I don’t wait, just seize the General by the arm and throw us both from the mule into the dust.
* * *
We run. Although you can hardly call it running, the way we stagger and lurch, boots filled with grit, lungs burning in the thin, hostile air, blood beating until I can’t tell the sound of engines from my own heart. We run until we reach the incline at the edge of the trail and then we leap, tearing skin as we roll into a narrow gulley. Only when we reach the bottom, plunging into shadows, do I stop. My head pounds, my hands feel like raw meat as I paw at my clothes, praying that the canister is still there, that the medkit is intact.
It is. And I see we’ll need it: beside me, the General is in a bad way, her face haggard, the sleeve of her flight suit torn, the flesh below grazed and bleeding. While she heaves at the thin air, I listen. I can still hear the engines, but more distantly.
My voice emerges as a croak. ‘Sounds like they’ve taken the bait, gone after the mule. Should keep them busy for a few minutes.’ I look down at her. ‘Can you walk?’
She coughs. ‘Where to? Without the mule we’re carrion.’
I look ahead. The gulley splits into two paths, and I nod to the narrower of the two. ‘Their ships won’t be able to follow us in there. It should lead to the plateau. And if we reach the plateau, we can try and intercept the Air Line Road. That runs all the way to Landfall.’
The General glares at me in disbelief. ‘You almost get us killed out in the goddam wastes, when there’s an Air Line?’
‘There’s no way through these gulley by mule. It would have taken us another four days to ride around. And going on foot would not have been my choice. As it is, you owe me a new vehicle.’
I knock the hat back into shape, and jam it on my head, listening to the distant thrum of engines. Have they truly let us go? By rights, we shouldn’t be alive. Luck, that’s all it is. Luck. Not them. I swill my mouth with a few drops of water and spit out the taste of bile, the memory of the sand.
‘Come on,’ I say. ‘We have to move.’
It’s hard going. The gulley becomes a steep ravine full of boulders that shift and tumble underfoot. Rock walls tower, turning the sky into a ragged strip of white, a layer of skin torn from the world. There’s no sound but that of sliding stones, their echoes magnified again and again until I’m half-convinced we’re being followed.
For all my confident words to the General, I have only the vaguest idea of where we are heading. I try to bring to mind the map I once saw of Factus, laid out on the screen of the lifecraft as I fell hurtling towards the moon, but those memories seem to belong to another woman.
If we die here, we might never be found.
Once, that thought seemed appealing, as I lay wretched in my cell surrounded by the screaming metal of the hulks. The idea that I could close my eyes and be forgotten by the world in an instant… But that was before I made the choice to live, and to live by the tally. Now, all I can do is set one foot in front of the other.
The General starts to stagger. When I call a halt I find that her skin is burning, her eyes narrow and bright.
‘Why are we stopping?’ she demands.
‘Because you are sick. We cannot keep this pace without resting.’ I glance at the sky. ‘If the night is clear we can travel by dark.’
‘I’m not sick,’ she rasps. ‘Or if I am, it’s from this damn moon.’ Nevertheless, she sinks to her haunches beside me, and accepts a bead when I offer one.
‘What are these things?’ she says, turning it in her fingers.
‘Mostly dex-amphetamine. People call them breath.’
Suspiciously, she puts it in her mouth and bites down. A few moments later her eyes open in surprise and she grunts appreciatively.
‘I have been in far worse states than this, you know,’ she says. ‘I caught the virus, when I was sent to Tamane.’
Every nerve within me freezes. That name.
Tamane.
‘It nearly killed me,’ she is saying, ‘but I never left the field. Fought through it all. The infantry were not so lucky. We lost two thousand in my training camp alone, before we were able to contain it. So much promise wasted.’ She turns burning eyes on me. ‘What do you say to that, traitor?’
Swallowing hard, I shove the name away, and all the darkness it drags with it.
‘I say you should stop talking.’
‘I could cut your throat,’ she says lazily.
My skin prickles, but she just sighs and leans back, her eyes drooping closed. I put the medkit away, hunkering down to watch the coming dusk.
I must have slept, because when I wake the voices have started up. It’s the night wind – part of me knows that – the first gusts racing down from the sky to sweep Factus clean. But in my exhausted state, the canyon seems like a throat from which voices emerge. Eight thousand cadets, all of them young, begging, crying, choking to death.
Tamane.
Then, above the voices, I sense them. They watch with lazy interest, as if satiated and satisfied, but still curious. I glance down at the General, her lips twitching in sleep.
‘Get up,’ I say.
She groans, rolling onto her side. ‘Give me one of those beads.’
I do, and take one myself to stave off my hunger pangs. It works, but it also makes the voices on the wind worse. I try to ignore them and focus on the trail.
As the hours pass, Brovos crosses the sky above
