“I don’t mean to doubt you, friend,” Cadoc said as the three of us floated with our heads just above the surface of the water. “You have once more proven yourself a worthy leader. But what, exactly, are we to do next?”

It was still night, though enough time had passed for me to hope that morning was coming soon. Meanwhile, the monster stood on the shore, watching, waiting.

“I’d hadn’t thought that far ahead,” I said. “But I guess we wait until the monster leaves.”

“And if it doesn’t?” Amaia asked.

A pause. The flow of the river was meandering, but still it took some effort not to drift downriver - we were already being carried off, just a little. We each took the lull in conversation as an opportunity to swim back to where we had started.

“If it doesn’t,” I said, finally. “We could try crossing to the other side.”

“Long way off,” Amaia said.

“Or we can drown,” I finished. “There’s always that option.”

For a minute or two that was sufficient for everyone. We treaded water, watching the yellow-eyed beast watching us.

“Oh shit,” I said, realizing something. “Amaia, how’s the wound?”

“Full of water.”

“Still bleeding?” I asked.

“Dunno.”

Silence again. After the fighting and the running and the narrow escape, the quiet seemed like an oppressive force weighing down the words in our throats. Well, it felt that way for me, at least.

“Alright,” I said. “Next idea. Let’s swim upstream. Maybe the monster won’t follow.”

“Why wouldn’t it follow?” Amaia asked.

“Do you have a better idea?” I asked, frustrated with the situation I had put us all in. “We can’t just tread water here all night until we run out of strength and drown.”

“Is it afraid of water?” she said. “Could we get closer and stand on the shore?”

I blinked at her. I turned, tried to read her face, but that was hard enough in daylight.

“You’re joking,” I said. “You want to get closer?”

“Looked like a cat,” she said. “Sometimes. Part of it.” She didn’t say anything more than that, as if that was a perfectly reasonable explanation of her thoughts all on its own.

“What kind of fucking cat do you people have in this di- part of the country?”

“I will volunteer myself!” Cadoc shouted, and the noise made me cringe - which meant bobbing below the water and very nearly snorting water up my nose. But no one appeared to be joking. Amaia was serious, and Cadoc was serious.

“Sure,” I said. My legs were already getting tired, and I’d have needed sleep anyway. “Whatever. Give it a try.”

So Cadoc swam up towards the shore. He wasn’t directly facing the monster - we had drifted downstream again - but still he was making his way closer and closer to that nightmare.

At some point he stopped, and I could see by the way his body stopped bobbing that he must be standing in the shallows.

For a long time he stood there, staring down the unmoving monster. I watched, my nerves tense, expecting the thing to leap at him at any moment. But it never did.

“So far so good, friends!” he yelled. “This monster is a coward, it seems! Could we not have another try at killing it?”

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“No!” I yelled. “Absolutely not! Stay there, I’m coming.”

Amaia and I swam up until we reached the shallows as well, and it felt amazing to be able to stand. We hadn’t been in the river long, but I was never much of a swimmer, so it was more draining than you might expect. At least I knew how to swim.

“Thanks for throwing me into the pool as a kid,” I whispered, thinking of my dad and speaking half-sarcastically. “Not only did it teach me how to swim, but how to swim under intense emotional duress.”

“What was that?” Cadoc asked. He turned to face me, and even though I shouldn’t have been at all surprised, I jumped and nearly fell over in shock seeing that a wide, toothy grin was plastered on his face. After all, the monster was not even a stone’s throw away.

“You alright?” Amaia asked as I steadied myself.

“Fine,” I said. “Alive. How’s the wound look?”

Instead of responding, she raised her arm and showed me. I could still clearly see the ring of tooth-marks there, but there wasn’t much blood - washed away, I guessed. But I could see that blood was starting to pool again.

I tried to remember if there was anything wrong with keeping a wound wet. It seemed bad. Seemed like it would cause an infection or something. But what was the alternative? Let it slowly bleed her out?

I took off the upper half of my leather armor - which was, of course, wet and heavy with river water. I would have thought that the water would run off of it better, which made me reconsider what I knew about leather. Which was basically nothing. I knew that people used to boil it to make it rigid. Was this not boiled? Or was it not even leather? Or was it leather from something other than a cow? That seemed likely.

Whatever the case, I peeled it off and threw it onto the clay beach. It was lucky that it was warm at night in those parts, but even still I was getting chilly, and I don’t know if taking the armor off was making it better or worse.

Then I stripped off my shirt - a cotton shirt, a remnant of home. It was dirty - even after being in the river, which tells you something - and it was cut in places, but being underneath my leather most of the time, it was surprisingly intact. Which made it seem like kind of a shame to tear it up.

I tore it into strips as best as I could - harder to do when the fabric is soaking wet. But I managed it. I took one of the longest pieces, and balled up the rest of them and threw them to shore, too. I was hoping they’d dry by the time morning came - and still very much hoping that the monster would leave at sunrise.

The monster didn’t react at all to the ball of rags. Maybe it thought it was a trap. It seemed almost braindead, standing there, unmoving.

