Having said his piece, Rene had expected the woman to accept her role as a prisoner of the Fleet. But no sooner had he taken his knee of her back than she was at him again, rolling over and cursing as she tried to spit him on her claws. Training kicked in and Rene applied the wrestling component of his hand-to-hand combat course. He secured underhooks with his arms, locking them together with his hands and hugging her tight from behind. Zildiz bucked and twisted around in a futile attempt to make room for her blades, even managing to get one of her knees beneath her and push off the ground. Rene allowed her to gain her feet, cunningly using the opening to slip the loop of his encircling arms around her waist. Now in complete control of her center of gravity, Rene swung his leg out and arched his back, heaving her up and over like a sack of turnips in a textbook suplex. A fraction of a second before he smashed the top of her skull into the hard ground, he remembered that he was supposed to keep prisoners alive and preferably not in a vegetative state, and so he cushioned the fall with his own body, falling on his side to increase surface area and dissipate the force.

Zildiz was caught totally by surprise. Unlike Rene she had neglected to tuck in her chin before the moment of impact, a vital detail which was one of the first things a recruit was taught to do on the mats.

“Oof!” she said as all the breath slammed out of her by the throw. Rene felt her body go limp as her dazed senses tried to adjust to the violent change of orientation. He took advantage of this moment of weakness and looped his legs around her body, locking his ankles together to form a full body triangle. His left forearm punched up and took her neck in a rear naked choke, a suffocating vise formed by the insides of his elbow crushing her windpipe and carotid arteries.

“I warned you,” he told her. His choking hand grabbed the inside of his other elbow, right forearm sneaking behind her neck and under his armpit, tightening the garrote even further.

“Had enough?”

“Hrrnnkk…” Zildiz choked. She lifted an arm and slid back the blade until it was the length of a finger, deliberately giving Rene the universal gesture to go and fornicate with himself, before sheathing the claw entirely and aiming her fist at him over her shoulder.

Rene ducked as the blade shot out again, only just avoiding it going through his eye socket and into his brain. As it was, it only nicked his temple, sending warm lines of blood trickling down his visor. Rene hugged her even tighter, constricting the chokehold until he heard her breathing reduced to an agonized wheeze. He throttled her until she stopped moving, her struggles weakening until she went completely lax. Then he held the choke for exactly three seconds longer, counting carefully to avoid giving her lasting brain damage. He let go and was relieved to hear her snoring faintly. Gently rolling her onto her back so she didn’t suffocate in the dirt, Rene cast about for a means to secure his prisoner. He had only a few seconds before she regained consciousness. Quickly he cut some vines from the surrounding trees and knotted them into a crude rope. He flipped her back over again and tied her hands at the wrists and elbows. He had no illusions that it would hold her for long. He tied her wings together at their bases for good measure. She had two sets of them, but the larger pair was missing one of its partners that had been torn off at the socket to reveal a gaping wound. They were wondrously tough membranes considering how thin and flexible they were, as sturdy as ultrapod leather. Rene looked over his work and loosened it a bit so as not to cut off the circulation in her arms. It wasn’t bad for something done on the fly. Then again, he’d been playing this whole thing by ear ever since the ambush that had cut his unit to pieces. Ye gods, but that whole experience felt like a lifetime ago. He had not expected to ever use that component of his hand-to-hand training designed for fighting human opponents. Of course, he’d helped put down a fair share of civil unrest in his time, but even during the worst of the food riots in Mound Ulysses he’d never so much as given a person a light shove. The civilians knew better than to antagonize a battalion of the Fleet’s finest over something as routine and reoccurring as a government rationing in the face of crop failure.

He felt quite bad about having to roughhouse the woman, that is, until she sat up awake and glowered hatefully at him, coughing and retching.

“Don’t,” he pleaded with her in exasperation as she gave him the old stink eye, “I don’t want to fight you again.”

“Why?” she spat defiantly, “Afraid you’d lose?”

