“Tell me about your people,” Perry said as they walked alongside the tracks.

  Anaksi was favoring one foot. She was silent, then looked at him, confused. “Why?”

  “I’m not from the region,” said Perry. “I want to know.”

  She looked ahead, still silent, face set. His hand was on her arm, but she wasn’t straining against him, and he was holding her only loosely. He was fairly certain that if he removed his hand, she’d bolt, no matter how fast he’d shown himself to be.

  She had long, braided black hair, an expressive face, thick eyebrows, and a wide nose. Her clothes were all animal hide, with fringe in a few places, covering her legs and body. Complicated ties at the front kept it closed, and she was dressed in layers, with something linen beneath the hide. She was sweating in the sun, or from the exertion of the train, or from trying to run from him, though she was more resigned now than she’d been.

  “Do you mean Yuuksen or Eeshkee?” she asked.

  “You said that you were Eeshkee, that Yuuksen meant ‘enemy’,” he said.

  “We use the word,” she replied. “It means … all.”

  Perry considered that. “Eeshkee is the tribe, Yuuksen are the whole of all tribes?”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “You call the whole of all tribes ‘Yuuksen’, which means ‘enemy’,” he repeated, trying to get clarity.

  “It’s not an Eeshkee word,” she replied.

  “Still,” he said.

  They walked together for a bit more. How many miles lay ahead of them was impossible to say, except that it probably was possible if you knew how the Flux operated. Perry was pretty sure that there was a lower bound and upper bound for distance, and that both were shrinking as they walked.

  “Tell me about the Yuuksen as a whole,” said Perry.

  “We were here before,” said Anaksi. She looked at him, as though waiting for him to gainsay her, like this was in question. “We had no guns, no harmonizers, no trains, no cattle, no horses. We had our ways, built over time, by our ancestors.” She paused. “Everything was impermanent. We had copper, gold, silver, but no iron. Our houses were skins, fur, wood, things that were replaced and repaired. We didn’t have such cities. We knew our kin.”

  “Your Commish is good,” said Perry.

  She shrugged.

  “You speak in the past tense, the way things were,” said Perry.

  “The old ways are dead and dying,” Anaksi replied. “We ride horses, we shoot guns. We speak your language. We’re penned in by your railroads, killed by your Commission. We are changed from what we were when the Char scoured this land.”

  “Charlonion?” asked Perry.

  Anaksi looked at him. “It came from the sky, twisting down, landing hard.” She mimed with her hands, and he felt her arm move where his hand was on her. It might have been a test, to see how much leeway she had.

  “When?” asked Perry.

  She looked at him again. “You have your own understanding.”

  “Right,” said Perry. “But I don’t know what the Yuuks say about it.” He watched her as she said the word, ‘Yuuks’, but she betrayed no reaction. Maybe, in spite of what she’d said earlier, it was neutral.

  “We count time by the generation,” Anaksi said. “It has been thirteen since the Char came down.”

  “Er,” said Perry. “And in terms of years, a generation is … ?”

  “You want to reduce our understanding to yours?” asked Anaksi. Her voice was sharp.

  He wanted to have some knowledge of when this was all supposed to have happened, but he didn’t even know the current time as the Commission would have reckoned it. But thirteen generations, assuming they were biologically normal humans, meant between twenty and thirty years, so maybe two hundred to three hundred years.

  “I’m writing a book,” said Perry.

  “I’ve heard of such a thing,” said Anaksi. Her voice was still sharp.

  “Look, I just want — just information, that’s all.” It wasn’t the time, though he needed to know. He was marching her toward what might possibly be her death, depending on what the people of the Gulch would do with her.

  “You are no writer,” she replied. “You handle a sword too well.”

  “If the writers don’t know how to fight and the warriors don’t know how to read, then the wars will be fought by the illiterate and the books will be written by cowards,” said Perry. He was pretty sure he’d mangled the quote.

  “You’re Commission,” she said.

