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CHAPTER

TWENTY-ONE

CORVAK

It takes several days to trap the enemy.

Obviously stealth is not in my favor. Not with a flood of hooting, messy, stinking snow-people trailing me at all times. They will not be silent, no matter how many times I make the hand signal for quiet, so I think of other methods I can use in which to ensnare my enemy without killing him.

A pit trap seems the most logical. It simply requires grunt work and patience.

I scout the area for two days in search of footprints, ensuring that he remains nearby. His scent and his trail are all over the nearby valleys, but it does not seem that he has realized that Aidy and I are close. Our scents are likely masked by the snow-people and their overwhelming stink.

Once I establish the perfect spot for my pit, I bring the snow-people with me.

We dig one night, and they are thrilled to be doing this for me.

With a dozen flinging snow about, the narrow, deep trench is quickly built in the heavy snows.

I cover it with some of the hard, crusty skins that we have been saving, the ones that we cannot figure out how to make soft like the ones we stole.

Once the trench is masked with the skins, we pile snow atop them to hide the sight.

When it's finished, the moons are almost gone from the sky and the trench itself is completely hidden.

The snow here is churned, but that is not so unusual.

Everywhere the snow-people go, they leave a trail of destroyed snow.

Satisfied, I plant the butt of my crude spear into the ground on the far side of the trench. When my enemy enters the valley, he will see it and wonder. Hopefully, he will approach it.

And then he will be snared.

The trench is just deep enough that he won't be able to climb out easily.

Snow can be dug at, though, and if he shares the same memories I do, he will be crafty.

I cannot leave the trench abandoned, then.

I find a perch deeper into the valley, high in the rocks, and wait.

The snow-people hover around me, making hiding impossible, but hopefully I will not need camouflage.

I need to capture him today. This is taking too much time.

The weather is cold this morning, the skies looking as if they are about to pour snow down upon us.

My stomach growls with hunger, but I ignore it.

There has been no time for hunting while I prepared my trap, and I hate that I am leaving Aidy alone for so long.

She is the reason this must be done quickly.

Whatever sickness has gripped her lingers, and she has not eaten much in the last few days.

It worries me. What do I do if she continues to grow sick? There is no medic here, no lab. I feel helpless, and nothing matters if I do not have Aidy. I cannot imagine playing this game without her. I cannot imagine leaving this game, because it would mean we separate.

There is no life after Aidy. I will be with her, or I will be done.

These morbid thoughts consume me as I wait for my prey.

The snow-people hoot and snap at each other behind me, and two of them break into a fight.

I hiss at them to stop, but there is no heat behind my gestures.

I'm tired of them. Aidy jokes that they are an army of tantrum-throwing toddlers.

I have never been around a small child, but if they are as unruly as this, it's a wonder that anyone breeds.

The hooting increases, and I turn to shush them again when one starts jumping and excitedly gesturing below us.

I turn to look and someone is approaching the pit.

They are covered in pale white furs, so I cannot make them out, but the size could be that of a gladiator.

I make the "silence" gesture and the snow-people go quiet.

I hold my breath, watching as the male below spots my abandoned spear, pauses, and then warily approaches it, his own at the ready.

He takes a step forward.

I clench my fists, willing him to keep moving.

The stranger pauses, looking around the canyon. The wind is in my favor—he will not pick up my scent. With luck, the snow-people will be silent long enough that he will not notice them until it's too late. Keep going, I say silently. Two more steps.

The male in the snows below hesitates a bit longer, then takes another step.

And another.

On his third, the ground below his feet dissolves. His arms go up and he disappears into the pit.

I whoop with joy, surging to my feet. At my side, the snow-people hoot alongside me, a cacophony of noise that for once doesn't bother me. Scrambling down the steep cliffs, I race to the edge of the pit, determined to make it there before my enemy climbs his way out.

When I move to the edge of the pit, I see him seated below, his hands cradling one bent leg.

His furs are scattered around him, and instead of looking afraid, he seems angry.

Pissed, Aidy would say. He glances up at me with glowing blue eyes and his lip curls.

"I don't know what kind of game this is, but I'm not in the mood. You broke my keffing ankle, friend ."

It's not what I expected him to say. Nor did I expect him to look the way he does.

I thought he'd look a bit more like me, to be honest. That he'd be a mixture of all races—mesakkah, praxiian, some moden, some a'ani, whatever is thrown into the mix to create the strongest candidate.

I thought he'd look as tired and worn as we are, wearing tattered furs and eating whatever this miserable planet tosses our way.

