Kairi abandoned her attempts to blend in and exchanged her dress in a deserted corner of town for one of Sora's shirts and a pair of pants, which were warm and sturdy and much better suited to the trek back to the transport point. The pleasant spring breeze of that afternoon had grown teeth after the sun set behind the mountains, and it nipped and tore at Riku and Kairi's exposed faces and hands. Neither had much to say on the pretext of saving their breath for the steep and rocky climb, but it was really apprehension that smothered the conversation. Sora was a good hand to have in a fight, better with his Keyblade than either of them, and his natural charm had smoothed over no small amount of rocky first meetings, but charm only carried one so far. Kairi had vague recollections from history class that they sometimes executed deserters in the thick of wartime, and whether this army continued that practice she did not want to discover after the fact.

She did not feel the need to share this memory with Riku, who was lost in his own worries. He was afraid for Sora, but the aura of conspiracy that surrounded the wizard-soldiers and Jonas' 'Dark Servants' was almost as worrying. The cheerful sendoff Market Chipping was giving its soldier boys was all well and good, but something in the management of this conflict left a sour taste in his mouth. When the public feared the public servants, there was something desperately wrong.

They were only left to simmer in their apprehension until the pinprick stars had filled out the sky in earnest, for Riku suddenly noticed they were not alone in the hills. A dark shape was inching up the mountain's base on the same path they were walking. At his signal Kairi doused the lantern. The figure moved with palpably painful slowness, and it did not take long for Riku and Kairi to slip up close behind with carefully placed steps. Riku called his Keyblade, just in case, and following his example Kairi stowed the lantern in her pack and did the same. It might be a harmless traveler…or it might not.

The silhouette turned out to be an old woman struggling up the mountains with a walking stick and basket in hand. She looked ancient, past eighty at least, with thin wisps of white hair escaped from her braid fluttering about her deeply wrinkled face, and her rheumy eyes hadn't spotted them yet.

Riku abandoned stealth and jogged noisily up the gravelly switchback path, Kairi following behind. She squinted down at them in surprise, raising her cane in what she attempted to make a threatening fashion. "Who'd be wandering the Waste this time of night? Thugs and robbers?" she called out. "If you're either, I'd like you to know your luck today is as rotten as mine's been, since I haven't got anything at all worth stealing."

"We're not thieves," Riku said, not ready to dismiss his Keyblade just yet, and holding it casually ready in one hand. "We're travelers. And I think you could add witches to that list of unpleasant characters, couldn't you? They wouldn't be having the best of luck either, since I know how to deal with witches." He didn't smell the taint of Darkness on her, but he wasn't ready to let go of his suspicion yet, either.

Kairi stepped slightly in front of him, pressing the shaft of his Keyblade down with her hand until the razor teeth were no longer pointing toward the old woman. "Riku, stop. She looks harmless," Kairi said.

The old woman humphed at that, looking insulted, and Riku answered Kairi's assertion in a lower tone not meant for the elderly woman to hear. "Ninety-year-old grannies don't go for strolls in the wolf-infested wilderness in the dark," he whispered. "Looking harmless isn't enough."

"Well I think this one is, for whatever reason, and even if she is a witch in disguise, we don't have any problem with her. Not all 'witches' are evil, remember?" she replied pointedly.

"Well," she said, impatiently adjusting her shawl as they quietly debated her identity. "Since you're not going to rob me, we're both going the same direction, and it's cold, I think we ought to keep walking no matter who we turn out to be."

Kairi took another step forward, confident in her assessment of this woman, and dismissed her blade. "But it's pitch dark—you could fall. Don't you have someplace to stay nearby?" Kairi asked gently. "Even I wouldn't want to climb these hills without light."

"A place to stay? Oh, yes…yes. I asked the turnip. He might be coming back…and he might not." She chuckled to herself, in on a joke that was lost to everyone else.

