Fray tries not to think about the last time he saw Echo, but most of the time he can’t help it. It just overcomes him, so warm and inviting he cannot help but fall into the memory.
It is bright and crisp at Charn’s boundaries, and she has come to see him and the rest of Gyr Warden off, like she always does. Fray is in high spirits, pleased as always to be serving Charn, to be serving Echo by serving Charn. Her broad hands cup his jaw and she bows her head over his, her scruffy strawberry blond hair falling into her eyes: one brown, the other the same gleaming gold as his own, the hexagonal pupil betraying its artificiality. She looks at him like she is peeling him apart. She always looks at him like that, like she can see something in him no one else can. She did even before she lost the eye. “You come back to me in one piece,” she tells him. “See to it.”
“We always do,” Fray signs back with a teasing smile.
“You had better,” she murmurs, and bites her lip. “I don’t know, doll. Got a bad feeling about this one.”
Fray might have brushed anyone else off. Not Echo. “It’ll be well with us,” he assures her. “Best warden team in Charn, right?”
“Hmm,” says Echo, and reaches up to pull out one of the clips she always wears to keep her permanent cowlick under control. It’s thin, flexible metal, a small star shape affixed to one end and painted blue. “You wear confidence well,” she tells him, and uses the clip to gather his bangs out of his eyes. He touches it as she does, feeling the warmth of being cared for bubble up in him. “But you’d best promise me anyway.”
“I promise,” Fray tells her, and rolls his eyes good-naturedly.
Gyr Warden, the best Luminary team Charn has ever produced. Gyr Warden, the ones dispatched when threats to Charn’s noble purpose arise. Gyr Warden, the ultimate strike force, the keepers of the peace, the sword and shield raised against the everlasting threat of the apocalypse.
Gyr Warden, bested by a pit.
It was a covered pit, of course, sheltered under the remains of some great building so the snow would not weigh its disguising sheets of rusted metal and repurposed tarps down too much. It had been rigged to collapse in on itself only with enough weight. Four persons’ worth, or thereabouts. Fray can still remember the sickening way the floor gave out from under him, the buckling and screeching of metal scraping together, how the world spun. One moment he had been focused on their surroundings, in search of the escaped targets Proxy reported sighting amid these ruined machines and buildings, and who she had gone ahead to scout for. In the next he is falling, falling, falling.
It’s luck and his heightened reflexes that keep him from being impaled on the stakes stuck purposefully in the bottom, but mostly luck. He just knocks his skull against the metal floor of the pit and blacks out for a few seconds. He wishes he’d stayed out when Glint and Shrike’s agonized screams split his ears. Beyond them, Sworn clutches an obviously broken arm. Basalt and Proxy are nowhere to be seen, until a horrible boom rings out over the shrieking. Basalt’s lifeless body comes tumbling into the hole after. He nearly lands on Sworn, who screams a little in shock.
A trap, Fray thinks dimly. A simple, stupid, obvious trap that he should have noticed. Basalt stares at him from across the pit with frozen, staring eyes.
It’s luck again, and years of training, that see Fray stay still when he detects movement above. His head is ringing with pain and the wails of his impaled teammates, until another terrifying boom rings out. Shrike goes limp. Whoever is shooting botches putting down Glint. The first shot just destroys her arm and the screaming redoubles, ragged and piercing. There is a scuffle and shouting up above. Sworn is whimpering, shuddering, staring—staring up at where Proxy is shoving her way toward the edge of the pit, through the gathered crowd of figures in tattered gold and jade. They let her push past, too far for Fray to read their expressions. Proxy lunges for the rifleman, bellowing something Fray cannot hear over Glint’s screams.
Three of the figures fall on her, and the shooter cracks her across the face with the butt of his rifle. Another of them steps forward and puts a slug into Glint’s forehead. The screaming stops. At last, Fray can hear what Proxy is saying:
“Stop! Stop! You said you wouldn’t hurt them!”
There’s a chorus of scoffing laughter, and despite her hextech, despite her training, Proxy is still overwhelmed when the crowd piles onto her and as one hurls her down into the pit, just yards from Fray. She lands badly, on one of the half-raised pieces of metal that had formed the false floor. The crunch her spine makes as it snaps at the waist echo in his ears long after their assailants walk away.
Once the figures leave, Sworn tries to drag themself to Fray. Miraculously unharmed for the most part, Fray rushes to them instead. Proxy lies where she fell, but her ragged puffs of breath into the frozen air betray that she still lives.
