Apart from the brush of their footsteps and their laboring breath, absolute silence reigned. The cold against Jainan’s face was clean and purifying; he felt detached, but in a strange way, as if he could see his tiny, insignificant form moving at the center of the huge spaces around them. Something in the space and silence was trickling into his bones, gradually filling them up with an itchiness like shoots of grass unfolding. It came with an aching feeling, and for some reason, the ache felt like loss.

There is something wrong with you, he told himself, because there was no loss, and now he was sounding quite insane. But it was like an echo of someone else’s voice.

“Here?” Kiem said, startling Jainan out of his reverie. Jainan turned, slow to react, and realized Kiem had stopped a few paces back to inspect a patch of earth sheltered by a cliff face.

Jainan gestured assent. “Give me the tent.”

Kiem unshouldered the backpack and tossed over a dense, knobbly pack with a handle at the top. When Jainan pulled the cord, the pack exploded into a pincushion of plastic tubes that pistoned out like spikes, and a waterfall of fabric that chased them and covered the surface of the structure until he was holding a rigid pod. It was noticeably small for two people. Jainan decided not to think about that. “Is there a heater?”

“Yes, but only three canisters,” Kiem said. “I thought we should save them.

There’s food if you want it.” As Jainan finished securing the tent and came around the front of it, he saw Kiem had laid out several foil packs on the snow by the sleeping bags. “Finest gourmet choices: you can have brown sludge, brown sludge, or grayish sludge. The gray one says it’s strawberry, but I’m not sure I believe it.”

Jainan picked up a piece of the brown rations. It was more like a hard cake than sludge, and it crumbled like a cookie; a square broke off in his hand. He tried a mouthful and then broke off a square of the gray one on the working hypothesis that it couldn’t be worse. It wasn’t, quite. He sat next to Kiem in front of the tent, his outdoor clothes rustling as he settled down. The valley they had just trekked down folded out in front of them.

Kiem stared at the red-tinged snow where the sunset light came through a

break in the fiery crags, absently eating square after square of the horrible rations. “Jainan,” he said. “What happens if both the treaty representatives die in a crash just before Unification Day? Does the Resolution appoint new ones?”

“I don’t know,” Jainan said. If he thought about it clinically, as a diplomatic puzzle rather than a sector-wide disaster, he could just about treat it logically.