CHAPTER SEVENTY - KILLING FIELD

It wasn't... quite a chase.

Lyur was leading her on. Letting her run into the ice fields, letting her charge, blindly and senselessly, into a frozen river that would shatter under her feet and chill her flesh to the bone. Right now, her skin was numb and pale, blood fleeing inwards to escape the cold, to nurture warmth around the things which mattered. If she fell into a pool of frigid water, left to grow colder and colder as the season wore on and the ice refused to melt... then her body would decide that even more deserved to go. Lose a foot, it was already a lost cause, the blood would freeze before it could warm the thing up. Let the flesh rot away, let it turn blue and black and crack away like a fresh carrot. When you were in an environment like this, you couldn't survive, just die slowly. This wasn't a place for humans. The best thing the body could do was keep you going long enough to find shelter, warmth, an environment where humans were meant to survive. Until then, all that could be done was damage control, triage, the careful amputation of a list of priorities, whittling down, down, down... until there was nothing left to amputate away.

She was already dying. So was Lyur. But he had a coat. An absence of wounds. A scarf wrapped around his mouth, until all that she could occasionally see of his face was a flash of pale skin, and dark, dark eyes.

In the race to see who could die first, she was winning.

She ran. The pale was all around, the wind howling and cutting into her back, flaying at any piece of exposed skin. Sand, snow... both were crystalline, both were jagged. Both could cut. Sand was a little better at it, but when you were out in the snow fields, alone, with no experience of a sandstorm beyond theatrophone plays... well. The difference felt academic. The snow came up to her knees, and she struggled through it with great, exhausting bounds, charging and creating huge passages that Lyur could easily walk down. The one advantage was that when she created a valley, it destabilised a moment later, and for someone like Lyur, someone who wasn't a giant, it still meant he was wading through deep snow. Still easier than it should've been. The smooth whiteness mocked her, looked solid, but the moment her foot made contact... she'd feel a flash of terror as it all gave way and her foot plunged down, down, down towards the ground. Would she hear a crack of splintering ice? Would she slip, twist her ankle, be forced to crawl like a dog until Lyur put her down? The knife wasn't in her hand, they were both too numb, she had them tucked under her armpits just to keep them from turning blue. But it was at her waist, and she could feel it bouncing, poking, the smooth, smooth blade kissing her leg whenever she stepped improperly. Never enough to cut. But always enough to remind.

If she turned, she might kill him.

Might.

He might shoot first. He probably would. He'd have no reticence, no moment of terror, no sudden paralysis in the face of a flat-faced giantess charging out of the growing blizzard. Big game hunter - knew that his evolutionary instincts to run or freeze were pointless when he had a gun. That the world wasn't full of giants for a reason, that buffalo died by the thousand, whales were dragged from their watery homes with harpoons, elephants were torn apart for their ivory, and in the lands were giants once dwelled, only rabbits, minnows, rats endured. Anything larger just made for bigger targets. And better trophies.

She couldn't kill him. Pragmatically. Couldn't.

And how could she kill something that... resisted understanding. Maybe she'd slice his throat, and he'd just keep moving. She'd need to... to wrap him up in a hug, crush his arms to his side, stop him from firing even as he died. She'd need to embrace him tighter than she'd embraced anyone in her life, save for perhaps her mother and father when she was much, much younger, and much weaker. Maybe his blood would freeze in his wounds, scarring over with ice before more than a drop could be spilled. Maybe he'd just keep moving, healing over with glittering crimson crystals, his eyes always fixed on her, never blinking, dead and flat as a mutant's.

She was...

Tanner Magg was twenty three.

Until a few months ago, she'd expected to wake up every day and do the same things. Go to the news room. Wait for the day's briefs to come in, if she needed any more. Get to work. Interview. Elaborate. Infer. Argue. Weigh matters up in her mind. And then do it again the next day, and the next, and the next. She had a vocation that would make her mother and father proud, would satisfy her lodge, would leave her regarded as an upstanding, normal, decent person. Unless you met her, on paper she'd be as ordinary as they came. Every day she created a more ordinary Tanner out of paper and ink, out of records, out of judgements. And one day, maybe in the far future, someone would meet her, look up in surprise... and their eyes would glaze over. Because all they'd known was this paper Tanner, this better Tanner. And what was this... crude lump of flesh and bone compared to that? Pale. Insubstantial. Easy to ignore, easy to only see the polite, normal, ordinary, mundane, decent Tanner that she'd spent years and years building up with every page she wrote and filed away.