In silence he triages Sworn. Their left arm snapped on impact, but snapped cleanly. The livid swelling in their ankle suggests that it fared much worse. They’re fine apart from that, other than scrapes and bruises, and the fact they just watched the horrible execution of three of their teammates. Three of their family.
Fray does what little he can for the injuries. He focuses on pulling Sworn out of their mounting panic not only for their sake, but for his, too. Sworn is the youngest. Sworn has rarely been faced with the cruelties that the outside world is capable of. He only relents when Sworn swallows and asks in a splintering voice, “Orders, major?”
Reality starts settling in again. Fray braces himself best he can. “Stay with Proxy,” he signs, and does not allow himself to look at her. “I have to … perform retrieval.”
“Acknowledged,” Sworn says weakly, and allows Fray to help them hobble to Proxy’s side. When they’re settled, when Fray has done a silent, mechanical once-over of Proxy—he cannot bring himself to look her in the eye—he picks himself up, and takes stock of their situation.
The pit has sheer metal sides. The walls rise up nearly twenty feet. It seems excessively deep, for a grave. There is nothing that would lend its to an escape, especially not with Sworn’s ankle.
He looks around long after he has gathered the information he needs. He’s putting off retrieval.
Basalt is nearest. Fray calls a knife to hand out of his hextech and sets about the grim work: pulling the implanted machinery out of his team’s bodies, so that it will not fall into enemy hands. Basalt is still warm. His blood crawls sluggishly out of the spots Fray cuts into him.
He hears the conversation begin, behind him.
“You led us into a trap,” says Sworn.
“Yes,” says Proxy, who never lies.
“You betrayed us. You betrayed Charn.”
“Yes,” Proxy says.
“What did they tell you? What was worth this?”
Proxy is quiet for a long time before she says, “Does it matter now?”
Fray, listening, supposes it doesn’t. Sworn falls silent, and then begins to cry.
Body by body, Fray excises hextech from his brethren’s flesh. He pulls stabilizers and hard light generators from limbs, and goes about the delicate work of deactivating the spine stabilizers. The liquid battery inside each one is rigged to explode when tampered with, unless disabled through the addition of another compound in a hidden compartment. He’s seen the result of failing to do that, on one of his first field missions, before Gyr Warden. The lieutenant had fallen, and the enemy tried to pull the hexes from her back. The explosion had killed everyone within thirty feet.
He crushes each one into uselessness, scattering their delicate interiors haphazardly around the pit. He even buries some of the pieces. He takes a long time to do it, too long, because when he is finally done there is only one more thing left for him to address.
Proxy lolls her head to one side when he comes to stand over her. She hasn’t gotten up. “Major,” she says, and tries to lift an arm in a salute. When Fray only stares at her and shakes his head she wheezes; he thinks it might be a try at a laugh. “Fucked this one up, brother.”
A dozen things fly through his head. He wants to ask her why, he wants to ask her what was supposed to happen to them, he wants to ask her what he did wrong that she betrayed Gyr, that she betrayed Charn. He wants to scream at her, to shake her, to beat the shit out of her.
Instead he just signs, “You’re paralyzed.”
“Yeah. Seems so.”
“I need you to tell me who those people are.”
The way she stares up at him, her face slack in an emotion he cannot decipher, makes his stomach churn. “Just people, Fray,” she says softly. “Just people like you and me.”
Something in him snaps. He drops to one knee, fisting his hand in the front of her coat and hauling her up by it. Proxy just stares up at him dully, as if waiting for his judgement. “Tell me what just happened,” he grinds out, the words fluting and mutating in his throat. It sounds more like tll m wht js happnd.
Proxy is quiet for a long time, looking at him, then past him, at the edge of the pit. “I made a mistake,” she says eventually. “I trusted the wrong people. I thought I was too clever to be taken in. Now all of Gyr Warden pays for my arrogance. I throw myself on your mercy, Major.”
Fray stares at her. Proxy, his second, his sister-in-arms, Proxy the great-hearted, Proxy the wise and merciful. The one he trusts—trusted—above all but Echo herself. She matches his gaze until he lets go of her shirt, too overwhelmed by the sensation of his heart cracking apart.
A day and a night passes. Another follows. Once some of the people in jade and green return. They talk quietly among themselves, casting a careful eye over the three remaining members of Gyr Warden, and then leave. Though he checks and rechecks their cage for means of escape, Fray finds nothing.
