(a/n: This chapter touches briefly on themes of racially-motivated violence.)

"I don't understand," Pyro said, early the next morning, as she watched Scout trying to find a way to keep his pack on his shoulders without it touching the gauze on his back. "I told you why I'm going with Esau. What are you coming for?"

"You said it yourself, right, yesterday, you don't know how to get outta here? Me neither. I got no compass, no map, that fire's still making it hard to get my bearings." He shrugged, all casual. "Besides, we go blow up them robots where it hurts, it's that much less fighting we gotta do when we do go back, the quicker I can go back home. Might as well try it."

She chewed her lower lip, eyes still steady on him as he adjusted his jacket and the white baseball cap he had fished out of a closet somewhere in town. He had apparently found a razor somewhere, too, because the patchy stubble on his jaw was now gone. He had the map she had originally given him in one hand, held gently and folded carefully. Sniper had once told her Scout had a thing about maps, and she had seen him drawing them once or twice before. "Kid knocks 'em out like nothing I've ever seen," Sniper had said to her one brisk day in Badwater, one long and bony finger pointing their youngest teammate out. Scout was sitting on a stump in the meager shade of a hackberry tree, hunched over a massive sheaf of paper, with a pen in one hand and a ruler in the other. "We call him Scout for a reason, see. Could drop him off in the middle of a labyrinth and he'd find a way out."

This did not do anything to help explain why Scout was actually coming along. But, Pyro supposed, it was best not to look a gift horse in the mouth. The extra manpower was probably going to be useful. She still wasn't sure if she should be watching her back around him, anymore, though. Not after the last few days.

But Scout got his bag sorted out, and then together they stepped out into the bright morning sunlight that streamed across Kewaunee in pools and ribbons, out to the mines.

The entrance was a good ten-minute walk out of town, traveling northeast (according to Scout). There were old signs of life along the way: tire tracks, spray-painted X's on some of the trees, a stray plastic wrapper here or there. Once they even passed by an old and rusting mine cart, wheelless and sitting suspended on red bricks. The town was all but vanished behind trees once they got to where they were going. Esau was waiting for them, and as they approached Pyro took a moment to digest the dissonance of the sleek lines of the machine next to the rough-hewn angles of the mineshaft. "Ready?" Esau said, turning to face them as whatever passed for its ears informed it that they were there.

"I guess," Pyro said. "Scout's coming, apparently."

By all logic, a robot without even a face should not be able to size someone up. Esau managed, though, giving Scout the once-over. "The more the merrier," it said. "Welcome aboard. You're both prepared, then? Once we go in, there won't be an easy way back to the surface."

Pyro nodded; Scout shifted his weight, returning the look Esau had given him. "I figure you better oughta give us the what's what before we go all Center of the Earth, yeah? What're we doin' once we get down there?" Gonna be blind enough down there, hell."

"That's fair," Esau conceded. "We are headed to the core computer, deep underground. It directs all the machines' motions by a satellite system. If we destroy the computer system and collapse the mine, it will cut the operation off at the head."

"Back at Mannworks we thought you were the one directing them," Pyro said. "We shot a satellite dish off you."

"That was not me," Esau said. "Instructions can be routed through my model, though."

"Is bringin' this thing down gonna take you out too?" said Scout.

"No. I'm self-sufficient."

The questions kept building; how long of a trip is it? Most of a day's journey. How deep underground are we going? Some two-hundred feet. Would they meet any other robots? Possibly. "I won't say there's nothing to worry about," it concluded at the end of their interrogation, "but it should all be pretty well in hand."

Pyro looked at Scout, and found he was looking back at her, with an equal amount of uncertainty. "Well," Pyro said, at last, "I guess I only have one more question. Why do you need us to destroy it? Why can't you do it?"

