The shadow of the mountain bowl kept the snow around them dark even while the sky above lightened to powdery gray. On the far cliffs, the dawn light glinted on the flybug wreck, small by now in the distance. Kiem looked at it ruefully.

No point crying over spilled milk, and it was too cold to hang around. He and Jainan consulted over the map, which had no idea where they were but handily told them which way was south. They picked the likeliest-looking pass they could see and set out.

They ate breakfast while walking by unspoken agreement. Kiem had been hiking in winter before, but he would be lying if he said he was happy to be stranded out here on an unplanned survival trek, not knowing if someone was after them. They’d been lucky: they were kitted up, and technically the rest of the journey should just be a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, but still, the more distance they could put behind them the better. Jainan seemed to feel the same way.

Once the light broke over the top of the mountains, midway through the morning, they both relaxed a fraction. Kiem was trying not to brood and also trying not to mention anything that would make the stress worse. He and Jainan traded comments and absent half jokes that didn’t really lead on from each other.

By the afternoon Kiem was feeling the walking in the complaints from his thigh muscles, though it was hard to distinguish the aches from the bruises he’d taken in the crash. He came to a halt as they crested another ridge. “Break?”

A weight lifted from his back as Jainan took the backpack. They’d been trading it all day. Kiem slipped out of the straps without argument. “Sorry,”

Jainan said. “I should have noticed. What hurts?”

Kiem made a face. “Nothing important,” he said. “Twinge in my hip. It’ll hold.”

“Sit down,” Jainan said abruptly.

Kiem was familiar with Jainan’s way of offering concern by now and was

touched, but that seemed like a bad idea. “It’s going to be hard to get up again,”

he said. “How about we just stop for a moment? View in a million, right?” He gestured ahead of them, where the ridge they had painstakingly labored up dropped away again into a series of valleys and more snowbound peaks. “I mean, apart from all those other ones like it that we’ve seen.”

“I have filled my quota of beautiful mountain scenes for the year,” Jainan said. “Possibly for the rest of my life.” Nevertheless, he joined Kiem on the promontory, a step back from the edge.

There was a long silence while they both contemplated the view and the relief of not walking, the wind occasionally gusting around them. Kiem rolled his shoulders.

“Kiem,” Jainan said.

“Yeah?”