09

Fayt had never experienced true cold before. He had seen snow in person only once, at a ski resort his family had spent the holiday at one year with Sophia's (how long ago that was; he had been young, yes, but it felt like more than a lifetime) but that was all; the people of Earth had long ago learned to keep the weather within the bounds of their cities comfortable for them, and the coldest feeling that he could imagine was the chill in the middle of his head after taking a transporter.

That, he now understood, was a tame kind of cold. Domesticated. All that he had ever experienced before this point was cold in the sense that a house cat was kin to a tiger. And this was the only comparison he could make, the only words that fit, because the cold that struck him when he stepped out of the crashed shuttle's airlock door was not tame at all but like a wild animal that leapt onto his chest and bit into his throat; painful and crushing and staggering at once. He gasped with it, airless, as if the white puff he watched rise from his mouth was the last breath in his lungs as it was torn from his body; his eyes watered with it as much as with the swirling black smoke. He was suddenly and in a very literal way painfully aware of how little care or thought he had put into his use of the replicator when he had first crashed on Vanguard III; clad only in his summer shorts and sleeveless vest, and, now, a thin poncho and a pair of poorly-tied sandals. He might as well have been wearing nothing for all the protection his clothing offered.

The wind Mirage had mentioned in the cockpit was not steady, nor was it like the winds that Fayt had experienced before. It growled and gusted erratically, driven in weird eddies by the heat of the crashed ship as it cooled, driving icy teeth into Fayt like snapping bites, never really taking hold but darting off only to lunge back in from some new and unexpected angle just as he was finding his feet again. He staggered and closed his mouth. The cold hurt even the inside of his mouth, God, it stung at his eyes and in his nostrils; how could that be a thing; how could anyone live this way?

"Stay steady, kid," Cliff said quietly. "Stay right by me and don't let your hands drop."

Fayt made a soft sound of agreement; it was not for lack of trying, but words stuck (froze) in his throat. He jerked his head in a nod and stayed beside Cliff. The shattered stone road beneath their feet was uneven, slick and wet where the heat of the shuttle had melted the ice and snow all around it, and the ground beneath was rocky and sharp. Fayt's sandals slipped whenever he took a step. He was thankful when they stopped, just outside of the range which allowed the door to hiss closed again behind them, sealing the ship once more.

It was done. There was no turning back now.

The people gathered around the crashed ship were all talking among themselves in earnest. They were too hushed and too heavily overlapping for the translator function of Fayt's communicator to pick up, but he could guess none of them had expected to see people emerge from the side of the steaming chunk of metal that had fallen from the sky.

The guards were not so awed. He heard one of them bark a command, and the translator labored against the new sound of it. It gave him nothing, but the guards were already surging forward.

"W-wait." Fayt tried to speak, but his own words were as sluggish as the translator's efforts with this new language. His hands jerked downwards, palms still out. He could not feel his fingers already. "Wait, please, we're-"

"Give it up, kid." Cliff spoke with a weird degree of calm. "Just give it up. Nothing we can do about it."

Fayt turned his face up to Cliff in disbelief, but the man's face was a blank. Fayt felt a surge of frustration—without thinking, he turned towards Cliff entirely, his voice rising. "Just give up? We have to at least try to talk to these people so-"

Cliff did not even blink. "Look behind you."

Fayt frowned even as he turned. "Why-"

But he stopped in the middle of the question, and the sound of it in his throat turned into a cry of alarm as he stumbled back against Cliff's side, hands coming up again.

Fayt could not imagine how the guards had moved in so close so quickly or quietly—not in heavy metal armor, not over the wet stone. But two of them were barely more than the length of their lowered weapons away, the sharp spikes topping the long poles now pointed directly at Cliff and Fayt. Now, when they were right in front of him instead of tiny figures on a tiny display, Fayt was startled by how dangerous they looked. Each of the guards was closer to Cliff's size than his own, massive and looming, and their black helms, though they had looked plain in the display, were molded into grotesque metal faces of their own; half animal and half man. The openings through which the guards looked at them were narrow slit eyes carved out above frozen snarls, the fog of their breath roiling out through sculpted fangs like smoke. The one guard which had pushed back part of the helm's mask seemed to stare at him with two sets of eyes: one hollow, but both dark and narrowed. Both cold.

