A Drifting Wasteland (Peregrine x DotCom)

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It was well after dark when Bruce finally led him out of the house. They had talked for several hours, as he had made his way over long before dinner. In unknowing imitation of Kaya, he had helped Bruce prepare the meal, and they had talked for a time after they had both eaten. Once again, he left with a piece of paper in hand. This one, though, was not a letter, but rather a map on a piece of durable paper, which would be able to survive numerous trips through the desert. This one was old and worn, and although Bruce had not said anything it was likely the very same map the man had used when he had still been an escort.

Bruce paused just outside his doorstep, and he turned towards the former escort, allowing his hand to be bobbed by Bruce's one remaining hand. "Good luck out there," he said, softly. "And try and keep what I told you in mind. It will make things a lot easier for both you and Kaya."

Once again, Kaya waited outside, though now, instead of sleeping, she traced a single straight line back and forth in front of Bruce's steps. Her pack, much smaller this time, waited at one end; there was a canteen slung over one shoulder. She looked up as the two appeared on the doorstep, eyes wary as they were excited. She looked first to her companion, scanning him slowly, carefully, before she turned to Bruce, her expression notably cooler.

"Can we go now?" she said bluntly. "It's late."

Bruce quirked an eyebrow at Kaya, although whether in disapproval or amusement was hard to tell. He reached up, way up, to clap Eli on the shoulder. "Thanks for stopping by again." He turned back to Kaya. "Do whatever you please."

Kaya sighed noisily, rolling her eyes back to her new partner. "Let's leave before he changes his mind, please?" She reached down to swing her pack over her shoulders and had actually started to walk away before she appeared, however reluctantly, to think better of it. When she turned around again, her expression was less neutral, more...carefully suspicious.

"What's that?" she pointed, flinging a finger at the new parchment in Eli's hand. She looked at her companion again. "Can I see?"

Eli handed it over just as willingly as he had passed over the letter yesterday evening, and waited quietly as Kaya unrolled the map to reveal several sheets of paper that were covered in an intricate network of lines that connected local cities. A route had been bolded, which connected Meeros and Essen, the center of the Escort Guild. Noticeably, the route skirted around the three cities that could have been stopping points along the way.

Kaya studied the map only briefly before turning the thing in her hands to inspect the parchment itself. She ran a hand almost reverently over the fine lines crossing this way and that under her fingers, then folded the whole thing back together. Carefully. She handed it back to Eli, but she did not look away from Bruce.

"That's practically a relic," she said coolly. "Yours, I assume?"

"Once," Bruce agreed. "It's been gathering dust for fifteen years now, so no one will notice it is missing. You'll get a new one from the guild if your license is approved."

"Then why hand this one over?"

Bruce shrugged. "I have no need of it anymore, and I won't have to fill out paperwork explaining why I handed out a guild map to non-licensed escorts since it is out of date."

"How convenient," Kaya said sagely. "In any case, I suppose even an ancient map is better than no map at all. But we would have made it there eventually." Now she glanced back at Eli briefly, her expression softening to something very near pride. "I think you know that now."

The silence went on for a beat before she seemed to catch herself. "We should go," she said again. "God forbid more of your people try and sneak after us again." She hefted the bag over her shoulders and nodded at her companion. When she spoke again, her tone was conciliatory. Almost kind.

"With any luck, your words will carry even half as much weight in Essen as they do here. Then we won't have to come back." She smirked. "You're welcome."

Bruce didn't comment, but simply sighed, shook his head slightly, and walked back into the house. He did everything except literally brush his hands clean of Kaya.

He watched her silently for a moment, wondering if that reaction might send her flying into another rage, but some combination of the fact that they were leaving, she'd gotten what they wanted, and that Bruce hadn't actually verbally responded seemed to keep her calm. They filled a couple more canteens of water at a pump, before navigating out towards one of the gates. It was a small one, and there was no one there except a couple of unknown guards to see them leave. That was certainly more preferable than last time.

He stretched in relief as soon as they made it through the gate, and all but smiled at the open desert. A moment later he glanced back at Kaya. He knew she liked the city, but it had been her choice to leave. Hadn't it?

Either way, she took off without a backwards glance, only pausing long enough to redistribute the weight of her pack on her shoulders and hips. They were off.
 
Kaya was near breathless with excitement and terror both. This was, at least technically, her third time leaving the city of Meeros, though this time she had both her companion and her letter of recommendation. And a goal, albeit a very different one than that with which she'd left Crolis. And, she supposed, the strangeness in being so sure of something so new.

Kaya stayed tense and silent for the first several minutes. She was not used to doubting herself, but some doubt felt warranted here. After so long having striven for a business in a city, she was leaving a city where she was fairly certain she could have built her own business. It oughtn have felt right...and yet even the thought of doing something else made her belly twist in knots.

"So, what did he ask you?" she blurted when the tension had become too much. Then, after a pause, "Just so you know, you should be very impressed I've managed to keep quiet about it this long."

Eli walked a few pace more before slowly slightly so that he was walking side by side with Kaya instead of in front of her. Unfortunately, this was not a sign that some long and meaningful conversation was going to take place. Eli simply shrugged, and then added "Don't remember many questions."

"I know. Give me the gist. You said something that changed his mind, that made him think...well. He trusts you. At least to do the job. And if I ask you what you said to make him trust you, I'll get nothing, right? So. Let's start with the basics. I can connect the dots on my own." She glanced up to make sure he was following, knowing he wasn't, and snorted to herself.

"Right. Do you remember any of what he said? Even pieces of it?"

Eli nodded slightly. "The wastes. People." He glanced at her, and she was only able to tell through the mask of bandages because his head moved slightly to the side. "You." He glanced at her again, hesitated, and then added "Me."

"Uh huh," she mused, nodding slowly. "Did he ask you how you know where the voiders are? Where they're going to be?"

"...Yes."

"And? Do you remember what he asked you immediately after that?"

"To take off my bandages."

Kaya stopped short at that, and that strange, breathless falling feeling she'd come to associate with the voiders, but was probably more generally associated with fear, swept over her. She caught up a second later, now studying him again. He'd have told her if anything had gone wrong, wouldn't he? Would he have known? Bruce was a nuisance, certaintly, but he didn't seem the type to invite someone into his home only to attack him. He was half crippled as it were, and while his propensity serving as an escort had been clear, he didn't stand a chance against Eli.

Still. Kaya chaffed at her bare arms. The night air was not cold, but she felt goosebumps rise under her fingers anyway.

"...and then what?"

"Kept talking." He glanced at her again. "You... mad?"

"Not at you," she muttered under her breath, then, remembering that he would take that literally, sighed and shook her head. "No. I'm not mad. Did you do it? Take off your bandages, I mean? No, wait. Don't answer that, of course you did. That's...it's fine. As long as he didn't force you, I guess, it's fine. What'd he talk about after?"

"People. Me being scared of people. Other things about people. And you."

"What about me?"

"Why I'm not... Why you aren't like other people. For me. Why I stay, even though I don't like cities."

"Oh."

Kaya paused here. Bruce had said, insisted, really, Eli was manageable only because he was afraid of people, and 'infatuated' with her. And it had sparked something in her, a thing she didn't expect. Anger, first, which was natural. But then...fear again? Or something else? It was something she had no name for, something that felt at once very, very old, but also very familiar.

She reached down and took a long swig from her canteen, suddenly impossibly thirsty, even though it wasn't remotely hot. She let them walk in silence for several more minutes, quietly weighing the cost of his answer over its value. And then, like she always did, she decided knowing was infinitely better than not knowing.

"What did you tell him?"

Eli seemed to have lost the train of their conversation in the silence. Either the desert had distracted him, or he wasn't really paying that much attention to their conversations. Maybe both. "About what?"

She almost flinched from his non-answer and realized she'd been holding her breath.

"About..." she started, then abruptly reconsidered. "Eli, are you afraid of me?"

He stopped, turning to look at her. "No?" The question didn't seem to be in relation to his answer, but rather why she was asking in the first place.

Kaya stopped, too. Because the idea hadn't really occurred to her, or not in that context, and while fear would have worked as a motivator before this whole thing had gotten started, if he was only here now because he thought she was going to hurt him...that bothered her in more ways than one.

"Are you sure?" she pressed. "Because if you are, we should...well. That changes things. If you're afraid of me, Eli, if you're going to run once we're far enough from the city, for any reason, then..." She paused and looked back over her shoulder, trying to measure the distance back to the city gates. It seemed unlikely that he would bolt on her, and even less so that he'd let her try and make it back hy herself.

But why? For once in her life, she didn't know why someone had chosen something, and it made her feel...sick. Afraid. Vulnerable.

She hadn't planned for this, she realized. Hadn't planned on what Bruce had said about her, about Eli being true.

"Why are you still here?" she asked finally. "Why am I...different from the others? Why aren't you afraid of me? What did you tell Bruce?"

She knew she had once more plied him with too many questions and words at once, though they all asked the same thing. His hands clasped together briefly, before he finally picked one question to focus on, disregarding all the others. Or, perhaps, answering them all at once, because his answer didn't hint at which one he was answering.

"You make me real," Eli said quietly.

"I...what?" She stared blankly, wondering if this was how he always felt when she spoke to him, though she was sure she was never so vague.

"What do you mean?"

"I am a... desert dream. A bad dream. Drifting. Hated. But you... you know, and you don't hate, even though I... you..." He trailed off, leaving the thought unfinished. It dind't need to be. "You gave direction to a drifter. You gave... purpose. A reason to be more than a bad dream, quick forgotten. Something real."

