"Trying to start a fashion, boys? You won't get new shirts when winter comes, you know. You'll freeze your stupid asses off."

"Yes, sir." Kieran let the struggle to keep a straight face show; he'd look like that no matter what his reason for having torn the sleeves off Ash's shirt. He wasn't nervous yet; there was no way for his face to betray the fact that a scrap from one of Ash's sleeves was holding a flap of hammered-flat spoon over the lock mechanism of their door, poised to pivot when the tier was opened, and that Kieran had just heard it clink perfectly into place. The guard glanced between them, alike in sleevelessness, and at the rag of blue-gray cloth Ash was wearing as a bandanna, and let it go.

"Go on, get in line."

Ash muttered, "You mean it gets cold here ever?"

"Sure it does. Freeze the tits off a statue," Kieran replied.

"No talking! Straighten it out, there."

As the line moved out, Kieran darted a glance back, but couldn't see the rag or the spoon. That was good. No one else would see it either.

Padding barefoot along the stone, Kieran picked a particularly gritty bit of corridor and did a startled shuffle-step, went the rest of the way at a half-limp. Once inside the mess hall, he dropped out of line to lean against a table. As he pretended to pry a splinter out of his foot, he watched Ash go through the supper line in his usual place. He kept up the splinter act just long enough to be last in line.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ash leave his tray and walk straight to Sona's table. Not so obvious, idiot! It looks planned! But neither of the two guards near the door reacted. Come to think of it, people really did plan that kind of thing, brooded for days before calling someone out, so Ash's awkwardness was right in character. The white boy bent over Sona, talking in a low voice, and Sona jerked upright with a look of angry suspicion.

Come on, come on, take the bait. It didn't look like Sona was going for it. Kieran was at the end of the line, the last lump of boiled vegetables was being dumped on his tray. If the distraction didn't happen, today was a no-go. If it happened late, this whole part of the plan would have to be reworked before they could try again. The cook shoved the ladle back in the pot of vegetables and turned away. Now, damn it! Say anything, just get him mad already! It's not like the man is a fucking saint --

Ash stepped back and threw his hands up, giving in -- then suddenly flicked Sona's tray into his lap with a nasty smirk. In an instant, the Iavaian was off the bench and swinging.

Perfect. Kieran didn't watch the rest. In that first moment of noise and sudden movement, when all eyes automatically jerked to the disturbance, Kieran's hands went to work. One to the coffee urn, one into the back of his collar where the opium was hidden in a ball of rag. Open the urn, shake out the rag; close the urn, hide the rag. The whole operation took two seconds, tops.

He drew off a tiny splash of coffee into his cup, to keep anyone from remembering a suspiciously clean cup after the fact. He turned around just in time to see a bloody-nosed Ash floor Sona with a beautiful right backfist to the jaw.

The guards hadn't moved; a glance showed one slapping the other on the arm, waggling fingers in the universal sign for 'pay up.' Kieran grinned, lengthening his stride to cut off a handful of inmates who looked as if they'd decided to play too.

"That's enough, Ashes," he said.

Ash turned to him, wiping blood from his face, eyes shining. "How was that, Teach?"

"You won. That's all that ever counts. Now go eat your damn supper." He shoved his tray at Ash. To Sona, he held out a hand. "Not dead yet, I hope?"

"Unfortunately." Sona ignored the offered hand. He used the edge of the table to haul himself upright, rubbing his jaw. "You put him up to that?"

"Wasn't me who stepped on his glasses. Give people something to prove, they prove it." With that, Kieran went to join Ash.

"Did you see that?" Ash greeted him with a huge smile. A smile on Ash's face after the past few morose weeks seemed like a lucky omen. "I kicked his ass!"

"Good work. Keep your head, now. This is where it might get sticky."

Ash leaned in close. "You think they saw you?"

"No. But watch my back anyway."

"I see them. They're just standing there."

"One of them bet on you, you know."

"I wonder how much he won? Not that it'll do him any..." The redhead's joy at winning the fight crashed into the fact that people were going to die because of it. Kieran felt sorry for the softhearted little twit. If there'd been a way they could do this without killing, Kieran would have done it that way, for Ash's sake.