At night, he keeps himself from despair by remembering Echo.
Echo stands head and shoulders above Fray (not impressive), could pick him up and throw him (a bit impressive), and is journeyman under the head machinist, overseeing the ancient technology inside the bodies of Fray and the other Luminaries (very impressive). She snores. She ruffles his hair every time she passes him. She is ruddy and precise and gentle and sings to herself when she works with a voice as rich as syrup, and if she told Fray she needed him to kill someone, he would do it without question.
Echo is one of the rare Charnites to have hextech without being a Luminary: the unmistakably false eye in her left socket, provisioned for her after she lost the real one retrieving machinery from the dangerous bunkers that spread warren-like under the city. Echo was the one who stayed with him night after night when his body rejected the first hextech he was given. She was the one who recommended him for the more unregulated, more compatible newer iteration, citing his dedication and skill. His body belongs to Charn, but Echo is the keeper of his heart.
In the frozen nights, where he builds pathetic fires out of the clothing of his dead companions to keep the rest of them from deaths of their own, he thinks about how he promised her he would come back unharmed.
“They’re waiting for us to starve, I think,” Fray signs to Sworn on the third day. “Or grow hungry enough to surrender. But I imagine they would have made their demands already if it were that.”
“Why don’t they just shoot us?” Sworn says, absently, like they are asking what time it is.
“I don’t know.”
Sworn is quiet for a long time. “She must, though,” they say at last, and does not need to indicate whom he means.
Fray has managed to create a makeshift shelter with the fallen metal. If nothing else it functions as a barrier between them and the sight of the bodies. Fray has moved Basalt and Shrike to the furthest edge, but Glint’s blood froze her to the spikes she is impaled upon. He cannot remove her without great effort, and he must conserve his energy to attend to the living.
The shelter was mostly for Proxy, who has lost the use of her legs. She has said nothing since Fray’s aborted interrogation, seemingly waiting around to die. Sworn has cursed her out a few times, only stopping when Fray intervened. Honestly, he doesn’t have the energy for that, either. A Luminary is better equipped for the deadly weather than your common man, but they starve the same as anyone else, and the rations he pulled from their packs are running low.
They drink snow melted in a crude bowl and set over the tiny fire Sworn’s hextech allows them to make. Sworn’s foot looks infected, looks like it’s dying. Proxy starts refusing her portion of the rations, so Fray makes a disgusting-looking broth of them and force-feeds it to her. Traitor or not, no one else is going to die on his watch. Not while he can help it.
On the fourth day, one of those jade-golds reappears, alone. Fray catches sight of her sitting at the pit’s edge with a rifle slung across her lap, watching them intently. Upon realizing she’s been noticed, she just raises a hand, like this is a casual greeting. Fray swallows his anger and signs to her. “Who are you?”
She squints at him. “Don’t know that hand stuff, champ.”
Sworn is in no condition to translate, but they’re roused to do so anyway. This is an opportunity too important to let slip. “You don’t need to have my name,” she says in response to Fray’s prior question. “But I know yours. It’s Fray, right? Rank of major, to hear Proxy tell it? Do they name all of you after nouns? I suppose that’s one way to strip off your humanity.”
“Her name is Agrippa,” Proxy murmurs. It’s the first thing she’s said in days. “Agrippa of the Vow.”
Fray gives no indication of hearing Proxy. “Then what do you want with us?”
Agrippa of the Vow blinks down slowly at him. “I want to watch you suffer,” she says. “After everything you’ve done, all the lives you’ve ruined, all the innocent people you’ve slaughtered … I want to see you down there, with the person who betrayed you. I want you to lose your fingers to the cold. I want you to get so hungry you peel the flesh off your friends’ bodies and eat it. I want you to hurt.” She leans forward, eyes roaming over them. “And then I’m going to put you down like the dog you are. I’m going to make it take days.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Sworn cries, leaping to their feet. “We’re trying to save this horrible world, from people like you—”
“Sworn,” Fray hisses, whirling on them.
“You people don’t see it, you don’t understand—”
“Sworn!”
“Kiddo, don’t do this,” says Proxy.
Sworn says, “We only do what we have to,” and Agrippa tilts her weapon down. There is the thunder of the weapon and the soft sound of Sworn falling to the snow. Fray lurches toward them, trying to drag them out of her line of fire. They clutch at their stomach, blood foaming past their lips.
“Fucking brainwashed animals, the lot of you,” the woman calls down. Her voice drips with disgust. “There, Major. You can eat that one fresh. You’re welcome.”