Until a few months ago, that was all she wanted from life.

Now her wrists were ragged with blood and torn skin. Her arm was sliced and bare. Her legs were utterly, utterly numb, and any pain from the knife poking them by accident faded after less than a second, stolen by the cold. Conspiracies. Plots. Couldn't stop thinking about the old man with his sad eyes, and the way he'd... he'd brought the knife closer, closer, so sharp she'd barely felt it when her skin was cut. Seen more death in the last few weeks than she'd seen in her whole life.

She wasn't... ready for this.

Kept running.

The dunes of snow surrounded her on all sides, and she wove around them, never trying to stumble up, which would only exhaust her, slow her down, make her easy pickings. Lyur was stalking her with lazy, patient slowness, unwilling to exhaust himself in some desperate sprint for the kill. Had to weave around the dunes, and this gave her cover, took away Lyur for precious minutes as he was forced to weave through. Sometimes her arm would lash out, and she'd allow her hand to become completely numb to the point of painfulness when she dragged great heaps of snow from the hillside, filling in the valleys she carved with her every movement. Anything to delay him. And while the wind howled... the dunes scattered it, kept it confined above her head. Gave the world an eerie, graveyard silence. Reduced the world down to single stretches, to the next turn, the next convolution of the landscape. No sign of any tower. But she... the maps, the maps, dig into her memory room, find the map. Remember what it looked like, remember where... right, there were some towers around here, she was fairly sure of that. But to get there, she'd need to go through these fields. The fields no-one was meant to go through at this time of year, by gubernatorial decree.

Simple.

She was going to die out here.

No. Not dying. She'd survived long enough to escape the tunnels, she'd broken her bonds, she beat three grown men in an unexpected fight, it'd taken... taken enough sedatives to put down a bull to knock her out! If Lyur didn't have his gun, she'd win in a heartbeat. He'd said it himself. That he wouldn't be able to beat her in a stand-up fight, not with a truncheon, maybe not even with a knife. If he lacked that gun... if he lacked that gun...

In the unearthly silence of the snow dunes, where each step could mean death...

Lyur spoke.

His voice carried clearly, despite the conditions. Despite herself, she strained her ears to listen for it.

"Tom-Tom didn't ask you for guards. Do you remember that?"

She did. Back when the investigation had seemed... faintly by-the-book. Tom-Tom had been adamant about not making a thing of it, just keeping it small, personal, almost private. And Tanner had immediately gone for the governor. Had Tom-Tom expected that? Dealing with someone that... well, her father and Lyur had both called her incompetent, shambolic, moronic. Dealing with someone like that was difficult - what was deliberate? What was accidental? Incompetence confused both categories, adding margins of error to every prediction.

"She wanted to search your house in peace. Check if you'd found anything, if there was any material we could use against you... not that we suspected much. One young judge... hm, though, even then, you were unnerving a few people. Allegiances unknown. Beliefs ambiguous."

She was a judge, she believed in the law, it was very simple.

No breath in her lungs to reply. But she could still listen, even as she rushed onwards, piling snow behind her to slow him down, trusting the pale haze, the lingering fog, the rolling landscape to shelter her for just a little longer. The matches he'd given her were under her dress, nestled where the chill wouldn't make them useless, where her hands couldn't fumble them. Warm. And in a place where she was perpetually aware of them.

"Found some interesting things."

Tanner almost stumbled.

Almost.

Gritted her teeth and kept going.

"Who's Eygi?"

Her face was utterly flat. Panic churned in her. Panic and anger. And his voice kept coming, clear as a bell, rolling around the hills like it was seeking her out, a living creature hunting her down. Lyur walked, and like a bloodhound, his voice rode ahead of him, seeking his quarry.

"You seem to like her. A great deal. Old lover?"

No.

"Noticed that she wasn't replying all that much. Did you leave those letters back home?"

A pause.

"Or are those letters just few and far between? I thought she might be dead, at first. Writing to an old, deceased friend, keeping her memory alive... but then we found the replies. She does write back. Just not terribly often."

Eygi was busy. She was always busy. Eygi was a noblewoman who had a life of her own, priorities of her own, and some people just weren't spectacularly good at writing letters. Tanner accepted that. Friendship was about accepting someone for who they were, blemishes and all. Eygi put up with Tanner's awkwardness, her foreignness, her lack of sophistication, of tact... and Tanner put up with the short letters, understood why they were short, and why they didn't come especially often. That was how friendship worked.