"Yeah, okay. Let's just hope they're all in a coffee mood tonight." And that the coffee's bitterness hides the taste. And that I put in enough, and it dissolves fast enough, and they don't start dropping until they're at their posts, because if they get replaced right away this was all for nothing.

He had to wrestle with himself not to stare at the coffee urn. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched it the whole period. No inmates went back for a second cup -- they seldom did, the stuff tasted like turpentine and they had no reason to stay awake. Halfway through supper, a cook opened the urn and poured in a fresh pot, and didn't seem to see anything amiss. Kieran imagined the swirl of boiling coffee stirring the dissolving drug, melting it into a potent soup of sleeping death.

"God," Ash said, "I'm so nervous."

"You're doing fine. Just remember to be a sulky bitch like you've been the past few weeks."

"Asshole." Ash made the insult sound affectionate.

"Eat. You don't want to do this on an empty stomach."

"I'm too nervous. I'll puke."

"No you won't, because I'll kick your ass if you do."

They both managed to force their food down. The bell rang, and they were let into the yard. Kieran imagined he could taste the heaviness of the impending storm, but that was wishful thinking. Through the side of the fence that faced west, he could barely make out that the mountains looked a shade smoother, a hair closer than usual.

"Are you sure --" Ash began.

"Yes. Quit talking about it."

"Sorry."

"Now we're going to practice like we always do."

"I'll screw up."

"So?" But he didn't need Ash acting weird, missing moves he'd had by heart yesterday. "We'll do kicks. Yours suck, so nobody'll be surprised if you do it wrong."

"Oh, thanks."

"Don't mention it. Floating stance. Bend your knees more, weight over your back leg. Good. Snap kicks, right here. And try not to break my hand, I'm going to need it."

He'd been right: Ash's kicks were awful, and no one noticed that it was because he was nervous.

"You kick like a constipated priest," Kieran said after a while.

"Well," Ash huffed between awkward efforts to reach Kieran's head-high hand, "you smell like one and the southeast tower's empty have a look."

Mentally congratulating Ash's even tone, which no one would hear even if they heard it, he circled under the guise of making Ash pivot. The kid was right; there was no one up there. The swivel gun was unattended, pointing at the sky. The other tower was still manned, and the guard there didn't seem alarmed. Those guards shouldn't have eaten yet -- could they be already shortstaffed? Better than he could possibly have hoped. He just knew something was going to go wrong to compensate.

Time passed. Kieran got tired, didn't have much strength to spare after getting zapped by the Director, so he stopped the lesson. There was nothing to do then but wait.

"Is it just me," he heard someone nearby comment, "or is it starting to get dark?"

"We shoulda been inside by now," was the puzzled answer.

There were no clocks, but the sun had fallen behind the cloud bank over the mountains, which at best guess made it nearly an hour later than they usually went in. Kieran imagined the confusion that must be occurring inside, as the prison administrators tried to compensate for the droves of guards that must be falling ill right about now. It rankled that this part of his plan's success or failure was invisible to him.

A careful study of the guard schedules had led him to decide that those who ate their supper after the inmates were a combination of two shifts. Both the afternoon people going off duty and the night people coming on would have a chance to sample his special recipe. Depending on how many came down sick, there might be almost no one in the towers or on the gates outside, because when missing half their staff their best option would be to put what guards they had as close to the prisoners as possible. Where Kieran could get at them. He hoped.

When the prisoners were finally let back inside, their escort wore white uniforms instead of tan. Kieran silently rejoiced. His brew must have been both potent and popular; they were so understaffed they'd had to pull people out of Testing just to get the inmates out of the yard.

They filed back into their cells. The White Watch men stood warily to their unaccustomed duty while a lone, nervous, tan-shirted guard went about hauling the levers that closed the cells. Kieran smirked at the Watchmen as he passed them. They couldn't use their magic inside the wards any more than he could. They were just men, in here, and they could smell a predator. One shifted his rifle to cover Kieran; the other stupidly stared at the business with the levers. Kieran hoped no one took advantage of this slackness to start a riot, because killing these idiots now wouldn't get anyone out of the cell block. But the only advantage the prisoners took was to talk and laugh while they were locked up, though they were supposed to be silent until the doors were closed. Only Kieran and Ash didn't have anything to say. They avoided each other's faces until, with a familiar clank and grind, the bars closed them in once more.

