, but it always is in the mornings, and once he gets moving, his leg will loosen up a bit. It’s still dark – it’s an early start even for him, but setting the traps will take him a week if the weather doesn’t turn foul, and he could do with the meat if not the pelts. He makes a big batch of thick porridge and lets the remainder cool outdoors while he eats his breakfast. The glutinous slab goes into a sealed tin and, eaten cold, will save him wood out on the trail. The rest of the food – the water, jerky, dried berries and fruit, hard bread, and his one luxury from his summer stores, a wax skin bottle of thick, dark honey – was packed last night. All he has to do is change his shirt, relieve himself and clean up, then check the brace on his leg is comfortable. He carefully extinguishes the stove fire, makes sure all the shutters are sound and tightly shut, then, as pre-dawn struggles unenthusiastically into real daylight, picks up his pack and heads out into the cold.

Snowed again last night, he notes, and the path is covered. No matter – he knows his way like he knows how to button his shirt in the dark. He’s the only one crazy enough to go trapping this time of year this far north, but to him, this is as close to true peace as he’ll ever find, and he welcomes the biting temperature, the slide and crunch of the snow under his limping footsteps, like old friends. He heads to the barn, decides Jesti is the animal for this trip, scritches the woolly heads of the other two and tells them he’ll be back soon. Not in so many words, of course. Urtibes don’t need language or meaningless assurances. They just want food and water and a firm hand, and somewhere to sleep out of the snow if it’s offered, though in all but the bitterest weather, they prefer to be outdoors where their shaggy coats insulate them perfectly from the vicissitudes of existence. Dek wonders why humans never developed something like that. A hide thick enough to protect him against needing to be in contact with the world – that’d be the thing for him.

As he swings clumsily up into the saddle, Jesti complains a little, grunting and hawing and scratching the ground with one hairy foot, but it’s only for show, and soon she’s plodding carefully down the rough path to the forest level. Her snorting, the white smoke of her breath, the dull crunch of her solid steps are all that disturb the perfectly still air. It’s thirty below freezing, the snow is crisp and unmarred under their feet and on the grey bark and deep green needles of the gnarled trees, and they’re the only living things moving in the landscape under a sullen sky. To Dek, this is paradise.

He’s not expecting much from this trip but even a couple of animals will make it worth his time – his store of pelts is respectable and will bring a good price when he takes them to Osiwen in the spring. Not that he needs the money but it’s the principle of the thing. He’s hoping for a good size qurka – he’s in need of new boots, and qurka leather make the best ones. Line them with gemil fur and he’d get no finer in Vizinken. It’s a little game he plays in his head, working out how much better he lives than the city folk, how jealous they’d be of the quality of the handmade goods he creates. In the back of his non-crazy mind he knows it’s ridiculous that anyone would envy him this harsh, dangerous life and his minimal comforts, but Dek’s mostly crazy, so he likes to think he lives like a king, and defies anyone to argue with him. No one ever does. There’s hardly a soul around to hear him out in the first place.

He’s planning a seventy pardec circuit, which in the summer is a trivial distance, and, in deep winter, all he’s prepared to risk, travelling on his own and with just the one animal. His plan is to let Jesti trudge at her own pace until around noon, or when he comes to a decent place to set up camp, lay his traps out in the afternoon. Then he’ll only have to wait until morning to check them before moving on. The trapping’s less important than the experience of being out here, just him against nature, in the stillness and solitude and the dangerous perfection of the frozen landscape. He can imagine himself the only man on earth out here, and the thought scares and comforts him at the same time, because though, intellectually, he knows he needs other people to survive, his gut tells him there’s not a person on the planet who can make his life any happier or easier. He wouldn’t want there to be. He has his knife and his gun and relying on them is a lot safer than people any day.

For him, such trips are a way of reconnecting with the land, his territory, and he can’t understand why the southerners think the north is boring, because every day is different. The first night he camps by a frozen lake near the foot of Mount Meninwen, the steam rising from geysers on its slopes wreathing it in a luminous mist. The second he spends in a forest where he hears the fogels howl all night in the tree tops, and the third in a snowfield which glows white under a gibbous moon. His traps remain empty, which he’s philosophical about. But at his fourth camp, he has better luck, and in the morning, one of his snares has a nice fat harwe entangled in it, its pure white fur luxurious and thick. Though they bring a good price down south, Dek thinks he might keep the pelt on this one for himself, and looks forward to the meals he’ll make from the meat. If he can catch another harwe this time, then the trip out will have been well worth it. He slits the animal’s throat neat and clean, guts it and tosses the steaming mess towards the trees for the small scavengers to feast upon, then slings the heavy carcass across his pommel.

He breaks camp and sets off, hoping to reach Tarik creek that day because there were gemils nesting there in the summer and their deserted nests are often used for winter shelter by muimuis. Muimui quills also fetch good prices, but he likes to catch a couple of the animals a year mainly because they’re handy in their own right. The shirt he’s wearing is closed by black quill toggles and he likes them better than buttons any day.

He sees not another living thing that morning. Even the fogels are silent, and he suspects the harwe might be all he’ll get this time – it’s the hardest winter he’s seen since the first one he went through, six years ago. He reaches Tarik creek at noon. The creek’s frozen of course, so the water Jesti needs has to be made by melting snow and a few of the long icicles hanging from trees growing at the creek’s edge. He tethers her to a tree and setting about collecting wood, to get the fire going. The woodland here is rather scanty – it was logged about twenty years before and unlike a lot of the area around here, not reforested. It’s mostly clumps of scrubby trees and hardy bushes in the winter, poking out through the heavy snow. In the summer, it’s a carpet of grass and purple flowers, and long rushes that grow in the middle of the stream. Dek sometimes likes to come to watch the gemils playing in the creek. But there aren’t any gemils around now.

He’s barely walked a thousand midecs when he sees the roughly made shelter tucked under a large, leafless bush a little upstream. He hides behind a twisted turfel tree and crouches, mindful of his bad leg, and peers across the snow, trying to make out how many people are camped there. He can’t see any movement from here, but there’s bound to be someone around. He draws his knife, cursing that he’s been foolish enough to leave the rifle on Jesti and the pistol in his pack. No one comes up here in the winter, and no one camps here for pleasure even in the good season. Maybe it’s poachers. Maybe his traps have been robbed, not just unlucky – but no, he’s seen no tracks, and he’s too good at this to have missed them.

He creeps forward – no sound, no movement comes from the shelter. Under the dragged together brush, there’s some kind of tent, bright orange, and way too light for the conditions – looks like the kind of thing they pack in flyers and airships as part of the emergency kit. But they’re a thousand pardecs from an airfield, and not on any flight path, so Dek has no idea how this has come to be here.

He risks straightening up, hiding a groan as his leg complains. There’s a dead fire, neatly laid out, with at least some of the night’s snow overlaying it. There are no footprints outside the tent, and as he edges around it, he can see more snow on its roof – if there’s anyone inside, they’ve not emerged all day. He picks up a handful of snow, packs it into a hard ball, tosses it against the side of the tent. Nothing. “Hey,” he calls. No reaction. He tries again with the same result.

He unfastens the flaps and unzips the opening – the air coming out isn’t more than about five degrees warmer than the outside. Someone’s lying inside, wrapped up in a couple of blankets, and he can see the silvering of a thermal one just poking out from under the wool. “Hey,” he tries again, and pokes at the presumed foot of the stranger with his boot. Nothing. Either dead or in trouble then. He sheathes his knife, and gets awkwardly to his knees. He carefully peels back the blankets, revealing a man’s pale face. When he touches it with his ungloved hand, the skin’s as cold as the snow outside, but when he leans in, he can feel the slow puff of barely warmed air against his cheek. So, alive, but sick. Shivering, barely, which is a good sign, but the lack of consciousness, not so much.

For a few moments he considers leaving the stranger to his fate – not his job any more, he tell himself, to look after feckless civilians – but then he’s ashamed he’s sunk so low that he’d think of walking away from someone in need, whatever the reason for their presence in this territory. He needs the rest of his gear, and Jesti, so he wraps the guy up again, seals the tent and hurries back to his own campsite.

The saddle blanket is the most warmed covering he has to hand so he takes it off Jesti and wraps it around the man. Then he has to finish collecting the wood and build the fire in the stranger’s fire pit. It’s just as he would have laid it – a scraped depression in the ground to concentrate the heat, maximum result for minimum effort. He’s dealing with military of some sort – but which army, he doesn’t know. They’re close enough to Febkeinzian that the question isn’t straightforward even if the guy doesn’t look Febkeinze, but right now, it’s not that important.

While the fire’s getting hot, Dek takes the time to hang the harwe high up in the tallest tree he can find near the campsite because, sick stranger or no sick stranger, he doesn’t want to lose a catch that valuable. He also collects more wood because he knows he’s going to need it. By the time he goes back into the tent, the stranger has begun to shiver a little bit more, but he’s still deeply unconscious. The stranger’s chances aren’t good, he knows. Dek has none of the specialised equipment they use in the medical centres to treat hypothermia, and if the man is too far gone, nothing Dek can do will make much of a difference. He might be hanging around only to make sure the man gets a decent burial, but they’re not there yet.

At least the man’s clothes are dry, and when Dek removes the gloves to check his hands, they’re in good shape and so are his feet, though one arm is splinted and obviously broken. The gloves, like the rest of the clothing and the boots, are all brand new and top quality – which makes the tent even more anomalous. The man has a black paranormal tattoo on his hand, which explains the military training, though Dek doesn’t recognise the pattern. Pity the poor sod isn’t a pyrokinetic, Dek thinks, though he’s not sure if a sick PK can make enough heat to warm themselves. The subject never came up with his brother, Tik, funnily enough.

Pulling the guy’s hood and woollen cap back a little reveals a shaven head, which is definitely unusual – red stubble on his scalp and his cheeks shows the natural colour. Dek revises his assessment from ‘poacher’ to ‘prisoner’ – but they’re thousands and thousands of pardecs from the nearest prison. There’s fuck all but hunters and mines and forests and ice fields in this part of Pindone, and absolutely no reason he can think of why a paranormal, possibly escaped prisoner would be wandering around in this region at all. He rummages through the man’s pack – it’s a new piece of kit, and some of the items within it, like a water canteen and utility knife, are decent pieces of equipment, but the rest of it seems to be scavenged. There are no papers, no clue to the man’s identity at all, nothing remotely like proper supplies or hard rations. No food at all, in fact – only water in the canteen which he guesses is new snow melt. He wonders if he’s dealing with hypothermia or outright starvation – either could kill a man out here, and it remains to be seen if they have.

Dek’s got little choice but to make his camp here for the evening, but he’s not sleeping in this useless tent. He gets to work, putting blankets to warm near the fire, before setting up his own better quality felt and microfibre shelter next to the smaller, crappy one. Now comes the hard part – moving the guy into it. He’s a hell of a tall man, and though he looks underweight for his size, is still probably as heavy as Dek. Dek give him a few minutes to see if the warmed blankets set around him have any effect, but he’s not waking up much, though when Dek moves his broken arm, he moans, tries feebly to get away from Dek’s touch. There’s nothing for it except to move him bodily the short distance between the two tents. Dek’s knee doesn’t appreciate the manoeuvre and it’s a struggle to keep from slipping on the hard packed snow as he grips the guy under the armpits and drags him like deadweight.

But finally he’s got him installed on Dek’s own decent sleeping pad, and packed around with all of his spare blankets. The guy’s still out, and his breathing still sounds unnaturally slow to Dek’s ear. Moving him might have been a bad idea but he’d have died where he was. He’d have died for sure if Dek hadn’t taken it into his crazy head to go trapping when no sane person would have contemplated it.

Somehow he’s got to get this guy warmed up some more, and that means warm fluids, so he goes out to the fire to check on his preparations there. He’s heated enough water that he can mix half of it with snow and give it to Jesti in the leather bucket along with some grain from the saddle bags. He makes khevai for himself and eats some jerky, leaning against Jesti as she snorts and snuffles her way through her food. When he’s done, he mixes about a quarter of the honey with the remaining water, letting it cool a little and pouring it into a flask, before bringing it into the tent.

To his surprise, the man’s eyes are open just a slit and there’s a little awareness in his expression. He mumbles something incoherent as Dek kneels down – Dek doesn’t ask him to repeat it. He props the guy up on his pack, making him groan, then sits beside him, pouring some of the hot sweet water into a mug. Then, using a spoon, he dribbles a little between the guy’s parted lips. He only risks a few drops, and it seems for a second or two the guy has forgotten how to swallow, but then he slowly licks his chapped lips. “More,” he whispers huskily, and Dek obliges.

It takes nearly half an hour to spoon a mug of honey water into the man’s eager mouth, and he’s asleep by the time Dek’s done, but Dek thinks he looks just a tiny bit better. If the energy and the warmth aren’t enough, then Dek’s out of ideas and he has to move anyway because his leg hurts like a son of a bitch. He eases up and goes outside to check on Jesti and throw more wood on the fire. He takes a piss, eats a handful of dried berries and some of the porridge, thinking regretfully that he can’t use any of the honey on it because he needs to keep it for the stranger, and wonders how the hell he’s going to get this guy out of here, and what’ll happen if he does. Dek’s still pretty fit and in a fair fight can take on almost anyone, but he’s got this stupid leg, and the guy is taller and with unknown abilities. The hypothermia will keep him under control for now, but Dek’s got rope in his pack and he’ll use it at the slightest excuse if the guy looks like giving him trouble. Still doesn’t know what the hell he’ll do with him.

He builds up the fire again and reinforces the brush shelter the stranger’s made, collapses the useless tent and uses that to strengthen the windbreak, then figures he’s got a long boring afternoon and night ahead of him. He fills both canteens with hot water, prepares more diluted honey, and goes back into the tent. The guy is awake again, his eyes darting anxiously around, trying to assess his surroundings. He stills as he sees Dek looking back at him. “Thirsty,” he whispers as he struggles to sit, but with his arm, he can’t do it. Dek helps him up, supports him on the pack, then tucks the canteens among the blankets. He starts to feed the guy sips of honey water, but the man grips his wrist weakly. “Can manage,” he says, and when a dubious Dek hands him the mug, fully expecting to have to clear up a mess in a few moments, he does manage, shaking hand raising the mug to trembling lips.

“Slow,” Dek orders, but the guy just gives him a wry look and sips carefully, though it’s clear he’d knock the whole thing back if he could.

“Thanks,” he murmurs as Dek takes the empty mug from him.

Dek ignores him as he pours some of the hot water into the mug and hands it back. “Drink,” he says.

“I’m Ren,” the stranger says. “Who are you?”

“Drink,” Dek repeats, and the stranger...Ren...obeys, pulling a face at the unflavoured water. He lies back with an exhausted sounding sigh, and the mug is suddenly difficult for him to hold.

“Sorry,” he says as Dek takes it off him and sets it aside. “Where are we? I got lost...camping expedition went to hell.”

He waits expectantly, as if he really thinks Dek will believe that crap. Dek doesn’t. “Shut up,” he says, already regretting his altruism. He makes the guy lie down and settles the blankets around him again. He thinks about whether to tie the man’s hands and feet together, but though the mouth is working and the brain behind it is less foggy than he expects with the hypothermia, Ren isn’t doing much moving around. In the morning, it might be a different story.

He stiffens as Dek settles down behind him. “W-what are you...?”

“Shut up,” Dek repeats, and doesn’t move. The guy will figure it out in a second or two, he thinks, and he does, relaxing with another soft sigh.

“Body heat, of course. Sorry.”

It’s more words than Dek’s heard strung together in nearly a year, and the guy’s making his ears hurt. He pulls the blankets tighter around them both and the sleeping bag around his ears, and hopes the guy will take the hint. Fortunately he does, and then all Dek has to listen to is the soft sound of Ren’s breathing, the crackle of the fire outside, and the distant mournful calls of the fogels and the weiwe birds. He likes it out here most of all because it doesn’t ever sound remotely like Denebi jungle, never hears the crash of surf on sand, or the sharp rattle of automatic guns, or the screams of their targets. It sounds like nowhere else on earth, which is just fine by him because there’s nowhere else on earth he wants to be.

The stranger spends a restless night, and the early lucidity gives way to confusion and nightmares that sound nearly as bad as anything Dek can come up with. His arm is troubling him, and in his frequent bouts of wakefulness, he moans with the pain and the cold. He mumbles a lot too, and Dek carefully files away in his memory each name that comes up. But now isn’t the time for an interrogation. Dek gets up every hour or so to offer the guy more water and build the fire – each time he gets back under the covers, the guy jumps a little, then he settles, like he keeps forgetting what Dek’s doing. A bit of an odd reaction, Dek thinks. Something else to find out about.

It’s a long and tiring night, but far from the worst he’s spent. At first light he gets up to piss, and when he returns, the stranger is looking back at him with sunken eyes. “I...uh...need to get up.”

Dek helps him upright – he’s got a sprained or damaged ankle too, so it’s all awkward, and as soon as they get out of the tent, the guy bends over and pukes. Nothing comes up but bile, but that doesn’t stop him dry heaving for nearly a minute, his good arm wrapped around his middle like he thinks his guts are going to fall out. Dek finds himself feeling sorry for the sod, despite himself.

“Sorry,” the guy gasps as he stands up – Dek doesn’t respond. He leads him silently to the latrine, where there’s a repeat of the vomiting, both before and after the stranger relieves himself. This is more than hypothermia but Dek’s got nothing to offer someone with a stomach bug more than he has done. He figures it’ll either kill him or it won’t.

He lets the man choose fire or the tent again – he chooses the fire, shivering as he hunkers down on Dek’s little folding stool. He’s listing badly and Dek suspects he needs more than sleep to mend him. The guy accepts another mug of sweetened water, which stays down, but when Dek opens the tin of cold porridge, he goes pale and his throat works. Dek doesn’t bother offering him any – no point in wasting food, especially when Dek only brought enough for one and now he’s going to have to split supplies. What they’ll do when the honey runs out, he doesn’t know. “Can you eat bread?” he asks.

The guy swallows like he’s about to be sick again, but then he nods. “Yes, I think I could. A little. Sorry, I’m not usually so picky.”

Dek wishes he’d stop apologising – it’s pointless. He cuts off some of the hard bread and warms it over the fire. The guy nibbles on it, apparently enjoying it. It’s obvious he’s pretty hungry – it’s just nothing much is going to stay down. “Don’t eat it and puke it up, I don’t have it to spare,” Dek warns.

The man smiles in a rather strained way. “No. I’ll try not to. I appreciate it.”

Dek grunts and eats his porridge. The guy watches him the whole time. Dek’s waiting for him to make his move – Dek’ll be ready when he does.