She had never yet seen Esau do anything like laugh, and when it issued a low chuckled it caught her off-guard. It was unlike its normal voice, natural-sounding and organic, but clearly recorded, like it had stolen the sound from someone else. "I've tried," it said, before she could quite recover. "It's guarded by small brigade on the outside chamber, and inside is a magnetic field that would fry me if I got too close. I can manage the other machines. But I need you to disable the field."

This, in Pyro's mind, only gave rise to more questions. But the absurdity of it all already felt like too much. She was in this deep already, wasn't she? "Alright," she said with a dry laugh of her own, shifting her pack on her shoulders and looking up at the clear sky, she hoped, not for the last time. "Great. Sounds easy. Let's go be heroes."

On, off. On, off.

Pyro had the distinct impression the constant clicking and sparking she was doing with her lighter was getting on Scout's nerves, but in the half-light from the beam shining from Esau's chassis it was hard to tell. It wasn't going to stop her, mineshaft Esau had led them down was cramped and cold. Their footsteps were muffled in the dirt, save for the occasional clang of Esau's feet striking the cart track running up from the depths of the earth. Even at her rather average height Pyro found herself have to bow her head to keep from hitting it on the support beams. About twenty minutes in, the space suddenly opened out, and she very quickly decided she had preferred the ducking: the walls and ceiling sunk away into black spaces, and the angle of the mine began to cant downward more palpably.

On, off, on.

Esau moved at a steady and unfaltering pace. Pyro had soon fallen behind some fifteen or twenty paces. She didn't really notice Scout had, too, until he spoke. "You, you figure my back is gonna be okay, then?"

Her Zippo snapped at the air as she clapped it shut. "I don't know," she said. "I don't have any idea what's going on with you, except maybe your name should be Jesus. Maybe respawn made you immortal all the time. For all I know it's not even going to scar."

"Oh, well." It wasn't exactly that she couldn't see Scout in the near-dark—she could, but he was a dark silhouette against a black background. She was not sure if this was comforting or frightening. "That'd … that'd be …"

"The word you're looking for is 'good.'"

"Yeah," Scout said. It felt like he was watching her, but she could not tell. "You didn't have those scars, before, right. When you met my brother. I know you didn't have that one on your face, anyway."

Something about this made her snort derisively. A stolen glance informed her that Scout was indeed watching her, and so she shrugged her left arm out of her jacket. The lighter popped to life again, and she held it close enough to her arm, near the inside of her elbow, to highlight a patch of wrinkled skin. "I had two scars before I met your brother," she said, tapping a finger on her arm. "This one was from a candle. I was eight and lit my bed on fire by accident." And then, tilting her head to one side and holding the lighter up to an old, fading gash under her right ear, right around the jawbone: "And this one. Fourteen, I think. Fourteen or fifteen. From the first time somebody tried to kill me."

"You—what? Fifteen, what? Liar," Scout said. Pyro clicked the lighter shut, dropping them back into near darkness as up ahead Esau soldiered on. "Unless you got on the murder train early. What'd you do was so bad someone tried killing you at fifteen?" asked Scout, and she glanced at him again, and saw still an anonymous outline.

"Not much," she said, presently. "Somebody just didn't like me. Mostly they didn't like that I was an Indian."

"Oh," Scout said, after a pause. "Well—well so what happened?"

195X
PENNSYLVANIA

The runaway had read Peter Pan exactly once, and hadn't been terribly taken with it. She didn't find magic very interesting, and Captain Hook seemed sort of stupid. The nun at the girls' home that had given it to her had been strangely enthusiastic about the Piccaninny "tribe" in it, and for this reason the runaway had agreed to try it; but once the book circulated among the other girls, the runaway was called nothing but Tiger Lily for a solid month.

It was some two months after grudgingly agreeing to let the runaway stay at her house that June got bored of calling her things like Pocahontas or Sacajawea or Hiawatha. The runaway did not particularly care for these names, either, but she could handle them, if only because June switched between them a lot. But when one morning at breakfast June said, "You wanna grab the milk out of the fridge for me, Tiger Lily?", the runaway dropped the bowl she had been washing into the sink with a clatter and snapped: "I have a name."

