It was an ugly turn to what had begun as such a promising day, but Tagen’s own frustration had long been swallowed up by weariness, and then that by concern for his human. Pursuing E’Var’s shadow all night would do nothing but dull their wits the next day. Tagen knew that, and he could put this setback aside for another day, but Daria was fueling her dismay with fatigue, and the deterioration of her ready mind and mood were now evident to anyone. If she did not have sense enough to see that it was time to stop, he would have to order her, and that would not be pleasant.

At last, Daria raised from her slump and turned away from the phone. She began to trudge back across the parking bay to the groundcar, and the cat, demonstrating a startling lack of good sense, leapt into the foreseat and curled up on Tagen’s lap to await her return. Tagen rubbed the animal’s neck uneasily. Daria was not meeting his eye through the window. The foreseat was likely to soon be a very bad place to be.

She opened the driver’s door and dropped into the pilot’s seat. There, she sat. Her hands tightly gripped the guidance wheel. The open door admitted a warm current of night air scored by insects. She stared straight ahead, her face tight and deeply shadowed where the vehicle’s interior light did not touch her.

Tagen waited. Under his hand, the cat began to purr.

Suddenly, if not entirely unexpectedly, Daria made a fist and slammed it down on the console, bringing Grendel awake with all its fur on end and its claws sunk deep in Tagen’s thigh. “Goddamn it!” she shouted. And then sighed and covered her face, all her energy spent.

Tagen took a tight-jawed moment to extract the bristling cat from his person and deposit it in the rear of the vehicle before addressing her. “It is late.”

“No, it is early,” she shot back in clipped, sarcastic mimicry. She glared at him from between her splayed fingers. “It stopped being late hours ago. Where the hell are they? How did I lose them?”

That she hoarded the blame for herself did not escape Tagen’s notice, but he had to pick the things he responded to and it was more important now to calm her. He said, “He does not travel every day. We have seen this.”

“But he left the hotel this morning!” She struck at the wheel again and Tagen heard the cat skitter to the furthest corner of the car. “If he stopped somewhere to…well, we’d have heard about it on the radio by now! Where is he? Why didn’t I…” She burst into tears.

Guilt rolled through him helplessly as he looked away out the window. This travel was torturous for her. She’d borne up well thus far, but every new day was harder. Six years she said she’d locked herself away, and now, all at once, he had forced her into this world and away from her securities. He had made her in part responsible for E’Var’s capture without any training of any kind. She could not even ask another human for help because of the danger it would mean for Tagen. The sooner he was gone from her (his heart sank and burned), the better she would be.

“Daria,” he said, once the storm of weeping seemed to slacken. “Anything could have happened. It could be as simple a thing as…as a need for a new wheel.”

She sniffled and scrubbed at her eyes, aged by exhaustion. She gave no sign that she had heard his words. When he laid his hand over her knee, she did not even look at him.

“It is time to rest,” he said. “E’Var will move on tomorrow. We will find him.”

“What if he’s gone?” She did turn then, searching his eyes with shame shining in hers. “What if he hit his limit and left? What if that was our only chance and I let him get away?”

“It was not you—”

“Yes, it was, dammit!” She wrenched her knee out of his grip and would have jumped from the car if he hadn’t caught her wrist. “I should have had that map figured out the first day! And I would have, if I wasn’t so…fucked up!” Her fist drove out again, and her target was not the console this time, but her own leg.

“No,” he said, beginning to be alarmed.

“This is all my fault!” she shouted, and struck herself again.

“No!” He caught her hand before it could land another punishing blow, then cupped her chin and forced her to face him. “No,” he said intently. “Criminals elude the law, Daria. I will not—” She tried to twist away and he brought her back forcefully, his voice taking on new vehemence. “I will not hear you punish yourself because you have not done in three days what neither I nor all Jota’s soldiers could do these past fifty years!”

She stiffened under his touch, her eyes till averted, and then slumped slightly. She sniffed, knuckling at her reddened eyes. She said nothing.

“You are tired,” he said, releasing her. “And so am I. And somewhere, Kanetus E’Var is surely sleeping.”

She took a shaky breath and nodded. “You’re right,” she said dully. “I’m so sorry.”

He bared his teeth at the apology, and then softened his irritation by leaning across and nipping gently at her shoulder. “Whatever may have happened,” he said, “it is clear that we will not meet with him tonight. Let us find a bed, my Daria. Tomorrow, perhaps, will bring us news of this day’s work. And if not, still it is another day.”

Again, she nodded, though she still refused to meet his eyes. Her hand found his, however, and her fingers twined with him for a moment, but her heart was not in the gesture and she soon pulled away. She leaned out to catch her door and close it, and then fired the groundcar’s engine and set the vehicle in motion, all without speaking.

Silence. It was not a comfortable companion.

Tagen stole several sidelong glances as the car passed through pools of roadside lighting and saw only the despondency of his overwrought human. He knew of nothing more to say to her that could console her, and it gnawed at him.

Daria took them a very short distance before pulling into another parking bay. The building there had the look of a hotel, and he knew by the defeated way in which her eyes moved over its identifying letters that she had called them already, asking after E’Var, and viewed coming back here to rest as a kind of defeat. She began to unharness herself, her shoulders bowed.

“If I were a better man,” Tagen remarked, looking out the window at the sky. “I would know what to say to ease your mind.”

“If I were a better woman, you wouldn’t have to say anything, because you’d have caught him by now.”

He frowned at her and halted her retreat with a hand on her knee. “Why must you insist on blaming yourself?”

“Because it’s my fault!” She wrenched away from his touch, her hands drawing into fists. “This, all of this, is my own fault!”

That made so much no sense that he couldn’t even determine how to argue with it. Cautiously, he returned his hand to her knee. On the tee-vee programs, over-strung females responded best when first broached with physical contact. He said, “It was through your efforts that we were able to determine E’Var’s victims from Earth’s own dead.”

She did not reply. He wasn’t sure whether to be encouraged by that or not. He continued, “It was your eyes that saw the pattern in E’Var’s hunting. Because of your help, we know we are on the right road.”

“Big deal!” she exploded. “So we’re on the right road! He didn’t spend the whole day just screwing around! We were driving up and down this stupid right road while he was out killing people! And-” Fresh tears welled up in her eyes and she slapped at them, hard. “And we could have had him last night if I—”

This was what was scratching at her?

“If you what?” he demanded. “If you humiliated yourself to a stranger? Do not you dare to take blame for that!”

She rolled her eyes at him, and if he hadn’t already seen this gesture performed on the tee-vee, he might have thought her over-exhausted nerves had provoked her to seizures. As it was, he had seen it, so he recognized the gesture as a deriding one.