“Uh huh,” Rene grunted, amused and even a little impressed by her spunk. She couldn’t have weighed more than sixty kilos soaking wet and was at least half a foot shorter than him even with that exomorph of hers, but this woman was all fight and no quit. She would have to be, living on the surface world and facing these abominations day after day. Rene looked at the dismembered corpses of the black-furred devils and had a sudden jolt of inspiration. As Zildiz tested the strength of her restraints Rene went over to the monster he had chopped to bits and poked the misshapen hump on its back, which had excreted thick ribbons of silk at the moment of death. Feeling more than a little squeamish, Rene pulled on the threads of silk. He had only meant to collect two or three meters of the material, but more and more of the stuff kept unwinding out its glands like a handkerchief from a magician’s pocket. Eventually his hands became enmeshed in the horrid stuff and he had to struggle like the dickens to unstick himself and scrape it off onto a bush where it stuck like a lumpy hammock. Remembering how his enemy had plugged the stab wound in its gut, Rene snapped off a twig and curled it into the white mess like those vendors at the fairs did with candy cloud treats, ending up with a spool of silk. He applied it to the cut on his temple by winding it around his head like a bandage, and was gratified when it stopped the bleeding almost immediately. He heard the rustle of dead leaves and turned around to find Zildiz furtively attempting to sidle away from him.

“Don’t even try it,” he told her, “Or I’ll run you down and knock you senseless. I’m taking you back to civilization. The Fleet needs to know what it’s up against out here, and you’re a veritable trove of information.”

Zildiz squatted back down and stared at him, simmering with resentment. Rene shook his head and continued his work, moving on to the monster that had been the first to die at the woman’s hands. Cutting open its hump, Rene was rewarded with a dense lump of thread still packed inside its spinneret. He took another twig and spooled it in, then wrapped the bundle of silk in a large leaf.

A leg twitched of its own accord. Rene nearly dropped the bundle as he sprang back, sword upraised. The devil’s limbs began doing a tap dance and Rene relaxed a bit, recognizing it as the onset of rigor mortis. The side of its face was split open and hanging loosely by a strap of flesh. Struck by a nagging suspicion, Rene stooped down and peeled off the segments of its head, holding the edge of his sword against its neck to decapitate it in the event that it proved too lively for his liking.

The musculature and armor tore away just like it had with Zildiz’s helm, and for the second time that night he found himself staring into the face of another living human being. Only this time it was a man whose face was utterly disfigured, a perversion of the basic form. In the place of his lower jaw were fingerlike protrusions of gummy tissue and exposed nerve endings. His nose cartilage was likewise missing, leaving only a pair of holes dribbling with snot. The man blinked, and glassy eyes with almost no whites at their edges fixed Rene in their gaze.

“Kill…me…” the man whispered.

Rene began to shake uncontrollably, wiping a trembling hand across his mouth as he was forced to consider the carnage he’d just wrought in a new and horrifying light. These weren’t three dead monsters littering the jungle floor; these were three dead men, and some of them he had killed himself.

“Kill me!” the man begged him. He was young, barely Rene’s age, his smooth skin untroubled by the wrinkles of age and worry. He had clear brown pupils and dark, expressive brows. If it weren’t for all the rest of him, Rene might’ve mistaken him for a fresh-faced recruit at the academy, or a paperboy climbing up the terraced apartments of inner hive to deliver news of the Fleet’s latest victory.

On unsteady legs Rene staggered back to Zildiz’s side and away from the awful truth he had uncovered.

“Something the matter?” Zildiz asked in a gleeful tone, “Feeling a little worse for wear, are we?”

“Shut it,” Rene said distantly. He dragged Zildiz to her feet and began winding the silk around her wrists, layering them over thick and tying them off with a simple knot. He kept the vines on her for added insurance and told her to start walking.

“Where to?” she demanded.

“I’m not feeding you to my children, if that’s what you’re asking,” he muttered, “I don’t have any to begin with, and even if I did, I sure as hell wouldn’t raise them to be cannibals.”

Zildiz didn’t move, so Rene grabbed her and frog marched her away. He had no real destination in mind—he just had to get away from this place and the bodies he’d made. Zildiz rounded on Rene, saying:

“Aren’t you going to deal with him? I only severed his neural connection to paralyze his exomorph. He’s still very much alive.”

“No!” Rene yelled, “That’s not how I—how people do things. Almighty ancestors, is that so hard for you to grasp?”

“Yes,” Zildiz replied quite candidly.

“He’s a living, breathing human being. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but those are pretty rare on Arachnea and worth keeping around.”

“No. He is a Leaper. After extracting your gilt helix, he and his packmates would devoured you right then and there.”