The runaway did not really talk back much. Particularly not to June, who reminded her frequently that she could kick her out at any time. The surprise was evident in June's face for all of ten seconds before she dropped back into a disinterested sort of expression. "Yeah? You and God," June snorted, shaking open her box of cereal. "So what? You want a medal?"

"I want you to use my name."

"Tough shit, kiddo. You live under my roof and eat my food. I get to call you Mud if I feel like it." The runaway muttered something under her breath, turning back to the dishes. "What was that?"

"Then call me Mud," the runaway said, picking the bowl back up. June called her Mud for the next two weeks, but it was better than Tiger Lily.

It wasn't all bad, though, living with June. June Wagner was a firefighter—which the runaway viewed with equal parts amazement and disgust. She had never heard of a female firefighter before (which was the amazement) and she disagreed with the idea of putting fires out on principle (which was the disgust). June worked multi-day shifts at the firehouse, generally leaving the runaway alone for long stretches of time, and because it was summer no one gave her a hard time about cutting class. This town was so small the runaway didn't think it even had a truancy officer. All in all, this left her with a lot of time to herself, and that was exactly what she wanted. Maybe life was a little less predictable or safe than it had been with her foster family, but she enjoyed herself a lot more, and it was pretty infrequent that she went hungry.

June's terms, which she had laid out to the runaway after a few fruitless days of searching for someone else to foist her off onto, had been as follows: June would give her food and a place to live, and the runaway would take up the chores that June's job left her too worn out to do. It was a good arrangement, although the runaway had thought of Cinderella at first and felt mildly worried. June didn't have nearly such high standards as the wicked stepmother, though. As long as things looked more or less decent, there wasn't a problem.

The whole situation left the runaway feeling very grown-up. June never curbed her language around her or talked to her like a child, and her newfound independence was a breath of fresh air. She didn't have a schedule mandated by people she didn't like, except to make sure the garbage was taken out Tuesday mornings. She didn't know anyone in this town, and so she didn't have to worry about paying attention to anyone. Back with her foster family or in the orphanage it always seemed like someone was in her face over something, constantly, and until now she had never really gotten to experience being on her own for any stretch of time. She found she preferred it to nearly anything else, and would spend her days alternatingly at the library, reading, or in June's garage, fiddling with a dusty set of tools and scrap metal, and starting fires in the trash bins.

Not much happened that summer. There was a day when someone recognized the bike she had stolen as she was riding by. Any qualms the rightful owner might have had about fighting girls were apparently thrown out the window if said girl was an Indian. That afternoon the runaway limped back home with no bike, a black eye, and some words she had never heard before ringing in her ears. June had been sitting at the kitchen table when she got back. The last five or six times the runaway had seen her, June had ignored her entirely, so it was rather a surprise when June noticed there was something wrong. "Did you meet some cowboys, brat?" she asked the runaway, who was pulling a bag of frozen vegetables from the freezer to put against her eye.

The runaway shrugged. "Just a fight. They took my bike."

"And you didn't get any scalps to show for it?"

"There were three of them."

"That's a shit excuse. You need to learn how to fight."

That was how, a few minutes later, June dragged her out into the garage and took swings at her until she had more or less pummeled the basics of fist-fighting into her. When the runaway went to bed, she had a sore ear and a split lip on top of the black eye, but she did feel like she had learned something.

The best perk about living with June, the runaway discovered that fall, was that June did not make her go to school. "You've read half that library already," she had said, when the runaway asked her about it once as they were clearing the roof gutters of fallen leaves. "I've seen you dragging those damn books home, new ones every three days. What's some limp-dicked science teacher going to tell you that you can't find out for yourself?"

"Not much," the runaway said, secretly pleased.

