Camp is not made until it is too late at night to continue the march. Yevon has pushed us relentlessly away from the fiends' attack, giving none of us the option of attempting to sneak back and still return to the main line undiscovered. By rights, it was our team along with Six that should be assigned to the rear now that Four has been lost, but the officials spoke to Nooj and ordered us separately to the center of the pack.

None of us know what this means. Gippal whispered to me that we might be only segregated from Six because the instructors are hoping for a repeat of an accident that was kismet for Yevon and disaster for the rest of us. If the Al Bhed is right, then Three is either at the bottom of the list or the top. They have remained at point consistently thus far. Even the instructors and their guard walk several minutes behind.

I wonder if Three is realizing yet that having a position in the lead is no honor, but only a glorified bait in case we are caught from the front.

Nooj found us gossiping in our oblique rebellion and gave his opinion. The Deathseeker believes that we are being sectioned out because of the value of our recorder. Paine and I escaped being casualties through sheer luck, but the instructors might be under the impression that it is talent.

If Nooj is right, then we are doomed. Paine was called away with the other recorders for an emergency meeting in transit, so we will not be saved if it is she whom the test officials desire alive. We have not seen her for hours. Left without our final member, the three of us trudge along like gallows-criminals bound in misery, keeping pace together in unthinking companionship.

When she is finally returned to us alive, it is well after Gippal had rigged the tent without either my or Nooj's help this time. None of us knew what to do with her share of the equipment, so we had left it in a pile in the center, as a cat might drop the dead body of a bird it suspects was actually your pet. All of us had stepped carefully around it and that had been our only acknowledgement that it was there.

Gippal spots our recorder first. "Paine!" Joy from the Al Bhed is easily expressed. "You're back! Hey, we were wondering, I mean we didn't know what was up when you got called away and you know we kind of were hoping you'd be back in time to have dinner, I know it's late but we didn't want to eat yet without you and--"

He's in the middle of raising his hand and his voice alike when Nooj interrupts. "Talk inside."

We obey without question. In my mind, the Deathseeker is right to request privacy for this. Paine has not said anything, her lips pressed firm in a line that matches the stern mien of her eyes. Carried against her thigh is her machina, out in the open as a badge might be borne. I hold the tent flap open for her to enter and then I tie it shut behind us all. I will sit near the door. It will help me notice if anyone is approaching.

Even inside, Paine does not relinquish hold of her recording machina. Instead she takes to the ground, crossing her legs and cradling the thing in her lap. While she appears more angry than vulnerable, all of us have come to know better than to gauge too much from her default expression. We already know that there is something wrong because she has not spoken. Nor has she let her jaw unclench.

Nooj leads. "What happened?"

"They confiscated my sphere."

None of us understand at first. Our Deathseeker arches a brow, mystified but responding to the rules of adversaries and attack; an enemy has intruded on his personal squad of three, even if that enemy is technically our superiors. Paine lost something. The details are unimportant. Paine lost something, so our choices are to defend ourselves from what is only an assault under the vaguest of descriptions. Nooj is our leader; fiends were once living people before their death, and he has made a career out of killing the former. Now his thoughts are working once more submerged in war.

I am not so quick to judge. The spheres are property of Yevon regardless, so in my mind, Paine should not be irate over having to return them prematurely. The instructors are an inconvenience. It does not mean that battle lines are drawn that can clearly define something so nebulous as an enemy in this situation.

Once more, it is simplicity that bridges us all and the isolation that we place ourselves into by our own thoughts. Wastefulness of machina makes little sense in Gippal's opinion, and he voices it. "What? But... you would have turned it in anyway, wouldn't you?"

"I know." Paine is discontent over being on the losing end this time around. The failure fills her throat with snappishness. "They called up all the recorders. Took our spheres away, even those of us who weren't near the attack at the time. And they told us... they would determine what had happened. That we shouldn't ask to see the records to figure it out on our own." She finally lets one of her hands leave the machina in her thighs and reaches up to fold gloved fingers against her scalp.

I can sympathize. A migraine is exactly what the officials are giving me as well.

"I don't like it." I cannot shake my head hard enough to express this. Nooj is broken out of his private estimations of advance and tactical retreat when I speak, and he studies me with narrowed eyes. I continue speaking regardless. "It's like... they let them die, and now they just want us to ignore it? What's next? What are we supposed to say if anyone asks us what happened to the other trainees out here?"