It was torture to wait until all the guards had gone down to the end of the tier, out of earshot. When he was sure it was safe, Kieran wedged his foot in the bars and hopped up to see how his clever little mechanism had worked.

It hadn't.

"What's wrong?" Ash backed away from the look on Kieran's face. "What is it? Oh, hell. I told you the lock bar was too heavy. It bent, didn't it?"

"Shut up." Kieran sat heavily on his bunk and put his head in his hands. "Shit. Shit. Well, there goes everything."

With his face in his palms, he couldn't see Ash's expression, and he didn't want to. He didn't want to see his misery mirrored there. He didn't look up even when the bed sagged under Ash's weight and a hand landed on his shoulder.

"Look, Kieran..." Ash's voice was careful. Humoring him, or afraid of him. Like everyone else. How could he have ever mistaken that for respect? "We'll think of something. Maybe the sickness dodge will work after all, what with everyone going down --"

"They'll know what it is by then. We have to wait for the storm, remember? If they can see us they'll gun us down, you know that." Kieran jerked his shoulder, trying to dislodge Ash's hand, but failed. "We're fucked. I fucked us. Quit trying to be nice about it."

"I'm not. Okay? Kieran, look at me. At least we're taking a bunch of them down with us, right?"

"Now you sound like me. Stop it."

"Kieran."

"I said stop!" Kieran forgot about not looking, but the expression he found on Ash's face was not the one he'd feared. Far from being miserable, Ash was burning bright again. The pale blue eyes were all the way alive, at this worst of times to lose detachment Ash was completely present. "Don't you care?" Kieran snapped.

"I don't believe it's over. Something will come up. We'll think of something. We're smart, we're smarter than they are."

With a shaky breath he regretted letting Ash hear, Kieran reached down behind the bed. He pulled a sliver of sharpened spoon metal from its hiding place inside the mattress and showed it briefly before palming it. "I'll send you off whenever you're ready, then do myself. I can do it so it won't hurt. I just want to hear that storm first."

Ash looked startled. He shook his head.

"Think about it, Ashes. When my 'supplier' talks, when it all comes out... they don't waste pain, around here. They'll probably make me kill you, then keep me alive to study how I did it. If I'm going to kill you, I don't want to have to live with it more than thirty seconds." He stopped, shocked at himself. Ash didn't speak for a long moment, biting his lip and searching Kieran's eyes. Then he nodded.

"Not until I tell you," Ash said. "I want to know for sure there's no hope first. Promise."

"I promise. Not until you tell me to."

There was nothing to say after that. They watched each other's faces. Kieran found himself oddly detached, caught by the complexities of iridescence in Ash's eyes, lulled into a kind of peace.

The lights went off. They sat together in the dark, not speaking or moving. Kieran heard the guards on the stairs, meaning they were walking both sides, just three guards for the whole place, but it didn't matter anymore. He thought of how they'd been planning to do it; sliding open their door under cover of the storm's noise, slipping out to catch the guards unawares, opening the cells and in the safety of a mob swarming through the mess hall into the yard, over the fence, capturing the towers, opening the gate, escaping into the wild dark while the rain erased their tracks...

It wasn't going to happen.

I'm going to die in this place, he thought. But I gave myself up for dead months ago. All this has been borrowed time. Is there anything I regret?

"Ashes," he whispered.

Ash's hand tightened on his shoulder briefly.

"Ashes, I read your diary. The other part of the book -- I've been reading it for weeks."

There was no reaction. Ash continued to watch him without expression.

"So I know how you think you feel about me. And, um, I think I want to apologize or something. For not being who you think I am. I know I have a pretty face, it confuses people into thinking I'm pretty inside. I'm not. I'm all rotten in there. And I'm sorry for that."

Slowly, Ash's hand slid from his shoulder. "What is this, a deathbed confession? I'm not giving up yet."

"Don't tell me you're not mad."

"Livid. Mortified." He just sounded tired. "Kieran, I think I get why you can't believe I might be right about you. But I'm right. You're not nice, I know, you're a killer. But your mind, your soul, is beautiful. Like a storm is beautiful, like the desert is."

Kieran gave a short sigh. "I can't believe we're having this conversation. I know, I started it," he added to forestall protest. After all, it was something like a deathbed confession, even if Ash chose to believe they might still somehow escape. "I'm grateful, I guess. That you see something in me. But you don't understand, Ashes, I'm dead inside. Cold. Cold like a dead thing."