  “No,” said Perry.

  “You knew when the train was coming,” she said.

  “Again, no,” said Perry. “I think that woman might have though.”

  “You move like a killer,” she said. She pulled at his grip on her, though not hard enough that he needed to tighten up.

  “Your husband killed quite a few people,” said Perry.

  “He killed for a purpose,” said Anaski.

  Her Commish really was remarkably good, if with a strong accent. She knew a breadth of words, and didn’t trip over them, even if she was sometimes slow. That raised considerable questions which probably had answers, if only he could get her to explain. Had she lived in one of these towns? Gone to some kind of residential school? It was clear that the Commission was trying to settle the land, or maybe that the Commission was taking advantage of other people settling the land, and campaigns of violence went along with that. It wasn’t clear to him whether the Commission actually had an army, but he would have wagered they at least had something like it. She could have been orphaned, kidnapped, all kinds of bad things. Her Commish was notably better than her husband’s.

  “How does it affect your people, the harmonizer?” asked Perry.

  “All these questions,” she said, grunting at him. “We could have silence.”

  So they walked in silence, for at least a mile. There was still no sign of the train, the town, or anyone else. Her limp got worse.

  “I need water,” Anaski said.

  Perry didn’t have any water. He hadn’t been issued a canteen, which seemed like an oversight. There had been spares on the other horses, water was something you couldn’t take for granted, but he hadn’t even considered it. He didn’t really need water, not with second sphere. He probably could have eschewed eating and drinking for a few days, in the same way that he could go without breathing for a bit, if he had to.

  “There’s a skin in the purse,” said Anaski.

  Perry reached into the satchel with his free hand and opened it up. He hadn’t looked inside. The harmonizer was sitting there, still with the unearthly pink glow to it, and there was a waterskin beside it. It looked like it had been made from an animal bladder or something like that, with a wooden stopper on the top. Some of it had leaked during the fight, but only a little, and he pulled it out to hand to her.

  “Wait,” she said.

  Perry pulled to a stop.

  “And let go of me,” she said.

  Perry released her. There was a chance that the waterskin held something other than water, something dangerous, but he wasn’t particularly worried about that. The waterskin her husband had used contained something strange, but it hadn’t seemed to work at all.

  She drank from the waterskin, gulping the water down, then held it out to him. He waved her away.

  “You’re not thirsty?” she asked. “After the train, the fighting?”

  “No,” said Perry. “Besides, I don’t want to risk being poisoned.”

  She watched his face, then shrugged her shoulders and took another drink.

  “How much further to town?” he asked.

  “We won’t make it there before nightfall,” she said.

  “How do you know that?” asked Perry.

  “We are taught the ways of the land from birth,” said Anaksi.

  “That’s not an answer,” said Perry.

  “We read the skies,” said Anaksi, pointing straight up. “And a train’s passing makes a destination long.” She handed him the waterskin, and he took a swig of it in spite of himself, then placed it into the pouch.

  “It would be shorter if we had no destination?” asked Perry.

  “And shorter still if I weren’t along,” said Anaksi. Her eyes were on him. They flickered down to his shirt. “You were … only grazed?”

  Perry looked down at where blood had stained his shirt. He’d deflected two of the three bullets, but the third had hit him, passing through the meat of his pectoral and into the periphery of the lung. It had passed back out, missing his ribs both ways. He’d felt some shortage of breath, but he’d been circulating energy as a matter of course, diverting his blood around the wound, helping it to clot quickly, and the lung itself was now almost completely healed thanks to the vital energy. He would have a mild shortness of breath if he was breathing normally, but he was drawing energy from the air as well as breath, and using some of that. Even a shot to the heart wouldn’t have been fatal, not if he had time and energy. This was almost a best case scenario.

  He had very definitely not been grazed. She was able to see that.

  “Oh god, I’ve been shot!” shouted Perry, looking down at his chest.