"Looked her up. They keep books of people like her - long lists of the great and good, and what they've been doing. I think you might not. Did you know she got married last year?"

Tanner almost stumbled again. This time she was closer to failure than to success, could feel herself slipping... kept running. Legs pumping, even as she felt nothing from them but the vaguest of impulses, and her breath kept freezing to her face. Lying. He was lying. Eygi would've told her about something like... no, Eygi had every right to keep her private business to herself, she probably expected Tanner to have found it out from the newspapers or... these books she'd known nothing about. Had nothing like them in Mahar Jovan, and no-one talked about these things in the temple, too earthly, and... yes, Eygi had expected her to know, and Tanner hadn't. Hadn't brought it up. Probably insulted her. That was why Eygi wasn't writing much, she was hurt by how Tanner had just never asked. Kept asking about the stinking weather, and not about... about her getting married. Maybe he was telling the truth, but it didn't mean anything. It meant nothing.

He meant nothing.

"The old man never quite got your measure. Never understood you. You were too... flat, too neutral, too dull. Rarely talked. Rarely emoted. Not the sort of thing he was good at dealing with. But me... I think I understand you. More than he did. Even when he had all his tools, I don't think he knew you as much as I do now."

A pause.

"You're scared."

Of course she was scared, she was being chased by a man with a gun.

"I think you're scared of yourself. You're scared of being alone, because if you are, then you have to reckon with what's inside your own head. Been a while since you've done that. Cling to other people, even when they push you away, because if you do that, you don't need to think about yourself. Only them. What they think of you. The reason the old man didn't know you was because... well. He never saw you. All he saw was the version you created when you met someone else. You're only honest when you're alone. And when you're alone, no-one can get to know you."

His voice seemed to swim around her, a haze as thick and obfuscating as the boundless pale. She ignored him. Marana had tried this. Tried to get under her skin, psychoanalyse her. It'd been annoying. Very annoying. And...

And... she had no other rebuttals.

He wasn't wrong.

"What are you afraid of?"

Nothing.

Her ability to hurt other people.

Him.

The idea of hurting people and leaving poisonous impressions behind her. Every insult a wound. Every injury an infection. Either you built a shell shaped like a better version of yourself, or you built a shell shaped like a worse version. This shell could live outside of you, beyond you, outliving you and outspreading you. It would meet people, greet people, forming an involuntary empire. No matter what you did, you formed an involuntary empire, and you either made it good or you made it bad. That was your choice. You didn't matter - you were a symbolic figurehead, a constitutional monarch, powerless and castrated.

And when you were large and strong and clumsy and awkward, it was easy to create a very unpleasant involuntary empire.

"You're alone out here. You could turn around. Try and hurt me. No-one would judge you for it. I wouldn't, on account of being dead."

She'd judge herself. Empire judging empress. Fidelizh once had a king, and that king was kicked away. Their ruler, their god, the man who embodied the state and all its people... and Rekida had done the same, centuries, millennia of slavery and domination, and then snap. Gone. A caste abandoning the city, the city left to die in silence. She could do what she wanted, but the empire of impressions she'd built for herself, emanated every time she spoke or was spoken of, was seen or sensed... that empire wasn't hers. It wasn't loyal. It was mutinous. Always on the verge of revolution.

He wouldn't understand.

Nothing like her doubts lived in those dark eyes.

"Do you think Yan-Lam would think of you as a coward if you got back alive, without my head on a platter? That girl trusts you, I'd say. And I'd say you trust her. But she'd want me dead. Wonder if she'd think less of you."

Shut up.

"How long until you stop following the law, because... where's it gotten you? Followed it, body and soul, and here you are. In an ice field. Quite possibly about to die. Turn around, slice my throat, and you'll break that faith... but you'll be alive. You'll win. Sometimes you just need to do it yourself."

No, she didn't.

The surrealists had kept talking about authenticity. Higher reality. Inner self. Getting past... what had that irritating man said? 'Mind-forged manacles'. Or that woman... 'sometimes one feels like the only real person here'. Danger reawakening the spirit. Taproots of vitality.

She wanted to turn around.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

She wanted to turn and strike. Maybe this was who she was, maybe this was Tanner when she was alone. When her actions would only affect one person that... wouldn't be affected for very long. Not if she was fast enough. Turn around. Cut his throat. Hide behind this hill, spring out, absorb the bullet, steal his coat while he was dying, run. If...

