Chapter Thirty Five

The morning was silent. The story had been exchanged, with one amendment - she didn't mention that she'd left her clippings at her side. As far as they knew, the creature had come only for the deposits outside. Cowardly, and Anthan shot her a reproachful look, but he didn't move to correct her. The story was told, and the group had reacted... appropriately. That is to say, they moved quickly. Ate quickly. Drank quickly. Lirana was twitchier than ever, and she looked... looked similar to back in that temple with the Sleepless, the same bleary expression. Carza remembered the sight of her face, soaked completely with Kralat's blood. Still wondered if he'd been entirely human... but compared to this thing, he was at the very least human enough to sustain a conversation. This thing was just... silent. Apathetic. She fully believed that it saw her as nothing more than a scrap of meat, a meal ticket that it would tear in half if she stopped providing it with meals. No idea how long scraps would keep it content. They set off into the morning light, the rain easing up enough to see ahead. The clouds on the mountains were a little lighter, and... oh, Founder, she'd never been so happy to see a bunch of very large rocks. The forest cut off a little way before the slopes, the soil growing too rocky and barren to sustain anything beyond a few shrubs and scattered patches of grass, which meant they'd have peace. The landscape was a rolling affair, which was... honestly, just wonderful. Each upward climb would be rewarded with a view of their target, and an immediate gentle descent. They were in the foothills, they were close...

Once they were through, they'd be at the mountains, the pass wasn't too far off, a village was full of supplies made ready just for them... well, for the Court of Salt, but by extension just for them... through the pass, into the steppe. And after that point, everything seemed elegantly simple. Anthropological work. Staying still and talking. People wouldn't be so mad over there, she hoped. Isolated from the business with the Sleepless, at least... and with people, with defences, there'd be no need to worry about mutants. No more living on the road. It was petty, but she imagined simply changing whenever she felt like it, not when the stars aligned and granted her privacy, a dry spot, and time. She imagined routines, and watching the sun rise of a great empty country which could still yield more than enough data to make this all worth it. She imagined a career stretching before her, years and years of doing... things. Just things. Little bits of research, fruitcake, samovar, more research, occasionally spinning out some more of her data to pay the bills... comfort. And living death.

Just... had to survive this. But for the first time in a while, she could really see her destination in front of her, not just 'the next day' or 'the next hour'. And not the grave. But then she heard the clicking of rifles being disassembled and checked, reassembled and reloaded, and she snapped back to her present situation. Being hunted. The air was growing cooler, at least. They marched single-file, and the canister of fuel was... well. Complex. Anthan noted that it ought to remain in the middle. The front was unlikely to get assaulted - mutants still had animalistic instincts for hunting, this one did, and if it decided to attack it would go for the back of the train. The middle, thus, would be safe... ish. And that meant that Carza and Hull split the load of the fuel canister, passing it between one another on every other hill. Each step made the half-empty canister slosh uneasily, the volatile liquid ready to erupt in their defence... if the mutant didn't realise what it was. She wasn't going to underestimate its intelligence. And overestimating would, at least, make her act more cautious, which would probably be a good move.

No more villages. No more bodies. The river here was narrower and faster, almost slicing through the ground with single-minded certainty. She could see the sharp gouges in the mountains, and thought that this river must've been weathering away for... well, an incalculable length of time. If anything could live in this part of the river, there was no-one willing to try and catch it. The bottom of the river was smooth, but trees hung heavily over it, and would gladly tear at any boat which tried to ply the waters. In some places, the water flowed so quickly that it became a solid mirror, deceptively calm... but if she fell in, she fully believed that she'd never get out again. Ice-cold, too. The mountain chill hadn't yet been cut by the forest heat, and the water reflected that. Seemed to be a ribbon of the slate-grey sky, dragged down to earth and pressed into service as a river. And appropriately, it inherited the cold, the danger, the inhospitability to humans.