“Here,” I said to Amaia. “Not sure how good it will do while wet, and I’ve also never really dressed a wound, but hey, it’s probably better than nothing. Maybe.”

She stared for a minute, then shrugged, holding up her arm. I took that as permission.

I wrapped it as tightly as I could around the bite, and then realized I had nothing to pin the bandage with to keep it in place.

“I’m going to try something,” I said. “If I fuck up, it’s going to hurt, but it won’t do anything but hurt. No damage or anything, I mean. You alright with that?”

“I guess.”

I held one finger over the end of the strip, while my other hand held it in place.

With a thought, I sent mana into my fingertip - but just a little bit. It was a different feeling from normal - most of the time I was trying to flood my hands with as much mana as I possibly could. But this time I tried to let it drip out slowly.

One nail fell, and I melted it immediately into liquid. Carefully I traced a line of these drops across the edge.

Amaia winced a little - the bandage wasn’t very thick, and it was almost certainly hot - but she didn’t stop me. And it seemed to work.

“I’m a genius,” I muttered. “I was thinking, don’t they make glue out of horse hooves or something? Basically the same thing as a nail, right? I mean, they probably treat it with some chemicals or something, but hey, who needs that when you have magic?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Amaia said.

“I concur,” Cadoc said.

“Don’t worry about. All you need to know is that it worked. Now, we wait.”

So we stood there, and I tried my best not to look at the monster. Its shifting shadowy appearance was enough to drive one to take hasty actions, and I thought if I stared at it too intensely I would convince myself it was a better idea to try to swim to the other shore.

Instead, I looked around at the trees and the river and the clay banks up and down the sides. Partly I was wondering if It’d get lucky and spot Naomi, but also I was just distracting myself. The area looked serene during the day, but now it felt like a hostile country. I wondered what else was waiting in the trees, and shuddered.

“Did Naomi really leave us knowing that there were things like that around?” I asked. “Is she a coward and a maniac?”

“She knew not to make any noise,” Amaia said.

I laughed, which sounded hollow. “That thing’s got enough eyes to not need to rely on hearing us, I think.”

“Fair.”

I shook my head, thinking again of Naomi. “Unbelievable. Fucking unbelievable. It’s like, I’m going to betray you all, and then just go die anyway. I want so badly to betray you that I’m going to put myself in danger just to do it. That’s beyond self-interest. That’s, well, that’s fucked.

“Was she stupid?” I asked. “I mean really. Did I not notice? Has she just been dumb this whole time?”

“I don’t believe so, Miles,” Cadoc said.

I sighed. “I almost feel sorry for her. Almost. But I don’t. Just to be clear. We’re still not letting her off easy. In fact, if anything, I’m more pissed off. We almost just died because of her.”

No one responded to that, so I let myself stew in silence for awhile.

Eventually the monster did leave. It just turned, unprovoked, nothing obvious having changed, and slinked off into the woods again. It let off one last annoyed cry, and left.

It was a weight off of my shoulders when it did, but I didn’t trust it. “Could be a trick,” I said. “We keep waiting.”

Not long after, however, the sun began to rise, and the thin light of the moon was overpowered, the world streaking orange and red and pink as the sun cast the monsters back into their holes. I hoped.

Still, I insisted we wait just a little longer. To be safe.

When the sun was sufficiently risen into a bright blue morning, we stepped ashore. With every step I hesitated, nerves loaded like springs, ready to jump back into the water at the first sign of danger. But the danger didn’t come.

I let out a breath of relief. “We did it,” I said. “We survived.”

Cadoc started towards where the monster had entered the trees, as if to make extra certain that he couldn’t still pick a fight with it. Amaia hanged back behind me, near the water, watching Cadoc and I.

First I grabbed my armor, and put it on. It was very uncomfortable without anything underneath, and I knew it was going to chafe. Then I picked up the ball of cloth from where I’d thrown it to. It was still very wet. Go figure.

“I’ll let this dry some more before we change your bandage,” I said to Amaia, not turning to her but still looking at the cloth. “We’ve got to get moving though, if we want to find that bitch who left us. Seems like traveling at night is not the right move. I can throw these strips over my shoulders or something, hopefully the sun will dry them enough after awhile. How the wound looking, by the way? We’d be in trouble if that water was dirty.”

But Amaia didn’t answer. That wasn’t the strangest thing in the world, but something stirred in my chest, some uneasy feeling. I turned. “Amaia?”

She was on the ground, face up, eyes closed. I thought at first she was taking a nap, and I chuckled. “I’m tried, too,” I said. “But we’ve got to get moving.”

But then I saw it. A strange black something poking out from the edge of her bandage.

Even though I had no idea what I was looking at, fear overtook me. I rushed at her and ripped the bandage off.

Underneath, the ringed mark remained, but around it, the skin was pitch black, not like any infection I’d even seen - which would have been red, or yellowed, or even a little purple or green - but this was black like a void, and the blackness seemed to have spread above and below the wound like spilled ink.

Amaia wasn’t sleeping. She had passed out.