“Oh,” the android said, after the briefest of pauses. It glanced back out to the dark waters. “I was just thinking; given that there appeared to be eight or nine people in the inflatable, and only seven are swimming back to shore, and what could well be one or two bodies are floating where the boat went down…” It turned to face her again. “… I believe I have just been party to a murder; two murders, perhaps.”

She was silent. The android looked back out to the water again, then back at her.

“How do you feel about that?” she asked.

It made a shrug. “I am not sure yet,” it said, sounding puzzled. “I shall have to think about it.”

She inspected its image in the nightsight.

This close up, people in a nightsight glowed vibrant and gaudy and obvious. The android was a vague light-sketch in comparison, its body only fractionally warmer than its surroundings.

“I’m sorry,” she said eventually.

“What for?” it asked her.

“Involving you in all this.”

“I was delighted to be asked,” it reminded her.

“I know,” she said, “but still.”

“Please, don’t be,” it told her. “This is all… extremely interesting for me. I am recording much of what has been happening recently at maximum saturation for later replay, enjoyment and analysis. I get to do that very rarely. It is novel. I am having fun.” It made a human gesture with its hands, lifting them briefly, palms up, from the sides of its body.

“Fun,” she said, smiling slightly.

“In a sense,” Feril said.

She shook her head, looking down at the faint, seeping warmth of the forest floor.

“Shall I make my reconnoitring expedition?” the android asked. “Shall I go to the head of the fjord?”

“Not yet,” she said. She turned to look at the weak, almost transparent signature of their fire’s column of rising smoke, thirty metres away in the forest. “I’d like you to keep watch tonight, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course not,” it said. Feril turned to look back at the fjord again. “You are worried that they still have another boat and may try to repeat the apparent attack we have just thwarted.”

“Exactly,” she smiled. “Spoken like one of the team.” She laughed lightly. “Well, sort of.”

Feril drew itself back a little. “Thank you,” it said. It nodded up the slope. “I shall keep watch from there, where I can see the fjord and the immediate vicinity.”

They walked that way. The android turned and sank down on its haunches at the point it determined gave it the best sight lines. “Ah ha,” it said.

She looked too.

There were two fires burning on the other side of the fjord; two tiny, hard-yellow specks vibrating in the granular darkness. She took the nightsights off and could still just see them from the side of her eyes.

She put the sights back on. “They’ve made more distance than we have,” she said.

“About three kilometres,” Feril said.

“Hmm,” she said. “We still have one heat-seeking missile left. We could give them an unpleasant good-night present.”

“Indeed,” Feril said. “Though the fires could be decoys.”

She watched the distant fires. “How far have they got to walk to the end of the fjord?”

“One hundred and nine kilometres,” Feril said. “There are two small fjords off the main one on their side.”

“Though they probably still have an inflatable.”

“Yes; they could use that to ferry themselves across the mouths of the side-fjords, though it might be vulnerable to attack with the machine gun.”

“Hmm,” she said, and yawned. “Oh well. Speaking personally, it’s time for bed.” She looked down into the hollow where the small tent lay inflated. It was supposedly comfortably two-person and could take three at a pinch. It was fit for four only if everybody was on very friendly terms indeed.

“Oh,” she said. “Would you like a gun while you’re on guard?”

“I think not.” Feril watched her yawn again. “Good-night, Lady Sharrow,” it said. It sounded very formal.

“Good-night,” she said.

Cenuij sat in the burning truck, looking baleful and sighing a lot. The flames and the exploding ammunition didn’t seem to harm him. He was cradling something in his arms wrapped in a shawl. She recognised the shawl; it was one of the family’s birthing shawls. She had been wrapped in that when she’d been a baby, as had her own mother, and hers before her… She wondered where Cenuij had got it, and worried that the baby inside the shawl might be harmed by the flames of the burning truck.

She shouted to Cenuij but he didn’t seem to hear her.

When she tried to move round the burning truck to look into the shawl and see who the baby was, Cenuij moved as well, swivelling and hunching up so that his shoulder hid the infant.

She threw something at him; it bounced off his head and he turned angrily; he threw the shawl and what it held straight at her and she put out her arms to catch it as the shawl unwrapped itself from the flying bundle and fell to the flames. It was the Lazy Gun she caught.

The shawl burned brightly in the wreckage, then lifted and rose flagrantly into the sky like a lasered bird.

She rocked the Gun in her arms, singing quietly.

She awoke to the stale, half-repellent, half-comforting smell of human bodies. She sat up and the dream faded from her memory. She felt stiff and tired; the seemingly soft ground under the tent had concealed rocks or roots or something that had made lying down uncomfortable, no matter what position she had assumed. Every time she had rolled over she had woken up, and-packed in amongst the others, sleeping equally lightly-she had probably woken them up each time too, just as they had her. She was cold on the side facing the flank of the tent; the single blanket they had between them had disappeared from over her early on in the night. She made a mental note in future to accept the boys’ offer to take the two outside positions. The plaster-covered wound on her hand throbbed dully.

She clambered over the others and opened the tent to a bitterly cold morning and the sound of wind roaring in the tree-tops. She stretched and grunted, feeling hungry and wondering what the hell they were going to use for toilet paper. Feril waved from its position at the top of the bank.

She replaced the plaster on her hand and poured more antiseptic over it, aware she was using up the supplies in the medical kit faster than she’d have liked.

It seemed to take a long time to get everybody up and moving and ready to set off; she had the dispiriting impression that the Solipsists, for all their martial eccentricity, would have been up at dawn and long since set out on their march; singing soldierly songs and beating drums, in her imagination.

They struck camp at last and headed away through the forest beneath the swaying, roaring tops of the trees. Their bellies rumbled. Breakfast had been a quarter of a foodslab each; they had seven of the bland but filling bars left.

The fjord was a wind-ruffled, sometimes white-flecked expanse of grey through the dark trunks to their right.

They walked through the day. It rained once for an hour, spattering light, torn drops through breaks in the canopy above. Miz wanted to stop and shelter, but they kept on going. They took turns to walk near the edge of the trees, keeping watch on the far shore, but didn’t see anything. They had spied a few birds, glimpsed movements high in tree branches and heard plenty of quick, tiny rustles in the undergrowth, but encountered no large animals.

Lunch was half a foodslab each, and all the icy stream water they could stomach. They had to drink from their cupped hands; Sharrow felt hers going numb after the second scoop. By the time she had finished drinking, the only thing she could feel was the cut in her left hand, still throbbing.

The android sat patiently by the stream. Zefla was down at the shore; Dloan had disappeared into the woods and Miz sat on an exposed root, re-tying his boots and grumbling.