Don’t you dare give up on me now, you sonofabitch, Racek told himself. Through clouds of soporific exhaustion he glided on, a lone Gallivant hurling himself against the hostile expanse which had swallowed up all trace of the one person in the world that he cared about.

He’d been searching for Zildiz for two days now, taking advantage of the fact that most of the Leaper tribes were busy wrangling the wildlife to better pastures and clear of the swathe of destruction the grey behemoth had caused. Either that or they were replanting the burnt-out sections by hand to expedite the ecosystem’s recovery through the ordered ladder of ecological succession. Racek had picked up on the busy wavespeech traffic between the Leapers, Gallivants and other kindreds whose services the Vitalus had demanded as tribute. The uneasy peace between the feuding species could only be maintained if they all abided by strict rules of engagement, nearly all of which Racek was violating by his unauthorized presence in Leaper airspace. He wasn’t sure how they hadn’t spotted him yet, or if they had, why he was being permitted to roam so freely without being challenged. He had of course taken steps to remain unseen, flying mostly during the hottest parts of the day when the scum were at their least active and staying nine or ten kilometers above sea level where he could use altocumulus clouds as a cover.

He had also used his former status as a migration mapper to change the pigment of his exomorph’s underbelly so that it matched the color of the noonday skies. The helixeer who had edited his genotype had asked him:

“Switching back to population ecology, are we? Smart move, Racek! The Vitalus is going to need more practical men like you before all this business with the grey behemoth is behind us. Forget all these theoretical arts—you’ll never become an alpha with those scribblings. It would be a shame not to pass on that brilliant mind of yours. What was it that you specialized in again?”

“Null-determinant strategies, my helixeer,” Racek replied, smiling feebly and certain that his dishonesty was written all over his face.

“Oh, right. Those things,” the helixeer said as if that entire field of mathematics was amusing to him. Then to add salt to the insult he jabbed his beastly scorpion’s tail into Racek’s shoulder, its modified venom sack delivering the retroviral vectors and the gold coated micro-projectiles that would alter the structure of his gilt helix.

One of the perks of being a beta drone was that nobody looked twice at him when he went beyond the bounds of the Gallivant nation. His mostly brown exomorph marked him as just another muck-raker off to do some crosspollination or forage for rotten berries to get drunk on.

Menash was as good as his word. Racek found his body double waiting on the lee side of the bluffs where the abandoned zeta nests still clung to the cliffsides, ruined by the water damage of the great flood that had swept through the wetlands three years ago.

The alpha had chosen some snot-nosed adolescent to mimic Racek’s magnetosynaptic signature. Thankfully the child had come prepared and wore a drab exomorph that matched Racek’s boilerplate configuration to a T.

Racek should’ve been thankful, but if anything, Menash’s thoroughness irritated him—the child even spoke like Racek did, his voice low and nasally:

“You give those Leapers hell, moyvraat,” the boy said, using the honorific signifying Racek’s status as a male of fighting age. Racek realized that the alpha had fed the boy a useful alibi; apparently, he was under the impression that Racek was leaving on some sort of covert operation against the enemy tribes.

“Depend on it,” Racek had replied, trying his best to act aloof and mysterious as befitted an operative tasked with a top-secret mission.

But if Racek was going to get anyone killed on this quest, it was bound to be himself. Just hours ago he’d gotten himself into a tangle with a pack of daggergnats, the ravenous pricks converging on him in the afternoon as he’d tried to catch some sleep in the tubelike trunk of a banyan. And before he knew it, they had sunk their lancing proboscises into his elbow joint, exploiting the gap between gauntlet and vambrace in order to drain whole pints of his blood in seconds.

Racek had come boiling up of his fitful dreams with a yell. With one limb too numb to deploy its arm-blade and feeling the rapid onset of an allergic inflammation in the wound, he’d gone crashing through the screen of overhanging kudzu vines in his haste to escape them, seeking refuge in the thermals swirling up the sides of the canyons. The daggergnats had broken off their pursuit, bellies full to bursting with his vital fluids. Their fear of that region of the skies was wholly instinctive, and, as it turned out completely justified.

Something which Racek would now find out the hard way as he rested his sore wings, coasting from one column of rising air to the next. He was taking a few turns around a ventifact for no other reason than that he was bored, admiring the wind-chiselled archway whose proportions pleased his mathematical sensibilities, when suddenly a piece of the overhanging shelf detached itself from the red sandstone and dropped towards at him, crushing jaws sporting a shark’s rows of teeth.