To her surprise, though, there were signs of inhabitation, just not... well, fishing. Large rocks were set off in the forest, barely visible through the trees, carved heavily with images of long-headed men and women. Hm. Same as the temple... the same perfumed scent, too, though here it was faded by the river's spray and the rushing wind. The Yasa, that was what Kralat had called them - the people who worshipped the glass-skinned men of the mountains, and attempted to becomes gods themselves through mutation. Idly, she wondered if this mutant was one of them - some ancient god which still ruled a huge stretch of forest, long after its servants were dead and gone. But... well, it was possible, but that didn't make it probable. Mutants tore each other apart, or were torn apart by humans, or just... became odd. Not much information on what mutants did after they hit their first century, let alone any subsequent. Hard to tell how old a mutant was, and there were so few ancients that any accounts were usually confused, easy to confuse with regular mutants or just drunken visions. There was an anthropological theory, back home, that had some sway for a bit - that early man had worshipped ancient mutants, bringing them lesser mutants as sacrifices, opening up springs for them...

If the theory had any credence, it had long-since lost any - because for all the resources of the outside world, not a single extant group had been found that practised this. Any people that did was long-gone. Wiped out by neighbours, or presumably by their 'gods' after the sacrifices stopped coming. Turned out that religions where the chief god was a vicious creature that would kill you if you stopped feeding it didn't last for long. So, maybe a precursor to more stable religions, an antithesis for others to react against and define themselves more strongly... or maybe just slander invented by one people to disparage another. Stranger things had happened.

Still.

As they paused to eat their lunch - more pemmican, washed down with ice-cold water (which felt a bit pointless now that the world in general was colder. Maybe if there was a way of drinking icy things in hot weather, then the universe would be fair and ruled by a benevolent deity) - Carza found herself captured by one of these stones. A clearing, just off the path. Hull was equally interested - this was his area, after all. This sort of culture, which came over from the steppes in a conquering wave... and here, in a small clearing, lay a whole army of their stones. Each one delicately scented, each one depicting a man or a woman with severe cranial deformation, long fingers, and eyes that burned with a cold superiority. Richly robed, but... hm. That was odd. They were facing one direction, all of them. A dozen stones, arranged in a circle, facing what looked like a featureless boulder. Each one of them was weathered and scarred by the passage of time, most were draped in creepers and clambering vines, not to mention a healthy coating of moss, but... that much was certain. Hull, though, had a keener eye.

"These are older. Definitely."

She tilted her head to one side, a small smile creeping over her face. She liked it when he was academic.

"How can you tell?"

"The temple we saw, that seemed like a later emanation of the same beliefs - the same cranial deformation, yes, but there was a temple. They'd made ascension to godhood a public thing... this, though, feels more... well, like a sanctuary. See, down here..."

He brushed aside some of the moss on one of the statues, revealing a handful of cramped letters.

"Not... quite Tralkic, but the same linguistic family, I'd say. Same symbols as the Court of Horn - see you can tell from the use of spirals. It's this weird little thing, they love spirals. Current theory is that they went from decorations to writing, using the same... I suppose 'aesthetic idiom' would be the correct term. And they used to live in tents, meaning their biggest form of domestic decoration was, well, embroidery, often of the tent walls."

Carza's smiled broadened, and she felt something unwinding. Alright, she'd roll with this.

"And why would spirals emerge?"

Hull grinned.

"Reinforcement. If you embroider spirals into cloth, it gets quite a bit stronger. So, you get to combine something practical and something... well, beautiful. And then their alphabet - no, not alphabet, abjad, there's no vowels in it - developed with the same basic ideas. Spirals. Pretty neat, huh?"

"Yes, Hull. Very neat. Well, what does it say?"

For a moment, she genuinely felt like she was back home. She liked listening to Hull talking, well, rambling about the things he found interesting. Largely because she did the same thing, and seeing someone else do it made her feel less guilty. He peered closer, humming wisely."

"...well, either it's a form I'm not familiar with, or it's a name. Probably the latter."

Carza blinked.

"...now that's interesting. I mean, the carvings back at the temple were more... generalised, I suppose. Not just one person, a whole array of them."

Hull hummed quickly, and began to brush aside more moss to search for more carvings. But Carza's thoughts were still running. New ideas were generating.

"You know, it could be that this is an earlier stage in identity formation."

"Hm?"