Think of the law. Of precedent. Once you laid something down, you had to commit to it, couldn't go back and forth. The Golden Law was a mass of chains, judgement leading to judgement, interlocking perfectly, articulating the outlines of a beautiful, self-evident truth. If they deviated, if they shilly-shallied, they were cutting the chains, disrupting the outline, concealing the truth. The ideal judgement was one page long, and would remain relevant for the rest of time. If she murdered him, why wouldn't she murder someone else? Why wouldn't she decide 'yes, this is what I am', and then... then she'd know her depths. The furthest limits of herself. Not just hurting, not just wounding, killing.

Once she killed him, she made a single link of a chain. And once the first was made, the second would come easier.

She'd have precedent for future murders.

Sister Halima would be disgusted. Brother Olgi would be disappointed. Eygi would be horrified. Mother and father would be ashamed. The lodge would blow out her candle and let witchcraft devour her luck. Marana would know her as iron-scented. Yan-Lam would be overjoyed and vindicated in her own poor instincts. Bayai would never look at her the same way.

...she was still thinking of herself through them. Lyur's words echoed in her mind. Who was she when she was alone. No roles. No expectations. Just unfiltered existence.

If she screamed in a dark room, would she recognise the voice that came echoing back?

Stop it.

Don't let his voice into her head.

She looked at the knife at her waist...

And paused. Only for a second. Lyur's voice... there was nothing being said, but she could almost feel it purring all around her. Infecting the world. His own impressionary empire, commanded with more skill than she commanded her own.

And started to gather snow. Her hands barely stung, too numb to feel the cold. Even felt twitches of warmth... she ran, but the snow was never-ending. She'd grab some, and pack it closer and closer together, straining her arms and back to compact the mass tighter and tighter, interlocking the crystals in a chaotic lattice bound to a smaller and smaller scale. The knife was ignored. The snow whirled around her, infiltrating her hair, slithering down the back of her dress, turning every button into a tiny icy bullet that sent shocks of pain through her whenever they touched her bare flesh. Felt like a child again. Packing snow into a ball, compressing it... going further than she'd gone before. When she began, she had something the size of a cricket ball. Then a grapefruit. And larger. Larger.

It didn't take long. Her arms were strong, wounded as they were. Her back rippled with muscle. Her entire body was a brutish, thuggish thing designed for the application of force. The same motions she used now... same motions she could use for strangling someone to death. In all physical exertions, the shadow of violence.

And when she turned, and stared into the pale...

Her arms moved much as they would if she was throwing a boulder, like one of those giants from the old stories.

She didn't say anything.

When she was terrified, she never spoke.

The boulder of snow sailed away silently into the pale, disappearing in moments...

She heard a crash.

A body falling backwards.

Didn't stay to see if she'd done any damage, just ran, gathering even more snow as she went.

Slow enough that she could still hear Lyur's voice. Laughing incredulously as she tried to get away.

"Alright! Point made! Throw a snowball at me, if you like!"

He broke back down into surprised laughter, completely bemused at the idea that Tanner would throw snow at him. Well. When one was large, one had options. She'd knocked him down, she thought. Maybe blinded him. Liked to think she might've knocked the gun out of his hand, but she wasn't going to count on that, not confident enough to charge. That'd just be suicide. But... it was a delay. That was the point. The snow was growing deeper, the wind harsher, and with every ounce of adrenaline left in her, she ran. Leaving him behind. She formed another snowball, abandoned it quickly once she realised he wasn't following. He wasn't going to chase her out here. He wasn't a fool. Enough delays, and... and he must understand that pursuing her would just get him killed. That was all.

Delay him until it became a death sentence to follow her.

Now she just had to reckon with her own death sentence.

* * *

Couldn't... think of how long she'd been out here. The sun was vague and basically invisible, just an aimless, constant light which brought no warmth. The snow was infernal. Couldn't feel anything. When she struck her hand against her leg, she only felt the tiniest burst of pain, then... nothing. Her feet were blocks of ice. Snow caked her dress, filling in every fold and crease, melting under the influence of body heat... then freezing solid. She was embalming herself in ice with each step she took, and sometimes she'd move strangely, only to find her dress cracking, ice raining from a dozen places in a fine, chilling mist. Her hair was a solid helmet. No scarf. No coat. No gloves. Hands tucked under her armpits, head lowered and buried in her own chest, like she was an ashamed child. Strides had become shuffles. Any faster, and she just felt like she was venting heat in ever-greater quantities. And any movement required her to excavate snow with her legs, to shamble through the ever-widening drifts. No trees. If there were, she might have wood to scavenge. But the blank landscape offered nothing, nothing but space. Like she was at the edge of the world. Unmapped territory - and if it was unmapped, unknown, unexplored... would it really exist? Maybe this was what uncertainty looked like. A boundless landscape with no landmarks, and an environment that slowly devoured all life. Even heat hadn't discovered this place. Maybe maps made the territory, and if this place was unknown, then it was the formless chill of the high-up places in the world, where everything was unformed and vague, hostile to life in all its emanations.