Kairi believed the old woman was exactly what she seemed, and Kairi was usually good at sorting people out, much better than Riku had turned out to be. Helping her, however, presented its own problems. She was placing her trust in root vegetables, which had Riku suspecting her mind had been ravaged as deeply by time as her weathered face, and the time it took to see her safely back to whatever farmstead she'd probably wandered away from would burn hours they didn't have to spare. As loath as Riku was to leave a senile old lady as a snack for whatever predators wandered by, he was even more reluctant to sabotage their chances of catching up with Sora. "We can't wait for you, but if you can keep up until we reach our ship you'll at least have someplace safe to spend the night," Riku said at last. It was technically breaching the royal directive (although at this point it was barely more than a suggestion) about interplanetary contact, but he doubted anyone would believe her story even if she did blab it.

"An airship? You stole a royal airship?! Travelers indeed," she cackled, very impressed. "Pirates, more like." There were simultaneous shrugs, and neither of them bothered to correct her. "Though you are the strangest pair of pirates I've ever heard of, stopping to help an old witch in between thieving and plundering…and…and…" here she stopped, chewing on the words with distaste as if the consistency wasn't quite right. "whatever else it is that girl pirates do. Alright, then, lead on."

They did, Kairi trying to match the old woman's slow pace. She inquired as to where they were headed, and Kairi, assuming that she would think the worst of them anyway, relinquished the truth about Sora's arrest and their nebulous plans to break him out of prison. After Kairi answered to her satisfaction, 'Grandma Sophie', as she insisted on being addressed, filled the air with random observations and complaints on the nature of being old as if it was a fascinating new experience. Kairi's adoptive grandmother did that too, most of it revolving around things that had stiffened up, dried up, or stopped up, all of which she would gladly have gone on not hearing but did anyway out of respect for the aged. She offered up sympathetic noises whenever it seemed appropriate, her mind elsewhere. Sophie didn't seem to notice, or if she did she plowed on anyway.

Riku was about to suggest they use their much younger legs to their full potential when Kairi stopped short and motioned for the other two to do the same. "Listen," she said.

Hovering above the whispering of the night—the cricket song, the rustle of the grass, the owl cries, the noise of a hundred thousand tiny things scratching out a life in the dirt below—was a harsh sound, manmade, that shattered the harmony of the night chorus. It was the screech of metal over metal. The darkness in the wild was thick, and untamed by streetlamps or the friendly glow that seeped past doors and windows to illuminate a city, and the circle of light cast by Kairi's lantern suddenly seemed small indeed. None of their eyes could pierce the night to find the source of the noise. "I can hear something," Riku said finally. "Machinery, maybe, but I don't see anything yet."

The woman wilted, muttering and straining to pick out the source of the sound with her elderly eyes. "I used to be able to see, curse it. Please tell me that's not what it sounds like."

"It's big," Riku said, when he could just make out the outline of something ever-so-slightly less black in the vast tableau of black and blacker black. "Big and coming this way."

With increasingly loud grinding and clanking, the silhouette neared until all three pairs of eyes could discern its details. It looked like a giant's child had raided a junkyard and pasted his findings together with school glue…blindfolded. A tin-roofed shack jutted implausibly from the dome of an observatory, which was topped with a factory in miniature complete with puffing smokestacks. There was a crow's nest, an oil derrick, a quaint country cottage. Its face, for there was something indefinably alive about the whole contrivance, was the prow of an ironclad battleship, the two gun turrets set in the prow swiveling around like the eyes of a chameleon. There was no way the entire mess should be moving, or even in one piece, yet here it was, scurrying toward them on four clawed legs that could barely support its bulk. Leading it was a faintly man-shaped shadow that sprang just out of reach of the crushing legs.

"What the…!" Kairi yelped, as the trailblazing…thing bounced past her then stopped next to the old woman. It was a ratty old scarecrow with a turnip for a head and a stovepipe hat, and it was obviously magical, mobile, and very, very agitated.

"That's Howl's Castle!" she cried at it. "When I asked for someplace to stay that's not what I had in mind!"

"You mean there actually was a sentient turnip?" Riku asked, staring at it. It was wearing, incongruously, what had once been a rather nice suit, as well as a toothy and permanent smile draw on with black ink.