He stows all the food and half the new melted water, giving the rest to Jesti, and spends a minute or two scratching her hide and checking her over. The guy stays sitting by the fire, apparently lost in thought. He still looks pretty sick, but they can’t stay here. Dek goes back over to the fire. “Got to get moving. Day’s wasting.”

“Going where? Where are we? And who are you?”

“Tell you when you tell me the truth,” Dek says, and the man’s eyes widen. “Get up.” He puts his hand on his gun and makes it clear it’s not a request.

At least the guy knows how to follow orders, even if he’s useless for almost everything else. He does put the fire out tidily though, while Dek breaks down the rest of the camp, and when Dek tells him to mount up, he doesn’t argue. Jesti’s too small a mount for him, but urtibes are tough and far stronger than they look, so Dek’s sure she can handle it. When he slings the frozen harwe corpse in front of the pommel, the man looks at it and then at Dek. “You can’t walk. Not with that leg.”

“Shut up.”

“Yes, sir,” Ren says, with a hint of a smile. Dek’s not amused. He’s commanded smartarse soldiers like this before and always made a point of getting them out of his unit as fast as he can. Even if this one isn’t a criminal, which he thinks is unlikely, Dek doesn’t like him. He talks too much.

The temperature’s steadily dropping, the sky is dark and lowering, and an hour after they start out, it starts to snow. At first it’s bearable, a few flakes nothing more than brief irritants against eyes and exposed skin, but quickly the flakes get fatter and as the wind whips up, Dek realises they have to take shelter. He drags the stranger off Jesti and walks her over to the only protection he can see – the lee side of a huge dead tree. He gets her to hunker down in the snow, trusting her abundant wool to protect her, and her hairy bulk to protect them. “Get beside her,” he shouts at the guy. They’re almost blind now, the snow an almost solid wall of stinging white in their faces. He pulls out his two mini-tarps by feel, throws on the ground next to his animal, and then, as they sit on it, wrapping the other around their heads, holding it down with difficulty against the whipping, biting wind.

Ren wraps his arms around Dek and buries his face against his back, trying to get away from the freezing air that’s getting in around the edges of the tarp despite Dek’s best efforts. He’s shivering hard again, and it’s dangerous, letting him get chilled again on top of existing hypothermia but there’s not much Dek can do about it. It’s not like he dumped the guy in this.

The wind howls around their ears, and Dek’s hands cramp up with the effort of holding the tarp down, until the sheer weight of snow holds it down for him. At least once they’re buried, it’s a little warmer, and the wind can’t penetrate their snow cocoon. They’re completely reliant on Jesti now – she’ll move if the snow gets too high for her, and she’s their only source of warmth, slight though it is through her insulated hide. Dek’s spent nights like this before now – he really doesn’t want to do that again.

In the end, it’s not that long. After an hour, Dek risks digging his way out and finds the blizzard’s passed, though the sky promises more snow soon. He hauls Ren to his feet, clicks at Jesti to get up, and knocks the worst of the snow off her hide. “Mount up,” he orders, and Ren climbs clumsily into the saddle. It’s immediately obvious that he’s not doing so good. He’s listing again, barely keeping his seat, shivering and not even making the effort to brush the snow from his encrusted face. “Can you ride?”

Ren shudders, but then nods and grips the reins in his good hand. Dek hangs onto Jesti’s pommel and urges her on, using her to haul him through the new snow that’s hip-deep in places now. It’s worse than walking in loose sand, and a hundred midecs feels like ten times that distance, so great is the effort. After an hour moving like this, with him struggling to keep his feet under him, and Ren sagging and nodding off in the saddle, Dek realises they’re never going to make his planned campsite.

He forces them to keep going for another hour, though it nearly kills both of them, When he calls a halt, more or less because he can’t really move another midec, Ren almost falls out of the saddle, and promptly pukes again, which is as tiresome for Dek as it is for Ren. “How long you been sick?” he asks when the man straighten up again and wipes his mouth with a shaky hand, then grabs some snow to scrub his glove clean.

“Uh...a while,” Ren admits, and Dek frowns. He’s got little experience of long-term illnesses that don’t involve injury and his field training doesn’t cover this. “Don’t suppose rijkil trees grow around here?” Dek glowers at him. “The...bark...folk remedy for...nausea,” he amends, and Dek wonders what he was about to say. “You make a kind of tea. I know it works.”

Better than nothing, Dek thinks, but he’s got other things to worry about. He uses the time it takes to swallow some water to try and catch his breath, but they can’t afford for them to both be incapacitated, so he can’t rest too long. The stranger tries to help him put up the tent until Dek snarls at him to fuck off because he’s useless.

It takes him twice as long as it normally would, but finally he gets it up and tells Ren to stay inside. “Don’t worry, moving’s a lot more trouble than it’s worth,” he says, giving Dek a wan smile. It’s getting close to the time when Dek will need to use a rope on the guy. But not now.

He still has to collect wood, but that, at least, is in abundance here, and since he passes a couple of scraggly rijkil trees on the way back, he hacks off some of the reddish bark and shoves it in his pocket. He has no idea if it’s enough but he’s too tired to look for more.

He builds the fire, and then crawls into the tent to grab an hour or so’s rest. Ren’s asleep, with the sprawled slack look of the utterly exhausted, and Dek wonders how much longer he would have survived if Dek hadn’t found him. Whatever this illness is, it’s coming on top of a lot of other bad crap. Dek needs to get the man to the defence outpost in Osiwen and let him be cared for properly. He has neither the skill nor the inclination to deal with it.

He dozes for a little while – doesn’t allow himself to go to sleep because there’s still things need doing – and once he’s warmed up, he feels a little more human. Ren’s still asleep, but Dek doesn’t wake him – no point since the guy’s next to useless in camp. He crawls out carefully, and heads over to the dying fire to throw more wood on it. After drinking a mug of khevai and chewing some jerky, he wakes up a little more and can assess their situation. Food’s probably their worst problem, but they won’t starve even if it takes three times as long to get home as he planned, which it well might do because he can’t walk very far on a good day on his damn leg, and this deep snow is hell for someone like him. They’re about twenty pardecs as the fogels fly from his house – on Jesti, it’s a day, easy. On foot, it’s two, three days – probably more like four or five. He just has to keep them both alive for that long.

Now he’s rested, and since he’s stuck with nothing much to do until Ren’s up to travelling, which won’t be until tomorrow at the earliest, he decides to make a virtue out of necessity and set some more traps, cut some more wood, do a little foraging. He’s in luck and finds some winter nuts and seeds close to camp which will make a good addition to their diet. He also skins and butchers the harwe because they’ll need the meat, and the thing will be easier to transport as a pelt.

Ren emerges, pale and none too steady on his feet, while Dek’s setting up the smoker. Dek’s sure he’s going to puke again, but he manages to hold onto it, and meekly asks about the rijkil bark. Dek gestures towards the fire with his knife and lets the guy get on with it. He finishes the smoker and sets out the meat, then curses himself. He’s forgotten the guy has a broken arm, but when he returns to the fire, Ren’s managed somehow, though his face is tight with pain. The knife and the red bark are in an untidy heap on the ground, but Dek doesn’t comment on the carelessness. “Want some bread?” he asks, feeling he should make slight amends.

“Please. I didn’t want to touch your stores, but I’m...a little hungry.”

Dek cuts him some bread, and offers some of the nuts he found, which Ren accepts and finds palatable. They chew their meal in almost companionable silence, but of course Ren has to spoil that once he sets his mug down. “I can’t tell you more than I have. It’ll endanger you. I don’t want to lie to you....”

“Then don’t,” Dek says, brushing his gloves free of crumbs over the fire. He goes to get up, but finds a hand clamped tight over his arm. It’s pure instinct, the way he goes for his knife and moves into an attack posture, his hand bringing the weapon barely a mycdec from his assailant’s face. Ren sprawls backwards on the snow, his green eyes impossibly wide, his hand up in a gesture of surrender. “Don’t touch me again,” Dek growls, and Ren shakes his head frantically. Dek wonders if he’s pissed himself in fright, and decides he doesn’t care. He gets up and stalks over to the smoker to check on things, and tries very hard not to think about Ren and his own overreaction. There’s a reason he’s not in the army any more, after all.

Ren hides in the tent the rest of the afternoon, and is very, very careful not to annoy Dek again, which, perversely, irritates him almost as much as anything Ren was doing before. When Ren accepts a bit of smoked harwe and forces himself to eat it even though it’s obvious his gorge is rising, Dek finally snatches the piece of meat out of his hands. “Eat the fucking bread,” he snarls, and throws the guy the slice as he hacks it off. Ren accepts that too and doesn’t protest, even though he struggles to eat the bread as well. Dek shoves a mug of sweetened water at him and Ren drinks every drop without looking at him.

Dek builds up the fire for the evening and checks on Jesti one last time, before gesturing at the tent. Ren gets up obediently, but then stops, turns to him with a desperate expression. “Please...don’t get angry again...just tell me. Where are you taking me? Please, I don’t think I can....”

“My house. Four days’ walk if you keep up.”

Ren’s expression changes to surprised relief. “Thank you. I’ll try, I really will.”

Dek grunts and points at the tent. Ren settles under the blankets without saying a word, not even when Dek takes up position behind him again. It’s not like they have much choice about the positions unless he makes the guy sleep in the snow, and Dek’s not at that point yet. Ren sleeps no better than he did the previous night, and Dek not surprised Ren’s so tired, if this goes on all the time.

The second day goes a little better, if only because the weather decides to behave and they don’t get caught up in any more blizzards. Despite the load on Jesti and his damn leg, they make decent time and Dek’s hopeful they’ll make the house in two more days. Ren doesn’t say a word except ‘thank you’, and ‘sorry’ just the once – he’s still nauseous, and actually faints when he gets up too fast after the noon break, which is when he apologises until Dek glares at him to shut up. But apart from that little setback, he clings stubbornly to Jesti’s back with his good hand, and doesn’t ask for anything until Dek offers it. That this forces Dek to anticipate his needs is annoying, but he can live with it.

Ren’s still only eating enough to keep a bird alive, and since they’re out of honey, and Dek’s found no more nuts, he’s living on the remains of the bread. Not enough for a big man in this weather, but then there’s less to throw up. The cold is still affecting him badly, but as night draws in on the third night, Dek realises it’s Ren’s arm which is bothering him most. It was splinted surprisingly efficiently, but splints don’t hold forever. “Show me,” he orders, pointing at Ren’s arm.

Ren blinks, confused. “My arm? It’s all right....”

“I said, show me,” and Ren obeys, having learned his lesson and what that tone of voice means.

Dek sits next to him and draws off the glove, tests the fingers. The splint’s loose, like he thought. When he carefully undoes the wood scraps and material strips, Ren hisses. “It’s all right, really, I’m a doctor....” Dek just gives him a look, and Ren subsides, though he bites his lip as he watches.

The arm’s badly bruised and painful, but the colour in the fingers is good. “Did it three weeks ago,” Ren volunteers. “Honestly, it’s fine. Just aches.” Dek looks at him again. “I know, shut up,” he says with a sigh. “I wish I knew how to make you stop hating me.”

“Try shutting up,” Dek says, then carefully resplints the arm, using leather strips from his own supply, and lighter bits of wood of the right length that should make it more comfortable and less inclined to catch and jar.

Despite Ren’s protests, it’s clear the pain’s less for him now as he tests it cautiously. “Thank you. That was really skilful. You’re trained?” Dek doesn’t even bother glaring at him for that. “If I tell you something truthful, will you give me your name?” Dek looks up, surprised in spite of himself. “My name really is Ren. I really am a doctor. I broke my arm in a flyer crash three weeks ago. And I would never hurt anyone.”

Dek stares, not sure if all those statements can be true, not with all he’s guessed, with all that Ren’s not telling him. “Dek,” he says finally.

“Hi, Dek, nice to meet you.”

“Shut up,” he says, and goes to take a piss.

By the time they’re coming up on the ridge where Dek’s house is located, he can feel every one of his thirty-eight years, and every crack and screw in his leg. Getting soft, he tells himself, using the urtibes instead of walking, but truth to tell, he couldn’t really live out here without their help, and promises to give the little hairy buggers some extra vegetables with their feed when he gets back. Ren’s pretty much done too – it’s not been a good day, and he’s had to walk some of it because of the terrain, something of a struggle with his ankle and the snow. Dek wonders what other injuries he’s nursing, and whether this puking thing is going to get any better. The bark tea seems to help, but he’s kept barely anything down today, and apart from toasted bread at breakfast, he’s refused all other food, sipping the tea whenever Dek makes a fire, and being grimly determined not to give Dek the slightest excuse to shout at him. Dek would be proud of the fact he’s still got what it takes to intimidate soldiers, except that intimidating a sick, injured man who’s completely dependent on him for survival isn’t actually a particularly admirable thing to do.

Ren’s nodding in the saddle as they climb the last demidec through the forest, snow clouds hanging low in the sunset, Dek hanging onto Jesti’s pommel and shamelessly letting her animal strength supplement his own failing human one. They’ve lost the light completely by the time they get to the house and the last few thousand midecs they cover with the help of the windup lantern. The steps up to the house look as high as Mount Meninwen and it takes the last of Dek’s strength to haul Ren up them. He gracelessly shoves the guy inside the front door, dumps the packs on the porch, and then he rides Jesti up to the barn. Even cold, hungry and exhausted, he can’t neglect her – she’s served him well, as the others have, and feeding and watering her, running a quick brush over her hide to get the worst of the mud and snow off it, is the least he can do. He’s shaking by the time he climbs the steps to the porch again and walks into his home. Taking his boots off seems like the hardest thing he’s ever attempted – he can’t remember when he was last this tired.

Ren has done exactly nothing in the hour since he’d got back except shed his outer gear and leave it on the floor in a muddy wet heap. He’s curled up fast asleep in Dek’s armchair, his head tipped back a little, lips parted. He looks exactly how Dek feels, but unlike Ren, Dek still has work to do. He stores what’s left of the meat and food, puts the pelt out in the drying room to deal with tomorrow, hangs up the dirty outer gear there too, and hauls out some stew from the freezer to make a quick, hot meal for himself in the cooker. As it heats up, he looks over at the sleeping man in the living room, and realises he’s got a problem. Out on the trail, Ren wasn’t going to try anything because he was in no shape to, and didn’t know where they were headed. But here, in Dek’s fully supplied and equipped house, he no longer needs the owner, and while Ren doesn’t give him any psycho vibes, Dek still doesn’t trust him, and doesn’t know the full story behind that broken arm or the shaven head.

He goes out to the work shed and selects what he needs, then comes back into the house and kicks Ren’s foot, at the same time drawing his pistol and pointing it at him. “Get up.”

“Dek? Wha...did I do something?” He’s slow, genuinely confused, blinking against the flare of the light and up at Dek’s face.

“Not yet. Get up.”

Ren obeys clumsily, stumbling a little on weary feet. “Move in there,” Dek orders, gesturing towards the second bedroom, the one that’s not seen any use since he came up here six years ago, but which Dek, unable to tolerate a mess, always keeps tidy and free of junk. “Take your boots off.”

“But it’s cold....”

“It’ll warm up,” Dek says truthfully. The heating in this place is one of the best things about it, next to the isolation.

Ren’s confused again but obeys. Dek’s already locked one end of the chain to the heating pipes, and now tosses the other end and the second padlock over to Ren. “Around your ankle.”

“Dek, you don’t....” Dek cocks his gun and Ren swallows. “All right. But you don’t have to do this,” he says as he sits on the unmade bed to obey Dek’s order. Dek makes sure the chain’s too tight to be eased off, then steps back. “Why?” Ren asks quietly, apparently really puzzled.

Dek ignores him. “Chain’s long enough to reach the bathroom. The key’s in the other room, so if you knock me out, you’re still stuck....”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Shut up.”

“Look, I know you’ve got to take precautions but I swear....” Dek raises the gun again and takes careful aim. “Maybe you should,” Ren says, not backing off at all. “If this is how it’s going to end, I’d rather die out here than...and maybe...one chain is better than the rest of it,” he finishes softly, as if speaking to himself. “Before you turn me in, will you let me explain?”

Dek lowers the gun. “I don’t know. You hungry?”

Ren shrugs. “If you’ve got anything I can eat. Otherwise, I’d prefer to sleep. Are you going to let me have bedding?”

Dek didn’t bring any with him when he moved up here, but the place came with all the furnishings, so he thinks there are spare sheets, and there’s one extra pillow. He collects all of it and an old duvet he found along with the blankets, and brings it back into the bedroom. Ren is sitting on the bed, staring into space, looking resigned and ill. Dek shoves the bedding at him. “I can’t undress like this,” Ren points out, and Dek silently curses his own stupidity.

He gets the key and keeps the gun on Ren while he unchains himself. “Strip,” Dek orders when the man hesitates. The room is warm enough now, and there’s clean underwear in Ren’s pack. Keeping him nearly naked might be an extra deterrent.

Ren’s mouth tightens. “No privacy?”

“No. I’m not interested in what you got, just in putting your clothes in the washer.”

“You’ve got a washer? Up here? How did you get it over that mountain?”

“I got neighbours who help out,” he says, making sure Ren knows that he can call for backup if he needs to, even if he never would. “Strip. Down to skin.”

He affects boredom, but underneath it, he’s puzzled. There’s precious little privacy in the military, or in a prison, and if Ren isn’t lying about being a doctor, the modesty thing makes even less sense. That is, it doesn’t until Ren removes his shirt and underlayers, and Dek sees the scars, obscenely livid marks on Ren’s snow-pale skin, on his arms, down his abdomen. He has no doubt if Ren turned around, his back would be similarly disfigured.

Despite himself he moves forward, and realises he’s about to reach out and touch Ren’s body. He jerks his hand back. “What year is it?” Ren asks in a harsh voice, working his jaw.

“Huh?” Dek’s still mesmerised by the ghastly, horribly regular lines and dents. No accident, he thinks, feeling queasy.

“The year. What fucking year is it?” Dek names it and Ren’s expression crumples. “Damn,” he says softly. “Four years.”

Dek raises the gun out of instinct, because Ren looks as if he’s about to fall apart. “What?”

Ren tosses the shirts and things onto the bed, and turns to Dek bare-chested. “The people who did this to me had me for four years. I...didn’t realise it was so long. I’m telling you now, gun or no gun, I’ll do everything up to and including killing myself to stop you taking me back to them. But,” he adds as Dek moves back a little bit. “I’d never hurt you or kill you. They haven’t brought me that low that I’d harm someone trying to help me. I wish you could believe me.”