No woman should travel in this country. No man, either. Not alone. Not in this weather. Once her adrenaline faded, and the terror of Lyur receded into memory... all she had was the rapid theft of heat from her body, energy from her limbs. If she kept moving, she could force the blood in her body to the skin, kept it warm. Once it retreated, it'd never come back. The territory would be permanently conceded.

She paused.

Tried to breathe through her nose. The air turned her face to a numb mass, and once she let it inside, it seemed to curl hungrily around her pores, her eyes, her temples, the outlines of her skull...

Tried to breathe through her mouth. Eat the air.

...her mouth wasn't opening.

Her eyes widened, then narrowed again just as quickly, flinching from the brightness of the snow, the shade too perfect and immaculate for humans to look on for long. With a wrench, she removed one hand from the armpit where it was warming itself, and the numbness immediately struck. Her bare left arm was useless, completely useless. She reached for her lips, scrambling with fingers that grew too numb to move with each passing moment, approaching that point of final paralysis...

Ice. Ice over her lips. Her own saliva, the mucus from her nose, the air itself, freezing into a solid mask.

She clawed vaguely, not even feeling... feeling the... ice that she touched, nor the wounds on her wrists.

A vague struggle...

Ice fell away. Her mouth opened. Her lips seemed reluctant to move.

Air flooded her throat. The reward for her efforts was a serpent of pure, unfiltered cold clambering down her throat like a parasite, her organs pumping wildly to kill it, to melt it, to warm it into something tolerable... could feel it lurking in her stomach for long, painful moments, spreading out fine, deadly filaments in the rest of her chest... it died shortly after, warmth returning. But then she needed to take another breath.

The matches. Light a match. Warm her fingers.

She fumbled... fingers were numb. Much too numb. And she'd been still for too long, the numbness was spreading everywhere. Her fingers were resistant to any command, she had to grasp the pack between her palms, lift it up and use her newly freed teeth to pull open the cardboard, to see the long wooden sticks with their beautiful red tips...

Managed to get one out. Barely. A moment of terror ran through her as she almost dropped the packet into the snow, but she lunged, crouched, caught it like she was clutching a ball in some playground game. Stayed there for a second, huddled around the pack, a single match clenched between her teeth.

And with laborious effort, she struck one.

Took a few tries.

The sparks flew. The smell rose...

A flame ignited. And Tanner lowered her head into her hands, match held between her teeth, feeling the warmth, letting the hands slowly, slowly regain some feeling... just enough to draw the match out from her teeth, so she could hold it for a little longer. Life returned, slowly, slowly... the match was already flickering. Not a huge number. But it was a tiny, tiny spark of beautiful, beautiful warmth...

Then the warmth was too much. The stick was too low.

She tried to cradle it as long as possible...

Then let the tiny sliver drop into the snow. The flame died in a second. The steam and smoke was stolen by the wind a second later. And once the snow fell... the little black twig was gone. Swallowed up by the dunes.

Idly, she told herself she hadn't yet plunged into a frozen stream. That meant something.

Kept moving. If she got over a hill, she could survey the landscape... or just see rolling banks of fog. Maybe she could dig a pit in the snow, sometimes to hide from the wind... she'd read about this, really had, but if she hid in such conditions, any heat would melt her home, she didn't know if the snow was deep enough to sustain it, and digging would require her bare hands. Success would still mean frostbite. Considered tearing her dress just to make makeshift mittens... but her dress was barely keeping the rest of her sheltered. Any more, and she'd be chilling everything else. Zero-sum game, nothing won unless something lost. Jovan might like this place. It accorded to their logics precisely. Only so much heat to go around. Only so much shelter. She moved on. Shuffling vaguely forwards under the glare of a monochrome sky. Grey above. White below. Pale all around. Her skin turning the same colour as everything else. Her dress slowly being eaten by ice and snow. Her hair turning into a snow-coloured helmet.