Sworn passes sometime in early morning. They had ceased whimpering some two hours before, and despite Fray’s best efforts he could not keep them conscious.
He puts their body with the others. He retrieves their implants and destroys them, except for the one that creates fire. He spends almost an hour trying to get Glint off the spikes and poles, and in the end simply saws through the metal with his hexblade. His hands are raw and bloody by the end of it, but Glint gets to join the rest of the family. Because that’s what they were, or what Fray had always believed Gyr Warden was. A family.
Their bodies won’t rot in the cold, and the floor of the pit is ancient steel. But he has Sworn’s flame hex, and it is no natural fire. The stench of burning hair and flesh sickens him, and the black smoke that belches up from the pit does away with any hope he might have had of the pyre going unnoticed. Regardless, Agrippa will not see him reduced to cannibalism. He stands in front of the flames for what feels like hours, forcing himself to watch. To remember. Shrike, storyteller, musician, field medic. Glint, trick shooter and master of comedic timing. Veteran and scout, Basalt, who could find his way through any storm. And Sworn, fresh and promising, so clever and passionate.
Gyr Warden, his cohort, his family. His to protect. His to fail.
When he goes back to Proxy and flings himself down beside her, she makes a low, pained sound. “And then there were two.”
He does not answer her.
“Fray, I need to tell you something.”
He does not answer.
“Luminary-Major First Among Us Into This Fraying World, look at me.”
Fray snarls. He obeys, he glares at her, his teeth coming down so hard on his lip that it breaks the cracked skin. His hands shake when he signs. “What?”
Proxy is crying. The tears come slow and languid, freezing to her face before they can slip all the way to the ground. She waits long enough to make sure he’s paying attention. “I want to tell you why this happened,” she says, voice creaking with the effort, “but I don’t think you’re ready to understand it.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means it took me such a long time to understand it myself that I can’t possibly hope to convince you of it with the time I have left.”
He wants to tell her she has years left. Even now, even after everything, she is still his family, and part of him will always love her despite it all. He wants to comfort her, to promise her he’s going to get them out of here, that he’s going to take them home. That they’re going to be okay.
He can’t.
“Tell me anyway,” he signs, slumping against the side of the shelter. “I might as well know.”
“You’ll kill me for it.”
“I wouldn’t bother. We’re already dead.”
“Yeah,” Proxy says with a broken laugh, and tells him.
She’s right. He doesn’t understand.
Luminaries stop sleeping like they did in their prior lives. They must still sleep, but they need less of it, and they rouse more readily. This is why it’s such a shock when Fray is awakened by something being pulled over his head.
He panics. He thrashes, kicking, throwing elbows, but an uncountable number of hands on him force him to stillness. People are talking around him, saying be careful, get him tied, don’t underestimate him because he’s small. His arms are jammed behind his back and tied painfully tight. He can hear Proxy’s muffled yelling, grim voices, the crunch of many boots on snow. Then he is being raised into the air. Up and up and up, and then down as he’s thrown to the ground. The thing over his head is taken away.
The world is black except where it is white with snow or orange with the light of the bonfire that has been built near the pit. Countless figures in ragtag clothing stare down at him; he can’t make out details with the way his numb face is pressed into the snow. “Alright!” calls a woman’s voice. Fray recognizes it as that of Agrippa. “You all know Lieutenant Proxy,” she sneers the title, “as our very own woman on the inside, who in her arrogance thought we would let her little pack of murderers live.” There’s a series of jeers and snarls. She goes on: “And of course we’ve got the famous leader of Charn’s precious slaughterhouse here today as well!”
Something takes hold of his hair and pulls him up to his knees. The crowd, at least fifty strong and armed to the teeth, explodes into noise and howling. Through his cold-dulled senses, through the lightheadedness of having run out of rations the day before, he hears them as a kind of terrible chorus. Curses, death threats, oaths of vengeance, cries of murderer and baby-killer and monster.
He thinks back to what Proxy said to him, that they are only people, people like Gyr Warden. Only Gyr Warden is—was—nothing like this bloodthirsty, torturous mob. Not for the first time, he mourns Proxy’s good nature getting the better of her.
It’s Agrippa who has him by the hair, he finds as he looks around for Proxy, and Agrippa has a knife in her other hand. In the half dark, crazed with shadows, it is all but impossible for him to make out anything, but at last he spots the half-limp form of Proxy on Agrippa’s other side, her hands tied in front of her. Agrippa is still going off, talking about justice and punishment and whatever other madness she’s concocted for herself. A zealot, he thinks with a dull, distant pity. She knows not what she does.