"Yeah, so. Keep your nose clean and nobody's gonna give a rat's ass what you do, kiddo. It's always worked for me."

It was good advice, and it worked. Apart from the incident with the bike, and the semi-frequent crass remarks about the color of her skin—which more often than not came from June, which made them slightly more bearable—apart from those, life was uneventful. And that was the runaway's life for the next six months, and she was content. Holidays came and went, which she hardly noticed, except for Halloween. (She awkwardly taught herself to sew with some borrowed needles and thread, and armed with no fewer than three stolen dime-store masks and a dark cloak, went and gathered enough candy to last her until at least April.) Thanksgiving went ignored, and as June was apparently Jewish and unobservant, Christmas and Hanukkah both came and went without fanfare.

It was early January when both the furnace and the water pipes of June's house broke down in the space of two days. The place was rendered uninhabitable until they were fixed, and the repairmen would not be able to make it out for some time. This was how the runaway found herself living in the fire station for three weeks, with June and all the other fire fighters.

It was a fascinating change of pace. So long as she didn't get in the way, she was given the run of the building, and she took full advantage of that fact. Her first discovery was mostly that the fire department was broke; something new seemed to stop working every day, and the equipment was all stopgap and patchwork at best. June's fireman's coat was threadbare around the elbows and her helmet was dented in five places, and according to her both of them were older than the runaway was.

Still, the station was full of interesting things. She prowled around the vast, convoluted bodies of the fire engines. She met the firehouse dog, not a dalmatian but a grand old weimaraner with a scarred nose and a jagged splash of white fur on his chest. According to June he had been rescued from a junkyard fire on Halloween night some years ago. "What's his name?" the runaway asked.

"Dog. Mutt. I don't know, kid, I don't even like dogs."

This was not a point in June's favor, the runaway thought as she scratched the hound's neck, and decided he would be called Silver.

She eavesdropped everywhere she could. She asked questions of everyone who would listen. She had read a handful of books that talked about fire and firefighters in the libraries both here and in her foster family's hometown, but those had largely been full of information she didn't especially care about. Here, though. Here she had an entire fleet of firefighters to interrogate, some of whom had been doing this job for over ten years. She wanted to know about how the fire trucks worked, and how to go down the fire pole the right way, and what the coats were made of, and what it was like to be in a burning building. She even wanted to know about the fire hoses and the hydrants, mainly because she felt better about things she didn't like if she knew how they worked.

She learned pretty quickly who would entertain her questions and who wouldn't. The man who had turned the hose on her, whose name was Joshua, was among those who wouldn't. The runaway had made a point of remembering his name so she could avoid him more efficiently. There was a skinny Irishman with glasses who liked to talk about the trucks, and a man with tattoos all over his body who would gravely and slowly answer her questions about burns and how to treat them, and a middle-aged black man with graying hair, named Donovan, who had a knack for storytelling. Donovan in particular got to be her favorite, partly because he had an endless supply of stories about his time as a firefighter, and partly because he had an endless supply of patience with her. From Donovan she learned about how dangerous smoke was, and how kitchen fires usually started and were usually the cause of house fires, followed by radiators and cigarettes. ("It's not worth it, smoking," Donovan said more than once. "If it doesn't kill the people around you, it'll kill you for sure.") And Donovan even answered the questions that had made other people—the other firefighters, and some librarians—look at her strangely, and stop talking to her. These were the ones about the fires themselves, how to start them, how to handle them, how to control them. She had always gotten the feeling they were questions she wasn't supposed to be asking, but she had never been clear on the reason. But when she asked Donovan, all he had said was, "Wy?"

"Why what?"

"Well, are you planning on setting any fires?"