"Looks like," Kairi said, and shouldered off her pack and extended her arm to summon her Keyblade. "But I don't think that's what we should be focusing on here, since there may very well be a Heartless wizard inside slavering for our souls."

"Yeah, that occurred to me too. I just thought the turnip was more out of the ordinary for us," Riku said, and did the same.

The castle slowed its headlong rush a mere thirty feet from where they stood, bucking like a bull trying to unseat a cowboy. Riku grabbed two hands and pulled them all out of harm's way as a piece of rusted piping as tall as he was clanged to the ground and began rolling down the hill. The castle reared on its spindly legs, shedding more metallic debris, and something else that slapped wetly in the dirt like pieces of ground meat. They oozed back upright immediately, righting twisted limbs and flattened heads with oh-too-familiar lantern eyes. The scarecrow bounded even higher, completely frantic, spinning around and around but always stopping with one floppy glove pointing far above their heads.

"Get back! " Riku yelled. "We'll be crushed if we fight them here!" They half pushed and half carried the old woman as fast as her legs would take her, and, no longer beneath the long moonshadow of the castle, they realized what the scarecrow had been pointing at. The previous low point of their day took another plunge.

Another Heartless was crouched low against the top of the shuddering contraption and tearing at the layers of machinery with terrifying ease, ripping off sheets of iron as if they were they were nothing more than orange peels. It was twenty times as large as the Shadows that were stalking them on the ground, and somewhat apelike, if any ape they'd ever seen had possessed claws the size of scythe blades and enough armor plating to put a tank to shame. It had been slow to catch the scent of the hearts far below it, but it had now. Like the Heartless in the alley it concentrated on the delicious strength of the Keyblade Masters' hearts first, and leapt. One of the Shadows was flattened under its feet as it landed with enough force to make the ground shiver. It took hold of a boulder, bellowed loud enough to echo around the hills, and crushed it in one fist like a handful of chalk.

In unison Riku and Kairi raised their blades. There was no need to speak; they had danced this dance too many times already. A few quick strokes dispatched most of the small, weak Shadows that had welled up before them. The huge Heartless swatted first at Kairi with one fist, who ducked gracefully, and the blow connected instead with one of its fellows, who stood in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Shadow's diminishing squeal bounced away a terrifying distance. The power in its arms was enough to chill the blood. One blow was enough to crush their frail human bodies beyond magical repair, and the only thing standing between its fist and their skin were a few layers of cotton.

Kairi wanted to run. For all its fiendish strength and size, the bony plates encasing its body weighed it down, made it sluggish, slow to react, and its tree-stump legs were bowed and unsuited to speed. With a good sprint and some luck, they could be within range of the ship's teleporter in under half an hour. They could—and the old woman hunkered down behind an outcropping of rock would be left to its tender mercy. She stood her ground.

They circled round and round again, just out of reach of every move it made, feeling the wake of its claws slicing through the air before them. Razor daggers of ice shattered against its hide, and fire didn't trouble it at all. Its armor had the organic strength of a turtle's shell and the articulation of a knight's steel plate, and it sounded like a river of smooth stones tumbling ceaselessly over themselves. Riku landed the first blow, with plenty of muscle behind it, but he only succeeded in jarring his hand so hard the hilt was torn from it and his Keyblade went spinning away into the grass. The numbing force put Riku in mind of taking a wooden plank to a block of marble, and was about as effective. He scrambled away from the killing reach of the beast's hands and recalled his weapon, lesson well learned.

There were gaps in the plate; like a knight's suit it was weakest at the joints and neck, and Riku and Kairi refined their strategy. But no matter how careless it got swatting at the two troublesome flies, it rarely offered them the more tender targets. They darted into striking radius and back out again just as quickly, their Keyblades nipping only hard enough to enrage it into more clumsy swipes.

The essential problem with this strategy was that Heartless lacked, besides the obvious hearts, burning lungs and tiring muscles, both of which would be troubling Riku and Kairi before long. A Heartless could keep going forever, without food, rest, or even air, but even allowing for the excellent fighting shape they were in, they were still bound by the limits of human endurance. To close the ground was death, but it was the only way to reach its vulnerable throat. Their second consideration was luck. Riku did not trust his, for he was burning through it quickly—after all, the Heartless had to be lucky only once, and he and Kairi every time.

