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When I reone now We need to keepHow are your feet?"

Maybe I did invent her The admission, even to hout my shoulders But I have no choice If he’s decided it’s time to move on, then I have to move on with hiht There’s no sign of anyone here, no tra to show that someone passed by

"They’re fine," Iblisters on my heels at the reminder

"Once we’re out onto the plains, we can find a place to rest, stop a little earlier today Neither of us is going to have ht"

I know he htens in protest, and for an instant I want to retort But thensnarl, and I s fur and the blood and I closetoward the plains, which is the direction Tarver proposes to hike in order to reach the wreck Perhaps if we just start , we’ll be able to track dohomever I heard

"Fine"

Silence froh that I’ me with an odd expression on his face, one I can’t read--his eyes aren’t quite onthe jacket he wrapped around ht

When I start to scra with the way the material ss up my hands, he’s roused from whatever trance he’d been in "No," he says abruptly "Keep it for now"

Then he turns his back and e that I’ll follow

What else can I do?

Somewhere in the back of my mind, a tiny, unbidden voice whispers, Would you actually want to do anything else?

The pace seeentler on

Weonly to choke down a ration bar each I choke, anyway; Tarver tucks in as though it’s a three-course steak dinner

He calls a halt again after another hour and a half of walking, looking around the plains in each direction Behind us the forest is a solden expanse of the plain I’ve never seen anything so immense as this, such a vast sweep of e fans out into a network of silvery strea the sh to juh that Tarver can dip the canteen into the the water filter do its work The wind ripples the grass of the plains in waves, for all the world like the oceans I’ve seen on the HV On the far side of all this are the mountains that stand between us and the Icarus

But we don’t see any signs of life No rescue craft roaring overhead, no colony traffic crisscrossing the sky the way the streams divide the plain I can’t understand why there aren’t colonies here Where is everyone? Neither of us says a word about it, but I know it can’t have escaped hiht before, and it takesa fire pit this tiht about that? Until I leaned against hi, even with a fire close at hand And after shoving hiain I shiver, athers up a bundle of the wire he stripped fro snares for food, and strikes out across the plain in a straight line At least I can see him here, without the trees of the forest to blockhi I had astill; sunburn, so up froot lost on a si a tropical vacation Then, my father just summoned a physician, and the burn e across my cheeks The skin around ine that it’s at least a little bruised--it’s had the four days since the crash to bloom At least Tarver has the decency not to mock me about it

I hear his voice not far behindto set a snare? I turn, chest tightening in surprise, only to find an eotten behind hten up, too far off for me to have heard him speak

The hair on the back of n of anyone, and yet as I stand there, heart pounding and ears straining, I hear another murmur It isn’t Tarver’s voice after all--it’s not quite as deep It carries some emotion I can’t identify, and I can’t understand at all what it’s saying

My body begins to shake,Fear, I tell myself, but it doesn’t abate even when I force myself to take deep breaths My skin runs hot and cold and hot again, itching with restlessness until I feel like I must h ht dress, and not enough oxygen is reaching my brain