Raven met that piercing, raptor’s gaze without flinching. She could feel that survivor’s shadow-self separate from the back of her, circling the cop with chisel in hand, hunting for the soft heel of him.

“Are you going to kill me?” she asked.

The look on his face had a sound, and it was the sound of a chisel striking in under armor.

“No,” he said. He glanced away at Kane, who was still facedown and motionless.

Raven followed his eyes. She could see the faint rise and fall of Kane’s breath, but it looked shallow and he showed no signs of waking up. One of his arms was still stretched out, the claws curled and the blood that tipped them dulled by dust. She could reach out a hand and touch him, but she didn’t dare even to look at him too long. She said, “Are people really looking for me?”

“Yes.”

“Cops?”

“Yes.”

She looked up at him; he was still gazing down at Kane. “Do they think I killed those people?” she asked.

He hesitated and finally met her eyes. “Yes,” he said.

This was the part where panic should be chewing her up from the insides out, she knew, but it wasn’t. Calm had her in a grip so profound it made her head feel swollen. All her thoughts had weight and substance, all her nerves were awake and tingling, but she couldn’t make herself not be calm. “I didn’t,” she said, and looked down at her hands where they gripped the ground. She had no fingernails and she couldn’t remember biting them or anything. “I was there, but…how was I supposed to stop him? You tell me. How?”

She looked at him. He looked away.

“He did things to me,” Raven said.

The lady was coming back with a pack in her arms, bigger than Kane’s, dark blue instead of black, with a funny star-like symbol over the lid, but made of the same stuff. She watched the cop open it with a slide of his finger along the seam and her heart ached a little. Her own hand went to pull Kane’s pack a little tighter against her side.

“She’s hurt pretty bad,” the lady said, circling Raven’s leg with a worried look. “Tagen, if we take her to a hospital—”

“I know.” The cop loaded drops of liquid from an assortment of vials into the spray-gun and held out his hand for Raven’s arm.

She offered it, her expression carefully blanked. “I’m clean,” she said. “He cleaned me. So that…it was safe. For him.”

The cop’s jaw tightened. That was all. He emptied the contents of the spray-gun into Raven’s arm in a hiss of air, and then put his hands on her shoulders and gently turned her onto her back. “Hold her, Daria. This is going to hurt,” he told Raven, in eerie half-remembered echo of Kane’s words to her that first awful night as she lay in convulsions beneath him.

Her nod came with fresh tears and she clapped both hands over her mouth and shut her eyes as the cop untied the shirt binding her leg and had himself a look. She felt one of his hands close on her thigh just above her knee and then the other wrapped around her ankle. “Steady,” he said, and pulled.

Raven meant to scream—he was clearly the sort of cop that reacted best to a girl screaming—but the sound of her bones grinding up and snapping back into place deafened her and after that, all sounds and colors kind of ebbed away like the tide on a flat, sickly beach. She stared glassily up at the lady’s face, silhouetted by the sun behind her, and waited to see if she was going to throw up or faint or what. The cop was still doing things to her down there, but she couldn’t even manage to move her eyes enough to see what. Eventually, things began to fade back in.

“…car seems to be working,” the lady was saying. “I think I can siphon some gas out of their tank and put it into ours. Enough to get us to a gas station, anyway.” A tactful pause came here, during which the lady’s fingers brushed thoughtfully at Raven’s brow. “What are you going to do with him?”

“He is unconscious,” the cop said sourly. “Killing him now would make for an awkward report.”

A touching tribute to cop-hood everywhere.

“He is arrested,” the cop continued. “And I will take him to Jota and see him imprisoned for his crimes. That is what I am going to do with him.”

“What’s going to happen when he wakes up?”

“I have…sedative…enough to ensure that does not happen.” He rose, a tower in the shape of a man, and Raven managed with effort to look directly at him.

“What are you going to do with her?” the lady asked softly.

Silence. Raven stayed as still as possible, staring at him without smiling and without speaking.

“We will take her with us,” the cop said at last, and threw out a sigh that held more then just a little snarl in it. “For now.”

And with that, Raven had to be content.

For now.

*

As with every mission that Tagen had known, the empty time following a difficult capture were weighted with doubts and lingering disappointments. The pursuit was done and now all that he had suffered in bringing it about had passed into the realm of the inconsequential. E’Var lay in the hold of Daria’s groundcar, by all appearances as innocent a passenger as any other, with all his history of violence suppressed by sleep. And Tagen himself, once more superfluous, sat and gazed out the window at the passing world, trusting to Daria to take them where they needed to be. He needed only to say, “East, presently,” or “Further south,” as the groundcar circled towards the hiding place of his ship.

They had made one stop to refuel, and Daria had gone into one of the roadside shops and left Tagen alone in the groundcar with the female who called herself Raven. She spoke to him in a low and listless voice from the seat behind him where she huddled with Tagen’s uniform jacket around her shoulders and Grendel sleeping happily in her arms. To hear of the monstrosities that had been performed on her in those tones of apathy and exhaustion had been among the most difficult acts Tagen had ever had to perform in a lifetime of service to the Fleet.

“He made me ask,” she would say, as Tagen stared out at the highway and the passing human cars. The sun was so bright, the sky so blue and peaceful. There was no evil apparent in this world, and yet: “He made me thank him.”

Daria returned ages later with bandages to dress all their wounds, a new shirt for Raven, and a medical brace she called a ‘crutch’ so that she could help Raven hobble to the station’s privy and back again. And then there was more road, more silence swelling out the groundcar’s interior. More time slipping like sand through Tagen’s fingers, bringing him inexorably to the moment when he would leave this Earth.

And now here it was, the moment come at last. They had left the last road behind them, driving on uneven ground at a walking pace, until Tagen had called them to halt. He had stepped out into the seemingly-empty clearing, walked to the low dimples of flattened grass that marked the landing struts of the shielded ship, made a few adjustments in mid-air and behold, a star-cruiser.

Now Tagen stood before his ship, the airlock open and ready to receive him and his prisoner, looking down on Daria’s face. She tried to smile, an effort that stabbed him to the heart. He was intensely aware of the other human watching them from the groundcar, and it made him over-conscious of the very little distance between them.

He stepped back, and then, pretending not to see the hurt in Daria’s eyes at that withdrawal, went to the hatch of the groundcar for E’Var.

Grendel was curled comfortably upon the killer’s chest, purring loudly. The cat complained at being moved aside and complained still further when Tagen pulled the unconscious man onto his shoulder rather than pause to rub the furry head. Grendel tried to follow, but Tagen shut the hatch. He felt the cat’s eyes on him, confused and stung, as he walked back to the ship. Daria watched him come with the same hurt expression, but she at least dropped her gaze when he met it.