Ammonite

“That’s an affirmative.” Pause. “Hello? Hello?”

Static crackled.

“Damn!” Da

Lu Wai stood, bowed slightly to her di

“What’s going on?”

Da

“You look ill. Ha

Da

Lu Wai came back at a run. Her face was set and pale.“Commander, I couldn’t get through. There’s nothing but static.”

Marghe crawled from the old herder’s cot. The morning sky was blue, but the air was tight and hot. Ripe. There was another storm waiting, somewhere. But not today. Today they would walk to Holme Valley.

They walked steadily. Halfway up a rise of sun‑dried grass, Thenike stopped abruptly and turned her head this way and that, listening.

“What do you hear?” Not the other storm, surely. There was no shelter here. Marghe’s face was still sore from the wind and the rain of the previous night, and her shoulders ached from hunching away from the crashing thunder and lightning.

“I don’t know,” the viajera said. “Something…”

Marghe listened, thought she heard something, lost it, then heard it again: a faint up‑and‑down hum. She knew that sound. “It’s a sled.” A sled. They would be eating lunch with Da

The sled was heading due south, and moving fast.

“Hoi!” Marghe shouted and waved her arms. The canopied sled turned in a wide hissing curve that flattened the grass. It did not slow down. Marghe and Thenike leapt out of the way.

The sled slammed to a halt and a Mirror leapt out, eyes wild, face smeared with dirt. Marghe crouched. This was not right. She rolled to her left and something thudded into the turf by her feet. A piece of wood. Like an arrow.

The Mirror was sobbing, trying to fit another quarrel to her crossbow.

Marghe came back to her feet, arms spread, ready to roll again. A Mirror with a crossbow? She did not have time to wonder at it: the Mirror was raising the bow to her shoulder again, shouting and crying. “Don’t move, you bitches. Just don’t move. Don’t move. Don’t move. Don’t–”

“Chauhan!” Another Minor stepped carefully from the sled. Her hair was gray. One arm hung loose; one pointed a weapon steadily at Marghe.

Chauhan looked confused. The crossbow wavered.

“Chauhan, lower your weapon.” The older Mirror came closer. Marghe could see how much that arm hurt. “Identify yourselves.”

This Mirror seemed in reasonable command of her faculties. Marghe lifted both arms, spread her legs slightly, waited for Thenike to copy her. The Mirrors were nervous, and hurt. She and Thenike looked like natives. Better act like one, until they calmed down a little. “We have no weapons except a small knife each. I am Marghe Amun, a viajera out of Ollfoss, come to speak with Acting Commander Ha

“Twissel.” She pointed her weapon at Thenike. “And this?”

“I am Thenike. We bear soestre.”

“What?” Chauhan said. “Is that a weapon?” Her crossbow was back at her shoulder.

“Chauhan!” Then, more quietly, “Chauhan, go tend to Dogias.”

“Dogias?” Marghe dropped her arms; Twissel motioned for her to put them up again. “Letitia Dogias?”

Twissel studied them both a moment, then nodded once.

“Was it the storm? Did she have a… I mean, did she… Is she all right?”

“No,” Twissel said bluntly. “I think she’s dying.”

“Dying? Letitia? What happened?”

“Natives. Ten killed. No, keep still until I say different.”

Marghe stopped in midstride and made an effort to not shout at the Mirror. “And Lu Wai?”

“The lieutenant wasn’t with us.”

“But you do have a medic?”

“Dead.”

“Then let us see her, Twissel. Thenike here might be able to help. Please.”

“I’ll need your knives first. Take them from your belts, two fingers only. Drop them on the grass.” Marghe felt a flash of anger and realized this reminded her of the way Aoife had treated her. But this was not Tehuantepec. She tossed down her knife. “Good. Kick them over here.”

The sled, all alloys and plastics, felt hard and strange to Marghe. It was air‑conditioned and cool, but the smells were still there: alien, manufactured materials mingling with blood and excretia and rank sweat. Chauhan was crouched in the cab, blank‑faced. They squeezed past her and into the covered flatbed.

Two women lay side by side on inflated medical pallets. Thenike immediately knelt by the nearest, a blond‑haired woman in partial armor.

If Marghe had not known that the other was Letitia Dogias, she was not sure she would have recognized her. Her memory insisted that the communications technician was vibrant, alive, full of irreverence and crackling energy; she was not this, this thing breathing stertorously through an open mouth with a hole in her stomach that oozed dark, dark blood. She smelled terrible.

“She’s dead.”

For one hanging moment, Marghe thought Thenike meant Dogias, then realized she was talking about the other one, the Mirror. The viajera folded the woman’s hands on her breast, closed her eyes, had to use both hands to lift her jaw and close her mouth.

“What was your companion’s name?” Thenike asked Twissel.

“Foster. Alice Foster.”

“Then we should bury Alice Foster.”

“No. We have to take her back.”

“The heat…”

“We have a bag.”

Thenike looked at Marghe, who nodded. “Then put her in a bag.” She motioned Marghe away from Dogias and knelt.

Marghe marveled at her calm poise; she took Dogias’s pulse, listened to her breathing, lifted the tunic away from the awful wound in her stomach, pinched some skin and sniffed it, all as matter‑of‑factly as tuning a musical instrument. “I’ll need to get her outside in the light and air. Then I want water, and clean cloths, bandages if you have any. And I’ll need my knife back.”

Twissel must have been as impressed as Marghe with Thenike’s examination; the Mirror handed Thenike her knife without comment, then picked up one end of the pallet.

When they had Letitia outside, Thenike motioned Marghe over to the pallet lying on the grass. Letitia looked even worse in natural light. “I’ll do what I can here, but you must help the other one. Chauhan. She needs to be busy.” She opened the medical roll Twissel had found and picked out a swab. “She needs to stop thinking about what happened, just for a little while.”

Foster was already stiffening. It took three of them to strip her armor and clothes, her dog tag and wristcom, and get her inside the body bag. Twissel, with her injured arm, could not do much.

It was Foster’s left hand Marghe would always remember. It stuck out awkwardly, and Marghe had to wrestle it into the slick black plastic bag: she noticed that two fingernails were broken, that Foster had chewed her cuticles, that there was a pale band of skin around the wrist where she had worn her wristcom. The mark of civilization, Marghe thought, then looked at her own, evenly ta

With the motor off, the sled began to warm. The smell got worse. Marghe left the Mirrors scrubbing at the flatbed with bundles of spare uniform dipped in water and alcohol and went outside.