Winter's Orbit

by Everina Maxwell

  There is something wrong with you, he told himself, because there was no loss, and now he was sounding quite insane. But it was like an echo of someone else’s voice.

  “Here?” Kiem said, startling Jainan out of his reverie. Jainan turned, slow to react, and realized Kiem had stopped a few paces back to inspect a patch of earth sheltered by a cliff face.

  Jainan gestured assent. “Give me the tent.”

  Kiem unshouldered the backpack and tossed over a dense, knobbly pack with a handle at the top. When Jainan pulled the cord, the pack exploded into a pincushion of plastic tubes that pistoned out like spikes, and a waterfall of fabric that chased them and covered the surface of the structure until he was holding a rigid pod. It was noticeably small for two people. Jainan decided not to think about that. “Is there a heater?”

  “Yes, but only three canisters,” Kiem said. “I thought we should save them. There’s food if you want it.” As Jainan finished securing the tent and came around the front of it, he saw Kiem had laid out several foil packs on the snow by the sleeping bags. “Finest gourmet choices: you can have brown sludge, brown sludge, or grayish sludge. The gray one says it’s strawberry, but I’m not sure I believe it.”

  Jainan picked up a piece of the brown rations. It was more like a hard cake than sludge, and it crumbled like a cookie; a square broke off in his hand. He tried a mouthful and then broke off a square of the gray one on the working hypothesis that it couldn’t be worse. It wasn’t, quite. He sat next to Kiem in front of the tent, his outdoor clothes rustling as he settled down. The valley they had just trekked down folded out in front of them.

  Kiem stared at the red-tinged snow where the sunset light came through a break in the fiery crags, absently eating square after square of the horrible rations. “Jainan,” he said. “What happens if both the treaty representatives die in a crash just before Unification Day? Does the Resolution appoint new ones?”

  “I don’t know,” Jainan said. If he thought about it clinically, as a diplomatic puzzle rather than a sector-wide disaster, he could just about treat it logically. “Under normal conditions, maybe. Given the Auditor already suspects Taam was murdered, it seems likely he would take this as a further sign that Iskat and Thea are not stable enough to sign a Resolution treaty.”

  “So that would be a great way to screw things up,” Kiem said grimly. “Even better than killing Taam.”

  Jainan shook his head. It gave his stomach a painful twist to even consider the idea, but he couldn’t fault Kiem’s logic.

  Kiem broke another square off with his teeth. “Did you see anyone near our flybug at the base?”

  “No.”

  “I guess we were inside most of the time. And Heaven knows I don’t keep tabs on my flybug at home.”

  Jainan glanced at their tent and noticed for the first time that Kiem had picked a site where they weren’t that visible from the air. The overhang provided some cover. “For what it’s worth, it would have been easier to carry out the sabotage at the palace,” Jainan said. “More people come and go from the garages there. But it could have been either.”

  “Or it was an accident.”

  “Yes.” Jainan didn’t bother saying any more.

  Kiem thoughtfully flicked some crumbs off his leg. “I hope Internal Security does a better job with this investigation than the last one.”

  He broke off another ration square and leaned against the backpack, which shifted to reveal something poking out of the top. It was wrapped in Kiem’s spare sweater. The part that was sticking out glinted.

  Jainan leaned over and disentangled what looked like a trowel. It was either made of gold metal or convincingly gilded. He raised his eyebrows at Kiem. “Gardening?”

  “Ah,” Kiem said. He looked faintly guilty. “Um. That’s the school prize. I thought we’d better not lose it.”

  Jainan weighed it in his hand. It had a solid heft and must have contributed to the weight of the bag. “So we are instead … carrying it over kilometers of trackless tundra?”

  “Well. It belongs to the school.”

  “They could get a new one.”

  “But this one has all the names on it, see?” Kiem took it and turned it over. “It might be important to someone.”

  “A school prize.”

  “Just because it’s not important doesn’t mean it’s not important to someone,” Kiem said. He must have mistaken Jainan’s look for doubt, because he looked faintly stubborn and said, “I’ll carry it.”

  “Mm, no,” Jainan said. He took the trowel back, wrapped it up in the sweater, and stowed it carefully back in the rucksack. “I think it’s a good idea.” It would not have occurred to him to do it. It had obviously not occurred to Kiem not to do it.

  Kiem sat back, more relaxed, and tilted his head to look up at the sky. His breath misted in the freezing air. It was absurd to be content, when Jainan’s shoulder still ached and they were in the middle of nowhere, in snow and treacherous terrain, relying on reaching a rail line to get back to civilization. More absurd when Jainan thought about the wreckage of their flybug behind them and all the people at the palace or the base who might have had access to sabotage it. He felt it anyway.

