I glared back, not wishing to give him any satisfaction.

He dug a weapon out of the scattered wreckage of the flitter; it looked like a starbreaker hand-gun. “This is a Ghost pit.” He crushed the gun like a dead leaf. “Stuff like this happens. Pits are pockets of spacetime where nothing works right, where you can’t rely on even the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry. But the Ghosts always arrange it so that living things are conserved—including us, and the little critters that live in our backpacks. You see? We know very little of how all this works. We don’t even know how they could tell what is alive. And all of this is engineered—remember that.”

I knew all this, of course. “You’re full of shit, L’Eesh.”

He grinned. His teeth had been replaced by a porcelain sheet. “Of course I am. Shit from battlefields a thousand years old.” He had an air of wealth, control, culture, arrogance; he was effortlessly superior to me. “Pohp may be able to see us. But she can’t speak to us, can’t reach us.” He took a deep breath, as if he could smell the air. “What now, Raida?”

There was one obvious place to go. “The bridge.”

“It must be a hundred kilometers away,” he said. “Our transportation options are limited—”

“Then we walk.”

He shrugged, dropped the remains of the gun. There was nothing to carry, nothing to be done with the remains of the flitter. Without preamble, he set off.

I followed. I’d sooner be watching L’Eesh’s back than the other way around.

Soon our lower suits were stained bright orange, as if we were transmuting into creatures of bone and dirt ourselves.

This trapped moon was too small for tectonic cycling. The land was old, eroded to dust, mountains and crater rims worn flat. Iron oxides made the ground and the air glow crimson. On the horizon, dust devils spun silently.