Chapter Thirty

No more time for goodbyes. Carza had none to say, and Miss vo Larima had done her part with the markings, the 'freedom of the Court of Salt', and a... mildly new perspective on things. She'd never thought of herself as some... smug aristocrat before. If she was a smug aristocrat, she wished she'd get some damn money as part of the bargain. Then again, she'd been given an office, free of charge, the moment she graduated, it was considered shameful for her to seek 'base' employment, she had rites and special clothes and a complex of libraries divorced from the outside world, and... uh. Huh. Her home was more similar to the Court of Slate than she really wanted to think about. The latter was just more cloistered, more elitist. And she knew her home too well to really think of it like some sort of unattainable goal or vaunted pillar standing high above the common rabble. She'd always seen it as a quiet little corner of existence, separated by high walls, kept quiet and strange and stagnant. A little golden void for her to get lost in for the rest of her life, where she could pretend nothing else existed. It was a temptation that was stronger than ever, now. It was a kind of living death - no need to change, no need to evolve, no need to adapt, it could simply endure. The closest she could get to death without really dying, which, in her eyes, was probably the pinnacle of comfort and contentment.

...maybe there was something worrying there.

Eh.

Either way. She was... networking now. She had contacts, she ran this town. She had this place locked up with her networks of informants in high places. She had... uh... her aunt. And now a lady who worked for another Court and had almost gotten her killed, and...

...had used her forehead for some creative finger-painting.

Well.

Anyway.

Time to run.

Anthan gave his... beau another profoundly lengthy, messy, and uncomfortably moist kiss. And with that, they were off. The forest was a shivering, sweating, steaming mass of life, and the last time she'd been here she'd been... terrified. Paranoid of danger from all directions, of uncertainty. Now? Now she was certain - all ignorance had been banished. Because she knew from what direction the danger was coming from, what the nature of the danger was, and precisely what it was going to do to her. Which... didn't make things better. So, still terrified. Just a different type of terrified, which wasn't an improvement, but it was change, and that was a necessary precursor to improvement, right? Right. Definitely. She was thinking rationally right now. Anyway. No horses, because there was no guarantee of them finding a path for them, and the landscape was... going to be rough. Fidelizh had tried to invade this place once, and their bowstrings had rotted off before they could loose a single shot - the heat, the damp, the cloying miasma of contamination. Anthan told her that anecdote again, but continued with a flashing grin - a comfortable grin, like he was finally back in his own element.

"And they say the horses didn't do much better. Unless you can dose them with these neat little tablets, about the size of sugar cubes, they just rot beneath you. Know about the Yasa?"

"A little."

"There's a reason they stopped here and didn't go further east, and trust me, it wasn't because they liked this place so much. They could barely hold this, their horses just turned to sludge, their bows turned to stuff so poor-quality you couldn't even use it as firewood... took all they had, all their dedication, just to carve out a little petty kingdom. Some tried to go east to greener pastures... half of them died on the way, and by the time they got to their destination? They were just happy to lie down and surrender, begging for anything that wasn't heat and damp and awful, awful, rot."

He laughed brightly.

"So that's why we walk."

And walk they did. The contamination used as a distraction was only going to last so long. The feral Sleepless would be coming their way soon enough. No way of reasoning with them, not with their leader dead, not with their minds blown out by mutation and fury. There was no obvious path into the forest, no trail-head, no point where the ground had the faded, daguerrotype-esque quality of frequently trodden earth... Anthan simply pushed his way through a handful of bushes, murmured that they'd better having something for ticks in their bags, and strode off. Carza followed, clutching her gun so tightly she thought the pearl handle might shatter. The bush's fronds slid along her arms, her legs, her torso, sticking and cloying and slithering... like being touched by a dozen long, boneless hands. A border check. She'd heard about the requirements some countries had... and the forest had a requirement of being frisked from head to foot, all her pockets checked, nothing left unexamined. And by the time she emerged from the bush, she felt like the forest knew her completely. Knew how she was shivering uncontrollably, knew how she was hunching into herself out of instinct, knew how her stomach twisted... and it knew how easily she could die. Then she passed it, the tollbooth, the border guards, her papers were examined, her goods were checked, her character was tested. And then... then she was through. And the forest consumed her on all sides.

An involuntary breath was drawn... and held.