  She took a step backward when he said it, and her brown eyes went up and down him, but she didn’t bolt. The joke didn’t seem to have landed, which was, perhaps, predictable.

  “Humor doesn’t transcend cultural barriers very well,” said Perry. He poked at the wound. “I’m fine, thanks for asking.”

  “They say the Commission has many powers,” said Anaksi. “Even the power over death itself.”

  “There are rumors,” said Perry. “It’s in the Commission’s interest to spread those rumors far and wide.”

  She looked skeptically at the bullet wound.

  “Let’s keep moving,” said Perry.

  “We won’t make it there by nightfall,” said Anaksi. “Not if we walk for ten hours. We have nothing to camp with, no equipment.”

  “What was the plan then, when you got on the train?” asked Perry.

  “We would ride the train to Grabler’s Gulch,” said Anaksi. “There would be men waiting for us there.”

  “Walk and talk,” said Perry.

  She did, grudgingly, and this time Perry didn’t have a hand on her arm. He liked it better that way, as though she wasn’t a prisoner. She was still limping, maybe worse than before.

  “And these men, would they have horses?” asked Perry.

  “They would steal them,” said Anaksi.

  “And that plan is now shot,” said Perry.

  Anaksi nodded, which Perry found curious. He couldn’t remember whether that was universal to humans, but he didn’t think it was. He tucked it away for later, a piece of evidence of something, one way or another. She spoke well enough, and even the nonverbal seemed to match.

  “Then what’s your plan now?” asked Perry.

  “No plan,” said Anaksi. “We’ll have to sleep under the stars. Hopefully we won’t die. If we survive, then there will be a new plan.”

  “You’re going to try to stay up, then run away in the middle of the night,” said Perry.

  Anaksi raised an eyebrow. “It’s not safe to run in the night. We’ll see what the moon has in store for us.”

  “They don’t talk much about the moon here,” said Perry.

  “They wouldn’t,” said Anaksi.

  “Our fates are linked,” said Perry. “You’re going to have to help me survive.”

  Anaksi laughed. “I saw the hole in you. You don’t need my help.”

  “You know the horrors of the Flux better than I do,” said Perry.

  “I wouldn’t help you if I could, evil stranger.” This last she said in her own language, and he didn’t get the sense that he was being tested, only that she wanted to insult him.

  Another hour passed. They weren’t making good time. She’d started off favoring one foot over the other, and it had turned into a limp, which was now pronounced, which she hadn’t brought up. That might very well have been part of some scheme or trap, it was hard to say. Still, she’d jumped from a train going at least twenty miles an hour, and it was possible that she’d twisted or sprained something in such a way that it was only now becoming an issue. He would find out if she tried to run again, he supposed.

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  There really was no one else around. The train tracks were the only thing around, and without them, Perry would have been utterly lost, mostly because there was no sun in the sky. The region was a mix of grassland and scrubland, and he imagined that from above, it would look unnaturally splotchy. They hit a stretch of great rolling prairie, and Perry gave up all hope of explaining it in terms of normal biomes. He had a burning curiosity about the Flux and how it actually worked.

  “They run a current through the rail, then it gets pinned down?” asked Perry. “It … becomes a permanent feature of the Flux?”

  “You know more than I do, fat-headed bovine,” said Anaksi. She had apparently gotten a taste for calling him names.

  “This prairie wasn’t here,” said Perry. “It’s only the track itself, not the stuff on either side of the track?”

  “It is logic, in the words of your people,” said Anaksi.

  “Logic,” said Perry. He looked up and down the tracks. Maybe he was seeing things, but it seemed as though she had a flash of opportunity, like she had thought it was her chance to run. “Explain logic?”

  “You don’t know,” she said flatly, almost an accusation.

  “I’m from the city,” Perry replied, as though that meant anything.

  “A train runs through here,” said Anaksi. “Yes?”

  “Er, yes,” said Perry.

  “This is known,” she nodded. “And a train has a course, yes?”

