“Okay, we’ll go back to just before Santiam Pass,” she said finally. “The road’s pretty narrow there and we can find a turnout to watch for him. Then we can—”

“In the dark?” he asked quietly.

She looked up, as if she could see right through the roof of the groundcar to the twilight sky above. On her face was an expression of exhausted astonishment. “Oh damn,” she said mildly.

And then began to cry.

Grendel came at once from the rear of the car, but Tagen was there first. He cupped her face in both his hands, smoothing her tears away and refusing to let her hide against the console. He murmured nonsensical words of solace and she cried harder.

“It’s all my fault!” she wailed.

“No.”

“If I hadn’t gotten shot—”

“No, Daria.”

“I made you have to—”

He stopped her mouth the only way possible, with a kiss. She tried to pull away, but the hands he twined into her soft hair locked behind her neck and kept her pressed to him. Denied escape, her resistance faltered. Under his gently persistent coaxing, her lips parted and he kissed her deeply. Her hands came to rest heavily on his shoulders, and she gave in to him entirely.

The rage of time and its urgency did not disappear, but it did dim. He held his Daria, breathed for her, tasted her tears and felt her trembling, and he did not allow any thoughts of Kanetus E’Var to rob him of the precious beauty of the moment. He ended the kiss at last, but remained touching her, brow to brow.

“What now?” she asked softly.

He sighed and drew back to rub at his eyes. “To begin with, we will trust that his retreat from the fair left him without transport and that he will be delayed.”

“Not for long.”

“No, but long enough, perhaps. We will go as you suggest to a lairing place and wait. The sun will rise and we will watch for him. And if by late morning, he has not come, then…then I will go to my ship and watch for his launch.”

She turned to the window, her fingers restless in her lap. “You should go there now,” she said.

“No. Not yet.”

She looked at him, her eyes deep and unhappily aware of his reasons. She said nothing.

“He has a female with him still,” Tagen said and tried to sound as though this were his only concern. “I would not have him escape with a hostage if it can be helped. If it comes to apprehending him in space, I would be responsible for his captive’s life and I would not have that stain my judgment.”

Daria looked down at her hands. She still did not answer.

He met her silence for as long as he could, and then quietly said, “Not yet. Not until I must. I will claw at every last moment.”

“And he’ll get away.”

“No.” And then, venomously, “Perhaps. We can do only as much as we can do, and it is beyond me, Daria Cleavon, to leave you now.”

Silence. At last, she sighed.

“Will you drive?” he asked.

She nodded and began to do things to the console, preparing to re-enter the empty road.

“And will you not speak?”” he asked softly.

She looked at him. Away. She shook her head.

He faced out the fore-window and into the mountains, not seeing them. “Why not?”

“Because I don’t want you to leave,” she said unsteadily, and took them out onto the highway. “But I can’t be the reason that this guy gets away. I can’t live with that, Tagen. I can’t think of all the people he’s going to keep killing because you couldn’t leave me. Me. I mean, I’ve got a newsflash for you, spaceman, I’m not all that great.”

“You are.”

She didn’t seem to know how to respond to such quiet conviction. At last, she felt back on her first argument, uttering it with a high despair that was close to tears. “You need to go back to your ship!”

“In the morning,” he said, and his heart clenched inside of him. “Whether I have found him or no. In the morning. Please.” He did look at her then, although she shivered away from meeting his eyes even for an instant. “Wherever he is, he is surely hours behind us yet. Do not ask me to spend those hours alone in space.”

Her shoulders hunched. “Okay,” she whispered. “You win. God help me.”

He turned his eyes out to the road ahead of them again. The sun was falling down, the night short, and the morning mere hours away.

Gods help them both.

*

The sun was low in the trees when Kane came to the end of the forest and saw the houses. The sight of them standing pleasantly in the sunshine of a summer’s evening infuriated him. It shouldn’t, and he was lucid enough to know that, but it did anyway. This was the hour he’d thought to be loading his females onto his ship and making ready for launch. Instead he was here, on foot, his ichuta’a gone and Raven at her limit, with no food or water since the previous day, and Heat scouring at him yet again. He couldn’t seem to feel anything apart from rage and that was a dangerous way to be.

He ordered Raven to sit and stay, and then he got low and crept in to the edge of the woods to get a better look. He saw no movement of any kind, not in any of the windows. There were groundcars parked before some of the houses, but not all of them, and Kane was smart enough to know that a groundcar on display was no guarantee that anyone was at home. Just his luck. All the humans that lived here had probably gone to the fucking fair.

No, a shadow moved. Kane’s eyes narrowed, trying to pierce the curtains and see clearly whether it was a human on the inside of that house or an animal, or just reflected light spilling in through the window and broken by branches. Futile. He could make nothing out but curtain.

The urge to just go kick in the door or smash through the window vomited up from somewhere deep inside him with enough force to momentarily blind him. Just tear his way inside and kill everything that moved—humans, animals, shadows, walls, every fucking thing.

Patience, gods damn him, patience!

Kane slapped a hand over his eyes, his claws digging hard into his own flesh, snarling as he fought for reason and calm. This was the last day and the Fleet had found him once already. He was lost, unknown kilometers away from his ship, and he had Raven to take care of. He couldn’t make mistakes anymore.

He dragged his hand across his face, wiping away sweat and blood in smears, and stared with fresh eyes at the houses before him. There were four, spread out in a miniature village along a dirt road, with four little patches of green grass before them and bright gardens filled with flowers lining their walkways. In the murderous heat of this unending summer, the sight said money to Kane, but at the moment, he couldn’t care less. All he cared about was getting something to drink, something to eat, something to fuck the Heat out of him, and then a new groundcar to take him the hell away.

The sun was sinking. He could hear the distant drone of the highway somewhere at the end of this dirt road. Shadows moved again within the curtained house. All these things were good things. He could still be gone from this world before its sun rose, but only if he were patient now.

Kane retreated from the forest’s edge and straightened as he turned. Raven was lying on her side, sound asleep. He hunkered down beside her, loathe to wake her. She was flushed with heat and yet, too pale. There was a rattling quality to her breaths that troubled him mightily. He’d seen her look worse when his tox-filters had been cleaning her out, but not much worse. No food, no water, too much sun and too much walking. And too much damned Heat coming at her. He was holding out as long as he could, but he had only so much strength left to him and he needed it for carrying her and not for fighting Heat. He didn’t even know how many times he’d stopped and had her since leaving the fair, but he knew that each new episode had left her weaker. Now here she was, a breath away from coma and him hard as rock again.