The guards spoke to him, the sounds sharp and aggressive but meaningless to him. The translator was laboring with the language more than it should have, spitting back only a word here or there, some of it nonsense. Fayt felt a creeping sense of alarm and unease. The translator rarely had difficulty adjusting to languages from 'human' classified aliens. Were these...not? They certainly looked like it—not only the ring of people around the crash site, but though he could only see a small oval of one guard's face, it certainly had the look of a human or closely similar race. His nose was large—the bridge and end both broad and a bit flat. His skin was a weathered shade of light brown, marked with nests of wrinkles around the dark rims of his eyes. Human.

Fayt swallowed hard. If the translator had not puzzled out their language yet, they would not be able to understand him any more than he understood them. That was what Cliff had meant, of course. There was no point in trying to communicate if you could not understand each other. But the guards, impatient for a response, were growing restless. One of them jabbed at him pointedly with their polearm as they spoke again, and tore a hole in Fayt's poncho in doing so.

He licked his lips nervously and felt the moisture cool to ice on his skin almost immediately. The parts of his body he could still feel were painfully cold. He heard "Uhm...we come in peace?" leave his mouth before he could stop it. He felt a faint motion move through Cliff's body that might have been a laugh, but the big man continued to stand in stolid silence.

The guard with the visible eyes narrowed them further. He lifted his weapon suddenly, but only enough to move forward and reach out to take hold of Fayt's arm. Fayt let out another faint cry, surprised and pained. He was not sure if it was the cold metal or the man's grip that hurt more.

"Cliff, what should I-"

"Just go. Don't fight anything they try to do." Cliff was also moving forward, slowly and evenly; his hands still held up over his shoulders and away from his body. The other two guards were covering him warily. "If they want your hands behind your back, let them put 'em there. They might take 'em off otherwise."

Fayt looked back at Cliff sharply, not sure he was joking. When his head turned the guard gave his arm a jerk. He stumbled on the slick ground, but so firmly held he did not think he could have fallen if he had tried. "I can't understand them!"

"Give it time. Calm down."

More guards were approaching. He could hear the rattle of their armor and the way its metal cracked loudly against the stone street. Their black eyes stared down at him (not their eyes, he tried to remind himself; it was only the molding of their helms, and he knew that, reasonably, he knew), and another hand took hold of him. He could see the pits and fine scars in the dark metal. It's always so smooth in the games, he thought for a moment, wildly, and he choked slightly on a laugh that he knew would have sounded shrill and afraid if he had let it out.

He was trying to be calm. He knew that shouting and struggling was only going to make things worse. But he was cold and afraid and in pain, and the only person he could understand or could understand him was a man he still did not fully trust one way or the other, not even to simply look out for him. And why should he? The murmur of the crowd continued, just barely too distant and too disorganized for the translator to make use of. But the guard was still speaking, pulling his arms backwards, and shouldn't it have been enough?

Metal closed onto his wrist, not the guard's fingers but a single coarse, heavy band. Fayt felt his throat clamp shut as palpably as the shackles now locking his hands behind his back. "Cliff-"

"Let it sample. This is unsurveyed territory. It's normal."

The words made it through to him the way a simple 'calm down' never could have hoped to. Of course. Of course the translation function had no frame of reference for the local languages. Vanguard III had been undeveloped, yes, but that didn't mean that there had been no surveys, no data gathering done. The foundations had already been there when he crashed, packet information shifted automatically by his escape pod from databases to communicator the moment his destination had been set. And who knew how many words it had still had to sample from Niklas and Meena while he lay unconscious. But no survey team or drone had ever set foot here, no matter how surreptitiously. All of the data had been gathered remotely until this moment.

Fayt took a deep, shaky breath, and then nodded, shoulders relaxing as well as they could with his hands clamped behind his back. "...Okay."

The guard barked something sharply behind him, shoving him forward. This time Fayt moved willingly, the faint, warm circle of his communicator comforting against his chest. It would do its job. As long as it was there and functional, it would do its job. He only had to wait.

The crowd parted grudgingly around them as the guards marched Fayt and Cliff forward through it. It was larger than he would have ever guessed from the console screen, packed into the narrow opening but stretched the length of a winding street; pressed tight by the closely-packed buildings. It was not as cold there as in the open space around the crash. The primitive multi-storied structures of wood and stone blocked the worst of the wind and radiated their waste heat into the dim passageway they formed. Fayt's jaw shivered and chattered all the same. Within a few yards, his wrapped feet were already soaked and heavy from the snow. "Think they'll give us a change of clothes?"