  “Yes,” replied Perry.

  “This, also, is known,” said Anaksi.

  “Okay,” said Perry slowly. “This is what I’m stuck on, because there’s an upper bound for the distance to the Gulch, and a lower bound, and we’re always making progress —”

  “No,” said Anaksi. “Not always.”

  “But it’s known,” said Perry. “It’s logic. You take a step and you get closer to your destination.”

  “Where are you now?” asked Anaksi.

  “I don’t know. Somewhere between Grabler’s Gulch and Taryton,” said Perry. “Closer to the former than the latter.”

  “And where will you be in five steps?” asked Anaksi.

  “I guess I’d give the same answer,” said Perry.

  Anaksi nodded.

  “So it might take infinite time to get back to the Gulch,” said Perry. “Except that in practice, that doesn’t happen often. Hardly ever, I would guess.”

  “Mmm,” she replied. “To walk is useful. But a step can take you further from where you wish to go.”

  “Meaning, what?” asked Perry. “That the path we’ve walked might be taking us toward Taryton?”

  “Possible,” nodded Anaksi.

  “And the train affected that somehow?” asked Perry.

  “Yes,” replied Anaksi.

  Perry was pretty sure that once Marchand was up and running, they’d be able to make a good mathematical model of it. If a step you intended to take toward the Gulch could take you away from the Gulch on occasion, then there was some kind of probabilistic process happening, weighted toward progress, if he could even be said to have a concrete position before reaching the Gulch.

  Mette would have been able to figure it out without needing a robot’s help.

  After that conversation, the railroad tracks seemed more like a lifeline than they had before. He was very aware that if he went away from them, they might not be there when he got back, having moved somewhere else, and he didn’t have a good sense of direction, though he thought there must be some way that these people knew north from south. He hadn’t thought to ask Wyatt, and it hadn’t seemed like a big deal at the time. Did they have compasses? He didn’t know that either. He hadn’t seen anyone consult one.

  Anaksi’s limp kept getting worse. He had her stop, though only because she hadn’t asked for a stop on her own, and got down to look at it, against her protests. She stayed still as he lifted the edge of her animal hide leggings, and she winced in pain as his fingers made contact.

  The ankle was swollen. Maybe it had started as a mild injury and gotten worse with time.

  “You’re not going to be able to walk on this,” said Perry.

  “No,” she admitted.

  Perry sucked his teeth. “Alright, no choice but to heal it.”

  “No,” she said, pulling her leg back from him.

  “You’d rather be left here to die?” asked Perry. “No chance to steal the harmonizer in the middle of the night?”

  She grimaced and extended her leg to him. “Tell me what you’re doing. And why.”

  Perry placed a hand on the swollen ankle, and she winced in pain again, covering her reaction more poorly this time.

  “I’m directing some of my vital energy to you,” said Perry. “Same thing that healed the gunshot.”

  She watched him carefully.

  “I’m going to touch you now,” he said.

  She nodded slowly.

  Perry was a bit shit at healing, if he was being honest. He’d tried, he’d practiced, but he had never quite been able to get it. He had energy, and that energy could make things function in the ways that he thought they ought to function, which was how it could repair Marchand’s systems that he had no specific knowledge of, or knit together clothes whose fibers he couldn’t see. But projecting that energy outward in this subtle way was difficult.

  Still, a sprain seemed like a best case scenario, if it was a sprain. Perry’s medical knowledge was minimal, but he was fairly sure that a sprain was just some overstretching of a ligament, and the only reason that she was doing so poorly with it was that he’d forced her to walk on it without much rest.

  After fifteen minutes, the swelling had gone down, but it wasn’t clear how much of that was from rest and how much was his attempts at pushing energy into her.

  He’d kept his explanation brief, because explaining vessels, meridians, and spirit roots felt like it might take all day, and was another thing that he was trying to keep under wraps in any event. Still, he told her more than he thought was probably wise. Maybe it was to assuage his own guilt.

