Jainan gritted his teeth and slithered down the next drop. He clearly needed to watch his behavior, or he was going to end up being needy and embarrassing both of them. He had to keep a tighter hold on his emotions. They were already on a knife-edge with the treaty. There was no room for error.

Up ahead, Kiem stopped and looked down at his feet. Jainan put aside his churning thoughts and increased his pace, slipping and sliding, until he caught up. He stood beside Kiem, slightly breathless in the cold, and looked at the sheer drop in front of them. “Oh.”

“This one might be a bit tricky,” Kiem said.

They had come down a long way already, but they were still about fifty meters above the valley floor, where the snow was patchy amid pines and clumps of stranger Iskat trees. There was possibly a way down, if you squinted.

It would require climbing.

“We can make it,” Kiem said. He pulled off the backpack and, before Jainan realized what he was doing, dropped it over the edge. It fell, rolling against the rock face for what seemed like a disturbingly long time until it hit the ground far below, where it bounced.

“We’ll have to, now,” Jainan said. The backpack rolled to a halt. “I hope you wrapped up the family glassware in that.”

“Like a baby,” Kiem assured him. He was moving with a nervous energy that Jainan suspected was the result of the three stim tabs. “Ready?” Kiem pulled his heavy-duty gloves off and stuck them in his pockets, leaving himself with only the thin, flexible inner ones. Jainan did the same.

Kiem went first, by unspoken agreement, so Jainan could see what route to take. He spread himself like a spider over the rock face, clumsy in his boots but somehow balancing. Jainan crawled to the edge to watch, but Kiem was making such good progress that Jainan started to relax. Then Kiem reached a part near the base of the cliff—one that looked the same as all the other parts to Jainan’s unpracticed eye—and got stuck for several agonizing minutes.

“Above your head to the right,” Jainan called, when he couldn’t stay quiet any longer. Kiem looked up, saw the ridge, and made a grab for it. It was just enough to get him onto the next shaky foothold. Then he went for one to the side of that—not even a ledge, more of a vertical groove—and his foot slipped.