“Ada, hurry up.”

She’s trailing too far behind him. She’d wanted to see the Marked Mountains, and he’d reluctantly agreed to take her with him to gather ice, but now she’s delaying him. Irritation growing, he turns to look at her as she trots through the weeds.

“Ada,” he repeats carefully, “I said for you to hurry up. Do not make me say it again.”

He snaps his fingers at her, and she quickens her pace, ducking under branches and trying to keep her eyes from straying.

Alexai had found his brother’s widow dead by the Sora River that slashes through the middle of Hera 6, near the Marked Mountains. The same river that cuts a line between his people and the ones who live in the caves. She’d been stabbed through with a shortblade sword, the skin of her chest and sides shredded. The men she’d been with were dead too. They’d only been collecting water.

He watches Ada’s little legs, heavy with boots and layers of leather beneath her dress, stumble over branches fallen stumps and wonders what the enemy saw when they killed her mother. Did they imagine something from one of those old picture books they hoarded? Or maybe something one of the ancient women showed them of earth? Did they make even death beautiful with those projections of theirs?

He realizes the difficulty of his indignation, the hypocrisy of it. He has killed before. Countless times. He is a soldier. He is at war. Death - your own and that of others - is an inevitability. But she had been a woman.

Alexai has never killed a woman. He avoids them in battle, which is relatively easy since women are such a valued commodity for the cave - the ‘birthgivers’, each a little factory for replenishing their numbers as they die off from weakness, disease. From a scratch even. They are disgustingly fragile.

He slipped up the day before when he grabbed that female soldier. He could have killed her, he knows, if it were down to her and him and only one could come out alive. He is not so soft as to think he’s incapable of it. But it’s not something he seeks and he doesn’t know why he grabbed her – the only woman in the whole party – and then froze. Perhaps it had been the colors streaking across the horizon suddenly. Perhaps it was the breathing of the ground under his feet, as if the planet was waking up, stretching its maw and yawning.

Perhaps it was because he recognized her.

He doesn’t want to. He’s tried to erase the encounter from his mind, but he knows those eyes, that hair. Even that smell.

That’s why he grabbed her and that’s why he did not kill her.

And he knows what the others would say. The last thing he wants to be is soft. He has more insignias of the enemy sewn onto his jacket than any other man in the camp - more kills racked up than anyone else.

It’s an unforgivable flaw of his. Outrageous, even. Those Ones are dispensable. Sick and frail, they come and go in a blink of an eye. The longest any one of them had ever lived, besides the ageless seers, was 70 years and then they wither up. What does it really matter if he had killed her?

It seems the universe is not without a sense of irony after all. The others had fought with the camp about the seers. Had decided to defy the rest of their people to protect ones who needed no protecting – who needed to be controlled – and run off to their cloistered caves and grown weak.

Ada finally catches up to him. She reaches for his hand but pulls away at the last minute, remembering herself, and they walk on in silence. He wonders what the other ones would have done to Ada if she had been with her mother that day.

Everything’s their fault anyway. They started the first fight over the sick. They idolized the seers when all others saw the danger in their power. They wanted to leave the settlement for the caves. And then, in the end, they fired the first shot.

That’s what Suzerain Ademar had told him before his first battle, almost 200 years ago: Always remember, they fired the first shot. Ademar had whispered it with a quiet finality, voice flat and resigned. He never said anything any other way. He had been granted his position as suzerain because of it. Because every one of the camp could look at him to say things exactly as they were.

Ada slips on the ice as soon as they begin to descend into the valley. He helps her up, ignoring her hiss of pain from the cold burn on her palm. She’s still staring at the cluster of mountains when she takes his hand.

He pulls it away.

“Do we get the ice from here?” she asks, seemingly unfazed by his rebuff.

“No, it’s easier if we go further in. There’s ice on the mountain walls.”

She darts eagerly ahead of him. As she passes, he stretches his fingers apart to brush off the feel of her little hand against his.

The Marked Mountains are colder than any other place on Hera 6, but he merely shrugs a bit deeper into his coat and digs his chin further into his collar. Ada, wearing one of those thick dresses and boer skin pants, chugs along easily.

