Marga jolted and stumbled, cried out in pain, and reached in front of her with her arms. Her fall was stopped by those hands, and she made it back up to her feet, running, hardly slowed by the injury. Marga shouted in frustration, reached for Marga’s arm again. She was closer now, if only by a few feet. Her fingers wrapped around the right arm.

On the front of Marga’s arm, Zoe felt an odd texture, epidermis infused by something, almost sticking to her fingertips.

Like a tattoo.

The tattoo radiated heat, and as Marga shook her arm and threw Zoe’s grip off with unnatural strength, Zoe cursed. Fucking Abrists and their sorceries! She reeled as Marga turned toward Zoe, hands gripping her wrist and pushing her back. The woman’s eyes were wide and wild, almost bestial. Her teeth gritted.

Kamila and Hilda were out of sight now – and they knew, of course they knew, that Zoe had been intending to betray them from the moment she sat down at that bar.

It didn’t matter. If they fled, even if they got past Cigdem and his men, where would they go - two young people alone in the wilderness?

Shoving Zoe away, Marga turned and ran, past the edge of the gathering hall, towards the edge of the village. Zoe gave chase, then ducked and threw her hands over her head as a series of loud cracks sounded from across the way. She looked over to see several rifles aimed in her direction. The soldiers lowered their weapons, surrounded by slowly-dispersing clouds of smoke. “Idiots!” Zoe shouted, at the same time Cigdem stepped out between the men, shoulders back, neck upright, screaming:

“Hold your fire!” Cigdem turned back to the crowd, holding his own weapon aloft. “No one move!” He raised the weapon, and Zoe, looking over his shoulder, saw the young Hilda dashing towards a nearby building, while Kamila, the older sibling, reached out for her younger sister’s hand and searched the area for cover, anywhere to hide for a moment.

Crack

Zoe turned her head away in a snap, but caught a glimpse of Hilda stumbling, heard her cry out in pain, and then, a moment later, heard Cigdem curse. “Go for the woman!” he shouted. “I’ll catch up with these soon enough.” Zoe nodded, rose to her feet, and looked over toward the edge of the village.

Marga was still in sight, climbing over a chest-high wooden fence. She hit the ground running, behind her, Zoe heard one of the young voices – whether Hilda or Kamila, she couldn’t tell – shouting something, and then the clash of steel. But she was already running, Marga centered in her vision. She tried to regulate her breathing – inhale, exhale, inhale – and pushed herself to greater speeds, hands knifing through the air around her.

Marga grew closer. She was over the fence and crossing through the field, climbing over the opposite fence. Not far from the edge of the fields, less arable land loomed, wet and muggy, the air itself prone to rot. Zoe pulled herself over the first fence, and when she landed felt her heavy soldier’s boots crush the grain she stepped over. She strode through the field with heavy stomps, wrecking crop as she went. The stalks of grain whipped at her stomach and chest and arms. Zoe’s coat lay discarded somewhere nearby, an encumbrance she couldn’t afford at the moment – still, she didn’t feel the sting from the grain stalks.

As she trampled through towards the other fence, Zoe saw Marga begin to change her gait – she began to take longer strides, even while keeping her weight lower to the ground. Zoe fired off a round from her sidearm, and less than a second later heard the crack of a rifle somewhere behind her, accompanied by a scream that abruptly ended. Marga jolted at the sound of Zoe’s bullet. She struggled to move her foot, dragging her leg for a moment before freeing it and continuing to run.

Zoe climbed over the next fence and lowered herself more lightly to the ground. She turned – Marga was running toward a nearby orchard now, with perhaps two hundred meters to go. Zoe began to hustle across the gap between them – fifty meters, maybe. She kept her weight low to the ground and took long strides, as she’d seen Marga do before. But that way of moving slowed her down. Marga chanced a look over her shoulder, and Zoe saw in her eyes that she knew she’d won. Zoe simply couldn’t catch up to her like this.

Zoe broke into a sprint.

Marga began to backpedal, turning to try to run, to increase the gap between herself and Zoe, but she was starting to get tired – maybe from overexerting herself and using the powers of that magic tattoo – Zoe certainly couldn’t tell. But she was getting closer, and that was wh-

She stumbled.

Mud and still water splashed around her as Zoe fell into the marsh, dirtying her face and sinking her boots inches into the marsh. She recovered quickly from her shock and looked up toward Marga. She raised her sidearm, hands shaking after the exertion of the run, shaking her feet as she tried to escape from the muck.

Marga came to a stop and turned toward Zoe. Sweat plastered unbound strands of the woman’s hair to her face, and her shoulders rose and fell rapidly, her stance barely steady. She took a step toward Zoe.