"I mean, it's... alright, for a personal example, back home, we're not very senior scholars."

"No. Well observed."

"I mean, we're junior. Very junior. And in the grand scheme of things, we might as well be... well, nobodies. And yet, the moment we meet someone from a different Court, we almost... close ranks. It doesn't matter if we're lower-ranking, it doesn't matter if the Court may do things that irritate us from time to time like... well, force us to do legitimately productive work that genuinely contributes academic progress."

Hull nodded seriously.

"Outrageous, yes."

"I know. Anyway, it's... well, there's one strain of anthropological theory which argues that a crucial part of knowing who you are is knowing who you're not. Otherwise, it's just... one hand clapping. So, when we're alone, we divide things up in the Court of Ivory - scholars divided from secretaries, divided from senior scholars, divided from janitors... all sorts of little divisions. And then contrasted to the other Courts…"

"We become the Court of Ivory, and all subdivisions vanish."

"Exactly. Now, if there's this... move from individual representations to collective representations in their art, maybe this group was... well, this was built when they first came over. It praises just a select few. And then they start ruling over a whole mass of other people, who are very different from them, so the praise expands, and now it covers everyone."

Hull nodded thoughtfully.

"You know, the Court of Slate did something similar once. I mean, from what we know of it. There's this whole genre of poetry which emerged during the Era of Horn which managed to leak out from the Court of Slate, which basically... alright, so the poetry is almost like a list. Just a very artful list. All the qualities of the Court of Slate, the idea that the 'values of the priests should be embodied even by the peasants'. We call them the Priesthood Documents, most of them just talk about holding everyone up to the same high standards. Is that... similar, at all?"

Carza couldn't help herself, she clapped her hands excitedly.

"Yes! Yes, exactly. Internal divisions break down in favour of something more general. Same way that when we meet other Courts, we become the Court of Ivory, and when we meet foreigners, we become citizens of ALD IOM. All depends on context - the other hand that claps."

Hull grinned.

"Been a while since I've seen you that excited."

Carza forced herself to settle down.

"Well, it's interesting. Can't fault me for that."

"I'm not faulting you, just... nice to see you not looking so... tense, I suppose."

Carza shot him a look.

"I'm still tense. I have every reason to be."

"...well, me too. But still."

The two of them fell silent... and once again, Carza's eyes were drawn to the central figure in the field of monuments. The long heads and sculpted fingers were all staring in one direction - to the centre. Where a seemingly uncarved lump of stone lingered. Carefully, she approached, feeling wet leaves and twigs shift beneath her feet... and stared up at it. It was large, larger than anything else, almost breaching the canopy of the surrounding trees. Just... well, it was just a rock. A very big rock. Smoothed by the passage of time, no more hard edges or points. Aesthetically pleasing, in a certain sense - if she was the sort of person to like big rocks, she might find it to be in the higher grades of big rocks in terms of attractiveness. As someone ambivalent on the topic, it was... well, just a rock. But why would it be so prominent? What would be the point? She ran a hand over its surface, feeling the morning dew, the dampness from last night's rainfall... it was smooth, but clearly not polished deliberately. Unsculpted, unsophisticated... but there was still an unspoken something about it. Maybe it was the light colour, so unlike the muddy brown stones she saw scattered here and there... maybe ti was the fact that it was clearly from elsewhere, whereas the surrounding carvings had been made from local stone.

Maybe...

She leaned closer.

The rock smelled odd. Not overtly, not dramatically, but... it was similar to the carvings around it, but deeper, more intense. Like the other carvings had been anointed in an attempt to imitate this... but the rain had washed away so much over the years. Miracle that anything remained, really. She stepped away, the scent still hanging in the air. It was indescribable - strong enough to be noticed, but too weak for her to get anything more specific. Earthy, pungent... like carraway or allspice, if she was going to hazard a guess, but really she couldn't be sure. Everything was far too faded.

The volume of her voice surprised her, she was so lost in thought.

"Ready to move, then?"

"Ready. Feeling alright?"

"...yes, I'm fine. I think."

She felt a hand on her shoulder.

"Come on, let's get back on the road."

