Suddenly, there was a sliding noise as Batra lost her balance, and then the sound of rock scraping against rock. Batra gave a single sharp cry. Halak jerked around in time to see her tumble to her knees. He moved toward her.

“Stop,” said the Bolian. “She can get up on her own.”

“Please,” said Halak, “let me help her.”

“Absolutely not. Stand clear.”

“Sorry,” said Batra. Halak heard tears edging her voice. Her face was turned back over her shoulder toward the Bolian, and Halak couldn’t see her expression. Her left hand clutched her left foot. “But I twisted my ankle. I don’t think I can stand.”

“Get up,” said the Bolian. He twitched the pulse gun. “Now.”

Her sobs tearing from her throat, Batra made some feeble scrambling motions. “I can’t.”

“Let me go to her,” Halak repeated.

“No.” The Bolian watched as Batra rolled onto her right side and then got most of her weight onto her right knee. “Come on.”

“Almost,” said Batra. She was panting. “Almost there,” she said, trying to balance on her right foot. But she slid, and spilled onto the rocks again.

Halak clenched his fists in frustration. “For God’s sake!”

“Stay where you are,” said the Bolian. “Keep your hands up where I can see them!” Cursing, he scrambled over the rocks until he was standing over Batra. Bending at the waist, he reached across his body with his left hand and grabbed Batra’s left bicep.

“I said,”he seethed, hauling her upright, his feet slithering on rocks, “stand up…”

Suddenly, Batra exploded in motion. Surging up, she brought her right arm whipping around, and Halak caught the flash of something long and metallic.

The knife. His mouth gaped in astonishment. The knife she’d taken from the men that afternoon.

And then he remembered: She’d tucked it into her waistband.

With a wild screeching howl, Batra jammed the knife into the Bolian’s left flank. The Bolian arched and screamed. The sudden movement threw them both off-balance on the rocks, and Batra, still howling, had the knife in her hand, and as the Bolian lurched backward, she threw her weight forward, driving the knife in deeper. Halak saw them stagger and nearly fall, and then he saw the Bolian’s face twist with rage and pain, his right hand jerk. The hand with the pulse gun.

“Ani!” Halak shouted. It was as if he’d been in suspended animation and suddenly snapped back to life. He sprang forward, his hands outstretched, trying to get there in time. “Ani, Ani, the gun, the gun, look out for the gun!”

The Bolian fired. There was a flash, a sizzle. A sweet smell that reminded Halak of burnt pork.

Batra shrieked—once.

“Oh God, no! What have you done?”Halak was rocketing toward the Bolian, even as Batra’s body sagged to the rocks. “What have you done? What have you done, what have youdone !?”

Halak slammed into the Bolian. Matsaro’s breath whooshed from his lungs, and Halak’s momentum lifted the Bolian from Batra’s body and brought him crashing down onto his back. Halak heard a ripping sound, and his mind registered, dimly, that his back wound had torn open again. Pain rippled like liquid fire down into his hips and up to his right arm, and in another instant, Halak felt a warm stream of his own blood drizzling down his skin, pooling at his waist.

But then the moment passed, and Halak barely felt his own body. It was as if that single bright point of grief—that instant when Batra had screamed and Halak had known that she was truly, irrevocably dead—had burned his brain clean, searing into his consciousness until his mind boiled with a single, awful purpose: vengeance.

Beneath him, Halak felt the Bolian twitch, then heave as the knife was driven in up to the hilt. He heard a hitch in the Bolian’s breathing and the harsh rasp of the Bolian’s breath in his ear, and he was dimly aware that the Bolian still had his pulse gun clenched in his right hand and was struggling to bring his arm around.

Halak’s fingers scrabbled over an edge of sharp stone, and then his right hand closed around the rock. Rolling atop the Bolian, he straddled the Bolian’s chest, planting his knees on either side of the Bolian’s head.

“No, no, no!”Halak screamed and brought the rock smashing down. The impact of rock against hard bone shivered up Halak’s arms; there was the sound that a ripe melon makes when it’s been thrown against a wall, and Halak felt the Bolian’s body jerk and flop beneath his body like a beached fish slapping against a dock.

“No, no!” Clutching the rock, he raised both hands above his head and brought the rock down again and again. “No, no, oh God, no, no…”

Halak kept on long after the Bolian had stopped twitching. He kept on until the sound the rock made as it crushed through skull and flesh and tore through brain became soft and wet, and he kept on until his arms burned with fatigue, and the rock was so slippery that Halak couldn’t hold on anymore, and the rock slid from his fingers.

Halak slumped over the Bolian’s body. His breath jerked in quick, sharp paroxysms, and his hands were slick with the Bolian’s blood. His own blood oozed along his skin and pattered to the thirsty earth, like a slow, steady rain.

And then—he wasn’t sure when, or how—Halak was hunched over Batra. She lay on her back, her arms outstretched. There was a ragged burned patch over her left breast where the blast from the pulse gun had seared her skin, ripped into her chest, and ruptured her heart, and in the light from the headlamps that fanned the darkness he could see that her eyes were open and her lips peeled back from her teeth in a death rictus.

“Ani,” he said brokenly, reaching for her face. This time, her skin wasn’t cool. It was icy, the warmth leeching away under his fingers even as he knelt beside her.

“Oh, Ani, Ani, Ani.” Halak gathered Batra’s limp body into his arms. He folded her to his breast and dipped his face into her hair. He inhaled the scent of jasmine and lemon, the scent that was his beloved Ani. He wept, alone, under an alien sky.

Then he carried her to the shuttle. The shuttle was small—only big enough for two—and there was no place for him to lay her out properly. In the end, he settled for detaching a restraining harness from one of the shuttle’s two chairs and strapping her body in place along the deck, looping the harness around her legs and chest and buckling the harness to a plate that ran the length of the shuttle’s starboard side.

He stood over Matsaro for a few minutes. The Bolian didn’t have a head anymore: just a misshapen, pulpy mass of smashed bone and flesh and blood. Stooping, Halak pulled the pulse-gun from Matsaro’s dead fingers and stuck it into his damp, bloody waistband, and he retrieved his phaser. Then, grabbing fistfuls of the Bolian’s shirt, Halak hauled him back along the rocks and then hoisted the Bolian into the aircar. The Bolian slithered along the length of the front seat, his body twisted and his left hip jutting up, so that what was left of Matsaro’s head hung down, out of sight.

Halak was seized with a sudden wave of dizziness, and then nausea. He slumped against the side of the aircar, turned his head to one side, and vomited. When he was through, he clung to the cool metal of the aircar, fighting to stay conscious.

Lost a lot of blood.Halak ran his tongue over his lips, but his lips were numb and didn’t feel right. His legs were wobbly, and his vision was narrowing to a single point. Lost a lot of blood, that’s all, and…oh my God, oh my God, Ani, Ani…

He couldn’t lose consciousness. Halak’s brain moved slowly, and he felt sluggish, stupid. He had to stay conscious. He shook his head from side to side, and it felt as if his face was as gluey as molten taffy, his movements slow and languid. Slowly, he reached in and punched in a new heading. He heard a click, then a whine as the aircar’s engine caught.