At times, the way became so steep that he was afraid of stumbling, falling, losing control and sliding as the car had slid. In these places, he went to his hands and knees, crawling from one sprout of vegetation to another, from one jutting rock outcrop to the next. Here, the car had often left the ground, then smashed back to continue sliding.
Hulann found a few twisted pieces of it.
He held on to a few of them as he crawled forward, until he realized there was no purpose in that. He threw them away to free his hands again.
The cold air burned into his lungs. His chest had begun to ache strangely, and spasms of sharper pain more frequently lashed through his entire torso with a fierceness that forced him to stop and grit his needle teeth into his lips, drawing blood. It was some time before he understood that his tender lung tissues were being frozen by the winter air. The soft, wet internal flesh would harden and crack under this sort of punishment. He would have to take smaller breaths, slower breaths, so that they had more of a chance to warm on their way to his lungs. He could not get by on his primary nostrils, though he might be able to manage on the larger secondary set. He allowed the muscles of the primary pair to force down the blockage flap further back in his sinuses.
There was a mysterious grayness in the air. Dawn was coming, and even reaching small fingers through the clouds and the snow, through the pine needles to the floor of the earth where he so desperately needed it. Then, in the slightly increased light, he saw the fractured hulk of the shuttlecraft ahead.
It was wedged between two columns of rock which thrust out of the mountainside like markers for some sacred portal. At first, he thought they were artificial, but discovered they were natural-albeit odd-formations. The craft was on its side between the rocks, crushed by a third, battered beyond recognition. From this vantage point, looking partly in on the bottom of it, Hulann could see that both rotars were gone, that all of the drive mechanisms had been torn free. He had not expected it to be operative, of course. Yet its final, total death was somehow depressing.
Giving way to the slope, he slid and stumbled to the vehicle, came up hard against the back of it. He gripped it, breathing hard through his secondary nostrils. When he felt steady again, he looked the car over, cataloguing the dents and scrapes, then found a way up its side, along it until he came to the driver's door. The other door was pressed flat to the earth on the other side.
He could see nothing inside, for the passenger compartment was in total darkness.
'Leo!'
There was no answer.
'Leo!'
Silence.
He wrenched at the door, frantic. The guilt that had begun to lose its edge in him now flowered larger than ever. If the boy were dead, then he had killed the boy. Surely. Yes. Because he had been driving; because he had not been careful; because he was a naoli, and naoli had set up the conditions which had made their flight necessary in the first place.
But the door held, jammed, locked by bent and intermingled parts. It rattled slightly in its mounts, nothing more.
He fought it until he was exhausted. Then he called the boy's name some more.
The boy did not answer.
He tried listening for the sound of breathing from within, but he was defeated by the breath of the storm, which was greater, louder, more dynamic.
When more work at the door would not help, he leaned back and inspected the shuttlecraft for a breach that might give him entrance. He saw, then, that the wrap-around windscreen had been shattered. There were only a few splinters of glass sticking in the edges of the frame. He broke these out with the flat of his palm, then braced against the rocks and the hood, worked himself inside the car.
Leo had crawled-or had been tossed-into the luggage space behind the seats. It had been, in the plummeting, disintegrating car, the safest place to be. Hulann lifted his own suitcase off the boy's legs, rolled him over onto his back.
'Leo,' he said softly. Then louder. Then he shouted it, slapping the small face.
The boy's face was very white. His lips were slightly blue. Hulann used the sensitive patches of his fingertips to test for skin temperature and found it dismayingly low for a human. He remembered then how little tolerance these people had to changes of temperature. Two hours exposed like this could do great damage to one of their frail systems.
He rummaged through his suitcase, brought out the powerful personal heat unit and thumbed the controls on the smooth, gray object that looked like nothing so much as a water-washed stone. Immediately, there was a burst of warmth that even he appreciated. He placed the device next to the boy and waited.
In a few minutes, the snow that had blown in melted and ran away, down the slanting floor to collect in the corners. The blueness left the boy's face; Hulann deemed it proper to inject a stimulant now. From the sparse medicinals in the case, he filled a hypo with serum and slid the needle into the visible vein in the boy's wrist, being careful to do as little damage as possible with the naoli-broad point.
Eventually, Leo stirred, kicking as if in a nightmare, Hulann quieted him by stroking his forehead. Ten minutes after these first signs, he opened his eyes. They were bloodshot.
'Hello,' he said to Hulann. 'Cold.'
'It's getting warmer.'
The boy moved closer to the heat unit.
'Are you all right?'
'Cold.'
'Aside from that. Broken bones? Cuts?'
'I don't think so.'
Hulann leaned against the back of the passenger's seat as he sat on what should have been the wall of the car. He breathed a sigh, realized his primary nostrils were still closed, and opened them. The warm air was good inside his chest.
In time, Leo sat up, held his head in his hands, began to massage his temples.
'We have to get out of here,' Hulann said. 'They'll be after us soon. We can't waste any time. Also, the heat source is going to give out if we have to keep it on full power. We'll have to find someplace to shelter and regain our strength and perspective.'
'Where?'
'Up the mountain. There's no sense in going down. We don't know if there's anything down there. But there's a road at the top. If we get back on that, follow the guardrails, we should come to a building sooner or later.'
Leo shook his head with doubt. 'How far up?'
'Not far,' Hulann lied.
'I'm still cold. And tired. And hungry too.' 'We'll use the heat unit,' Hulann said. 'We'll have just a little to eat before we go out.' You'll just have to fight the weariness. We must make time. The Hunter will surely be sent out soon.'
'Hunter?'
'One of my kind. Yet not of my kind. He hunts.'
Leo saw the terror in Hulann's eyes and stopped arguing. Maybe there were two kinds of naoli. The kind men had fought, Hulann's kind. Hulann was friendly. The other kind hunted. Maybe that explained the war. Yet Hulann had given him the impression that there was one Hunter-no more than a few. So that did not explain the war. That was still a mystery.
Hulann withdrew some doughy material which he compared with wheat bread-though Leo thought the taste altogether different, and inferior. He did not say so. The naoli seemed proud of the quality of the food he had been able to bring and considered these things minor naoli delicacies. To argue otherwise would only be to insult him.
They also had the eggs of certain fish suspended in a sour honey-gel. This, Leo thought, was indeed something special. He would have eaten much more if Hulann had not pointed out the danger of requiring too much heat for digestion and thereby forfeiting that needed to keep from freezing to death. Also, it might be wise to begin rationing.