"...yes, yes. Let's."

"Interesting thoughts on those carvings."

"Hm? Oh, yes. Thank you."

Couldn't say why she was feeling so odd... either way. The two of them gladly left the clearing and returned to the others, who were stretching languidly in preparation for the next stage. The rain was gone, thankfully... and the forest was making sound once more. The kind of sound that could be noticed if it vanished, and could be used as a pretty reliable indicator of that mutant coming closer. After so long worrying about the Sleepless, it was... eerie to face down something that was so... apathetic, in a way. Was engaging with them for reasons that were entirely animalistic, had no basis on ideology or belief... it wasn't a fanatic, it was simply hungry. Not for the first time, Carza looked over at Hull and remembered the feeling of him launching her out of that river, away from one of the Sleepless.. and then her brutalising that Sleepless with the butt of a pistol she could barely aim with. Quietly, she leant into him for a moment. Just to remind him that she was there, and she was happy at his continued existence. He made a surprised noise in the back of his throat, glanced down... blinked a few times, shrugged internally, and did nothing more.

Good.

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And to her surprise, when she shouldered her pack once more, feeling the weight of all her worldly possessions - her clothes, her portable typewriter, her pens, pencils, odds and ends... she had to take out a jacket and wear it. For the first time since she arrived in Krodaw, she could wear a jacket and not feel like she was about to die of heatstroke or from spontaneously losing every drop of moisture in her body. A heavy tweed jacket, a little musty from the damp, but otherwise... just as she remembered it, sturdy buttons and all. A sense of solidity returned to her, a kind of... shabby respectability that she enjoyed. Gone was any feeling of being some shambling vagabond, some vagrant in her shirtsleeves, ambling along forest paths... no more. No more. Now she was a coated individual. And a coated individual was a respectable individual, because they understood the value of warmth, shelter, and additional pockets. Anthan glanced at her, and snorted slightly.

"Nice coat, Carza."

"Thank you."

"You look like a bit of a juju man."

"...what?"

"Juju man. Egg, you know what I'm talking about?"

Egg smiled for a moment.

"Juju man, yes. Quite."

"Do I need to ask again?"

Anthan and Egg exchanged glances, and Anthan began.

"It's... mostly the skinniness, the tiredness, the heavy coat... juju man. Juju men are just... well, they're juju men. Funny folk, feed on visions and not on food, never sleep unless they're knocked unconscious, always watching and thinking."

"...well, I... suppose I should thank you for the compliment on my thoughtfulness."

"Well, if you'd like to take it that way."

Hull grunted, shouldering his own coat.

"Me too?"

"No, too well-built. Juju men are the skinny sorts, you're too... well, thick."

"Oy."

"Don't worry, I'm sure if you spend long enough stressed out of your mind and hanging around a hot stretch of wilderness, you'd wind up as juju as your friend here."

The five shouldered their packs with some performative grunting and 'hoo's and 'alright thens'. All the usual preparations for those who were already well-prepared and now just wanted to make a show, to wind up a little. Something anthropological there, Carza thought. A longing for liminality, to adjust from one state to the next through a borderland of grumbles and groans and little personal noises. The river burbled along in its quick-flowing way, and the liminality ended. Off to the mountains.

* * *

For hours and hours they walked. The sun rose higher and higher, yet never exceeded the domain of the pale and lifeless. A permanent dawn, that was it - the same weakness of the light which defined dawn. In contrast to night - blinding. In contrast to noon - painfully feeble. The day wasn't ready to begin, really. It had to be liminal, by necessity. There was a schedule to follow, and some crucial item hadn't been met. Her coat swung loosely around her ankles, and she felt... bundled up, like a parcel. A compact little pile of bones, skin, tweed, and belongings. One solid unit that couldn't become unbound until the day was done. Made her feel a little clumsy, sure, but... safe. Not totally safe. Her hand remained wrapped around her gun... and piece by piece, conversation died. They tried to keep it up for a bit, to keep up some kind of consistent rapport. But it felt wrong. Like talking backstage during an unfamiliar performance, not sure if a scene was meant to be happening, if the conversation was making them miss vital cues and lines and entrances and exits. If soon they'd see a red-faced director hissing for them to do something. Again the memory of her nightmare from last night, the feeling of being late for something she didn't know a thing about, preparing work for a deadline that was right now, and yet remained utterly unknown to her.