And no matter what she did, a core of air, hard as a marble and dense as a ball bearing, would linger in the bottom of her lungs. A tiny piece of weighty numbness that would be held close to her heart until the boughs were gone, and the mountains lay before her. Only then would she let it out. Because this place wasn't hers. It did not know her. It felt like she'd entered the belly of a huge, bark-skinned monster, and on all sides were its fronds, extensions of a great self. She'd heard terrible stories as a child, centring around this sort of thing. Bedtime stories, to make her go to sleep... or at least stay quiet. There was a demon which lived at the fringes of the forest, slithering up the nostrils and into the ears, behind the eyes and down the throat, constricting and whispering a wordless madness. And in the forest itself... the men with their chins stained with sap, and fingers bristling with splinters. Whose eyes were the green-brown of rotting leaves, and whose breath stank of stagnation and moss. They wandered under the boughs and drank greedily from the algae-laden ponds, ate only the meat which had begun to rot and bristled with tiny bodies... their teeth were soft and spongy as young wood, and they needed the maggots to pre-digest their food, or so her mother had said. But their tongues were long and hollow and burrowed deep into sleeping creatures... but only if they thought they were alive.

So be quiet. And be still. Because they wouldn't drink from the dead... they'd only eat the dead, and only when the dead were beginning to rot.

Be still. Be quiet. Be very, very careful. And don't meet their eyes.

Carza's mother had been a wonderful person. But she was still human. And sometimes she needed to threaten Carza with the kiss of a woodman just to get a good night's sleep. Nowadays, it was easy to forgive her. Best not to speak ill of the dead, and all.

But under these boughs, where all she heard was the rustling of the wind in the branches and the chattering of strange birds...

She knew that she looked very, very, very alive indeed.

* * *

"You need to walk soft, in this part of the world. You bunch, you look afraid - and you step like you're afraid. Don't tip-toe, and don't crash, just... place your feet down carefully, and keep your backs a little hunched. Pay attention to the branches around you, and try to force yourself not to flinch."

Anthan's commentary was low, steady, and calming. He knew this place, or somewhere very much like it. Carza listened with all the frenzy she had back in her first lectures, when anything could be integral to her success, even if it seemed useless at first. She had no ability to distinguish between the useful and the useless, not now. Not here. Not with this damn forest. He kept going.

"I'll say this - you're looking at the forest like it's somewhere that wants you dead. Truth is? It doesn't. It doesn't want a damn thing. It just wants to keep on existing, that's as far as its collective will goes. You're a galumphing great primate, you're unusual and odd and too large. Something kills you, it won't have a chance to eat you before you start to go rotten. If something here kills you, it'll be a mutant, or yourself - because the forest doesn't want you. It has no need for you. You're too weird. Too difficult to kill. The forest is neutral ground, we just don't know it as well as the Sleepless. All this cover? It can be ours too. All these bugs? They bite them just as much, give them the same diseases. The heat? Trust me, heat doesn't care about what country you're from. You're sweating because you're not used to it - but they sweat too. They can overheat. They need to drink. They need a lot of things."

Egg murmured in faint bemusement.

"You're having a grand old time, aren't you, my lad?"

Anthan flashed a small grin.

"Familiar, that's all. And I never get to lecture people about this. You know how many ladies I've turned off by rambling about the heat and the sweat and drinking your own urine?"

Carza paled.

"I've turned off a lot. I never get to lecture."

Carza looked at Hull, who looked back with a deep, terrified frown slowly emerging on his face. Lirana growled.

"I am drinking no-one's urine, Anthan."

"Don't worry, it's fine out here. You should've seen the canyons up to the north-east. Nasty stuff, there. Not too hot, but the problem was the water - back in the Great War, mutants loved clogging the water supplies with their dead. Contamination all the way downstream. Some places had the advantages of reservoirs, aquifers... canyons didn't. So... well, you had to get efficient, let's put it that way."

Founder, he was talkative now. She'd barely talked with him before this, but she was fairly sure he hadn't been this chatty. Was he... yes, he was definitely comfortable with this sort of situation, likely more comfortable than any other. His entire frame relaxed. Only now did she look at him, and realise just how... half-complete he'd been. Like the forest, the wilds, the infinite arena of Hostile Territory was his homeland. Any time away from it, and he was going to be a half-made creature which shambled from place to place senselessly, finding it hard to engage. Like part of his soul was out here, and only when he returned could he reclaim it, and become a person again. Confident and competent and alive. Carza felt that way sometimes. Felt the fish-hook of homesickness in her guts, the razor-thin line twisting and coiling and curling around her innards and squeezing tighter with each remembrance of home. Was he like that too? But did he only feel it when he was somewhere safe, civilised, with paved roads and high buildings and the chatter of animals reduced to the vaguest of distant murmurs?

