Rial was explaining the dead to her.

"They're not technically dead," he said.

They were sitting in her place, the upper floor of a four-storey building which had once been the site of a major money-lending business but was now unoccupied except for Tala and a frail old lady whose name nobody knew. The old lady was too crippled to climb stairs and spent most of her time muttering unintelligibly at the walls below, which essentially meant Tala had the top three floors to herself. Torn and dusty velvet curtains were pulled apart to allow in the daylight, shining down on old golden gilt and fine hardwood furniture.

Tala's bed was a simple sheet thrown down on the floor; she refused to use anything other than this. She told any who asked[1] that it was to keep herself used to the hard camp beds they slept in outside.

"I've seen them. I know how they begin. I've seen my dead friends rise from where they lay," said Tala, sat across from Rial in a deep cushioned armchair.

Rial was sat curiously on a facing armchair, legs tucked up under him with feet on the cushion. A battered but well-maintained sword in a crimson sheath leant against the wall besides him.

"I'm sorry to hear that," he said, face dropping into solemnity for a moment. "Of course the people that once inhabited the bodies are gone. It's just that I have a... friend... who gets very technical about these things."

Tala wondered at the pause.

"And what does your 'technical' friend have to say about the dead, then?" she asked.

"It's more what he has to say about life, actually," Rial replied. "See, life must fulfil certain conditions to be considered so. The basic set is the ability to grow, to reproduce, to metabolise, to maintain homeostasis, and to respond to stimuli."

Tala stared at him.

Rial coughed.

"Sorry. As I said, it's been a long time. Essentially, the 'dead' continue to perform three of these five conditions. They no longer reproduce, and they no longer grow, but they respond to what happens around them and they continue to maintain and metabolise energy."

"I don't know what this 'metabolise' word means, but I've never seen them eat if that's what you mean."

Rial looked surprised.

"You're a fast learner. Faster than I was," he smiled, but on seeing no change in Tala's stern expression moved quickly on. "No, they don't eat. They receive their energy from elsewhere. It's all... very complex. The mind ceases to function but the proton gradients across mitochondria never degrade. The electron transfers and proton pumps continue and allow movement. The energy source has just changed from a macro to a micro-molecular scale."

To Tala, the final two sentences sounded as though they were in a different language. Not as in words she didn't know, but as in an actual, grammatically-distinct separate language. Rial caught it as well, face falling into confusion as his words trailed off.

It didn't help that he had been speaking faster and faster as he talked, caught up in the sound of his own voice. He really had been away from people for a long time.

He coughed nervously and when he spoke again it was with far less excitement, far more restraint.

"Anyway, that's not important. Tell me, why do they burn the lands around here?"

Tala was surprised he didn't know. Exactly how far away was this strange person from?

"We burn it because it's dangerous. Everything; the plants, the pollen, the grasses. All of it. Some can kill you with even a cut. We call it the Wasting. How can you not know this?"

Tala had taken the man in to question because nobody else would. They had stared on fearfully at this stranger as he stepped through the gates, a man who had waited out the night and was now smiling and even waving to them all.

Was he insane? That would be the simplest answer. This man must have drunk enough red water and eaten enough poisoned vegetation to drive him right around the curve and back the other way. His words seemed sane, yet carried no meaning, and there was no way he could have survived without knowing these most basic things.

And yet... Tala remembered khiladri eyes, looking up at her in the night.

“How did you survive out there?” she asked.

She looked at him through narrowed eyes. He must be more than half her age again, she thought, the lines of harsher winters than she had faced carved into his skin. Still, there was something youthful about this middle-aged man, a flicker of a smile never far from lips half-hidden by a wispy beard. It was something she had never seen; dour expressions of exhaustion and fear were the order of the day in her world.

“Do you hear it, when you sleep?” he replied, a question for a question.

Tala froze. Nobody talked about that.

“You do, don’t you?” said Rial, smiling. “You’re the first person I’ve met who does. Or at least, admits it to themselves.”

What he was saying now could get them both killed.

It wasn’t a voice, not quite. It whispered in the back of the mind, a constant melody that you only became aware of in complete silence, or in the depths of sleep. Tala remembered asking her parents about it, back before they succumbed to the wasting disease that swept across the city. Her father had delivered a back-handed slap to her cheek so hard she fell over. Tala’s tears stopped before they began at the cold look coming from her mother.

“You hear nothing,” her mother had snapped. “Understand? Nothing. Never say such things in front of others.”

It was the only time Tala ever mentioned it. Those foolish enough to do so in public were... punished, in a way that meant they would not need to be punished again.

She stood up and walked across to the windows, drawing the heavy frames closed, then moved over to the stairwell, leaning over to check no one was there. She shook her head at her own paranoia as she sat down again.

“What is it?” she asked.

[1] Not that many people came up here, but there were times you had to relieve stress somehow.