Kaya opened her mouth to speak more out of instinct, hold habit, than the need to. She closed it again when she realized she didn't know what to say. She tried again with the same results, and when she found herself unable to answer a third time, albeit for slightly different reasons, she turned and started walking quickly in the direction they'd been going before he stopped them.

How was she supposed to respond to that? His words felt...well, honest, yes, but...too honest, perhaps, almost burdensome. He attributed too much to her, and Kaya was not modest a modest person. A purpose? A reason? She knew, of course, precisely what he meant, if only because she'd been in search of the same thing for a brief space of time, and it had felt like nothing she'd ever felt or wanted to feel again. She knew what he meant. But did he know that he had done the same for her? Kaya herself wasn't quite sure she'd known until...well. It seemed obvious now, in the same way her nose was. A truth that had been there so long and so quietly, she'd just sort of learned to look around it.

It was suddenly very difficult to swallow. She'd wanted to know what Bruce had said, had asked about Eli, and what Eli had answered. That the old escort now almost certainly knew more about her partner than she did felt just shy of criminal and left a taste in her mouth she didn't like. But her stomach kept turning over, and every time she tried to speak, tried even to think of what to say, a lump rose in her throat.

She resolved to ask about Eli again later. Not because she wanted to know what Bruce knew, but simply because she wanted to know. Because she cared. And somehow that realization put the excitements and terror of the wastes themselves to shame.

They walked again in silence for several minutes, Kaya lost to her own thoughts before she remembered she hadn't answered him. She didn't think she needed to -- he wouldn't feel bereft without one. But the right one could make a difference. Or at least let him know why she had chosen to stay.

"You came back," she said finally, glad for the dark, because she could feel her face burning so bad her scalp felt hot. "After the first voiders. After we got to the city. After...after." She waved her hand in a way that was not quite casual enough to be dismissive. She stared hard at the sand under her feet.

"You came back. On your own, you came back. Dreams don't...they don't do that. At least not the bad ones. Those go away in the morning, and you stayed, even thought they..." She exhaled, frustrated. Remembered who she was talking to. Flushed redder still.

"Well. Anyway. You stayed. I'm...I'm glad."

And then it was quiet again.
 
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They traveled a couple days in a familiar rhythm. He led them through the wastes, and Kaya followed after him, chattering about everything and nothing in particular. But there were a few differences, and despite the familiarity of this journey those differences might as well have made it completely different.

For one thing, they were following a path now. Before that point he had always done his best to avoid the places people might travel, having no particular desire to encounter them, and fearing how the interaction would end. Of course, it was rare to encounter people here, but it was still far more likely than running into someone off the paths. This time, though, his goal wasn't to simply wander through the desert, finding the things he needed to survive. This time he had a destination. This time, he also cared about reaching his destination. He'd never known where Riven was, or how to get there from Crolis. This time, though, he knew how to get to Essen, and he had no intention of getting off-track unless it was absolutely necessary.

The other difference was he actually did his best to pay attention to what Kaya was saying. Her burbling could have been easy to ignore, but he was back in the desert now, in familiar territory he knew how to handle. There was no reason for him to remain constantly vigilant. He still only ever understood half of what she said, if even that, but it now felt important for him to try and pay attention. He still didn't offer much, but he did throw in the occasional grunt when she paused, and seemed to be expecting some kind of response from him.

Perhaps the fact that he'd been paying more attention to her words was the reason he noticed, and considered it odd, when Kaya suddenly went quiet. It would be another several hours before she began speaking again, just as suddenly.

"So, I've been thinking. We won't have any trouble finding clients, our at least not once we're settled. And they'll be...jumpy around you, maybe, but I can fix that. The problem will be when I'm not...like what happened the other night. You got everyone back to the city safely, and that's what's important. If things happen like that again, do exactly what you did, and I'll handle the rest as soon as I can. But for the future, there's two of us for a reason. And if one of those things get close, you need to focus on getting us away from it. Not me. I'll make sure no one spooks." She was, as usual, using entirely too many words to make her point, though whether or not that occurred to her was immediately apparent.

"But if I'm going to be around for that, awake for that," she went on as calmly as if she were discussing the weather, "I'll need to be actually awake. Aware, really. At a certain point, I suppose I don't have any control over it." She scowled at that, but continued. "But as long as we don't get too close, I think I can still help. I just need some...practice. Do you understand?" She looked up at him expectantly.

He would have hoped he'd gotten better at deciphering her words at this point. Obviously not. He shook his head.

Kaya sighed. "I figured as much." She chewed her lip for a moment, pensive, then tried again. "When we start bringing people out here, I want to be able to help, even if a voider gets close. So I need to practice being able to work, even if I'm...not feeling well." She turned her her to squint out at the horizon. "I've been thinking we ought to find one and follow it for a few days. We won't go...we don't need to be near enough to get inside, of course, but near enough I feel..." she trailed off, gesturing vaguely with a hand. "Until I can get used to it. You know?"

He stared at her. She looked up at him again. "We should find a voider and follow it until it doesn't affect me so badly. Alright?"

For a moment he simply stood there in blinking silence. "No."

Kaya huffed her irritation. "Well, why not? We don't need to go inside, not even close enough for it to be a danger. Or not a huge one. And you know where the edge is. If it changed directions, we could just...walk away."

His eyes still hadn't moved from her. Did she really think he was objecting because he worried they'd fall in? The voider would start chasing them as soon as they stepped over the outside edge, but he was more than capable of keeping them out of it. That wasn't the problem in the least. He thought of her shaking in his arms, of the strained, vacant look in her eyes. "It's not... good for you."

"Yes, but -- " Kaya started, then appeared to actually hear what he'd said. She closed her mouth and tilted her head to look at him, her gaze shrewd, and then something else entirely. "Right," she said quietly, clearing her throat. "Well, maybe not, but it could get better if we...I just need to get used to it. You know? Just like I did with all the walking when we first set off. We can practice now, and I'll get used to it, and then when it happens later on, it won't be so bad." She paused and thought for a moment. "If it gets bad, we'll stop. It won't need to be long, even, just...just for as long as I can handle it, and then we won't go near another one." She coughed and kicked at the sand under her feet. "For a couple days," she added, much softer.

He frowned at her, the motion hidden behind a mask of bandages. A part of him knew what she was talking about. He'd nearly died of dehydration after first emerging from the voiders into this moistureless wasteland. Now, though, he was used to it. But a part of him also doubted that this was the kind of thing that got better by exposure. He'd never seen any people who reacted the way she did around voiders. "Kaya..." he said slowly, coming to a halt. "I don't think... it's physical. Not that way. It's not like walking. It's... something else."

"What else?" she demanded, a hint of irritation creeping into her voice. "Look, I...appreciate the concern, but I'm telling you I know what I can handle. It's...if it is something else, maybe this is the only way to find out. We won't know 'til we try, and if we try and it gets better, well, then, that can only be good, right?" She sighed, her expression softening into a plea.

"I am going to do this. But I can't do it without your help. You know that." She paused, swallowed hard and looked down at the ground again. The tips of her ears were red. "It'll be okay. You'll be there, you won't let anything bad happen. I know that. And if it starts...when I think I can't do it any more, I'll tell you, and we'll take a break. And by the time we hit Essen, I'll be better, and it won't have to happen almost at all, okay?"

Every part of him still craved to say no, to keep her close to the trail and away from voiders as much as possible. Perhaps Kaya sensed this, though, because she gave him a hard look. "We're going to do this," she said shortly. "We're going to try. And it will be fine. You'll see. Now c'mon, we're wasting time."

She turned and started walking again without waiting for him to acquiesce, or even checking if he intended to follow. A part of him was tempted to reach out and grab her, to keep her on the path and therefore, in his eyes, safer. Instead he let out a short sigh, and stepped off the path after her. He wouldn't let them lose sight of the path, not when they twisted and turned worse than any arroyo. Maybe they wouldn't find any voiders, and Kaya would forget this idea she'd somehow lodged in her head.

He doubted it, though.
 
It took them less time than she'd have liked to find a voider.

She knew, because she felt a wave of cold wash over her all at once, just a sudden and shocking as if someone had upended a bucket of water over her head, only even with the heat, it was far from refreshing. She stopped so quickly he nearly walked into her, and just staring at the otherwise vacant space in front of her.

"How long have you known that was there?" she asked wryly. It was mostly a stalling tactic, though she supposed it would be good to know. Best she start making note of her triggers here than when they were trying to convince people to follow them.

Eli shrugged, rather unhelpfully. He never had been very good at telling lengths of time. However, seeming to want to come up with some answer to her question, even if it wasn't exactly satisfactory, he added "Not long."

Kaya took a breath and made a face, and then crouched to dig the journal Thomas had given her out of her bag. She flipped past the first few pages of shaky-handed love letters she'd promised to read to find a blank page and scrawled a few quick notes before tucking the book under an arm.

"Right," she said, slinging the bag back over her shoulders. "Are you ready? We'll just keep on the outside edge for a bit. Just as long as I can stand it, and then we'll take a break, alright? Try not to touch me unless it looks like things are going south." She glanced over her shoulder at him and offered a sincere, if not particularly convincing smile.

"We'll be fine," she promised. "You'll see. Now, c'mon, before we lose it."

She didn't catch Eli's snort in response to her words.