Cliff laughed. The guard escorting him shoved his shoulder hard and said something Fayt could hear but still not understand. He wondered if it was as frightening for the natives as it was for them not being able to understand what the other was saying.

They moved from the narrow street up winding steps onto another, wider one, wind blowing the snow in erratic gusts around them. While the general crowd was no more, people pointed and murmured at each other from the sides of the maze of winding roads and switchbacks they found themselves passed through, most staying close to the buildings or behind the safety of metal railings on raised side streets, watching with a mix of distrust and curiosity. A small pack of children followed close at the guards' heels, scattering away when they were shooed at only to move back in like curious, yapping dogs. One of them moved in close enough to tug at Fayt's poncho before it was ushered off, laughing and shouting to its cheering fellows.

They're just people, he reminded himself. Just people like us, or Niklas and Meena. And the distrust was troubling, certainly, but hadn't Niklas and Meena also been wary at first? These people at least weren't fearful of them. There had been no Norton here. Everything would be fine.

The street was as wide as the roads he had seen on Vanguard III, and so Fayt was surprised when the guards finally turned them out onto another, even larger: an expanse of worn, smooth stones as wide as any federation thoroughfare. Even the tallest of the storied buildings were no longer close enough to block the wind or light, and the resurgence of both hit him so hard as he stepped out onto it that it pulled him up short, earning another shove forward from the guards. He squinted up at the grey sky for a moment, then around at his surroundings as he tried to find his bearings.

A pretty large city, Mirage had said. It takes up a lot of the available space. But Fayt had not expected anything like the urban sprawl around him. The main road sloped straight and unbroken down the mountainside until it reached the city wall below, smaller avenues snaking off like the feeder roots of a vast plant among the staggered, uneven layers of thatched and tiled rooftops with smoking chimneys, and Fayt realized with a sudden start just how far they had been led, both in distance and in height. Sudden cliffs and terraces jutted up among the otherwise relatively consistent descent and broke up his ability to find the crash site or even the outer edges of the city, massive natural walls and towers in the middle of clusters of houses leading his eyes in strange loops and tangents. On one, a huge animal of some sort perched, hide aglitter with barding, a long tail swaying lazily towards the ground and its leathery wings spread as if to catch the wan sunlight. It dwarfed the pair of human figures beside it.

"Cliff- Do you see that?"

Cliff turned his head. His eyes flicked up and he grunted slightly as if to confirm before he was shoved again and turned his face forward. The guard behind him gave a shove as well and Fayt almost tripped as he stumbled forward. He shook his head, spared one last look (he couldn't help if it was a little wistful) at what was almost certainly an actual, live dragon, and tore his eyes to the front once more.

His legs were numb with the cold, and he was thankful for it: the main road continued upward at a gentle but relentless slope at least as far as they had already come, and he knew that if he could have felt them they would have been sore. He wanted to rest; he wanted to look longer and more closely at the fantastical creature on the tower. He did not slow his pace only because the guards surrounding him prevented it. The tip of one of their polearms pressed pointedly into his back. If he slipped, it would probably skewer him.

They trudged up the road, battered by the elements. The thin air left a strange taste on Fayt's tongue as he began to breathe more heavily, sharp and faintly sour; every so often, madly, impossibly, he thought he could smell some distant hint of the seaside. The city itself seemed to taper, surrounding them with fewer buildings and more raw, black rock, scattered and heaped with white snow; more open sky, grey and heavy with clouds that scattered the light. Ahead of them, above them, another wall loomed out of the mountain as if carved from the living stone. The gate at the center of it yawned, an open mouth, the sharp bottoms of an iron portcullis drawn up into its arc like metal teeth. Behind it, towers natural and manmade rose side by side, narrow slit windows almost seeming to stare down at them. With a start, Fayt realized that he was looking not at a mountain peak but a castle. "You've got to be kidding me," he muttered. His shoulder was shoved again.