It was in the weak roof of a rabbit's warren that Riku's luck failed. As he stepped back on it, unaware, it collapsed half a foot into the heather and threw him backward before he could regain his balance. The ground was one place in a fight to never, ever be, since it was often followed shortly after by a place in the ranks of the losers—or the dead. The Heartless lurched in for the kill, and Riku found himself staring into a pair of crimson eyes. It was a perspective he wished he'd never gotten. The Heartless raised its fist with the intention of crushing his skull. Kairi screamed, not in fear, but in anger, an Amazon's battle cry, and threw her Keyblade at its upraised fist with all her strength, but in the darkness and her haste she misjudged the distance and her weapon went sailing in an arc over its head.

Riku threw himself onto his belly, and its fist landed with ground-shaking power three inches from his ear. Twisted ankle or no twisted ankle, a fist the size of a watermelon was extremely persuasive, and Riku was back up on his feet and out of reach. "We've got to end this now!" he yelled. Kairi noticed with a twinge of concern how reluctantly he put weight on his left leg, and agreed completely.

She had neither Riku's strength or Sora's speed, but she did have the ancient bloodlines of the queens of Radiant Garden, a world that had been awash in magic for centuries. "Give me some room and get ready to move!" she shouted. Riku didn't question her order, but did as she directed. He drew the creature towards him with a few taunts (it didn't take much, with Heartless, since most could only barely comprehend human speech), and she began the spell to bind and direct the air. These were usually defensive, spinning arrows and blows harmlessly away from the caster, but that was not what she had in mind. That use was traditional, but Kairi, who was also the first Princess of Heart to take up her own Keyblade, was empathically not a traditionalist. Instead of the buffering winds she had been taught, she took as her inspiration the typhoons that battered Destiny Island in the summers of her childhood, whose shrieking winds stripped roofs, shattered windows, and uprooted trees. She thrust all the power she had into the spell, reserving nothing, until the roaring gale almost broke her control in its eagerness to be freed. With effort she held on, her hair lashing her face, until Riku put enough distance between himself and the Heartless. The winds ripped a deep gouge in the dirt, sending heather and shards of rock to lash the beast's face. It reared and stumbled, pushed off balance, and its throat was bared to their blades.

This time Riku threw, and his Keyblade buried itself deep. The beast bellowed, mortally wounded. With any other weapon it would have been a deadly foolish thing to do, leaving oneself unarmed, but the Keyblade wasn't any other weapon. Riku recalled it to his hand and threw; again the blade reached deep into its mark. There was no blood, since Heartless were not flesh and did not bleed, but its cries of rage were ebbing and its legs going unsteady. It crashed to the ground and melted silently into a fog over the hills.

"Good aim," Kairi said, when she'd caught enough of her breath to speak.

"Likewise," Riku said, leaning against his Keyblade. "When did you figure out you could make Aero do that? I can't make Aero do that."

"About five minutes ago," Kairi replied, who was still flushed and coasting on adrenaline.

Riku grunted appreciatively. "Badass."

"Sophie?" Kairi shouted behind her. "Are you all right?"

Sophie levered herself up from the ditch she'd been crouched down in and half jogged, half limped over to them. "Am I all right? You two are the ones I'm worried about. He nearly got squashed like a bug. I spent the whole fight shivering in a ditch."

Kairi ran her fingers through her hair in a vain effort to undo the snarls the winds had woven into it, as if she could smooth out everything else, too. That had been much too close, and exactly why she did not enjoy fighting. The thrill of battle crested in her heart like a wave, while it lasted, since there was no time to think about what she was doing, only the blade in her hands and the enemies surrounding her. Once it crashed down, though, and spit her back on the shore, she felt less like basking in the golden glow of victory and more like finding a quiet spot to go throw up in from nerves. She took two deep breaths and forced the urge down. "We're fine, Sophie, thank you." Kairi answered, and her voice only stumbled a little.

