Get moving, or you’ll freeze.

Insufficient reason. Not enough to overcome shock and fatigue.

The girl then. Get her moving, or—

Or what? Dwer somehow doubted even twice this much suffering could kill Rety. Trouble would not spare her yet. Trouble must find her too useful as an ally and friend.

But he was on the right track, Dwer felt sure. There was something else. Another duty. Someone awaiting his return…

The glaver. Dwer’s mud-crusted eyelids opened. I left her hobbled. She’ll starve. Or a Hgger will get her.

With quaking limbs, he fought his way up to his knees — and found he could rise no further.

Rety struggled up, too, and sagged against him. They rested, leaning against each other for support. When folks find our frozen bodies lying together this way, someone’s sure to think we must’ve liked each other.

That, alone, was good reason to move. But messages to his arms and legs weren’t obeyed.

A soft moistness stroked his cheek…

Stop that, Rety.

It repeated. Wet and scratchy.

What’s the kid doing now — licking me? Of all the weird…

Again a wet tongue — rather long and raspy for a little sooner girl. Dwer managed to turn his head… and blinked at the sight of two huge bulging eyes, rotating independently on each side of a broad rounded head. The glaver’s mouth opened again. This time the tongue abraded a path right up Dwer’s lip and over both nostrils. He flinched, then managed to wheeze—

“H-how… how-w…?”

Vaguely, distantly, he heard his own words. So he wasn’t completely deaf, after all.

Knowing a better perch when she saw it, Rety transferred her one-armed grip from his neck to the glaver’s. The other hand still clenched her prize — a fragment of knobs, lumps, and scorched metal feathers.

Dwer didn’t pause to question fortune. He flung himself over the glaver’s other side, sucking warmth from her downy hide. Patiently — or apathetically — the creature let both humans hang on, till Dwer finally found the strength to gather his feet and stand.

One of the glaver’s hind legs still bore remnants of a rope hobble, chewed off at the knot. Behind her, the cause of this miracle grinned with the other end in its mouth. Mudfoot leered at Dwer, eyes glittering.

Always gotta make sure to get full credit, don’t you? Dwer thought, knowing it was ungrateful but thinking it anyway.

Another brilliant explosion sent rays of brightness cutting through black shadows, all centered on the fiery site by the lake. Two more reports followed within a few duras, erasing any thought of going back after his supplies. Flames continued to spread.

He helped Rety up, leaning on the glaver for support. Come on, Dwer said, with a slight incline of the head. Better to die in motion than just lying here.

Even stumbling in the dark, numbed by cold, pain, and weariness, Dwer couldn’t help pondering what he’d seen.

One little bird-machine might have been rare but explainable — a surviving relic of Buyur days, somehow preserved into this era, wandering confused across a continent long abandoned by its masters. But the  —  machine — that daunting, floating menace — was no dazed leftover of vanished Jijoan tenants. It had been powerful, resolute.

A new thing in the world.

Together they weaved unsteadily down another avenue between two forests of boo. The channel spared them from the frigid wind, and also from having to make any decisions. Each step took them farther from the lakeside conflagration, which suited Dwer fine.

Where there’s one death machine, might there be more?

Could another levitating minifortress come to avenge its brother? With that thought, the narrow, star-canopied aisle ceased seeming a refuge, rather an awful trap.

The boo-lined corridor ended at last, spilling the four of them onto a meadow of knee-high grass swaying before a stiff, icy wind that drained their bodies as they shuffled along. Frost flurries whirled all around. Dwer knew it was just a matter of time before they collapsed.

A grove of scrubby saplings clustered by a small watercourse, some distance from the path. Shivering, he nudged the glaver across the crunching, crackling grass. We’re leaving tracks, the hunter in him carped. Lessons drilled by old Fallen floated to mind. Try keeping to hare rock or water… When you’re being stalked, head downwind…

None of which was helpful now. Instinct led him to a rocky ledge, an outcrop shrouded by low bushes. Without his fire-lighter or even a knife or piece of flint, their best hope lay in finding shelter. Dwer yanked Rety off the glaver’s neck, pushing till she understood to bend and crawl under the shelf. The glaver shuffled inward on all four knees, Mudfoot hitching a ride on her corrugated back. Dwer yanked some fallen branches where the wind would pile leaves on top. Then he also dropped, slithering to join an interspecies tangle of limbs, fur, skin — and someone’s fetid breath not far from his face. Snowflakes sublimed off flesh as body heat spread through the confined space. Just our luck to have a late flurry, so far into spring, he thought. Old Fallen used to say there were just two seasons in the mountains. One was called Winter. The other was also winter, with some green stuff growing to trick the unwary.

He told himself the weather wasn’t really so bad — or wouldn’t be if their clothes hadn’t been burned off their bodies, or if they weren’t already in shock, or if they had supplies.

After a while, Dwer realized the deafness must be fading. He could hear someone’s teeth chattering, then a murmur of some sort, coming from behind him. That was followed by a sharp jab on his shoulder.

“I said could you move jes a bit?” Rety shouted, not far from his ear. “You’re lying on my—”

He shifted. Something bony slid from under his rib-cage. When he lay back down, his flank scraped icy grit. Dwer sighed.

“Are you all right?”

She squirmed some more. “What’d you say?”

He writhed around to see her blurry outline. “Are you okay?” he shouted.

“Oh, sure. Never better, dimmie. Good question.”

Dwer shrugged. If she had energy to be nasty, she was probably far from death’s door.

“You got anything to eat?” Rety added.

He shook his head. “We’ll find something in the morn. Till then, don’t speak ’less you must.”

“Why?”

Because robots probably have ears, he almost said. But why worry the kid?

“Save your strength. Now be good and get some sleep.”

A slight vibration might have been the girl, mimicking his words sarcastically under her breath. But he couldn’t be sure — a blessed side effect to the beating his ears had taken.

With a series of sharp jabs, Mudfoot clambered up his leg to settle in the wedge between his body and Rety’s. Dwer squirmed to a position where his head was less sheltered by the glaver’s warm flank. A bitter chill greeted his face as he peered back at the trail they had just left — the narrow avenue between two vast stands of boo. As a makeshift hunter’s blind, this wasn’t bad — if only more snow would fill in the trampled trail they had left in the broken grass.

We got away from you, One-of-a-Kind, he thought, savoring a victory he had not won. Many patches of skin still seemed too numb, too cool for even the glaver’s warmth to heat up, tracing where the spider’s golden preserving fluid had stuck. No way to clean them right now … if the droplets ever would come off.

Still, we got away, didn’t we?

A faint touch seemed to stroke his mind. Nothing he could pinpoint, but it triggered a tickle of worry. Surely the crazy old mulc-deconstructor couldn’t have survived the inferno by the lake?

It’s just my imagination. Forget it.