  Eventually, he had her stand and put weight on it, then take a tentative step.

  “Can all in the Commission manage such things?” asked Anaksi when she found she was able to walk.

  “No,” said Perry.

  “And it diminished you, to do this thing for me?” she asked.

  “Not very much,” said Perry. “It was more difficult than expensive.” He touched his fingers to the bullet hole in his shirt. “This one was more expensive than difficult.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Let’s get going,” said Perry.

  He wasn’t sure how far to push her, but he was hoping that Grabler’s Gulch would appear on the horizon like the rising sun, or maybe that members of the posse would show up on horseback to make the whole thing take less time. He would have been fine to walk for days, if he had to, suppressing the need for sleep and keeping his body in shape. He was using precious little of his energy, refilling the stores through breathing deeply and taking in some of the textured energy of the land. He allowed the second sphere to do its work, and in the course of that, allowed the shirt to clean itself, blood fading away and bullet hole knitting itself closed. Anaksi noticed, but didn’t say anything.

  “We’re out of water,” she said at their next break. “We’ll have to find some.”

  “How are we going to do that?” asked Perry.

  “A stream,” she replied. She pointed at the horizon, away from the tracks. “That way.”

  “No,” said Perry.

  “Without water, we’ll die,” she said. “Delirium follows thirst. You haven’t been drinking enough.”

  Perry frowned at her and placed the empty water skin back in the satchel. “Turn around and close your eyes,” he said.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Just do it, alright?” he asked.

  She turned around, and presumably closed her eyes. Perry opened up the shelf space so it was facing her, then stepped into it backward, so he could keep an eye on her. He was thankful that he’d kept food and water relatively close to the entrance. There were three dozen carafes of water with cork stoppers, all of them sterilized as much as they could be, and he put two into the satchel. For food, there were tins of it, meal prep as good at the culture of Markat could do it. He took four of those, along with two forks.

  So far as Perry could tell, Anaksi had not moved. He stepped out of the shelf and closed it behind him.

  “Alright, done,” said Perry.

  She turned around to look at him, and he could tell she was immediately distrustful of his bounty.

  “Where did it come from?” she asked.

  “Take it or leave it,” said Perry. “We’re stopping for supper.”

  It would have been better to build a fire, but the food was serviceable at room temperature. It was one of the worst meals that Perry had eaten in recent memory, stewed peas and some kind of root vegetables, with a little of what might have been meat. Anaksi picked at it, then after deciding that it was good, started eating it with gusto, finishing before him.

  “What do your people eat?” he asked.

  “Bulbs, berries, nuts, roots, seeds,” she replied. “Corn, squash, beans, if we have access to water. Meat from the animals.”

  Perry nodded. “You do farming.”

  “To farm requires staying still,” she said. “It was more common before your people came.”

  “And in the Flux, that means … someone has to stay near the crops?” asked Perry.

  “You don’t understand the Flux,” she said, turning her head to the side.

  “I’m trying to,” said Perry.

  “We make a pannat,” she said. “A mound of plants. Then another, and another, all around, many rows of them. They become a part of the texture.”

  “Part of the Flux,” said Perry. “Which means … you go out from your village and you can find one, even if it’s not exactly the one that you made there.”

  “You do understand the Flux then,” she said.

  “And a railroad is different, somehow,” said Perry.

  “Somehow,” she shrugged. “We’ve tried to destroy them. We’ve ripped up the rails. Sometimes it works. Mostly it doesn’t.” She looked at him. “You should know this.”

  “I’m not with the Commission,” said Perry. “I’m not sure what it is that makes you think I am.”

  “I’ve never met one,” Anaksi replied. “And I’ve never met a man like you.” She looked down at his shirt. The place where the bullet had struck him was now completely fine. There was no blood and no trace of a hole. Her ankle was completely fixed too, as she’d proven by walking a mile on it.