With the sound of complaining metal the castle shook loose the last of the debris the Heartless had managed to dislodge. It had waited for them the whole time, and that in itself seemed as much of an invitation as any. Set in the tail of stucco walls and terracotta roofing tiles was a red door and a gas lamp above it that illuminated a globe of the countryside. They collected their packs and tried the door, which Riku found to be locked, but that was no obstacle. He had barely to raise his Keyblade to it before all the tumblers clicked obediently into place and it swung open on whining hinges. He hesitated for a moment with his hand on the weathered boards, afraid of what he might find when he passed them. Evil wizards had an unfailing flair for the gruesomely dramatic and decorated accordingly, as if the tools of their craft weren't repulsive enough: knives rusted with the gore of sacrifice, mummified things with fangs and too many legs, pots of grave dust, talismans carved of human bone. With utmost care, senses tuned to the slightest twitch or whisper, Riku ascended the stone steps.

What he found to be the pervading smell in the cramped room was not lingering death but…unwashed socks. Unusual for most wizardly residences, it turned out to be a great deal smaller than it seemed from the outside, and crammed to a perilous degree with junk. Some of it was obviously magical equipment in the same vein as Merlin's—spellbooks, twisting glass beakers, bottles of dark glass with rubber stoppers and faded yellow labels, and bunches of herbs tied to the rafters. Riku broke off a sprig, crushed it between his fingers, and found it to be nothing more interesting than mint. The rest of it was what would be found in any home: there was a set of blue china, most of which was chipped, dusty, and everywhere else but inside the china cabinet and mundane books sharing desk space with crusts of bread. Scraps of paper had descended on every flat surface like leaves after an autumn storm and been printed with a delicate lace of teacup rings. He'd been expecting a whole crocodile, but the only stuffed beasts he found were a line of dusty teddybears arrayed on a high shelf beside the hearth.

All in all, the worst thing his quick investigation yielded was a jar of very fuzzy marmalade on one of the bookshelves. "You can come on up. I don't think he's home," Riku said in the direction of the stairs.

Kairi acknowledged this with relief, and moved to help Sophie to the chair in front of the hearth, which looked as though it hadn't had the ashes swept out since the stonemason had constructed it some three hundred years ago. "What a dump," the older woman observed. "When I pictured Howl's Castle this isn't what I had in mind." She flexed her knobby fingers, unsatisfied with the job the thin heat of the dying fire was doing to warm them. "My dear, could you throw a few more logs on that? These old fingers don't care much for spring nights."

Kairi obliged, since even her young ones were feeling a little numb at the tips from hours of hiking through the chill damp. She dropped some logs into the feeble fire from the pile beside the hearth. The fire licked at them greedily…then opened two wavering eyes, blinked at her, and spoke up crossly: "The door was locked for a reason, you realize." It then paused expectantly, probably waiting for them to scream and run back out the door. They didn't. Kairi and Riku waited for the old woman to scream. She didn't, either.

Riku sat down on the very edge of the stone hearth and stretched out his long legs with exaggerated informality, mostly because his ankle was really starting to hurt, but also to give the impression he broke into legendary wizards' strongholds on a regular basis. Although Calcifer wouldn't have know it, and glared at the show of bravado, it was more or less true. "And we unlocked it for a reason. Several reasons. All of them with very sharp teeth," Riku replied calmly. He was by now pretty much immune to the shock of hearing voices issuing from things that really had no right to be talking—armoires, teacups, chipmunks, and lobsters, for example. Sentient fire barely registered on his weirdness meter.

"Nice to meet you, too," Kairi said, who was not used to having her efforts with a Keyblade greeted with sarcasm by anyone but Riku. She had to concede that breaking and entering wasn't really inside her comfort zone, but the castle itself had practically invited them in, regardless of whether or not it had consulted with any of the occupants. "I'm Kairi and this is Riku. You could at least thank us for knocking off that big gorilla…mantis…armadillo…" she gestured around vaguely, looking for a word capable of encompassing the crushing horror of the beast they had defeated, and failing, "…thing that was tearing off the roof."