This is the only place he really feels content, despite the hungrily nipping cold and wet air. The snow is soft and so white that even a drop of water stains it. The ground is veined with black aqueducts of water, sheeted by thin ice. The look of it has always fascinated him. He imagines it’s the only place that even the other ones do not bother to change the look of. No trick of light can ever replace that blinding snow and those black spiderweb arteries. He knows the Men live somewhere in the dark grottos near the fresh water, but he hardly thinks they’d have any issue with someone from the camp. Their anger is at the cavedwellers for taking their women – the seers – far into the caves.

Though he never understood the grudge. If their wives wanted to leave, wanted to worshipped by a bunch of savages, let them be.

Settling his large bag by a frosted sheet of near vertical rock, he gets to work. Ada watches him pull shards of ice from the sides of the rock, dumping them into the bag.

“Can I try?”

He glances at her bare hands. “No. You have no gloves. Your hands will burn.”

“It’ll heal.”

For a second, the ease in which she says it sends a spasm of something he thinks is anger down the base of his spine. He’s not sure why, though. She’s right. It will heal for them, quickly.

“Healing or not, unnecessary pain is illogical,” he replies, voice tight, but she’s young and doesn’t notice it as the others would.

“I can wear your gloves.”

He’s stops in the middle of hitting his fist against a large block and sighs.

“I’m going to have to learn to do it on my own soon anyway,” she says, voice more than a little manipulative. He wonders where she learned that trick. Was it from him?

He pulls off his gloves with his teeth and passed them back to her without looking. When she steps up next to him, her little hands look ridiculous with such large things on them. She tries to curl her fist but has to tuck the extra fabric of the palm down before she can get any movement.

She strikes her hand on the ice, hardly moving it. A few unprogressive moments pass before she huffs irritably.

He tsks reprovingly at her. “Patience. Keep going.”

She hits the block with both fists and hisses in pain.

“Keep going.”

A determined look, entirely too reminiscent of his brother, and she runs her whole body into the thing before he realizes what’s she’s doing. The ice block tumbles onto his feet and she goes sprawling into the snow.

Before he can stop himself, he’s helping her up. She’s smiling, though, face dusted with little shavings of ice.

“I did it.”

He nods and pushes the ice into the bag, closes it, and hefts it up onto his shoulder with a smothered grunt.

“I can help you carry it,” she volunteers and anchors herself under the bag. She’s not helping at all, but he keeps his mouth shut and trudges on, trusting her to keep up. The entire way back, she holds one corner of the bag up with her arm and shoulder.

When he gets back to camp, Ademar calls him into his tent. He drops off the water with the trench guarders and sends Ada back to his tent – their tent now– with a warning to stay there until he’s done.

The camp is busy. Efficient. He walks through the eating court and past the slaughtering pin towards the soft, recently sifted plot of land where they’d just buried Ada’s mother. The dirt looks darker there, right over where she lies, and Alex turns away and strides quickly towards the low handing tent near the base of the cliffs.

The suzerain’s place is near the back of the camp. It’s next to the small plot of land that makes up the cemetery, near The Devouring Pyre where bodies of honorable soldiers are burned. The air always tastes a bit of copper and ash, bitten through in the sunslayed winters with the cold of colorless snow. Alexai knows the enemy must have a cemetery that’s much larger. There are rumors about the area behind the caves, about how there’s an enormous valley filled with graves, all piled on top of each other. About how their dead are thrown into holes with no coffins, no burial rites. Alexai would feel sorry for them in this small thing, but he knows they probably just project something more pleasant to look at anyway- his camp’s burial grounds may be small, but it is what it is and no amount of mental concentration can change the truth of that. The ones of the camp can’t make things beautiful for themselves - he doesn’t really even know what the word means. Can’t picture the thing that it represents. Can’t imagine it because he has never seen it.

He doesn’t understand how you can miss something you’ve never had, never seen, never touched, but he does. They all do – it’s as if something has been ripped from the depths of their bones, and they feel the hollow thud of where it used to be with every step they take.