--

Knowing how close was too close came easier to Kaya than she'd have expected. Moving toward the voider felt rather like walking upstream, if the stream had become sentient and wanted to kill her. It was so instinctively wrong, she found herself fighting an almost insurmountable urge to turn around and was able to keep moving only through sheer force of will. Even so, those first few steps wavered a bit, and she found herself stopping shy of actual unconsciousness. Which was maybe all for the best anyway.

Once she was sure she could move without following over, she turned and started walking again, trusting Eli to keep them on the edge without going too far in, and trusting herself not to wander too far away. Whenever she felt the fog in her mind start to loosen and lift she clenched her jaw and pushed back in the other direction. Every once in a while, she would feel her left hand start to shake involuntarily; she made it a point not to go too much further than that.

From there, it was a simple matter of forcing herself awake, making herself aware of her surroundings. At first, she spoke aloud, out of habit and a need to hear herself speaking both. Every few minutes, she would pause to write down something in her book, and then look back at Eli, as if to reassure herself of his presence. She walked him through every detail she could put into words, even when she wasn't sure he was listening, even when she wasn't sure anymore what she was saying. She told him when it got too hard to think and she could only focus on putting one foot in front of the other. She told him when it became strangely cold. She didn't tell him when the cold started to hurt.

When she couldn't speak anymore, she retreated inside her head, reminding herself with no small difficulty of the process of reloading one of Sam's double-barreled shotguns, and then a six-shot revolver when that got too hard. The names of the people she'd met in Meeros, and then the names of all the cities she'd ever lived in. Then just Eli's name and her own, and where they were going, over and over and over again.

Once, she didn't know how, but she suddenly felt herself falling. She couldn't remember whether it was in her mind or for real, but she stopped suddenly, swayed, and then jerked a hand out to the side, eyes shut.

"D-don't," she murmured, counting her breaths in her head. "M'...m'okay. Almost done. Just...just a little...little longer."

She didn't catch Eli's words, at least not in distinct, individuals. She got the general impression, though. This isn't safe. Let's get out of here. She shook her head.

Ultimately, Kaya wasn't sure how long she lasted -- though she made a note as soon as she was lucid again that she would find some way to track that the next time, even if it meant making Eli count on fingers and toes -- but it felt like an eternity. Hours, at least, maybe days, though it might have been less than ten minutes for all she knew. She was shivering by the end of it, her skin sticky with cold sweat, her shirt stuck to her back and soaked through. Her left arm was twitching almost nonstop, and her breathing hard turned labored. She'd dropped her journal, would have done the same with her rucksack if it weren't strapped to her, and had all but forgotten Eli was there at all, though she pulled away whenever he came too close, mechanically assuring him they would be out of this place soon.

As it turned out, he would be the one making the final decision. Kaya paused midmumble as abruptly as though she'd been cut off and lifted her head to squint into the distance. She blinked, tilted her head to once side, and put out a hand, reaching for some invisible thing.

"Adi?" she murmured. "Wait, Adi, don't -- "

Kaya took a step forward, half a step, really, then stiffened like she'd been struck by lightning.

The spasms started a moment later.
 
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Somehow, he knew the moment just before Kaya was going to faint, and it had nothing to do with her words. He raced forward, barely making it in time to keep Kaya's head from striking against the ground. She'd been keeping away from him, as though she was afraid he was going to do something to her, and whenever he'd gotten too close she would speed up, walking with reckless obliviousness, tripping over small obstacles, until a "safe" distance had been put between them once more. He'd watched with concern as her steps grew more and more unstable, as the little book she had been carrying suddenly tumbled from her grasp, as it seemed like she could no longer even see what was really around them. He'd wanted to grab her, wanted to carry her out long before that moment when the seizure began, but he'd feared that she wouldn't even recognize him anymore, and that she might hurt herself trying to get away from him. In the end, though, he'd waited too long to get her out of the voider's influence.

It had been a bad idea all the way around. He couldn't understand what possessed Kaya to want to attempt something like this. The voider continued in its inevitable creep in their direction, but all he could do was crouch over Kaya, large hands cradling her head and neck to keep it from injury, as he rolled her over onto her side to allow the vomit in her mouth to slowly dribble out. But Kaya kept bucking, and the voider kept creeping closer, and eventually he let out a frustrated whimper. He scooped Kaya into his arms, desperately worried that he was going to hurt her as he pressed her in close to his chest and tried to ignore the way her shins were bashing into his legs as she continued to jerk. They couldn't stay here.

It was a tense and uncomfortable run out of the voider's influence. He had managed to keep the path in his sight throughout Kaya's unexpected expedition, but it wasn't until he actually reached it that he realized they had ended up luring the voider close enough to the path that the edge now overlapped it. Letting out a growl of frustration he picked up the pace, long legs able to cover more distance on the smooth, level ground of the path. Kaya's violent bucking had faded somewhat, but she still quivered in his arms, eyes rolled up in her head.

This had been a bad, bad idea. Everything about it had been a bad idea. There had been no reason to go. Kaya had gone delirious, and now risked serious injury. There was also no telling when another person might come along this way, and said people might end up walking right into the voider that now crossed the path. He growled again, less at the voider itself and more at the situation as a whole. Why had Kaya done this? Would she want to do it again, even after this? Somehow, he worried she would.

Her seizure finally came to an end when they passed beyond the outside edge of the voider. His pace slowed somewhat, but he didn't come to a halt. It was in part out of a desire to put more distance in between them and the voider, but it was primarily because the only things that surrounded them now were wide, flat, empty spaces of barren desert. Kaya was going to sleep for several hours, maybe even until the next dawn, and he didn't want to leave her unprotected and at the mercy of the elements. So, he stopped just long enough to reposition her more comfortably in his arms, before taking off again, his strides long and low and smooth to keep from disturbing her.

A couple hours later, and the desert had transitioned from flat to slight rolling. The path cut a winding path through the mounds, following along the edge of one mound, before circling over to another. Unwilling to leave Kaya behind, even for a few moments, he took the strenuous climb to the top of one of the hills with her still cradled in his arms, until he stood at the top, panting. The hills went on as far as he could see in front of him, gradually rising in height, but he didn't really care about their destination. Instead he skimmed the closer hills, looking for a hint of greenery that might promise water and relative shelter. No such fortunate sight greeted him, and he was forced to descend once more and continue along the path.

He ended up having to repeat the hill climbing process four more times before he eventually found what he was looking for. Just around the next mound, nestled in a hollow between three hills, the faintest trace of green waved at him. He made his way over, finding a large bush nestled in the groove. The ground around its roots was ever so slightly damp, promising some sort of spring or other source of water if he dug just a little bit down.

Right now, though, his concern was Kaya. He could do the rest later. He dug into the sandy side of one of the mounds, which would be generally protected from the prevailing wind, before delicately extracting her from her pack and nestling her in the cradle. For a few moments after that he silently watched her, reluctant to move away. He remembered the last time they had been in this situation. Then, it had been him who had forced her to the edge of the voider, not the other way around. He remembered how she had reacted when she awoke without him there. It was only now that he was able to recognize the fear that had driven her bravado. There was no way he was going to be able to go out to find good food for himself.

The plant became sacrifice instead. Animal flesh was always better, but any organic matter would ultimately do. He dug it up, roots and all, and slowly stripped it into eatable fragments. He worked his way through the more palatable parts, before leaving the rest to the side to go dig for water. If Kaya didn't wake up before nightfall, he'd eat the rest then.
 
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She woke to tangerine streaks across a bruise-colored sky and the iron tang of blood burning her tongue.

There had been a moment, a small one, before she'd opened her eyes when her body knew before her mind had even awoken what had happened. It was becoming familiar, the strange, nameless, boundless haze that always accompanied the waking. She didn't know whether to find it a nuisance or a comfort, though it did little to assuage the helpless dread either way. But wherever she was, whoever she was, the air wasn't sticky and sweet, didn't close like a clammy hand over eyes, mouth, and nose, didn't sit, heavy and treacherous in her lungs. This was not that place, and if she had nothing else, she had that.

She opened her eyes and turned her head, looking for him before she knew what she was looking for, or that she was even looking at all. Her eyes settled on his dark form in the near darkness and she felt her heart rate slow and that alone was enough to tell her what had happened, though her mind was sluggishly giving her bits and pieces of what it could remember.

They had set out from the city -- Meeros? Yes, Meeros -- recently, perhaps a few days past, though in this vast void, time still had no meaning. She could vaguely recall wanting to find a voider, which felt like insanity for several moments, until she remembered why. It came faster after that. The memories of gently (sort of) cajoling him into tracking down a voider for her, finding one and following it for...well, there the memories became hazy, disjointed. As far as she could remember, it had felt like a marathon, an endless sprint under the relentless sun, and all of it wasted if she had pitched a fit in the end. Frustrated, and finally waking to the myriad punishments her body was now exacting, she rolled a bit and spat into the sand, grimacing at the taste of blood and vomit on her lips.

"Bloody brilliant," she muttered, slowly clawing her way to her knees. They would have to do this again, she knew, perhaps several times, if this first had ended so badly. Her muscles throbbed with now-familiar cramps, and it hurt to turn her head too far in any direction. One side of her tongue was tender and bloody as raw meat, which would have turned her stomach right over if there was anything left in it. She'd have to find some way to time herself next time they tried. Perhaps it was more a matter of how long she could stand being near a voider, more than actually going into one. The seizures that came with crossing the edge seemed as inevitable as Eli had hypothesized...though there was still something to be said for improving her recovery time, or at least growing accustomoed to staying on her feet when she felt ill.