The male below is praxiian, though. Perhaps not pure-blooded praxiian (there's something a little too flat about his features and his coloring to be a true praxiian), but it is clearly the majority of his genetic makeup.

His mane is a striped dun, stark against his white fur cloak.

His clothing is well-made, too. The foot he cradles is shod in a boot that would make Aidy envious, and he has a variety of knives and weapons at his waist, held by a tooled leather belt. He looks healthy. Clean.

He's thriving .

I realize in that instant that Aidy and I are not. We are struggling because it is only the two of us, and the snow-people are more of a hindrance than a help. Our energy is spent every day preventing them from fighting when we could be using it in other ways.

For a brief moment, I feel a stab of resentment toward this male, that he is doing so well here on this planet and I, for all my scheming, am not. "We are not friends," I say back to him, hiding my frustration. "And you know very well what sort of game this is."

The male bares fangs at me. "What are you talking about?"

"The game." I gesture at our surroundings. "We have been sent here to play, and I am determined to win. Give up now and I will take you captive. Do not force me to eliminate you."

It's a bluff—Aidy has asked me to bring him back and I will, because I refuse to disappoint her. But this male does not know that.

His nostrils flare with irritation, his gaze flicking to the top of the pit, where I loom over him.

I can practically see his thoughts, see the plans as he discards them, one by one.

The snow-people are lining up around me, and he is obviously outnumbered.

"Very well," he says slowly. "I will go with you if you promise I'll be safe. And you help me bind my ankle."

I flick a hand at him. "Toss your weapons up and my army will get you out of the pit."

He eyes me dubiously. After a long hesitation, he tosses up a dagger.

Then another. His spear is snapped in half at the bottom, and he tosses each end up to me.

Each time he flings up a weapon, he shoots me a look of pure disgust and loathing.

Eventually there are seven knives, the spear, and a bola tossed up to me.

"Is that everything?" I ask.

"What, you think I have a knife shoved under my tail?" the stranger snarls back at me.

"It'd explain the attitude," I retort back. "This is nothing personal. It's just gameplay."

"What keffing game?" he shouts up to me. "Are you a madman?"

"You know very well what game," I say, though the more he protests, the more I think about Aidy's comments the other day.

How she wonders if there is something different about this game because nothing is going as we expected.

How the "smooth people on the beach" do not leave.

Unsettled, I gesture to a few of the snow-people to jump down into the pit to lift him up.

Six of them do and they're able to lift him by working together, and I use a hand to haul him the final distance to the surface. He glares at me, eyeing his weapons now at my belt, but doesn't reach for them. "Who are these strangers?" he asks.

"They are my army."

"Yeah, well, you should tell your army to wash. I smelled them two valleys over."

I bare my teeth in an unfriendly smile. "And yet you still fell into my trap. What does this say about you?"

He scowls. "It says that I let my curiosity get the better of me, and that I should never go hunting when distracted."

"The smell is that much of a distraction?"

He's silent.

"What are you doing hunting this far into the mountains?" I prod, wondering if they have come looking for us or if he's lost. He seemed surprised to see me earlier.

The praxiian doesn't answer. Instead, he hobbles forward and then hisses, shaking his head. "You're going to have to carry me to your healer because my ankle is keffed up."

"There's no healer down here," I reply.

He groans, staring up at the sky as if his patience is completely exhausted. "Why me?"

"You aren't afraid?"

"Should I be? You would have killed me already if you'd intended to. And I imagine that it's better to go with you for now, because if you don't kill me, someone else might when I don't return." He grimaces.

Unsettled, I pick up one of the furs that fell into the pit with him.

It's difficult to inspire fear in an enemy that's merely annoyed by you.

He should be worried, not mildly irked at being inconvenienced.

I spread the fur on the ground and gesture at it.

"You can sit and I will drag you, if you cannot walk. "

His annoyance increases. "You should let me go."

"Why would I do that?"

He doesn't answer, his long tail swishing. Instead, he looks unsettled for the first time since I pulled him from the pit. "I need to go back. That's all. I'm needed…elsewhere."

"I don't care. I need answers. You're coming with me." I point at the fur again. "You can sit and I can drag you, or they can carry you." And I gesture at the snow-people.

The praxiian's nostrils flare and he shoots me a disgusted look. Favoring his bad leg, he leans over and eases himself onto the fur, then gestures at me as if he's the one in charge.

I drop the end of the fur blanket and gesture to my army. Pull him with us .

The male is swarmed by the snow-people and he makes a sound of pure disgust that warms my heart.