“Finish up,” Dek says coldly, to cover up his shock at what he’s just learned. When Ren takes off his trousers and long johns, Dek notes that he’s been starving for longer than three weeks. Once he’d been a big man, probably, with decent musculature, but now he’s almost frail, the knobs of elbows and shoulders and knees overlarge like those of a famine victim. He’s devoid of almost all body fat except, oddly, slightly protuberant nipples and a little pot belly under a particularly nasty and recent scar high on his abdomen.

“Enjoying the show?” Ren snaps, and Dek realises he’s staring. “Can I get a shower?”

“Water’s timed for a minute. Go in and I’ll fetch the gear. Toilet’s down the hall – don’t throw anything in it that doesn’t break down.”

“Yes, because I’ve got so many possessions,” Ren says bitterly, almost like he no longer gives a fuck that Dek’s holding a gun on him. He stalks into the bathroom, and Dek lets out a breath. Marra’s balls. This isn’t what he was expecting, not at all.

He leaves the underwear, towel and new toothbrush (glad, now, of his habit of keeping multiple spares of everything) in the bathroom, and makes up the bed while Ren’s getting clean. He goes back to the kitchen and extracts his stew, then tosses a couple of frozen dough balls into the cooker while he boils water for khevai and to thin out some frozen meat stock concentrate. He hears Ren coming and picks up his gun, but Ren ignores it. “Thanks for the shirt and pants,” he says, before sitting at the table. “Smells good – anything for me, or do you need to chain me up first?”

The shirt and fleece shouldn’t be big enough for a man’s Ren’s size but he’s so underweight they’re almost too big. The pants are too short but fit loosely around his hips – he’s wearing them under his pot belly like it would hurt to have anything across it. Dek figures he’s got more than enough unpleasant information tonight and decides to save the interrogation until the morning. He doesn’t rise to Ren’s bait, and simply sets the stock, bread roll and khevai down in front of him, then grabs the stew, rest of the bread and his own mug of khevai and sits at the other end of the table.

Ren just looks at the food, but doesn’t pick up his spoon. “I can’t go back,” he says tonelessly. “Dek – please. Promise you’ll shoot me rather than do that. I can’t,” he says, lifting his gaze to Dek, and Dek sees tears in his eyes that don’t seem the least bit faked. “You don’t know what it’s like. I’m begging you.”

“Eat your meal,” Dek says, ignoring the plea. He’s in no shape and no mind to deal with this. When Ren still doesn’t touch the food, he knows threats won’t work. “Talk tomorrow,” he says grudgingly. “Eat, sleep, talk then.”

“All right. Sorry...I....” He drops his gaze and picks up his spoon, begins to eat slowly. “This is good. Thank you.”

Dek grunts and continues eating, but he’s wondering what crime could possibly justify doing this to a man, and what kind of man would hold the scalpel and do it? He thought he’d seen the worst of mankind in Denebwei, thought he’d plumbed the depths of the human capacity for viciousness and cruelty, and yet, here in his home, is someone who’s walking proof of how wrong he is.

He has to get Ren out of here. He doesn’t need, doesn’t want anything to do with a world like that. It doesn’t want anything to do with him either, and that’s how he likes it. Ren and whoever did this to him, doesn’t fit in the haven he’s created for himself up here, and that means Ren has to go. Somehow.

It’s the first night in a week that he hasn’t been woken up by Ren’s moaning. Pale light is already filtering through the high windows, which means he’s slept a lot later than usual. He grabs his trousers and checks on his unwanted visitor – Ren’s still out, huddled under the blankets like he’s freezing, even though the house is perfectly warm. The bucket Dek left in his room for puking purposes is unused, and Dek hopes that’s all passed now because it’s getting pretty old, Ren getting up, puking, pissing, puking again. No fun for Ren either, of course.

He has things he should do, but he’s still exhausted, right down to the bone – probably getting too old for this, he realises, and maybe trapping in midwinter is just a little crazier than even he’s prepared to admit to being. So he makes his porridge and khevai like he does most mornings, takes his time over his meal, and tries not to think about the man in the other room because it’s stirring up dark and painful things inside that he couldn’t deal with then and can’t deal with now. Running away is a perfectly good strategy if the enemy is invincible. Dek discovered that six years ago and hasn’t had cause to revise his opinion since.

He hears harsh retching and sighs, waits for Ren to come out, and then rolls his eyes at himself because the whole chain thing has completely slipped his mind. Some soldier he is, forgetting his own prisoner. He’s already walking towards the bedroom when he hears the quiet ‘Dek?’

Ren is sitting on the bed, wrapped in blankets. His face is pinched, his eyes lifeless and Dek’s arrival gets no reaction but a dully polite, “May I get dressed?”

Dek tosses him the key and decides he really doesn’t want to see Ren’s mutilated body again so he retreats to the kitchen, his pistol at the ready but really only for the look of it. Ren might be taller but now Dek’s seen him naked, he knows that a child of three would have little trouble controlling Ren if they really wanted. Which raises the question of how the hell he got away from his torturers, not to mention who the hell the torturers were.

He’s got toast and sweetened khevai ready when Ren comes through. He sits, thanks him in the same flat tones as before, and starts to eat. Even though it’s food that’s sat easy on his stomach on the trail, this morning it’s clear from his expression that Ren’s having to force it down, not looking at Dek once while he does so. Dek almost starts to offer something else, but Ren’s subdued, submissive manner holds him back so he doesn’t, just waiting for the struggle to be over and the meal done. When he’s finished, Ren gets to his feet. “Ready for the chain again,” he says, staring at the floor.

“I’m not. Sit down.” Dek’s still eating his breakfast after all. He looks at Ren coolly over the edge of his mug, knowing that the mouth won’t be able to take the silence, and sure enough after a couple of minutes, Ren starts to talk, slowly, quietly.

“Dek...I wasn’t lying out there when I said I was trying to protect you. If I tell you the truth, then you’ll have to take me to the defs, which will mean I’ll have to try and stop you, and if you don’t and they find out you were protecting me when you know the story, they’ll lock you up too.” He shudders, his fingers clenching convulsively where they rest on the table. “I don’t want that on my conscience.”

“Then I’ll take you to the defs anyway and let them sort it out.”

“No!” Ren’s pale cheeks have a slight colour to them now and his good hand clamps into a tight fist. “You’ll have to kill me, I swear it. I’ll kill myself!”

“Suit yourself,” Dek says, knowing he’s being a bastard, and sips his khevai. Never did have any patience with amateur dramatics. Ren wants his help, he’s going to have to stop shouting. Dek doesn’t want to help him, but he’s not highly delighted at the idea of sending anyone back to be cut up, whatever they’ve done.

“You don’t care, do you?” Ren says, crestfallen. “Figures. I never did have much luck. Look – will you at least let me leave? Maybe...give me some directions? If I could just....” He clenches his hand again. “‘Walk out of Pindone’ is probably too much to ask for, huh.”

He’s looking green again. Dek pushes the khevai and the sucrose over to him. “Don’t puke on my floor or I’ll shoot you.”

“If I thought you would, I’d vomit on purpose.”

“You want to kill yourself, there’s the front door. I’m not stopping you.”

Hope lights Ren’s features. “Really? You’d let me...but I guess asking for supplies is a waste of time.” Dek nods briefly and Ren sags back in his chair. “Dek – look, I’m injured, I’m lost, I know a little survival stuff from being in the army, but the far north isn’t for beginners....”

“Not my problem,” Dek says, tugging the khevai pot back to himself, bored with the whining.

“And I’m pregnant.”

Dek freezes, the instinctive words ‘you must be fucking joking’ ready on his tongue, but something about Ren’s hunted expression keeps them behind his teeth, as the clues click together. The nausea, the strangely rounded belly, the breast tissue – even the scar. He stares, but can’t come up with anything sensible to say.

“At least you didn’t shout ‘it’s impossible!’,” Ren says wryly. “I wish it was. I wish I was joking, but I’m not. I’m not even the first. But one thing’s for sure – unless I get this thing out of me in less than six months, I’m a dead man.”

Dek’s found his voice. “Explain.”

“I said, I can’t....”

“I already know too much. I know you’ve been a prisoner, I know you’re on the run. Let you go now and I’ll have some explaining to do regardless. So you explain. And don’t lie,” he says, lifting the gun. “Who’s Geya? And Meram?”

Ren’s face contorts. “My wife and son,” he whispers. “Ex...wife. When did...?”

“You talk in your sleep. And Jinase?”

“My sister.” The words are laden with sorrow. “I have no idea if she’s still alive.” Dek gestures with the gun for him to get on with it. “I...am a doctor. From Vizinken. I spent five years in the army while I qualified after I finished reservist training, but I went back into the reserve so I could work at the civilian hospital. My sister is...was...a doctor too. She’s not paranormal, but she’s always been involved with the Spiritists, because of me. I am...was...too, but only as an adult.” Dek wonders what the hell this has to do with anything. “The war in Denebwei caused a lot of problems for the talented...there were rumours our kind were working with the enemy against our own forces. It got pretty ugly, with arrests on suspicion and the like, and after a TK tried to kill the President, it really got bad. People were being forced out of their jobs, no one was abiding by the letter or the spirit of the anti-discrimination legislation, the media were calling for greater restrictions on our kind.”

Dek grunts, not really caring. He heard about the assassination attempt but he has no interest in current events any more. It’s nothing to do with him.

Ren takes his lack of attention for what it is. “I’m telling you this for a reason,” he snaps. “It’s not like I enjoy cutting myself open for your entertainment.”

Dek leans back in his chair. “I can think of things I’d enjoy more too,” he says, and Ren curls his lip in a snarl. Dek likes that reaction more than the obsessive politeness, but he can’t help think it’s not much of a survival instinct in a man facing someone holding a gun on him.

“So sorry to impose. I don’t know why I’m bothering.” He gets up, sways dangerously, and is forced to sit down with a thump. “Bugger.” He puts his head in his hands, and Dek wonders what the hell it must feel like, to have an alien presence in your guts like that, feeding on you, making you sick and sore. Women did it all the time, damned if he knows how.

The man’s looking nauseated again, and this’ll go a lot faster if he feels better, so Dek pours him out some khevai, dumps a load of sucrose into it, and shoves it back at him. Ren stares at the mug, then at him. “Why are you bothering?”

“Boredom. If you’re done, I’ve got animals to tend to.”

“I’m not done. You’re a real prick, do you know that?”

Dek just looks at him – tell him something he doesn’t know, he thinks. He only has to wait. Ren’s out of options and if there’s a salvation in store for him, it’s Dek. Dek hasn’t begun to decide what he’s going to do about any of this, if anything, but he sure as hell isn’t doing anything until Ren stops glaring and starts explaining again.

“Something broke you, didn’t it?” Ren suddenly says. “You’re military – ex-military, that’s obvious. You hurt your leg in service?”

“All right, that’s enough,” Dek says, lifting the gun again. “Talk or walk. Which is it?”

Ren swallows. “I’m sorry, I...forgot the situation. I’ll talk.” He lifts up the mug but it wobbles in his trembling hand so he sets it down. “Could you...not point that at me so...?” He looks like he’s struggling for another word, but finally says, “aggressively?”

Dek doesn’t move, or answer, and Ren nods, accepting Dek’s refusal. “I guess not. I...mentioned my sister because...I didn’t realise it but she and some of the Spiritists were getting themselves involved in smuggling paranormals out of the country. Changing their biochips, altering medical records, trying to let people have a normal life. I knew nothing about it until the officers from Elite came to my door and arrested me. I thought when they realised I wasn’t involved with Jinase’s plans they’d let me go, but someone had tipped them off that I was supposedly falsifying records too. I wasn’t. It was just a mistake. There was a boy – one of my patients – and I missed that he was an incipient telepath. They assumed I hid it deliberately because of Jinase’s group and I was convicted like her, of treason. I asked for a mindscan but they refused.”

He looks up. “They said there was a new group of paranormals they’d uncovered with undetectable shields, and they said a mindscan wasn’t reliable. The most I could have was a guarantee of no death penalty. They gave me thirty years instead, even though I’m innocent. And my sister...Dek, she wasn’t hurting anyone and they...if they’re doing to her what they did to me....” He covers his eyes, and hugs himself with his bad arm. “That was almost worse,” he mumbles. “Thinking all the time...that Jinase was going through this too....”

“We don’t torture people in prison in this country,” Dek says, unsympathetic to the traitor’s tale and thinking this is all crap. “You’re lying.”

Ren glares and pulls up his shirt. “You think this is a lie? I know ‘we’ don’t do this in prison. I wasn’t in prison. Not a normal one. I never got inside the gates of one. As soon as the trial was over and sentence pronounced, I was drugged and taken...well, eventually I worked out it was north. A long way north. There were a group of us, all paranormals, being kept in this compound. Our biochips were cut out, and we were told our families would be informed we’d died in prison. They could do whatever they wanted to us for the rest of our lives, and no one would ever know or question it.”

Dek leans forward. “Why? What’s so special about you?”

“I didn’t know at first. I thought maybe it was because I’ve got two talents – I’m an empath and a TK, so if I’d wanted to run away, I could have picked your fucking lock anytime,” he says, and Dek sits bolt upright, shocked at the revelation and his own stupidity. He should have found out what that bloody tattoo actually meant. “They were certainly interested in the empathy...uh...that’s where a lot of the physical stuff....” He looks nauseated again, and Dek doesn’t press – he’s got enough horror images in his mind without Ren’s adding to them. “There was a TP called Jiffir running that side of things, a real whacko. The head of the ‘researchers’,” he makes the quotes with a expression of revulsion, “was someone called Fei hon Detel, who made Jiffir look like a kindly person. He was more interested in paranormal fertility. After I’d been there for a while, and had like about the hundredth semen sample extracted, I found out that the one thing all of us had in common was that we had viable sperm.”

“That’s not possible,” Dek says, shaking his head. “My brother’s a PK. He can’t have kids.”

“Neither could I...before. Look – to make a baby, you need more than a few hundred live sperm per shot. A man’s considered infertile if he’s not producing at least twenty million sperm per myclit, and I don’t produce anything like that. I make the equivalent of a bucket of fresh water for all the salt in the Northern Sea. But that was apparently enough to make us interesting to Fei hon Detel and his people. At first they were trying to up the sperm production, so we were on a lot of different drugs. They affected blood clotting, caused strokes...some of us died,” he said quietly. “They were the lucky ones.”

“Why paranormals?” Dek asks, confused by all this. He had no idea anything like this went on in a civilised country, let alone Pindone.

“You can’t figure that out?” Ren says, sneering again. “Ex-military and you can’t imagine?”

Dek’s gut goes cold and heavy as he suddenly gets it. “They wanted to breed you. Your powers.”

“Exactly. My...Geya...was working on it. At least...working on the fertility issue. She divorced me as soon as I was charged – didn’t even wait for the conviction.”

Better that than having her crushed by three thousand parkigs of machinery, Dek thinks, his brief sympathy for this story going cold. “Continue.”

“What did I say?” Ren asks, frowning at him. “You...went all....”

“Continue,” Dek says, lifting the gun again.

Ren purses his lips. “Look – you can threaten me all you like, but I’m not nearly as scared of you as I am of those bastards. I’m serious – I’d rather be dead than go back.” He closes his eyes briefly as if he’s in pain, then lifts his mug and drinks some of the sweet khevai. “About six months ago – not exactly sure how long because we had no way of keeping a record of time – the drug regime changed, so did our diet. Some time after that I was operated on, but whatever it was, failed, so they tried again. That’s when I was told they were implanting a blastocyst on my intestines. They were making me carry a foetus,” he says in response to Dek’s uncomprehending look. “No idea why, and I don’t know how it was even possible – I knew the theory of it, and women have abdominal pregnancies from time to time, but it’s such a risky strategy and men aren’t exactly equipped....”

Dek shakes his head, still wrapping his mind around the idea that the man across from him is carrying a child. No – a foetus. It won’t be a child until it’s born, and that is not happening here, he’s sure of that. “So you escaped.”

“No. We were rescued. A group of paranormals came and...blasted us out. Killed everyone who wasn’t a prisoner,” Ren says, looking ill at the memory. “They were Weadenisi. They said they’d discovered what was going on and were going to get us out.”

“‘Were’?”

“Yeah. Didn’t go to plan.” Ren closes his eyes again as if he’s replaying it in his memory. “The TK flew us out to a rendezvous point with a flyer. They were well-prepared, had full kits ready for us, snow gear, all that, and gave us all a medical once over. When I told them what had happened to some of us, they said they weren’t equipped for such a dangerous operation, but they would remove the foetuses when we got to where we were going.”

“Did they say where?”

Ren shakes his head. “I think they didn’t want to tell us too much. All they would say was that we were under the protection of ‘Wechel hon Gezi’.”

“Then maybe we can get you to him and he can help you.”

Ren blinks. “‘We’?”

Dek curses his slip. “Tell me about the accident.”

“Oh. Right. Jevizel – that’s the TK – got us to an airstrip. I guess it was still pretty far north, but south of where we were...where are we now?” Dek doesn’t answer and Ren sighs. “He and the PK left us with the others who were going to fly us out, because they wanted to make sure nothing was left of the compound. Everything was fine until this massive storm hit. The flyer started to break up, I think – it happened really fast – the pilot lost control and we crashed. Most of our group were killed, but five of us survived. Two...died that night. I did all I could but....”

His eyes go lost and sad again. “Edwe, Jembin and I decided we’d just head south – we knew it was a long shot, but we got what we could from the flyer’s emergency kit and supplies, and started to walk. But Edwe must have taken a hit across here,” Ren says, drawing a line across his belly, “because he began to haemorrhage internally. The placenta was probably abrupted – ripped off. All we could do was watch him die. Then it was just me and Jembin, one of the Weadenisis. We walked and walked and maybe we’d have had a chance but he fell down the side of an ice ridge and broke his neck five days before you found me. We’d almost run out of food by then and I couldn’t really forage on my own. So I would have died if you hadn’t found me. Just gone to sleep and never woken up, I guess.” His eyes seem to say he wishes that had been the case.

Dek concentrates on distances. They might have managed as much as fifteen pardecs a day, but in this weather, with injuries, that’s unlikely. The crashed flyer could be as little as a hundred, or even fifty pardecs from here – but in which direction, and what does it matter anyway, since everyone’s dead? “Why did you survive? Of all of them?”