  Jainan shifted position to cross his legs, and his knee came into contact with Kiem’s. He didn’t even realize he’d done it until Kiem twitched and drew up his legs to put space between them.

  The contentment receded. Jainan struggled to hold on to it, then realized it was in vain, and let it go. He let out a breath and let the twinge of humiliation recede with it. “It’s been a long day,” he said, because it seemed the least awkward way to apologize.

  “Very long. So long,” Kiem agreed, though he was still holding himself awkwardly to avoid touching Jainan. He turned it into a scramble to his feet. “You know what! I think I’m going to go to bed.”

  “Yes,” Jainan said. He got to his feet as well. “Do you want—”

  Kiem had already grabbed one of the sleeping bags. “There isn’t enough room in there,” he said. “I’ll sleep out here.”

  “What,” Jainan said blankly.

  “These things are rated for outdoors, and there’s no wind,” Kiem said, unfolding the sleeping bag. “Perfect conditions.”

  “Oh,” Jainan said, feeling leaden. It was a reasonable solution; sleeping in the same small tent would have been extremely awkward. “No, I have the bedroom at home. Take the tent.”

  “This is not your problem,” Kiem said, intently not-looking at Jainan. “You’re not sleeping outside because of something that is in no conceivable universe your problem.”

  It wasn’t worth fighting about. “All right. Yes.”

  “All right,” Kiem repeated. The relief was unmistakable; Kiem always wore his emotions on his sleeve. “I’ll just get some water. I think there’s a stream still running over there.”

  Jainan turned away and crawled into the tent. He could identify the odd sadness now. It came from the same source as the joy: life had been good to him, unexpectedly, but it wasn’t fair to try and stretch it out. If he had any regard for Kiem, any gratitude, he would have to try and think of a way out for him—some way that Kiem could live his own life, not shackled to someone he wasn’t attracted to. This couldn’t go on.

  CHAPTER 17

  Kiem was already sitting up and taking stock when the dawn sky started to lighten.

  He still hadn’t managed to come to terms with someone wanting him or Jainan dead. He could go over the facts as much as he liked—someone had swapped out Taam’s crash data, someone must want the treaty in trouble—but even though he kept listening out for the drone of a flybug coming after them, he couldn’t make himself believe it. Nobody had ever had a grudge against Kiem. He didn’t really make enemies.

  They were doing as well as they could, given the circumstances. It wasn’t Kiem’s fault that Taam had been up to his ears in shady transactions, or that the Auditor wouldn’t instate them yet. It wasn’t his fault their flybug had crashed
or that someone might have enough of a grudge to sabotage it. Maybe if Kiem hadn’t taken them off their scheduled flight path, they wouldn’t have to trek to find help, but they were doing all right at the trekking. The only problem that was really, indisputably his fault was Jainan.

  It wasn’t fair to phrase it like that. The problem wasn’t with Jainan himself; it was all on Kiem’s side. If Kiem had managed to be less weird last night, they might still be almost friends, or whatever it was they had been recently.

  Kiem absently dug up a handful of the snow beside him in his gloves and packed it into a ball. He needed to get a grip on himself. He and Jainan had managed to reach some kind of fragile stability, and if Kiem carried on like this, he was going to screw it up for both of them.

  “Is this the prelude to a snowball fight?” a voice said from behind him. “I should warn you: unlike your usual school fete opponents, I am not five years old.”

  Kiem grinned and tossed the snowball in his hand, banishing the introspection. “So much the better,” he said. “Have you ever faced twenty five-year-olds? They’re terrifying.” He tossed the snowball again, but it fell apart when he tried to catch it. “Dammit.”

  “Structurally unsound,” Jainan said. “Blame the contractors.” One corner of his mouth was pulled up in a smile, but there was a tension underneath it. Kiem hoped he was hiding his own better. “How are we set for today?”

  “Right.” Kiem scrambled to his feet and started compressing his sleeping bag. “If the terrain’s not too bad, I think we should get to the rail line today or tomorrow. We could get going and have breakfast later, if you’ve slept enough.”

  “I’m not sleeping any more,” Jainan said. He sounded as resigned to it as Kiem had felt at four that morning. “Let’s start out.” He turned away to collapse the tent.

  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?”

  “I was thinking—if the treaty goes smoothly. If we have twenty years until the next one. I was thinking about monasteries.”

  “What about them?” Kiem said, startled by the sudden change in direction. “Is this about the time I got sent on a retreat? I haven’t done anything recently.”

  “No!” Jainan said. “No. That’s not—it’s quite normal for people here to go on long meditation retreats and, and contemplation and that sort of thing, isn’t it?”