“That’s why you saved me, isn’t it? So they couldn’t obtain this shiny helix thing?”

Zildiz ignored his question, continuing:

“If you leave him here, at best he will die of exposure. At worst, his tribe will come looking for him, and if they find him, they will run us down and kill us anyway.”

Rene bit his lip. She spoke the truth and they both knew it. But after all this world had already taken from him, there remained one thing which he refused to part with. And Rene knew that if he gave in now and took the expedient option—the sensible option—he would be surrendering it forever.

“Sorry,” he said finally, “That’s against the rules.”

He dragged Zildiz over to the Leaper and spoke to him, saying:

“I won’t kill you. I’m not about to eat you either, so you can stop begging for a quick death. As long as you tell me what I want to know, we’ll leave you here and go our separate way. I might even patch your wounds if you’re cooperative. Does that strike you as a fair bargain?”

The Leaper met this pronouncement with a look of utter perplexity that mirrored the one on Zildiz’s face.

“I’ll take that silence as a yes,” Rene said impatiently, “You’ll begin by telling me your name.”

“Kryptusshh,” the Leaper said slowly, as if not daring to hope.

“Very good. Are there any more of your people out there, Kryptus?”

“Why sshhould I trusht you? I would only be dooming more of my kindred, and there issh no certainty you would not kill me afterwardssh.”

“It’s a chance you have to take,” Rene shrugged, “Either that, or I’ll let this woman do as she pleases with you. And just between you and me,” he said in a loud stage whisper, “She doesn’t seem all that fond of your sort.”

Zildiz and Kryptus locked eyes with each other. Rene could almost feel the waves of hatred coming off her as she bristled, every tendon in her body tensing expectantly. Kryptus must have seen something he didn’t like, for he looked away and said:

“I am a warrior of the Weeping Vipersh. We are roughly eleven hundred sshtrong. One tenth of that number are bravesshh like me.”

“He lies,” Zildiz said, baring her teeth in a snarl, “That is less than half their true strength. He does not count the adolescents and the old loom-mothers, who are the deadliest of their kind.”

“Three hundred, then, if they are consshidered,” Kryptman quickly admitted, “Your pardon, merciful one.”

“I’ll excuse your forgetfulness just this once,” Rene warned, “But your memory better not fail you again.”

He questioned the Leaper closely. Kryptus claimed that only he and his pack had seen the safety pod’s crash landing, and that they had told no one else as they wished to claim the great prize all for themselves. The Weeping Vipers were the largest tribe in the rainforest and were always looking for an advantage over their numerous and belligerent neighbors. Apparently Kryptus had hoped to gain a modicum of the Divine Engine’s power by extracting something called a ‘gilt helix’ from Rene’s blood.

“Jussht one sample would have shatishfied uss,” Kryptus swore, “Then we would have taken you back to the Loom alive.”

“I’m sure nothing would’ve pleased you better,” Rene said wryly, all too cognizant of Zildiz’s earlier assumption that he planned to feed her to the Fleet’s youth.

Rene learned from Kryptus that the Divine Engine had ignited a blazing wildfire that was swiftly spreading north and west. The tribes would likely have noticed it by now, and would all be sending braves in a joint effort to douse the flames. For some reason all the Leapers felt collectively responsible for the wellbeing of the region, and could not allow it to come to harm for fear of dire repercussions.

“Last question. Is anyone going to come looking for you?”

“Not till the morning.”

“Good!” said Zildiz, breaking out of Rene’s grip and aiming a vicious kick at the side of the Leaper’s head. Rene barely caught her and yanked her back, shouting:

“Blood and thunder, woman! Is there nothing you won’t do to piss me off?”

“Are you insane? You cannot possibly mean to leave him alive!” the Gallivant hissed.

“That’s exactly what I’m going to do. Now come here!”

Rene took her by the elbow and pulled her forward, leaving Kryptus where he lay.

“You promished you would tend to my woundssh!” the Leaper cried after them.

“Don’t push your luck!” Rene said over his shoulder, “Anyone who follows us will meet the same end as your friends.”

He and his prisoner went tramping off into the night, Zildiz raging at him all the while.

“Fool! We will both come to regret that decision!”

“You’re probably right,” Rene had to agree.

“Then why did you do it?”

“For the same reason I’m letting you strut around and screech into my ear. What can I say? I’m a conversationalist.”