Come the morning they left in the grey pre-dawn, despite Yoawin’s protests. “Don’t you spit at me, you addled stumble-hoof,” Tefwe said, and spat back at it. “There. See how you like it.” She wiped her face while Yoawin shook hers. “There. Now, sorry. Both of us sorry, yes? No more spitting. Here.” She gave it some dried berries.

A series of tall cliffs kept them mostly in shade until nearly noon, letting them keep going longer. They ate, drank and dozed under an overhang.

The track just before the pass was very steep; she got off Yoawin and led the animal up the zigzagging path. Dry stones rattled under her boots and the aphore’s hooves. At a corner in the trail near the top, one fall of initially just a dozen or so stones set off a small landslide further down. The fractious, rattling, rumbling sound of it echoed off the cliffs and slopes all around like dry thunder. Tefwe watched the dusty mass descend, to see if it would sweep away any part of the track, but it didn’t, and the tumbling mass of stones and boulders slowed and slumped to a dusty stop on the shallowing slope some way above the valley floor.

From the pass, the plateau was only fifty metres below her, ringed by sharp peaks and ragged cliffs. Its surface was bright with salt lakes and thin wind-corralled whorls of pale sand. Yoawin panted. Tefwe patted the animal’s snout and looked around as the hot wind swept her hair back from her face. She smiled, and felt the dried skin on her lips protest at the motion.

A couple of kilometres away, shimmering in the heated air, she could see the rocky outcrop where the drone Hassipura Plyn-Frie would be working on its sandstreams.

Tefwe reached up to where the flower she’d picked the day before had been, tucked into a coil of her hair, at least until this morning, thinking to leave it here at the pass. But her fingers closed round nothing; it had gone, already fallen.

xGSV Contents May Differ

oGCU Beats Working

You appear to covet the behaviour of our superlifter siblings, and have become a sort of serial tug. Were you getting bored?

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A little. I also thought that – given the Ronte had been due to arrive at Zyse in particular significantly after the Enfolding – helping them to get to Zyse swiftly might help preclude the Liseiden, faced with an empty home system devoid of both those it had belonged to and those it had been allocated to, being tempted to ignore the decision in favour of the Ronte by resorting to illegal pillaging. I simply wanted to remove that temptation by making sure the Ronte were in position at the time of the Instigation, thus ensuring a smooth handover.

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Thoughtful. However it does rather make it look as though we favour one over the other.

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