The guards at the gate stopped them. After a brief back-and-forth, the guards already surrounding Cliff and Fayt shifted. One of them—whether from the gate or the original group Fayt could not tell—grabbed him roughly and pulled him forward. They continued to talk among themselves (one of them laughed, the sound sudden and unexpected with no context to prepare him for it) as one of them drew a knife and cut Fayt's poncho off of him. They pulled it from his shoulders before he could react and crumpled it into their hands, then shook it out brusquely. Seemingly satisfied there was nothing hidden in it, the guard passed it to one of his fellows and it disappeared from sight.

Fayt had only a moment to feel relieved that he had relocated his translator before large hands in heavy gloves began to pat him down. He felt a surge of panic; only the weapon at his back kept him from jerking away. "Cliff-!"

"Nothing we can do, kid."

And of course, there wasn't. Their eyes were unyielding; Fayt had no illusions that he could have resisted them, or that they would have hesitated to use further force if he tried. And so he could only stand there, helpless, as the searching hands felt over him, as they turned out the pockets of his shorts and tugged and pat at his vest, cutting through it as quickly and efficiently as they had his poncho the moment they crossed the small, hard circle of his communicator. His heart lurched up into his throat as the guard pulled it out, turning it in his hands and looking at it uncomprehendingly. The man held it out to one of the others, his tone conveying the question that Fayt could not understand. They all shrugged and muttered over it, and then over the second communicator lifted from Cliff's person. One of them held the devices out towards them, one in each and, and snapped another question.

Fayt shook his head. The guard made a snarling sound and shoved him forward again. They moved on through the gates, their communicators and the translators within left behind.

"It's okay," Cliff told him quietly. "I've got your back." His tone said he meant it as a reassurance, but with even the hope of communication taken away, passing into the darkness of the mountain fortress felt more than physical. It felt like an ultimatum from the universe.

They were ushered through the stony halls beyond more quickly than they had been moved through the icy streets themselves. The air was warm and smoky from torches lining the dark brick, almost stiflingly so; he smelled the strong scents of hay and both men and animals living in close quarters: the vaguely familiar kennel smell of dogs but also something else more feral and exotic, sharp and prickling in his nose. The halls seemed as mazelike as the streets outside and yet swept by quickly: almost as soon as he had entered the dimly flickering halls it felt as though he were being shoved through another doorway, this one a cavernous maw leading down into the earth, the air coming out of it weirdly wet and musty though the stairs beneath his feet seemed as dry as the halls above.

The group stopped in a room so small it might almost have been a landing. Another burly man, this one in a long dark-colored tunic and fur trimmed vest rather than heavy armor, rose from a small table and moved towards them. The men all talked among themselves. It was not long before their voices rose, sounding almost like an argument, but Fayt no longer bothered trying to listen. It no longer felt like there was a point. He looked up at Cliff, who was following the conversation attentively with his eyes but not moving otherwise. The frown on his face was deepening, and Fayt wondered for a moment if he somehow recognized any of what was being said.

He was taken by surprise when both of his shoulders were grabbed and he was pulled away from Cliff. He let out a short yelp of alarm, trying vainly to dig his heels into the stone floor as he was dragged away. "Hold on!"

Cliff turned quickly and started forward: two of the guards grabbed hold of him, one taking each arm, and pulled him back again. He drew himself up for a moment as if he were going to shake them off (and he could have, Fayt had no doubt of it whatsoever), and one of them snapped at him again. A pair of polearms came down to cross in front of him, blocking his path. Cliff set his jaw, teeth faintly bared, and pulled up short. In the flickering light the bands around his neck seemed gaping, larger than before; great black wounds in his throat. "...Try to hold together, kid. It's gonna get worse before it gets better."

"What?"

The men around them growled and shouted. Something struck Fayt hard on the back of his head, stars bursting in front of his eyes with the impact. He gasped sharply, his legs buckling, and the hands hauling him back by his shoulders were suddenly holding him up instead. He was pulled backwards, vision swimming, into darkness. The cold wet air from below washed over him, sparks in his eyes swimming around the torches as they flashed in and out of sight. He tried to get his feet under himself but could not; every time they made contact with the floor it was only to skip off the edge of the step once more.

At the bottom of the stairs they dragged him, still dazed, through a heavy wooden door banded with metal. The room smelled closed and foul; he could hear running water, quick and shallow, echoing in the small space. Somewhere, sounding far off but echoing off the stones, he heard a low, haunting wail.

