'They're almost here. Good work, Alfin. Go for Merril next. I don't see Glory.'
The Grad said, 'I haven't seen her since…since.' He rubbed his throat.
'She may not have jumped. Seven of us. Seven.' He flung a line. Jinny snagged it in her toes, and Clave pulled them both in together. He said, 'Welcome to what's left of Quinn Tribe.'
They clung to Clave more in desperation than affection. Jinny pulled back to look into his face. 'They're dead? All the rest?' As if she'd already guessed.
Alfin demanded, 'Why didn't the Scientist see that coming?'
'He did,' said the Grad.
'Treefodder. Why did he stay, then?'
'He was an old man. He couldn't climb fifty klomters of tree.'
Alfin gaped. 'But…but that's the same as murdering everyone who could climb!'
There wasn't time for this. Clave said, 'Alfin, pay attention to what you're doing.'
Alfin set off two jet pods, then another. The fan drifted toward Mernil, who waited in what might have been stoic calm. He murmured, 'The children!'
Somewhere off to the side, there was motion.
What Clave had taken for a purple-clad corpse was floundering in air. Clave pointed. 'One killer left.'
They watched. She wasn't floundering now. She'd tied a line to her long knife, and now she cast it out. She snagged a dead companion and reeled it in. She searched the corpse, then pushed off from it in the direction of the next.
She hadn't found much, but it must have been what she wanted. Now she fired two jet pods in turn. The thrust carried herintoward Voy. Alfin said, 'She's not coming here. Or going home. What does she think she's doing?'
'Not our problem.'
Merril caught a line thrown by Alfin and pulled herself close. By now there was no room to clutch the fan itself. Clave asked her, 'Did you see any sign of Glory?'
'Hanging on to the bark for dear life, last I saw her. She was in the out section. Gavving's a good distance in.'
'We'll go after him. I hope we get there in time.'
By then it was obvious. The woman in purple had passed them and was heading toward Gavving.
Gavving watched her coming. There was little else he could do. When he could see her face he watched her watching him. The rictus of hate he'd seen earlier wasn't there. He saw close-cut dark hair, a triangular face with an oddly narrow chin, an expression that was thoughtful, judging.
She was going to go past.
He didn't know how to feel about that. He didn't want to die alone, but he surely didn't want to die with those mini-harpoons through him. She was close now. She reached behind her back for a tethered miniharpoon. He could only try to put the meat between them as she pulled her odd weapon apart, looking him in the eye, and released it.
The feathered thing buried itself in warm meat.
Then Gavving moved in frantic haste, pulling his knife, reaching for her line-Her words were strangely twisted, but he understood her. 'No, no, no, let me live! I have water! I have jet pods! I beg you!'
It might be so. He shouted, 'Freeze! Don't reel yourself in! I have to think'
'I obey.'
She hung, tethered, motionless.
'You've got water and I've got food. What if you kill me and keep both?'
'My sword,' she answered and produced the long knife and threw it.
Startled, Gavving reached out and managed to catch it by the handle.
'My bow,' she said, and he had time to bed the knife in the meat before she threw him the pull-it-apart weapon. He caught that too.
Now what? She was just waiting.
'What do you want?'
'I want to join you, your people. There's nobody else.'
He could festoon himself with his weapons and hers, and so what? With nothing between them but forty kilograms of smoked meat, either could snatch a weapon and kill the other at any time. He'd have to sleep sometime…and still she waited.
He thought suddenly, W7iy not? I'm dead anyway. He called, 'Come on.',
She coiled the line as she came. Gavving had been hanging onto his pack, but she hugged herself up against the meat with no thought for what it would do to her purple clothing. She worked a jet pod out of one of the dozen pockets that gave her body its shapeless, lumpy look. She set it and twisted the end. When it had expended itself there was some change in their velocity. She used another. Then another.
'Why were you carrying so many?' he asked. 'I took them from my friends.'
From their corpses. Gavving turned away. Quinn Tribe now formed a single clump around. 'The Checker's Hand,' said his enemy. He had trouble understand ing her odd pronunciation. 'They're all moored to the Checker's Hand. Good enough. Fans are edible. So is dumbo meat.'
'I know that word. Checker: the Grad's used it, but he never tells anyone what it means.'
'You should not have attacked the Checker's Hand. We tend it tended it.'
'Is that why you killed Jiovan? For a fan fungus?'
'For that, and for returning from exile. You were cast out for assassinating a Chairman.'
'That's news to me. We've been in Quinn Tuft for over a hundred years.'
She nodded as if it didn't matter. She was strange…she was a stranger. Gavving knew every man, woman, and child in Quinn Tuft. This citizen had dropped on him out of the sky, complete and unknown. He wasn't even sure he should hate her.
'I'm thirsty,' he said.
She passed him a squeezegourd pod half-full of water. He drank.
The clump that was Quinn Tribe seemed minutely closer. Gavving might have been imagining it. He said, 'What do we do now? The way you use a jet pod, maybe you handle yourself better in the sky than we do. Can you tell us what to do next? Dalton Tuft—'
'Dalton-Quinn Tuft,' she corrected him.
'Your half of the tree is probably safe, but it's being pulled out by the tide. I can't think of any way to reach it. We're lost.' Then his curiosity suddenly became unbearable. 'Who are you?'
'Minya Dalton-Quinn.'
'I'm Gavving Quinn,' he said for the second time in his life. The first had been at his rite of passage into adulthood. He tried again. 'Who are you all? Why did you want to kill us?'
'Smitta was…excitable. Some of us are like that in the Triune Squad, and you were killing the Hand.'
'Triune Squad. Mostly women?'
'All women. Even Smitta, by courtesy. We serve the tuft as fighters.'
'Why did you want to be a fighter?'
She shook her head, violently. 'I don't want to talk about it. Will your citizens accept me or kill me?'
'We're not—' killers? He'd killed two himself. It came to him that if the Grad had taught him rightly, those times when the Scientist would have whipped them both for such talk, then…then Minya's half of the tree, falling out from Voy, was also falling out of a drought. So.
'Can I tell them this? If we can get you back to the far tuft, you'll see to it that we're made members of your tribe. It looks better if I can say that. Well?'
She didn't speak at once, and then she said, 'I have to think.'
The meat and the fan were passing at fair speed when Clave cast out a weighted line. He'd reserved their last pod. Another mistake, maybe. Now they'd have only one chance… but the dark stranger caught the line neatly and made it fast. They braced against their mutual spin.
Gavving shouted across the gap. 'This is Minya of Dalton-Quinn. Tribe. She wants to join us.'
