The others looked at the glove. “She did cut her hand a couple of days ago,” Zefla said. Dloan tried to undo the glove.
They had to cut it eventually. Her hand was bloated and discoloured; the original wound oozed from beneath a small, sopping plaster. Miz made a face.
Zefla drew her breath in. “Oh, oh,” she said. “Oh, you silly thing…” She touched the swollen skin. Sharrow moaned.
Dloan drew his laser, opened the grip and adjusted the controls.
“What’s that for?” Miz asked, staring at the weapon.
Dloan closed the grip again, turned and fired the gun into the needle litter at his feet; a tiny, continuous red ember burned. Dloan seemed satisfied and clicked the beam off.
“Poison,” Dloan said, gently taking Sharrow’s wounded hand and laying it as flat as possible on the ground. “Antiseptic? Dressing?” he said.
Zefla was rummaging in Sharrow’s satchel. “Here,” she said.
“Might wake her up,” Dloan said, kneeling so that he could hold Sharrow’s hand securely. “Want to hold her down?”
“Shit,” Miz said, and took her feet. Feril held her other hand and pinned her shoulders; Zefla smoothed her hand over Sharrow’s forehead.
Dloan pointed the laser pistol at Sharrow’s wounded hand and pressed the trigger. The flesh spotted, blackened and split, parting like the skin of rotten fruit. Sharrow moaned and stirred as the liquid inside spilled out, sputtering and steaming under the laser’s power. Miz looked away.
Zefla rocked back and forth, stroking Sharrow’s forehead and cheeks; Dloan grimaced and screwed his eyes up as the fumes bubbling from the wound reached him; but kept the laser pointed at her hand, lengthening the incision. The android looked on, fascinated, while the moaning woman moved weakly beneath him.
They built a fire. Zefla had a last lump of foodslab left she’d been saving; they warmed it with the laser and tried to get Sharrow to eat it. They used a laser to heat some water in the hollow of a stone, soaked a bandana in it and got her to suck at it. Her face seemed to grow less puffy, and her breathing became slower and deeper. She passed from unconsciousness to something more like sleep. The smell of antiseptic spread around the hollow.
They had travelled only ten kilometres from their last camp; they still had thirty left to travel to the tower at the head of the fjord. Feril thought that given the state of the ground on the far side of the fjord the Solipsists might be significantly delayed; but it would be close-run thing, and while it could carry Sharrow until the next camp it would have to leave soon after darkness if it was to get back to the mouth of the fjord in time to attempt to make contact with the submarine.
“We don’t really have much choice, I guess,” Miz said. He still felt ill after watching what they’d done to Sharrow’s infected hand. His feet ached and his stomach felt like it was eating itself; he was light-headed and shivery with hun-ger. He couldn’t stop thinking about food. But at least the pain of walking helped take his mind off his empty belly.
“You’re sure you can carry her safely?” Zefla asked Feril.
“Yes.”
“I could kiss you,” Dloan said.
The android paused. “Thank you,” it said.
“Okay,” Zefla said. She lifted the satchel. “Let’s go.”
The small group of people walked along the cold, grey shore under a dark, lowering sky. The tall leading figure walked lightly, even gracefully, but the one following looked too slight to carry the burden in its arms as easily as it appeared to, and the last two in the group were limping.
Above them, a sky the colour of gun-metal shook free the first few tiny flakes of snow.
Elson Roa watched from the top of a bluff through a pair of high-power binoculars. He saw the leading figure of the group on the far side of the fjord take an object from a satchel and stop briefly while they examined it. Then they replaced the object in the bag.
Roa switched the field-glasses’ stabilisers off and listened to their slowly dying whine as the air above the waters of the fjord began to fill with snow, wiping the view out in a swirling grey turmoil of silence. The sniper at his side checked the range read-out on her rifle again and shook her head, tutting.
Roa looked behind him to where his comrades stood, healthy and alert and waiting. A little snow drifted out of the dull expanse of cloud hanging between the mountains and settled gently on their dirtied but still gaudy uniforms.
They moved through a limited world; the falling snow obliterated everything save for a circle perhaps ten metres in diameter consisting of forest-edge, rocky shore and flat water. The patch of the fjord’s black surface they could see specked continually with white flakes that vanished the instant they touched that darkness. No waves beat. Where the snow-flakes touched the ground, they sat amongst the rocks and pebbles for a brief moment, then melted. The sky was gone, brought down to an indeterminate low ceiling where the mass of grey-white flakes became a single cloud of chaotic, cluttering movement.
Feril followed Zefla Franck, putting its feet where hers had gone. Sharrow was a slight burden in its arms; her extra weight meant that it had to lean back a little as it walked to keep its centre of balance vertical, but it could continue like this indefinitely if it had to. It kept looking around even though there was little enough to see. It maintained its audio sweep, listening for anything unusual.
They had pulled the hood of Sharrow’s jacket up over her face when they’d set off; when Feril looked down at one point it saw that the hood had fallen back, and flakes of snow were falling onto her sleeping face. The soft white scraps touched her cheeks and became tiny patches of moistness. Where they fell on her eyelashes, they lasted long enough for the android to be able to see the shape of the individual crystals, before each unique shape was dissolved by the heat of her body and flowed into the skin around her eyes like tears.
Feril watched for a moment and then pulled the hood back up, sheltering her.
Zefla Franck was leaving footprints now; the snow swarming from the closed and heavy sky was beginning to lie, collecting flake by tiny flake on the rocks and pebbles and the rough-surfaced trunks of the trees at the forest’s hem and building small bridges of softness over crevices and rivulets, which had begun to freeze.
The shore became too steep and the snow too heavy; they returned to the forest, walking among the trees in a scarcened filter of flakes, enlivened every now and again as a clump of snow fell suddenly from the canopy above through the branches to the forest floor.
Zefla cut through the tangles and fallen branches they encoun-tered with her laser, leaving the charred smell of burned wood curling behind on a cloud of smoke and steam.
Sharrow made occasional small, whimpering noises and moved in Feril’s arms.
They walked on until it became too dark to see, then stopped to rest. Sharrow slept on, Zefla sat still, Miz complained about his feet and Dloan offered to take Sharrow. Feril said there was no need. Then they walked on, all but Dloan equipped with nightsights. He followed just behind Miz. The falling snow thinned, then thickened again.
Feril could see Zefla Franck’s previously well-balanced gait becoming ragged and clumsy, and hear Miz Gattse Kuma’s wheezing, laboured breathing behind. Dloan slipped and fell twice. They were only about nine kilometres from the head of the fjord, but the ground ahead was rough and much of it was uphill. It suggested they stopped and made camp.
They sat, exhausted, on a fallen trunk. Sharrow lay across their laps, her head cradled in Zefla’s arms. Feril found wood and used a laser to light the fire. It erected the tent for them, too. They put Sharrow inside; Zefla wrapped her in the blanket. Miz and Dloan sat at the fire.
“I could go on the last nine thousand metres with Lady Sharrow,” it told them, once they had gathered round the fire. “Even if she does not wake up, her palm, applied to one of the tower’s stone square’s posts, might well open the tower up.”