Kaya heaved a frustrated sigh, stretching carefully before realizing how early it was. Her companion might well be asleep, and with the light not yet half risen, there was no point in waking him.

Especially if things had ended the way she suspected they had.

Kaya swallowed a groan as she groped through the darkness for her pack, already feeling a headache settling in somewhere between her shoulders and the backs of her eyeballs. She was vaguely interested in how long she'd been unconscious. She felt less groggy than she usually did after waking, though that could just as easily have been her growing resilience to the voiders, or that's what she would choose to tell herself. More telling, of course, would be what she managed to pull from the thick fog that had settled over her last waking minutes or hours. She could almost remember talking to Eli, maybe, trying to tell him something, or trying to keep something from him, or both. She remembered being cold, then hot, then cold again...and maybe a small pool of water? Though in the desert, that was near impossible, or at the very least, unlikely.

She thought she remembered something else, too. Something big, something that she was supposed to remember, something she had tried to make herself remember for exactly this moment, even though it had almost nothing to do with acclimating herself to the voiders. She thought she could remember that, too.

She furrowed her brow, green eyes intent on a thin shaft of sunlight illuminating the peak of a mound in the distance. What was she missing? What else had there been?

With a sudden gasp, Kaya sat up, only then realizing how close she had been to quietly nodding off again -- so much for adjusting to the effects of the voider -- to dig through her pack in earnest.

Notes! She had taken notes! She could hardly remember what Thomas's little journal looked like now, let alone what, if anything, she had written, but anything was better than nothing, and if she could get Eli to remind her about the booklet any time they encountered a voider, she might have a way to piece the mystery together.

Several frenzied moments of frantic searching, though, brought up nothing and Kaya sat back with a grunt of mingled frustration and horror. She had had the book, hadn't she? She could have almost sworn she remembered digging it out of her bag before they'd gotten too close to the voider, maybe even having written something in it...but then...then...

"Eli?" she said as gently as this sudden anxiety would allow, just in case he was sleeping. "Hey. Eli!" She got once more to hands and knees, crawled through the sand to crouch over him impatiently. "I had a book with me before. Didn't I? The little one Tom gave me?"
 
He noticed as soon as she woke up, his sleep so fragmented and restless that even a faint twitch from her was enough to jolt him back into consciousness. However, this time, rather than just tossing fitfully she woke up fully, scrambling uncertainly out of the pit he had dug for her. He had to force himself to stay quiet and not reach out to touch her in concern, uncertain if she would remember who he was again, or if she was still in some voider-induced fit.

It was a relief when she spoke, although it took him a moment to realize who she was talking to. Him. Despite the fact that he knew there was no way she could be talking to anyone but him, it still took him a moment to connect that name with himself. Eli. She'd called him that before, but that was the first time she had ever used it when there hadn't been someone else around who might require a name to mark his existence. A name. It seemed like a foreign concept, even though he could remember wanting one before. The fact that she was using it now somehow made it seem more significant than when she had been using it in the town. There, it had seemed like a concession to other people. Now... Now it seemed like a name. Something intimately associated with himself. But people were supposed to care about their name, weren't they? There was supposed to be something important and significant about a name, that made it unique to an individual. Wasn't there?

He shook himself slightly, reminding himself that there had been a question associated with her use of his name. A book. The little book Thomas had given her. He remembered it, remembered when he had picked it up after her limp fingers had allowed it to tumble to the sand, and then... Well, he certainly didn't have it now.

He hesitated for a moment, before shaking his head. "I dropped it when you... when you fainted."

"I didn't faint," she snapped abruptly, then appearing to catch herself, added, more gently, "When we get clients, you can't tell them that. Or not in so many words. Anyway." She sighed wearily, the sudden excitement that had appeared to seize her moments ago gone as quickly as it had come.

"I suppose there's no use for it now," she murmured, her attention once again turned mostly inward. "Though if we get another -- and I think I might -- if I drop it, just give it back to me. As many times as you have to. Or put it in my bag. Something. These notes might be all we have for the moment." She eyed him sidelong, her expression now half hopeful, half dubious.

"You don't remember anything of what I said, do you?"

"You didn't want me to touch you," he replied, somewhat petulantly. "You ran away whenever I got close."

She frowned, her brow furrowed in thought. "Did I?" she mused quietly. "Interesting. I suppose that's something." She considered this for a moment, then looked up at him again, her vigor somewhat renewed. Or as renewed as it could be after having woken from a 15-hour coma.

"What else? Did we see anything? I...thought I remembered...well. What did you see?"

"You fainting."

Kaya seemed unfazed. "Before that."

Still feeling somewhat petulant, and uncomfortable with what it meant that Kaya was asking all these questions, he cast her a hard look. Of course, the effect was rather muted by the fact that she couldn't see his eyes behind the layer of bandages. She simply stared back at him, waiting for an answer.

Finally he sighed, giving up. "Desert. Eyes in the ground from the voider." He paused, looking at her again. "You unable to walk in a straight line."

She seemed mollified, if not completely satisfied with his answer, and quietly uncapped the canteen in her lap as she sat in thought. After several moments, she shrugged and sighed.

"Well, that's hardly helpful, but I suppose we've got time. As far as those...reactions go, I'm almost certain I held out longer this time than when we were outside Meeros. I must have lasted almost...twenty minutes, at least, right? More?" She looked at him for an answer, then went back to talk again before he could say anything.

"We'll have to find some way to track my progress. If I got you some sort of timekeeper, do you think you'd be able to hang on to it?"

The nagging suspicion that had been building in him while Kaya asked all these questions suddenly settled into utter certainty. "No," he stated, flatly, uncaring or unaware of how easily Kaya would be able to misinterpret that reply, if she wanted to.

The frustration that crossed her features was fleeting. "Alright," she said patiently. "I'll hold onto it then. I'll set it next time we get close then stuff it in a pocket or something. There's still the matter of taking these running notes, but if I can adjust to the voider, I can certainly adjust to not dropping something."

She took another sip from her canteen, grimaced, and shrugged. "I guess we ought to make a bit of progress before we try again? I wonder...do you think it would be better if..."

"No."

This time, Kaya stopped talking and blinked at him as though he'd suddenly splashed cold water in her face. "No?" she repeated, "What 'no'?"

"No trying again."

She raised an eyebrow, a hint of incredulity touching her lips. "So, what, you just think we ought to wing it when we come up against our first with clients? That they'll be fine and well with me going off into one of those episodes? Don't be ridiculous. We're doing it again. It's the only way to fix it, even just partially."

"No."

Kaya stared at him for a moment, then took a deep breath.

"Eli, I appreciate your concern, but it's completely unnecessary, especially beside everything we stand to gain. A few hours of discomfort is nothing compared to the smoothness this will bring later, and anyway, there's no other way to -- " She broke off, paused, then started again slowly.

"I'm alright. Thank you for getting me to safety. If it's only a matter of saving time, we can make it up in the evenings once I've woken, and that only until I get used to it. We did well today. I think we'll have adjust quickly, maybe within the next two or three trips. Okay?"

"No." He had no intention of budging, and was simply waiting for Kaya to realize it. Her words weren't going to work this time.

"You can't just keep saying 'no'," Kaya snapped, and she wasn't so quick to correct her tone this time. "You have to at least explain why you're so upset, and we can work on it. This is a partnership, right? That requires some modicum of cooperation. Compromise." She glared at him before allowing her expression to soften ever so slightly.

"You can tell me," she added almost gently. "What's wrong?"

This was one moment where he wished his face wasn't wrapped in bandages, or he was better with words or expressions. He really did want her to get it, wanted Kaya to understand how serious what she was doing to herself was. But he had already tried that, albeit poorly, and she had just waved it away. But maybe he could try something else. If she was so worried about clients, maybe using that might appeal to her more. "If we gt that close, we've already failed," he offered.

Kaya shook her head once. "No. I won't go into this without a contingency plan. Obviously, we're going for zero voiders. But I won't have something that should have been a near miss become an utter disaster just because of some silly thing I can learn to control." She huffed a bit, clearly growing irritated.

"I know you're worried, but we'll be alright. You can rest as long as you need to once you've gotten us out of it. I'll be sure to monitor how I feel. I'm almost positive I can learn to signal if I know something is going to go wrong. If we do this right, you won't even need to carry me away. But I need to practice. I'm going to practice. Whether you help me or not."

"No."

She set her jaw. "And if I choose to go find one on my own? You won't let me fall inside. You wouldn't leave me. So, what then? You can't just keep me on a leash, Eli."

"I won't let you get close." He said it flatly, and with utter confidence.

Kaya snorted contemptuously. "And you're going to stop me?" she countered. "You wouldn't. You might hurt me."

"That's stupid, Kaya." As if he had so little control over himself that he'd misjudge his own strength like that.

"What's stupid is this discussion," she growled. "You're being ridiculous. I know my body. It makes more sense to weed out the issue now then try and cut around it when we're working.You'll understand when we get closer, but now I need you to trust me. I am going to find a voider if I have to run in the middle of the night. I am going to follow it until it doesn't make me sick anymore. And we are going to find clients who aren't any the wiser -- about either of us."

"No."

That was apparently the final straw. The tension that had been building in Kaya came to a sudden peak as she lurched unsteadily to her feet, flushed with indignation or heart or both.

