For the next couple of hours, the feeling of being followed grows within me. My Changed sight is not a perfect night vision, but I see figures on the ridges. Wolves? There haven’t been wolves in this part of the Bavares for thirty years. Mountain lions do not hunt in packs.
As daybreak approaches I realize that I am closer to my platoon’s hidden runway than I could hope. Six, maybe seven miles by air? Overland is a range of mountains between me and my friends. If they are still there.
I pause at a crossroads only I can see. The shorter way is through the plain. If I push myself, I think I can be back to camp in less than two days—but that would require traveling by day across the open plain, where I would be obvious to enemy flyovers.
I hear the droning of their bombers every day, see the cargo planes passing overhead. The cargo planes have escorts with them now, and I tell myself it’s because our raid was successful, but my happiness at the thought is short-lived. They are still moving forward, setting up their air base and creeping closer to Bava.
The longer way back to camp is to go over the mountain. It is a shortcut, as the crow flies, but the terrain is rough. It will take me three days or more, but I know where to find water and wild mushrooms.
I make camp, my mind still not made up, sleeping restlessly through the day, worried about being seen. When night falls I make my decision and head into the mountains.
My unseen followers seem to flank me as I navigate the crags and slopes of the goat trails. Sometimes I think I spot them by the light of the moon—human-like figures, a little too large and grotesque—but I do not trust my own senses after so much effort on so little food and water.
I now think they are Changers, but the idea makes no sense. I have seen at least three separate creatures, and Changers do not gather in such numbers, not since far earlier in the war. They are too valuable, spread out across squads like mine in both our forces and the enemy’s.
Could they be runaways? Some sort of war-weary coalition hiding here in the mountains? Are they enemy Changers, come together to hunt my friends? The first thought exhilarates me. Both scare me.
I try to move quietly, to somehow lose them, but my talons drag along the rocks. My body sags. I wonder how much of a fight I can muster if they decide to attack. I have no hope against three Changers, but I have fought my kind before, and decide that I can take one of them with me even if they come en masse.
Considering strategy helps me focus, pushing onward up the narrow trail. Rocks tumble from a ridge to my left as a figure maintains my flank.
They know I am here. They must know that I know they are also here. Am I being herded toward an ambush? Am I being observed? Am I being escorted out of their territory?
I shake my head at the last. It is too feral. I am a Changer, not an animal. Perhaps I have been Changed for too long, back hunched, legs elongated, traveling only by night.
I stop and sniff. Petrol on the wind again. This time I am certain of the smell; just as certain as I am that I am being followed by wizards.
A brief fear seizes me. If there are Changers in the mountains, there might be other wizards. If I am being tracked by a Smiling Tom, I might be a dozen miles off course and wandering farther into the mountains. I try to think of a motivation for leading me astray, and the explanation is easy: they want me dead without a fight.
I try to recall what Bellara taught me about seeing through an illusion. The key, she has said, is to trust all of your senses together. The very best Smiling Toms can fool smell, sight, hearing, and even taste. They cannot fool touch, and even an expert will struggle at fooling all of the senses at once.
The path I follow feels familiar. The smells—besides the distant whiff of petrol—are of the mountain flowers, the stone, and the dirt. I decide that I am not being led astray.
I continue on for several hundred more yards before I crest a slope, only to spot a Changer standing some ways down the path. He—or she, I decide—is smaller than me. Her talons dig nervously at the dirt, and she has a hooked beak instead of a jaw, and spiraling horns that remind me a bit of fanciful art I once saw of a satyr. She seems startled to see me so close and scrambles behind a boulder.
I stop, looking behind me. Another has been trailing me. I can’t quite place the third.
I am tired. The moon is only a sliver, and I do not want to pass that boulder. She will be close enough to touch, a perfect ambush. A small part of me—the human part—wishes for a machine pistol, though I know by experience it will do little but annoy my adversaries.
I stare hard toward the boulder the Changer is hiding behind and then limp over to a nearby rock. I close my eyes, focusing inward on my sorcery. I reverse the joints on my arms, force the claws to recede from my hands and the talons from my feet. Spines shrink and disappear. In a few moments I am human again, and immediately I feel the bite of the cold night air. I am all but naked, clothed in the tattered remnants of the pants I wore for the air drop mission. I sit on the rock and throw up my hands, trying to look relaxed.
In reality, I am tense. I can Change in a moment, talons striking, teeth tearing. I hope that they cannot see that tension in the darkness.
I wait for five minutes, then for ten. I hear stones turn in the darkness. It feels good to rest, but I can feel myself slipping away. A figure scrabbles across the scree to my right, just over the ridgeline. It passes me, going up the path, and then I see it dash behind the boulder where the first Changer has hidden.
If I strain, I think I can hear a whispered conversation.
“Javiero!” a woman’s voice suddenly calls out from the darkness.
I turn and watch as a Changer charges up the path from behind me. He reaches the top of the slope and, seeing me sitting less than a dozen paces away, stops. Like the first Changer, he is smaller than me. He has hooked spines on his elbows and leathery skin covered in old scars. I realize with a start that he is naked, and wearing a satchel on his back. I would laugh at the silliness of such a creature wearing a backpack, if it wasn’t such a good idea—a good way to keep your clothes from being destroyed every time you Changed.
The Changer—Javiero—paces back and forth along the path, blocking my retreat and glaring past me. A few long moments pass and I hear the crunch of gravel under foot. Wary of Javiero, I glance toward his companions.
I am surprised to see a man and a woman emerge from the darkness. They have Changed into humans. The man shrugs into his jacket, while the woman levels a submachine gun at me. Her face is thin, elfin, her features delicate. She looks like she’s in her thirties, but I can’t be sure in this light. Her finger floats around the trigger of her weapon.
“What are you doing, Marie?” Javiero asks in a guttural tone.
Marie does not answer him. Her submachine gun does not waver as they draw closer. The unnamed man is bigger than his companions, almost as big as me, and I spare a glance for their clothes. Both of them wear old, beaten leather jackets, but they are in good repair. The man’s has no emblems. Marie’s has the patch of the Bava city militia on her shoulder.
Marie, Javiero: these are names that belong to my people. Her Bava city militia jacket confirms it, but I am still apprehensive. Three Changers up here in the mountains on their own could mean anything, and I wonder again whether they are runaways.
If they are, they will kill me to keep their location hidden. It is what I would do.
“Who are you?” Marie demands.
I try to look tired, beaten, slumped on my rock. Inside I consider which to kill first, and worry that I cannot Change before her bullets rip my human skin to tatters. “I could ask the same of you,” I say.