would remember him. In retrospect, Asara thought that she should probably have kept Laranya’s suicide quiet until they were in a safer place; but what was done, was done. He would have felt betrayed if she had kept it from him any longer, and she wanted him smitten.
She left him to sleep, to heal himself of tragedy. Asara had watched many dramas like this over the course of her long life, and they bored her in the main; but she was curious to see how Reki would fare under this test of his mettle. Though he was as easy to manipulate as any man, he had innocence and inexperience as his excuse, and she found those qualities appealing enough so that she did not have to entirely fake her interest in him.
But she herself could not sleep. She was thinking of an argument, weeks ago, and of Kaiku.
After her deception had been revealed, after she had fled from Kaiku in shame, she had gone to Cailin. It was ever her way: to run from what hurt her, to change herself and hide again. Cailin would provide her with an excuse to leave, something that she could tell herself was the real reason she was going, and not Kaiku at all.
But somehow it had descended into an argument. Cailin was just that little bit too haughty, taking her for granted, telling her that she had to go to the Imperial Keep.
‘I am not your servant, Cailin!’ Asara had spat, whirling around the black-and-red conference chamber of the house of the Red Order. ‘You would do well to remember that.’
‘Spare me these half-hearted attempts at independence,’ the Sister had replied coldly. ‘You know you can leave at any time. But you will not leave, will you? Because I can grant what you desire most in the world.’
Asara had glared at her furiously. ‘We had a deal. I did not agree to be your subordinate!’
‘Then we are equals, if you prefer,’ Cailin said. ‘It changes nothing. You will do as I ask, or you may break the deal. But until then, you will help me get what I want. And then, I will give you what you want.’
‘Can you?’ Asara had accused. ‘Can you do it?’
‘You know I can, Asara, and you know I will. You have my promise.’
‘And you have my promise,’ she returned savagely, ‘that if you trick me I will be avenged. You would not want me as an enemy, Cailin.’
‘Stop these threats!’ Cailin had snapped. ‘The deal stands. It requires a certain measure of trust on both our parts, but you knew that from the beginning.’
Trust. Asara could have laughed. Trust was an overrated commodity. But Cailin knew what it was that Asara longed for, what she would risk almost anything to get. And so Asara worked for the Red Order, partly because they had the same goals, mostly because it was the only way she could imagine her wish might be granted.
An end to the loneliness, to the emptiness, to the void inside her. It was almost too precious to imagine.
TWENTY-NINE
The sun was setting on the Xarana Fault, igniting the western horizon in clouded bands of red and silver and purple. In the golden light of the day’s end, Yugi and Nomoru crouched on a bluff overlooking a land riven with ghylls and canyons, from which flat-topped plateaux, rocky hills and buttes thrust upward unevenly.
Below them, hidden within the creases of the Fault, men and women were dying. The sounds of gunfire and occasional detonations echoed into the calm sky. Wisps of smoke seeped like fumes from the cracks. Fleeting glimpses of movement caught their eyes from time to time: swiftly retreating figures, pursued by dark and terrible shapes. At several points over the last few hours, the battle had spilled up out of the shadow and into the open, skirmishes across hillsides or areas of scrubland. Yugi did not recognise half of the factions that he saw, but he was sure they were not Libera Dramach or folk of the Fold.
‘Getting close,’ Nomoru said, her tone suggesting that she did not care one way or the other about it.
‘We’re not slowing them by much,’ Yugi observed distractedly.
‘What did you expect?’
Yugi shrugged at that. He did not want to deal with Nomoru’s surly pessimism now. He had more pressing concerns.
Kaiku’s estimation of the Aberrant army’s speed had been accurate. Three days had passed since the night of the moonstorm, and their rate of advance had been steady and