Sometimes he claimed he stayed with her because in a year she did as many weird things as he would see in ten anywhere else. Pilgrim really was a pilgrim, so that was an extreme claim indeed. His memories went back centuries, hazing off into unreliable history and myth. Few packs had traveled their world so much, or seen so much. The price of the adventuring was that Pilgrim was more a surviving point of view than an enduring mind. It was Johanna’s great good fortune that that point of view was currently embodied in someone whose attitudes were so basically decent. Of all the Tines in the world, Pilgrim and Scriber had been the first she’d known. That bit of luck had saved her. Ultimately, it had saved all the remaining Children.

“You’re not going to tell me your plan, eh?” said Pilgrim. “But I bet you want me to fly you someplace.” That was not a difficult thing to guess, considering that Johanna was still walking toward the flier, which was parked—crashed—at the base of a cliff so steep and smooth that no pack or unaided human could hope to climb it.

Pilgrim ran around in front of her, now leading the way. “Okay, then. But keep in mind. The Tropicals can’t live here very well. The packs they make are loose, even when they try to form them.”

“So you’ve lived in the Tropical Choir?” That was something that Pilgrim had never quite claimed.

Pilgrim hesitated. “Well, for a time I lived on the fringes—you know, in the Tropical collectives. The true Choir of the deep jungles would be very quickly fatal for a coherent pack. Can you imagine being surround by such mobs, no one caring to keep a decent distance? Thought is impossible … though I suppose if the stories of nonstop orgies are true, it might be a happy way to dissolve oneself. No, I just meant that these shipwrecks have happened before. We’ll have a year or two of nuisance, far more singletons wandering around than normal old age and accidents would account for—more even than after the war with Steel and Flenser. But eventually the problem will take care of itself.”