But the Setebos Egg seemed to be keeping the voynix at bay.

It was almost dark when Daeman took Ada, Tom, and Laman away from the warmth of the fires to the ashes of Hannah’s cupola to open his rucksack and show them the hatching egg. The thing was glowing even more brightly, shedding a sick, milky light, and there were tiny cracks everywhere in the shell, but no openings yet.

“How long until it hatches?” asked Ada.

“How the hell should I know?” said Daeman. “All I know is that the little Setebos inside is still alive and trying to get out. You can hear the squeals and chewing sounds if you put your ear to the shell.”

“No thanks,” said Ada.

“What happens when it hatches?” asked Laman, who had been in favor of destroying the egg from the beginning.

Daeman shrugged.

“What exactly did you have in mind when you stole the thing from Setebos’ nest in the Paris Crater blue-ice cathedral?” asked the medic Tom, who’d heard the whole story.

“I don’t know,” said Daeman. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. At least we could find out what sort of creature this Setebos is.”

“What if Mommy comes looking for her baby?” asked Laman. It was not the first time that Daeman had been asked this.

He shrugged again. “We can kill it right after it hatches if we have to,” he said softly, looking at the growing winter darkness under the trees beyond the ruins of the old palisade.

“Can we?” said Laman. He put his left hand on the many-fissured eggshell and then pulled it away quickly as if the surface were hot. All those who had touched the egg had remarked on the unpleasantness of the experience, as if something on the inside of the shell were sucking energy through their palm.

Before Daeman could answer again, Ada said, “Daeman, if you hadn’t brought that thing back with you, most of us would probably be dead now. It’s kept the voynix away this long. Maybe it will after it hatches as well.”

“If it—or its mama-poppa—doesn’t eat us in our sleep,” said Laman, cradling his mangled right hand.

Later, just after dark, Siris came and whispered to Ada that Sherman, one of their more seriously wounded, had died. Ada nodded, rounded up two others—Edide and a still-portly man named Rallum—and they quietly carried the body out beyond the edge of the fire, setting it under lumber and stones near the tumbled barracks so that they could properly bury Sherman in the morning. The wind was cold.

Ada did a four-hour shift of guard duty in the dark with a loaded flechette rifle, the warming fire a distant glow and the nearest other sentry fifty yards away, her concussion causing her head to pound so fiercely she really couldn’t have seen a voynix or Setebos if it had sat on her lap. Her broken wrist required her to prop the weapon on her forearm. Then, when Caul relieved her from duty, she stumbled back to the crowded, snore-filled lean-to and fell into a deep sleep stirred only by terrible nightmares.

Daeman awakened her just before dawn, bending to whisper in her ear, “The egg has hatched.”

Ada sat up in the dark, feeling the press and breathing of bodies all around her, and for a moment she knew she was still in the nightmare. She wanted Harman to touch her shoulder and wake her into sunlight. She wanted his arm around her, not this freezing dark and press of strange bodies and flickering, fading firelight through canvas.

“It hatched,” repeated Daeman. His voice was very low. “I didn’t want to wake you, but we have to decide what to do.”

“Yes,” Ada whispered back. She’d slept in her clothes and now she slipped out of her nest of damp blankets and carefully picked her way over sleeping forms, following Daeman out through the canvas, past the low but still-tended fire, south, away from the lean-to toward another, much smaller fire.

“I slept out here away from the others,” said Daeman, speaking in a more normal tone as they got farther away from the main lean-to. His voice was still soft but each syllable roared in Ada’s aching head. Far overhead, the e—and p-rings whirled as they always whirled, turning and crossing in front of the stars and a fingernail moon. Ada saw something move up there and for a minute her heart pounded before she realized it was the sonie, orbiting silently in the night.

“Who’s flying the sonie?” she asked dully.

“Oko.”

“I didn’t know she knew how to fly it.”

“Greogi taught her yesterday,”said Daeman. They were approaching the smaller campfire and Ada saw the silhouette of another man standing there.

“Good morning, Ada Uhr,” said Tom.

Ada had to smile at the formal honorific. It had not been used much in recent months. “Good morning, Tom,” she whispered. “Where is this thing?”

Daeman pulled a long piece of wood out of the fire and extended it into the darkness like a torch.

Ada stepped back.

Daeman and Tom had obviously piled up palisade logs on three sides to cage the… thing… in the triangular space. But it was scurrying to and fro in that space, obviously ready and soon capable of climbing the two-foot-high flimsy wooden barricades.

Ada took the torch from Tom and crouched lower to study the Setebos thing in the flickering light.

Its multiple yellow eyes blinked and closed at the glare. The little Setebos—if that is what it was—was about a foot long, already larger in mass and length than a regular human brain, Ada thought, but still with the disgustingly pink wrinkles and folds and appearance of a living, disembodied brain. She could see the gray strip between the two hemispheres, a mucousy membrane covering it, and a slight pulsing, as if the whole thing was breathing. But this pink brain also had pulsating mouths—or orifices of some kind—and a myriad of tiny, pink baby hands beneath it and protruding from orifices. It scrabbled back and forth on those pudgy little pink fingers that looked like a mass of wriggling worms to Ada.

The yellow eyes opened, stayed open, and locked on Ada’s face. One of the orifices opened and screeching, scratching sounds came out.

“Is it trying to talk?” Ada whispered to both men.

“I have no idea,” said Daeman. “But it’s only a few minutes old. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s talking to us by the time it’s an hour old.”

“We shouldn’t let it get an hour old,” Tom said softly but firmly. “We should kill the thing now. Blow it apart with flechettes and then burn its corpse and scatter the ashes.”

Ada looked at Tom in surprise. The self-trained medic had always been the least violent and most life-affirming person she’d known at Ardis.

“At the very least,” said Daeman, watching the thing successfully trying to climb the low wooden barrier, “it needs a leash.”

Wearing heavy canvas-and-wool gloves they’d designed at Ardis early in the winter for work with livestock, Daeman leaned forward and plunged a sharp, thin spike that he’d curved to form a hook into the solid band of fibers—corpus callosum, Ada remembered it was called—connecting the two hemispheres of the little Setebos’s brain. Then, moving quickly, Daeman tugged to make sure the hook was secure, snapped a carabiner to it, and rigged twenty feet of nylon rope to the carabiner.

The little creature screamed and howled so loudly that Ada looked over her shoulder at the main camp, sure that everyone would come boiling out of the lean-to. No one stirred except one sentry near the fire who looked over her way sleepily and then went back to contemplating the flames.

The little Setebos writhed and rolled, running against the wooden barriers and finally clambering over them like a crab. Daeman tugged it up short on six feet of leash.

More tiny hands emerged from their folded state in the pink brain’s orifices and pulled themselves along on elastic stalks a yard or more long. The hands leaped at the nylon rope and tugged at it wildly, other hands exploring the hook and carabiner, trying to pull them free. The hook held. Daeman was pulled forward for a second but then jerked the scrabbling creature back onto the frozen grass of its cage.