Rekida, either you chained the world to your will, or the world bucked and threw you off like a wild stallion.

Why did humans ever come here? They lacked fur. They lacked hibernations. They lacked all the tools that regular animals used to thrive in such conditions. Well.

They could steal those tools. Exploit the success of others. One animal grew thick, thick fur, specialised in it, worked for generations at the task, natural selection slowly pruning away defectives and producing something perfect... and then came a human with a knife, and a will to stay warm and full.

She kept moving.

And lit another match. Not many left. Only lasted... ten seconds, maybe a few more if she was lucky. Ten seconds of vague warmth around her hands and face. And then she'd keep moving. Like water in a desert - living from drink to drink, blessing every drop. Idly, she thought there might be more tunnels around here. If she found another entrance... maybe she could shelter...

The hills rose. She clambered up with some difficulty, the wind growing worse as she moved, but... she could see the landscape.

Saw nothing. Nothing but the pale.

Her lips were unfrozen, the matches saw fit to that. She started talking to herself. A vague, rambling mumble, barely audible, her lips barely moving and her tongue barely having the wherewithal to wag. Started shambling downhill as she did so, lighting another match.

Didn't know what she said. Just... spoke to herself. To her muscles. To the landscape. To the obsession with hills. To Eygi, asking her how her husband was. If he was kind. Handsome. The sort of person she deserved. Thought about her portrait, smirking coyly, all her little personal edges smoothed away by an artist who didn't quite understand that those personal ages made her pretty to begin with. Tanner was... she was a rude, uncouth, thoughtless, mindless little... little cow, a big, lumbering cow, not asking about her love life, because Tanner thought that personal discomfort with the topic meant it was fine to never talk about it. Lazy ass, dozy sow, absolute beastly wretch. Should've asked. Why didn't Algi tell her? No, she'd almost strangled him, and she doubted he'd been invited to the wedding. Oh, gods, the wedding... wished she'd been invited. Why hadn't she been? Why had Eygi, one of her oldest friends, not invited her to...

Stop thinking.

Eygi was her friend. The standard against which others were judged. Years and years of Fidelizh, of seeing people her own age as fragile little birds who either mocked her or were crushed by her, always kept at a distance by worried parents... and associating with people much older, or being stuck at home with father, or sent out to work in the fishery, or the lodge... years and years of this, and then that wonderful girl with the half-broken teeth and the frog-like eyes just came up and bought her a pie. In exchange for lifting a bag.

Move.

The paleness swallowed her once again. She was... vaguely walking in the right direction. If she looked behind her, she could see the straight-if-slightly-erratic line stretching behind her, growing shallower with each metre, until it was gone completely. Just had to set herself with that line behind her, and she'd keep moving forwards. Through the hills. One match at a time. She was... still surprised that there'd been no frozen streams. Lyur had stopped chasing her because of them, she'd been driven out here in the first place because of them, and yet... she'd not even seen a trace. And as numb as she was, she was fairly sure she'd notice cracking through a thin layer... come to think of it, there weren't any gates that opened to this area. To get here, you needed to leave the colony by another gate, and wander around the edge of the wall. She'd only come here because a secret, ancient tunnel so happened to spit her out in a convenient location. Safety was an obvious reason, safety and utility, not like you could do much with this place, but...

She couldn't see the hellish, hazardous landscape that everyone talked about.

Well.

She could feel it. In her bones. Each match only gave her a tiny burst of heat, she was genuinely unsure if she'd have all her toes by the end of this. But her face was a little warmer. Ice wasn't forming over her lips now, and sometimes she deliberately breathed smoke just to get a hint of heat with her laboured breathing, instead of the endless string of icy worm-things that slipped down and nested in her stomach as long as possible, leaving a trail of numbness through her throat and lungs. Her fingers could feel the cold, so long as the heat was here. She wasn't sure how close she was to death. You never knew, right? Never felt it. The brain became deluded the worse it became - the worst it was, the less able you were to recognise it. She kept mumbling as she walked, mostly to stop the ice forming, to remind herself that she could talk... sometimes to her mother and father. She recited every last fact she knew about eels and their significance, going off on mad little tangents every other second, touching every part of her knowledge. Like she was trying to mimic the cold air in her throat - a single point of thought, spreading out in branching filaments, maybe to warm her head back to a state of functionality.

Maybe.

Spiderwebs of warming thought.

