By the time they reached the bend in the road marked on the hastily scrawled directions, Cyril had grown and obliterated a series of blisters. Aristide looked strangely gray. It was daytime, fully, though the sun hid behind a low pall of leaden clouds. A rocky outcropping kept off the worst of the wind, but it certainly wasn’t warm.

Aristide lowered himself onto a lichen-covered boulder and produced a matchbook and a pack of straights from one pocket. He lit up and inhaled, then burst into painful hacking.

Cyril took the straight from him and smoked it, standing close without touching. Aristide’s breath came unevenly for a while, and then began to grow steadier.

“Thank you,” said Cyril, flicking ash into the scrub at his feet.

“Pardon?” Ari’s voice was another man’s, raw and crackling with phlegm.

“For all this.” Cyril gestured with the butt of his straight, then took one last drag and pitched it. “Thank you.”

“Save your gratitude until we’re out of the elements, or you might be thanking me for hypothermia.”

“Well, I’ll die free at least,” said Cyril. Then, not letting himself think, “With you.”

Aristide paused. Just as he turned on the rock, about to speak, a truck came around the bend. Then another, and a third, and suddenly Ari was standing in the middle of the road, one arm thrown up to halt the oncoming caravan. Then it was haggling and hustling and the distribution of cash. Aristide hopped into the back of a van. Cyril climbed into the cab of the rear truck. He spent the ride squeezed between the driver and a woman holding an E4 Hoare submachine gun, the same model the border guards and soldiers had carried. Vintage, but kept in fine trim. The sort of thing Gedda had used in the Spice War, in his grandmother’s time. The stock banged him in the ribs every time they hit a pothole.

An hour outside Dastya the convoy nearly took a mortar—the western suburbs of the city were fortified with artillery against Tatien incursion.

“Jumpy,” remarked the gunner, and that was the only comment anyone made.

After that, adrenaline ate the time up, and suddenly they were at the checkpoint outside the city. Adam Wallis presented himself looking suitably battered for a man who had just made his way through an insurgency, and told them he was a war correspondent with Siebenthal’s. He had no luggage to speak of—the cardboard suitcase had disappeared somewhere along the way, he hoped with nothing valuable inside of it.

“Lost my bag somewhere between Eré and Kareniv,” he said. “Along with my driver. They wanted the car, and he went along. Setup. Should have known. They took my press credentials, too, and my letter of transit. Managed to keep my passport, though it’s in a bit of a state.”