"No," the runaway said patiently, because she had learned a long time ago that was the only acceptable answer to give. The runaway was always planning on setting fires. That was what she did. That was why she was asking, so she could do so more efficiently. Not fires that would hurt anyone, she didn't want to hurt anyone. But she would gather dry brush and paper and anything that would burn well and put it in a tall stove pot she had scavenged from June's neglected cupboards. She would fill it up and then take it somewhere lonely, somewhere with a lot of cement, and drop in a match and watch it burn. It was just something she had to do. She had never had an accident, and she never would, because she was smart and she was careful, and she never looked away from her fires anyway.

So Donovan had told her the things she wanted to know, because he said it was better for people to know things than to not know them. The runaway liked this philosophy. He told her about how they could tell if a fire was arson or not, and what you did to make sure a bonfire didn't get out of hand, and that there was a thing some people had called "pyromania" that made them crazy and made them burn things they shouldn't. The runaway thought this was very interesting, and was glad she did not have it. She could control herself, about fire.

Donovan was great. But all the firemen worked in shifts, and after a few days Donovan left. The new person, Victor, was a tall, clean-shaven white man with startlingly white teeth. The very first day he arrived, after breakfast, June cornered the runaway alone in a side room and said in sharp-edged syllables, "Listen to me and listen good. You do not speak to Victor. You do not even be in the same room with him alone, or," and she raised a hand, sudden and high, a visible threat, "or I will break your goddamn nose."

June had never hit the runaway before, outside of the time in the garage, where it had been sort of necessary with learning how to defend herself. The runaway had gone very still, eyes locked on her caretaker's hand. "Why?"

"First because I said so." June did not lower her hand. "Second, because I goddamn said so. And if I find out otherwise, I'll put you on your own personal Trail of Tears, got it?"

The hand dropped. The runaway mumbled something in the affirmative, startled and a little afraid. June had grunted in assent, and left.

As always, though, she bounced back. And "because I said so" was not a very good reason. She resorted to asking around, asking what the deal with Victor was. The tattooed man was the only one who gave her a decent answer. "Yeah, I'd say old battle-ax is right. Safer for you. Victor don't like your kind."

"Indians?"

"That's right."

"So? He doesn't have to like me."

The tattooed man had raised one eyebrow. "Sure," he told her," but if that was the only problem, Wagner wouldn't'a cared."

It was two days before they went back to June's house, mid-February, when the runaway found out exactly what June and the tattooed man had meant. She had been pulling her things together, which all had managed to get strewn in out-of-the-way places all around the fire station in her three weeks there. Now she was in the break room, where June had first brought her that day in July. It was always a mess, she had learned, and the runaway thought she had maybe left some of her socks here. She had found no socks on the west side of the room, and had moved her search to the east side, near the jukebox and the fire pole and the gaping hole in the floor.

It was the noise, probably. Someone had left the jukebox on, playing some quiet radio station. And it had been sleeting outside, not quite cold enough for snow, and the heavy rain drumming the windows was an unwelcome distraction. If it hadn't been for these she might have been listening, and heard it when the door to the third-floor break room opened and shut. As it was, she remained on her hands and knees, near the hole in the floor, searching.

A shadow falling over her was the only warning she got. It darkened her field of view, and she lifted her gaze just in time to see a huge hand reaching for her, and beyond it, Victor's face. She froze, a deer in headlights, and of course the hand caught her. Of course it drove her backwards with ease. Of course she fell.

She glimpsed the second floor for an instant as she dropped, she felt her knees clip the edge of the hole and her head smack against the pole. Then she was turned around somehow, and with a vivid explosion of pain something tore open the skin under her right ear. She cried out when she hit the ground floor, cement cushioned only by a two-inch pad at the base of the pole. Something hot and coppery flashed in her mouth.

She lay where she had fallen as the pain caught up with her. She stared fixedly ahead, unseeing, only barely aware of what had happened. She had fallen. She had been pushed. And Victor had just slid down the pole after her.