Fortunately for Racek, he had spent the bulk of his childhood as the target of relentless bullying by his brood fellows. They had loved to bushwhack him whenever he was preoccupied with mundane chores like chewing up wood pulp for building materials or looking up the values on his trigonometry tables. But the twelve-meter-long monitor drake that was coming at Racek now had something rather more serious in mind than giving him a wedgie through his codpiece. And as its ribbed sail membranes unfurled and its gullet gaped open to accommodate him, Racek’s finely honed instincts had kicked in, the same defensive tactic which had served him so well in youth now coming to his rescue again.

Not bothering to put up the least shred of resistance, Racek cut all power to his wing flexors and let himself plummet feet first into rugged bluff. The monitor drake’s fangs clanged shut like the hinges of a steel trap, closing a hairsbreadth from Racek’s toes. The ambush predator overshot its mark and landed catlike on the opposite bend of the arch, twisting round to try for him again. But Racek was already diving into the thinnest crack in the cliffside he could find, only breaking his descent moments before he pancaked into the wall with a furious flurry of his wings. It was just enough for his exomorph to kill the brunt of the impact while he scrunched into the vertical fissure, the stones scraping off strips of chitin off his plates like the rind from a lemon. The drake’s roars of frustration shook the canyon and reverberated through the crawlspace that had saved Racek’s life. It reached in with its claws and tried to tear open the masses of stone to get at him, a feat of raw strength which might have achieved if Racek hadn’t chosen that very moment to grow a pair of testicles and stab the monster in its footpad.

It raised merry hell after that, squalling and yowling to let the whole wilderness know of its injured pride. The good old Racek routine, he thought, feeling both ashamed and vindicated. Go limp at the first sign of trouble and scuttle down the nearest bolthole. It never fails.

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Then everything went eerily quiet, which if anything worried Racek more than the racket. The creature’s natural camouflage made it indistinguishable from its surroundings. From the safety of the crack Racek made a game of trying to guess which of the featureless outcroppings the monster was impersonating. Eventually he gave it up and decided to wait things out. He started thinking about all the things that mattered to him most in ascending order of importance.

His dogs came to mind first. Kysha and Spirny, his two sweet girls. The best girls, really. He’d asked his mother to feed them for a few days while he was gone, but there was no knowing when he could ever get back to them. He hated to delegate such a sacred responsibility to his aged mother—she could barely clear the ground with her wings these days, and she was always forgetting to help the dogs swap out their external lung grafts. One of these days she would forget and he would come home to find them curled up on the floor, stone dead.

Racek didn’t know what he’d do when that happened—he would never be able to replace his girls since the failure to maintain his dependents would result in the permanent loss of his pet-keeping privileges. Oh well, at least he would still have his research. Racek had reams of equations piled under his hammock, the sum total of his lifelong obsession with applied mathematics.

At the moment he was working concerning null-determinant strategies, specifically an exciting new solution for breaking out of what his fellow beta scribblers called the Hungry Slave’s Conundrum. The conundrum described real-life situations where, according to game theory, two players acting according to their own interests would ultimately result in a sub-optimal choice for both of them.

A helpful analogy was to imagine two starving Leapers locked up in a pen as punishment for stealing food, with the following instructions being given to them:

1. If you confess and agree to give testimony against the other slave, who continues to claim innocence, the charge against you will be dropped and you may devour your fellow inmate as a reward.

2. If you do not confess but the other slave does, you will be fed to your fellow inmate as his reward.

3. If both of you confess, you will both be blinded.

4. If neither of you confess , you will both lose a limb of your choosing and be sentenced to hard labour.

This was the simplest form of the conundrum. Mathematically, the first slave to tattle on his fellow inmate had the best chance to survive and even profit from the situation.

Racek’s paper tackled a more complicated version of the problem where the two opponents were locked in an unequal power dynamic, such as that between a master and a slave, for instance.

The stronger party was called a tyrant, and the weaker party was called the victim. If the tyrant was smart and used the appropriate null-determinant strategies, they could unilaterally claim an unfair share of the payoffs in this revised version of the Hungry Slave’s Conundrum.