"I could warm you."

Anger sparked. "You think it's always cheap for me? You think I'm cheap? Say something nice and get it for free?" He had to take a calming breath to keep his voice to a whisper. "We're going to die tonight, I'm trying to be honest. Not that it'll keep me out of Hell. I just want to be honest right now, okay?"

"Okay. I'm sorry. You know I didn't mean it like that." Though the light was dim, he could see the shine in Ash's eyes, the tremble of his lower lip as words were discarded before they formed. Eventually Ash went on, "I wish I had my Talent right now. Then I'd know if you wanted me to believe you or not." He breathed a faint laugh. "It's a relief to have it out in the open. But it seems so much smaller, when it's not a secret. Hello, yes, I'm an invert too, and I want you desperately, I might be in love with you, is that all right? It seems... stupid."

"It's not stupid. I'm just sorry I can't deserve it more, is all."

"I won't waste time arguing whether you deserve it. I just want to see you smile and mean it, once. What do you want right now?"

"I want to leave," Kieran said. He heard sullenness in the words, the useless petulance, and perspective opened for him. He'd known it forever: nothing matters when you're going to die anyway. Why were they bothering to talk at all?

He reached, despite everything surprised that Ash didn't flinch, and brushed a tendril of dirty hair away from Ash's lips, which moved under his fingertips as Ash turned to chase the touch, eyes flicking closed. A hitch in Ash's breath caught Kieran in the chest like a bullet. He swallowed hard, heart suddenly hammering. He bent and covered Ash's mouth with his own.

Something strange ran between them in that kiss, some current of new energy. Contact shocked him; with its immediacy, with how incredibly good it felt to be touched, close, wanted. It hurt, it was delicious, it made him weak, he needed it more than breath.

He pushed Ash down on the bunk, one hand knotted in the soft curls at the back of Ash's neck and the other sliding down his hip. Ash's arms were around his waist, clinging desperately. As his weight bore down, pinning Ash to the mattress, Ash groaned into his mouth and shuddered all over, squirming, aroused beyond bearing and ignorant of what to do about it. Kieran released Ash from the kiss and moved to graze teeth along Ash's jaw and neck, making him gasp.

At first, the thunder was buried under the pounding of his heart; the taste of the skin of Ash's throat interested him more. When he noticed the hiss of rain, it seemed only fitting, a background for the storm in his blood. His fingers were trying the drawstring of Ash's trousers, making the muscles of Ash's stomach jump in interesting ways. Nothing else seemed remotely interesting, compared to that. It was the hail that got his attention. It sounded like gunshots.

Half reluctant, half irrationally relieved, he pulled away by stages until he could look at Ash's face. He wasn't sure what he was going to say, if he even meant to talk at all, but the option of speech was lost in a shock of breaking glass.

There were shouts, reminding him that they were not alone, that he had been about to undress Ash in full view of anyone who happened to walk past; more crashes sounded, and time returned in the clatter of debris striking the cell block floor. Lightning showed faces pressed against bars, eyes turned up, mouths round and black, rain and bigger things frozen in midair. The next flash was longer; he saw a jagged clump of ice the size of his fist hit the floor and blow like a grenade.

And behind all that noise, he sensed a different kind of sound. It reached him through the soles of his feet. The whole mountain hummed with it.

He took Ash by the arms and pulled him off the bed. Ash came trustingly, though he kept looking back at the spectacle of breakage in the middle of the cell block. They crouched in the back corner, against the wall. Kieran was grinning so hard it made his face hurt. "Come on," he growled through his teeth. "Come on, rip it down."

"What is it?" Ash shouted over the rising wind. Deep inside as they were, it was blowing into their cell and it was hot -- night in the desert and the wind was hot, and smelled burnt and wet at once. Rather than try to answer over its howling, Kieran wrapped Ash in his arms and pulled him down. Ash seemed to get the idea, tried to make himself small.