Ending at the curve of the skull. Giving into the cold. Out here, she was an empire of one. Her borders could never be expanded, only invaded and diminished. Her shell ended with her skin, her thoughts died on her tongue. In the horizon, amidst the pale, she thought she could see the other Tanner, the Tanner of paper and ink and word and deed, hunched over like she was crawling out of the light, out of the sun. It's over, it seemed to say, this hunched behemoth, birthed from the shapeless sun, faceless with the caul - birthing caul, wedding veil, funeral shroud, all great divisions were marked by conditions of facelessness. It's over. My time. Your thoughts die with you. No more can be said. That snowball was the last thing you'll ever do as a living creature that marks someone else. Give in. My time. Birthing caul. Wedding veil. Funeral shroud. All three merging. A whole life in one image. A thing born complete.

No death but being forgotten. And that was a slow, piecemeal death. Erosion, more accurately. No death, only erosion.

She saw the hunched shadow on the horizon. Titanic. Brutal. Clawing its way closer and closer, eating the world as it went. Hands like cobwebs, spreading out everywhere, sticky residue clinging and binding and influencing. It was a figure - a wind - a cloud of whispering locusts. It was her. It was her whole summation. Before her was all she knew and had been.

Hours passed. Maybe. Could be minutes. Seconds. An instant. Gritted her teeth.

Did the moment of death feel like forever?

She warmed herself again, but the match slipped from her fingers. Too numb. The wind ate the flame, and there was nothing more. She reached, scrabbling in the packet... two left. Two matches. Twenty seconds at most, assuming she didn't drop one. Burn them, and admit that she wasn't going to reach a tower and light a fire. All she could do was snatch some passing comfort and hope for the best. Or keep staggering on. Die with hope?

The shadowy thing was closer. She stared vaguely... hallucinating as she died. Pure and simple.

Before her was all she'd known and had been. Every mark she left. The Tanner that lived a thousand lifetimes. Couldn't... she wanted to see the internals. How would she be remembered? Had she left behind enemies who'd hate her? People she'd insulted, who'd speak ill of her? Would the judges ever finish her job? She kept moving, but her knees were weak, aching to fall... had a brief image of finding a buffalo, a bear, tearing it open with her knife and sleeping in the warm entrails... she'd lose, but she... maybe there was...

Must be hallucinating.

The shadowy figure seemed to be closer.

She looked.

Something looked back.

Her lips had frozen again. Couldn't muster the will to break them apart. Everything was equally numb. It look down at her... no, it was... was it standing on a hill, looking down? She saw scars. Very many of them, and strangely shaped, none of them conventional. She saw a face that wasn't her own, staring blankly out of the fog. And she saw a cloak wrapped around it, making its body vague and shapeless, almost ghostly. The snow covered its feet, so it seemed to be floating, a ragged wisp on the winter wind... the cloak was the brightest shade of red she'd ever seen. Even the snow seemed to wilt before it.

Tanner tried to croak something. Lips frozen.

Was she standing? Was she falling? Had she found one of the streams?

Would it hurt when she went?

Her eyes slid shut...

And then...

* * *

Awareness exploded back.

She felt heat. She felt heat. Her entire body woke up to it, and moved quickly, seeking it out hungrily... she was starving for heat, and the sudden excess... she didn't even open her eyes, which was good - the ice had formed, it was a distinct effort to wrench them apart, but she could feel it melting, oh gods, wonderful heat, wonderful heat... no, no, ration it. Parched men threw up when they drank too much water, starving men felt sick when they ate too much food, no idea what frostbitten giantesses did when exposed to too much heat, but presumably it would be unpleasant. Thoughts of spontaneously igniting sweat came to mind. She just lay there for a moment, shuffling back slightly, letting the cold touch her... before inclining herself back towards the heat. Rolling to one side, then the other, eyes shut, mouth closed, just gently breathing through her nose. Darkness, warmth, and... as the snow melted, damp. Blindness, muteness, and at this point, deafness. She rested in this second womb, and waited to see if she was going to die. Some people did, you know. Almost die of cold, warm up too quickly, drop dead on the spot.

She waited.

Nothing happened. But for a second she hung there. Balanced on the edge, too tired to really care where she fell. Waited in the warm dark. Breathing softly as her lips thawed. Her flesh ached, and she welcomed it. But for now... nothing. Couldn't quite believe she was feeling any kind of warmth, couldn't quite believe she wasn't dead. Had she passed out? For how long? No, no, shush, just... rest. Let something inside her unwind, some vital core of tension that had been winding tighter and tighter and tighter since she started this investigation. Since she'd arrived in the colony. Since she'd been told to come here in the first place. This winching that had just intensified by degrees, until... she let it unwind. A tiny bit. The most tiny possible amount. And she felt...