He calls out a hello, pushing the flap of cloth aside after he’s invited in.

Alexai is barely seated on the worn pillows on Ademar’s floor before the suzerain speaks. “We’re not going to send a force to the wall tomorrow.”

Alexai sighs, mirroring the older man by crossing his legs. “Don’t you think it’s time for us to take some offensive stand?”

“We have not brought a full-scale army against them in years.”

The waning lampfires in Ademar’s tent flicker, sending shadows sallying across the thick canvas. Alexai watches their dance for a while.

Ademar stands and pours himself some water from a small pitcher, continuing, “We will merely get caught against their wall, as always. We must continue on as we have been – with smaller battles. All we have is the element of surprise. We cannot risk gathering a large army to march against them now. We also need to make sure we have heightened security when we go for water runs now that it’s evident that they’re not above petty abductions.”

They hadn’t abducted Ada’s mother. Perhaps they had been trying to, just as they’d taken dozens of other camp members.

Finally, Alexai merely says, “And what of the ones who did this to Ala? Are we to simply let this go without responding in kind?”

“In kind?” Ademar asks. He runs a hand through the short hairs dotting his chin and takes a seat across from Alexai on the floor, smoothing the thin carpet beneath him with old, weathered hands. “We already have some plans for a small combat mission next week, despite the risk of those old women coming out. Aaron says there may be a weakness in the cave walls there - some way to get into the citadel. We were going to look into it. More of a reconnaissance mission than battle. Besides that, what would you have us do? Find one of their people and leave them dead on their doorstep? This is a war, Alexai, not a personal vendetta. We have to think practically. We’re already at a disadvantage.”

“That is not what I meant.” Though, if he’s honest with himself, he doesn’t really know what he means. Fortunately, Ademar doesn’t press him. Alexai continues, “And what do we plan to do with this weakness of theirs, if there is one?”

“We could get to the women, or to their medical facilities. Either way, we could get inside and fight. Hopefully take them by surprise so that we could do some damage. Also, we need to find out what power their seers have over us now.” A pause. “The soldiers going in know this.”

“We should try to discover what lies behind their ability as well. Is that not what we are really after?”

“Their ability to project? Of course. We’re pretty certain that the answer is somewhere in one of their labs. Some synthetic agent they use to keep the power going for them. Of course. Why do you ask?”

Alexai rises gracefully, straightens his jacket, and turns to leave, “Merely curious. Seems at times that we forget what all this is about.”

A curious hum. Alexai waits for some response beyond that but none seem forthcoming. Before he can start to feel uncomfortable standing there, waiting, he turns and begins to duck out of the tent.

Ademar follows behind him, and Alexai tries not to tense up. He wonders what else the suzerain wants to speak to him about.

He’s quiet as they walk back towards the trees near the rear of the eating area.

Alexai keeps obediently silent. The gray, rock mountains and hills rise up behind the camp, dividing them from the Land of Flames. He turns his head and looks at the Ebon Forest in the distance, blocking them from the valley leading to the caves. The sky’s dull and filled with smoke-sodden clouds. It gives the horrible feeling of being enclosed on all sides, trapped.

The idea of a synthetic agent as the base for the others’ power is fool’s hope. This power had once belonged to all of them before the divide. Just because his people had lost the ability did not mean the others must have lost it at some point as well.

They’ve retained it. For some reason, the planet has deemed them worthy of holding on to this even as it strips his own people of it. And while he should think of the healing and long life as an equal trade, he does not.

He looks up the sky once more.

As they march past the Lady’s tent, like always, she somehow knows he’s there. She steps out as his shadow crosses over her doorway and stares at him. She doesn’t say anything, but her strange gaze stops him for a moment. He gazes back. She’s an older woman, nearing 800 by last count, and in the lines around her eyes, around her mouth, there are secrets and untold stories that no one can get from her. No one even knows her real name anymore.

