I shot out of the chair and I fell forward as my leg gave out. I lunged back up to my feet, shakily, and looked back. Helena was writhing on the ground. I grabbed the skin off the chair and ran over to her. I poured the wine in her face and she shook and coughed and looked up at me, dazed. I threw the skin away and grabbed her.

“How do I get out of here!”

Her blank stare turned into a snarl and she clawed at me. I slapped her and held her hands down.

“She's alive! I can get to her first!” She looked stunned for a moment then thrashed and shrieked.

“I can get to her first! He found her!” There was a loud bang on the door and one of her henchmen yelled something with his face an inch from the wood.

I looked at her and tried to open my mind, but I didn’t know how.

“Please, you have to help me. You know me!”

She didn’t. It takes more than seeing all the events of a person’s life to know them, a lot more. But she did think she could use me and she did believe I was still in love with Liana and that I hated Him. That was enough.

She stopped struggling and I eased up off of her. She got to her feet roughly and moved to the back of the room. She almost fell going up the ladder. When she got to the top she threw some books off the shelf, opened a hatch, and motioned me up.

I was up the ladder in three steps. She grabbed the railing and vomited off the side. I moved through the small hatch and it was cave dark inside. I turned back to her.

“I need a light!”

She shook her head and closed her eyes. I thought she had gone out, but then I felt her in my head. It was a dull nudge and I realized I had gotten used to it.

I saw the passage lit up by candlelight, felt myself walking through it as she had done a thousand times. I understood and took off.

I ran through the tunnels as the shape of them was laid out in my head. They were winding paths of all kinds. I climbed, crawled, ran and leaped. Towards the end, I felt her failing. I thought of Liana, of all the memories I had of her, even those that were Helena’s, and she stayed with me.

When I came up to a door she showed me the key hidden under a rock that would have been lost in a hundred others just like it. Past the door was the city sewers, and she showed me how to get to the manhole before I felt her fall out of my mind. I fumbled my way in the darkness and pushed the iron cover off inches at a time.

I pulled myself up into the old city, off some side alley. I had gone under the great river somehow. I ran out and stopped a cab and threw all my money at him.

“East road, fuck codes and caps!”

He did the best he could, but I still thought of murdering him more times than I can count. Now that I was sitting still, memories crashed in my head like guts coming together after a knife wound. I saw the false ones (me cutting out her tongue, our time together) fall away, but there were still gaps left unfilled by any real memory.

There was something else. It came to me slowly and as I realized what it was I pushed it away.

I thought instead about what I would do when I got to the cabin. We would have to move north. They would send out the Hunters. I didn’t know how long we could run and I didn’t know if she would come with me. To her, I was just a man who she had spent one night with months ago, and who had helped Him find her.

A few times during the trip my mind broke. I didn’t know it then, but it was my mind reeling from the effects of being cut into by Him and Helena. Once, before we got out of the city, I was suddenly sure that I was riding in the cab to the university to talk to her professor. I reached in my pocket for my pipe and lit it off the tinder in the box, and tried to think of what I would say to the man. I realized the cab was going the wrong way, we should have turned north on the dock road. I knocked on the cab and the driver looked back. I didn’t remember hiring him to take me to the college. In fact, I hadn't taken a cab, but had walked there. This brought me back to the present and I almost choked on the smoke. He looked at me like I was a lunatic and I waved him off and leaned back.

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It happened again when we were outside the city. For a few minutes, I was eight years old again looking out the window of the cab wondering where we were going. then I looked around the cab and didn’t see my parents or my brother, so I panicked, and the fear brought me back again, like waking from a dream.

As the cab raced away from the station at the edge of the trade road after picking up two new horses, I slipped back into the day I had returned from the war. I thought about my brother, what in the hell I would do after I handled the estate, and wondered if I was making a mistake not reenlisting. I remembered I had a bottle of Anasian citrus still in my luggage, but when I looked down my bag was gone. The voice of the cabby brought me out of the dream.

“Is this it?”

We were at a small trail leading off the road. I had seen it before.

“Yes!” I threw myself out onto the road.

“End of the line then. Carriage won't go in that.”

“Give me one of the horses.”

“You didn’t give me enough money for that.” He put his hand on his dagger.

“This is a matter of the State!”

“Yea, I've heard that one before. I’m not getting stranded here while you gallop off into the sunset.”

I was wondering whether a man of his age could survive a punch to the jaw when I sensed something above me, and looked up. My mind broke again and for a moment and I was back in Novera.

There were three of them. Their wings blended into the sky and their metal badges reflected the bright sunlight that still reigned above the amber evening. They flew in a classic V formation. The two tips banked left and right, scanning the ground below. I pointed up and yelled at the cabby.

“You think those drakes are out for their health? Provide me with a mount, in the name of the Empire!”

He almost threw himself out of the driver's seat and unharnessed the horse. He moved to the back of the cab.

“Where are you going?!” I yelled.

“I keep a saddle in the back, my lord”

“Fuck that!” I grabbed the horse on the withers and threw myself up onto it. I took the reins and got him going. I hadn’t ridden in three years but I moved like hell all the same. It felt like I was floating and at any moment I could have eaten dirt.

It was half an hour from the road at the speed I was pushing. When I got to the winding path up the ravine the smell of fire had risen in the air. That would make getting away a long shot. Why would they mobilize drakes for this?

I dismounted when I knew I was close. I took out my long knife and moved low and quiet toward the cabin. The smell of smoke grew stronger. If they weren’t trying to capture her then it wouldn’t be a controlled burn and I would probably be dead soon.

The cabin was a small two-roomed thatch topped square of wood with a thrush floor and a central hearth. It was also completely empty. I could still smell the last meal she had made. I went down the trail to the forest and saw fresh hoof prints on the ground. I turned to go back down for my horse but I heard a clamor of hoofbeats from the trail. I couldn’t see them but I knew the sound of a Trooper’s wagon well enough. I cursed every god I could think of and took off again on the forest path.

I kept under the canopy and cut through the dense foliage. Some of the drakes I had served with had claimed to be able to sense a man hiding under the jungle cover, but I had never seen any proof of that and I hoped not to now.

I came to a clearing near the bottom of the ravine where the high sides opened up to flat land and the creek snaked down in wide curves. On the far side of the creek, the forest was unmarred but clouds of black smoke rose behind it and I expected the tree line to burst into flames at any moment.

Liana was in front of the forest looking downstream. Her horse was pacing nervously. I moved fast and low. When I was ten paces into the clearing I dropped to my hands and knees. It was a move of pure instinct and I did it before I realized why.

The drake flew in low as if it had popped out of the trees. He came at her head on and I saw his leg lift to his chest with the fore claw shining. It flashed down like lightning as he went over her and my breath stopped. I saw the blood when he was already beating up into the air. It came in red splashes from above the horse’s shoulders and they both went down.

I got up and sprinted to her. It didn’t matter if they saw me now. She had avoided having her horse fall on her and was frantically coming to her feet. She held her hands out towards the flowing wound in the horse's neck as if there was anything she could do. She heard me and looked up, saw me running at her with the knife still in my hand, backed up frantically and fell over the horse which was still writhing. When I was almost close enough to touch her, I felt him.

He was walking leisurely towards us, a solid black shape, as if he had cut a hole in the day and exposed the dark night underneath. His darkness was so pure next to the daylight that my eyes struggled to tell distance and it seemed he was right in front of me. I moved between him and Liana and I felt him laugh. He spoke and his voice came from all around and in countless tones.

“Sleep.”

I did.