“Why did you?” Ren asks quietly, and Dek clenches his fists. “I don’t know. I didn’t want this, Dek. I’m not a traitor. I never...and my sister...fuck.” He gets up and walks into the living room. Dek doesn’t try and stop him. He’s relieved, secretly, that the chain idea is a bust, but it does leave him with different problems. Somehow he doubts Ren will murder him in his sleep, but he’s desperate enough to try something nearly that stupid. Dek holsters his gun. For this, he needs his brain, not a weapon.

Ren’s huddled in the armchair, one knee under his chin. “Going out,” Dek says, and leaves him to it. He needs to get away from people, and to have time to try and make sense of what he’s learned.

It’s snowing hard, making it difficult to get up to the animals, but when he does, the barn is a warm, welcoming fug out of the bitter weather. His urtibes are in their stalls, eating their hay, and not showing any inclination to wander outside – when it’s too cold for them, it’s too fucking cold for anyone. He gets a curry comb and set to work on Jesti, who leans her hairy bulk against him appreciatively as he untangles long knots and snarls from her dense fur.

A man carrying a baby. Ren said it as if it wasn’t a surprise to him, but he’d had longer to get used to the idea. Dek guesses that if people can accept paranormals, they can accept a pregnant man, but why these researchers had done something so outrageous, so dangerous, as well all the other stuff, he can’t fathom. Intellectually, he knows the army probably creates some of its nastier weapons through testing that he’d find unpalatable, but what this lot were up to, goes beyond all common sense. If Ren and his fellow prisoners were so valuable, why throw them away on something that could easily kill them? Maybe these people did it because they had the power to – Dek had seen it in Denebwei, and in Febkeinzian, soldiers drunk on their greater strength and weaponry, abusing their position and ending up with dead and injured civilians. But these weren’t ignorant foot soldiers – these people were doctors, intellectuals. The kind of people Dek had been brought up to admire and respect.

Right now, he has a practical problem. Ren can’t stay with him even if Dek wanted him to, which he doesn’t. Ren is presently incapable of making any significant journey alone and will probably continue to be, even if he had any idea where he could go and be safe, which he doesn’t. Dek could help him if he wanted to, which he doesn’t. “What do you think?” he murmurs to Jesti, scratching under one big hairy ear. She snorts and isn’t much help.

He stays in the barn for nearly two hours because it’s warm and comforting and Ren’s up in the house with his horrible, painful history and his horrible, painful situation, and Dek’s only got room in his head for one fucked-up human being at a time, and that’s him. Finally he can’t delay it any longer, and he does have stuff to attend to. He leaves his gear in the outer hall and slips in through the laundry to get the washing out and hung in the drying room. Then he walks into the main body of the house, looking for Ren.

He’s at the kitchen table, reading a book, and in front of him....

The red mists descend and Dek, his mouth spasming with anger, draws his pistol, advances with murder in his heart. Ren looks up, starts to speak and then realises Dek is drawing a bead.

“Dek! No!” He falls off his chair, scrambles into the corner, and Dek catches him there, smashing him across the face, and then pushing the gun against his forehead, his other hand twisting in the neck of Ren’s shirt, pulling it tight. “Please....” Ren whispers through bleeding lips. “Don’t do this.”

“Who said you could touch it?!” Dek shouts, jabbing the gun hard against Ren’s skull. “Why did you touch it!”

“What? The picture? It fell out of the book – Dek! I never meant...please, let me explain....”

But the red mists are slow to clear, and when Dek comes back to himself, Ren is sprawled on the floor, bleeding from the nose and mouth. Dek stands up, panting, his hands raw and bruised, and looks at the table again. Lomare’s picture is still there, unharmed, and it’s only now that Dek remembers that he’d put this one in a book because he couldn’t stand to look at it any more. His graduation certificate is there too. He remembers the day he put them in there, before he packed up his few belongings and caught the rollo north, and got a ride with Lomare’s uncle to his new home. He remembers kissing the book as he put it in the shelf. It was her book, a book on bridge structural forms. Ren probably chose it at random. Dek picks up the picture and the certificate, and puts them and the book back where they belong. Then he looks to see just how much damage he’s caused.

Ren’s groaning quietly, and Dek is ashamed to be relieved that at least he hadn’t punched him in the stomach, but he’s made a hell of a mess of the guy’s face. He fetches a washcloth and then kneels down. He tries to put it against Ren’s face but the man knocks him away. “Fuck off,” Ren growls, so Dek drops the cloth on his chest and backs away. Ren’s not going to get up while Dek’s in the room, so he retreats to his bedroom and shuts the door. Sits on his bed and rocks, realising with a sick slide in his gut that he’s still as crazy as he was six years ago, just as dangerous, and just as unfit for company as he ever was. He’s sort of glad Lomare’s dead and can’t see him like this. It’d break her heart, he knows that.

He hides for a good hour but he knows he has to face what he’s done, and whatever else he can be accused of, it’s not cowardice. He finds Ren lying on his bed, face turned to the wall. “Hey,” Dek says, not knowing what kind of reception he’ll get, but figuring it won’t be a warm one.

“Come to finish the job?”

“I’m...sorry. I didn’t...I just....”

Ren rolls over slowly and glares at him out of two bruised and bloodied eyes. “I know you’re suffering from PTSD, Dek, and I know you can’t help yourself when I set off your triggers. I’m just mad because you won’t tell me what the fucking triggers are so I don’t have to discover the hard way what not to do around you. Do you have a brother called Tik?”

The abrupt change of subject throws him completely. “What?”

“A brother. Tikome hon Cerimwe. He’s yours?”

“Yes, but....”

Ren sighs. “Went to the academy with him. Is he all right? We used to be close.”

Dek’s had his world view slapped upside the head so many times this morning he feels as dizzy as Ren probably does. “He’s fine. I think. We...uh...don’t have a lot of contact.” A call once or twice a year, and that’s it. Dek never has any news, and Tik knows Dek has little interest in his. But Tik probably knew about Ren going to prison. “He lives in Darsino now. Maybe we could ask him for help.”

“Are you serious? You want this to land on him too?” Ren asks scornfully, waving his hand at his body. “Dek – I don’t know how far their reach extends. I’ve already endangered you – I sure as hell don’t want Tik involved.”

“No.” He walks further into the room. “Uh...how do you feel?”

“Like crap.”

“I’ve got some pain killers....”

“Already took what was safe for a pregnant man, thanks. That’s a scary medicine cabinet you’ve got in there, Dek.”

Dek curls his hand, letting the hurt remind him of what is and is not acceptable behaviour towards this man. “You said you’d die if you didn’t get the baby out. What if you took something that killed it now?”

“Then I’d have a lump of rotting meat inside me until we could find someone to cut it out. Not a great idea. I already thought about that – there are any number of natural abortifacients, but that assumes there’s somewhere for the foetus and placenta to be expelled from and I can assure you, this...whatever it is...isn’t coming out the normal way.” He covers his eyes with his arm.

“Is it yours?”

“I have no idea. Right now it’s nothing more than a parasite and as dangerous as a tumour. I already have a son, Dek. My wife took him away from me.” He uncovers his eyes and looks at Dek again. “You got kids?”

Dek shakes his head, his throat tight. “That...woman. My wife. Dead.”

“Fuck. I’m really sorry, Dek.” He struggles upright, wincing, and giving Dek a much better view of the injuries he’s caused. “Connected to your leg injury?” Dek shakes his head again. “This is one of the things you can’t talk about, right? Now I know not to piss you off by mentioning it. Anything else I shouldn’t do?”

Dek hates the casual, snotty way Ren’s talking to him about the mess Dek’s made of his life, but he tamps the anger down because he owes the guy for the unprovoked attack, and really, it makes sense to get some of the ground rules established for however long Ren is going to be here. “Don’t...touch me. Don’t surprise me, don’t wake me up, especially from a nightmare, and leave my stuff alone. My...personal stuff.”

“All the books?”

“No. Just...I’ll put them away.”

“I’m sorry about that – I wasn’t snooping, I just...I haven’t held a book since I was arrested. I wasn’t even really reading it, I was just...touching. Hoping this was real,” he adds with a crooked smile. “Then you came in and made sure I knew it was real.”

“I...that picture...I....” He clenches his jaw.

Ren slowly gets off the bed, favouring the injured ankle. “It’s all right,” he says quietly. “I’d probably be the same about a picture of Meram if I had one.”

“Your wife set you up, didn’t she?”

Ren hisses in a breath and looks at Dek as narrow-eyed as he can manage. “You worked that out?”

“You said she divorced you as soon as you got charged – like she knew what the outcome would be. And who else would know about something that obscure in a kid’s medical files?”

“Not many people. I...tried not to believe it for a long time. I wanted to believe it was just all bad luck, could have happened to anyone. But when they implanted the blastocyst that second time, something told me that this was what Geya had been working towards. That she probably knew what they were doing and maybe even helped plan it. That doesn’t hurt as much as knowing they’re probably impregnating my sister too. Maybe she’s already had a kid that way. Maybe my kid,” he said, his face twisting. “They didn’t scruple at much else, why should incest bother them?”

Dek has nothing he can say to this, because for all he knows, Ren’s right. The evidence of their callousness is written in the scars on his body, just as Dek’s insanity is marked out on Ren’s face. “You...uh...want lunch?” he finally says, inanely.

Ren seems to accept it as the peace offering it is. “Sure. If you’re making more of those bread rolls, that’d be good. I’m starving again.”

“Eating for two.”

Ren rolls his eyes. “I knew you’d say that.”

Finding food that Ren can eat is a challenge, but at least Dek knows what he’s dealing with now, and since Ren’s now being honest about the situation, they can work on the problem together. Bland or salty works, as does sweet without any other flavours. Ren says ‘morning sickness’ can come at any time. “Stress,” he explains, “makes it worse.” Dek’s surprised there’s a time when he’s not upchucking, considering.

Fortunately, Dek’s bread and the meat stock sits easily on Ren’s stomach, and he makes himself eat some soaked dried fruit for the fibre and the vitamins. “Don’t you need drugs to keep this going?” Dek asks, wishing he’d paid more attention in biological science at school, though he doubts the curriculum would have covered this particular situation.

“They’re inside me – an implant,” Ren says, gesturing vaguely at his stomach. “Slow release of hormones. One of the new techs they employed was chatty – seemed to think I’d find it fascinating,” he says, grimacing. “Mostly the foetus produces what it needs. Towards the end, I’ll need more hormonal support – they assumed I’d still be there to receive it. Not entirely sure what will happen if I don’t get it – babies are amazingly tough, but this is about the most dangerous pregnancy type there is. Not to mention the most implausible,” he adds, his bruised lips twisting wryly.

“Why do it? Why risk you if you’re so valuable?” Dek asks, ladling out more stock and offering Ren another roll. Even without the pregnancy, the man’s got a deficit and this is no place for someone so low in body fat. Fortunately, Dek’s stores are healthy – for now, at least.

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” Ren says slowly. “I think...maybe they were running out of time. Being pressured for results. That kind of facility costs a lot of money to run, with all the guards and researchers and supplies. Most of what Jiffir was doing was sadism dressed up as science – probably not interesting or useful to anyone but him, though I suppose he spun some yarn about manipulating paranormals or something. The fertility stuff is more widely applicable, but I guess they weren’t getting anywhere much using our sperm. I think this might have been their last gasp, to come up with something that would really make an impact and justify the cost. I think we were getting close to being expendable – for all I know, we were going to be put down soon anyway.” Dek winces. “If that’s the case, then it was a win-win situation. If we died, they were no worse off. If they succeeded, they could present male pregnancy as a real alternative for infertile or same sex couples. In other circumstances, this might have been something I actually wanted.”

Hell no, Dek thinks, instantly revolted. He and Lomare had wanted children very much, but no way would he have considered this as an option. But then he is – or was – very fertile, and so was she, so maybe he’d feel different if he was paranormal like Ren or Tik. “I’ve got kids,” he blurts out. “Technically,” he amends at Ren’s puzzled frown. “My wife...donated eggs. I gave...you know. To Tik and his wife. We...uh...were waiting. Until I got promoted. So we...they have twins.”

Ren smiles sadly. “Yes, I know – Tik sent me pictures of them. I didn’t realise they were yours. That’s nice. A generous thing to do. Tik’s a great Da.”

Better than I would be, Dek thinks bitterly. “We waited too long.”

“Still time, Dek. You’re what, forty-five?”

“Thirty-eight,” Dek corrects him, irrationally stung at being thought to be older. “Too late for me.”

“Yeah well, I thought that, and look at me,” Ren says dryly, pointing at his gut.

“Stop...doing that.”

Ren tilts his head. “You don’t like to be reminded?”

“No.”

“All right. I don’t have a lot of choice but to think about it, but I’ll try not to shove it in your face. Speaking of faces...I should maybe put some ice on this.”

Guilty again, Dek hurries to find some icepacks, and Ren lies down with them on his face. The guy’s lucky Dek didn’t fracture his cheek or his jaw – maybe there was something in the back of Dek’s damaged mind that held him back. He doesn’t know, but he could have easily killed Ren with his bare hands, and didn’t. Come to think of it, Ren has enough training that he could have fought back better than that – but he didn’t. “Why did you let me?” he asks, watching Ren wince and shift under the cold packs.

“This? You didn’t give me a lot of choice.”

“You didn’t even try to fight back.”

Ren shifts one of the packs so he can glare at Dek. “You try imprisonment for four years where every real or imagined infraction means getting hit with an electroreed or worse, and see how much fight’s left in you. You think I’m a coward?”

Dek doesn’t know what to think. He shakes his head and pushes the pack back onto Ren’s face. “Be back later,” he says, and lets Ren get the rest he needs.

The harwe pelt needs preparation, and he has other small tasks to attend to – he’s never without something to keep his hands busy up here, when he has to depend on himself. He thinks of Ren’s situation, and can’t imagine much that’d be worse – to know that no matter how brave, resourceful or tough he was, he wouldn’t be able to survive without someone else’s help. Even in the army, Dek was never that badly off, though plenty of times he’d been the last hope of one or more of his men. Dek’s always been determined not to be beholden to anyone. Last time he’d made the mistake of relying on someone else, they’d fucking died on him. After Lomare, he swore he’d never let someone be his anchor point again.

But Ren doesn’t have that luxury, and doesn’t even have the wherewithal to make a choice about what to do. Except to kill himself, and even in Dek’s darkest hour, he’s never seriously considered that an option. Not because it’s cowardly but because it’s his duty, somehow, to see it through to the bitter end. After Lomare died, he believed that even more. But it’s Ren’s decision ultimately. Dek won’t stop him if that’s his choice.

Ren’s clothes are dry – thanks to two well-positioned windmills and a solar array further up the hill, heat and electricity are two things Dek’s house has in luxurious abundance, and he could have it a lot harder than he does, living up here – so he collects them and takes them back into Ren’s room. Ren’s pushed all but one of the cold packs off his face – they’re probably pretty unpleasant to a man who’s recently been hypothermic – and is lying on his side, good arm across his belly, staring into space. He doesn’t react when Dek walks in and lays the clothes on the chair. “How are you feeling?” It’s strange to hear the words coming out of his own mouth – he was never good with sick or injured people. Ren would have a much kinder bedside demeanour.

“Pathetic. Don’t mind me. The hormones screw with my moods. Geya used to joke about what men would be like if they could get pregnant. Guess she got her revenge.”

There’s nothing Dek can say to that. If Ren’s ex-wife is behind the betrayal, it’s monstrous, but it’s also ancient history. “When do you think you’ll be fit to travel?”

Ren’s blank expression changes, becomes more animated. “Depends on how I travel and who with.” Dek doesn’t give him a clue and he sighs quietly. “My arm will take at least another three weeks to heal, and be weak for longer than that. But the longer I wait, the larger the foetus gets and the more potential difficulties it can cause. Humans aren’t designed to carry babies attached to their bowels. There’s the risk of foetal death, and that’ll mean I’ll need surgery sooner rather than later. I guess what I’m saying is that if I don’t go soon, I won’t go anywhere. But go where, Dek?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you help me?”

Dek sits on the end of the bed. “The defence post in Osiwen has a decent guy in charge. If we told him what happened to you....”

“Yeah, right, because I have had so much experience of good faith from the Defence Force.”

“I’d talk to him.”

“Dek – please don’t start swinging your fists again, but a stressed out former army officer isn’t exactly the best advocate I could have. I assume you were discharged? You didn’t resign your commission?”

Dek narrows his eyes, but Ren is being carefully non-judgemental in his expression. “Honourable discharge,” he says. “Pensioned off.”

“All right, but people can be funny about mental illness and you’re...not exactly....”

“Sane?” Ren moves back a little, wary of him. “I know I’m crazy.”

Ren lets out a breathy laugh. “You’re not crazy. You’re...tense.”

Dek points at Ren’s battered face. “Crazy. Bugfuck crazy. Lock ‘em up and throw away the key crazy. I heard it all. You don’t need to be nice.”

“Crazy’s not a medical diagnosis, Dek. PTSD’s an illness like any other, and treatable. Didn’t they try?”

“This is me after they tried.”

“Ah. But you stopped going to therapy?”

“Wasn’t doing any good. I don’t like to talk about that stuff.”

Ren raises an eyebrow. “No, really?” and a reluctant grin creeps across Dek’s face. “The point remains though. You’re not the best witness I could hope for. So no defs, and no military.”

Dek didn’t really expect him to agree. “Tik would help. He’d do it for you. He’d do it for anyone – him and Janil both. He helped me.”

“You’re his brother.”

“You’re his friend.”

Ren sighs. “I haven’t seen him in over ten years, and he knows I’m a convicted traitor.”

“Tik doesn’t care about crap like that, and he’ll listen to me, if I explain. Ren, he’s rich, got connections all over. He could do it.” Ren smiles. “What?”

“You said my name. I wondered if you’d even remembered me telling you.”

“Fuck off.”

Ren grins at that briefly, before his expression changes. “I can’t, Dek. He’s got kids. The Darsinis are Pindoni allies. If he got caught helping me, it’d destroy his life. It’s not worth it. Not risking him and his family for me.”

“Then you need to ask this Wechel hon Gezi for help. He’s Pindoni? Does he live here or the Weadenal?”

“Not in Pindone,” Ren says, an odd, unreadable expression on his face. “If I could get to the Weadenal, I might have a chance. But I don’t know how I’d do that.” Dek doesn’t answer, so Ren pushes. “Dek – you’re going to have to tell me where I am, if I’m to have any chance of walking out of here.”

“You don’t have a chance of that anyway – not this time of year. Not in your state.”

“If you’re not going to help me, and I don’t have any other choice, I’d rather die trying than lie here and wait for this fucking thing to come bursting out through my stomach,” Ren snaps. “I just want to know where the hell I am. Damn it, I’ve been kept in the dark and fed shit for four years. Let me have some control back over my life!”

