“What is it, girl? Little Timmy trapped down the well?” Lee prompted. The hoped-for smile came, a brief flash of teeth in the moonlight. Then Mal was off, heading on a course parallel to the river and the treeline, seawards. She seemed careless of the big grazers, who in turn ignored the pair of them utterly, motes of life entirely irrelevant to their ponderous vegetarian lives. Once or twice, though, Mal took a detour without explanation. Lee could only guess at what hazard or predator had been there, invisible to her tourist eyes but clear to the born-again barbarian her friend had become.

“Mal…” she said, after they’d been trekking for maybe an hour. “Look, I remember you weren’t even in the Girl Guides. You hated when we had to pitch a tent, and you made damn sure we had a butane stove with us—or better yet, a local delicatessen we could get brekkie at. How…”

“How did I not just starve to death looking for a coffee shop?” Mal said.

“Well, yes. With a side order of ‘How is the same not going to happen to me?’ ” Lee could feel a very real sense of panic. But Mal was here, after all. Mal was confident, and even if that didn’t mean she actually knew what to do, it was a contagious confidence. If she’d been a man in another century, Lee reckoned Mal would have been really good at leading her underlings on desperately romantic but suicidal charges against enemy guns. She’d always been able to make something up on the spur of the moment and be credible enough to convince herself as well as others. She wasn’t a hypocrite but a dreamer. In other circumstances it had been endearing.

And yet she was still alive, despite that. So maybe sometimes she could even convince the universe to cut her some slack.

“Thumbs,” Mal said, concise but not informative.

“What?”

“Imagine life without thumbs.”

“Mal, I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about. Also, could we slow down or maybe stop? My legs are killing me.”

“Not far now—look, there it is.”