"You forgot this..."
The voice came out of nowhere. At least, that's what Tris thought until she realized it was the man she'd left sleeping, if "man" was the right word, which she was beginning to doubt.
"...and you'd better put that down."
Tris looked at the blade she held and then at the half light obscuring the entrance to her rocky overhang, where Luca was unwrapping himself into existence. The Baron had the manners not to point out that the child's sword Tris held was his.
She'd once spent a whole winter wanting his look. She'd been a kid back then, impressed by an older girl's quick and dirty body change. Of course, being a kid, Tris hadn't realized the new body was meant to look like Luca and she doubted if the other girl did either.
"What did I forget?" demanded Tris crossly. There was stuff in bed she'd have given a miss if she'd known she was going to see Luca again. Things like his bite to her throat and leaving one of her nails in his back.
Stepping around the blade, Luca smiled. "You left your marble on the chest."
Tris sighed. "It was a present," she said. "And it's not a marble."
"Oh." Luca looked thoughtful. "What is it then?"
"It's the memory," said Tris, "from my yacht."
"You had a yacht?"
"You saw it, remember? A C-class, X9 interchange." All objects of value in the 2023 worlds were grown individually, that's what Tris had always understood. And yet the owner of All Tomorrow's Parties still gave his ship a number. No wonder Doc Joyce hated him.
"Where did you get a yacht?"
Tris wanted to say, Don't I look like a girl who might own an X9 interchange? Unfortunately they both knew the answer to that.
"I stole it," said Tris, taking the marble from Luca. "Then we crashed into a lake except it was really a river. This is what's left."
They ate wild hare, roasted in the ashes of a fire Luca built in the mouth of the overhang. He took the wood from a long-dead thorn, snapping branches as easily as Tris might have broken twigs and igniting the fire with a snap of his fingers. He also set the trap. A slight thing that was little more than a noose, a thorn branch bent double and a V of twig to peg the thorn to the ground.
"That's it?" Tris had asked.
"Sure," said Luca, "it's enough."
He'd already discarded his leather satchel and was unbuckling his cloak at the time, fussing with a silver knot on its left shoulder. "It used to untie itself," he said. The cloak was already large enough but when Luca unfolded it once and then twice it became very big indeed.
"Find me a long stick," he said.
Tris almost said, Find one yourself. But she restrained herself and after setting the trap outside, she helped Luca make a bivouac from his cloak, the stick she'd found and a dozen small rocks arranged around the edge. Since the cave-like overhang already kept out the worst of the wind Tris wasn't sure this was necessary.
It was when she was putting the last of the stones into place that Luca came back with the hare. "Here," he said, "kill this."
"You do it," said Tris.
Luca shook his head and offered her the animal, which he had by the ears. "I'm not allowed to."
"But you eat meat?"
A nod, quick and totally unashamed.
"That doesn't make sense."
"Maybe not," said Luca, "but that's the way it is."
"Why?" Tris demanded, but she took hold of the hare, only just avoiding one of its back legs which raked towards her wrist. "Tell me--"
"Do you always ask too many questions?"
"Yeah," said Tris, "always."
Luca sighed. "The thing is," he said, crouching down to sit on his heels, "if I started killing I'm not sure I'd be able to stop. You wouldn't like that. So why don't you kill it, I'll cook it and we'll both eat the thing?"
"You're not human, are you?" Tris said, realizing as she said it that this might be a tactless question.
"Nor are you," said Luca, his voice matter-of-fact. "Actually, most people aren't. Not in any sense humans would understand... Now hurry up and kill the hare, anything else is cruel."
"We could let it go," Tris said. "That wouldn't be cruel."
"You need to eat," said Luca. "That's one point. The second is that the animal's half dead with fright so you have a duty to kill it." He nodded towards the small rock she'd only just put into place around the edge of his bivouac.
"Use that," he said. "And hold it the other way up or its ears will come off in your hands when you hit it."
Grabbing the hare by its back legs, Tris hung the animal upside down and thumped it hard with a stone on the back of its head without giving herself time to think. Shitting black raisins at her feet, the animal turned from something living to meat.
"You do the rest," Tris said.
Fifteen billion people watched her toss the dead hare at Luca's feet, although Tris didn't know this. Which was just as well, because the first thing she did after stalking from the camp and dry-vomiting away her disgust, was drop her silk trousers and raise the hem of her padded jacket, letting rivers of steam melt frosted blades of grass.
"Moron," she said.
And all the while, buzzards circled overhead and a lizard clung to rock, either dead or too catatonic with cold to move. There was no single camera watching Tris and Luca. Indeed, the concept "camera" meant nothing to Tris. If she'd stopped to wonder how feeds were fed she'd have decided by magic.
The truth was far stranger. Every living thing on Rapture watched everything else, from the cat that slunk across the yellow roof of the Emperor's pavilion to the single butterfly delivering a message as it touched his wrist. And the Library drew together these threads and, from them, created a seamless feed that was life in the Forbidden City.
Ripping a leg from the roasted body of the hare, Luca held it out as an offering. "Try it," he suggested.
They ate in silence.
It sleeted that night and again the next morning. What had started as sleet became hail, driven on a chill wind that roared down a valley into their faces. They had to set their next bivouac quickly and break it down just as fast, Luca converting their crude tent back into his cloak with a sleight of hand that Tris somehow always missed.
"You sure this is the right way?"
"No," said Luca, "I'm not."
"We should have brought a map."
Luca stared at the hail and sleet breaking up the world around them. "No point," he said. "Coordinates have zero meaning at this level." It was the last thing he said that day.
And Tris was ready to believe he'd forgotten her existence, except that once she slipped while stepping from rock to rock and Luca grabbed her so fast she barely saw his hands move. She slept in his arms that night as snow piled up against one side of the bivouac, although there was nothing sexual in his stroking of her hair and both retained their clothes.
"No," Luca had told her, when Tris first knelt to scrape snow from the hillside, making space for their bivouac. "Don't dig."
"Why not?"
"Sleeping on snow is warmer," he told her. "Here..."
Tris caught his knife.
"Stab the ground."
Shock echoed up Tris's arm and only the fact Luca's knife had a crossbar stopped Tris slicing her hand on the blade.
"That little sword of yours could break stabbing this stuff," said Luca. "It's permafrost. You need to know these things."
He read the question in her face.
"Because," Luca said, "you're meant to be doing this on your own."