...hm.

The forest, though, was still frightening to her. Even with his words rolling through her mind over and over, telling her that this place was on her side, it wasn't going to hurt her, it was a harmless little realm where she just needed to not be a complete idiot... she knew that this place disliked her, and it wanted her gone. She was a scholar, she spent her time doing scholarly things in a scholarly way while wearing scholarly robes and sitting in a scholarly office and having scholarly conversations. Forests weren't scholarly, they were... the opposite of scholarly. She saw no samovars, no libraries, no pens, no typewriters, and no fruitcakes. So... basically a completely different continent, one no human had ever visited and returned sane from. At least, from her perspective. The forest was dark, and for all the heat and humidity, it was dry. The trees were greedy, the ground was puckered with hungry mouths, all of it draining the moisture from her and leaving her gasping for air. Like breathing through a straw. No horses to take the burden, just her, and the feeling of one foot in front of the other, a pack on her back containing what was necessary to survive... nothing more. Maybe the forest didn't want her dead, in the sense that it wasn't sending armies of animals to consume her... but it didn't want her here.

The damp. The dryness. The choking thirst. The gloom. The diminution of distances down to what she could see - that is to say, nothing at all. With the paranoia and the tension and the fear, it all became a confusing stew of experiences. She could almost feel her eyes retreating into her skull, like she was some exotic animal which had managed to adapt to the heat only by running from it. Retreating. Shrivelling. Sending everything inwards and leaving the extraneous elements to die off. She looked at her hands and couldn't be sure if they were shrivelled or swollen... and which one was best. All she knew was that her skin was too thick, and her clothes had united with it into a single damp mass, and...

And the noises were almost a comfort.

Anthan paused, and glanced around, sniffing the air like a dog. She doubted he could really detect anything, but... maybe the motion helped. Egg would do random things to become a god, maybe Anthan did things to become the sort of creature which might survive here. Maybe she should do the same, sniff the air, taste the wind, widen her eyes and flare her nostrils, hunch more, curl her hands into perpetual fists...

"We're being followed."

Carza's gripped her gun tightly, feeling each involuntary shiver transmit its way up the handle, through each internal mechanism, climbing up the barrel until it shuddered like a conductor's baton.

She whispered, her voice a dull rasp.

"What do... do we do, then?"

Fight? Fight back? Maybe?

"Keep moving. Not sure how many, could be enough to fight... could be more."

Uncertainty. Huzzah. The march continued, but they were faster. The undergrowth parted around them as they followed the trails left by animals which, likewise, learned to walk single-file. Egg brought up the rear, Anthan led, Lirana was right in front of Egg, and Hull and Carza huddled together in the middle of the pack, both of them painfully certain. Move, fight... they weren't good at either, the best they could do was try and keep up. Gas masks hung loose around their necks, just in case... and she saw a contamination detector on Anthan's belt. Silent, for now. Had he topped it up with water? Was it functional? Maybe things had interfered, and... she scratched her arms, at the mixture of tiny scars, budding skin tags, and mosquito bites. Just keep moving. The sounds kept up, though. Distant, but approaching. Cracking twigs, rustling branches... they weren't being subtle. Maybe they were angry, or desperate, or too mutated to care. The mutant has nothing to fear from other animals, she remembered. Basic lesson from back home. The mutant walks loud and proud, the only thing the mutant fears is its own kind.

Maybe these ones hadn't learned fear.

A low whistle caught her attention... and Anthan signalled. Gas masks on. They were coming close to contamination, then. Another spring from one of the great underground rivers. The sound of mutants declined, and the sound of her own breathing almost deafened her. Low rasps, a dry throat, the occasional gasp as she flinched at something she could vaguely see... not that she could see much through these damn lenses which fogged up if the mask was a little out of position. Just a little. They were walking faster, faster... she scratched at her arms more and more, just out of habit and nervousness. Wanted to drink, but the mask was still on and she didn't dare take it off. Tired and paranoid and shivering constantly. All her allies became strangers once their faces were consumed by metal and leather, their eyes hidden behind thick lenses. No-one wanted an eye mutation, it was... one of the worst you could get, really. Painfully noticeable. Impossible to remove without maiming yourself. The forest rushed by as their pace increased, and her breathing with it.