Every chirp of birdsong made her more and more nervous. Gambler not sure when her luck was about to run dry.

When would the silence come?

The fuel sloshed. Egg's head shone with tiny beads of sweat. Lirana kept sniffling, her eyes red-ringed with mild illness. Anthan kept his eyes fixed ahead, and his hands never left his gun. Hull and Carza stuck close together, unwilling to let each other out of sight.

They were being hunted. They could feel it, in a dim evolutionary part of their brains.

A long, dead arm in the middle of the night, reaching through a cage of roots... opening wide with teeth and a red, red tongue...

When would it shift from gluttonous consumption to scavenging - taking what it could, with the bitterness of someone cheated out of a good long meal.

The mountains rose, the landscape undulated, the forests were thick, dense, and old. This was not a place for humans. Old growth forest for an old growth mutant... and always, little signs of old slaughter. No more bodies, though. Just... markings. Scorched ground where fire had been set, years and years ago. Half-buried pistols and rusted knives, even a whole uniform at one point. A heavy military overcoat, rotten with mildew, crawling with small insects that sheltered in the waterlogged pockets. The 61st expedition had come here before them, and... and Carza remembered what Lirana had said. That no-one had known what happened to them, really. Madness, death, and then the execution of their commander. Return and disgrace, followed by mutation to the point of confinement to a sanitarium. Silence, always silence... they were following their road now. And the coolness in the air made her feel a little less mad, a little less jittery, but the sheer wildness still had a darkness to it. If she wandered off the road for a few hours she might not find her way back, and no-one would find her. This was a place with no safety net.

Silence interrupted her thoughts.

Terrible, terrible silence. Silence to swallow the world whole.

Her eyes widened.

The birds had stopped singing.

A bead of sweat trickled down the back of her neck. Anthan had frozen up ahead. He'd heard the silence too. The detector was dead, but only for a second... then she heard it. A low, mourning warble. Contamination was close. She could imagine vast jaws parting, breathing out foetid air, loaded with putrid rot...

Carza's world became... slow. Something primordial in her brain screamed, made her think faster, see faster, but... but not move faster. A mind convinced that it was about to die, demanding that she feel every second as it ticked towards the end.

She saw something grey in the forest.

Moving.

Vast.

Fast.

She remembered the arm which had reached out last night, slithering over her and caressing her with shivering fingers. The fingers weren't shivering now. They knew their purpose. They knew their target. A grey, long arm stretched from the trees with easy fury. The others saw it, and moved... slow, slow, far too slow. Anthan raised his rifle and barked a warning. Lirana stumbled, and her fingers fumbled for the trigger. Egg's eyes bulged with alarm... and he reacted. Anthan was too far to do anything, but Egg... Egg, with his heavy shoulders and his godly bearing. Egg was the one close enough. The arm seemed painfully slow to Carza, but then again, so did she - the world was being slow, letting her see the movements in terrible detail. Making every second count before the closure. The arm, with its grey flesh, with the seam concealing a mouth with a red, red tongue, bristling with sores and suckers and fluid that clung. The seam was open, now. The tongue was lashing, tasting the air. And the grey mass in the forest... no idea who it was reaching for, maybe no-one in particular. Maybe it simply desired meat. And meat it would have. Too fast for them to dodge, too fast for them to muster a proper defence. The arm moved like a snake, and she could see down the long, ruddy throat which led to the great trunk of the creature. For her? For Hull? For Lirana?

The choice ceased to be relevant.

For Egg had inserted himself into its path.

No roaring, no spiteful cries. None of the things her novels had told her about, none of the barbaric whooping of the Sleepless in ambush. Predators didn't growl before they attacked, they didn't howl... they just leapt in ambush, deathly silent. And now that silence was met with silence, and eyes which burned with feverish power. For a second he was highlighted in the morning light. Godly. Every element of him focused, every muscle tightly bound, his brow gleaming with sweat, his jaw locked in place. The dew and sweat gleamed like a thousand jewels across his bald forehead. A moving sculpture. His rifle raised, barking a sharp retort that shattered the world and turned it to chaos and speed and madness.