All of this, though, took a back seat to the shout that reached her ears and instant later. There were hands upon her again, but this time they were pulling her up into a sitting position. The runaway blinked and realized there were tears in her eyes and hot blood streaming down her neck. Someone was speaking. "Kiddo. Shit, kid, look at me. Can you hear me?" She lifted her hand to the side of her neck. Her fingers came away red, and she gazed at them stupidly. By the time June had gotten her propped all the way up, the blood was running freely. "Don't move," June said.

"What?" the runaway got out, thickly.

"Don't move."

"Is she okay?" said a new voice, deep and smooth. Victor. "I tried to stop her, but she got too close to the hole."

June said nothing, not at first. She had her eyes on the runaway, one arm tight around her shoulders. For her part the runaway had mostly gone limp. She couldn't seem to get her thoughts straight, everything hurt. "Yeah?" June said, eventually, the word like two stones grinding against one another. "Is that what happened?"

The question was not directed at Victor, though it took the runaway a few seconds to realize it. She swallowed down more blood and tried to make her eyes focus. The words came out like molasses. "He pushed me."

June's stare had not abated. Now Victor was speaking, a swift, affronted torrent the runaway could not entirely follow: doesn't know what she's talking about, tried to help her, not my fault, little liar. June got to her feet, leaving the runaway to slump over onto her knees. Things still felt far away, distant, but she did manage to lift her head in time to see June's entire body twist in one sharp movement to throw itself before the punch she slammed into Victor's jaw.

"An' then what?" asked Scout.

"She broke his jaw," Pyro said. "Laid right into him. I never saw him again. Then she beat my ass when we got home."

"Damn," Scout said, and for a while that was all. Absently, Pyro put her fingers back up to the scar beneath her ear. She had nearly forgotten about it. She was surprised she remembered at all. When he piped back up with, "Somebody's jaw gettin' broke over you, that means somethin'," she drew her hand away as if caught at something.

"I guess so."

"Sure it does. Hey, but, so, your, your thing with, uh, with fire. I haven't ever got that, I mean. It's just fire. It's hot and it burns stuff and I guess sometimes it's pretty. But you, it ain't just that with you, is it? I've seen how you get about it. Is that—is that how you got all burned up?"

She could practically feel his discomfort, in the asking. At first that was all she felt, because she didn't know how to feel on her own, given the question. Given the question from Scout. They walked another thirty paces before she found a response. "Yes. It is. And even if I did try to explain you wouldn't get it."

"Well, how come?"

"Because nobody gets it. I don't even get it half the time. It's just something about me that is, and it's dangerous and it's just about ruined my life, and I'm stuck with it. And I don't really want to talk about it."

Ahead of them, Esau had paused. Pyro looked up at it and found it had stopped in front of a broad, shallow-looking channel of water rippling over a dip in the path and disappearing into the darkness. It was maybe fifteen feet across, and as they caught up with it Esau started sloshing through. The water only reached up to the first joints in its legs. Beside her, Scout had stopped to pull his socks and shoes off. Pyro followed suit, a little slowly, and after she had rolled up her jeans and grabbed her boots she took an uneasy step into the water.

It splashed up and around her shins and knees, frigid and slimy. Rocks and debris and the cold iron of the rail track clawed at the soles of her feet. Nausea reared up in her throat but she forced her eyes forward, fixing them at where the water ended, and then on something nearer: Esau, picking its slow way across. She reached out and caught hold of one of the lengths of tubing that piped along its back. It was warm. Esau itself was incredibly warm, she now realized, radiating heat she had never been close enough to feel before. And it moved on without noticing her, pulling her along with it. She let it, relieved to have something grounding her, to keep her from being pulled into the dark.

Scout was at her side, now. His shoes were slung over his shoulder by the laces, and he was staring in a determined fashion at the far bank. "Okay," he said, suddenly. "Okay, yeah, I know about those. About how those things are, sometimes. They ain't any fun. I get it."

Silence.