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Her bag thumped on her back, out of sync with her heartbeat. She almost adjusted her stride, just to get them to work in unison, just for the sake of her own sanity...

Something in the forest.

Something coming.

Egg whirled, bringing his rifle up, firing quickly and then pulling the bolt back to send the spent... shell? Round? Bullet? She wasn't sure of the terminology. It clattered to the ground anyhow, the sound immediately consumed by the damp earth and chattering wildlife. One of the Sleepless roared. The next thing Carza felt was Hull's hand pressing into her back, forcing her lower to the ground, accompanied by him. The world became a confusing mess. She barely saw the Sleepless... but she could see that the mutations were advancing. All she saw was a face twisted in rage, unblinking eyes with divided pupils, and... and an arm. Something was very, very wrong with his arm. He lunged, bleeding freely from one shoulder... and she heard more thunderous bangs, more clunks of bolts being drawn back, then the snick of a knife coming out of its sheath... Anthan jumped over her prone form, a tense grin on his face. Egg roared something, and Carza heard something... something like the sound of a butcher's shop, the shick-shick of a knife coming down on meat, carving it apart, the slither of meat detaching from itself, the... the pitter-patter of blood onto the hungry ground. Hull was keeping her close. He was larger than her. More of a target.

Roars ceased. It was just the bloody struggle now. Lirana grunted in exertion, the Sleepless panted and snorted and huffed like a wild animal... the guns were useless, it was in too close. Body on body, sweat dripping, blood spilling, muscles churning with furious abandon. Her fight with Kralat now felt woefully amateurish - only a few seconds passed, and from what she could see and hear, the fight was already almost over. There was no screaming or acrobatics... just strength meeting strength, knife meeting knife. One of her novels had compared violence to lovemaking. She... couldn't really talk about the accuracy there, but she thought she understood parts of it. It was uncomfortable to listen to. And the more she heard the more thankful she was that she had no part in it.

And a second later, it was over. With a rush, a pulse, a push, and a final, shuddering sigh echoing from a pair of dying lungs.

That was it. Not even a scream.

A few seconds of bloody combat, the Sleepless was dead, and... and it was over. She stood up shakily, heart almost pounding out of her chest, and she saw a pale body lying in the grass. Couldn't even see the holes were the bullets had entered, just... just thick blood. Thickened with contamination. How did he have so much in him? The ground was drinking it up almost as fast as it could fall, but not a single insect settled on his body. Well. Not until the mutated insects arrived, that adored the contamination in him. Anthan's voice broke her paralysis.

"Egg, start patching up Lirana. Scholars, you two, I need some help here."

She staggered to her feet, feeling numb. The body was just... lying there, and right now... oh. Anthan was pulling out some small metal canisters from his pack. Looked heavy, but... right. She could smell the oil. Flammable stuff. Probably requisitioned from fallen flamethrowers - jellied fuel, the sort which stuck and burned with unnatural fury. Another reason why theurgists were so damn rich. Lirana had a gash along her shoulder which Egg was tending to, splashing something from a hipflask which made her hiss and bite down on the belt she'd placed between her teeth. Carza stopped looking at her. She looked... vacant, burned-out. Signed on for an expedition, and had wound up killing two people. Three, now. Wasn't ready for it. And the body in the grass... Anthan thrust one of the canisters into her hands, along with some curt instructions. Mutated body, needed burning. If they didn't, they have mutants following them, and not just the Sleepless. Burn it, and burn the forest nearby.

"They're feral. This one looks far-gone... mentally, at least. Rushed ahead of the rest, frothing at the gills... they know we're here. They're just waiting until they can get the numbers. Not used to fighting fair battles, they need ambushes, overwhelming numbers... terrain they know and can trust."

He grinned.

"My guess? The other party drew off some of them. Sent them into chaos, just trying to get their numbers back together. And this little fellow slipped the leash."

Carza gulped.

"...so they are going mad?"

"Madder than usual."

"...why burn it? Won't that just give us away?"

"Mutants hate fire. It doesn't remove contamination, but it evaporates it from the flesh. The forest's... not great, but if we kick up smoke and ash and crap, we should be able to confuse our scents. Force them to go around. Plus..."

He glanced into the undergrowth.