A starting prompt that interrupted the slowness of her mind.

And made it all go at its normal pace.

That is to say... fast.

Too fast.

The arm moved faster than Carza could see, accelerating to its proper speed. A grey flash, tinged with red, and always silent.

The mouth clamped around Egg's neck. She heard a grunt of pain. Meat parting, a sound of something soft being pierced, something that ground against its piercer.

She saw him being dragged into the forest, heard the pitter-patter of blood from a deep bullet wound in the creature she could barely see.

Anthan's rifle snapped.

Another wound.

The creature made no sound, simply a deep rumble which carried through the trees and sent the dew shivering downwards in a crystal rain. Not a single twig had snapped. Not a single branch had been moved. And only now did the forest react to the assault - and it was with a rain of pure diamond, gleaming in the ever-morning light, in the mournful grey of a sky which matched the corpse-grey of the creature.

Only now did the stench hit her as the wind changed.

The reek of contamination.

Of life redefined by the great underground rivers which churned incessantly beneath her feet.

And the presence was moving once more. She barely caught a glimpse of it, barely... she saw grey flesh, and it was mottled, much like the arm. Rotting, really. Like the skin of a corpse. And she remembered the empty uniform from earlier, remembered the sight of it feeding on the bodies of the dead. Corpse-gnawer, grave-robber. And it was huge... she could flecks of grey in the canopy, and a handful of glaring eyes, pupils so devastated by mutation that they'd blown up to monstrous size, consuming iris and sclera both, only the vaguest rim of white lingering around the edges. Like a sun in the middle of an eclipse, a dark circle with a hint of bleeding light. Eclipsed eyes glaring outwards with apathetic annoyance - animal annoyance. No real fury there, no emotion at all. A placid acceptance of the wound, of the challenge, a passive enjoyment of the meal provided, satisfying its basic desires... not even that. Egg hadn't been mutated. The wound was visible, too. A gaping hole in its sight, from which flowed tar-like blood, boiling with mutation. She saw fragments of other arms, of a vast torso, and red. Little flecks of it, like the ribbons on a birthday present.

A second. More smooth motion, this time tinged with... satisfaction.

The arm was gone.

Egg with it.

The entire process had taken a few seconds.

A scream of alarm burst from Carza's mouth, hilariously delayed. The party clamped together, locking ranks, refusing to let each other out of sight. The great presence had moved again, retreating... blood behind it. Thick, tar-like, rotten. The blood of a mutant, more loaded with corruption than anything natural. Egg was gone. Egg was gone. She'd seen the teeth cutting into his neck, seen the blood spilling from it...

Less than a few seconds...

Less than a few seconds, and Egg was gone. Ripped away right in front of her by an arm longer than his entire body, connecting to something vast. Not even time for a scream, and just... just gone. She could barely process it. The world faded to tinnitus, a whine of surprise racing through her mind. Like her brain was terrified of the silence and needed to create noise. Nothing this... this big happened in silence. It needed an accompaniment. And all her brain could muster was a high-pitched whine at the corner of her hearing. Her eyes refused to blink, just kept staring, insensible to reason. Hull was pulling her... she came back to reality for a few seconds, controlled her own feet, lunged with the others off the road. Against a tree. If their backs were to the wall, nothing could come from behind them. River as a defence. Unless it could live there too... the rushing waters were too thick with bubbles and silt for her to see the bottom, anything could be down there. Anthan had reloaded, Lirana was shaking like a leaf, her eyes wide.

They were staring into the forest, all four of them.

Four.

Not five.

Four.

Egg was gone. Egg had been stolen away. Maybe he was still alive, maybe he was still going, maybe he was... maybe. He could be alive, right? Could be? Maybe? Maybe he... he had no contamination in him, maybe the mutant wouldn't tear him apart, maybe it would...

She heard something snap. And shortly after, a nauseating crunch.

And she knew he was gone.

