Caleb McLaughlin

Dusk.

The maluraii stumbled. He’d been in bad shape for miles, but he’d never complained. Never asked to stop and rest. I respected that. He knew as well as I did that nowhere was safe. Distance was our only chance. We might’ve dodged the Night Folk’s thralls at the river crossing, but I knew better than to think we’d lost them for good. And Vertex was out there with his maculae . . . somewhere.

He tripped, falling.

“All right,” I said. “Enough. Time to hunker down.”

“I will continue.”

“No. You won’t.” I scanned the area for cover. “Do you smell them?”

“Who?”

“Night Folk. Thralls of Night Folk. Maculae—the ones who attacked us at the Dream. Other psionics. Bounty hunters, thieves. Anybody or anything.”

He sniffed without moving. “No.”

“Then we’re done for the day.”

We sheltered inside the skull of a dead predator, the hollowed recesses just wide enough to share space. Rain drizzled through the cracks.

“I’ll take first watch this time,” I said.

“No. I will not sleep for some time.”

“You should try.”

“I am,” the maluraii said, chewing over the right word, “too energetic.”

I opened the fourth pouch from the left on my belt, took out wire and rattlers. “Valerie was the same. Never could sleep after action. But me? I can sleep anywhere.” It took less than ten minutes to string the rattlers and line our makeshift camp with wire. When I returned, the maluraii was awake. “If you go outside to take a piss, don’t hit the rattle-wire. I’ll shoot whatever touches it. Won’t have time to check if it’s you.”

“Hnnh.”

Third pouch, right—I broke the last of my jerky and tossed him half. He snapped it midair.

“This Valerie,” he said. “She is your sister?”

“Sort of. We’re not related. Just grew up together.”

“You are close?”

I chewed. “We were.”

He was silent. I knew the look in his eyes, so human for something inhuman: he’d gone somewhere else in his mind.

“Maluraii aren’t common around here,” I said.

“No.”

“Your family . . . or your pack . . . where are they?”

“Where I left them,” he said after a pause. “Far from here.”

I struggled to realign the broken shards of my dream. “The Dawn knights found you on a beach. Not with your family.”

“Yes. I . . . left. I was a danger to them. They are safer with me gone.”

“Because of your psionic bleed?”

“Because,” he said, “of who I am.”

A thunderous crash somewhere far away interrupted me mid-reply. I drew my gun and stuck my head out of our makeshift shelter. It was fucking dark. Sanct-dwellers never understood how dark it got at night, especially when it was raining. “Dog—what do you smell?” I asked him.

His ears swiveled and his nose twitched. “A beast. It smells like a village. It smells like a mass grave.”

“Arastok. He’s awake.”

“Who?”

“More of a what,” I said, withdrawing inside and dropping to the mud. After a moment, I pulled him down beside me. “Keep your head down. Stay absolutely silent.”

We both stilled. Listening. Waiting. I heard him now: his grunts had disguised themselves in the roiling thunder, but as he approached, each of his steps were an avalanche. Each step jangled the rattlers on my line. I couldn’t pick him out from the utter blackness, but the stench announced him long before his shape appeared on the hillside. My eyes watered. Spoiled meat sour undercut by musky, damp carpet.

The maluraii held his breath.

Through the hollowed, broken eye socket of our skull, we spotted his silhouette. Then lightning forked, illuminating the King of the Frontier: the beast Arastok. He stood twenty stories at his zenith, dense and long like a monstrous bear whose head nearly scraped the clouds on his hind legs. The cords of his foul, ropy hair dripped months of collected dirt, blood, and carrion, a second rainstorm that clattered off our shelter. Small bones fell into my hair. Bird, maybe. I did not move. His every step shook Ertah’s crust, clattered my teeth, and sent shockwaves up my ribcage.

Arastok trudged overhead.

His immense belly teemed with corpses and writhing bodies twined into the netlike tangles of his fur. Some of them were still alive. They screamed. I wasn’t the praying type, but if I was, I would’ve prayed then.

Arastok’s strides took him past our camp and into the edge of the forest a quarter-mile away. Trees splintered as he carved a thoughtless swathe. After a time, his steps faded into the background chorus of thunder, and I breathed easy again.

“Never thought I’d see him up close and live,” I said.

“What is he?”

“No clue, but we’re lucky there’s only one of him.”

“He was hungry.”

“Yeah. I know for a fact more’n a few towns around here make offerings. Stukka, grassfowl, stuff like that. But it’s been a lean summer.” Arastok didn’t care where his meat came from, so long as it was there for the taking. Who would draw the short end of the stick and join the teeming mass entwined below his belly?

The maluraii sniffed. “Everything ran away.”

“Anything with a brain runs from Arastok.”

“Except for us.”

I snorted. “Yeah. ‘Cept for us. Stay here.”

The bones in my hair were a mix of skynt and squirrel, as it turned out. I discarded them in a small hole I dug within the rattler line, which I straightened. The maluraii’s bright eyes were waiting for me when I came back.

“I’ll need you to take over the watch in a few hours. You should sleep while you can.” He blinked. I snapped my fingers in his direction. “You—did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

The maluraii slunk to the farthest, driest corner, where he curled into a ball. Time passed. Aside from the pattering rain and the thunder, a deathly stillness had settled around us like a funeral shroud. Even the cicadas had stopped. Quiet did not suit the frontier. It made me antsy. I shifted around the confines of our shelter, varying my point of watch at random so nothing could pick out a pattern and sneak up on us.

Maybe an hour later, the maluraii rolled over. He was awake. Probably had been the entire time. “What?” I said.

“You called me ‘dog.’ I am not a dog.”

“Yeah, well, it rolls off the tongue easier than ‘maluraii.’”

“That is what I am,” he said. “It is not who I am. I have a name.”

“Okay. Me too.”

“Should I call you ‘human?’ Or perhaps ‘primate?’”

I moved to a different vantage point. One where I couldn’t see the maluraii’s disturbing gaze. The rattler line had been quiet since Arastok had moved on. I would’ve liked to have shot something by now. Like the frontier, quiet didn’t suit me.

I sat, looking into the night. My eyes conjured images to fill the nothing night pressed against us. Blackness became whorls of flames. When the Dream had burned, I’d grabbed the maluraii before I’d jumped. It had felt like the right choice at the time.

He was a magnet for trouble. Worse, he was a volatile psionic who couldn’t stop his powers from escaping.

“If not dog,” I said, “or maluraii, what should I call you?”

The rain became a downpour.

“My asur name is forfeit,” he said. “Kolya called me Legion.”

I remembered now. Kolya had said that on their holorecording the night they’d died. Felt like years ago instead of a few short days.

“Why Legion?”

“They told me it was ironic,” said the maluraii, “but I do not know why.”

I watched the rain for a long time. The maluraii kept shifting in his place.

“You’re safe,” I said, turning to face him. “You can rest now . . . Legion.”

After a few minutes, his ragged breaths steadied, became deeper, and he drifted off to sleep.