Dek turns on his heel and walks out, goes to his bedroom and fetches what he needs from his desk. He returns to Ren’s room before the other man has even had a chance to stop blinking in surprise, and throws the map down on the bed. “There,” he says, touching the paper carefully, because temper or no temper, maps are valuable. “We’re four hundred pardecs from the Febkeinze border, and twelve hundred from there to the nearest port. You’d never make it on foot before you...pop.”

“But by pack animal? Or trail veecle?”

“Roads are pretty bad between here and the border, and there’s a civil war going on over there. Urtibes are the only option, if you’re going in covert. A flyer or airship would work, but I’m fresh out of them.”

Ren looks up, and through the bruised, puffy flesh, his eyes plead with him. “Dek – you’re my only hope here. Will you let me take one of your animals? I can’t pay, I’ve got no money, but maybe I could send....”

Dek cuts him off with a gesture. “I need all of them. No.”

“But...does anyone else have one spare?”

Lomare’s uncle, Kaisei, runs urtibes, and is where Dek got his animals, but they can’t involve him in this. “No. Can’t ask without causing suspicion.”

Ren closes his eyes. “Then I’m a dead man,” he murmurs.

“If you steal one of my animals, I’ll find you and shoot you.”

“I won’t. I’ve hardly ridden at all. I’d probably fall off a cliff. I give up, Dek. Take it away,” he says tiredly, shoving the map back at him, then rolls over with a pained grunt, dismissing Dek.

Dek picks up the map and carefully folds it. “The defs are the best option.”

“I’m sure you believe that. Would you mind going away? I don’t feel so wonderful and I’d rather not burst into girlish tears in front of you.”

Dek walks out and returns the map to his bedroom. He sits at his desk, trying to see if there’s some way Ren can get out of this mess without Dek having to ruin his own life. But there just isn’t one.

Ren stays in his room until mid-afternoon, and when he comes out, he’s silent, moving slow like he aches. Dek doesn’t get the impression he’s sulking as such, but it’s no surprise that Dek’s attitude is a blow. He leaves the man alone, except to say, as he collects a few precious and private books from the shelves in the living room and leaving the rest of the collection in plain view, “All yours.” Ren looks up, seems grateful, but the bruising on his face is a reminder of how badly wrong things have gone and can go between them. Dek doesn’t stay to hear his thanks, if he has any to give.

Whatever the drama, chores still need to be done, meals have to be prepared, and especially at this time of year, skipping them isn’t an option. Stew’s his staple in the winter, but all the meat he has in store is smoked, and the smell’s something Ren can’t tolerate. The answer is to make a separate batch of soup from his frozen stock and stored vegetables, but if Ren’s going to be here for any length of time, Dek will need to go hunting again.

“Sorry for the trouble,” Ren says quietly as Dek rummages around in the cooler. Dek clenches his jaw and turns around. Ren stumbles back when he sees the expression on his face. “I didn’t mean....”

“How long before this morning sickness stops?”

“I don’t know,” Ren says carefully, clearly try not to set him off. “In women, it can last the whole pregnancy. Mostly it’s done by the fourth or fifth month. I have no idea since I’m not normal.”

“So...another month, maybe?”

“Y-yes. Dek, I can’t promise....”

“Shut up,” and Ren’s mouth snaps closed. “Your arm? Another month do it?”

“Pretty much, though I’ll have to be careful....”

“Right.” Dek slams the container of stock down on the table. “In a month, the thaw starts. It’ll take about four weeks to get across the border, taking it careful. That leaves how much time before you can’t travel?”

“I...a month, four weeks....” Ren rapidly does the calculation. “It’ll be about five months since implantation by then. Two months? I don’t know for sure,” he says, his eyes wide. “Does this mean you’re going to let me have an animal?”

“No,” and Ren slumps, disappointed. “It means I’m going to haul your arse to Jurgizme Port myself. Put you on a boat to the Weadenal, and hope like fuck you can make contact with this Wechel guy.”

Ren straightens up, his mouth open. “You...you’ll really do that?”

“Said it, didn’t I? But if you’re not travel fit in a month, then I’m calling the defs. You won’t be my problem after that.”

“I’ll be fit or I’ll use your gun,” Ren declares.

“Well if you do, make sure you do it out of my territory, dead bodies stink like a son of a bitch.”

Ren’s startled into a laugh. “Yes, they do. Dek...I don’t know what to say.”

“That’s a first. Now shut up, and keep out of my way.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And can that, it pisses me off.”

“All right.” But that doesn’t stop Ren beaming at him. Dek doesn’t smile back. Ren doesn’t realise just what’s ahead of him. If he did, he’d be a lot more worried than he is about this trip.

The real reason Dek wants to delay a month isn’t Ren’s nausea or his arm – it’s to give him time to regain some condition, and to prepare for the longest trip Dek’s undertaken since he moved north. Dek might not be in the army anymore, but he plans everything like a military expedition, and like any expedition, it’ll move on its stomach. The complication is that Ren’s stomach is occupied, and even though Ren has no interest in the foetus itself, to keep him alive, they have to keep it alive. The only way Dek can handle this at all is to treat it like any other problem, and not think too hard about the person or what’s brought them to this pass. He learned long ago that day by day was the only way he’ll get through what’s left of his life.

He hadn’t counted on Ren to actually be of any help, but he’d forgotten he was dealing with ex-military, and a doctor too. Ren might not be of much physical assistance, but his brain’s undamaged, even if in his own way, he’s as fucked up as Dek and maybe more. In some ways, it’s surprising he’s not more fucked up, and Dek suspects once the immediate crisis of this pregnancy and his escape is over, Ren will hit the wall harder and higher than Dek’s ever seen anyone. He’s hoping Ren will be out of his hair long before then.

The pregnancy complicates everything, from clothing to food to sleeping arrangements on the trail. At least Ren’s experience as a doctor and of his ex-wife’s pregnancy, gives him plenty of warning what to expect. Ren being Ren, he can’t help sharing the knowledge, even if Dek would really rather be spared some of the details. “Basically you have to imagine a three parkig lump sitting in your guts under your ribs,” he tells him as Dek’s cutting up leather for his new boots.

“Sounds like fun,” Dek says, thinking nothing of the sort.

“Not much, if Geya was anything to go by. At least I don’t have to worry about vaginal discharge.”

Dek lifts his head and glares. “Do you mind?”

“You’ve seen vaginas, Dek. And your sister-in-law’s a doctor.”

“Some things you don’t talk about,” Dek mutters, and Ren has the audacity to smirk. His mood’s been scarily good since Dek made his decision, though he still calls out and cries in the night, and he has a tendency to disappear into his room and emerge an hour or so later with red eyes and a tight mouth. Dek never talks about it. That side of it isn’t his problem.

The nausea doesn’t seem to be improving much, but Ren claims he’s more comfortable anyway since he can choose when and what he eats, and in the quantities that suits him. Apparently his captors were inclined to force-feeding, and he spent the first six weeks after each implantation in restraints so he wouldn’t try to harm himself or the foetus. If Dek had known that, he would never have put that chain on Ren’s leg. Ren doesn’t appear to be holding a grudge over it, or the beating, though Dek would never have forgiven either if the situations were reversed. Despite his non-stop talking, and his tendency to overshare on the medical details, Ren’s surprisingly less annoying than Dek was expecting, and his frank attitude to Dek’s PTSD actually helps quite a lot.

They talk about it a bit – well, Ren talks, Dek gets on with stuff, since there’s so much to do. “You know, treatment’s moved on since you were discharged,” Ren tells him one evening as Dek’s measuring him up for the trousers he’ll need as the foetus grows. Neither of them ever refer to it as a ‘baby’. Dek doesn’t comment – doesn’t need to. Ren can carry out these conversations in an empty room if he needs to. “There’s some new drugs, some very effective ones, and we’ve had some successes using telepathic therapists too. If you can take the edge off the worst memories, the mind can do the rest of the healing.”

Dek’s not letting some fucking telepath mess with his head, but he doesn’t say this. Ren can sense his scepticism though. “I wouldn’t recommend what they were trying up in the compound. Jiffir was using extreme pain and distress as a way of trying to force the injured mind past the trauma – needless to say, he drove a lot of his subjects insane. I suppose that’s one way of overcoming PTSD – make the person so crazy they can’t distinguish the pain of that from other pain.”

“He sounds pretty crazy himself,” Dek says.

“Well, now he’s fucking dead,” Ren spits out, “and I for one don’t mourn him. I never believed in killing or the death penalty, but I’ve changed my mind about people like him.”

“People say traitors should be hung too,” Dek points out, and gets a glare for his impudence.

“I’m not a traitor. You done?” he snaps, and when Dek nods, Ren stalks off. Dek doesn’t really think he’s a traitor but Ren’s a bit on the sensitive side about it. Dek wonders if his sister’s still alive – in some ways, it’d be merciful to hope she isn’t. Dek doesn’t agree with what they were doing, but they don’t sound like bad people, just misguided. Locking them up just makes martyrs out of them.

Dek concentrates on cutting the heavy cloth and ignores Ren’s tantrum. Two hours later, as Dek’s clearing up and thinking about going to bed, Ren comes into his workroom. “Do you think I’m guilty?” he asks without preamble.

“Only got your word for it,” Dek says, though the honest answer is no, he doesn’t. Something makes him want to poke Ren, though he doesn’t know why, since it just makes the bugger talk more.

“Do you think even if I was, I deserved what happened to me?”

His eyes are huge in the bare overhead work light, his mouth tight and sad, and Dek hasn’t got the heart to provoke him more. “No, I don’t,” he says. “Don’t think you deserved prison at all. Maybe a fine, a note on your professional record.” If the facts are are as Ren’s told him, then the harsh prison sentence is the best proof that this was all an elaborate plot to get hold of him. Janil told him of other doctors who did what Ren did and they barely got a slap on the wrist. Either Ren’s lying, or he’s a victim of a terrible conspiracy. Dek doesn’t know what to believe, but someone stuck that thing in Ren’s belly, and there has to be an explanation for that.

“I didn’t do anything,” Ren says, raising his hand like he wants to throw a punch or something. “I wish someone believed me. Just once before I die, I’d like someone to know the truth.”

“You know, that’s all that counts,” Dek says. “Try these on,” he says, chucking the new trousers over at Ren. “And quit dragging that crap up. Doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to anyone anymore.”

“Does to me,” Ren says, even as he starts to undo his belt. “It matters to me, Dek.”

Dek gives him a hard look. “I can’t fix this for you, Ren. Nothing I say will change what happened to you or why. You’ve got to make your peace with it yourself.”

“Work for you, that attitude?” Ren snipes as he drags the new trousers on.

Dek refuses to bite. “It’s all I’ve got to work with. How do they feel?”

“Good.” He sticks his leg out, feels the fit, examines the drawstring waist that will give him room to expand. Then he looks up with a forced smile. “What the well-dressed pregnant man is wearing this season.”

“They had any sense, they all would,” Dek deadpans.

“I still can’t get over the fact you make all your own clothes. I can’t sew worth a damn.”

“It’s not hard.”

“Teach me how?” Ren asks, his previous anger forgotten.

“Maybe,” Dek says cautiously and Ren smiles. Trousers, boots. These are safe topics. They need to stick to stuff that doesn’t hurt them or they’ll both be so crazy by the end of it, there’ll be nothing left to save.

The month goes surprisingly fast. Ren complains that every time he opens his mouth, Dek tries to shove food into it, which is only a slight exaggeration. Ren’s worryingly out of shape, but that’s hardly surprising since he’s been locked up or restrained for four years. Much as Dek needs him to build up some fitness and get used to the cold, he needs to stack on some weight more, so Dek’s keeping him in the warm house as much as possible, and shovelling the high-energy food in as best he can, given Ren’s constant nausea. Dek rediscovers his skills as a baker, and is sneaking a lot of fat and sucrose into Ren’s diet in the guise of cakes and pies. He can only hope out on the trail that Ren’s morning sickness (or, as Ren’s starting to refer to it, ‘this fucking pukestorm’) will have eased, because he won’t be doing a hell of a lot of fancy baking over a campfire.

Ren’s determined to get a little fitter, and to learn the skills he’ll need while they’re travelling. Dek’s as keen that he should learn, fully aware that if something were to happen to him, Ren would be desperately vulnerable, and while he’s eager to get the bastard off his hands and to safety, he also wants to make sure the job’s done right. If this plan’s botched, Ren would be better off dead – or at least in the hands of the local defs, which Dek’s still convinced might be the better option. Ren won’t even discuss it, and Dek knows better than to force the issue. If Ren’s not travel fit at the end of the month, then Dek will take matters into his own hands. If he is, then Dek will keep his promise.

So Ren starts to work with the urtibes, and reveals an unsuspected deft manner with them. Watching him working confidently and calmly with the sometimes skittish Wuzi, and seeing how Jesti will cross the barn just to have Ren tickle her under the chin, Dek wonders what Ren had been like as a father. The son’s never mentioned, but Dek understands that strategy perfectly well. Some pain’s too deep to drag out into the light. Ren’s son will think he’s dead, and maybe that’s how Ren copes – pretending his boy is dead too. Dek wonders if losing a child hurts more than losing a wife, and decides he’s glad he’ll never have to know.

The one thing Ren’s not too happy about is Dek’s insistence on weapon practice – not just with a knife, but a gun as well. “You did this already in the army,” Dek says, frustrated by Ren’s reluctance.

“Yes, and I hated it. I’ve never killed anyone.”

“Bunch of people died so you could get free,” Dek points out, a little meanly. “Even if you didn’t pull the trigger.”

Ren stiffens, his eyes narrow with annoyance. “Those weren’t people,” he spits. “No human does that sort of thing to someone else.”

“More often than you’d think,” Dek says, remembering the jungles in Denebwei and what they’d discovered in some of the rebel camps. The remains of their prisoners weren’t even recognisable as people any more. “Besides, it’s not just humans you’ll be facing. We’ll be travelling through tjuwai country.”

“I don’t really want to shoot them either,” Ren says glumly. “They’re endangered.”

“You will be too if you hesitate when one comes charging at you. I can’t guarantee to be there to protect you.”

“I don’t need your protection,” Ren snaps. “I need your help, that’s all.”

“And part of that’s protection. No point in pretending you’re much more than deadweight on this. You were anything else, you’d be doing it on your own.”

Ren picks up Dek’s spare handgun, a hard looking curl to his lips. “The shooty end goes this way, right?”

Ren turns out to be a crack shot with pistol and rifle. He just keeps coming up with ways to surprise Dek, and not all of them unpleasant. He’s not squeamish about using the knife to kill prey either, not like you’d expect a city boy to be. But he says he doesn’t want to use it on soldiers, and Dek agrees. If they get caught, Dek will just give Ren up, because he’s not going to turn that much of a traitor and kill their own people to save one man’s life.

But soldiers aren’t the only danger in the forests and mountains here. Smugglers, refugees, poachers and criminals on the run all cross the border illegally around these parts, and the border patrols are always undermanned. They catch about one in a thousand coming across the border, and mostly they have to rely on the inhospitable terrain cutting down the flow to something like manageable proportions. At this time of year, in this area, there won’t be anyone patrolling except by the occasional flyer, which is why travelling now makes sense, though it’s definitely the harshest season to attempt it. They’ll have to climb some high mountain passes, and Dek’s not sure Ren’s up to it. “It’s not me, it’s the parasite,” Ren says, when Dek mentions it. “I can cope with the lower oxygen levels, and so should it, providing we’re not going above four pardecs or going to be up high for too long. Will we?”

“Not planning on it.” But Dek’s still worried. Everything about this is more risky than he’s happy with.

Ren might be useful in other ways too. He knows quite a lot about medicinal plants, at least theoretically, since folk and ancient remedies for common ailments were the subject of his higher degree thesis. Dek knows the plants from the field, and when he’s not sewing or cobbling or repairing in the evenings, he and Ren pour over his books, while Dek explains how things will actually work when they’re on the trail, comparing ideas and uses for the provender they can expect to find. Ren’s done some trapping, though this part of the world is completely new to him, and knows the basics of outdoor survival. The one thing that worries him is the riding, because he hasn’t ridden urtibes hardly at all, and he doesn’t know how his changing shape will affect that. Dek worries too – this isn’t a good place to learn riding skills. But they have no choice – all their other options will bring Ren to official attention. So Ren gets used to the saddles and the gear and the feel of the animals by riding in tight circles inside the barn, and the rest, he’ll have to pick up as he goes along.

As they work and prepare, Ren talks, of course, like he’s making up for four years of missed conversation. He’s curious about Dek’s background – hardly surprising, since he’s curious about everything. Dek doesn’t want to discuss it, but some of it’s relevant so he reluctantly gives a little information when Ren wants to know why he’s so familiar with the border territory and the north. “Grew up in Riekwenil, about three hundred pardecs south of here,” he says. “Then I was stationed on the border for two years, doing the patrol. Spent three years in Febkeinzian too. We moved all over with the army.”

“Your wife was military too?”

Dek clenches his jaw and glares a request for Ren to shut up, which only works half the time. Now Ren’s looking at him with an open, harmless expression that gets under Dek’s guard a lot more often than he’d like, and he finds himself speaking almost without meaning to. “When I met her, she was training as an engineer. She left the army when we married so she could move posts with me. Became a civilian contractor.”

“How did she die?”

Dek gets up and goes to the sink to do some unnecessary clearing up, hoping Ren will take the hint. But two weeks in comfort and safety have made Ren bold, so he actually comes up behind Dek – though at a safe distance, he’s not that bold. “Dek? You know my history. Why can’t I know yours?”

“Don’t want to know yours,” Dek snaps. “You shoved it down my neck. I don’t want to know anything about you. Just get you out of my hair.” He takes a scouring pad and attacks imaginary grime on his spotless tiled splashback until he hears Ren’s slow footsteps leave the room. Only then does his breathing ease, and his gut unclench. Man’s got the sense of a dead fogel.

He hates it when Ren stomps all over his boundaries like this. He knows it’s a human thing – for all he knows, it’s even more of an empath thing – to want to make a connection with someone you’re spending time with, but Dek doesn’t. He doesn’t want to get close to Ren, or get to know him, or care, or do anything at all. He assumed some responsibility for Ren by picking him up off the trail, and more when he promised to take him to Febkeinzian, but there are definite limits to how far that goes, and he doesn’t owe Ren his friendship or his soul.