His hands were jerked up over his head without warning, still behind his back, shoulders wrenching. He screamed. One of the men laughed, reaching up over him, and fastened his bound arms to a chain overhead. It was just high enough that his toes barely touched the ground; enough to keep himself from swinging if he strained for the ground, but not enough to take even the tiniest fraction of weight off of his arms. With Fayt so restrained the man leaned down, bending over to peer into Fayt's face. He asked a question, meaningless, then shrugged when Fayt did not answer—could not, god, how could they not see that he couldn't understand?!- and stood straight again. Fayt lifted his head. "Wait. Please. Let me go-"

He didn't know why he'd spoken. He knew they couldn't understand him. The two men looked back at him, inscrutable, the faint light of a single torch on the back wall of the room reflecting strangely off of their pupils, silver-green like an animal's. Fayt felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cold. One of them spoke again. Fayt shook his head. "Please, I can't understand you, but-"

One of the men looked at the other and then shrugged. They reached out and shoved Fayt's chest, hard, making him swing on the chain. Fayt cried out again as his body strained against his arms, pressure tearing bright jags of agony across his already sore chest and shoulders. His eyes squeezed shut as he gasped in pain, blood roaring in his ears, his entire body afire. He tried to catch his breath and found that the pressure was too much. He could only pant and wheeze.

When his eyes opened again, both men were gone.

He didn't know how long he hung there alone in the dark with only the sounds of running water and the clinking chain. It was long enough for Fayt to work through shock to outrage to shock again. It was long enough for his eyes to adjust to the single torch, but there was little to see in the long cell. The running water was just below him, a shallow rivulet in the stone floor entering through one wall and then exiting through the other. Closer to the door there seemed to be several cots or tables, but he could not raise his head enough from his vantage to be sure which. It was long enough for his shoulders to become not-quite-numb, throbbing maddeningly, putting sparks in his eyes every time he tried to shift. It was long enough for the pressure on his chest to become oppressive, for every breath to ripple through him like a sharp punch to the abdomen. It was long enough that he could no longer feel his hands.

Another man came to speak with him after a while. Fayt's head was beginning to swim by the time that he did. His mouth was dry and his stomach in knots of pain and hunger alike. When was the last time that he had eaten? It had been with Niklas and Meena on Vanguard III. How long ago had that been? The crash couldn't have come more than a few hours after leaving the planet, but how long had he been in the cell? He didn't know. There was no way of knowing at all. The man questioned Fayt and Fayt questioned the man and neither could understand the other. The man, frowning deeply and shaking his head, eventually left Fayt alone again.

Another man came. He spoke to Fayt, words meaningless, eyes strange and animal in the torchlight. He offered Fayt water, which he gulped at desperately, but only a sip, cold and as painful on Fayt's empty stomach as it was relieving to his dry mouth. He held it out and spoke again. Fayt understood that he was offering the water in exchange for answers, but he had none to give. "Please," he said, tears streaming down his face, but the man frowned and shook the bowl of water at him insistently. When Fayt could offer him nothing he understood he, too, eventually left.

Fayt wondered how Adonis Klein would deal with this situation, but found he could not reconcile the idea; he had no context for it. It was not something any of his simulations had ever prepared him for. Adonis Klein was a hero, and heroes did not get themselves captured and thrown into dungeons. It had all happened so quickly he was not completely sure how or why he had been thrown into a dungeon. Cliff was right that the crash had proved them to be dangerous, but did that extend to the locals believing they were attackers of some kind? What reason could they possibly have, not only for holding them, but for holding like this, strung up alone in the dark, when surely they must realize that whatever they wanted Fayt wasn't able to give it to them? What kind of monster treated another thinking, feeling lifeform in such a way?

He thought of Norton and the ruins on Vanguard III. It wasn't a comparison he was entirely comfortable making, but what else was he supposed to think? They'd given him nothing else to go on.

Eventually Fayt heard the door at the far end of the cell open a third time. It slammed closed again, and yet another man's voice spoke to him from the gloom beyond the torchlight. Fayt squeezed his eyes shut and tried to draw in a deep breath, to brace himself for another round of incoherent questioning. He could only wheeze, the muscles of his chest drawn crushingly tight by his position. "Please," he said, knowing the words were meaningless, hoping only to convey his desperation by tone alone, "please, I can't understand you, just let me down..."