But Racek’s radical new hypothesis boiled down to this: if and when a stalemate was reached, the victim could only gain a fair trade-off if it chose never to bend to the will of its tyrant. By refusing to cooperate, the victim sacrificed a portion of its own potential reward to inflict disproportionate damage to the tyrant’s position. By raising the spectre of mutually assured destruction, the victim let the tyrant know that their tyranny would only incur ever increasing losses on both sides, with the abuser suffering more overall. This was the only way for the weaker party to break out of the otherwise unfavourable deadlock: making the tyrant realize that best option available was to offer a fair, equal split on the rewards for both parties.

Racek called his theory the Tyrant’s Trade. It was the thesis of his entire life, Racek now realized. He had always been the smaller, weaker, lesser male. From the pupal chamber up to his adulthood there was always someone knuckling him under, telling him what he could and couldn’t have or snatching it out of his reach.

Just once in his life, couldn’t he have what he wanted? What he needed?

Zildiz represented the impossible summit that he could never hope to attain. If he could only possess a being like her, everything else would fall into place. His gilt helix would live on in the next generations, improved as they combined with her more superior sets of alleles. Their pupae would be both strong and clever. He would finally be awarded alpha status and have his pick of all the females and grafts that he wanted.

He would be more powerful than that useless product of nepotism named Menash, more powerful than all those bright and beautiful people who had never deigned to look down their maxillae at him.

Ah, but who was he kidding? He was never going to find her now. All of this was just idle dreaming. Racek was still brooding over his run of bad luck when he felt his receivers prickle as they caught the ghost end of a transmission, tremulous and faint. Wait a minute. He recognized that magnetosynaptic signature. It was her!

“Zildiz!” he screamed back out into the dead air. She was in trouble. A malfunction in her exomorph, perhaps a hematoma in her biomineral antenna coil? Come on, my dear, Racek mentally pleaded with her. Just one more pulse and I can get a fix on you. Please, I know you’re strong enough.

One final time her plaintive cry for help reached him, and this time Racek managed to parse through the spikes of static and make out a string of words: “kssshsstt…mercy, oh lord of Arachnea! through the void…ksszzhtt..they have taken me prisoner…ksshsszzztt…the Leapers…ksshhzztt deliver us, oh arbiter of destruction! Deliver us from the doom of our making!”

Zildiz broke off her message with a sob. Racek couldn’t believe his ears. He’d never heard her sound so utterly broken. It was just as he’d suspected. The Leapers had her! Racek’s self-doubt gave way to a mounting fury. He hadn’t come all this way just so those degenerate web-spinners could deprive him of his one true love. Racek popped out an arm-blade and gritted his mandibles, knowing what he had to sacrifice but uncertain if he had the character to go through with it.

“Recent computations show,” he said, quoting the conclusion of his own thesis, “That discerning victims do not often yield to extortion out of concern for equality,” Racek bit back a scream as he sawed through the connecting ligature of his swollen arm, “And are willing to discipline tyrants by refusing to give total cooperation.”

Racek didn’t have the ability to selectively shut off his pain receptors, and thus felt every shifting moment of agony as he degloved his exomorph, pulling off the inflamed segment with a tearing of meat and tendons.

“Here we locate and characterize classes of strategies such that the best response of any rational tyrant against the unbending victim,” he whimpered through his cracked molars, “Is to offer a fair split.”

He wedged the dripping piece of his own forearm into the bottom of the crack so that part of it dangled outside, a tantalizing lure. Racek heard the scraping of claws against the rock above him as the monitor drake slid over his hiding place, forked tongue flickering as it tasted the blood on the air.

The monitor drake looked at the proffered meat, then eyed Racek hungrily. He could almost hear the thoughts turning in its head as it considered the exchange Racek was proposing to it: a piece of his forearm in exchange for Racek’s freedom. But instead of taking the deal the stupid beast chose to claw at him again, draping its body over the fissure in its eagerness to reach him.

That proved to be a fatal mistake. For in a flash Racek plunged his blade into its exposed underbelly and slit the beast open from groin to breastbone, coating himself in a welter of gore and intestinal fluids. The monitor drake slipped off the cliff with a dying hiss and left most of its bowels hanging on the jagged rock, gravity doing all the work of disemboweling it for Racek.

Racek waited a few hours until it stopped twitching before he descended.

“You should’ve taken the deal,” he told the tyrant, “Better luck next time.”

He cut out its heart, a length of gut, and some haunch to make jerky with. Racek stuffed the meat into the gut and tied off both ends to make a crude sausage, then strung his rations around his neck and started off once more, his desire for her burning in him like a guiding star.