She leaned back on her elbows, kicking a branch into the fire with the heel of her boot. The flames protested briefly, coughing and sputtering on the damp wood, but slowly licked their way back into a crackling cone. The damp hadn’t quite crept through the thick cloak she’d laid out onto the packed snow, and her carefully tended fire kept her organics warm and supple. She kept her blades close to her body, discouraging the formation of frost that could jam the daggers in their scabbards in a time of desperate need.
A hook-beaked bird, perched on the buckle of her haversack, cocked his head to one side and keened quietly. The assassin stirred, shuffling a tattered scrap of blue cloth from her knees. “Bad hunting today, Marcus,” she agreed, brushing the small raptor from her pack. She unthreaded the buckle and produced a worn parcel of waxed paper containing a few dismal scraps of dried fish. The bird hesitated for a moment, yellow eyes glittering in the firelight, and then tore into the flaking meat.
“It wasn’t always this way,” she lamented to the treetops blackening the night sky. Just beyond the grasping branches, Ryjel gleamed bigger and brighter than the surrounding stars. The bird listened, scattering morsels from his curved beak. “There was—”
Even after 500 years she plainly remembered his skin, like the creamy underside of a pre-beam flower petal, and the gold freckles speckling the bridge of his nose, tips of his ears, his shoulders. He practically glowed beneath the sun, radiant in its presence, a testament to a life full of verdant pleasures and warm afternoons. Free from endless night, the klaxon of radiation alarms.
She tracked him through the fungal forest, her figure a flickering green shadow darting between the stalks. He made steady progress, stopping occasionally for a cube or fluids. She noted the halberd lashed to his back, calculated its potential reach and how quickly he could draw and swing 180 degrees. (Assuming, of course, that it was an unmodified blade.) She counted the number of steps he walked between each break. Though he was wearing what looked like a full suit of duratyne armor, it didn’t seem to slow him down. What was his purpose? What sort of sun-sucking Ryjellian planned a camping trip to the Frill? He was an enigma brazenly striding through the wilds.
On the fourth day he stopped and made a proper camp on the bank of a fetid stream. She watched him unhook a complicated baldric, lay the massive halberd beside the fire, and remove each piece of armor, the fine plates retracting and collapsing in precise lines. She squinted. Duratyne that expensive could have been equipped with optical camouflage. It took one to know one, after all. Even without the armor, he cast a thick shadow.
When he started humming, she froze, fingers curling around the hilts of her daggers. Something about the melody tweaked an old ghost in her brain. But he kept moving, ducking to pull a handful of bright red fruit and a half-plucked bird from a small sack. He arranged these over a crumpled foil, waited for the flames to settle, and shoved the foil into the glowing orange coals.
Before he could straighten up, she melted out of stalks, disengaging her optical camouflage at the precise moment the tip of her poisoned dagger pressed into the back of his neck. An oily green tattoo wicked into his skin.
“You’re a long way from your kisk, friend.” The second stiletto eased into the flesh above his tailbone. In two neat motions she could sever his spinal cord. He didn’t move, and she leaned in to her blades. “Any final words?”
A beat of silence.
“Why do they call you the red fox?”
By the Ring. She stiffened in alarm, and he moved then, a slight pivot of his shoulders and neck, letting the dagger carve a furrow through his deeply tanned skin. Blood welled over the blade and spilled onto his tunic, beading over the fabric. Beautiful, she realized, with a growing sense of unease. So drenched in melanin he probably could have photosynthesized. Envy briefly tempered her anxiety.
“You were always such a sneaky little thing.” His grin met her mismatched eyes.
“Marcus,” she whispered, snatching her daggers away. She sheathed them at her hips without breaking his stare, wondering at the sharp angles of his face. “How did you—”
Unsteadily, the tranquilizing poison singing through his veins, he rose to his feet and tugged his bloodied tunic straight. “When I heard the name, it tickled my memory,” he began, hazel eyes examining her critically. They’d been darker the last time she’d seen him, just like his hair. He was a gilded, resplendent version of his former self. “Ancient by now, but I placed it eventually. Who else would it be?” And if the name was on the lips of Ryjellians, there’d been inquiries. Again.
“Your wings would fetch a fair price on Ryjel, Zorina.”
“You’re here to kill me, then.” Her claws itched toward her hips.
“Maybe.” He paused for a beat. “But I’m not foolish enough to chase bounties.” He laughed. It was a distinctly melodious sound, and nothing like she remembered. What had happened to the rough and tumble young man she’d fought beside so long ago? He was all angles and carefully veiled strength now—a threat, she reminded herself. Ryjellian.
“You’ve managed to gain a modicum of wisdom in the past five hundred thirty years. I never would have imagined,” she joked, swallowing hard. Quantifying the distance between their past and present unwound something hard and cruel beneath her ribs. The feeling blossomed from a seed of bitter regret, digging into her lungs and pushing up the back of her throat.
“You look—I don’t know—different. I mean, have you put on weight or something?”
Zorina choked down a hiccup and threw a shaking, balled fist at his face. Even slowed by the poison, it wasn’t difficult for him to catch her sinewy wrist in one of his large hands. Ah, hands. With fingers that tapered into half-moon, chewed up nails. Her claws suddenly felt monstrous. He brought her up short, peering at her face, and stroked the inside of her wrist with his thumb. “You found me,” he offered, flashing a bright white strip of teeth.
“You’re in the Frill,” she spat. “I didn’t find shit. You were looking.”
“I thought you were dead.”
“And yet here you are,” he started, touching the nape of her neck where a scarlet mane tapered down her spine, “the scourge of Forward Command. New enemy, old tricks. Nothing really changes.” He seemed to ignore the talons, the green cast of her skin, the preternaturally sharp teeth. She could get rid of him then and there, she knew. It would be a simple matter to gut him with the concealed knife in her bracer and watch him bleed out as he gazed longingly into her eyes. She clenched her jaw.
“What do you want, Marcus?”
“What the Beam never gave me a chance to finish.”
Later, she’d remember his hands the most, the way they gently stroked her cold skin and left behind heated fingerprints. In those moments, she was sure he’d marked her with an indelible ink crying her betrayal: Lover of Light, Mistress of Ryjel. She remembered how he’d carelessly draped his blue cloak over them both and tucked the edges around her body, how he’d nestled her close to his breast and fallen asleep. He’d been a veritable furnace, a source of warmth she hadn’t felt since she’d had the sun. Just before what counted for dawn, she’d kicked the cloak to one side, craving the crisp air’s relief. An innocuous looking flim pad slid from a concealed pocket, hit a damp rock, and turned on. It had immediately started broadcasting orders. An impossible order.
The red fox never asked any questions.
In the present, Zorina glared at the faint ring arcing across the night sky. “There was a man with the keys to my past, my feathered little friend.” She paused, fingering the tattered cloak. “And I killed him.”