The man ignored him. Fayt could see him moving around the low cots or tables, no taller than the others who had come to speak to him but somehow larger in every other way, and hear small objects clattering against each other through the pounding in his ears. The sound filled him with a strange, undirected sense of dread. Neither of the others had stopped at the tables. What was different now?

The man shrugged out of his vest and tunic, stripping down to his waist. He folded the garments carefully and set them aside before pulling on a pair of heavy black gloves, the leather creaking audibly as he tugged them tight and flexed his fingers inside of them. A black hood followed. When he turned his head towards Fayt, he saw that it was not just a hood but a mask: the torchlight flickered off a rictus of metal teeth set into its front and deathly pale lenses covering his eyes.

He spoke briefly, voice muffled by the leather hood.

Fayt shook his head.
The man jerked his chin up. When he spoke again, Fayt felt his stomach curl into itself. Something in the change of his tone that had not been there with the others. Something in the way he lifted unknown items from the table, tossing them glibly from one hand to the other before hanging them from his belt. Something in the swagger of his steps as he turned and approached at last. The shift and roll of muscles beneath his fat and skin, weird and predatory.

Fayt was not prepared for the feeling of his jaw being suddenly grasped. He thought fleetingly, horrifically, of Cliff and Norton beneath the ruins as he felt himself lifted by the hand now clamped to his face, the fingers digging into his cheeks until they forced his mouth open, pressing between teeth from the outside, the weight of his entire body taken from his arms at last only to be transplanted here, to the juncture of his jaws. He made a shallow sound in his throat, brittle and distressed, little more than a fluttering gasp of surprise and pain. White glass eyes stared at him impassively. He could see coarse flecks of rust on the glittering metal teeth grinning from the leather beneath them.

He tried to beg the man to stop, but could not move his jaw to do so; he could only moan faintly, stars bursting in his vision anew. He tried to swing his legs, to kick the man, but only scrabbled against him weakly with his feet.

The man spoke again. Nothing about his manner seemed questioning. His fingers tightened in Fayt's jaw, pressing the insides of his cheeks against his teeth until the taste of fresh blood burst into his mouth over the staling remnants from his bitten tongue. He could not have expected, even wanted an answer—how could he? How could he, when his actions would have prevented Fayt from speaking even if he had one to give?

When the man let go it was both suddenly and completely. Fayt's weight fell back onto his arms again entirely without warning. He screamed. The white in his vision bloomed, burst, turned first red and then black. He realized that he had lost consciousness only when the came to again, swinging painfully on his chains and head spinning, to the sound of the man laughing. He could feel a warm dribble of blood over his lips. "What- Why-"

The man stopped his swinging with a single, careful hand to his shoulder. His other hand rose to Fayt's face again, but this time tipped his chin up almost gently on the sides of his thick fingers. His voice, like his touch now, seemed soft and infinitely reasonable; like his touch now, it made no sense. Fayt blinked at him unsteadily, his masked face swimming in and out of focus: a monstrous blotch of shining teeth and eyes in a black pit.

"I-I can't understand you."

The hand propping up his drooping chin lifted to pat his cheek gently, almost affectionately. It turned into a fist before his eyes and dropped down below the line of his vision. He felt agony burst in his gut. He tried to cry out but vomited instead, nothing but blood and water burning its way up his throat. He gasped and burbled on it. "Stop. Stop. Why are you-"

Again. He choked.

Again. He hadn't even said anything.

Again. The man's other hand still rest on his shoulder, firm, holding him in place, not letting him swing now that it might have been some form of relief, pulling him in as if in some kind of warped embrace or companionship to meet every blow, inexorable, of the relentless fist forcing up everything in his stomach (nothing but water, nothing but blood, and soon not even that) and never flinching when it splashed over the bared arm or chest. The man spoke as if they were old friends. He laughed. The sounds of his words began to overlap, to loop, to repeat themselves. Was he really repeating himself, though, or did it only feel that way, because the blows never stopped landing? Was it really his words that were becoming familiar or only the sound of leather-covered bone smacking into flesh, the sound of his own cries, the sound of his hitching and gagging throat, the bark of laughter? Fayt wondered, bleakly, if such a man actually cared whether he could tell him anything at all.

Surely the masks's rusted grin, chasing him again and again down into darkness, seemed to prefer it this way.