He did not look back. To look back would be to invite the wrath of the thing pursuing him, give it an opportunity to hack and slice its way through his defense of pain and panic, cleave him in two from head to foot and let his insides cool here in the hills until the scavengers came. Instead he concentrated on the glittering spread of Pavisse, tinted silver by the life moon. And before long he was running like a mountain goat, leaping from hump to hump, missing the gullies in between that would bend and snap his legs, avoiding the rocks, their sharp edges promising to finish what the man in red had begun.

If there were noises of pursuit he did not hear them. There was no need to be silent now, and breath was punched from his lungs with every slap of his feet on the ground, every impact as he landed and sprang onward. Rafe’s mind seemed to retreat as he ran, revealing nothing of the passage of time, the shifting of night, nor the exhaustion he was forcing himself into. His body protected itself by driving him out of his mind.

By the time he reached the stone walls—the first touches of humanity since leaving his dead village—dawn had broken and spilled its glow along the valley. Rafe paused, hardly able to breathe, his heart hammering, his legs ready to fold beneath him. For the first time in hours he looked back, became aware once again. Shadows still hid beneath rocky overhangs higher up on the hillsides. He wondered what hid within them.

ON THE WAY into Pavisse he passed by an old mine. Its throat was open to the air like a badly healed wound, the land around it scarred blank by dust, horses’ hooves, and the feet of the workmen who had lived and died hauling coal and fledge from the ground. To one side of the opening, overgrown and decayed down over the centuries since it had died, stood a machine. Its gray flanks of stone were supported by rusted veins of worked metal, and there were empty spaces where pieces of it had once been.

A machine! Rafe had only ever seen small ones, as big as his head or torso, their forgotten purposes only guessed at. But this one was huge, almost as large as the house he and his parents had lived in. Birds nested in its upper portions, and a soft breeze whistled through its long-petrified guts. Rafe wondered what its function had been, but the very idea of this massive, mysterious thing moving shocked and astounded him. His parents had told him that these things had not worked since the War, but that they had been here forever.

He passed the mine and approached Pavisse, and as he neared other people—and, he hoped, safety—the effects of the night truly began to weigh him down.