He also hates the way Ren’s so ultra careful after these (all too frequent) screw ups, because he knows it’s not based on respect, or consideration, but fear. Dek’s a dangerous, unstable man, and Ren’s right to be afraid of what he can do, but it’s one thing to know you’re a crazy bastard, and another to have your nose shoved in it all the time. Dek was happy before Ren appeared in his life, and now he spends too much time thinking about the things he’s lost, the things he never can have. He can only hope that when Ren goes, he’ll get that peace back which he’s fought so hard and long to achieve. He doesn’t want to end up hating Ren, but if Ren keeps poking him, he might well do. Ren doesn’t seem to get the message that Dek just isn’t going to be buddies. Dek will keep him alive, and that’s as far as he’s prepared to go for anyone now.

At the end of the third week, Dek removes the splint and Ren seems to be cautiously optimistic about the healed fracture, testing the movement of his fingers and his hand. “I’ll just need to be careful, try and build it up. But I’ll be ready to travel,” he says with a defiant tilt to his chin.

“And the puking?”

“I think it’s better. Either that new tea mixture’s working, or I’m just improving. I’m putting on weight too.”

Dek assesses him and agrees that he does seem heavier – and not just in the obvious place. The hollows in his cheeks are filling out, his hands seems less scrawny. “Still need to eat,” he says.

“Yes, mother.”

Dek raises an eyebrow. “No, that’s you, remember?” and Ren laughs, not at all offended.

Two days before they plan to leave, Ren stands up after supper, suddenly put his hand over his belly and grunts in pain. “What?” Dek asks, alarmed. “You going to be sick?”

“No. It...uh...I think it moved.” He looks queasy as if the reality of the thing inside him has just hit him. “Wasn’t expecting it to feel like that.”

“Like what?”

“I...it’s really weird. Not a nice weird either.” He swallows. “Guess I better get used to it.”

Dek stares at Ren’s gently swelling stomach, mostly hidden by the heavy shirt and fleece, but still noticeable. There’s a fucking baby in there, he thinks. Or something. Ren’s made a couple of comments which makes it clear he thinks the thing could be horribly deformed, and may not even be human. This would be bad enough if Dek thought there was a real child likely to be produced at the end of it – but if it’s some kind of monster.... “You sure you can do this?”

“Yes. I just want to get going. We should leave tomorrow.”

“No. We’ve got a plan, and I’ve still got things need doing. Go make another pair of underpants if you’re out of things to amuse yourself.”

Ren gives him a disgusted look, but slightly to Dek’s surprise, he takes up the suggestion. He’s a terrible tailor, but he’s only making things he’s wearing himself. Dek’s not stupid enough to wear boxers Ren’s made a botch of.

If it hadn’t been for Ren’s little grunt, Dek would delay their departure a week or so because the weather has turned much more snowy and bitter these last few days. But the longer they wait, the more dangerous it becomes for Ren, and snow’s a risk for the next four months anyway. By then, it’ll be definitely too late, so all Dek can do is make sure Ren’s outdoor gear is as warm and protective as possible, and to be mindful that he daren’t push too hard until Ren’s used to it. Extreme exertion is bad for the foetus, apparently – anything that reduces oxygen flow is – and they have to keep the parasite alive to keep Ren alive. The parasite – Ren always calls it that now. His antipathy to it and his situation seems to be growing day by day, and Dek can’t help but wonder what will happen when – if – Ren’s presented with a live baby. Probably not much – it’s not like Ren’ll be obliged to keep it, and there’s always someone looking for a child to adopt. Ren’s attitude makes sense, but it still bothers Dek a little and he can’t exactly explain why.

The night before, they’re down to the minor packing and cleaning up. Dek’s sent a message to Kaisei to say he’ll be gone for a few months, and asking if he wouldn’t mind dropping in if he’s over this way, which he usually is once or twice a year. Other than that, and another message to Tik, Dek hasn’t got anyone else to inform. “I don’t know how you stand it,” Ren says, shaking his head. “Don’t you miss people?”

“No,” Dek says. “Especially not now.”

“You don’t mean that,” Ren says playfully. Dek doesn’t respond. He does shitting well mean it too.

The trip means Dek’s stores are run down very low now, but he’ll be returning in the spring and can restock in Osiwen on the way back. His vegetable garden’s the biggest regret since he’ll probably be too late for the main planting. He might have to buy in fresh stuff from Kaisei, but he can still do some trapping in the summer and autumn, and it won’t be his first lean year. They can’t carry stores for the entire journey – just enough to get them across the border, or further if Dek can supplement things with trapping and foraging. He’s counting on being able to buy supplies in the large border town of Finmeilidze. He’s hoping to learn more about the civil war situation too. Last he heard, fighting was confined to the more heavily populated, prosperous southeast, but he can’t take that for granted. It’s one of the few times he’s regretted not having a viewcom or skimmer in the house, but military intel isn’t be available on the public services anyway.

The border didn’t used to be any better guarded on the Febkeinze side than their own, the Febkeinze having better things to do with their small army than defend a long and mainly indefensible border. The area stretching on their side of the mountain range is poor farming territory, being in a significant rain shadow, and contains mainly mines and thermal energy generation plants. The plants will be guarded, as will the bigger mines. Dek’s planning to keep well clear of them, stick to the arid plains. He might be able to put Ren on a rollo at some point, but he doesn’t know how well the infrastructure’s working right now. Ferries run along the Limodi river down to Jurgizme Port and they’re a much better proposition. They can take the animals on board as well, and it would cut at least a month off their journey time. That kind of saving could make all the difference to Ren.

Because of these plans, they need to take other things besides food. He’s kept his habit of having a good cache of paper money on hand – always came in handy when he was posted outside the country – and they might need it for bribes or supplies. Dek doesn’t want to be accessing his account from Febkeinzian if he can help it, that’s for sure.

Ren stares at the notes as Dek carefully divides it into two piles – one for him, one for Ren to carry. “Dek...this is costing you a fortune.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Dek’s got the money to spare and then some. He hardly ever thinks about this stuff any more. Lomare’s life insurance paid for the house, and then some, adding to the careful savings they’d made, preparing for a family they never ended up having. His invalid service pension is more than he needs to live on even without the interest on the rest of it. His bank account grows every year, and he barely has to touch it. He makes enough from his pelts to cover his basic requirements, and the big expenses – the cooker, the washer, the household appliances that he’d replaced when he bought this house – are done with for a few years. Everything costs three to four times more than city prices up here, with having to get them delivered by trail transport, but his needs really are simple. He orders a few books every year to collect when he goes to Osiwen, and he’s bought two new rifles, but that’s it, apart from staples like cloth and flour and sucrose which are more effort than it’s worth to produce himself. He’s not bought boots in the entire time he’s lived here.

“Look – I’ll try and repay you, if I can get settled in the Weadenal....”

Dek keeps counting the money. “When you get settled, that’s the end of it. Don’t want to see or hear from you again. Stay out of my life.”

Ren looks like he’s been punched. “All right. Sorry to burden you now.”

“Too late for that.” He shoves Ren’s pile of cash at him. “Put that away and go to bed. We’re moving out at dawn. You be up two hours before.”

“Yes. Uh...good night.”

Dek just grunts and turns away. He’s sorry to hurt Ren because the guy’s not a bad person, and had more than his share of sorrow, but better to be clear about things now. This trip’s going to be tough enough without other distractions.

It’s still snowing when Dek looks out the window at first light, but the wind’s dropped and the temperature’s risen a tad, so he thinks they’ll just have to risk it. Ren’s more than ready – he’s been fully suited up for nearly an hour, and the grim set to his mouth means he’s not going to stay whatever Dek decides. When Dek turns around from the window and nods, Ren gives him a tight little smile. “So what are we waiting for?”

“Nothing. Let’s go.”

He can’t help a little knot of anxiety at leaving his home for so long, on a trip with such uncertain prospects. He pats a porch post as he walks past it, and hopes he’ll be seeing it again soon.

They take their time loading the animals, because this can make the difference between extreme discomfort and a safe, easy ride. Dek’s taking no chances about their protection either. He’s given Ren a handgun and one of the new rifles, and they’re both carrying knives at their belts and in their boots. Each of them is carrying enough equipment that if they get separated or one of them is lost, the other can carry on alone, though what Ren will do if Dek dies, he has no idea. They haven’t talked about it. Ren’s aware as Dek is of the dangers out here, how vulnerable his situation is, but as Dek pauses, preparing to haul himself up onto Jesti’s back, and says, “Last chance to back out,” Ren just shakes his head, and mounts up at the same time Dek does. So that’s that.

After some consideration, Dek’s put Ren on Wuzi because he’s their biggest animal, and, under Ren’s control, placid enough. He’s just young and full of himself, so he and Ren make a good pair. Guteb is their pack animal. All three urtibes are in top condition, and can do without substantial food for several weeks if need be, so long as Dek keeps the water up to them. He’s carrying grain, and they should be able to cut fodder for the next couple of weeks at least, but this trip is going to test them every bit as much as the humans.

After weeks in the house, listening to Ren’s near constant conversation, the snow-muffled silence almost feels to Dek like he’s gone deaf. It takes him a few minutes to tune into his surroundings, but then a familiar contentment steals over him. This is his land and he’s in his rightful place. He ignores Ren behind him for a little while, just so he can enjoy the soundless fall of the snowflakes on the landscape. Ren seems to respect that need, because he says not a word as they head down the path to the tree line.

The snow’s deeper than when he passed this way five weeks earlier, and if he’d been on foot again, he doubts he’d make it. The flat, perfectly adapted feet of the urtibes easily manage the crisp snow, and he fancies, from the delighted little snorts and weird chuckles Jesti gives out from time to time, that she’s actually enjoying herself. This is their element, after all.

They ride single file most of the morning. Dek sets a deliberately easy pace, looking back every few minutes to see that Ren’s coping with the riding and keeping his seat. The man seems to be doing all right, and with a taller animal and two healthy arms, is managing a lot better this time. He doesn’t talk much, only responding to Dek’s somewhat obsessive checking of whether he’s feeling too cold or tired with curt monosyllables. They’re both muffled up to the eyebrows, and Dek can’t tell anything from the little bit of skin that’s poking out from snow-encrusted wool. He supposes that Ren won’t enjoy any of this all that much, especially since he’s not had long to get over a pretty nasty physical ordeal, but there are no complaints.

He stops every couple of hours so they can drink water, or, when they make a fire at noon, a couple of mugs of deliciously hot khevai. Each time they rest, he checks Ren’s face, hands and feet for frostbite, checks his responses to make sure he’s not hypothermic again, or even too tired, because that can kill as easily as the cold. Ren endures it all patiently, though when Dek forbids him the least unnecessary movement, or to help with the chores, he makes a snide comment about Dek treating him like a cheap romance novel heroine. Put you in a book, Dek thinks as he turns his back on his insolent companion, have to pay people to read it.

The snow eases in the afternoon, but the wind whips up, and the drifting snow and the raw cold forces them to call a halt a little earlier than Dek planned. They’ve made decent progress – easily twenty pardecs – and if they can keep this up, they’ll cross the mountains in much less than the projected four weeks. But it’s only the first day and this country learns a man not to be cocky. Seeing Ren’s slow, clumsy movements as he gets off Wuzi, follows Dek around the campsite in a daze, tells Dek his caution was warranted. Twenty pardecs is plenty for one day.

The night’s harder than the daylight hours in some ways. Dek’s done what he can to provide comfortable bedding for Ren, who’s been sleeping poorly, but there’s no getting away from the fact they’re lying on frozen ground in subzero temperatures in a small space that would be cosy for one man, let alone two. Or that both of them are prone to nightmares that are worsened by stress. As Ren staggers out of the tent in the morning, he gives Dek a wan smile. “Maybe we should have practiced this,” he says, then bends over to throw up.

Maybe they should have. At least it had been warm enough. The bed of thick furs was well worth the effort of bringing them, and of losing the price of the pelts. He might be able to sell some of the better ones anyway, once the weather warms up after they cross the border.

He takes it even more slowly the second day. The knife-like wind dies down, which is a relief, and the snow isn’t as deep in the forest as it is outside, so the animals can walk more easily. He lets them forage a little on low branches, scrape out snow-protected seedlings with their horny feet – doesn’t lose them a lot of time, and it means he can assess Ren without making it too obvious. Ren’s more tired today, and the morning nausea persists until noon, but lunch perks him up a little, and over hot food, he asks Dek about the forest and his trapping, inconsequential stuff, making conversation out of habit despite his weariness. Dek plays along, not minding the harmless curiosity. It’s reassuring, in a way, to know Ren can still scrape up the energy to talk.

It ebbs and flows, the stream of words, and Dek can’t help being curious about the pattern to it over the next few days. As they ride, Ren hardly talks at all, saving his energy. At rest, around the campfire in the evening, he’s still subdued. More than once he starts to say something, only to stop speaking with an odd look at Dek. Dek’s confused at first, then remembers what he’s said to Ren about their future non-contact, and understands. Ren can’t help himself, but he’s trying to respect Dek’s boundaries. It’s tiring, and Dek would tell him to knock it off, except that might encourage him. Though the strange wary companionship he’d tried so hard to stifle back at the house, is still flickering into life – and he doesn’t entirely regret that – he doesn’t want Ren to get ideas.

It’s in the tent at night as they settle down to sleep, that the words come the easiest. Ren mumbles sleepy inconsequential observations about the day, mutter about how the damn parasite is kicking his guts or how he’s developing callosities from the saddle. He’s talking to himself mostly. Dek just listens, or grunts if he thinks it necessary, and wonders if Ren was like this with his wife, or if it’s a reaction to four years in hell. He doesn’t mind it as much as he thought he would.

The first few days Ren struggles with all of it, and there’s a couple of times when Dek gives serious thought to turning back, but then after that he adapts to the cold and the discomfort and though urtibes aren’t the easiest animals to ride, he takes to that like one born to it. Dek still keeps a close eye on him but now he can spend more time concentrating on his own riding, and on the trail. When they reach the foothills, that’ll become even more essential than in this lowland area which he knows so well, and which is relatively safe. The weather is always unpredictable at the higher altitudes and that’s something he can only prepare for as best he can. The first bad storm could kill them, and that’s out of his hands. But he knew the risks before he left. So did Ren. He still chose to go.

Until they reach the foothills, they’re lucky with the weather. The worst of it is the heavy snow that’s already fallen, and what gets dumped on them in two blizzards, a week apart. They lose one day because of it, spending it buried in a snow cave because the tent can’t cope with the storm force winds. That’s...not a good day for Ren. They’re warm enough – Dek’s made more snow caves than he has boots, so the thing’s comfortable and provides excellent shelter – but he’d forgotten who he was dealing with, and afterwards, he kicks himself for not thinking about it in advance, because the enclosed space triggers horrific memories of torture for Ren. Memories of being shut in a box for nearly two days and tormented with electrodes, memories of being tied down and forced to experience the emotions of other men being tortured, and Ren will do anything, including killing himself, to get away from the terror and the pain, if Dek will let him.

Dek won’t, not like this, but it’s a fucking hard battle to stop him. Dek hangs onto him hard, fighting him down, to stop him trying to claw his way through the roof of the shelter and outside into the killing weather. When the flashbacks end, after far too long a time, Ren clings to him, whimpering and crying, helpless as a child and adrift in his mind. When he finally falls asleep, Dek lies in the dark and tries to calm his breathing. The worst of it is, it won’t be the last time he’ll have to make a snow cave for them. That’s a certainty. Somehow, Ren will have to deal with the memories because turning back’s no longer an option for him.

The howling wind has dropped to a stiff breeze by the time Dek digs them out the following morning. The urtibes rise like shaggy boulders from their snowy rest, and snort their displeasure at their encrusted fur. Dek doesn’t waste time trying to build a fire – they’ve got melted snow for their own use and the animals, and the sooner they get on their way the better. Ren doesn’t question the decision. In fact, Ren’s silent all day, white-faced and nervy and refusing to eat with nauseated shakes of his head. He doesn’t mention his freakout until Dek’s raising the tent for the evening. “I...uh...don’t know if that’ll happen again.”

“Probably will,” Dek says.

“Yeah. Look....”

“It help you, me being there?” Ren, surprised, nods at him. “You do what you have to. I do. Won’t think less of you if you cry.”

There are crystals on his face, maybe snow, maybe tears, making his eyelashes sparkle in the lantern light. With his pale skin he looks like he’s made out of snow, but his problem is that he’s not. His heart’s too warm for what’s he’s been through. “I’ll try not to.”

“Do what you have to,” Dek repeats. Ren needs psych counselling and probably drugs but there are none to be had for thousands of pardecs in any direction they choose to look. Dek can’t help him except by being there. For now Ren can only do what Dek does, which is to endure. Works about fifty percent of the time. Dek figures that’s good enough.

That setback aside, the trip is going a lot smoother than he’d dared hope. He knows this territory moderately well from his summer hunting, has been across the border twice on this route during his army days and he’s got excellent maps, but there’s no overestimating the danger of what they’re attempting. He’s got absolutely no complaints about Ren’s conduct on the trail – he follows orders and instructions with perfect obedience and good instincts, and if he questions anything Dek says, he does so intelligently, twice saving them both from a near catastrophic mistake. Dek revises his initial assessment about what kind of soldier Ren would have made, but he still would have got rid of him because Ren really wouldn’t have been happy in the army, and Dek had only wanted soldiers who liked the job. Like he had before he went crazy.

Two weeks in and they’ve started to climb into the mountains for real. Going is slow and dangerous now, and the riding takes real effort, real concentration. Freezing fog plagues them, forcing them to halt, unable to see, barely able to breathe as the frigid air steals all the warmth from their lungs. Dek almost prefers the blizzards. It’s been a week and a half since they saw the sun, or sky that wasn’t burdened with snow and sleet cloud.

The trail they’re following is relatively snow-free, sheltered as it is by the looming black rock mountains, but that only means they’ve swapped one danger for another since the path and almost every surface is covered in ice at depressingly frequent intervals. The animals hate it but they’re adapted for this too, fortunately, and can walk confidently where a man would break a leg as soon as he set foot to ground. Even so, their speed has dropped to under a pardec an hour – slower than Dek can crawl, not that he’s any intention of doing so. He has to force himself not to stare over the side towards the certain death that awaits the unwary.

They’re barely creeping along a dangerously narrow and exposed part of the trail, when Jesti snorts and Dek looks up, peering at the rocks and the snow and the ice ahead, trying to decode the images. He holds his hand up for Ren to halt. “What?” Ren asks quietly, but then he sees them too – a small group of people huddled under a ledge, a five hundred or so midecs ahead of them. Dressed in brown and black, their faces hidden, they seem almost part of the rocks themselves. “What the hell?”

“Febkeinze.”