"You can't just say no and then not give me a real reason. What is it? You're worried about the timing? The voiders? Me? These are all things that can be fixed if we just keep this up. I'll take better care of myself, if that's what you're worried about. Water and something decent in the mornings. We can save the heavy work for the evenings, and maybe cut some of the sessions shorter. The whole goal is that I don't get hurt. Why can't you see that? This will make things better, I promise. I just need you to trust me."

Quietly, Eli shook his head. "You're wrong." He could see it so clearly, why couldn't she? He had meant what he said before. This wasn't like walking, wasn't something she could acclimate to. If it got better, it would only be because her mind was breaking, twisted and malformed like a piece of steel that had been re-forged too many times. He hadn't been certain before, but he'd had nothing else to do but watch Kaya as she had stumbled around in the edge of that voider. He was sure now, and he wouldn't let her break herself in some misguided attempt to "fix" herself.

"I'm not wrong," she growled, though the effect was somewhat lost as she brought up the heel of her hand to scrub at her temple. "You'll see," she said, then added, almost reluctantly. "I need to sit down." She looked up at him, her gaze challenging, and now mirroring his earlier petulance. "Because I'm tired. That's what happens when you work a new muscle. Just before it gets stronger."

"No," he said again, but this time it was sad and resigned, rather than stubborn. He wanted to pat her on the back, gently rub her shoulders, offer some sort of condolence for her own mistaken beliefs. He didn't think she'd accept it, though, so instead he just sat down.

She watched in furious silence before following suit just a little too quickly a moment later She lasted another ninety stubborn seconds, glaring at him from beneath heavy eyelids, before she was snoring quietly again, cradled in the little pit he had dug for her.

He watched her silently for a few minutes, before moving back over to the remains of the plant he had dug up at dusk, and finished eating the remains of the tough fiber. He certainly wasn't going to have any time to go off and hunt now; he'd have to make do with whatever he could find while they were traveling.

As he began to settle into fitful sleep, another thought occurred to him. He probably wasn't going to be getting much sleep until they reached Essen, either.
 
They -- or rather Kaya, as Eli's responses and demeanor both were patently invariable -- spent the next two and a half days alternating between well-reasoned arguments, reticent fury, suddenly and seemingly unprovoked ad hominem attacks, vague threats, not-so-vague threats, and more than one lengthy bout of apologetic, if somewhat pouty quiet. All of which were met with unyielding, utterly infuriating silence, or, even worse than that, the plain, simple, inevitable, "No."

Kaya hadn't known it was possible to hate a single syllable so much.

It was after noon on the third day, the hottest part of the day, chosen partly out of stubborn rage, and partly chosen not at all, when she finally gave up and bolted. It was an action borne mostly out of desperation, and maybe, just maybe, a desire to punish him, though she knew full well they'd both pay for it. She knew also she wouldn't actually be getting very far, but that seemed to matter less than showing him just how far he had pushed her, or at the very least, how much she needed him to listen to her.

All told, there was less than a minute spent between Kaya having made up her mind, quietly stopping in her tracks, waiting for him to get just a few feet ahead, then turning and sprinting as quickly as she could in the other direction...and him catching up with her just a few moments later, scooping her up in his arms and depositing her, none too gently, over his shoulder. The longer part of it was her banging her fists against his back, legs flailing, knowing full well it was futile, and yet needing some way to vent her rage. She fought until she couldn't anymore, then went abruptly limp, face bright with shame or fury or exertion.

"You can't do this forever," she said when she could speak again. "Not sleeping. Not eating. It's going to take a toll eventually, and then what'll you do?"

"Get to Essen," was his flat reply.

She groaned and scrubbed at her face with the heels of her hands. "You won't make it to Essen. That's my. That's my point. Why won't you listen to me?"

"Will."

"Will what?" she spat irritably. "You can put me down. I don't have anywhere to run."

He eyed her for a moment, as though considering whether or not to trust that she wouldn't bolt again, before finally kneeling down, allowing her feet to once more find solid ground. She straightened quickly, brushing herself off.

They walked in silence for several minutes, though Kaya didn't realize what she was going to say until she said it. She felt her stomach lurch sickeningly within her, and ignored it as she spoke.

"It's my sister."

It was a final, desperate attempt, and it felt as near to giving up as she'd come since that last voider they'd gone into. She didn't look at him as she spoke, though he had stopped walking to turn around and face her.

"I've been...seeing her in the voiders. Or...hallucinating her, I guess, but it doesn't feel like that, it feels like...like..." She gestured vaguely with her hands then gave a grunt of frustration and began to pace, now wishing she hadn't said anything at all.

"When I was younger, my mother tried to cross the desert with us. She was in trouble, I think. She was always in trouble, a child raising two children, but it must have been bad this time. She woke us in the middle of the night and said we were leaving. Said she'd found some friends who could take us somewhere safe. I didn't know until it was too late what kind of 'friends' they were, or how she'd paid them to help us escape." Kaya snorted bitterly. "It's too bad your friend wasn't around then, or he might have saved us all the headache.

"I still don't really know what happened. I must have been sick even then. Just...one night I feel asleep, and we woke to screaming, and..." Kaya swallowed hard and shivered despite the heat of the day, hugging herself, her jaw tight. "Our tent was gone. The horse and cart were gone. All our supplies, one of the men we'd come with, everything, gone. But not Mother. Mother was...she was...Well, I suppose maybe she was gone, too, but in a very different sort of way."

"Adi started screaming and I went to see whether I could wake our mother, at least clean away some of the blood to see what had happened, but before we could do anything, the other 'guide', he grabbed us and started running. And Adi started screaming about how she could see fire and blood and glass, but I could only see Mother. I don't...I don't know what happened after that. There was this sound, like some dying thing was being devoured alive from the inside out, and then..." She shrugged. "And then it goes hazy like it always does when we get too close to one of them. The next thing I remember, we'd been rescued by a caravan bound for Crolis. The man who had come with us, he wouldn't stop screaming. He died two days later, strapped to this board, with his wrists and mouth all bloody, like he'd tried to...well. You get the idea.

"As for Adi, they never found her. Said they'd only picked up me and the dead man, that there was no sign of anyone else for miles. They said I was lucky to have survived, and even luckier not to remember any of it." She scowled at that, too. "That was hardly the only thing we disagreed on."

She trailed off then remembered with a start that she was still speaking. She caught herself and turned to face him abruptly. Her face was still red, and her eyes were now puffy and swollen. But her expression was defiant, and her jaw was set.

"I'm not telling you this so you feel bad for me. I'm telling you because it's true, and you deserve to know why I want what I want. You know the voiders. You know what they're like, what they do. I've no use for your pity like you've none for mine. But I need you to understand that I need to go back. I need to find her, or whatever's left of her. I need to know I didn't just abandon her to one of those things for twenty years. I need...I need..." She exhaled wearily, fighting the sudden urge to yawn.

"Closure," she said finally, letting her hands go limp. "Do you know that word? Do you know what it means? I want to do this. I need to do this. I will do this if it kills me, and it might, I know that. I don't want to endanger your life if I don't have to, and if you want no part of this, I understand. It's far from perfect, but if we have to part ways, we...you could still have a job. A purpose. If something happens, you need to find your way back to Proctor, alright? Tell him everything. He'll help you. He can do that much.

"But I haven't lost sight of our goals, either. There's still room for that, if you help me. I'm not asking you this as a business partner, or your former employer, someone I paid to protect me. That's not your job anymore. I'm...I'm asking you as the only friend I've ever had." One hand twitched at her side, but she didn't look away from him. Couldn't look away from him.

"Please, Eli. Let me finish this."
 
For a few minutes, Eli simply stared at Kaya in silence, letting the words sink in. And there had been a lot of words. But they hadn't come in Kaya's usual rapid bubble. No, these had been slow and purposeful, and while he knew he had missed pieces, potentially important pieces, he also knew that he had gotten a lot of important pieces too. And so the silence stretched on, while he slowly contemplated what she had said. After all, this time it was important. This time it was true. Kaya had offered a lot of reasons over the past couple days, a lot of excuses, but these words finally cut to the core of the matter. He didn't want to attribute less significance to them than they deserved.

For a time Kaya simply waited, and it was easy to think then. But his thoughts slowed the more she moved, and by the time she was pacing back and forth his mind seemed to have ground to a halt. It would have to be sufficient.

"Kaya," he finally said, and there was a great deal of emotion contained in that word. Worry and concern and kindness and caring, but not pity. Not even a trace of pity. "More hurt can't... undo hurt."

Kaya stopped short where she was, her back to him, the first word from his mouth seeming to pin her in place. She didn't move for a long moment, except maybe to flinch away from him, like she'd been struck.

Finally, she sighed, and the sound seemed also to release every bit of the rigidity she carried in her shoulders. She might have sagged to the ground anywhere else.

"No," she agreed very quietly, and her voice sounded almost foreign. "Not undo. Rectify."

He stepped forward hesitantly, placing a hand on her shoulder. "No. Hurt can't fix."

She twitched under his hand, but didn't move away. But she didn't turn around either. "So, this is 'no', then?" she said after a moment. "This is a kinder version of 'no'. You may as well just say it. I...we need to move on. You need to move on. Essen, or back to Meeros. I can't...I can't go with you. Not yet."

For a moment he stared at her back, but his hand didn't let go, either. Didn't let her move. He stared at the back of her head, as though he could see into it. As though he could take the right words from within her mind. Instead, he simply saw brown hair. But words came anyways. "Why do you want to hurt yourself?"

"I want to find my sister," she replied dully. "If that means...well. Whatever it means. I need to know what happened to her. I need to know why I keep seeing her, if she's..." She gestured vaguely and let her hand fall to her side. It was quiet a moment, and then she tried to pull away.

