And they ran. Nirgal took the lead, and tried to pick the cleanest route over the canyon floor, the one least littered with rocks. The starlight seemed more than sufficient to illuminate their way. Art kept pounding up to his right, pressing him to hurry. It almost became a kind of race, and Nirgal ran much faster than he would have on his own, or in any normal circumstances. So much of it was rhythm, and breath, and the dispersal of heat from the torso out into the skin and then the walker. It was surprising to see how well Art could keep up with him, without the advantage of any of the disciplines. He was a powerful animal.

They almost ran right by Coyote, who leaped out from behind a rock and scared them enough to knock them down like ninepins. Then they clambered up the rocky trail he had marked on the cliff wall, and were on the rim, under the full dome of the stars again, the bright lights of Senzeni Na like a spaceship that had dived into the opposite cliff.

Back in the boulder car Art gasped for air, still out of breath from the run down the canyon. “You’re going to have to— teach me that lung-gom,” he said to Nirgal. “My Lord you run fast.”

“Well, you too. I don’t know how you do it.”

“Fear.” He shook his head, sucked at the air. “This kind of thing is dangerous,” he complained to Coyote.

“It wasn’t my idea,” Coyote snapped. “If those bastards hadn’t stolen my supplies, we wouldn’t have had to do it.”

“Yeah, but you do stuff kind of like this all the time, right? And it’s dangerous. I mean, you need to be doing something other than sabotage in the outback. Something systemic.”

• • •

It turned out that fifty kilos was the absolute minimum they needed to get home, so they limped south with all noncritical systems shut off, so that the interior of the car was dark, and fairly cold. It was cold outside as well; through the lengthening nights of the early southern winter they began to encounter frost on the ground, and snowdrifts. Salt crystals on top of the drifts served as the seed points for ice flakes, which grew into thickets of ice flowers. They navigated between these white crystalline fields, dimly glowing in the starlight, until the fields merged into one great white blanket of snow, frost, rime, and ice flowers. Slowly they drove over it, until one night the hydrogen peroxide ran out. “We could have got more,” Art said.

“Shut up,” Coyote replied.