be somehow broken, she did not know why, perhaps the waste, perhaps the increasing likelihood that they would not survive; perhaps simple hunger, there was no way of telling. The young were odd. But he reminded her of Peter, and so she didn’t look at him either.
The snow made each night glow and pulse. All of it would melt eventually, carve new streambeds and carry her Mars away. Mars was gone. Michel sat beside her through the second shifts of the night, looking for signs of the way. “Are we lost?” Maya asked him once, just before dawn.
“No, not at all. It’s just … we’re leaving tracks in the snow. I don’t know how long they’ll last, or how visible they are, but if … Well, just in case they do last, I want to leave the car, and walk the last part of the way. So I want to be precisely sure of where we are before we do that. We’ve got some standing stones and dolmens erected that will tell us for sure, but I have to find one of those first. They’ll show on the horizon, you know. Boulders a bit taller than usual, or columns.”
“It will be easier to see those by day,” Simon said.
“True. We’ll have a look around tomorrow, and that should do it—we’ll be in an area of them. They were designed to help people lost like us. We’ll be okay.”
Except that their friends were dead. Her only child was dead. And their world was gone for good. Lying down by the windows at dawn, Ann tried to imagine life in the hidden shelter. Underground for years and years. She couldn’t do it. Go, idiot, go! Damn you!
At dawn Kasei hooted with hoarse triumph: out there on the northern horizon was a trio of standing stones. A lintel bridging two pillars, as if a single fragment of Stone-henge had flown here. Home was that way, said Kasei.
But first they would wait through the day. Michel was becoming extremely cautious about being seen from satellites, and wanted to continue on by night. They settled down to get some sleep.
Ann couldn’t sleep, she found herself energized by a new resolve. When the rest were out cold, Michel snoring happily, all of them asleep for the first time in about fifty hours, she tugged into her walker and tiptoed into the lock. She looked back and surveyed them; a hungry, ragged lot. Nadia’s crippled hand stuck out from her side. Getting out the lock made some unavoidable noise, but everyone was used to sleeping through noise, and the whirrs and clicks of the life-support system partially covered her exit. She got out without waking anyone.
The planet’s basal chill. She shuddered in it, and set off west, walking in the rover’s tracks so she couldn’t be followed. The sun was cutting through the mist. Snow was falling again, tinted pink in shafts of sunlight. She trudged along until she came on a little drumlin ridge, with its steep side clear of snow. She could traverse along the bare rock without leaving tracks. She did so until she got tired. It was really cold out, the snow falling straight down in tiny flakes, probably accreted around sand grains. At the end of the drumlin was a fat low boulder. She sat in its lee. She turned off her walker’s heating unit, and covered the blinking alarm light on her wristpad with a clump of snow.
It got colder fast. The sky was an opaque gray now, tinged with faint pink. Snow fell out of the pinkness onto her faceplate.
She had just stopped shivering, and was getting comfortably chill, when a boot kicked her hard in the helmet, and she was dragged up to her knees with her head ringing. A suited figure banged its faceplate into hers, hard. Then hands with a vise’s grip took her by the shoulders and flung her down to the ground. “Hey,” she cried weakly. She was yanked by her shoulders to her feet, and her left arm was pulled back and held up high behind her back. Her assailant worked at her wristpad, and then shoved her painfully forward, her arm still held high. She couldn’t fall without breaking her arm. She could feel the diamond pattern of her suit’s heating elements begin to flare against her skin, burning their pattern into her. Every few steps she was slapped hard in the helmet.
The figure marched her right back to their own rover, which