Lee jerked around to see Mal sitting behind her, separated by a few inches of space that she made no attempt to bridge.

“Why?”

Mal’s pale face was unreadable. “I…was trying to follow the fault line back to…Earth, human Earth. I thought that was where we’d go. But we’re here. I guess this is ‘home’ to me. I was here too long.”

“It’s okay,” Lee heard herself say. “We can just…wait for the next…”

Mal stared at her. Then she grinned, though it was forced. “It’s okay here, though.” She was desperately cheerful. “I mean, it’s better than the rats, right?”

Lee nodded vigorously, shuddering at the thought. The sheer open space here seemed almost indecent, after those cramped and populous crawlspaces. She rose to her feet and took a few steps downhill in the direction of the river. A hundred yards away something she’d taken for a rock lurched to its feet and yuffed in irritation. She had the sense of a big hippo on gangling, knock-kneed legs. For a moment she eyed it, but it neither charged her nor lumbered off, just folded back down into the grass.

“So where’s this?” Lee asked. “Also…can you make a fire, or something? It’s parky out here.”

“I can do better than that. I can take us to a friendly village. I can’t guarantee a tavern or an old man giving out quests, but they’ll have food and warmth and a roof of sorts,” Mal said. “Only…you’ve got to be cool, right?”

Lee eyed her. “Is this going to be like when you introduced me to your Oxford friends? Because that was awkward as fuck.”

Mal just stood there for a moment. Her shoulders shook, and Lee thought she was laughing, because if there was one thing Elsinore Mallory hadn’t done since the third year of secondary school, it was cry in public.

“Mal…?”

And then Mal had swept her up in a tight hug with all the unaccustomed strength granted by her lost years. She wouldn’t let go, and Lee could feel her hard body shudder.

“I’ve missed you,” she whispered. “You can’t imagine…Four years, and every day I…I’m sorry, Lee, I’m so sorry.”

Then they broke apart, and a distance was between them again that only Mal seemed to be able to cross. She was looking about herself, almost theatrically getting her bearings, all but sniffing the air.