They came up on the other side. Esau had stopped, and she stood still hanging onto it for a second, waiting for the shivers that always seemed to accompany cold water for her to pass. Eventually she had to let go and put her boots back on, though. Scout did the same. Esau waited for them to catch up, and then they were off again.

The air was growing humid, and slightly warmer, as they continued their descent. Pyro saw fewer and fewer artifacts of humankind the deeper they went. And the air did not exactly feel thinner, but with every echoing footstep she could not shake the growing sense of claustrophobia, and wished for the first time in a long time that she still had her mask. If wishes were horses, though. The lighter came out again; she only snapped it about three times before Esau stopped and told her in no uncertain terms to put it away. "There could be gas pockets this deep," it said as she stared down at it with a mixture of surprise and resentment. "I'd like to not go up in flames."

So much for that. She put it away, and felt that much smaller. This might have been why she flinched when, a few minutes later, Scout's voice came again from the dark. "Why d'you do the lighter thing?"

"It's … it's a coping mechanism. I don't know. I don't like it down here and fire makes me feel better." And maybe it was the fact that coping mechanism had just been taken from her, or maybe it was just nerves finally spilling out, but no matter what the reason was she said it anyway. "Why are you being so nice to me?"

In the seconds that followed, the air was so still that she wondered if she'd imagined saying it. She sort of hoped maybe she had. But of course she had no such luck, and Scout's voice sounded foreign when it came again. "Saved my life, didn't you?"

"Sure, and then I tried killing you again."

"Except then you went and tried saving it again after that, is what Esau said." He sighed, a sound like rustling leaves. "I guess it's … and maybe this is stupid, I don't know. But I ain't ever been good at figuring out people. That was Toby, and he, I dunno, most of the time he was pretty on the mark about that stuff, and the whole time he was around it seemed like the only damn thing he ever tried to do was give people a chance."

The darkness, quite suddenly, felt like a friend, for Pyro was not altogether sure what the expression on her face was, and she wasn't sure she wanted anyone else to see it. "He gave me a chance," she said, stiff. "Look how well that turned out."

"Yeah, well. He gave me a chance, too, a lot of 'em, and I gave him a lot more reasons not to. I was just about a charity case. I spent my whole life growing up wantin' to be just like him, and nearly I died without ever getting there. So that's what I'm trying to do, I guess. Be more like he was."

Pyro found she had no answer, for this. They walked on in silence. Each step was an exercise in wrestling with herself. Eventually she found the words. They were sour in her mouth, and softer than she had meant to say them. "Was I a charity case, too?"

She stole a glance at Scout, still nearly invisible in the half dark, and caught a reflection of Esau's light flashing off his eyes as he met her gaze. "I mean," she went on, abruptly scrambling to fill the silence, "I must have been. There was something wrong with me when I met him, something really wrong, and I never—I never understood why he wanted to talk to me. I must have been. Right?"

Pyro looked at Scout again. Someone much taller was looking back, this time. And he laughed, distantly.

"He really liked you," he said, quiet. "He talked you up all the time. I didn't get it, I still don't, probably I won't ever. I don't know. I don't think you were. He really liked you."

Pyro could think of nothing else to say. Ahead of them, Esau marched on in steady silence. She kept her eyes forward for what felt like an eternity, and when they at last strayed back over to Scout, he was himself again.

She came to a decision. Straightening, she slung off her pack and rummaged around into the very bottom for something. She pulled it out, turned it over in her hand, and then held it out to Scout. "Here."

He took it, nearly dropping it in the dark. The cold and heavy weight left Pyro's hand, and she was left in the darkness and the quiet as he slowly realized what it was. "My pistol?" he said, and Pyro could not help but hear the slightly mystified tone in his voice. "I thought I lost it in the river."

"You didn't," Pyro said, and slung the bag back onto her shoulders. "That's the only thing I took off of you. It might not even work anymore, I don't know." And then, as an afterthought: "And I still don't have your compass."