She’s also the only one of them who has had a child without express permission. It happened hundreds of years ago, before Alexai was even born, and no one knows who the father was. Or where the baby had disappeared to. While her actions were frowned upon, no one made any move to take the boy from her - it was her child, her right, even if it did go against camp consensus - so despite their disapproval, the camp was startled when she came back to her tent one day with no child and no inclination to tell what happened to him. Most think she murdered the boy. Some others think she had given him to his father - one of cave.

Needless to say, no one ever offered to marry her, even when opportunity arose to be bonded. And no one wished to keep company with someone touched by one of the others, so for centuries she kept to herself, hardly bothering anyone.

Except Alexai.

He forces himself to keep walking, hoping the suzerain did not notice his second of hesitation.

He tells himself that she only notices him because he’s one of the few who visits Ademar alone. He just happens to be the only solitary figure to cross her path, and so he’s the sole recipient of her attentions. She stares at him often. Once she even tried to touch him.

He’s not frightened of her. At least not in any physical sense.

Once they’re well into the cluster of sagging trees, away from all the tents, the suzerain speaks again. “You realize that Ada is your responsibility now?”

Pale, sickly light columns downward, stippling the weeds around his feet. He did realize this. He wonders why the suzerain feels the need to discuss it.

“Ada doesn’t understand,” Ademar continues. There is no judgment there, but Alexai wonders if it isn’t some kind of accusation anyway.

He looks up at the sky, all bruised gray, then down at the blanche barked trees. He has a small scuff of soot on his hands from the funeral pyre that was stamped out early that morning. He licks the skin clean, gums tightening against the coppery tang.

“All she knows is that her mother is gone,” he replies, careful to look the suzerain right in the face as he speaks.

“She would have been removed from her mother’s care soon at any rate. You’ll continue to watch over her until the camp decides she needs to be on her own.”

“Do I get to have any say?” he asks before he’s able to stop himself. A stupid thing to ask. Easily misconstrued as emotion. All he has to do is feed and shelter her. Beyond that, she should be of no concern to him.

“Why would you have a say?” the older man responds.

The wind whistles shrilly through the air, through the black leaves, and Alexai glances towards the camp, nestled out of sight past the forest the two men are standing in.

“If she lives with me,” he continues, after gathering his thoughts, “I’m sure I’ll be able to gauge how ready she is for independence.”

“Leave it to us.”

Alexai feels an unseemly bite of anger. He’d been helping Ala take care of Ada since his brother had died in battle. It hadn’t been a long time, but long enough to make the sting of her absence smart a bit now that he has a child to handle all on his own. And to think he’ll be playing feeder and giver to another mouth without any say or sway in her life makes him bristle.

Ademar glances up towards the sparse, black leaves. “With another dead, someone else can finally have a child.”

Alexai nods his head, trying to look at the pragmatic side of it. Ala had been alive for only 298 years. Still a vibrant woman. But her death paved the way for another birth, and the painstaking process of picking a couple who could be granted the (secretly desired) permission to have another child will take up most of the camp’s attention for at least a few weeks.

Alexai doesn’t think Ada will find much comfort in that fact. But he keeps his gaze steady and simply nods, turning to return to the camp.

The smell of roasting game and firewood drifts through the trees, and he’s a few steps away before the suzerain decides to stop him again, his words carefully detached.

“You know we found the bodies shredded.”

Alexai stops. He hadn’t told anyone that he had torn into the bodies of the men at the river, the ones who had failed to protect Ada’s mother. Does the suzerain know somehow? He wonders if this is a trick. But Ademar can’t know. No one knows and no one ever will.

He doesn’t turn around. “Probably boers. Or coyets. Fresh meat attracts all kinds.”

He waits for the other man to say something but when nothing seems forthcoming, he walks on, feeling a bright sting of pain, like the edge of knife pressing into his skin. It’s shame, he knows. He tries to forget that moment of weakness, but at night, even after reigning himself in, he still often lies in his small tent and listens to the rhythmic breathing of his niece (now his daughter, by camp custom) and imagines thousands of little eyes peeking out of the caves where the other ones live, blinking with laughter at him and his misfortune.

When he gets back to his tent, Ada shows him her arm.

Next Chapter: Chapter 3