"Baralai." Gippal's pronunciation of my name is an exasperated one. "You're acting like any of this is supposed to surprise you. They're Yevon, what more d'you expect?"

Even though I know the Al Bhed is only resorting to old beliefs, uncustomary annoyance rises in my heart alongside my temper. "Do you want to tell the families of those people that their relatives just vanished?" I ask him in exchange. "We all knew the risk of fiends out here. What we didn't know was that we'd be abandoned just for asking questions."

"We're getting off track." It is Nooj who brings us back together. "Paine, what else happened while you were there?"

Something I have said seems to have attracted Paine's attention, because when Gippal and I both look back to her, she is staring at me. It is as if I have turned into a fiend myself by the way her eyes are fixated, a fiend of feathers and grace that hypnotizes its victims before it feasts. "I was looking for the spheres from Team Four's recorder," she answers after a long minute, even though she is speaking while still watching me. Then her face turns back to Nooj. "We each have different drop-sacks so that the teams can be told apart. I figured on working with the other recorders to try and substitute in our own spheres just in case Team Four had come across something they shouldn't have... if there was a reason why the instructors might have wanted them deliberately eaten by fiends, instead of just ignoring them."

Gippal voices the question on all our minds. "And?"

"Gone. Team Three's recorder even asked when we all noticed that one of the sacks were missing. The instructors said that we should consider those spheres lost." This is a lie that is too blatant even for Yevon, and we all know it. Paine shifts uncomfortably and keeps her eyes on the floor. "Even though there should have been those that were already submitted, none of us were allowed to see them. We were told... that we should forget about them."

It is now that I realize the officers have brought no Summoners with them. Such a thought has never bothered me before, back when I thought the exercises they had called us for were practice only. No one had mentioned the desert until we were out here with not enough machina to go around, and empty barracks whose previous occupants we could only guess at.

Without a Summoner, they have never planned on having to Send any of us should an accident occur.

This realization could paint my face ashen with an unwillingness to believe, so I try and restrain my thoughts from going further.

"Your orders are to turn in even the spheres you record out of combat. Why?" Nooj likes having enemies to wage strategy against. It gives him leniency to be direct. "Can't you substitute other spheres and falsify the information to them?"

Paine's answer to this is to shake her head. "Yevon's marked the ones we're required to use. Red for the Crimson Squad." A delayed snort from our recorder shows her disdain for these imposed limitations. "Not only that, but they're also supposed to be keyed to a certain classification level. I don't know what that means, but all of the reports we recorders are tallying are going somewhere. I don't know why they're being so stringent with them. It's... uncommon."

Uncommon. As if Sin taking flight for tourists was something to be termed infrequent.

I would hate to see what Paine found worth calling rare.

Gippal has noticed how deeply I have fallen into silence, my gaze refusing to hold directly upon people's faces but dropping to wander the sand beneath all our feet. He nudges me. I glance up to him as a warning; I do not think my natural suspicions will help anyone's peace of mind right now, particularly my own.

Paine is continuing to speak, made awkward for once underneath Nooj's determined aggression. "I... can give you my spares if you want." There is hesitation in her voice. No. Fear. Why? "Just be careful with them. If I request too many and don't turn them in, they'll wonder why I keep letting them get eaten by fiends." A dry laugh follows from her throat, but it dies quickly. The joke is an inadvertent reference to very real deaths.

She realizes it, exhales the word, "Sorry."

Why do her eyes dart to me when she says that?

Nooj is the one who makes the final decision. "No. It's too risky. But try to record only the basics if you can, Paine. All of us," he nods to the group as a whole, "let's try to figure out why the maesters want to keep such a tight control over these things." Command makes his voice strong again. It motivates his body, urges him up once more to pace broken lines across the sand. "If you ever find discards, try to hold onto them. Just in case. I don't like Yevon meddling in this way. If we want the truth, though, we're going to have to dig it out on our own."

Our Al Bhed has lost interest with Nooj's words past the man's first firm declaration. Glimmers of light peek across the tent and paint the ceiling with ruddy waves; Gippal has one of the spheres already in his hands, having apparently taken the orders literally. Like a farm pest, he squirreled it out of Paine's pouches without asking or any of us noticing. Now he rolls it from palm to palm as he speaks. "You got one with Baralai in it?"

