I wake in the night and hear the distant sounds of engines, protesting as if hauling a huge weight up a steep slope. Disembodied lights climb the darkness in the distance, pause for a while and then continue on their journey. Jade does not hear them, or if she does she pays no attention.
I think of the massacre, of the bodies cooling in the night, providing food for whatever wild creatures remained. I huddle closer to Jade, but sleep eludes me. The darkness is haunted by the silvery twinkle of stars, their brightness distracting and surprising at this altitude. Sometime in the night, just before the darkness flees and there is a brief lull in nature to greet the dawn, I hear a faint sound from the south. A wailing, but possessed of many voices; a calling, like the tortured grind of metal on stone. I sit up and listen harder, but then the birds start singing and their song drowns the noise. I am glad.
When Jade wakes up I tell her, but she merely shrugs and smiles. “Another Lord Ship over the town.”
“But I didn’t hear it coming.”
“Sometimes they just drift in from over the sea, then out again. Sometimes, they’re as consistent as the tides.”
I shake my head. “But they’re not manned anymore. The Lords died, or fled.”
Jade shrugs. When she has no answer, she shrugs.
She begins to prepare breakfast — a thick, stodgy gruel made from a paste in her bag and powdered milk, a few drops of water added to lighten the load on our stomachs. She looks tired, as if she was the one kept awake by the night, not me.
“I heard engines last night,” I say, watching for a reaction. She raises her eyebrows, but she does not look at me. I wonder whether she is beginning to regret her offer of help. I wonder how sane she can really be.
Jade does not speak for the next hour. We eat and wipe our bowls clean, then roll up the sleeping packs ready for transport. I sit for a few minutes on a large rock overlooking the valley we had travelled up the previous day. The Sickness is not too bad today, the pain bearable, the growths only leaking small amounts into my already stained and caked shirt. From my observation point I cannot make out the gully where the bodies lay, nor the dried streambed, not even the wall that had hidden the terrible slaughter from our view. On the horizon, marked more by its haze of smoke than the actual outline of buildings, lies Malakki Town
Jade taps me on the shoulder and informs me that we should be going. I smile, but she is as unreceptive as before. I begin to fear that she is like this because, just as yesterday morning, there are things to be seen today that she cannot bring herself to talk of. The thought stretches the skin over my scalp with terror, but I cannot bring myself to ask. I try to remember our sex from the night before, but it seems like the memory of another person’s story, told long ago.