"Mutants love fresh kills. Back in the Great War, you need to worry less about... well, the big mutants, the ones that want you dead? They're not good. But it's the others, the carrion eaters, the scavengers, that can ruin your day without you knowing it. They're not idiots. They won't want you dead, but they'll realise that you're leaving a trail of delicious bodies in your wake. So they follow you. And others follow them. And before you know it, you're the eye of a little hurricane of contamination. Makes you obvious... and if you slow down, if you stop feeding them, then the hurricane collapses and they decide to tear you apart. After all, the longer you spend around mutants, the more contaminated you are... and if you're too weak, then they might decide to take what they can get and run."

Carza stared blankly at the body. The hair had entirely fallen out - dead tissue. What remained looked more alive, closer to antennae than anything else, too wiry, too thick, too mobile. Even now, in this windless place, his hair was waving slightly, tasting the air and listening for prey. And the arm... the arm. His left arm hung down to his knees, extended far too long, an additional elbow developing on what used to be the forearm. An additional thumb had sprouted, still red and raw from being gestated inside the flesh. Ideal for gripping... the nails had turned a darker shade, like the horns of a stag. And the arm was spotted - the same material as the fingernails, protruding through the skin and marking it, reinforcing it. The wounds which killed the man hadn't been on that arm, despite its size... it was tough, clearly. Armoured. She almost shrieked when the arm twitched, fingers clutching at the ground... the eyes of the man were still dead, glazed over, cloudy, but the arm, the arm... she stepped backwards, breathing heavily. Anthan watched it quietly, the other can of fuel still in his hands...

The arm began to detach itself.

It was heavily mutated. It could survive without the body. And now she could see the hole in its palm which led to a long, long throat... and how the keratin marking the skin was retreating inwards, sharpening, becoming teeth. Armour discarded in favour of consumption. The fingers navigated clumsily, but she could see them lengthening, becoming more mobile, more flexible. And with a shunk, the palm embedded itself into the body... and she could hear the sound of chewing. Anthan grunted, and splashed some fuel on.

"Come on. Get to work."

Carza hesitated... and then splashed more fuel on. The arm didn't react. She wasn't mutated, it didn't want her. There was no brain in the arm, nothing to perceive the fuel as anything more than an unpleasant smell. It stank of old, dead things... and she kept going, the black liquid spilling over the arm clumsily. Anthan got to work on some of the surrounding area... and Carza could see the arm continuing to develop, trying to survive even with the loss of its central support. It was chewing desperately at the torso, swallowing ribs whole, extruding them outwards red-raw and bleeding, using them as a brace of legs. She wondered what it would look like, in the end. Some kind of... centipede? Maybe? Would it ever become intelligent again? Could mutation give intelligence to the idiotic, or would it remain a little engine of consumption, barely fit to crawl and slither and devour until something else snapped it up. Already she could see the greasy black carrion birds in the sky, little shadows circling lazily through the gaps in the canopy. They'd come down soon. Start chewing. Followed them from the camp, most likely, decided to take what they could and hunt for the freshest kill, unlikely to be picked over by other mutants. Carza breathed heavily through her gas mask...

And reached for her matches.

Anthan came back, his own canister sloshing half-empty. That was one advantage, she supposed. The canisters would only get lighter as the journey continued. Accommodating their weariness. How decent.

Her hands were shaking too much to light up, and Anthan gestured vaguely, asking for them - she gladly surrendered the little sticks with their glass caps, and watched silently as the flames descended...

And the fire began.

The forest lit up with terrifying swiftness, burning so brightly that for a moment all she saw was white. Anthan didn't even stop to watch, just clapped her on the shoulder, and turned her around, pushing her gently until her legs moved and she could function on her own. Hull stared for a long while at the fire. The arm was still chewing... and she could see the moment when its sensory system linked up properly. It didn't even scream or writhe in pain, it just... just began to calmly extract itself from the body, clicking away on bony legs which sank deep into the forest floor, leaving a pockmarked trail that reminded her of an insect's hive. It walked, and burned, and shed its flesh in dripping waves... skin giving way to muscle giving way to bone, all of it washed away in yellow liquid fat. Contamination became a heat haze, wafting upwards... she could almost hear the carrion birds shrieking in irritation. Maybe they wouldn't follow, then. Maybe they were clever enough to think that they weren't a good food source anymore. The fires spread quickly into the trees, following the path of the fuel but rarely exceeding it. The wood was too damp, the air too humid, for a proper wildfire.

