A metallic rattle distracted him. Raven was at the human’s closet. She had pulled some clothing from the articles hanging there and was putting it on over the top of her ruined string-shirt. Her shoulders were shaking.

A good idea. The male in the other room was big, for a human. If Kane was going to be doing much travel by groundcar on the human’s roads, it would be smart to have a disguise.

“Stay close,” he said, and got up.

“Can’t I please go back downstairs?” Raven’s voice was broken, her eyes shining with desperation since her body was too dry for tears. She clutched both her hands before her, miming shackles, and said, “Please? Please.”

Kane glanced at the bed. Blood had soaked the pillow already, was dripping onto the floor. Without answering, he went to the wall and thumbed the switch that operated the light. He went to Raven, catching her wrist though she tried to cringe back, and dragged her to the bedside. He put her before him, his free hand closing on her jaw, aiming her at the body on the bed.

“Take a good look,” he said, unconsciously giving her the same words (and in much the same way) as Uraktus had given him, years and years ago. “That’s death. That’s what I deal in. Look at it. Smell it.”

Raven trembled in his grip. Her eyes were huge, staring. “She’s just a kid,” she whispered. She looked away, at the papers and human images that coated the walls, at the soft toys and pink-colored objects that cluttered the floor. She pushed back, blindly seeking the comfort of Kane’s chest; Kane, who had done the killing.

He patted her arm reassuringly and studied the dead human without much interest. He didn’t think she was as young as Raven believed. The female’s chest-bumps were full and firm, the scent of her musk was mature. She was young, but not that young. Death just had a way of shaving off the years.

Raven turned around and pressed her face into the crook of Kane’s arm. She made that sobby sound, but just once. “Are you going to kill me?” she asked.

“That’s up to you.”

“I want to live.” He could feel her breath on his bare skin. She said it again, as though trying to convince herself. Then she stepped away from him, her arms wrapped around her middle and her head bent. When Kane left, she followed.

In the male’s room, Kane found only a few items of value to him. Foot covers, heavy and grimed with use, but sized to fit even over Kane’s talons. A long coat, ill-fitting and much too heavy to wear all the time, but an essential thing, he thought, if he was to move for any length of time among humans. A head-cover, wide-brimmed, which Kane took solely to keep the sun out of his eyes as he walked. And finally, sitting right within easy reach of the bed, a weapon.

It was a hand-held pellet-projectile device, black and stinking of oil. Kane picked it up, feeling it heavy in his hand, and gave the dead male on the bed a long look. If he had reached for this instead of shouting, Kane would be dead on the floor right now. Life. Funny.

But he liked the thing. He like the dull gleam of it, the lethal feel of the metal. He glanced at Raven; she was gazing tight-lipped at the corpse. “What’s the name for this?” he asked, hefting the weapon.

“It’s a gun,” she answered dully. “I don’t know what kind.”

“Do you know how to work it?”

She dragged her eyes off the bed and finally came over, holding out one hand.

“Don’t touch it,” he said, pulling the thing back out of her reach and smiling faintly. A part of him was coming to approve of his human, and he thought he might eventually come to like her quite a lot, but he was light-years away from trusting her to hold a weapon. “Just tell me.”

“You need bullets first.” Raven looked around and came up with a box of shiny metal tubes. “These,” she said. “You put them in the clip part…right here…I’m going to have to touch the gun to show you.”

Kane could see where she was trying to get at. He pried at the place she called a clip, and managed on his second try to get it out. He eyed the bullets loaded inside, fit the clip back in place, pulled it out again, and then smiled. Just like a Kevrian pulsor, really.

“Now if you want to shoot somebody, you make sure the safety…this thing…is in the off position. It’s on right now, so it won’t fire.”

Kane toggled the ‘safety’ and aimed the weapon at the wall. It had been designed for a smaller hand and more fingers, but he found he could hold it sideways easily enough, and his thumb claw fit neatly into the trigger guard. He tested the pull, drawing back by minute degrees until the gun jerked in his hand with a flat thunderclap of sound. A black hole opened as by magic on the wall, coughing out a tiny spew of dust.

Simple. Elegant. Very effective.

Kane toggled the safety back on and put the gun into the pocket of his new coat, and then slung that over his arm, along with his other acquisitions. “Anything else?” he said.

Raven bent and picked up the dead human’s clothes from the floor. She put her hands in its inner folds and removed a bundle of flat metal shapes, strung together into a jingling ring like a baby’s toy, and then a leather pocket, shiny with time and bulky with material. From this, she took several folded bits of greenish-grey paper which she held out to him. Kane took them, puzzled. “Money?” he guessed.

Raven nodded. She was wiping down the sides of the leather pocket on her new shirt before letting it drop to the floor.

At first, Kane couldn’t imagine what had compelled her to rob the corpse for human currency. Then he remembered losing the first groundcar because it had expended all its fuel. He gave Raven a long, considering glance. She hadn’t forgotten. Even here, face to face with hard death and hating it, she’d kept her wits around her.

“There’s food downstairs,” she said now. Raven looked one final time at the body on the bed, and then turned away and preceded him out into the hall.

‘Boy,’ said Urak’s voice, in tones of mild appreciation. ‘You could have done a lot worse.’

Silently, Kane agreed. He followed his female downstairs.

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Chapter Five

East.

The sun rose hot and hateful every morning, and Tagen walked into it. It blinded him, it burned his face and robbed his lungs of breath. It fell behind him every afternoon and Tagen could feel it like the hand of a murderous god, pushing him relentlessly ahead. He took his suppressants, but the heat was there regardless, leadening his limbs and clogging his mind of thought and purpose. His clothing stank. He stank. Sweat was a fog that warded off even the biting insects of Earth. He was in hell.

The forests gave way to mountains after four days of battle with branches and roots. The mountains were cooler, just enough to mock him, not enough to supplant his need for suppressants. And the mountains were more treacherous footing than even the forests had been. The ground beneath his feet was loose, dry, and unstable. He climbed, he fell, he rose bruised and often bleeding to climb again.

There were streams in the mountains, often springing right from the rock itself in eruptive white falls that were beautiful even to Tagen’s increasingly bitter turn of mind. The water was itself a torture, a curse disguised as a blessing. Tagen drank his limit at each he passed just for the sense of fullness it gave him, but the thirst was always with him. He could wash, or at least he could wipe away the newest layer of sweat and grime and briefly cool his burning flesh, but the stink of him never faded. Tagen was coming to hate even the sound of the water, splashing and burbling happily to itself in defiance of him. It stung at him more and more that he had to be grateful for it.