The wind's noise took on rhythm. It was a harmonic throb now, thrumming in his bones. It sounded like a race between the nine fastest trains in Hell, as heard from inside an oil drum the size of a cathedral. It reached inside Kieran, that sound, and shook him, more alien than the stars and at the same time just like coming home. Tornado. A big one, a huge one. What a wonderful way to die! Things were flying around -- paper, clothing, broken glass -- the air was cloudy with dust and mist, mud pounded to a vapor. Kieran bent over Ash's head, not trusting the northerner to protect his own eyes and lungs. He squeezed his own eyes shut against the abrasive air, snatched a handful of his hair over his mouth, wishing he'd thought to grab a blanket to cover them. It was too late now. Even in the back of the cell, the wind was buffeting them painfully.

The floor and wall gave a series of shudders, more tangible than audible. Kieran's ears popped. There was a dull, crunching thud, and everything got louder.

Time lost meaning. Everything was happening at once. A fine crack ran across the floor right between his knees, and he knew the storm would go on until everything was ground to dust. It felt right. He was aroused by the way Ash shivered against him, and that was not out of place either. The noise was infinite. There was no end to wind. His mind shuddered, and he knew that the wards were about to go, but they didn't.

And then the wind was not so loud, and nothing else was falling. The air went cold, and then there was only sighing rain, and distant rolling thunder. Darker than usual, because most of the lamps had smashed, the cell block looked strange.

He realized, abstractedly, that he was sorry it was over. Uncurling himself carefully, he checked Ash for damage. A few scratches, nothing even really bleeding. Ash was watching him expectantly, caught between fear and excitement. In the weird light, he saw with dismay that the cell was intact. They were still locked in. Voices were beginning to murmur, rising in astonishment; from the piles of debris on the floor, from the rain pouring in, he understood that the roof of the central area had been torn completely off.

"Holy shit," he said. His voice sounded strange in his aching ears.

Ash's mouth moved, and the words reached him from a long way off: "I thought it was going to kill us."

A flash of thought, his brain restarting -- hope bubbled up, unfamiliar and urgent. He launched himself at the front of the cell, scrabbling among the debris, and came up with a daggerlike shard of glass ten inches long. It was scary-looking, but not very sharp. He handed it to Ash. "Hold this."

Taking it, Ash was all eagerness. "You have an idea?"

Kieran couldn't find his makeshift knife. There was no time. He selected the thinnest sliver of skylight he could find and sawed it across the skin of his ankle, high up where his pants would cover it.

"What are you --" Ash stopped when he saw what Kieran was doing, ripping the cheap cotton of his shirt, smearing the blood on his hands and chest. Ash pressed the sharp tip of the shard against the floor until it broke off flat, held the larger piece out for Kieran to spatter. "You want me to yell for help."

"You're quick." Kieran placed the flattened end of the shard against his ribs, making sure it looked right. He dropped to his knees, curling over it as if in pain, and nodded. "Be realistic."

Ash took a deep breath, and for a moment Kieran thought he'd screech like a harpy and be totally unconvincing. But he started out only a bit louder than usual. "Kieran? Oh shit. Oh shit, okay, hold still." His voice began to climb and crack. "Help? We need help down here! Don't, don't, don't try to move it you'll make it worse -- we need some help here!"

The occupants of nearby cells took up the cry, moved by the usual human urge to be busy when things are weird. Kieran wanted to applaud. Instead he dabbed blood on his chin, set his teeth in his lip, and gave a hideous drawn-out groan for the pair of grubby, wild-eyed Watchmen who came to fumble at the lock of the cell.

"Hurry," Ash urged, hovering at Kieran's side.

To their credit, they were wary of Kieran. One covered him with a rifle while the other knelt to examine his wound. Their mistake was discounting his frantic, knuckle-biting cellmate. One moment, Ash was whimpering and fussing; the next, he shoved the rifle upwards and head-butted the guard in the nose, transformed in an instant from a comic-opera nancy-boy to a snarling fury.

Kieran made the nearer man swallow his exclamation of startlement, along with a few teeth. The angle was bad, so the beginning of the fight was awkward, and he took a solid punch to the ear that set his head ringing, but once he got his feet under him he dispatched the man in short order and turned to rescue Ash.

Ash didn't need rescuing. He was choking his man with the rifle. Seeing that Kieran was done, Ash flung his victim free and clubbed the man upside the head with the stock. He offered the gun over the Watchman's twitching body. "Got you a present," he grinned.

