Page 9 of Solomon's Ransom

“Nothing to say, hmm,” said Remma, somehow still running his mouth.

“You have enough to say,” Sol said, “for both of us,” and reached down to put his hand over Remma’s. Enough of this nonsense. He wanted to come.

Remma stroked him off with slow pulls of his hand, but Sol was so close he didn’t need anything more. His thighs tensed and he felt his back arching. Oh, he was almost there, that sweet sharp pulse of ecstasy throbbing in him, and then one last draw of Remma’s hand brought him over. He shook and shuddered in Remma’s arms.

“Good,” Remma gasped, and filled Sol just as he’d promised he would.

It was exactly what Sol needed.

FOUR

They did eventually get up to pitch the tent and cook dinner. Sol slept well and long for a man who’d recently encountered a bear, but in the morning as he drank his instant coffee he spent a while reconsidering his decision to keep going. Knowing of potential danger was different from actually facing down said danger.

The bear hadn’t attacked them, though. It hadn’t seemed aggressive at all—only curious. Even if they ran into it again, which seemed unlikely, it probably wouldn’t bother them.

Unless it had gotten hungrier by then. Always a possibility.

He just couldn’t convince himself that turning back was worth it. Better to roll the dice and keep going. He was hoping they’d find another drop, and then Loden might even smile when he told her the news. He wanted to be able to ease her worries, at least for a little while.

“Onward?” Remma asked him, sipping from his own cup.

“Onward,” Sol agreed.

The wind blew through the trees as they walked, cold and biting. Sol turned the collar of his coat up around his ears and hunched his shoulders. He wasn’t soft like Remma, but he couldn’t say he enjoyed this weather, either.

He didn’t hear anything as they went, and didn’t see anything, either. There were no glints of metal through the trees and nothing of interest otherwise. The barrens were really living up to their name.

After a brief stop for lunch, they kept pushing forward along the same route. Sol constantly scanned the forest, searching both for drops and for danger, but he found nothing worth noting until, abruptly, he did.

He put his hand back to stop Remma. Wordlessly he extended his other arm in the direction of what he’d noticed: a low shape sprawled on the ground, just visible between the trees.

He gave Remma’s shoulder a firm pat:Stay here. Moving as silently as he could, he crept forward to get a better look.

It was a person—a body, probably dead based on how much blood darkened the soil around it. Face-down, motionless. Sol crouched to check the pulse. Yeah. Definitely dead.

He went back to Remma. “It’s a corpse,” he said quietly.

Remma swore. “You think the bear got them?”

“Might have. Come with me, will you? Leave the sledge here. I need you keeping watch.”

Remma followed him back to the body. Sol crouched again to turn the person over, which took more effort than he’d expected. It was like flipping a huge sack filled with flour, weighty and ungainly. He managed with a heave. The person—it was a man, judging from the beard and the size—was so soaked in blood it was hard at first to tell what had happened.

“A bear did that?” Remma asked, sounding unsure.

“No,” Sol said. “No, it wasn’t a bear.” He reached out to pull the man’s collar down, just to be sure.

No bear could do that. The man’s throat had been slit, cleanly, neatly, from one point of his jaw to the other.

“Shit,” Remma said.

The man was probably a scrapper from one of the moon’s other colonies. He was dressed like a scrapper, in simple homespun clothes much like the ones Sol wore. And nobody lived here who wasn’t a scrapper. But Sol didn’t recognize him, although he knew a lot of the residents of other nearby colonies. And who would have killed him? The colonies didn’t always get along, but there was rarely outright violence. Everyone was just trying to scrape by.

Sol sat back on his heels. He wasn’t equipped to deal with this.

Who had been following them the other day? Not a bear, he was certain now. A person. This man? Or whatever—whoever—had killed him?

“What should we do,” Remma said.