Who left her youngest brother to himself; while Green–started down a path all his own.

Jin thought that he might have done better by all of them. In the end he felt guilt–that he could not tell them what he knew, and how: that once there had been ships, that ships still might come, that there was a purpose for the world and patterns they were supposed to follow.

It was the first time, this walk with his eldest sons, that they had ever walked in step at all–young men and a man twice their age, the first time he had ever come with them on their terms. He felt himself the child.

iii

The way was strange along the bank, the reeds long since left behind, where the river undercut the limestone banks and made grottoes and caves. The calibans had taken great slabs of stone and heaved them up in walls–no caprice of the river had done such things. It was a shadowed place and a hazardous place, and Pia refused to go into it. She perched herself on a rock above the water, arms about her knees, in the shadows of the trees that arched out from rootholds in the crevices of the stone. Moss grew here, in the pools; fish swam, black shapes in the ripples, and a serpent moved, a ripple through the shallow backwaters of the river. Ariels and flitters left tracks on the delicate sand, washed up on the downstream side of the stones, and at several points were the grooves calibans made in their coming up from the river, deep muddy slides.

She looked up and up, where the cliffs shadowed them, scrub trees clinging even to that purchase. There were caves up there. Possibly ariels found them accessible, but no human could climb that face. Bats might nest there. There might possibly be bats, though they came infrequently to the river.

And very much she wished for her brothers…the more when something splashed and moved.

She turned; caught her breath at the sight of the coveralled figure which had come up behind her among the rocks.

“Green,” she said softly, ever so quietly. Her youngest brother looked back at her, out of breath, with that strange, sober stare he used habitually. “Green, our father’s looking for you.”

A dip of the head, one of Green’s staring nods, his eyes hardly leaving her. He knew, Green meant; she knew how to read him.

“You know,” she said, “how upset they’ll be.”

A second nod. There was no hint of distress on Green’s face. No feeling at all. She remembered why she hated this brother, this feelingless nothing of a brother who had changed everything when he came.

“You don’t care.”

Green blinked, solemn as one of his leathery pets.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she asked. “Doing what? You want to starve?”

A shake of the head.

“Speak to me. Once, speakto me.”

Green sank down on his haunches on the bank and gathered up a stone, laid it flat on another one. He no longer listened.

“That’s nice,” she said. For one desperate moment she thought of warning him off, telling him the others were coming, so that he would run off, would escape, so that they would never again have to worry about him. But the words stuck in her throat, an ultimate dishonesty–not for themselves, but because it would be hard to look at her father and claim Green had run away.

She sidled closer while her brother made patterns with the stones…sidled closer, snatched suddenly at his arm and spoiled his pattern. He came up flailing and splashing into the margin of the water, twisted in her grip, and of a sudden her foot skidded on wet moss, spilling them both.

He twisted loose. “Green,” she yelled after him, as he went skittering this way and that among the higher rocks.

But he was gone, and she was sitting in the water, soaked and shaken to think that finally he had gotten away. She was jolted by the fall–embarrassed and no small bit angry that he had outdone her, her little brother.

But gone. They were free of him. Finally free.

She gathered herself up then and laved off her hands and muddy coveralls, settled herself finally to dry off and wait.

And when her brothers brought her father with them down the banks of the river, she rose up off her rock to meet them in the twilight.

“He pushed me,” she said as dourly as she could. “He hit me and he got away.”

She was not sure what to expect–focused only on her father’s eyes.

“Did he hurt you?” Jin elder asked, which question warmed her heart with a warmth she had hardly felt since she was small. There was concern there; care for her. He took her into his arms and hugged her as he had done when she was small, and in that moment she looked beyond him, at her brothers; and at Nine and his kin, with a warning and a triumph in her smile.

She was someone again, with Green gone. She looked at Jin Younger, and Mark and Zed and Tam, and they knew what she had done. They had to know, that she had not struggled half hard enough; and why. So she was one of them: co‑conspirator. Murderer, perhaps.

“You tried,” Jin elder said. But she had no twinge of conscience, looking up into his face, because, at least in intent, she had done that much.

“Go back with father,” Jin Younger said. “We’ll search further.”

“No,” Jin elder said. “Don’t. I don’t want that.”

Because he was afraid of this place, Pia thought; he took care for them now and not for Green. He had given up, and that was sweet to hear; that was what they had wanted to hear.

“I’ll look,” Jin Younger insisted, and turned away, up the bank, up among the rocks, never asking which way Green might have gone. It was the wrong way; and Mark went off that way too, toward the cliffs where Jin was leading. So she understood.

“We’d better get home,” Zed said. “It’s getting dark. He’s off into the wild places. And there’s no help in all of us wandering around out here.”

“Yes,” Jin elder said finally, in that quiet way he had, that resigned things he could no longer mend. For once Pia felt a shame not for him, for the simple answers her father gave, but on their account; on her own. Yes. Like that. After walking through territory that was a terror to him. Yes. Let’s go home. Let’s tell mother how it is.

Her brothers were in no wise bound after Green. They had no interest in Green. They had left themselves a maincamper up on the cliffs and night was falling; it was time to go get Jane Gutierrez down before she went silly with panic. Games were done. The night was coming. Fast.

And as for her brother, as for Green, spending the night out in the cool damp, slithering underearth where he chose to be–

She shivered in the circle of Jin elder’s arm, turning back to the way along the shore. Nine and his brothers had already begun to walk back, having nothing to do with her father, and less with their own; besides, Nine had reason to avoid her now. So Jin elder was their possession, theirs, finally, the way he had been before Green existed.

iv

The sun sank, casting twilight among the stones, and Jane Flanahan‑Gutierrez walked briskly down the trail among the mounds. Her knees shook just slightly as she went, making the downhill course uncertain. Fear was a knot in her stomach; and she cursed the azi‑born, the beautiful, the so‑beautiful and so hollow. Stay away from them, her mother said–stay away. And her father–said nothing, which was his habit. Or he delivered lectures on ships and birth‑labs and plans gone amiss, and why she ought to think about her future, which she had no desire at all to hear.

Beautiful and hollow. No hearts in them. Nothing like them in the main Camp, no men so beautiful as Jin and his brothers, who were made to fill up the world with their kind. She wanted them; lowered herself to go off in the hills with them, like their own wild breed; and then their half‑minded brother took to the hills as crazy as everyone expected of him, and they left her–just walked off and left her, up in the wild and the oncoming dark, as if she were nothing, as if it was nothing that Jane Flanahan‑Gutierrez came out of the camp and wanted them.