They can hardly ride past, so Dek dismounts. One of the people detaches themselves from the group and walks slowly towards him. “Greetings,” Dek says politely in Febkeinze.

The man stops short and stares as if Dek’s descended from the skies. He begins to babble so fast that the only words Dek can make out are ‘help’, ‘lost’ and ‘food’. He holds his hands up. “Slowly – I don’t speak Febkeinze that well.” Behind him, he can almost hear Ren’s impatient curiosity, but no way is he letting Ren deal with this.

The man explains, and it’s a depressingly familiar story – he and his family have come over the border, but are now lost and out of supplies. Ren gets bored with waiting, and before Dek can stop him, he’s walked over to the group and hunkered down, smiling at the women, and patting the kids reassuringly. All without speaking a word of the language.

“Please, can you help us?” the man asks.

He’s just a kid, Dek realises. An underfed, undersupplied, under-informed infant in a harsh, lethal landscape that’s brutally unforgiving of stupidity, and there’s fuck all Dek can do about that. “Sorry, friend, we’re going the other way.”

The man’s hands flutter helplessly in front of him. Dek wishes these people would get themselves some decent gloves before they attempted the impossible – they never do. All of them underestimate the mountains. “My wife...please, she’s pregnant.”

Marra’s putrefying testicles. “I’m sorry. We can’t do anything about it.”

Ren, still crouching with the group, turns. “Dek?”

“They’re lost and hungry, what a surprise.”

“We have food.”

“Yeah – enough for us. We share, we all die. Fact of life.”

Ren gets to his feet, smiles at the toddler – fucking hell, what are these people thinking of to bring children this small out in this – and walks over, still smiling, but his eyes aren’t smiling at all. “There are three children here, Dek. And a pregnant woman.”

“And you’re a pregnant man, so what’s the difference between her dying of cold and starvation and you doing that?”

Ren bares his teeth but it’s not a smile. “No one dies at my expense. Give her my share.”

“And the next one? Because there will be more, Ren. I warned you about this. People come across these mountains all the fucking time, and most of them die. We’ll probably die too, but it’s a certainty if we split our supplies.”

“Can’t we give them the game? Some of the furs? They could give you information about the war. Please, Dek. We’ve got more than we absolutely need.”

“No, we don’t. Now get on your animal, smile nicely and we’re leaving.”

Ren folds his arms and plants his feet firmly. “You’ll have to shoot me.”

“That’s always an option.”

The man, who clearly speaks not a word of Pindoni, knows they’re arguing but not about what, and now he plucks at Dek’s arm. “Please. At least take my children back with you. We made a mistake but you don’t know what it’s like.”

Dek does, that’s the problem. He knows exactly what they’re running from, more than Ren does. “We don’t have supplies to spare,” he says. “We have to get across the mountains, and he’s sick,” he says, pointing at Ren. “Cancer,” he lies because it’s close enough to the truth.

“But we’re starving. For the children, if not for me. Please.”

Dek hates this, he really hates this. He’s being manipulated into a pointless act which endangers them all, and these people will still die, he knows that. “Ren, get on Wuzi.”

“No, Dek.”

Dek thinks about using his gun on the group – it’d be a kinder death than the mountains offer – but only for a second. “We can give you a small amount,” he says, every word like acid in his throat. “And give you directions to where you can find shelter. That’s all.”

The man’s face breaks into a smile, and Ren, realising what’s happened, grins too. Dek’s hand itches from the need to belt the stupid sod.

They waste nearly four hours with these idiots, giving them hot food, Ren checking the children and mother for frostbite and illness, telling the woman in great detail about what food they can forage, and what to avoid. Dek hands over a couple of gunheis he caught the day before, half a parkig of dried fruit, and a quarter parkig of fat, as well as some khevai grains. All things they will almost certainly need in the coming days and weeks, he thinks bitterly, and nothing like enough to keep these people alive. Ren gives the woman some of the sleeping furs and she clutches them to her with tears streaming down her cheeks, which he kisses while saying soothing things she won’t understand. It’s all maudlin and stupid and what makes him sick to his stomach is knowing none of it will make any difference at all. It’s Denebwei all over again, only with snow.

The only thing that redeems the situation is that he gets up-to-date information about the civil war from the man, who’s a teacher, and not a total moron, just unused to this harsh environment. Dek gives him detailed instructions and draws him a map in one of the notebooks Dek’s brought with them, their cobbled together cover of being two amateur botanists and rock hounds becoming useful a lot sooner than he was expecting. Dek also repairs their crappy tent and tells them how to make it warmer and drier, and shows the man how to make simple snares, with advice as to what he can hope to catch.

There’s a better place for the group to camp for the night if they can move on another pardec, and Dek and Ren watch them make their tortuous way down the path. “You realise all we’ve done is delay the inevitable,” Dek says.

Ren’s smile disappears. “Yes, I do. But it might be enough. You could say that’s all you’re doing for me – delaying the inevitable.”

“You, I agreed to help. Not the entire world. And tonight when your back’s killing you from the cold and you can’t sleep, you just think about those furs you gave away – which, by the way, didn’t even belong to you.”

Ren gives him a lopsided smile. “Oh, I’ll think about them. I’ll be thinking about that little girl’s face when she got some hot soup inside her, and the hope we might have given them, and I’ll be thinking that after four years in prison, I might have just saved a life. Which is all I ever wanted to do.”

Dek shakes his head in disbelief. “That’s the last time you pull that stunt. Do it again, and I’m leaving you here. You can fend for yourself.”

“All right.” But Dek knows that Ren will pull it again, if he thinks he has to, and Dek can only hope he’s got the balls next time to force Ren onto his mount and get him out of the situation. They just can’t save everyone. Only time will tell if they can even save themselves.

Dek is completely right about the result of giving away the furs, and when Ren develops painful constipation as a side effect of the pregnancy for which the donated dried fruit would have been a perfect solution, the desire to say ‘told you so’ sits heavy and tempting on Dek’s tongue. But he doesn’t, and not just because Ren’s miserable in a way that Dek could never have dreamed up as a punishment for stupidity. He’s still shitting mad at the idiot, and determined not to be bounced into acting against his judgement again, but at the back of his mind is a grudging respect – envy even – that even with all Ren’s been through, he’s hung onto more humanity than Dek had even before he went crazy, let alone now.

Four days later, they meet more refugees, but fortunately these are better provided for, and all they want is confirmation of directions. Maybe Ren has really learned a thing or two, because he stays quiet the whole time. Dek’s just intensely relieved to have got past a potentially tricky situation without conflict, and glad they’ll be across the mountain range in just over a week, if all goes well.

He should know better than to tempt fate by thinking such things, he really should. The day’d been going so well too. The weather has remained calm despite some threatening clouds and early rising wind that disappeared almost as soon as they broke camp. Ren’s difficulty has improved rather suddenly after some seeds he’d collected in the foothills for this purpose (and which he’d been hoarding because he’d been expecting the problem) have finally worked their magic. Perhaps because of that, and the unexpectedly still and pleasant conditions, he’s even been a little more chatty than usual. The trail has widened out again, much to Dek’s relief, and it’s covered with crisp snow which the animals are crunching through with every sign of enjoyment. It’s not exactly the same as spring being in the air, but there’s a bounce in their footsteps, at least for a little while.

As they ride side by side under a leaden sky, they talk about the hot pools that Dek knows are about a day’s ride along their path – a slight deviation that he considers well worth it for the benefit they’ll both get from it. “I visited the Nuri Inn once, while I was on leave from the army one time, “ Ren tells him. Dek’s heard of the resort – everyone’s heard of it. “I didn’t want to check out.”

“What is it, a thousand a night?”

“Two thousand. There were eight of us in the one room. One of the guys was getting married – his last fling before he had to behave himself.” Ren sighs and sounds almost happy. “The food was....” He stops abruptly, straightens up in the saddle. “Company,” he says.

Dek tugs on Jesti’s reins to make her stop, and then he takes a good look at the newcomer. It’s a tall, heavily armed man on an urtibes, and Dek knows right away this is no refugee.

“Poacher,” he murmurs under his breath for Ren’s benefit. “Hi,” he says more loudly.

“Well, you don’t see many folks going thisaways,” the man says with a grin. He’s heavy set, about fifty, with a grey-grizzled beard poking out from under his thick scarf. His outer gear is tanned leather and pelts, homemade and rough looking, and Dek suspects the guy spends very little time in civilisation. Across his pommel is a dead tjuwai cub – worth a lot of money for its beautiful red pelt and claws, and completely illegal to hunt. Dek carefully doesn’t stare at it.

“Got business on the other side,” Dek says. “And I don’t want to be unfriendly, but we need to get moving.”

“Sure. Weather’s looking nasty, don’t want to get stuck out here. You don’t have any grub to spare, do you? I’m getting low.”

“Sorry, no. We’re low ourselves. Been helping refugees,” Dek says with a significant roll of his eyes at Ren, who contrives to look a little soft in the head, smiling rather inanely at them both. “Told him we’d run short, but would he listen?”

“Green, is he?”

“A bit,” Dek says, casually shifting so that his rifle is more visible and his thigh holster’s clear.

“He’s right here,” Ren says indignantly, and the stranger laughs at his offended tone.

“Don’t mind us, boy, tagging the young’uns is good clean sport.”

Dek forces a grin. “We’ll be moving on, then. Good hunting.”

The man nods and rides past them – Dek notes the other furs and rolled up skins, and the brand-new Markeg rifle holstered near the stirrups. He wonders if the rifle was a ‘donation’.

“Get ahead of me,” Dek subvocalises. As Ren does as he asks, Dek filters out the sounds of their own animals and their harness, strains his ears to listen for the pad and thunk of the man’s heavier urtibes, the clink and jingle of reins being tugged to make an animal stop and turn.

It comes barely a minute later, the click of the stirrup holster being unfastened, the slide of metal against oiled leather amazing loud in the perfectly still air. The man’s voice sounds harsh as a fogel call as it bounces off the steep cliffs across the gorge. “Actually, gentlemen, I think I really do need your supplies. Turn around, and don’t try anything – I’ve got a gun pointed at you. I don’t want to shoot you, but I will.”

Dek’s got his hand on his own gun, but he doesn’t hesitate – he doesn’t want the animals spooked by a warning shot – and turns Jesti around. The guy has the Markeg aimed right at him. He gestures at Ren’s back. “You too, young’un.”

Ren’s strangely clumsy as he attempts to obey, Guteb apparently being fractious, groaning and wheezing, as Ren tries to turn him. “Sorry, Guteb. Easy there. Dek, watch out, Guteb’s...!”

There’s a squeal of an outraged urtibes, the barrel of the rifle wavers as the guy’s distracted by the misbehaving animal, but even as Dek has his pistol half out of his holster, there’s a startling loud crack and the guy falls back. The poacher’s urtibes skitters off down the trail and Dek struggles to get a startled Jesti under control. Once he’s got her tightly reined in, he turns to look at his companion. Ren still has his handgun aimed at the poacher. His voice is a harsh whisper, his eyes tight and hard. “Is he dead?”

“Cover me,” Dek says, dismounting, and then handing Ren Jesti’s reins. Holding his pistol straight-armed in front of him, he advances cautiously, expecting the guy to leap up and shoot at him. But the poacher’s leaping days are over – Ren’s shot took him clean in the forehead, killing him instantly. That’s one hell of a shot with a pistol at that distance, from the back of a bucking urtibes.

“Clear.” Dek brings his gun into the rest position, takes a breath, lets it out slow, before he turns around. “Quick thinking.”

“He was heading towards those other people,” Ren says, his voice shaking. He’s still got his pistol pointed at the corpse. “He would have robbed them too.”

“Yes, he would.” Dek holsters his own gun. “Stand down, Ren. You did good.”

But Ren still doesn’t lower the pistol, and his eyes are all wide-pupilled and spooked, his breath coming in short pants that wreathe him in mist. Dek has to walk over and put his hand on Ren’s wrist, ease his arm down, before Ren will look at him. “I could have....”

“No. You did exactly the right thing at the right time. You saved our lives, and damn, you’re good.” And a lot scarier than the poacher, Dek thinks, because Ren gave no warning. He moved so fast, so naturally, even Dek was taken in by his playacting. The guy had no chance. “Come on – we need to sort this mess out.”

Ren clenches his jaw as if he’s about to puke, and Dek gives serious consideration to just mounting up and moving them past this, but his practical nature says they can’t. “Ren, I need your help. Freak out later.”

Ren nods jerkily and dismounts. Hoping the familiar activity will calm him down, Dek lets him secure their animals while Dek goes back to the body to search it. He doesn’t bother with ID – doesn’t care who he was or where he came from. He just wants whatever they can use and to strip the man’s urtibes. The man was low on supplies but not so low they can’t supplement their own with what’s left (Dek won’t make the obvious observation that they’ve got back about the same amount as they gave away, because Ren won’t take that well.)

He briefly considers butchering the tjuwai because the waste is appalling, but they’re not good eating, and Dek figures the stress that looking at the sad little pelt will cause Ren, isn’t worth it. So he drags it off the path so it can be returned to the great circle of nature, and become another tjuwai. The poacher, he shoves over the edge with Ren’s help because burying’s too good for him. By the time anyone in officialdom discovers it, if they ever do, the poacher will be nothing but scattered bones, and Dek will hopefully be back in his own home, hundreds of pardecs away.

They take the man’s knives and guns and blankets, but Dek smashes the illegal traps because he hates that kind of viciousness. The pelts they keep to trade or give away, and the same with the other equipment they can carry easily. They leave the saddle at the side of the trail and let the urtibes go, since they don’t need a fourth, and it’ll do just fine out here on its own. They make good eating but Dek didn’t even consider killing it – it would have been an insult to his own faithful three. He decides not to mention his reasoning to Ren, though it would probably amuse him.

Ren’s gone very quiet and white, and is holding himself like the foetus is kicking him again, which it has been with increasing regularity over the last two weeks. “Come on,” Dek says. “Let’s move on a bit and make early camp. Hot pools tomorrow with any luck.”

Ren mounts up without a word, and doesn’t speak at all for the rest of the day, even when Dek makes camp and they’re sitting around the fire. It’s awkward, because Dek’s lost any knack he ever had of offering comfort, and the last thing he wants to do is get Ren to open up, but at the same time, he’s seen soldiers who looked like this, get up and blow their heads off with their own weapons before now. So he gathers his courage and puts his hand on Ren’s wrist. “He really was going to kill us. Seen the type before. He was just getting us into the best position for him. Probably would have made us dig our own graves if the ground wasn’t frozen.”

Ren’s face is bloodless, despite the heat from the fire. “I know. I don’t know how I knew, but...I could sense his...glee. His smugness. But that wasn’t the reason I...I just knew. And it was like it all laid out in front of me, how I could stop him. I just did it. I didn’t warn him. I just executed him.”

Dek squeezes Ren’s wrist again, hard enough to feel through the layers. “It was him or us. If you’d warned him, he’d have killed us there and then. I bet he’s killed before, on this very trail, on this trip even. You were right – he would have taken out those other people. You’ve got no reason to feel guilty.”

Ren turns to look at him with stark eyes. “But I don’t. That’s what horrifies me. I’m glad he’s dead. It felt good to kill him. And that’s revolting. That’s...not what I am. What I trained to be. I’m a doctor.”

“You’re also a soldier. You didn’t kill wantonly, you didn’t kill for fun – you did your job and that feels good. Let it go. You got plenty of reason to chew on things – don’t let this be one of them.”

Ren closes his eyes, shakes his head a little as if arguing with himself. “I don’t think I’d have done it before,” he murmurs. “They changed me.”

“Everything changes us. They didn’t make you a bad person. If they had, I wouldn’t be doing this. Think about that.”

Ren looks at him, slightly startled. Starts to speak, then closes his mouth. He brings his other hand up and covers Dek’s with it, on his wrist. “Thank you. I know...talking about this...to me...makes you sick. But thank you. It helps.”

Dek wants to say, you don’t make me sick. He wants to say, it’s not actually about you at all. But he can’t. Instead, he just pats Ren’s hand and gets up, looking for more wood. Crisis averted, he thinks, and knows he’s a broken human being for not being able to offer Ren more. He’ll never be that kind of man again, but it’s something he’s made an accommodation with long ago. He’s had no choice but to.

They reach the hot pools in the early afternoon the next day, and more than ever, Dek’s glad he’s planned to stop here. He’s been anticipating the pure relief that soaking in the steaming springs will give his strained muscles and aching bones, for hours, and the sight of the little oasis of warmth and greenery in among the starkness of the surrounding basalt range, gives his spirits a badly needed lift. The smell of rotten eggs isn’t exactly wonderful, but doesn’t take away from the surreal beauty of the place. Bubbling water is restrained by pure black stone, vapour rising into air that’s below freezing a few midecs above the surface of the pools. Snow banks up at their edges, but melts elsewhere as the rock is heated from below. Where it does, the startling green of opportunistic bushes and plants, even a few gnarled, deformed trees, contrasts sharply with the monochrome environment and come as a welcome relief after the harshness of the mountain path.

He’s no stranger to the joys of thermal baths. He sometimes makes the trek to a small hot spring a hundred pardecs from the house, too small and uninspiring to attract visitors, too unattractive to tempt a resort owner. He can bathe in hot water in his house, of course, but the sulphurous mineral springs are good for his many aches and pains, and it’s his secret treat, known to him and few others. Though most aren’t as famous as those of the Nuri Inn, such springs and pools are dotted all over Pindone, and many are tourist attractions. These, thousands of midecs above sea level, and nestled in one of the most rugged mountain ranges in western Pindone, probably don’t get a human visitor more than once every ten years.

But he’s not just looking forward a long soak and a chance to ease the aches of the trail. He’s hoping it will help Ren. The man’s still not talking, still brooding over his action the day before, and the discomfort the pregnancy’s causing him is becoming more and more evident as the days pass. His energy levels are dropping, his ease of movement slipping away. He walks as if his back’s killing him, and not just because of the loss of the sleeping furs. The temptation to cut the foetus out and be damned to the consequences would be overwhelming, if it was Dek in this situation. But he’s not and Ren’s not that desperate – not yet – so he can only hope this short interlude will boost him physically and mentally. They’ve got a long way to go yet and Ren can’t afford the depression that seems to be enveloping him.

Under heavy skies that promise more of the snow that’s falling lightly as they arrive, they set up the tent on the edge of a pool over thermally heated rocks. The animals are tethered near the greenery which they attack with gusto, and wash down with buckets of snow-cooled water Dek hauls for them from the pools. Then he takes the dirty clothes a little downstream to wash. He tells Ren to take it easy and soak his feet – he can’t bathe properly because it’s dangerous for the foetus – while Dek attends to the chore. Ren’s so tired, he doesn’t even make a token protest. The warmth of the water and the rocks means they can shed their outer gear, a real luxury. Being clean will be blissful.

