It was a midura past nightfall when the ember crossed the sky, a flicker that grew briefly as it streaked by, crossing the heavens to descend southeast. Dwer knew it was no meteor, because the spark traveled below the clouds.

Only after it was gone, dropping beyond the next rank of forested knolls, did he hear a low, muttering purr, barely above the rustling of the tree branches.

Dwer might never have noticed if his dinner had agreed with him. But his bowels had been shaky ever since the four humans began supplementing their meager supplies with foraged foods. So he sat at the makeshift latrine, in a cleft between two hills, waiting for his innards to decide whether to accept or reject his hard-won evening meal.

The others were no better off. Danel and Jenin never complained, but Lena blamed Dwer while her intestines growled.

“Some mighty hunter. You’ve been over the pass dozens of times and can’t tell what’s poison from what’s not?”

“Please, Lena,” Jenin had asked. “You know Dwer never crossed the Venom Plain. All he can do is look for stuff that’s like what he knows.”

Danel tried his hand at peacemaking. “Normally, we’d eat the donkeys as their packs lightened. But they’re weak after recent stream-crossings, and we can’t spare any from carrying our extra gear.”

He referred to the weight of books, tools, and special packages that were meant to make human life beyond the Rimmers somewhat more than purely savage. If it was finally decided to stay here forever. Dwer still hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

“One thing we do know,” Danel went on. “Humans can survive here in the Gray Hills, and without all the vat processes we’re used to back home. Right now we’re adjusting to some local microbes, I’m sure. If the sooner band got used to them, so can we.”

Yes, Dwer had thought, but survival doesn’t mean comfort. If Rety’s any indication, these sooners are a grumpy lot. Maybe we’re getting a taste of how they got that way.

Things might improve once Danel set up vats of his own, growing some of the yeasty cultures that made many Jijoan foods palatable to humans, but there would be no substitutes for the traeki-refined enzymes that turned bitter ping fruit and bly-yoghurt into succulent treats. Above all, Dwer and the other newcomers would count on the sooners to explain which local foods to avoid.

Assuming they cooperate. Rety’s relatives might not appreciate having the new order-of-life explained to them. I wouldn’t either, in their position. While Danel was skilled at negotiation and persuasion, Dwer’s role would be to back up the sage’s words, giving them force of law.

From Rety’s testimony, her tribe likely totaled no more than forty adults. The social structure sounded like a typical macho-stratified hunting band — a standard human devolution pattern that old Fallon long ago taught Dwer to recognize — with a fluid male-ranking order enforced by bluster, personal intimidation, and violence.

The preferred approach to ingathering such a group, worked out by Dwer’s predecessors, was to make contact swiftly and dazzle the sooners with gifts before shock could turn into hostility, buying time to map the web .of alliances and enmities within the band. After that, the procedure was to choose some promising middle-ranked males and help those candidates perform a coup, ousting the formerly dominant group of bully boys, whose interest lay in keeping things as they were. The new leaders were then easy to persuade to “come home.”

It was a time-tested technique, used successfully by others faced with the task of retrieving wayward human clans. Ideally, it shouldn’t prove necessary to kill anybody.

Ideally.

In truth, Dwer hated this part of his job.

You knew it might come to this. Now you pay for all the freedom you’ve had.

If gentle suasion didn’t work, the next step was to call in militia and hunt down every stray. The same hard price had been agreed to by every sept in the Commons, as an alternative to war and damnation.

But this time things are different.

This time we don’t have any law on our side — except the law of survival.

Instead of bringing illegal settlers back to the Slope, Ozawa planned to take over Rety’s band. Guiding them toward a different way of life, but one still hidden from sight.

Only if the worst happens. If we’re the last humans alive on Jijo.

Dwer’s mind reeled away from that awful notion, as his innards wrestled with the remnants of his meal. If this keeps on, I’ll be too weak to win a wrestling match, or however else Jass and Bom settle.their tribal ranking. It may come down to Lena and her tools, after all.

Throughout the journey; the stocky blond woman carefully tended one donkey carrying the gadgets of her personal “hobby” — a human technology passed down since the first ancestors landed on Jijo, one so brutal that it had been seldom used, even during the urrish wars. “My equalizers,” Lena called the wax-sealed wooden crates, meaning their contents made her able to enforce Danel’s verdicts, as thoroughly as Dwer’s muscle and physical skill.

It won’t come to that! he vowed, commanding his body to shape up. Dwer touched several fingertips whose frostbite damage might have been much worse. I’ve always been luckier than I deserved.

According to Sara, who had read extensively about Earth’s past, the same thing could be said about the whole bloody human race.

That was when the glowing ember crossed the sky, streaking overhead while Dwer sat at the makeshift latrine. He would never have noticed the sight had he been facing another way or engaged in an activity more demanding of his attention. As it was, he stared glumly after the falling spark while the rumbling thunder of its passage chased up and down nearby canyons, muttering echoes in the night.

They faced more stream crossings the next day. It was hard country, which must have influenced the sooners’ ancestors to come this way in the first place. Guarded first by the Venom Plain, then ravines and whitewater torrents, the Gray Hills were so forbidding that surveyors checked the region just once per generation. It was easy to imagine how Fallen and the others might overlook one small tribe in the tortured badlands Dwer led the party through — a realm of sulfurous geysers and trees that grew more twisted the deeper they went. Low clouds seemed to glower and sulk, giving way to brief glimpses of sunshine. Green moss beards drooped from rocky crevices, trickling oily water into scummy pools. Animal life kept its skittish distance, leaving only faint spoor traces for Dwer to sniff and puzzle over.

They lost several donkeys crossing the next rushing stream. Even with a rope stretched from bank to bank, and both Lena and Dwer standing waist-deep in the frigid water to help them along, three tired animals lost their footing on slippery stones. One got tangled in the rope, screaming and thrashing, then perished before they could free it. Two others were carried off. It took hours, sloshing through shallows, to retrieve their packs.

Dwer’s fingers and toes seemed to burn the whole time with a queer icy-hot numbness.

Finally, drying off by a fire on the other side, they measured the damage.

“Four books, a hammer, and thirteen packets of powder missing,” Danel said, shaking his head over the loss. “And some others damaged when their waterproofs tore.”

“Not to mention the last fodder for the beasts,” Jenin added. “From now on they forage, like it or not.”

“Well, we’re almost there, ain’t we?” Lena Strong cut in, cheerful for once as she knelt butchering the donkey that had strangled. “On the bright side, we eat better for a while.”