is paramount."
"Fucking right it is!"
"I will focus on my own repair for a time. When proceeding will cause no further damage, we will locate the man."
"Well," Ramon said, nodding, relief and pleasure flushing through him. "All right, then! Good you grew some fucking huevos. We'll track him down on foot. We can do that."
"Is he like this as well?" the alien asked.
"Like what?"
"You are not coordinated in your thoughts," the alien said. "Your tatecreude is unfocused, and your nature is prone to aubre. You comprehend killing and will, but not niedutoi. You are flawed at your core, and if you were a kii hatchling, you would be reabsorbed. You attempt to separate and also to rejoin. Your flow is always in conflict with itself, and the violence of this confuses your proper function but also overcomes boundaries that would otherwise restrict you. Is this what the man is like, or are you continuing to deviate?"
Ramon looked into the alien's uninjured eye, trying to make sense of what it had said. Flow and conflict, violence and restriction. Belonging and not belonging. Or maybe he was the one who'd brought that up.
"No, monster," he said at last. "It's not deviation. I've always been like this."
Chapter Twelve
After an hour, the alien heaved itself to its feet, with a ratcheting sigh that sounded like a length of chain being dropped through a hole. "We proceed," it said grimly, and gestured to Ramon to take the lead.
It took a little more than an hour of pacing slowly around the meadow's edge to find the other man's trail. Through the long hours of the morning and into the afternoon, Ramon took point, the sahael trailing behind him to Maneck's slow, steady plodding. It would have been a harder thing if Ramon hadn't known the kind of tricks he himself would have employed to create a false trail. Twice they came upon what looked like a mistake on the other man's part - a muddy footprint leading up onto a stony ridge, a length of roughened ground where he might have lost control as he went down a slope. Ramon guided them past the red herrings easily.
The nature of the forest changed as they walked. On the higher ground near the mountains, the trees were all iceroot and pine analogs. The farther they moved toward the river, the more exotic the foliage became. Wide-branched perdida willows with black trunks shaped like half-melted women; towering pescados blancos, named for the paleness of their leaves and the oceanic scent of their sap; halfmobile colonies of coral moss with bright pink skeletons peeking out from beneath the rich green flesh. The weariness and the throbbing of his knee seemed to fall away from Ramon as he caught his stride. It felt almost as if he knew beforehand where he was going, where the other Ramon had gone before him. He almost forgot Maneck's lumbering form walking behind him, matching his path perfectly to avoid catching the sahael on two different sides of the same tree.
A flatfoot blatted at him as he passed, scolding him with a noise like an annoyed oboe. The thin, gnawed bones of a kyi-kyi lay scattered at the base of a small cliff, pale as the slats of the yunea. The other Ramon was roughly following the creek that had run by the meadow where he'd set his trap. The water was an infallible guide, and though there was no trail beside it, Ramon found they were rarely out of earshot of its chuckling flow. A sense of peace infused him, and he found himself smiling. The sun rose, the temperature inched up. If he'd been wearing a shirt, Ramon would have been tempted to take it off and tuck it into his belt, not because he was overheated but only because the air would feel good against his skin. At last, untypically, Maneck called for a halt. Its skin was ashen gray, and it seemed almost unsteady on its feet.
"We will rest here," it said. "It is necessary to recuperate." "For a little while," Ramon said. "We can't let him get too far ahead. If he gets to the river ... well, if he gets to the river, he'll have to take the time to build some kind of raft. And with a fucked-up hand, so I guess that could take him a while. But if he does get out on the river, we'll never catch him. We should have just used your flying