  “We’re going,” said Perry, getting to his feet. He gathered the forks and placed them in the satchel, along with the bottles of water, which weighed the satchel down. He looked at the empty food tins, not knowing what to do with them. “Can I … leave them here?”

  Anaksi looked at the tins. “Why?”

  “I don’t want to carry them around,” said Perry. “I just — is it littering?”

  “I don’t know this word,” she said. She wrinkled her nose. “Like a sow?”

  “Nevermind,” said Perry. He had felt it not translate. “I just didn’t want someone to come along and see my trash laying there, that’s all. It’s impolite.”

  “I’ve heard liquified shit runs down the open gutters in the city,” said Anaksi.

  “Mmm,” said Perry. “There’s a sewer system.” He knew very little concrete information about the city. “But it’s a dirty place, overall, and dirtier because people don’t care about each other.” This was a guess, just based on every city he’d been to. Teaguewater had been disgusting, and he thought Charlonion would probably be worse.

  They started walking again, leaving the tins behind, which irked Perry just a little bit, maybe because he’d been raised to see litter as a Sin.

  He had half-suspected that the town would simply appear in front of them, that she would be wrong about the distance. It could very well have been a lie, the kind designed to let her go. But as they walked, the sky began to darken. It was not in any way like the sun setting on a cloudy day, because there was no directionality to it. The only real variance were the red veins, which were thicker than in the morning, getting brighter than the yellow-green they were set within.

  Perry could see decently well in the dark, maybe just because of heightened werewolf senses, though he couldn’t be sure. Still, they stopped when only the red veins above were visible, and waited, looking up. It was another time for her to run, if she was going to run, but she stayed still, eyes on the sky.

  The experience reminded him of an old monitor refreshing, or a lightbulb slowly coming on. There was a moment of pitch black when the red veins faded to darkness, and then the stars started to appear, and the moon along with them, like a filament that was warming up before their eyes.

  The moon was a dark orange, a half-moon that was split horizontally, so that the line of darkness across it matched the horizon, making it look like a setting or rising sun that was far away and far too high.

  The stars, at least, were roughly the same as they’d been the night before, clustered in stripes.

  “Good omen,” said Anaksi, letting out a breath she’d been holding. “We sleep now.”

  “There’s enough light to see by,” said Perry. “And we’re going across flat land.”

  “Walking at night attracts things we don’t want to find us,” said Anaksi. “It invites death.”

  Perry sat down, and she sat down beside him. He had a flashlight in the shelf space, but he hadn’t grabbed it. He was pretty sure that he could see more clearly than she could. On a whim, he held out his sword and let it glow, then released it so it floated above them. It was a dim light, but much brighter than the orange moon and the stars around it.

  Anaksi looked at it, frowning, but said nothing about its impact on their odds of survival. She laid on the ground, laid herself straight, and folded her arms across her chest, in a pose that reminded Perry of a mummy or a Dracula.

  He sat down on the ground, contemplating what he was doing here.

  In theory, he had an enviable position. Marchand was still doing the error correction thing, and that was probably going to be done in a day or two. Perry had the harmonizer, which was still in the satchel, and that would make him a hero in Grabler’s Gulch when they got there. He had Anaksi as a prisoner or hostage, which would help him to fight off her tribe when they came, en masse, to attack the town, unless that was just puffery from her. He didn’t like the idea of her being executed by them, but didn’t know how likely that was. He would speak in her defense, at the very least.

  Perry thought about Queenie, and what the hell she’d been up to. Stealing the harmonizer seemed likely, but to what end was more tricky to guess at. She had a magic scarf, but he hadn’t seen her do anything much with it, aside from maybe getting on top of the train from standing on the tracks in front of it. If she was a thresholder, why would she want the harmonizer? If she wasn’t a thresholder why would she want it? To sell it to someone? To ransom it back?

  Perry was sure he’d feel much better with Marchand back.