“Listen to me… Marga.” Marga flinched when Zoe said her name, but didn’t stop stepping forward. Zoe’s hands were still tight on the sidearm. Shaking. Marga drew closer, cast a quick split-second glance over her shoulder, took another step. “If you don’t want this to turn into a massacre, you’re going to have to come with me.” Her voice grew dull, monotone, distant despite the shaking of her hands and of her feet and the pounding of her heart. She didn’t know how to speak for this woman, so she went for the old mainstay: professionalism. It got her through army training, it got her through all those years being denounced.

“Come with you?” Marga grimaced and took another step forward. She was perhaps three meters away from Zoe now, the tremor of her hands increasingly apparent with each step that she took. Zoe could see the blood dripping from her back, staining her dress, mixing with the marshwater beneath them. “I ought to kill you. You shot me. Your friends shot Eksha. Killed him like nothing.”

“He should have stood down,” Zoe replied, her voice still calm. “We weren’t after him. We were after Mirshal.”

“You don’t care about Mirshal.” Marga laughed. “If you wanted to find Mirshal you wouldn’t be murdering your way through every village in the south of the Vale, would you? You care about power.” Marga bowed her head and reached out to her side with her left arm, her lips beginning to move, silently.

“You’re misunderstanding the situation. We just want the Mirshalites. We know how you hide in the population, how you use these people as your cover.”

“And you kill them!” Marga laughed. “You bitch, I’m not using these people as cover! I live here!” Her head remained bowed. When she’d said her piece, her lips continued to move – silently. Zoe could feel a charge in the air. She struggled against the marsh that held her down. Slowly, she began to draw one foot out of the muck, slowly. With the heavy boots she wore, it was a painfully difficult process, but she could feel the moist earth she’d fallen into getting looser around her.

“Don’t you want to stop this from becoming a slaughter? If you just cooperate with us, I can help you. Get the Captain to stop any violence, end searches. I can even get you amnesty.”

Lies, of course. Why wouldn’t she lie? It was her duty to lie.

Marga raised her head, looking at something behind Zoe. Her mouth opened, slack. Zoe tried to turn, but couldn’t twist her head around far enough to see what Marga was looking at.

She felt her feet become loose, and faked a fall to one knee, further freeing herself, reaching to her hip and stopping her fall with an elbow. The sidearm remained trained on Marga’s chest.

The charge in the air grew intense, and in Marga’s hand formed the edge of a glowing circle. Orange light stretched out and bent until it formed a ring, as wide in diameter as Zoe’s whole body. “You tried to kill my children!” screamed Marga, as she stepped forward and swung the arm holding the ring.

Zoe twisted her feet out of the mud and fell on her side before the weapon could slice through her. She felt intense heat in the side of her arm as the thing whizzed overhead, the air suddenly sweltering despite the cold climate of the Wanderer’s Vale and particularly this marsh. Zoe felt her body go dry, her face clean of the mud she’d stumbled in. She must have fired her sidearm at some point during her lunge, though she did not remember it, because Marga stumbled back, hand clutching a fresh wound to her torso. Blood covered her hands. She spoke – Words that Zoe couldn’t understand but knew enough to fear – and a great pole-axe came swiping down at her. She rolled across suddenly dry earth, didn’t make it quite far enough, screamed as the blade sliced into her side. Not enough to kill, she knew immediately – a flesh wound. But holy fuck did it hurt. She dropped her sidearm, and her knife. Her hands spasmed, grabbing at the earth, for anything to hold onto. She dug her fingers into the dry, dry dirt and her hands came up trailing grains of sand among the black earth.

“You should have left when you had the chance!” Marga’s voice called through the buzzing in Zoe’s ears. She coughed – blood along with the phlegm. Zoe tried to push herself up. She couldn’t. Tears obscured her already-blurred vision. She could barely hear Marga’s footsteps as the woman turned and ran, unsteady steps. It was as though a great distance had opened between the two when Zoe was struck. She turned her head. Blinked. That figure, Marga, running away, toward the orchard – or where Zoe thought the orchard was – it was so blurry. God. Sol. Emperor Aivor. Cigdem, even, that grumpy old shit.

I need a hypo.

With shaking hands, with herculean effort, Zoe reached for her bandolier. She could barely move her arms or legs, couldn’t stand up, but slowly she forced her hand into the ring of the bandolier and withdrew a silver cylinder ringed with green. She pressed the open end to her arm, forced her thumb over the opposite end. Pushed down.

Ah-haaaaaaaa

Consciousness ceased.