"I asked you a yes or no question. This is you saying no, isn't it? That's fine. But we're wasting time here. This...this doesn't help anything. Are you going to help me find her, or not?"

"Find her?"

She gave a frustrated, if shaky sigh, and brushed a sleeve across her face before turning around. "Find her. Look for her. Go after her. Something. Whichever of those you can understand. If she's...alive, somehow, or even if she's not, I need to...she could be..." She shut her eyes and her shoulders drooped again.

"What if she's in one of those things like where I was? What if she's alone? What if she's been alone for years, just waiting...or...or..." She trailed off. "We're wasting time," she tried again, though there was no fire in it now. "I don't want to talk anymore."

Eli gave her an inscrutable look. "Talk or be carried."

She looked up sharply, her expression vacillating between incredulous and furious. Finally, she gave a little bark of laughter. "This would have been helpful back in the city," she mused dully. She turned away for a moment, squinting into the distance like she could find something to help her, before shrugging.

"Before we left, I hadn't been back out here since I lost her. And now I'm...I'm seeing her again. It's got to mean something. Right?"

"Yes."

She looked at him again, her expression now carefully guarded, though the flicker of hope was undeniable. "Yes, what?" she demanded carefully. "What does that mean?"

"It means your mind is trying to tell you something, and you won't let it."

For a moment, just half a second, the hurt and betrayal in her eyes was clear. Then she made a sound of disgust and turned away.

"No," she spat. "I'm not taking self-help advice from some half human thing that's spent its whole life in the sand. I'm going to find Adi with or without your help. You think I can't find others to bring me out here? Do you think I need you? I used you, I'm using you, and when you've reached the end of your usefulness, you'll be right back where you started. Come with me or don't. I don't care. I'm going to find my sister, and you can't stop me."

The words had no visible effect on him, but inside they hurt. Of course they hurt. They were designed to wound. He reminded himself that simply meant he was right, and if he expected her to listen he was going to have to keep pushing. His hand still hadn't let go, ad if she started walking away again, he would pick her back up. He wasn't going to let her kill herself looking for someone who was already dead.

Behind his mask, he blinked. Did Kaya realize this? He suddenly realized she might not. Was it stubbornness? Defiance? Delusion? "I know the sand," he agreed, focused back on the beginning of her words. "And you can't find her again."

She had been struggling against him again, half-heartedly trying to pull away, but his words made her pause, stiffen almost as if in pain. Abruptly, she redoubled her efforts to get away.

"Let me go," she growled, then again, suddenly perilously close to tears: "Let me go. I'm going to find her. You don't know what you're talking about. She's there. I've seen her. I just...I just have to find the right one, so let go of me."

"No." How had they made it back to that response? "I won't let you die too."

"She's. Not. Dead." With one final, frenzied effort, she yanked away from him and started running again, this time ditching her pack in the sand behind her. He caught back up to her in a few strides, gathering her back into his arms. But this time, rather than putting her over his shoulder, he kept her cradled in his arms, pressing her in tight against his bandaged chest.

"It's not your fault."

She was like a feral animal in his arms, kicking and scratching and hitting for all she was worth.

"Let me go," she snarled, unknowing or uncaring of the sheen of tears that coated her face. Her hysterics were sudden and powerful, fueled by rage or fear or desperation or some combination of the three. Her pulse raced; her breathing came in short, quick gasps broken by hoarse screams.

"Let me go, you miserable heap of rags, I am going to find her, do you hear me?!? I am going to find her, and then you'll see, you'll understand how fucking wrong you are. Let me GO."

He only held her closer, clenching his jaw as her fingernails tore open the bandages on the side of his face and her teeth sunk into his arm. "I won't let you die. I won't." He briefly rested his head against hers, before she flung her head and cracked it against his own. He wondered if that didn't hurt her more than it did him. "It's okay, Kaya. It'll be okay. It's okay."

"Shut up!" she shrieked, the scream itself sounding painful, raw. "You don't know what you're talking about, you bloody mongrel. Let me go, or I will kill you, I swear. Let me go, let me go, let me go! It's not okay. It isn't okay. It'll never be okay, she was counting on me, and I let her die!"

That one word seemed to spur a second wind, and then she was struggling anew, not to hurt him, not to get away, but seemingly just against him, or perhaps herself. It went on like that for longer than either of them could tell, Kaya alternately screaming or shaking or fighting, with him patiently muttering the occasional kind words into her ear, and all the while her struggles grew weaker, her voice more and more hoarse. And then finally, somehow, she was there, cradled in his lap, utterly spent, her ear pressed to his chest, both hands wrapped around his bicep the same way a dying man might cling to the edges of life.

She'd gone quiet long enough he began to wonder if she hadn't fallen asleep when she murmured, "I was supposed to protect her. That was how it was. Always. Our mother, she would…she'd be gone days at a time, off God knows where, with God knows who, and Adi...she was just a child, I couldn't tell her that her mother, our mother was...might never come back. I fed her. I clothed her, bathed her, found her places to sleep at night. Me. Any way I knew how. Lying to the men in the market, or stealing or cheating or charming them out of stupid little trinkets to sell for food. I could get her anything she ever wanted, anything she needed, and she never went to bed hungry or cold or wanting, not for anything, not once, not ever," she whispered fiercely. "She was mine, and I was supposed to protect her, and I…I…I don't..."

She stirred a little in his arms, made a sound between a moan and a whimper. Shivered against him. "I don't feel good." She swallowed convulsively. "I don't – "

He released Kaya just in time for her to buck forward and puke, fresh tears rolling down reddened cheeks, though she still clung tightly to his arm. She fell back into him again after a few moments when she couldn't retch anymore, resigned or exhausted or both.

"We should find somewhere to stop for the night," she said dully, without bothering to open her eyes. "I don't think I can…I want to stop for the night. Okay? Please?"

"Okay," he agreed, slowly struggling his way back to his feet without the aid of his hands, which still held Kaya close to his chest. He only released her for one moment, to bend over and scoop up her pack, swinging it over one shoulder, before returning to cradle her. "Let's go find a place to sleep."
 
She was less aware of how long they walked, and moreso of the way the rocking motion began to feel more and more uncomfortable. It had been a long time since they'd opted to stop while the sun was still in the sky. Maybe since those few days after the flood that had seemed to catalyze this new normal of watching everything she had slip through her fingers. Kaya whimpered and cringed away from the heat pressing in on her from all sides, as if she could some how escape the desert through sheer force of will. As though sheer force of will still meant anything at all.

The moment he set her down, she put her back to him and threw up again, though there was nothing much to bring up this time. She hadn't lied about not feeling well. Her episode had left her feeling worn, rubbery, like an elastic band stretched too far. Her head ached and the heat felt dense, heavy, a thick glove pressed over her face and mouth, leaving her breathless and light-headed, though none of it could seem to stop her shaking. She wanted to ask for her canteen from her bag -- she couldn't remember when she'd dropped it -- but asking for anything just now seemed a massive effort, and she was so tired of hearing the word no.

She supposed she must have slept, though it offered no real respite. She would wake to the sky spinning sickeningly overhead, now vibrant swirls of burning blue, now pitch black starred with streaks of silver, now hazy wisps of jewel tones that felt close enough to touch. Or else she would dream, and the dreams were always of Adi, and never pleasant. Adi, being torn to pieces in a sea of broken glass. Adi, burning alive under a heavy rain of fire. Adi, bloated and gray at the bottom of a smoking river. Adi, pale flesh visible in patches under a writhing mound of black and green and teeth and fangs. And each and every time, she would first ask, and then demand that her little sister stop fooling about, come quickly before dark fell, promising stories and trinkets and sweets and whatever she could to make a small child listen. Adi never did.

In the back of her mind, rocking treacherously under a veil of black, Kaya knew she was forgetting something, something important. A timeline, a due date, something that had been vital once, and then paled in comparison to Adi, like everything had back then. She would try to make her way toward it sometimes, when the heat didn't feel so heavy, when the images of Adi didn't threaten to rise up and drag her under the sand. She never got very far, and slowly, surely, like watching smoke drift into the night sky, the other thing twisted itself up and out of her grasp, into the cool darkness she could never seem to reach.
 
There was nowhere good to rest. The wastes were dry and flat and empty, stretching towards the horizon in uncomfortable flatness. On his own, he never would have drawn anywhere near such a stretch of the wastes. He would have circled around it, following the narrow bands of moisture that criss-crossed this land. But the paths of moisture also seemed to be the paths of voiders, and while he could safely avoid such things, most could not. The paths followed the dry, flat land. Now he followed the paths, and there was no wagon to provide shelter.

The very world seemed to contrive against letting Kaya rest, and every time he had to pick her up to move on, to try and find another spot where there might be some safety and shelter, to protect her from the sun or the wind or the eyes of listless predators Eli wanted to hunt for himself but did not dare leave Kaya alone long enough to chase down, he felt guilty.

She didn't behave like herself. She'd make feeble attempts to pull away from him, push weakly at him hands and arms until apparently deciding the fight was more trouble than it was worth and settling into another restless coma, always with her sister's name on her lips. The sun seemed both scourge and blessing as the heat simultaneously sapped her strength and emboldened her pleas for the dead girl. And except when he started to move her again, she seemed largely unaware or uncaring of his presence.