She'd almost been tortured to death. Had been drugged and kidnapped. All her companions might be dead, lives paid to make up for the lives spent on getting her here. All Ms. vo Anka's expedition, the coachman, Tyer, Lam, the soldier, the governor, Myunhen... however many bodies yet remained.

Something threatened to come loose in her. Some... screw that held the whole straining engine that passed for her being together. Could feel it weakening, wondered what would happen...

She was tired. So very tired. If Tanner Magg was the sort of person to cry, she might've.

But she wasn't. So she didn't. Tightened the screw. Reinforced the engine. Let the gyre of tension snap shut, completely immobile once more. No thoughts. Just huddled there and waited for her body to reawaken completely. Or for her heart to abruptly stop. It didn't - could feel it, when she curled up and wrapped her arms around herself.

And slowly, reluctantly, she opened her eyes.

Steam.

Steam?

Was she indoors? Had... what had happened? Curiosity and nervousness flooded back into her. The engine was completely restored, she was back, she was fine, no strange thoughts. Her job wasn't over yet. There were more things expected of her. The shadow on the horizon, the ink-paper-word Tanner, the lingering ghost of all her impressions, waiting to be brought to fuller life by gorging on her own... it was gone. Well, she'd definitely been hallucinating, but still. Gone. She could... she could alter it. Right? Make it more complete. Expand her impressionary empire, make it a little more tailored... head back, be informed, be clever, be decisive, be witty, be powerful. Be all the things she had to be, was expected to be. She'd chosen to live down there in the tunnels. Chosen to escape, chosen to not kill Lyur, chosen to run into the wasteland where she was almost certain to die. What had Lyur said? It was a matter of will. And she'd willed her survival at all costs.

Now she had to foot the bill for her will. Hah. Oh, it hurt to think of laughing.

She'd lived. Now, the consequences. Healing. Injury. Return. Implications.

The steam was rising... no, not from an indoor space. She was outside still, but around... a patch of perfectly unmelted snow. Of grass and mud, oh, mud, glorious mud, nothing quite like it for warming the blood. She was alive, she was alive. And steam was rising from a fissure, a black, moist pit where mud dripped ceaselessly... where snow melted before it could even touch the ground. She leaned closer, welcoming the heat, bathing in it for a long few moments...

Steam?

Why was there steam out here?

Why did it smell so peculiar?

Oh, gods, she was being poisoned, she was... no, no, still alive, had been for a while, nothing happening to her that she couldn't ascribe to injury, exhaustion, cold...

Oh, gods she felt terrible. No, no, push it all down. Like a corset - tighten up, push out, restrain. She could restrain herself from hurting others, she could restrain herself from feeling hurt. Just different degrees of binding.

How had she gotten here? Vague... hallucinatory memories. Scars? A cloak? No... no, was that the... shadow, or...

She didn't know.

Her mind was cloudy.

And as she looked into the steam, breathing deep of the fumes and feeling herself slowly relax, as much as possible, feeling her near-frozen wounds stir to painful life again, a pain she welcomed for what it meant, that she was alive, that the world wasn't over, that she would live, she...

She saw something.

Something past the steam. A shape.

Tanner froze.

Her voice was a hoarse rasp. Throat tightened by cold, by fear, by all of it. By the roar she'd let out when she escaped.

"Are... did you bring me here?"

Silence. Was she talking to an inanimate... no, no, she saw movement. A cloak? Was...

The thing moved.

Shuffled.

A low, moaning voice emerged, barely human. Sounded flayed, changed, broken.

"...big lady?"

What?

Tanner blinked.

The voice moaned out again.

"Big lady. Ug."

No... what, no, no, this didn't...

An arm reached through the steam, the rest remaining utterly invisible through the haze. A bare arm. Corded with muscle. With... mottled patches of skin.

And two fingers fused together into a single crude claw. A claw tipped with a nail the colour of jade. A claw she recognised.

Tanner had no more words.

And the air was filled with nothing but the sound of steam rising... her heart beating... and laboured breathing from the shadowy woman, lurking out in the desolate cold, around a phenomenon which shouldn't exist. And together...

They lingered.