I interpret his question as a request for confirmation, and dart a look at the orb he toys with. Paine knows better and confronts him directly. "What do you mean by that?" Her tone of voice startles me and I change the direction of my curiosity to her; it is Paine's turn to resort to avoidance when I do, turning her head back towards Nooj and then towards her compromised machina pack.

Currently, I am not sure who's winning in the fencing match of our faces.

"I just figured, hey, maybe sometime when I'm a big-shot commander and I haven't seen you three in a couple months 'cuz you've been busy with your own units, I can play it and it'd be like you were there." Gippal has a particular shamelessness. It's his heart. He confesses such a thing to the group and we all stare at him as if he were Sin itself, walking and talking and smiling. He does not look bothered by our surprise.

Even Nooj looks momentarily taken off balance by Gippal's nonchalant ease. This is no longer a council of battle. Now it is a reminder of alliances again, and in this field, Nooj is not as utterly comfortable as the blonde. Our Deathseeker laughs and holds his hand out in a lax demand for the sphere. When it is given to him, he tosses it towards Paine without even glancing at the contents.

Remarkably enough, what is jest almost becomes embarrassment; our recorder registers the flicker of motion barely in enough time to look over, snap her hand up and catch the orb before it physically strikes her. Neither of us were paying much attention. By almost cracking Paine's skull with a glorified record, Nooj has interrupted a brief skirmish between the both of our wills being pitted against one another through the language of sidelong glances.

Shame. I think I was winning.

"I need to get spares now." Judging from the dry heaviness of her voice alone, this is not a task that Paine relishes. "I'd have had extra if I didn't get that last one taken away." Sand trickles from her legs as she gets to her feet. The machina hangs from her fingers like a sword, threat implicit even though it remains dormant. Then Paine kneels by her pile of equipment long enough to sheathe the thing in its carrying bag, and it is hidden behind a zipper and two buttons.

Gippal flops down on the cot. Considering that this limits my conversation options to Nooj, and he already has begun to lapse into belligerent brooding, I also stand. My fingers undo the ties on the tent flap and then pull it back. "I'll walk you over."

Her footsteps slow when I present this offer. It causes me to wonder if she had wanted to get away from all three of us with her errand. Then she inclines her head, wordless, and ducks out of the shelter.

Outside, occupied by velvet dark, the desert is estranged from its noonday heat. Sand does not retain the sun as effectively as moist dirt, and so most of the trainees are wrapped up in their own tents under whatever sparse blankets they have managed to win off each other in gaming bets. Here and there, campfires stud the encampment. They burn low. Any heat coming off them is rabidly absorbed by the guards stationed on night watch. They clump around the thin blazes rather than keep their eyes on the dunes, so I hope that tonight will not surprise us with more monsters.

Paine herself suppresses a shudder as the difference in temperatures strikes her again after exiting our tent. In silent response I step closer, and then finally reach out an arm to touch my fingers to the small of her back. That is a spot I am becoming overly familiar with on our recorder; in the future, I may always remember her by association with a slight dip in someone's skin. Paine takes up the silent offer, leans into me.

I think about offering her the jacket, but that would require removing my hand from her to take it off first.

I choose instead to speak. "You were... really calm in filming."

"My hands were shaking," our recorder admits with a short laugh. It is a sound that sums up all of her own tension. Nooj's fists, Gippal's tendency to ramble, and now Paine's breath when she barks it. "Anyone who tries to play back half my spheres is going to have the worst luck trying to figure out what went on."

"Maybe then they won't study ours too much." Light banter serves its purpose. The virtue of the two of us is that we are the quietest in our team, and the volume of our words barely carries above the slight crunching of our footsteps.

Midnight's peace is impossible to preserve. Just when I am thinking about how comfortable Paine's leg feels against mine as we walk, she speaks up in a phrase as hard as steel. "Look... I just want to know something before this goes any further." Make that as hard as stone. Paine is forthright when she is uncertain, and despite how I know this well by now, I still wonder if she will attempt to break my arm if I displease her.

So I am careful when I speak. "Yes?"

"Are you going to get me into trouble with the maesters, Baralai?"