When they ran out of their cell, someone cheered. Another voice joined it, and another. Then demands and instructions swelled over the cheers and overwhelmed them. Kieran saw the one remaining guard running toward him and worked the rifle's bolt, but the man skidded and changed direction. He went for the exit on the far end. He'd be through it and raising the alarm before anything could be done about it, unless Kieran made a lucky shot -- in the dark, with a pounding heart, using an unfamiliar weapon, he doubted he could drop the man in time. He chose not to bother shooting. They weren't going out that way.

Climbing over rain-slick piles of broken stone, he felt his ankle begin to twinge where he'd cut it. He shut the pain away. Reached the lock lever and hauled it down. With a clang, the tier unlocked, the doors swung open in unison. Ragged, dirty men swarmed out, cheering.

He wasn't going to waste time on the other three tiers. "Let everyone out!" he shouted over the general hollering. "The more get out, the less get caught!" A glance at the rifle showed him it lacked a strap, so he tossed it aside. He made a stirrup of his hands, nodding to Ash. "Go."

Boosted onto the lock box, Ash hesitated a moment, trying to fit his fingers and toes into the cracks in the wall. There had been no way to practice for this.

"Go!" Kieran bellowed, and somehow Ash found footholds. Kieran was right behind him.

It seemed to take hours to climb the wall. Below, faces swarmed and shouted. There was one gunshot, but it wasn't followed by any change in the general commotion. Kieran could see that Ash's limbs were shaking; his own were beginning to tremble as well, reminding him that he'd been through Testing that same morning. A moment's dismay broke in his mind. We're not going to make it. But right on its heels came the realization that half an hour ago he'd been making final confessions, and now he was halfway up the cell block wall, heading for open sky. More than halfway. Almost there. And they were pulling themselves over a lip of broken wall, between twisted slats of metal that had once barred the skylights, into the full blast of the downpour.

Lightning flashed, showing him the wreckage all around. The tornado had broken down walls and snarled fences like yarn. He spotted a relatively clear hole and pointed it out to Ash, getting a nod in answer. Beside his feet, a knotted strip of torn blanket thumped across the top of the wall; the less limber prisoners had made a rope and thrown it up to him. He didn't have time to help them, but he did it anyway, tying the blanket rope to a solid-looking bit of skylight frame before he took off running.

A shout, several shouts from different directions, muffled and meaningless. Then a shot. He ignored it. The rain was bucketing down. No one could shoot straight in this, he could hardly see ten feet in front of him. They were running downhill, he could tell because rivulets of runoff were forming and flowing the same direction. Ash was pulling ahead despite his shorter stride, not bothering to pick his footing but trusting to pure luck. There were more shots, more shouting, falling behind. A heap of fence loomed on their right, eerily tall the way the winds had twisted it, and then they were through.

Suddenly he was no longer blind. Ahead of him, Ash stumbled and slowed, then settled into a smoother gait, subject to the same sensation: seeing with something other than eyes, knowing in a way he had never even noticed before it had been taken away from him. They had passed the ward's edge, they were finally really out.

And we're going right back in if we don't put some serious miles behind us, he reminded himself.

It was easier to run, outside the ward. He had a general sense of the terrain around him, allowing him to pick smoother ground. He'd never thought about that ability before, but now he realized most people must not have it. He could sense that the ground here was flat and sandy, that the puddles and rivulets forming on it were shallow and solid-bottomed. Fluttering blue from the clouds showed him that it looked the same for a ways ahead; hard to judge distance in this light and veiling rain, maybe half a mile. Beyond that was just a dark jumble, which he could only guess must be a bit of hilly terrain.

Ash was faltering now. That first burst of speed had worn him out. Kieran took his arm, made him stop, and they took ten seconds to catch their breath. Put their heads back and gulped rain. Then Kieran clapped Ash's shoulder to get his attention and led him out in a brisk walk. He hoped Ash was a good walker. He himself could keep up this pace all night, even tired as he was, but Ash was looking worn. The climb had been hard for him. He might have torn muscles.

"You're fine," Kieran said. "You'll make it."

In reply he got a wild-eyed look he couldn't interpret. It could have been fear or elation or anything. He darted a look back at the compound, but aside from a general impression of untidiness he couldn't see anything that was going on back there.

