By the time we ran out of gully, it was full light. The walls were barely waist high, and disappearing rapidly. Too dangerous to continue.

  "Rest," the Knife said, folding down beneath his camouflage cloak, another small, grassy mound in a desert full of them.

  I sank down beside him, my head so full of pain I didn't even feel it any longer. I fell asleep curled into a ball, shivering.

  The Knife woke me at sunset. The desert was quiet. The port was a streak of light pollution in the sky, barely visible in the dusk, but gaining strength as the sunlight faded. My mouth was dry, my stomach painfully empty.

  "Hungry?" the Knife said, as if he could read my mind. He held out a strip of leather. "Chew this," he said. "It's horse."

  I took it, a hard piece of meat the size of my thumb. It tasted of salt and smoke, reminding me of meals long past. I started shivering again.

  "Good," the Knife said. "When you don't have the energy to shiver, that's when you're really in trouble."

  "How far to the Gash?" I said.

  "Two days," the Knife said. "Three if we're unlucky. But there are death piles along the route."

  I huffed. First time I'd ever been happy to be hunted. We might get a shot at water, and food. If the Knife could point out the shooting bunkers, I could search them for life. They couldn't all be occupied.

  The hard outer shell of the dried horse meat started dissolving in my dry mouth. I wanted to chew it, swallow it, but it was too hard.

  A thin trail of smoke still rose in the distance. Dry docks. The damaged hauler. The sight should have heartened me. Instead, I looked toward the port, searching for the bumps of the thermal scanners.

  "We'll never make it," I said. "Not with a large group of people in tow."

  The Knife nodded, a rustle beneath his camouflage cloak, small and subtle. It might as well have been the wind.

  "How did you imagine it would go?" he said. "When you planned on bringing down that ship?"

  "I didn't," I admitted. "Figured we'd bring it down, then wait. It will take them weeks to repair it. We could infiltrate the City perimeter, goad the clans into a fight. They'd fall for it. Those crudmuckers hate each other. Get the people from the Gash close enough in the meantime, blow up the missile packs, maybe call down the cruisers. We need the cruisers out of the sky or they'll hunt us down. A war would bring them close. Lots of noise, lots of confusion, get away while they're busy shooting at each other."

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  A quiet chuckle filled the dusty air between us.

  "I'd have given good food to see that," the Knife said. "Be difficult with so many people, though. The sensor net is too strong out here."

  "You could have warned me about it," I said, too hungry and too tired to put much fight in my voice.

  "Could, if I'd known," the Knife replied softly. "Never been this far in. Old regrets and old wounds."

  I didn't know what that meant. Maybe that regrets healed with time. Or festered. The sun was entirely gone, the sky dark above us. I couldn't even see the thermal scanners behind us. If there were any nearby, we'd stick out like bluegrubs at a banquet. Again, I wished that we had a shadow ward.

  Which was stupid. I didn't have to wish. Knowing what to defend against, I could ward up a dozen of them, ten dozen. We could hide an army behind those wards.

  "I have a plan," I said.

  "Oh?" the Knife said. I wished I could have seen his face. There was chuckle in his voice, but I couldn't tell whether it was directed at me, or with me.

  "I do what I do best," I said. "I infuse a lot of shadow wards, some light, some thermal, some infrared. Use the lids of the food cans. Give one to each group of people, and let them walk up as close as possible to the port. Go in first a few days early and start up a fight. With a lot of shooting and confusion among the Syndics, it could work."

  Silence. I waited. Nothing.

  "Won't work," the Knife said, right when I'd decided that he'd fallen asleep beneath his cloak. "You'd have to get a hundred wards or more."

  "I can do that," I said.

  "You that good a mage?"

  "Warder," I corrected. "Yes."

  He thought this over. I stretched my stiff legs.

  "Might," he said after a while. "Just might."

  I could hear the longing in his voice, and the fight with his reality. How long had he been on Remba? Fifteen years? But if I could make him believe, I could get everyone to follow.

  "It would work," I said. "The hauler will be almost repaired. They're bound to seal any damage first. Even if it doesn't have a new engine pod, we could fly it on the remaining ones."

  The Knife shook his head, another rustling of polymer strips and dry grass.

  "You're going to get everyone killed," he said.

  "They're going to die anyhow," I said. "You said so yourself. Everybody dies on Remba. This is a chance to get everyone out."

  He was silent, then, and I waited.

  "Might," he finally said, and it was as good as I could get.

  "So we go back to the Gash?" I said.

  "And start warding," the Knife answered. "You'd better be as good as you're claiming, or there will be a lot of blood on your hands."

  "They'll be dead hands," I said, "for I intend to be first in line through those sensor wards and electro-fields."

  "Don't forget the mines, the auto-guns, and the Syndicate troops waiting beyond them," the Knife added.

  I was about to tell him off, but kept my mouth shut. At least I didn't run the risk of being overly optimistic.