Paine's voice is low when she says this, like a swordblade coming in with hope to hamstring you. It does its job perfectly. I stop in place stunned; the hand on her waist reaches up to grip her shoulder, working on pure instinct alone and desiring her not to depart. Tr to hit me. Then the rest of me is moving and I am pulling her to face me, both my palms on the mixed cloth and flesh of her pride. Her arms are cooler than I would have expected. I wonder how hard she is working to keep herself from shivering.

"Why did you say something like that?" I do not recognize who birthed that phrase until I replay it back in my mind and notice that it was my lips that moved. The resonance of it is too low. The last time I heard such a noise in my mouth was when I was last angry, and that years ago. Back when life wasn't a matter you could smile through. Being around my teammates has changed me. They are reaching inside my guard and making me honest.

Paine recognizes the banked ferocity of my words. She stares intently at my jacket collar with no sign to actually confront me back. I wonder what Gippal and Nooj have done to destroy all the habits she grew up with in turn. "I always thought you would be the most loyal to Yevon than any of us, Baralai. Can you blame me?" Even her words have transfigured to uncertain adolescents, stubborn still as they may be.

"You... were afraid I would turn you in?" The concept is painfully surreal. "For helping us out?"

My doubt of her has Paine uncomfortable again. She refuses to look at me, angles her elbows in uncommitted efforts to pull away. "I can't read you. Okay?" Saying it sounds like she's been forced to present her own guts at a dinner party and be civil about the garnish. "You're not the easiest person to figure out what's going on. You were born in Bevelle, you still sounded like you believed what the maesters said. And you take the least risks out of all of us. How am I supposed to know if you're just playing me for a fool?"

Ingrained behaviors are what keep me from denying the last question. Bevelle teaches a person to lie by omittance and to rarely commit. Besides. The nail that has driven through my mind is the accusation which seems the most out of place. It is to this that I protest.

"I take risks."

Now at last, Paine wrenches her eyes away from tracing the temple script on my clothes. They lift to me like bloody accusations.

"Prove it."

Above us, the stars spell out stories that navigators recite back to themselves when they are lost.

I give in to the challenge of her face, blocking them out of my vision when I kiss her.

Paine's mouth tastes like she has torn the inside of her lip from biting it in frustration. Sweetness lingers, mixing with salt; a mystery undefined makes the flavor of her a mix I am compelled to devour. She pushes back in equal hunger. We wrestle there with fingers tightening in each other's clothes, Paine's hands succeeding in pulling the layers of my shirt out from where they have been tucked, and finally I break away first because I need to pant my breath back in.

She's already moving to trace her tongue around my ear when I manage to revive my wits. We are both standing exposed in the middle of camp. I am telling myself that all the canvas shelters around us are likely occupied by people who would definitely not like us stumbling in on them. They are full of sleeping guards or sleeping instructors or they are just plain stocked with people we should not even think to interrupt.

I am telling myself this even as I'm taking a step towards one and reaching out an arm to twitch the entrance flap aside.

Paine comes to the conclusion of the contents before I do because it is hard to focus when her fingers are dipping into my belt. "Supply tent," she's mumbling against my chest while she's parting the folds of my clothes to mouth my skin.

Works for me.

Tumbling inside is a process that involves almost falling into several boxes when Paine's feet get snarled with mine. It would have likely been far more graceful if I had not had my leg pressing between hers. She is not as cold as I thought; rather, her thighs are hot enough through her shorts that as I cradle her to me, her body feels like a sun.

The tent flap falls closed behind us. Paine makes a muted noise of protest when our mutual fumbling leads us to collide into what sounds like a munitions box, but by then her lips are back on mine and I am swallowing her muffled voice as it becomes a muffled groan. Buckles unsnap beneath my fingers. By the time Paine manages to finish pulling off my jacket and drop it unheeded to the floor, I have already managed to succeed a second time in undoing all the metal locks that keep her leather tightly in place.

My bones remain unbroken.

In the darkness, I can't see her as she lets her head tip back. I couldn't even if I wanted to because my eyes are closed from the pleasure of having her breast in my mouth and her knee bent up against my arm. The crates I am helping support Paine against have labels that might explain more of the maesters' intentions, but right now neither of us care to worry about what's inside them.

We are submerged in a world where the only light is what little that comes creeping underneath the canvas and I have absolutely no problem with being blind.