Downhill, the slope becoming more gradual as they left the vicinity of the immense mesa, they began to encounter knots of scrub, lumps of rock. His feet were starting to hurt; though he'd grown used to going barefoot, no amount of callus could save him from all this gravel. He hoped they didn't step on anything poisonous. In a rain like this, critters could get flooded out of their holes, and in their panic they'd sting or bite anything that got near them.

The rain seemed to be letting up, so what was that roaring? Water was doing something large up ahead. Kieran wanted to uncurl his senses and reach out to it, but he wasn't sure how. His mind was too sore, this particular skill too unpracticed. He slowed his pace, mindful of the dangers of a desert rainstorm.

It was fortunate that he did, because there was no lightning to show him the sudden river that cut their path. Only the sense of surroundings that came with Talent kept them from falling in. Not, he realized, that he could sense the river itself. In fact, it was blank, a wall of emptiness, snatching away any senses that were extended toward it.

"Now what?" Ash's voice was a shade too high. Starting to panic. "Can we go across?"

The experience of his whole life told him that you never, never cross unknown water in the desert, never go down in a wash in a rainstorm, never linger in a slot canyon at any time, because the water might not follow the regular water rules. It might suddenly swell, might drop on you a wall of water ten feet high, or it might do the opposite and be suddenly sucked away, leaving you buried in cemented mud. It might carry you off, slam you against rocks, wedge you in holes, and of course it would always do its best to drown you. In this darkness he couldn't tell how wide this flood was, but from the sound and the way it blocked his mind it had to be big. So the idea that came to mind was probably suicidal.

"It'll cover our trail. We go in."

"What? No, no we don't."

"Grab onto me. Here, not just my hand, that won't work. We'll lean on each other and try to stay upright, but if we fall -- can you swim?"

"Not in this!"

"Sure you can." Arms locked around Ash's waist, Kieran stepped into the water. Ash had no choice but to do the same.

The current snatched at their ankles, rose around their knees. Debris knocked and scratched, snarled weeds wrapped and tangled. Step by laborious step, they made their way downstream. The rain was beginning to let up. A glance back made his stomach clench -- there were lights at the prison again. The search was beginning. With luck, they'd round up the weaker ones first, the ones who hadn't made it this far, but he couldn't leave it to luck. He and Ash were still close enough that a searcher with a lantern might locate them by sight alone.

"We have to go faster."

"We can't," Ash protested. "We'll drown."

"You can swim, right? We'll ride."

"No. No. Kieran --" Ash's objection ended in a splutter as Kieran pulled him deeper into the rush of water. It snatched them both instantly, knocked their feet out from under them and whirled them away.

Aware only of his struggle to breathe and to keep hold of Ash's shirt, Kieran didn't know how long the flood carried them. Longer than minutes, less than hours. His strength was ebbing fast, the chill of the water stiffening his muscles. More than once, he took on a lungful of water and thought he had drowned himself. He threw a mental apology to Ash for his stupid idea, which had surely killed them both. But at last sandy ground scraped under him and rolled him over, and he was beached, panting in the icy night.

The darkness was total. The water had shelved, spread out maybe, and he lay on his back in inch-deep mud. He still had a handful of Ash's shirt; Ash was attached to it, and alive, wheezing and coughing. Relief turned his guts to warm jelly, making him feel even weaker than he already was.

"It's cold," Ash said shakily, when the coughing was over. "Where are we?"

"How should I know? It's as dark as the inside of a dog. We should get up. We should walk, to keep warm."

"I can't."

"Me neither." Kieran rolled over, spit out a mouthful of grit. He tugged at Ash's shirt, tried to get closer. By shuddering stages, Ash climbed into his arms and huddled there. It seemed forever before the space between them grew warm. Kieran would not have been surprised if his wet shirt froze to his back.

"This would b-be a s-s-stupid way to die," Ash chattered.

"We'll get up and walk in just a second. As soon as the moon comes out."

"Okay."

"Won't be long now."

"Okay."

Gradually, their shivering subsided. In the storm's wake, the damp air was not so cold, and clinging together like this was warmer than Kieran had thought it would be. With warmth, though, came exhaustion. He heard it in his own voice when he spoke.

"They won't find us. We must've rode that river for miles. We got out, Ashes."

"You got us out." A ghost of a laugh. "Kieran Trevarde, you are significantly larger than life."