As best he can, he braces himself for what he knows is to come. He has no hope for a quick death from these lunatics, but perhaps they will be kinder to Proxy.
“What shall we do with him, then?” Agrippa asks the crowd. The noise surges back into a fervor. They want his blood. They want his agony.
Strip him and throw him in the fire.
I bet he won’t be so dangerous with his eyes gouged out.
Carve up the girl and make him watch.
Not Proxy, he pleads in silence, she was misled, she made a mistake, he would bear a hundred tortures if it meant they would spare her. She is still his scaffolding, his right hand. He still loves her even now. He dares not beg for her safety, not when giving up such a wish would be like dangling meat in front of wolves.
“I know what you really want,” Agrippa shouts, yanking Fray’s hair high enough that he struggles to his feet to ease the pain. His pulse screams in his ears. “This man’s head, yes. But you what you really want is the ones pulling the strings. You want to blot out this disease before it comes for anyone else. You want Charn!”
Cheering.
“And what does Charn have that we don’t?”
“Those damned machines,” snarls one.
“The old technology,” cries another.
“The fucking Luminaries,” finishes Agrippa. “And what is a Luminary but a man with metal in his limbs? I say we rip them out of him.”
A boon, Fray thinks, half delirious. That will kill him. A mercy. And the hextech will be useless without the serum.
Unfortunately, this is when Agrippa turns her attention back to Proxy. “Okay, Prox,” Agrippa says, voice dripping with poison. “Here’s your chance to spare yourself some pain. Tell me how the shit inside you freaks works.”
Proxy gapes at her. “I don’t—I don’t know, Agrippa, I told you I don’t know!”
Agrippa gives a great, aggravated sigh, and sinks the knife into Fray’s shoulder. The guttural shriek that tears its way from his throat is so horrible that at first he does not realize he made it.
“I don’t know!” Proxy wails. She pushes herself up on her bound hands. Blood has frozen around a cut on her forehead. “We’re just soldiers! We don’t get told how it works! Stop hurting him!”
The knife twists. Fray screams, bile crawling up his throat. “We’ve caught your kind before,” Agrippa says patiently, in a different voice than the one she used to whip the crowd into frenzy. “We’ve tried implanting the technology into our own men. It doesn’t take. I need to know how to make it take, Proxy.” She pulls the knife out, slow, slow, and the withdrawal is somehow worse than the stab. For a few seconds, the blackness overtakes everything.
When Fray comes to again, the knife is between his lips, threatening to split into his cheek if he moves. “Stop crying,” Agrippa is telling Proxy. “You know how to end this.”
Proxy’s shoulders shake. “You’re horrible,” she says. “We deserve death for what we’ve done, but you’re no better. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you.”
How? Fray wants to ask with the last shreds of intelligent thought left to him. She understands the process no better than he does; it’s a closely guarded secret for this very reason. Yet he never suspected her part in the trap, either. How long has she been working with Agrippa? What else has she betrayed?
Proxy shakes tears from her face and swallows a sob. “You have to start at the spine,” she says. “You can’t transfer them unless you crack the power cell. They’re coded to the individual.”
She’s lying. She knows as well as Fray does what happens when the liquid battery cracks. Relief sweeps over him like an avalanche.
He is shoved down to the ground again, his bindings cut and his arms stretched out before him by two men. He shrieks as his stabbed shoulder is yanked forward without heed for his pain. His coat and clothes are sliced open to expose his back. The three stabilizers that burrow against his spine are left open to the freezing air. He seethes his breath in through his teeth against his pounding heart as Agrippa sets her knife against the topmost one and pops the housing off.
He is trembling from cold and tension by the time Proxy walks Agrippa through the last protective layer above the battery. “Now what?” Agrippa is saying, and Fray manages to twist his head enough to find Proxy’s face. She has run out of tears, and stares at him. He jerks his chin the slightest amount. Do it.
Proxy takes a deep breath. “There’s a cell of liquid,” she says. “If you expose the liquid to air, it releases the hexes.”
“What a fucking nuisance,” Agrippa says, and leans forward. Fray feels it through his spine when she sets the tip of her knife against the glass to crack it.
The failsafe has been primed. Unprivileged modifications of Farlight property is disallowed. Cease and desist, or local override will activate. This will be your only warning.
