Nara felt his horror in waves. Laurent, poor gray man, was still aghast that the Dhanti could have so little respect for ritual, for the Old Enemy, death. That blow from behind had made Zai more bitter than his months of torture, more anguished than having to walk into the trap of his own free will, sadder than watching his fellow captives die one by one. Nara could hear the question inside Laurent: the two guerrillas had handled the dead with him, and they wouldn’t let him finish a simple prayer. Were they utterly empty?

“Laurent,” she offered, “they’d seen millions die on their world, without any hope of resurrection.”

He nodded slowly, almost respectfully. “Then they should know that death is beyond our political feuds.”

Death is our political feud, Nara Oxham thought, but said nothing.

The sunset had turned red. Here in the unpolluted air of the deep south, the sunset lasted for two hours in summer. Nara knelt to place more wood on the fire. Laurent settled beside her, passing logs from the fireside pile. The house grew its own wood, a vanilla-scented cedar engineered for fast growth and slow burning. But it took a long time to dry properly, and hissed and smoked when wet. Zai hefted each piece in his hand, discarding those still heavy with water.

“You’ve built a fire before,” Nara said.

He nodded. “My family has a cabin in the high forests of the Valhalla range, just above the snowline. Entirely datablind. It’s built of wood and mud, and its only heat comes from a fireplace about this size.”

Nara smiled. “My mother’s line has a dumb cabin, too. Stone. I spent my winters there as a child. Tending fires is youngster’s work on Vasthold.”

Laurent smiled distantly, at some more pleasant memory.

“It develops a sense of balance and hierarchy,” he said, or quoted.

“Balance, yes,” Nara said, leaning a slender log carefully against the central mass of the fire. “But hierarchy?”

“The match ignites the kindling, which feeds the larger pieces.”

She chuckled. A typically Vadan interpretation, to see order and structure in the consuming chaos that was a healthy blaze.

“Well, at least it’s a bottom-up hierarchy,” she commented.

They built the fire together.

“We were well treated at first, during the few weeks of negotiation. Our captors made populist demands, such as medical aid for the tropics, which were in epidemic season. They began playing with the Imperial government. Wherever the government acted against disaster, the resistance would issue demands retroactively, making it seem as if any Imperial aid on Dhantu was a result of the hostage-taking. The resistance took credit for everything. Finally, the Imperial governor-general grew weary of their propaganda. He suspended all humanitarian aid.”