Page 14

“Come on.”

Lina tried. Her injured leg folded almost immediately, but Kesta caught her before she went down. They managed three uneven steps before something struck Kesta across the shoulders. Weighted cords wrapped around her arms and torso, jerking her backward hard enough to knock the breath from her. Thin hooks caught in the fabric of her shift as she hit the ground.

By the time she dragged in another breath, the raider leader was crouching beside her.

“Claimless,” his translator said in its broken metallic rasp. His gaze traveled over her clothing and stopped at the black band around her wrist. “No camp mark. No bond scent.”

Kesta twisted one hand against the cords and discovered the hooks tightened when she pulled. She looked up at him instead. “I’m not property.”

His mouth curved beneath the edge of the jaw-mask. One claw tapped the black band. “Everything dropped belongs somewhere.”

“Then your filing system has a problem.”

The humor was wasted on him. He cut the net loose only to snap a metal loop around her wrist and attach it to a tether. When he straightened, Kesta saw movement along the ridge beyond him. The six-limbed predators had returned, their low bodies blending into the black rock so well that only the occasional reflection from their eyes betrayed how many had gathered.

One of the raiders noticed them too. His shoulders tightened beneath his bone armor. “Rift stalkers.”

The leader jerked Kesta’s tether and glanced toward Lina, who had sagged between the two men holding her. Blood had soaked through the bandage around her thigh and darkened the fabric almost to black.

“Walk,” he said, “or feed them.”

Kesta pushed herself up, forcing her attention away from the predators and back to Lina. Fear would not improve the woman’s circulation or reset the fracture. Neither would rage, though she had more than enough of that to spare. One of the raiders still carried Mira’s body, treating her sister’s corpse like salvage taken from a wreck.

Kesta fixed his face in her memory.

She could do nothing for Mira now. She could still keep Lina alive.

The raiders drove them north through a maze of fractured stone. Kesta counted turns automatically, storing landmarks as she passed them: three narrow basalt pillars, a split boulder shaped like an open hand, a sulfur vent that breathed heat through a crack in the ground. Years of forensic work had trained her to notice details no one thought mattered until later. If she survived long enough to need a way back, she intended to have one.

The horn did not sound again.

That seemed to disturb the raiders more than another warning would have. Their pace increased, and the man holding Kesta’s tether glanced over his shoulder twice.

“Who made the signal?” she asked.

He ignored her. Kesta watched the tight line of his shoulders and tried again. “Whoever he is, you’re afraid of him.”

The raider leader turned sharply. He yanked the tether hard enough to bring her within arm’s reach. “Fear keeps bodies breathing.”

“Judging by yours, it must work very well.”

His hand came across her face before she saw him move. Pain exploded along her cheek, and the inside of her lip split against her teeth. Kesta tasted blood but stayed upright. Lina was leaning on her now, and falling would take both of them down.

The raider studied her as though deciding whether to strike her again. Kesta wiped the blood from her mouth with the back of her free hand and met his stare until he looked away first.

They reached a shallow basin surrounded by jagged basalt. Heat shimmered above fissures in the ground, carrying the metallic stink of minerals and something scorched beneath it. The raiders fastened blue glow rods to the rocks, creating an uneven circle of light. Beyond it, the rift stalkers stopped advancing, although their calls moved around the basin from one side to the other.

Kesta lowered Lina onto the least uneven patch of ground she could find.

“She needs the fracture set.”

The raider leader removed his jaw-mask. His face beneath it was narrow and gray, with four vertical nostril slits and teeth sharpened deliberately rather than by nature. “She lives until trade.”

“She may not.” Kesta pushed Lina’s torn trouser leg higher and examined the swelling around the calf. “The bone is displaced. If circulation shuts down, you’ll have a corpse instead of whatever you think you’re trading.”

His gaze shifted to her medical pouch. Interest replaced some of the contempt in his expression.

“You heal.”