  “Well, it depends on your sect,” Kiem said dubiously. “I mean, the meditation stuff is pretty general, but some sects have strong ideas about gods. Does yours? Uh. Sorry. That was kind of a personal question.”

  “No. It’s fine,” Jainan said. “My faith group is quite generalist.” He looked up ahead. The wind gusted again; Kiem had to squint to see Jainan’s face through the sudden water in his eyes. “Once the investigation is over, I could give us both some space by going on a retreat. I could do it regularly. I’d be out of your way.”

  It took Kiem a couple of moments to understand what he was saying. “Right,” Kiem managed, not quite knowing how to form a coherent sentence. He should have expected this. Jainan wanted a space where Kiem wasn’t there—that was completely understandable. “Right.”

  Jainan was still watching him in that sideways way he had. Kiem raised a hand to his face, not knowing what he was doing, and changed the aimless gesture into trying to rub some warmth back into his cheeks. He was supposed to be good with people, dammit. He shouldn’t be blindsided by things like this.

  “It might not work,” Jainan said. “It was—it was just a thought. We can talk about it later.” He looked like he might have said something more, but at that moment, his eyes narrowed. He jerked his head around to look behind them.

  Kiem was slower to react, still stuck on the thought of Jainan leaving, but he heard the second sound. It wasn’t coming from the ridge Jainan was looking at but from a row of trees straggling along to the side.

  “There,” Jainan said, turning his head again as he triangulated. “What—”

  They both saw the black shape detaching itself from the shadow of the trees at the same time. It had its head down in a gesture you never wanted to see in a bear, one that meant it was speeding up to charge. Kiem’s mind seemed to move slowly and his body was sluggish. He heard himself shout “Bear!” then desperately backed into Jainan, grabbed him, and threw them both off the promontory.

  They landed a few feet down the slope in a thick layer of snow and rolled. The snow sheared off with them as they tumbled, clutching at each other. Snow. Sky. Snow. Sky. Rock. Kiem heard himself yelling. On one frantic, painful rotation he caught sight of the black shape shooting through the air over them—it had miscalculated the tackle. He tried to yell again, but one of the rocks knocked the breath out of his lungs. On his next glimpse he saw the bear land on the snow and scuttle away into the trees.

  Jainan pushed himself up the moment they stopped, a stone’s throw from a stand of trees. “What was that?” he said, fighting for breath. “It moved like a lizard!”

  “Bear,” Kiem said, looking around warily for anything that could be used as a weapon. “Let’s back off slowly—it’s got our scent now, it’ll come back.”

  “That’s not a bear!”

  “Pretty sure it couldn’t be anything else!” Kiem said. “Quick, we need a rock, or a—”

  “Here.” Jainan pushed the end of what seemed like an entire fallen tree branch into Kiem’s hand.

  “What—right,”
Kiem said. He examined the branch, keeping a wary eye on the trees where the bear had disappeared. “I guess we can wave sticks. If we’re threatening enough, it should leave us alone—Jainan?”

  “Just over here,” Jainan said, from a few yards away. He had picked up another branch and was methodically stripping it of twigs and leaves.

  Kiem spun around at another sound, but it was just snow shifting in the groove gouged by their fall. “Okay, I think we should really get away from the trees.” The back of his head hurt and he’d pulled something in his leg. The bear was presumably skulking somewhere in the copse, but they hadn’t hurt it, so it would still think of them as easy prey. “Into the open. Down here.” He pointed down the slope, where a wide swathe of open space stretched between two straggling edges of a pine wood. There was a frozen river running along one side of it.

  Jainan came away from the trees, weighing the branch in his hands. “Is that ice going to hold us?”

  “We don’t have to cross it,” Kiem said. “Just follow its banks so it can’t come up behind us. Let’s go.” He waved Jainan in front of him and followed him, checking back over his shoulder every couple of steps. “If you see it, yell and look threatening. It’s not that dangerous if we can scare it off.”

  “Not that dangerous,” Jainan repeated. He grounded the end of the stick beside him as he walked, while Kiem kept his—still with the leaves on—raised by his side, in the hope that looked threatening. “But that one attacked us. Do these things kill people?”

  “Sometimes,” Kiem said. “Occasionally.”

  “So, yes,” Jainan said. His hand moved over the branch restlessly. “You could have mentioned these before.”

  “I didn’t think we’d meet any!” Kiem said. “They’re pretty rare this far north. Don’t you have bears in the mountains on Thea?” He paused to turn back and stare at a patch of shadow by a bush that caught his eye, reassured himself it was just a shadow, and turned back.