They’ve done minimal laundry on the trail so far – socks, the underwear they wear closest to their skin when they have a place to dry the clothes near the fire – but now’s a chance to wash out shirts, longjohns, and themselves, of course. Dek tells Ren to strip and chuck over his clothes, and while Ren huddles under a blanket at the edge of a pool, his pale legs dangling over in the water and snowflakes falling around him, Dek pounds and soaps up their rank belongings, laying them out on the rocks to dry, before stripping himself and washing what he’s been wearing. It’s refreshing to smell the sharp scent of his coarse soap instead of his own body reek, although it’s strange to be naked like this after nearly a month on the trail. A little primeval and liberating, in fact. Belatedly he realises he’s flaunting himself in front of a man whose issues about nudity are nothing to do with modesty and everything to do with the trauma and abuse he received in prison, so he wraps a blanket around his middle before he walks back over to Ren.

“Good?” he asks.

“Wonderful,” Ren says, looking up with a sad smile. “Going for a swim?”

“Yeah. You don’t mind me...?”

“Being naked? No. You’re sort of cute. Tik was cuter.”

Dek blinks at him. “I beg your pardon?”

“Tik. Your brother. Good-looking guy. Good in bed too.”

Dek stares, wondering if Ren’s having him on. Ren’s giving him an innocent look, which tells him nothing. Dek decides not to rise to the bait. It’s ancient history if it’s true, but if it is, it’s news to Dek that his brother’s bisexual. Tik probably doesn’t know Dek is, not that it’s anything but theoretical now. “You talk too much,” he says gruffly, and Ren grins.

He takes off his brace and then gingerly edges into the pool. The water’s fucking, deliciously hot and he slides in slowly with a deep sigh. If Ren could share this, it would do him good, but he can’t, so Dek concentrates on enjoying himself.

He finds a convenient place to sit, and then he looks over to Ren. He’s let the blanket slip from his shoulders and is peering at his protruding stomach. Dek wonders what’s so fascinating but then, with a queasy feeling in his own gut, he sees the skin’s rippling. He wishes it didn’t remind him so much of infested dead things he’s seen on the trail whose hides move like this as they’re consumed from the inside out.

Ren catches him looking. “I used to watch Geya’s stomach move like this,” he murmurs. “She’d complain about the little fellow kicking and I’d...put my hand on him. Like this. I’d talk to him, tell him his Da would really appreciate it if he’d make life a little easier for his Mam. Sometimes it even worked.” His voice catches on the last words, and tears start to spill out of his wide eyes. “I was so happy then,” he whispered. “Looking forward to the baby, looking forward to being a father. I loved Meram, my boy. This....” He slaps his belly painfully hard and Dek starts in shock. “This is a fucking nightmare!” He hides his face in his hands as his shoulders start to shake.

Dek doesn’t know what to do. Ren’s never let it go this bad before, not in front of him. What can Dek say? ‘It’ll be all right?’ That’s a plain lie – it probably won’t. Nothing can give Ren his son back. This...whatever it is, isn’t a substitute by any means.

Ren’s hugging himself now, his head hanging, his breath coming in hard sobs. Under his folded arms, his stomach is still moving. Dek can’t imagine what that feels like, can’t imagine what it is to be reminded every second of every day of the rape of one’s body, one’s integrity. He’s almost starting to think being blown up by a mortar was getting off easy.

He slides across the pond, and put his hand on Ren’s ankle. Ren’s head jerks, and he stares down at Dek. “You can’t give up now,” Dek says. “The worst part’s nearly over.”

“Is it over for you, Dek? How many years has it been since she died?”

Dek clenches his teeth. “I don’t want....”

“To talk about it, no, of course not. But you can mouth platitudes at me, can’t you? ‘Good job, Ren.’ ‘Don’t let it get to you, Ren.’ ‘The worst is over, Ren.’ And yet you’re so fucked up you can’t even tell me how your wife died or when. Me? I’ve got no choice. You can see what’s wrong with me,” he says, a bitter twist to his mouth, a slash with his hand at his obscenely bulging belly. “But your wounds are so special and beyond a mortal’s ken that I daren’t even allude to them. You sit there, revolted at me, judging me, and yet I’m not even allowed to know who or what is doing that judging.”

“Shut up. Shut your damn mouth, Ren,” Dek says, squeezing his ankle painfully and making him wince.

“You act like you’re ashamed of her. Like I should be ashamed of Meram, never mention him. Never mention...how much I miss him. How....” He stops, gritting his teeth against the tears. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I...just want to talk about him sometimes, because I miss him and I...can’t really believe I’ll never see him again. I don’t understand why she did that,” he says almost to himself. “She didn’t hate me. I’d have known if she....”

Dek never had this. He knows Lomare loved him like he knows he has brown hair and eyes, just a fact of existence. She died, loving him, and he let her go, loving her to the very end. He can’t imagine how a wife could be so cold-hearted as to toss her husband to the fates like that. “Thirteen years,” he says. Ren looks up, blinking tears away. “She died thirteen years ago. An accident at work. There was an equipment failure, she was trapped.” Doesn’t really cover it, but Dek can’t make himself put into words the horror of watching her die, watching her know she’s dying. For years, he went to bed every night knowing he’d wake with his mind full of the memories of her grey, cold skin, her failing, laboured breath, the smell of blood and of burning metal from the failed rescue. Now he has different nightmares. He’s almost grateful for Denebwei for that.

Ren clears his throat. “Ah...is that how you hurt your leg?”

Dek shakes his head. “No, that was a lot later. I...just got promoted to utag, and when she died, I asked for a posting overseas. Was stationed all over, but ended up at Denebwei. I was there for three years. I got caught in an ambush. At Altiri.”

“Altiri...the one where the entire squad....”

“Yeah. That’s the one. They said I was lucky to survive. Lucky to keep my leg. Yeah, I was real lucky.”

He closes his eyes, and just like that, like he’s right there, like every time this happens, his nostrils are full of smoke and explosive and blazing fuel, of blood spilled on hot metal and dust mixed with bone ash and flakes of skin, blinded by blazing tropical sun and the blood running into his eyes. He can hear the screaming, the guns in the hands of dying men, the moans and grunts as bullets hit their bodies, and he can’t...fucking...help...can’t...fucking...move....

“Come back, Dek. It’s all right...let it go....” He can hear a quiet voice, a new voice, among all the other sounds, the explosions, the screams, and he doesn’t understand. Who’s talking to him here?

“That’s it...ease out...it’s a memory, not real...come back....”

He opens his eyes and blinks, wondering for a moment why everything’s all black and grey and cold white, instead of sun-gold and blood-red. There’s red, but it’s only Ren’s short hair, the colour of burnished copper, bright and beautiful. Not like blood at all.

Ren has his hand on Dek’s head. “Don’t touch me.” He means to snap, but it comes out as a harsh, husky whisper, like his throat is full of ash. He scoops up some of the pool water and washes out his mouth, letting the mineral taste drive away the other.

“All right.” Ren withdraws his hand unhurriedly then hitches the blanket around his shoulders. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to trigger a flashback.”

“What the fuck did you just do to me?” He can’t remember the last time he came out of a flashback that easily, without his heart trying to pound through his chest and his gut threatening to empty out. He just feels...sad. Like he does when he thinks of Lomare. Like it’s some ordinary grief and not the thing that smashed his body and his life to pieces.

Ren gives him a painful smile. “Just a little benefit of travelling with an empath. I’ve done it before to you in the night, when you’ve had nightmares.”

“I told you not to fucking touch me!”

“You mean in that tent where we have to lie in each other’s arms if we don’t want to end up outside? Yeah, really easy not to touch you there.”

Dek scowls and swims across to the other side of the pool, feeling like a idiot for being angry that Ren’s actually helped him. But Dek doesn’t need his help, and since Ren’s only a few weeks from being out of his life for good, his help’s pretty pointless anyway. Why the hell hadn’t he just left the stupid sod where he found him that day?

Ren’s huddling under the blanket, not looking at him. However angry Dek is – and he’s plenty angry – they’re stuck with each other, unless Dek just leaves him now, which might be tempting, but he’s given his word. He just...needs to make sure the ground rules are clear. Again. So he swims over to Ren, preparing to lay down the law, but Ren forestalls him. “You know, I was pretty much starving to death when you found me that day, but food wasn’t the only thing I was starving for.”

Dek stops. “What?”

“Dek, I’m an empath. Empaths need people. They need to be around positive emotions. They die if you take them away from people, and surrounding them with people who are dead and cold inside like the ones who had me prisoner, is nearly as deadly. I’ve been feeding on you because I have to. But with that goes the need to give back as well. I can’t not do that. I can’t really even control it. So until we part, until we stop being near each other, you’re going to be affected by my talent, and I’m going to be affected by the way you keep choking off your emotions. I don’t know what’s worse – feeling this damn thing kicking me in the guts non-stop or feeling your hostility and anger all the time.” He bends and scoops some water up with his hands, lets it trickle through his fingers with a faraway expression. “I hoped you might have got used to me by now. Guess I was wrong.”

“You want more than I’ve got to give. More than I want to give.”

“Yes, I know,” Ren says not unkindly. “I’m just explaining. I’m fucked up, but I’m a special kind of fucked up,” he says, his mouth twisting in self-disgust. “If it’s any consolation, there’s no earthly way I can hurt you with my talent.”

“What...did you do?” Dek moves a little closer, but is careful not to touch him.

“I ate it.” Ren gives him a quick, embarrassed smile. “What you were feeling. We can do that. Prefer to eat the nice stuff, but I can absorb your fear, your anger, your hate, as easy as I can your happiness. Haven’t had a chance to do that though,” he adds, mouth lifting briefly in an almost smile.

Dek knows almost nothing about empaths – their talent has very little military application, and this is all like some kind of black magic to him. “Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Yeah, it does. But I know how to deal with it mostly, if it’s my choice. It’s the stuff I can’t choose to deal with – all that background anger of yours, their hate of us – that really screws me up. You probably should get out of there now.”

Dek shakes his head at the sudden change of subject – Ren’s good at doing that to him – and carefully climbs out of the pool. He puts the brace back on and grabs the small travel towel Ren hands him, wiping himself down and enjoying the way his skin glows pinkly with absorbed warmth. He looks up at the sky and realises it won’t be long before they lose the light, and Ren’s not had his own bath. Still naked, he walks over to the tent and gets the bucket they use to melt snow in, and comes back. “Your turn.” The flecks of snow are delicious points of tingle against his skin, but it won’t be long before he chills, so he needs to make this fast.

He draws the blanket from Ren’s shoulders and hands him the soap, then, before Ren can get cold, he starts to pour hot water over him. Ren splutters and shivers, but then begins to soap himself. Dek keeps the hot water coming, trying to give Ren at least some of the sensation of soaking in the pool, even if he can’t do it for real. As he pours, watching the water streaming down Ren’s snow-pale skin, down the obscenity of the scars and the utter wrongness of his belly, he thinks about what Ren said, about how hard it is for him to be around someone so hostile. It’s like he’s kicked something small and helpless in the guts. Dek’s got so used to his personality being of no importance to anyone, his problems being no concern but his own, he never gave a second’s thought to what this was like for Ren.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, and though it’s too low for Ren to hear, he looks up, startled. He coughs as Dek accidentally pours water over his face, and then he smiles.

“That was nice. What you...how you felt then. It was...warm. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Dek says, still confused about how this works. He offers Ren the towel. “Hurry up, snow’s getting harder.”

The rest of the daylight they have to use for chores – making a shelter to store the drying clothes, carrying water and feed to the urtibes, netting fish in the cooler pools, and collecting some of the plentiful weird but edible purple algae that grows at the edge of the hotter ones, stuff that lives off the rising mist and the minerals. Good for mother and child, Ren says with a straight face.

They spit the fish on twigs over the fire and eat them whole, with a little sprinkled salt the only flavouring. They’re slightly metallic-flavoured and not the tastiest thing Dek’s ever eaten, but it’s the easiest meal they’ve had since they set out, and the algae isn’t bad, fried in gunhei grease and eaten crisp and crackly straight out of the pan. They give some of it to the animals raw, since Ren says it’s a general tonic, and with food so hard to get out here, Dek won’t waste something that useful.

“Still can’t believe you learned all this stuff out of books,” Dek says, lying back on the blankets near the fire, and feeling warm and comfortable and full. The best, in fact, he’s felt since they left his house. The dull heat from the rocks under the blankets almost makes him want to sleep right here, curled up and comfortable. If it snows, he’d die, of course, but the idea is definitely tempting.

“My mother was a botanist,” Ren explains. “Grew up in a house full of plant books.”

The memory makes his mouth turn down a little, and Dek regrets mentioning it. “I grew up on a small farm,” he says. “Dirt poor. Da sold up and moved south to Tsikeni, started a veecle repair business. I left to join the army soon as I was legal.”

Ren tilts his head, gives him a smile. “You know, that’s the first information you’ve volunteered about yourself.”

“Don’t get used to it,” Dek growls, reaching for his mug of tea.

“Oh, don’t get all nasty again, it’s just an observation. So all this outdoor stuff, you learned on the farm?”

“Some. Some in the army, some since I bought the house. I enjoy it. I can rely on myself, don’t need other people.”

“Lucky you,” Ren says wryly. “But that house isn’t exactly roughing it. I’ve seen people living worse in Vizinken. A lot worse.”

“Yes, I’ve seen ‘em. The house belonged to an author and artist – wilderness artist. He lived up here for thirty years. When he died, he had no family so he left the place to Lom...my wife’s uncle, who owns the property next to it. I was looking for a place to live up here, so he let me have it for a fair price. All I had to do was update the appliances.”

Ren’s grinning. “What?” Dek asks, annoyed at his life being thought so amusing.

“Nothing, nothing. Just nice to see you so chatty.”

“Prick.”

“Yeah, can be. I like your house. But living like that.... I’ve had enough of being alone,” he says with a shiver. He puts his hand on his stomach – something he does a lot now. Probably because the ba...foetus is moving around so much.

“You think you might keep it?” Dek says, sipping his tea. Ren’s smile slips. “It’s a natural question.”

“Yeah, but not one I can deal with. I feel...like even thinking about it is being disloyal to Meram.”

“How old was he when you...you know?”

“Five,” Ren says, grimacing. “Such a happy little boy. Geya hated being pregnant and considering what she did for a living, that’s pretty ironic. She said she’d never have another kid but I loved the whole business of being a father. Everything, even the bad stuff. She let me get on with it, while she got on with her career. I think...that was when we probably drifted apart. I loved her...but I think she stopped being interested in the things I was. But I had Meram and...everything seemed fine. Then it all wasn’t.” He sits up and swipes at his eyes. “Crap, I wish I could stop this. Fucking hormones.”

Not hormones, Dek thinks. Hormones aren’t making him feel this sad. “Maybe one day you’ll see him again.”

Ren turns to him with red eyes, wiping at his nose. “If I live that long. Got to get the parasite out of me first.”

Dek closes his hand over Ren’s wrist. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” Ren’s confused.

“Don’t call it that. It’s a baby. Didn’t ask to be in your belly. Can’t help itself any more than the one inside that woman we met.”

Ren stares at him, and then at Dek’s hand on his wrist. “I...I can’t let myself care. You know all about that, Dek,” he adds unkindly.

“Yeah. And it was doing you harm. You hating this kid is hurting it. Maybe they can sense it. What if it’s an empath too?”

“We don’t even know it’s a human being,” Ren snaps. “For all I know it’s Fei hon Detel’s child, or a genetic experiment, or a baby barchin, or anything. I’m not going to care about a...a thing.”

“That working out for you? Hating it like that?”

“Don’t try and analyse me, Dek, you’re too fucked up.”

“You do it all the time, and you’re fucked up as me. Snow shoes fit either foot, you know.”

Ren shakes his head at him. “You’re something, you really are. I liked it better when you didn’t talk at all.”

“Fine by me,” Dek says, finishing off his tea, and getting up to swill it out. He takes their dishes and eating utensils and cleans them quickly but thoroughly outside the shelter, hangs them up to dry. He uses the latrine and wanders back, intending to tell Ren it’s time to hit the tent.

He finds him staring into the fire. “Sorry,” Ren says. “I didn’t mean to be bitchy. Well, I did, but I know I shouldn’t be. This the most contact you’ve had with people in years?”

Dek sits down again. “Over six. Not enjoying it much. Maybe sometimes,” he corrects honestly, thinking of this evening with its easy quiet conversation, and Ren smiles. “But I don’t want it. I want you gone.”

“Yes, you said, and I know why. I’m being selfish because I need...something to hang onto, or I’ll go crazy. Start running around the woods bare naked, painting my face with berry juice.” Dek arches an eyebrow at the image. “Won’t be pretty.”

“Can think of better sights,” Dek allows and Ren laughs a little. “Don’t know what I can do to help. I haven’t got it in me to do it.”

“You do, you just don’t know it. Even when you....” He extends a hand, carefully so not to spook Dek, and lays it gently on Dek’s wrist. “Just that. Lying next to me. Talking to me. You don’t know what that means after these four years. No one touched me when they weren’t trying to make me hurt. When you helped me wash today, I...I was crying, I was so happy just to be treated so kindly. Sorry if that makes you feel uncomfortable.”

Dek doesn’t know how it makes him feel, except a little scared at being so important to someone he’s desperately trying to get rid of. “You really sleep with my brother?”

Ren laughs again and removes his hand. “Well now, that’ll give you something to think about for the next few weeks, won’t it?”

“Prick.”

“Yep. You ready for bed?”

Lying behind Ren that night, Dek wonders how often his nightmares have been absorbed by Ren’s weird talent, and what they feel like to someone who can do that. Feels amazed that he, with his crippled body and mind, can give anything back to this damaged man. He didn’t think he mattered anymore, doesn’t think he makes any difference to anyone. Had thought the most impact he’s going to have in the future is when he dies and leaves his money to Tik’s boys. But here’s someone who needs him, needs what fragments of comfort he can give, and who’s grateful, desperately grateful, for what he sees as kindness even when it’s nothing of the sort.

It’s dangerous. Ren can hurt him if Dek lets him close, and Dek’s afraid of only one thing now, and that’s more pain. If he knew then what he knows now, he might very well have left Ren to slip into coma and an easy death that day. But he didn’t, and he made a promise, and now he has to suck it up. “Don’t get used to it,” he whispers against Ren’s sleeping back.

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