The fire puffed itself up, sending a blasting wave of heat rolling out of the hearth that made them all shrink away reflexively. Like just about any ancient and eldritch creature, it did not take well to a scolding about manners from an eighteen-year-old girl. "I am the great and powerful fire demon Calcifer! And I don't go around thanking annoying little housebreakers!"

Sophie sputtered a little and patted her face as if to assure herself her abundant eyebrows were still there. "That was uncalled for, Calcifer," Sophie said sharply, in a voice that would have struck terror into the hearts of disobedient young boys in schoolrooms everywhere. "She saved my life and I think she just about saved yours, too. The beastie seemed very keen on finding a way in, if I'm any judge."

Calcifer glared hotly (and literally, they could all feel it on their skin), then blew an embery raspberry in her direction by way of reply. Sophie did not seem impressed with his rebuttal, and smiled a mischievous smile. "Well, since we've established you're not Howl, does that make you one of his servants, then?"

"I am not a servant. I am a demon! I am the blazing light of distant suns! I've forgotten more spells than Howl will ever learn!" he roared, blasting them again out of pique. "But I may be temporarily assisting Howl as a term of my mm…mmm…imprisonment and I'll thank you not to bring that up again." The last part was said very quickly, like he didn't care for the words. Sophie mumbled an insincere apology, removed her shawl and laid it over her legs, and settled deeper into the chair Kairi claimed for her. "Hey…hey, hey, hey!" stuttered. "What'd you think you're doing?"

"I'm tired," Sophie answered. "These nice young people have places to be and daring rescues to plot. I think I'll stay here for a bit and get out of their hair."

"That's not fair! Now you're in mine! Wait til Howl gets home…he'll, he'll—"

"You don't have any hair," Riku pointed out. "And he'll what?"

Kairi was torn neatly in half by relief and concern. She knew they couldn't afford the delay of having her tag along either, but this didn't seem like the safest place to spend the night, especially given the stories they'd been told at the cafe. "Are you sure you'll be all right here, Sophie?"

"I think so. Can't imagine Howl would want the heart of a shriveled old lady like me."

Calcifer disagreed, raucously, and with a great deal of smoke and sparking, as well as empty and possibly not so empty threats to Sophie's person. Riku stood up, and ever-so-casually called his Keyblade into being so the tip was exactly level with Calcifer's wavering eyes. Whether a Keyblade was any good on a creature made of fire he had no idea, but threatening people with it had served him fairly well in the past, and it couldn't hurt to try. The demon went cross-eyed, bug-eyed, and finally doe-eyed in rapid succession and suddenly stopped complaining. "If it's in your power, can you promise she won't be hurt?" Riku asked. "Threatening people who look like my grandma is about a negative two on the one-through-ten scale of pathetic."

Calcifer drew himself deep under a glowing log, looking sheepish. Riku wasn't expecting such a thorough change of heart, but having an intensely magical weapon shoved in your face did occasionally have that effect. "Fine, she can stay one night. I'm not totally heartless," Calcifer mumbled. "Howl won't hurt her, and neither will I," he paused, thinking, and then said, with shades of his former acid tones: "but if she pokes her big nose somewhere it shouldn't be, I'm not sticking my neck too far out for her."

"Sounds fair enough," Kairi said, and moved to leave.

"Hey wait," Calcifer said, hesitantly. "She said you had somebody to rescue."

"Yeah," Riku said, intrigued, but smart enough not to show it. "Why do you care?"

"He got one of those giant keys too?"

"He does," Riku answered. "What difference would that make to you?"

"Neh," Calcifer said, waving off the question. "Where'd they take him?"

"Porthaven Fort. He was arrested by the military police on charges of desertion."

"Hmmmm..." Calcifer said. He hmmmed some more, and chewed on his lips, but finally blurted out: "I'll let you in on a little secret. Don't tell Howl. In fact, don't tell anybody, ever, or I'll curse you so hard your brain will leak out yours ears; I have a reputation to uphold. That door you came in isn't necessarily the door you'll be leaving by. Twist the top knob and it'll spit you out in the Waste, or Porthaven, or Kingsbury, or well…the black one is strictly forbidden, but you get it. Turn the knob 'til the top marker is red," he said, and pointed at a glass disk split in fourths mounted over the door, green quadrant up, "open the door, and step outside, and you'll be within spitting distance of the Fort."