Egg grunted, and silently began to move. Lirana staggered to her feet, clutching her bandaged shoulder. Looked pale... and still a little red at the edges where she hadn't been able to scrub all of Kralat's blood off. Anthan was already gone. Hull and Carza hesitated for a second, almost childishly hypnotised by the flames... before following quickly and quietly.

And the arm slowly descended to the ground as it lost anything that could keep it alive... and all that remained was the skeletal structure of a creature which could never have lived, evolved naturally, emerged from the designs of any intelligent creator.

* * *

They didn't sleep. All seemed tired, but... well, no-one dared to close their eyes for too long. The Sleepless would be distracted by the fire, maybe buying them a little time by scattering their scents. Anthan led them to patches of earth which were laden with the right sort of undergrowth, the kind which consumed their tracks and left nothing behind. No more attacks. The black birds were gone, leaving to find someone else who might give them something. The river was meant to be nearby, and that should make things easier, but... she still felt like a rat scuttling in a vast world it couldn't even begin to understand. After a while, the low, panicked whistle of the detector quietened down, and she was able to tear off her gas mask and return it to her neck, where it could weigh her down without choking her breaths. The forest at night buzzed with strange life, and Anthan lit the way with a hooded lantern that she could barely see the light of. The river, that was it. Just needed to find the river. Couldn't say how long she staggered onwards... she marked the time with the feeling of her left big toe colliding with the front of her boot. One thump after another, the discomfort fading with repetition, feeling her nail slowly give way, feeling a blister slowly grow under her ankle, feeling herself fusing with her clothes until the two were one and the same, and her eyes retreated so far into her skull that a stork wouldn't be able to pluck them out.

And the river came.

Black waters, slowly rushing, the foam catching the moonlight and turning into little eddies of perfect silver, marble, milk, something that shone and was cool. She stared for a moment, hypnotised by the darkness of the water and the way it would come up with a million patterns in its ripples... before destroying them just as quickly. She could stand here for her entire life and never chart the same pattern twice. The same hypnotising quality as the fire. She looked into the water, and wondered how far she'd come. Not on this expedition, just... generally. She'd been born in a garret room in a forgotten corner of a city which the world had been content to forget for hundreds of years. Whimpering and cold, staring at the stars. Same stars. But now reflected in waters born in some distant mountain, flowing in a channel carved over the course of hundreds of years, and... and she'd been born twenty-one years ago, and suddely she had a cigarillo in her hands and breathed in the smoke, letting it fill her lungs. It'd been a long time since she'd woken for the first time, hadn't it?

And here she was. Staring the river, letting smoke surround her head, her features reduced to a gray haze and a single, glowing, eye-like ember.

The others were settling down. The path ahead was clear. They'd been going for a while, and the light would be here soon. Might as well catch a little rest, just for a moment, just before the panic began again.

When she'd woken up this morning, she had been Carza vo Anka. And now she was still Carza vo Anka, but she was also a murderer, on the run, had felt a man's flesh part under her knife... had felt the gnawing in her stomach escalate to new, terrifying proportions, going from a self-interested yearning to survive, to a burning hunger which consumed anything it touched, and would gladly sacrifice others to keep on burning. Kept thinking of that arm crawling out of the fire on stolen legs, calmly and efficiently, moving without panic - it was incapable of the sensation. Moving and burning and melting and flowing into the earth... she slumped against a tree, sinking to the ground, staring out and watching the river flow. Her voice wasn't her own, and she was surprised to hear it leaving her mouth.

"What's this river called?"

Anthan glanced over. He was watching the dark, rifle in hand, the same brightness in his eyes which seemed to give life to all his features, illuminating them in a way which made her wonder how she'd ever found his old appearance attractive - because this threw it into the deepest shadow by comparison.

"...can't rightfully say, really. It's a tributary of the Tulavanta, I think."

He smiled.

"You know, most places out here, they have fancy names for everything... until you translate it. I can tell you what this river is called by the locals."

"Hm?"

"'The river'. Or 'that river over there' or 'that river which isn't that other river'."

He laughed quietly, and tightened his grip around his rifle. Carza stared... and cracked a tiny smile.

"Makes sense, I suppose."

"Linguist, right?"

"Right."

"Familiar with this sort of thing?"

She blinked slowly.

"...there isn't a fancy name for 'naming things what they are'. That's just called... naming. If that's what you're asking."

"Huh. Neat."

Carza fixed her eyes on him - the focus stopped her hands from shaking.

"Who are you? Really?"

