A sickness worse than any hunger grew in his belly as he walked, then ran, back up the slope to the tent.
Sharrow had woken with the noise, still groggy; then she saw Zefla’s pale, slackly unconscious face, and the blood oozing from the wounds in her chest and head.
Now their earlier roles were reversed and Sharrow knelt in the tent, tending to the shallow-breathing, trembling Zefla. Dloan looked on, his body shaking more than his sister’s. He held her hand, staring at her face, his eyes wide and terrified.
“Call for help,” Sharrow told Miz.
“What?” he said.
“Of course,” Dloan said, his eyes shining. “The Franchisers. We can call the Franchisers.”
“But-” Miz began, then looked from Sharrow’s face down to Zefla’s. He shook his head. “Oh, Fate,” he said with a moan. He took his phone from a pocket and opened it. He tried pressing a few buttons, frowning. Dloan saw the expression and looked, wide-eyed, for his phone. Sharrow dug hers out from her satchel and found Zefla’s.
None of them worked; it was as though they had been turned off from outside.
There was little they could do for Zefla. The bullet in her chest had gone right through, puncturing a lung; the front wound bubbled with each shallow breath. The bullet that had struck her head had left a long gouged mark along her temple a centimetre deep; tiny shards of bone marked its edges. They couldn’t tell if the round had pierced her skull or grazed off. They sprayed antiseptic on her wounds and bandaged them.
Feril arrived back twenty minutes later; it had heard the noise from its position near the tower. It tried broadcasting a distress message using its own comm unit, but didn’t hold out much hope of it being picked up unless somebody was deliberately looking with a targeted satellite.
It put its hands gently to Zefla’s head, feeling carefully around, and told them there was a bullet lodged inside her skull near the back.
The android suggested it went on guard now. Miz gave it the machine gun. It closed the tent and left them to tend to the wounded woman as best they could.
It knew now that it should have spoken its mind earlier when they were trying to decide what to do; it ought to have suggested that it stay here, on guard, but it had not felt it was its place to say anything. They were experienced at this sort of thing, their lives were more totally at risk than its was, and it had not wanted to be thought presumptuous or patronising.
Fool, fool, it told itself, taking the safety off the machine gun. Fool, Feril; fool.
It sat down in a pile of freshly fallen snow near the top of the small ridge above the camp, and nursed the gun until the bitter dawn arose.
They set off just after dawn, leaving Dloan behind in the tent with Zefla. She was still breathing shallowly. The bandage round her chest was soaked red, and they had to keep her turned on her side to let her cough up blood without choking. Dloan just sat there with wide, frightened, child-like eyes, stroking her hands and whispering to her.
“She’ll be all right,” Sharrow told him, not believing it but feeling it was the only way to dam his despair. The big, powerful man looked about five years old.
Dloan said nothing but looked at Sharrow with a faint, tremulous smile, and kept on stroking Zefla’s hand. Sharrow ran her hand over Zefla’s pale, hot face and stroked her cheek.
“You’ll pull through, eh, girl?” she said, trying to keep the choke out of her voice, then pulled away and stood shakily outside the tent where Miz and Feril were waiting.
She hesitated, then went to the body lying frozen just up the slope from the tent; it had been torn almost in half by the machine-gun fire. Sharrow pulled the black mask off the figure’s head, remembering Keteo. It was a woman’s face.
Again, she thought at first she didn’t recognise it, then recalled the woman at Roa’s side in Vembyr, during the auction and then afterwards at the docks. It was her. She let the mask snap back and rejoined Miz and Feril.
“Let’s go,” she said.
They set off into the snow-quiet forest under skies like milk.
Feril knew the fastest route; they moved as quickly as they could, uphill through broken boulders and deformed, wind-blasted trees. Sharrow walked until the android saw her stumble and gulp for breath, then offered to carry her.
She said nothing for a moment. She stood breathing heavily, her bandaged hand hanging at one side. For a moment Feril thought it might have mistimed its offer, but then she nodded.
Feril picked her up easily and strode off through the trees. Miz struggled to keep up; the air was like freezing water in his throat, his legs weak and shaky with hunger and fatigue.
They were fifteen hundred metres away when they heard the firing up ahead.
They stopped for a moment and Sharrow got down from the android’s arms. Machine-gun fire crackled and laser fire snapped; there were sharp explosions that might have been grenade or mortar rounds, and a booming ripple of fire that could have been a cluster munition. Trees around them reacted to the shuddering air, loosing powdery falls of snow.
“What,” Miz wheezed, “was all that?” His breath smoked in front of his face. “The Solipsists… couldn’t have had… ordnance that heavy… could they?”
“I believe I heard jet motors,” Feril said.
The gunfire and explosions died away, the echoes fading slowly to silence amongst the mountains.
They listened a while longer, then Sharrow shrugged. “Only one way to find out.” She looked back the way they had come, as if trying to see the tent. She let herself be lifted when Feril offered her the cradle of its arms again.
A few minutes later they saw the smoke rising above the trees ahead, piling silently up to the calm skies, spreading and fanning in the shining space above the peaks.
They came to the tower quarter of an hour later.
The trees ended four hundred metres from the tower; the slope descended to a delta of tall rushes. The stone square containing the shallow-walled circle with the stubby tower at its centre was just as the android had described it, near the straight edge of the fjord’s end with the braided river delta beyond.
They looked out onto devastation. The whole small estu-ary around the stone square and the tower was dotted with smouldering fires, bodies and wrecked vehicles. The decaying superstructures of a couple of long-foundered boats rested above their still images in the quiet waters of the calm fjord.
It was hard, at first, to distinguish ancient wreckage from fresh carnage, then the android pointed to the trail of bodies that led from a break in the trees on the far side of the river delta and stretched towards the tower. Smoke still rose from several of the corpses.
“Those the Solipsists?” Miz asked it. Most of the bodies were too blackened for any colours to be visible.
The android took a moment to reply.
“Yes,” it said eventually.
They could see the two parachutists the Solipsists had dropped; they must have been hit again, because both their bodies were burning, too. Sharrow caught the smell of the individual pyres on the breeze and felt sick. There was just one other gaudily uniformed figure visible, sprawled at the corner of the stone square nearest them.
“Who did all this?” Sharrow said. “Was this all the tower defences?”
The android lifted a hand, pointing towards the forested valley behind the small estuary, then seemed to droop.
“I believe…” it began, its voice small, then it fell over slackly, thumping into the ground and rolling a little way downhill, limbs flopping.
“What-?” Miz said, stumbling after the android with Sharrow.
They lifted Feril’s head.
“Fate,” Sharrow said. “How do you bring one of these things round?”
“Can’t see any switches,” Miz said. “Think this was natural? You know; just a fault in the android, maybe? No?”