The words somehow—he doesn’t know a better word for it—the words are somehow coming from his bones. He hears them as if they’re being spoken directly into his ear, a tinny, buzzy voice, neither male nor female. At first Fray thinks he’s hallucinated it, until it comes again when Agrippa’s knife bounces off the glass.
Failsafe activated. Local override activated. Tolerance is: zero. God help you.
Several things happen simultaneously. The first is that there is no self-destruction, no ignition. The second is that something surges through his exhausted body. The machinery in his arms and chest and spine blaze with light and heat, and he stares in bewilderment as dozens upon dozens of golden, hard-light hexes appear from nowhere all around him, like a full-body shield. One of the men holding his arms down jerks backwards; the other is not so fortunate. The gleaming hexes burn through his hands like a knife through butter. Behind him he hears Agrippa raise her voice and then cut herself off with a strangled grunt of pain. There’s no one on him, Fray realizes, and tries to push himself upright.
He moves, but not in the way he had meant to.
He’s drawn stiffly to his feet, the shouting and gunshots muffled compared to the overwhelming hum in his ears. His own skeleton is being operated without him. It draws his sword and moves him puppet-like, jerky and slow, until it isn’t, until it’s deadly and swift, faster than he’s ever moved before. He cuts down man after man with cold efficiency and watches himself do it, watches bullets ricochet harmlessly off the armor. There had been some fifty strong in the crowd when this began. By the time he can stop and draw breath, over half of them lie dead in the snow. Agrippa has vanished.
The thing—the local override—seems satisfied by this. It turns him around and surveys the area, as if checking its work. The only remaining living thing is Proxy, staring at him with wide eyes. She awkwardly shoves herself up with her hands, twisted painfully at the waist. “Major?” she says, and the override notices her.
No, Fray thinks as his body steps toward her. No, you can’t, she’s not a threat, stop, stop! He tries to work his jaw, his throat, and nothing comes out. He tries to hold himself back, tries to fight it, tries to regain control. It’s like trying to hold back a wall of sand with his hands.
“Fray?” Proxy says as he comes to a stop in front of her. “What—what is that? What’s going on? How—?”
She doesn’t get to finish her question, because despite the way he is screaming at himself to stop, he lifts his arms and brings the sword neatly through her neck.
Nearby, the fire crackles. The hum begins to wane, and he can hear his own labored breathing. Tolerance met, says the voice in his bones. Local override cleared. Thank you.
The armor dissipates. The sword shivers into nothing. Proxy’s severed head stares glassily ahead, her jaw half-open.
Fray falls to his knees. He tries to scream, but nothing comes out.
There is no more Gyr Warden.
There is no more Luminary-Major First Among Us Into This Fraying World.
There may not even be a Fray anymore.
A storm blows in, the next day. A blizzard. It covers everything: the pit, the bodies, the blood. In the morning, from the place he collapsed next to the fire and into a barely-sheltered crevice of metal, Fray stares out over the pristine white and spends the next hour hoping, hoping, begging, pleading for it all to have been a horrific dream. For his team, his family, to still be alive. He wants Sworn to irritate him with questions and to hear Glint and Shrike argue over rations, with Basalt telling them both to shut the hell up. He wants Proxy to come up behind him and smack him across the back of the head, the way she always does when he’s done something stupid.
He waits for a long time.
When this does not happen, he picks himself up and starts walking.
He walks for so much longer. He walks through the empty, meaningless white void and sees nothing, no one. He got a new coat from somewhere and it keeps him from freezing outright. He collapses more than once and each time hopes another blizzard will come and bury him, too. His wish is never granted. He picks himself up again. He starts walking.
He walks and walks and walks.
Until there’s a caravan.
The man who runs it is tall and dressed in brilliant orange and black. His gold jewelry shivers and jingles every time he moves. He looks Fray over with keen interest before calling for food and blankets and some hot tea, for God’s sake. Fray watches it all happen. He doesn’t realize it’s happened to him until late into the evening, when the man sidles up next to him and asks him what on earth he was doing wandering the permafrost alone. Fray, who had been staring stupidly at the blue star on the barrette he’s just taken out of his hair, just redirects his hollow gaze to the caravan owner. The man takes this as chastisement rather than the utter speechlessness it is, and instead asks: well, where are you headed?
Fray means to say Charn. He means to say home.
Instead, Fray says in halting, splintering words, each one tearing at his throat as it passes, “As far from here as you’ll take me.”