No-one had screamed. No-one but her. Just shouts of alarm... and now, now they waited. The mutant was still out there, bleeding from two bullet wounds. Still no idea of how big it was, how... how potent it could be. Couldn't get the arm out of her mind... the sight of Egg's blood prickling on his neck like beads of sweat, shining in the dull ever-morning light... not even time to scream. Neck was being squeezed too tightly.

The mutant had decided they weren't going to give it anything else. Their clippings weren't even snacks, their Sleepless had long-since run off, and now... now they had nothing to offer but themselves. Anthan was silent, staring, trying to get the position of the mutant while his hands smoothly slipped another bullet into his rifle... bullet? Shell? Round? She still had no idea. Before she could think, she was raising her pistol, pointing it out into the amorphous mass of trees, searching for a hint of grey. No birdsong. It was silent. Still so very, very silent. And Anthan growled out a few commands.

"If it leaves, it'll heal and come back later. Pick us off one by one. Either we run away and hope that it won't follow us, or we try and lure it in. Boss?"

Carza and Hull glanced at each other. Hull's voice was stiff with tension, and it creaked out of a throat that wanted to focus on panting or roaring, or simply silence. Speech felt... felt wrong.

"So... why not run?"

Lirana choked out a response.

"If we run, it'll chase us. Attack while we're tired and scattered and unfamiliar with the terrain."

Anthan narrowed his eyes.

"She has a point. Shit, why now..."

Carza couldn't even bring herself to chide him over his vulgarity. For once, it felt appropriate. The mutant had just... last night it had been eating scraps like a tame animal, the next it was attacking them... had she done this? Had she brought it? Had she made it think it was worth following them, promising it treats she couldn't keep giving? The wounds from her clipping had scabbed over, and they itched furiously, her skin burned with guilt, the kind which made her break out in a cold sweat and made nothing feel quite right. Maybe she'd done this. She'd killed them all because she couldn't... couldn't get rid of the damn clippings before going to bed, idiot, idiot... should've been more careful, should've learned... she'd done this. Her hands shook, and her mouth remained shut. Maybe there were others, maybe the others had left a trail for it with their clippings, and... and she couldn't bring herself to shift the blame. Lirana sniffled again, itching idly at her bandaged shoulder, before adjusting her own coat. Rifles were poised, and a pistol shook beside them. Silence. Always, silence.

She gritted her teeth... and watched.

No-one was saying anything.

No-one.

She'd gotten them into this mess. Anthan should know. Anthan must know. Why wasn't he... he was just staring out, he wasn't looking at her at all. Guilt burned in her like a hot coal, and she... she had to.

Had to speak.

"We... we should burn it. We still have fuel. If we can th-throw it, we can burn it to death. Yes?"

Anthan grunted.

"We could. But we need a good shot - only one chance."

"But if we... we do it, then we win?"

"I doubt it'd survive. And if it did, it wouldn't try and kill us - would just back off."

"Then we need to... to... to lure it. Yes?"

"Yes. Question is how..."

An idea.

"You... you lured the Sleepless with contamination. Found a spring, burst it open. Maybe..."

"We'd need to find another spring, which would mean going into unknown territory - into the forest."

"Cross the river? Escape that way?"

"Too fast. Too deep. No bridges or natural crossings I can see, none for the last few hours at least. Not sure if there's any up ahead."

Her mind was feverish, burning with ideas. She had to do something, she'd convinced herself that she'd gotten them into this mess, gotten Egg killed, and... and that made two. Cam had died because she came here in the first place. Egg had died because she'd been too damn stupid. Two deaths. She remembered huddling in her room, insensate and paranoid, after seeing Cam's body in the morgue, and... and she couldn't do that again. If she went that low here, she'd get everyone killed. Couldn't just be some... some invalid that the others had to haul around. She couldn't shoot, could barely punch, all she could do was linguistics, anthropology, and thinking. So think she would. Guilt sparked fury, fury sparked determination. Determination sparked inspiration.

She kept her voice low, though.

Determination couldn't excuse being loud. The silence was their only clue that this thing was around, after all.