  It took some time for Anaksi to fall asleep. She did check on him, from time to time, glancing over at where he sat every five or ten minutes, though the checks became more infrequent. Eventually her breathing slowed, and she relaxed somewhat, arms still crossed.

  He wanted to go into the shelf space, but she might wake up and run away. That wouldn’t be the worst outcome — a part of him wanted her to get away. If she ran, he could just fly with his sword along the tracks and be back in the Gulch in time to get a beer and go to his room.

  But she was a part of it, the plot, the ongoing mess, and if she slipped away in the night, he was pretty sure that she would be back, maybe with him in her crosshairs. He’d fully recovered from the bullet wound, but a shot to the head would kill him, he was pretty sure. That was going to be a problem, going forward, which was another reason he needed Marchand back. He wasn’t even sure that people would give him a second look if he went around wearing the power armor, it really did seem like people minded their own business about glowing fingers or cat tails. At most, he’d get a crude nickname.

  Perry smelled the creature before he saw it. It had the scent of wet moss or cut grass, distinct in the cold, dry night. He found its eyes easily. They were red, reflecting the glowing light of the sword.

  Perry sat where he was, as still as he’d been idly, looking off into the distance while tracking the animal. His body betrayed nothing. There was only enough light to get the general shape of it, its scrambling legs that were silent against the ground, with a bulky form above that.

  It prowled around them, trying to get behind Perry, and Perry stood up, stretching out, still plausibly unaware that the animal — or whatever it was — was after him. He was making himself look bigger, too, and maybe that would let him avoid a confrontation. He stilled his heart and dialed back his perspiration. The moon was giving him energy with a weird vibrato to it, off-kilter but digestible, doing something to the Wolf Vessel that wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

  The creature came at him suddenly, all sense of stealth abandoned, thumping loudly across the ground. Perry called the sword to his hand, and it spun once in the air before landing in his palm, casting wild shadows in the process. As the creature came close, Perry finally saw what he was dealing with.

  It was like someone had tried to draw a crab from memory using only horse parts. It had six angular, knobbly brown knees that ended in hoofs, a maw with spiraling teeth that didn’t seem to leave room for a tongue, and a jagged set of tusks or teeth that came out from the sides of the mouth, looking like they’d once been ribs that had been turned out and put to other purposes. The red eyes were large, and dull in the sword-light. Where it had skin, that was brown too, sleek in some places but matted with blood in others. It smelled, overpoweringly, of rotting hay.

  Perry ducked to the side as it lunged at him, raising his sword to cut through bone and flesh. He rose to his feet and kicked the thing over. It was surprisingly light, for how large it was, and it kicked out with all its legs, spasming and moaning, trying to writhe itself back up. Perry sliced through two of its legs, then came around to what was approximately the head and began stabbing it repeatedly. The sword was the primary source of light, and when Perry plunged his sword in deep, it became too dark to see much until he withdrew his sword again.

  He looked at the creature, making sure that it wasn’t moving, then spun around to look at Anaksi. She was on her feet, crouched down, but not ready to run, just watching him.

  “It’s been an hour,” said Perry. “How many more of these should I expect?”

  She glanced at the moon. “Three.”

  “Three?” asked Perry. “You were really prepared to sleep with these things out here?”

  “They leave you alone if you sleep,” said Anaksi.

  Perry nodded. “Then I’ll plan on not sleeping, and killing three of them.”

  Anaksi watched him. He released the sword and had it move back into position as their nightlight. She laid back on the ground and closed her eyes, but it took her much longer to fall asleep this time.

  The next morning, with four corpses around them, they set off for Grabler’s Gulch. They arrived after only twenty minutes of walking to find a town that was buzzing with activity.

  Thresholder, a web serial I've been writing. If that information helps you, there's a good chance that you have some serious problems going on right now. How did you get here? Where are you going? Do you need help?

  Thresholder, they're available on , though I would suggest that you go back and read the previous 154 chapters of Thresholder for context first.