More than anything, he longed for a sheltered space, a rock with a small reservoir of water where he could keep her fed and watered, and let her rest until her mind decided it was ready to re-enter the real world. He knew every time he moved her he might be starting her recovery process all over again, but there was no way he could simply leave her in the places they rest. The exposure might very well kill her before she could recover.

So they moved on, never resting for long, Kaya cradled in his arms and her pack on his back. He had to rewind the bandages every morning, and each time it seemed they got an inch or two longer. He'd wind them down his arms, before moving back up after reaching his wrists until he ran out. At first it was only a wrap or two. Soon enough it reached halfway up his forearm. Before long, it had made it all the way to his elbow.

It was the third afternoon of their new routine, the pair having stopped to seek shelter from the hottest part of the day, when Kaya seemed to rouse herself somewhat. Lying on her side in the sand, she stared at him for a long time, face flushed, eyes glassy, before saying, "I need to find her body."

He hadn't expected her to speak, but still he moved over to her, shifting slightly to use his own body to block her face from the sun. "Why?"

"I have to know. I have to, maybe she's...You don't have to come with me. I figured it out, I can find her, and then we'll go to Meeros. Essen. Wherever you want, just...please..."

"Adi's dead," he said, softly. "Finding her won't change that. It will only kill you."

She stared at him for a moment longer before curling closer around herself. "But you don't know. Right? You could be...maybe you're wrong. Maybe...maybe she had someone like you, and she's okay and she's waiting for me. We have to try. I have to try."

"If she found someone else, then you don't need to take care of her anymore. You can let her go."

She had been drifting off, maybe, until that moment. She looked at him sharply, her gaze more focused then it had been in days.

"Are there other places like the one where...where we were?"

Like it? Like it how? He wondered if it really mattered. He wondered what she wanted to hear. He wanted to pick the right words, to help comfort her, to help her let go. But he couldn't figure it out, and eventually he had to jut say something. The truth would do. "I've never found any."

The tension went out of her body all at once as her eyes drifted shut. She nodded weakly.

"Okay," she said finally. "Okay."

She seemed to sleep a little easier then, and didn't fight him quite so hard the next time he had to pick her up.

Two days after that short conversation, he finally found the shelter he was looking for. A lonely rock rose out of the smooth desert, and he dug down on the north side of its base, creating a sheltered depression he stacked higher with more sand and dirt. The rock's overhang offered shade the whole day through, and during the night the cold stone would allow a few drips of water to condense on its surface. He lowered Kaya into the space he had dug before crawling in after her, curling up, and finally going to sleep himself.
 
She dreamt of Adi.

At the end, she felt simultaneously as though she had been sleeping for years and not at all, and still she could remember nothing but Adi. Adi waking her up every morning. Adi pestering her for breakfast, or sugar, or a bedtime story. Adi sick and sleeping, Adi crying for their mother.

Adi turned bright red under the ruthless sun. Adi grinning at Kaya while she finished the last of their water. Adi pale-faced and wide-eyed, watching their mother disappear, screaming, into a sea of poisoned glass. Adi shaking Kaya awake, trying, failing, not to cry. Adi being yanked away by the strength of a phantom world. Adi writhing at the edge of a voider, her tiny body shrunk beneath fire and blood. Adi begging for her sister, for Kaya to help her, save her, do anything to make the hurt stop. Adi realizing her sister was quietly paralyzed.

Adi, gone, and then a silence she would never forget.

It felt, when at last Kaya woke, as though she'd been wrenched from sleep, though there was nothing and no one around her she could blame it on. For having spent the last few days with a fever, she felt doused in a cold sweat all over.

She lay there for a long moment, staring up at the sky, a jagged patch of indigo etched in warm gold. Her breathing was slow and even, her belly roiled with fear or hatred or guilt or maybe just hunger. She was alone now, or nearly. She could feel him there beside her.

How many days had it been? How long had he carried her through the desert, waiting for her to wake, when he could have left her at the base of any sand dune when she grew too heavy, too incoherent, wound breathless in the thorny snarls of her own mind? She'd learned weeks ago what her money meant to him. She wondered if she'd ever had enough to make him understand what it meant.

Slowly, carefully, swallowing a quiet groan of exquisite agony, she sat, feeling sandpaper in her throat. Sand and salt caught between her clothes and her skin and as she reached for her canteen, she made herself promise she wouldn't drink it all at once or just upend it over her head.

Adi was gone.

It made sense, she knew. Every logical part of her brain had known from the moment they'd entered the voider, or maybe before. But the small, hidden part of her, the part that had been secretly searching for years only to surge to the surface in a fit of desperate rage...that part of her felt worn, stretched thin. And desperate. Utterly, completely desperate, almost helpless. Alone.

Almost.

He had said the place they'd been had been unique. That if Adi had gone the way they had, there would be none of those creatures to...to find her. But there would be nothing and no one like Eli either.

She turned to watch him without thinking. It seemed now she was always watching him, her guide and protector, and maybe the only person, the only reason she had left in the universe. The thought made her belly ache. She trusted him more than she'd have thought it possible to trust anyone. If he said Adi was gone, she would listen. She had to. But that new angry shard of understanding had yet to wear down to a smooth pearl of pain.

"We -- " she started, then coughed, then winced, then drank and started again. "We need to move. Soon. Quickly. We need to make up the time we lost."

We lost. She tried not to think about where she would be without him. Tried not to think about Adi and what had happened and how she could not push it away anymore.


"You need to hunt. And I need to...to stay here. I will," she added pointedly. She was hungry, too, she realized. Her bag laid just beside her knee. Had he carried that, too?

"Stay here. You go, but be quick as you can. Enough so you're at full strength, but we can still leave before it's too hot. We'll have to push late, too, if we can."

She wouldn't look at him. She reached for her bag, began a listless inventory, hardly even aware of what she was touching. Essen. She could only think of Essen. That was what remained to her, and she couldn't lose that, too.

"You go and eat, and when you get back, we need to go. Move. But first...first, we have to talk."
 
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Perhaps for the first time since they had left Crolis, what now felt like an uncountable length of time ago, he did not wake at the point, or before, Kaya began to stir. Perhaps it had something to do with the bone-deep weariness that had settled into his body, seeming to drain his energy even as he had fought to keep awake and keep moving. He could not say that he had ever been that tired, that malnourished, before this point, except for those first, few harrowing days when he had emerged from the voider. Had she not woken, not spoken herself, it was possible he would have simply kept laying there, entering into a state of death-like hibernation, until some scavenger found what it thought was a free corpse, and he would be able to get a meal.

But Kaya did speak, and long before she started coughing he had fully awoken, snapping back into awareness with all the speed and grace of a tree felled by the wind. For a moment afterwords, though, he had trouble remembering what he was doing here, or figuring out what she was saying. It just sounded like noise. But his memories reasserted themselves quickly, and he stopped rubbing at the bandages that covered his arms to look more fully at Kaya.

It seemed she was finally rested. Finally healed. She sounded healed, at least, although perhaps that wasn't such a good way to judge. She had always sounded fine, at least to his ears, but that whole time he had known her that little bit of pain had been buried inside of her, just waiting for the right moment to emerge. Now it was... gone? Or simply buried again? He supposed there was no way to find out except to wait and see what happened. Or talk.

Talk. He had to remind himself it was the way she thought, the way she processed, and that silence wasn't required for her to heal. It might even be harmful. But her words were always too many, and they told him too little. He would have preferred to simply wait and see, and deal with whatever came when it came. But this wasn't about him. It was about Kaya. So he would talk. Or, at least, try.

He looked at her, waiting for her to start speaking just because, like she always did. But she stared at him instead, and he promptly realized that, for once, she was waiting for some kind of response from him. "Okay," he said simply, before throwing in a rather jerky nod. Just to make sure his message got across.
 
She stared at him for a moment, trying to sift through a dozen unfamiliar thoughts and emotions and ignore them at the same time. She settled on shaking her head.

"No," she said shortly. "I meant go now. You hunt. We talk. We leave. Understand?"

It was better this way. She needed him focused. And she needed a minute to clear her mind. She could feel an ominous truth, something she'd already accepted hovering at the back of her mind, a dark cloud floating on the edge of a cold blade, waiting to collapse to one side or the other. A push. A whisper. That's all it would take.

"Go," she said again, more gently this time, cradling her canteen in her lap. "I'll be fine here. I'll wait."

He gave her one last searching, or perhaps simply confused look, before nodding again. A moment later he shifted away, disappearing over the lip of their little sand hollow and vanishing out into the wastes.

She dozed while he hunted, even just a few moments of wakefulness feeling overwhelming after so long spent in a coma of catharsis. She waited, and she slept, and she tried not to dream, though it wouldn't have mattered. She knew she wouldn't be able to let Adi go until Eli returned, anyway.

She gave a soft chuckle of surprise at that sudden knowledge. It was true in more ways than one.

Kaya was half sleeping when he returned, her canteen cool against her belly, a dried hunk of meat curled in her fingers. Eli moved in so soundlessly that she almost didn't notice his return. If it wasn't for the mismatched smears of crimson blood that showed he had killed something and then rewound his bandages it might have almost been as though he never left at all. Patient as ever, Eli simply settled back in the space he had been inhabiting when she first woke.

The relief she felt on his return first surprised, then frustrated her. Swallowing a grimace, she sat again, looked him up and down, took a deep breath, and spoke.

"Better?"

"Full," was his straightforward reply.