"Anthan. Last name's... well, in my own language it sounds impressive, but translated, it just means 'tanner'. Not even my dad's profession, my... great-great-great-granddad's, back in the days when we all had to invent surnames to catch up with the rest of the continent."

"I mean... you're at home here, aren't you? You know this place?"

Some of the others were looking over, curious themselves. Anthan coughed slightly.

"...not this place specifically, but I'm familiar with the wilds. Great War, and all."

Egg grunted.

"More familiar than I am, I'll say that."

Anthan grinned.

"You were stationed somewhere else, though, right? Tour of duty into the lands beyond, and all?"

"Over the river, yeah."

"I was more of a... well, reconnaissance. Not so much about purging, more about staying quiet and moving quick, going in deep. Enemy lines and all."

"...difficult business."

"Not easy, no. Still, half the time we avoided conflict, so..."

Egg grunted again, a small smile appearing on his broad, hairless face.

"Don't downplay yourself. Fought pretty well back there."

"Put me in a pitched battle, though..."

"And we'll all die, myself included. So that's it? Just reconnaissance around the canyonlands?"

A shrug.

"A little of this, little of that. Good work, in a way. Paid badly, but once you've been under fire, once your only obligation is to survive, everything becomes a bit easier."

Carza leaned closer.

"But you came back for us."

"Of course I did. We have a contract."

"Most people would run away."

Anthan barked off a quick laugh.

"No offence, miss, but I'm not sure if I'm going to rely on your judgement of people, honestly not sure how many you've met."

"I've met enough."

Anthan smiled broadly, gently mocking her, and he opened his mouth to retort. Egg interrupted, his eyes flat and watchful.

"She has a point. Very decent of you coming for us, but it could've gone wrong at a dozen points. And the tactics you use on mutants... not the same as for people."

Anthan's smile was a little dimmer now.

"Doesn't really matter. Just felt like a decent thing to do. Seems like you folks wouldn't be able to get on without me, is all. And I wouldn't want to abandon people to the mercies of the Sleepless. That's really all."

He stared off again into the dark, and his lips were thinner. Unwilling to go on. There was something there, something suspicious, something... but then Carza took a step back, and realised that there were better things to be paranoid about. Much, much better things. Like if they were being watched. She settled back against her tree, closed her eyes... and heard someone breathing heavily. Her eyes snapped open again, and she reached for her pistol, cradled under her arm. Her eyes darted... and she saw Lirana nearby, curled up on the ground, shivering and... and breathing heavily, and... was she crying? Carza stared uncomfortably. Not the first time she'd seen Lirana weeping, but... but it was quieter, and more desperate. Inhibitions melted by the heat and washed away by the damp. Barely audible over the babbling of the wide, dark river. Carza looked around... she'd closed her eyes, and she'd fallen asleep, clearly. Anthan was staring off, Egg was slumbering, and Hull was much the same. Lirana was just trying to stay quiet. Carza hesitated...

And reached out to pat her.

Lirana whispered quietly.

"Sorry, miss, can I... can I stay close? Just for tonight."

Carza nodded jerkily, too nervous to reject her. Lirana shuffled over, and... curled up beside her. It wasn't comfortable for either of them, and Carza just kept patting her shoulder automatically. Not sure what else to do. Lirana was clearly... strained. She looked like... like Carza's father after shaving. He always forgot to clean away all the foam, so he was left with little patches of white under his ears, in odd spots around the neck... Lirana was much the same, but with the rust-brown shades of dried blood. She didn't say anything. Just... huddled, and cried softly to herself. And Carza wondered just how old she was, and what she'd done before this, and if she'd really rather be anywhere else... and if by bringing her along she'd doomed her, or at least made her life measurably worse. She didn't dare to ask. Maybe Lirana was young and naive, had signed up without thinking, and now regretted it. And if she knew that... well, going on would be harder. Sometimes, things were easier to keep bottled up. If they were bottled up, they were yours. The world couldn't judge them, take them, corrode them... a feeling that was bottled up was unhealthy, perhaps, but something bottled up was kept sheltered, protected, preserved.

Doubt could be kept as it was, never flowering into the dejection of real, genuine failure. Dissent could remain an unspoken theme, never demanding true resolution.

Sometimes, Carza thought, as she patted Lirana on the back...

Sometimes it was better to just be very, very, quiet... and listen to the sounds of the forest.

Because that was where all the mutants lived.

And if she heard them first, she could run.