"We... should lure it. Burn it. If we run, it'll pick us off one by one - it can move faster than we can, and if we're tired, we won't stand a chance."

She gulped.

"...and we can lure it by... uh..."

...wait.

"Lirana, did you keep those clothes?"

"What?"

"From the temple, the clothes you had on when Kralat died."

"...yes, yes, I do."

"Are they still-"

"Bloodsoaked. Yes."

"Maybe he was a mutant - he was large enough for it, and all his men were mutated too. And if he was a mutant, and if we soak those clothes in the blood that thing left behind..."

Anthan caught on.

"...then the clothes should have the scent of contamination on them. Loaded with the stuff, maybe not much, but... enough to convince, possibly. Good thinking. But might not be enough, I mean, it's a scrap. Nothing much."

And then the awful part of her idea came out.

"...last night. You remember last night."

The others glanced over, curious. Anthan, though, nodded grimly.

"I do."

"...maybe..."

"It's a stupid idea."

"But... it might..."

"It might."

Hull narrowed his eyes.

"What are you two talking about?"

"...last night, I wasn't able to... I mean, I didn't get rid of my clippings before I went to sleep. The mutant came in the middle of the night, and it... it took them. Licked them up. Anthan was awake to see it. And... and if it's following us because it thinks we were going to keep feeding it, then..."

Hull paled, and Carza grimaced.

"...then I'm the last one to have fed it. Strongest association. Might prefer to target me."

She'd admitted that it was her fault. Admitted that she'd lured it in because she was an idiot, and... and Hull's voice was uncomfortably loud.

"No. Definitely not. Even if it did work, that'd just make you... well, bait. Which is about as-"

"We find a clearing, you all wait in ambush. I can get those clothes from Lirana, if we soak them in that thing's blood, then it should be more pungent - and if anyone has anything to clip, anything at all... add them to the pile. We need the most convincing lure we can possibly mate. If I'm... careful, maybe..."

Maybe she'd live. But honestly, she was... she looked at Hull, saw the look in his eyes, and she thought that... that she couldn't watch him being dragged off and killed. She couldn't. If she did, she'd... if Hull died here, she wouldn't make it over the mountains. Simple as. Maybe she was being protective, maybe she was being stupid, maybe she was just being guilt-ridden over the fact that her own damn idiocy had gotten someone else killed, and she wasn't accepting any arguments to the contrary there. Her fault. Her own damn fault. And if she could get the others out of here, then she would. Anthan was looking at her speculatively, and something else was in his eyes - pride? Guilt? Sadness? Regret? No, it was... curiosity. What was he curious about? Her ability to follow through?

She stiffened her back and stared him dead in the eyes.

"We're doing this. I lure it out. You burn it to death."

Her voice rose.

"I am your employer, and that's what I'm ordering."

She fixed her eyes on Hull, who was opening his mouth to retort. Her voice dropped, becoming almost pleading.

"Please. I can't..."

Can't watch him die because of something she did. She'd dragged him here. She'd decided that this was the best course of action. She'd brought the mutant. She couldn't let her mistakes kill him. Just... just couldn't. Carza vo Anka was a coward. She knew that. Being a coward was healthy, it had kept her alive more times than she wanted to admit. And the gnawing in her stomach, the selfish urge to survive, it had... along the way, somehow, it'd become wider. More broad. It longed for her to survive, yes, but also Hull. Melqua. The people she truly, truly cared about. And just as she couldn't imagine denying the gnawing its due... she couldn't imagine letting them die. It was an impossibility. Hull was her first real friend, a fragment of home, one of the few things keeping her sane in the months after graduation... he'd become something of a necessity, and she couldn't live without him, much like how someone couldn't live without water or food. And if she got him killed, if she not just failed the gnawing but worked against it, then she was working against the core of her own character.

That kind of denial, it...

She couldn't.

Just couldn't.

"Please, Hull. I need to do this."

Hull looked distraught, and her heart ached.

"...not unless I have a way of getting you out of there."

She smiled, and felt her eyes grow sore.

"Of course."

"You are getting out of this alive, Miss vo Anka."

"...I'll do my best, Mr va Trochi."

And that was that.

The plan was settled.