She snorted quietly and glanced down at the canteen again. "Good. We'll need to make up some time getting to Essen." It felt tempting to move on after that, to say nothing, to get up and start walking, to let the journey consume the rest of her thoughts. She also knew she wouldn't really be leaving their little hovel until she could find her own way out, and that path was nowhere near so easy to uncover.

"I need to ask you some things," she said finally. "They are going to be uncomfortable things. For both of us, probably. But after this...after this, we won't have to stop again. Alright?" She glanced at him, determined, grim, She didn't wait for an answer.

"The place we were before. The one where you...before Meeros. You'd been there before?" The words had the intonation of a question, but only for his benefit. She was sure she already knew the answer.

He stared at her for a long time, and she waited, patiently. There was nothing else she could do. Finally, he nodded. Only once. She didn't allow the concession to unsettle her, still quiet, calm, cool.

"That's where you're from," she went on. "That...those things, what they did, they've done it before." Anoter long, pregnant pause. Kaya wondered if they wouldn't be better off just jogging to Essen. "Your mother?"

He nodded again. Barely. She mirrored the action without really thinking about it, her mind far away, forming nightmare images of what she imagined his childhood would have been. Could have been. For a moment, she was afraid all the water she'd been drinking would end up back in her lap. She made herself speak instead.

"Tell me about it," she said, so quickly the words almost ran together. Then, without waiting for an answer, "How long were you there? How long was she? Did you even know her? What happened to her? Did she help you escape? Could she help you escape?" She suddenly realized she was shouting and felt her flush flush hot. Hotter. She didn't realize she was nearly shouting until she felt her face grow hot. With a wordless growl, she lurched to her feet for maybe the first time in days, pacing as she tried again to sort through the chaos of her thoughts.

But her next question was a surprise, even for her.

"Eli. Did you...did we go there on purpose?"

It might have been a relief for Eli, as it would have given him an opportunity to ignore all her previous questions, if it wasn't for the reaction it earned. A carnal shudder rippled across his body, giving her all the answer she needed. His head shake was perfunctory.

She might have cried if she'd thought it would do any good. As it were, she tried to still a shiver of her own. Instead, she took a long, slow sip from her canteen, willing her stomach to settle.

"I never really saw the thing that took Adi," she said after a moment. "I had dreams, nightmares about it, whatever it was, for months after, but I don't think I ever really saw it. Or...or them. I used to think my imagination was worse. Maybe it is. I just know when I...when she screamed for me, when I looked up and saw her, I froze. I don't remember feeling confused or afraid or anything, really, it was like something else had taken control of my body, like all I could hear was this clear, loud voice saying, 'If you go for her, you'll die. You can't save her. Not from this.' And I believed it. I didn't even try, I just watched her, and by the time she was...wasn't screaming anymore..."

She cringed and sighed, trailed off into silence. "The men who took me out of the desert the first time, they were just men. And I was young, but I was so sure I knew everything men could ever want. Power. Money. That's all it ever comes down to. They weren't like those things in the voider. I didn't bleed when they touched me, or not right away. I could still move, still think when they came for me. It was nothing like the voider, and still I couldn't fight them. They were normal. They were human. They were -- "

She broke off again, now facing him, her expression alight with something like fury or fear. Or maybe both.

"You are nothing like those men. You weren't...you didn't, and you could have. You didn't hide, and you didn't run, and you...you came back." She held his gaze as evenly as she could manage for a long moment, feeling as though she strength were leaking from her like water through the bottom of a cracked glass.

"I made a mistake, leaving Adi to die. Letting her come out here at all. I know that, and I'll live with it. I have to. But if there's even a chance she could still be somewhere...anywhere, I have to know. Say the word, and I'll trust you. But please know, please understand, I would want her back, even if she was like your mother. Like you, or like me, or..." She took a shaky breath.

"Tell me she's dead. Promise me she's dead, and I'll never look at another voider again."

Eli looked at her seriously, and this time he didn't hesitate when his hand twitched. It came to rest lightly on her shoulder, fingers squeezing. "She's dead."

She flinched under his hand but didn't pull away. A shadow passed briefly over her features, then it was gone again, replaced by still more grim determination. She nodded once.

"Okay. Alright. Then let's go."

There was more, so much more she could have said, maybe even wanted to say, though for once she would not be able to find the words. It didn't seem to matter. Adi was gone. Eli was here. Whatever she'd been looking for when she'd set out, she'd found it here. Or perhaps she'd lost it. The world had shifted under her feet, and somehow, she was still standing. And maybe not so near alone as she'd originally thought.

Rolling slowly to her feet, she tucked her canteen in her bag and started chewing on her dried meat with a renewed vigor. She looked at Eli as though ready to say something. Then she reconsidered and started walking, knowing, trusting, he would follow.
 
They didn't end up rushing to Essen. He didn't allow it. Instead they moved at the same slow, steady pace they always did. Perhaps they moved even slower, as he didn't allow Kaya to push herself beyond what her wasted body could endure. They traveled in the mornings and evenings, hiding from the blistering heat of the sun and the dangers of dark nights.

Kaya was visibly frustrated, but seemed too distracted to argue with him. Much. After her third or fourth insistence that making good time would be better, she quietly gave up before sinking into relative silence. At least it wasn't the oppressive, worrying silence she had adopted after the rain, or after the first voider, or the second, or the third. Of course, neither was she as talkative as she had been after leaving either of the cities. At first it was enough to cause him to worry, but pretty soon it came to feel more like a relatively comfortable, if a little different, medium. Kaya woke each day, spoke her piece on their less-than-satisfactory pace, then went quietly through the rest of their daily routine. Eli found himself growing to like it.

He didn't understand her desire to hurry. It wasn't as though there was any time limit on their arrival in Essen. Bruce hasn't sent out a message announcing their arrival; no one knew they were coming. Nor was there any time limit on the letter of recommendation Bruce had given them. Hurrying would only weary them both, leaving them less prepared to face whatever challenges would undoubtedly be waiting for them when they finally reached the city. He had always preferred the desert.

Kaya, of course, did not. Their voyage this time was not plagued with the dangers and challenges that had seemed to stalk their footsteps previously, but the desert was still not Kaya's home. She didn't move thorough it the way he did, wasn't able to read it the way he did, and didn't know how to handle the unpredictable twists it would throw out with unfortunate regularity.

Not that it bothered him. He considered it his job to protect her, keep her safe from not only the voiders, but the other little, natural phenomenon that might arise.

Of course, he wasn't perfect. They sheltered under a little raggedy tree at one point, something as much like an overgrown bush as anything, but less than half an hour had passed before Kaya suddenly leaped to her feet, a large, yellow scorpion clinging to her back. Eli reached out as fast as he could, but the scorpion's tail was faster, managing to plunge through the thin cloth and into her back before he latched onto it.

It stung his hand as well, before he managed to crush it. Eli didn't mind it. He'd subsisted off of such things before, when there was nothing else to find, and its tiny bite had never bothered him. But he had also seen what had happened to other animals when they tussled with a scorpion. Rarely did the other animal come out ahead in those confrontations. His eyes turned to Kaya in worry, and her legs gave out before she could finish assuring him that she was fine.

He acted out of some mixture of desperation and instinct, pulling off Kaya's shirt to stare at the swollen, pale spot on her back, surrounded by bright red flesh. He could imagine the vicious little drops of liquid that would have come from the scorpion's sting coursing through her blood. All he could think to do was try and get it out.

He grabbed the blade from Kaya's bag, too panicked to care about the fact that the sharp metal sliced open his own hand, becoming covered in his own dark, sticky blood. He didn't think to clean it off before he sliced open the pale flesh, and began to suck out mouthfuls of her blood. He then bandaged her up and left her to rest, not knowing what else to do for her other than keep her fed and watered.

When Kaya woke up two days later, Eli finally stepped up the pace. They traveled late into the night, slept through the heat of the day, and the miles rolled away under their feet. As little as he liked it, for Kaya's sake, it was time to leave the desert. Before he knew it, and long before he would have liked it, the walls of Essen appeared before them.
 
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To say Kaya was frustrated by the sudden turn of events would have been well beyond understatement. One minute, she was both begrudging Eli his forced afternoon hiatus, and relishing the relief of a moment in the shade. And the next things were going sideways again. Literally.

Kaya had only just planned another half-hearted argument as to why it was important they make good time in reaching Essen, when the tree bark at her back and neck suddenly wriggled and dropped into her collar. There was a moment of surprise, then realization, fury, resignation, and finally, pain. The pain struck like something physical, something tangible. A big, hard, solid something she'd been hurled into, so vast it knocked the wind from her lungs, made her head spin and her ears ring. She wanted to tell him that she was alright, that this was exactly why (mostly why, at least) she'd wanted to hurry. But she turned to look at him and found herself on the ground instead.

The next two days were not quite hazy. Nothing like the fever had been, though her sleep was pockmarked with dreams of Addy and her wakings were brief, mostly at his insistence. She could recall vaguely him prodding her to drink or eat, and her murmuring arguments about them needing to be on their way before she dropped off again. But when at last the time came for them to move, she was sure she knew it almost before he did.

Progress after didn't feel like success so much as it did an inevitability, as if they had experienced the entire world, the very best, and the very worst of it in their long weeks since leaving Crolis, and now there was nothing else for them to do but reach Essen. It did not stop Kaya from picking up her pace the moment she saw a city, not a dream or a mirage or a trick, but a city, rising from the sand.

"We'll stay only long enough to catch our breath and find a few clients," she promised breathlessly, unable to take her eyes from the city walls for even a moment. "A few days. A week at most, and then we'll move again."
 
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