"Why should we believe you?" Riku asked, ever suspicious. "That seems too convenient."

"I'm telling you because I like to stay on the good sides of big threatening guys who wave magic swords in my face. Good insurance policy, having people like that owe you favors," he answered, with unabashed honesty. Selfishness was a wholly believable reason, although the thought of owing a favor to a demon was an uncomfortable prospect, Riku knew they didn't have much of a choice.

-ooo-

Calcifer was true to his rather put-upon word, and once properly set the front doorway opened into a quiet street of small apartments and shopfronts, this particular one belonging to a 'Wizard Jenkins', apparently one Howl's pseudonyms. The door shut behind them as soon as Kairi stepped past the threshold. Experimentally, she tried the knob again, but it had locked behind her, and getting her Keyblade out was probably not a wise choice unless she absolutely had to. Her eyes felt gritty with exhaustion, and beside her Riku tried unsuccessfully to stifle a yawn. This world was quite a few hours off the Garden's standard time, and the fight had made them start to feel it. "It'll be hours 'til those thugs make it over here, even if they take an airship. Now what?" he said.

"Depends. How's your leg?" she asked, since Riku was still limping and trying his damnedest not to show it.

"I'll be okay. And before you ask, no, I don't want a potion. They taste worse than my ankle hurts."

Kairi sighed. The last sentence was a flat-out lie, since the healing potions the Moogles brewed up for them tasted like very, very carbonated gingerale, a pleasantly sweet, spicy, throat-tingling taste only Riku had ever claimed to dislike, and that was only when they were out somewhere with a small and finite supply. "If you're that tough you can choke down a sip, since walking on it will only make it worse," she said, and dug the bottle out of the front pocket of her pack and shoved it at his chest. It was a worn blue sports bottle than had once been printed with the words Twilight Town Struggle '78, and the contents glowed faintly through the plastic.

Riku looked at it with distaste, but picked it up, pulled the top open with his teeth, and squeezed a tiny amount onto his tongue. He made sure Kairi saw the concessions he was making, horrified grimace and all, then stoppered it and handed it back. "So do you want to try finding a hotel at this hour? Because I don't."

Kairi was forced to agree. They were sweaty, dirty, scratched, slightly bloodied, and looked thoroughly disreputable. If the people here were as paranoid about staying on the good side of the police as Jonas had been, Kairi didn't want to sleep in any hotel that would stoop to taking them as guests. Her enchanted pack fit an awful lot, tent, camping pad and blankets among them, and the temperature here was much milder than it had been in the high country they'd just left. "Come on. Wouldn't be the first time we've had to crash outside."

As luck would have it, they found a public park barely steps from the shop. A sleeping drunk had already claimed the largest bench, but a line of tall shrubs tucked in the corner looked unoccupied. Kairi stopped to tuck a package of the chocolatey backpacking rations in the pocket of his shirt-cum-pillow, since he looked like he could use some, although he remained oblivious to this small act of kindness and continued to snore the snore of the completely and utterly plastered. Kairi and Riku tossed their packs under a convenient bush. She loosened the drawstring and began pulling out the relevant items: an antique-looking tent, pegs, and poles covered with Donald's duck-scratch runes warding against danger and discovery, and a foam pad and a blanket of decidedly more modern design. The tent wouldn't bar anyone (or anything) really determined to find them from doing so, but it greatly increased their chances of an uninterrupted nap if the worse that passed by were some Shadows or a bored copper.

It came together quickly, with the efficiency born of frequent repetition, and they lay down inside with relief. Kairi rolled over on her side, so Riku's hair tickled her face, and she could reach around to wrap her arm around his chest.

"What?" he whispered, when he felt her sigh heavily into his neck.

"My back is cold."

"I know."

"Now I know what he felt like, chasing after me. It sucks."