POV: nomad
Summary
They peel out together at full speed for the scout — a gaunt man in a white coat with red stripes who spots them at once, spins his cycle, and dives into a wide lava tube to use the rock for cover. Nomad goes in low after him, Rebeke close beside, hair flagged out behind her, an intense expression on her face. Aux, in Alethi, gently lampoons the squire who once swore he was the sensible one who did not rush headlong into every fight. Nomad, who is keeping a teenager alive and admits to himself that he is bored, lets the line hang. The tunnel is broken in places, open to the rings overhead, full of hairpins narrow enough to require careful judging of speed.
Contemplation breaks in over the radio: what are they doing? A scout, he tells her. She reminds him sharply that he is needed to open the doorway and that if he dies they will be locked out. He answers that if he dies it stops being his problem; she mutters reckless fools and asks him, drily, not to encourage Rebeke — Rebeke is all her family has left, and Contemplation would prefer to see her safely behind the Refuge's door before her own time arrives. The phrasing lands like a punch: her time to be left for the sun, to become her people's next power pack. He files the gut-punch and ignores the rest of the radio. The chase is on.
The scout is good — slips a tight curve, accelerates into the turn — but he is rattled, and Nomad has been the one being chased too many times to count. He cannot use the rifle on this planet, and even at the scout's tail there is nothing he can do; but he can press hard enough to push the man into a fatal mistake. He tells Rebeke, over the radio, to take the next broken ceiling out of the tube — he is going to punch this up.
He slams the accelerator. The lava tube spits them into a canyon, then a narrower one full of jagged occlusions, engines twin-roaring off the rock walls and the rings flashing in and out of the gaps overhead. The scout glances back, catches how close Nomad has gotten, and gets reckless — speeding into curves, sloppier each time. Aux mutters about high-speed chases on a planet of expert pilots. Nomad answers, privately, that he may not be the better pilot but he is an expert in being chased. He knows the panic of a hunter at one's back, the way all the dangers ahead become trivial against the one behind. The story of his life.
The narrow canyon opens into the floor of a wide crater, walled by mesas. The flat lets the scout maximise his speed; their cycles are matched, so Nomad cannot close. Then the ground erupts. A geyser of magma fountains beside him, sparks washing over the front of his cycle and refusing to go out. Aux exclaims with feeling. The scout, panicking, swings toward the wall instead of climbing; another section of crust explodes; chunks of melting rock burst across the ground like fireworks. A wave of glowing stone heaves up in front of Nomad's path; he swerves around it, narrowly avoids the next eruption, and finally pulls upward out of the bad ground, accepting that he has lost the race. The scout is far ahead. He has almost reached the far crater wall when —
A shot of light from above blasts the man off the cycle. The body drops; the abandoned machine tumbles end-over-end in the dust. Nomad looks up. Rebeke is on her cycle a short distance ahead of him, rifle to shoulder. He had told her to get ahead. He pulls up beside her, breathing hard, half-wondering what the planet thought it was doing with those geysers — extreme convection, tidal forces, the crust just generally unreliable — and then deliberately stops. None of that. Not now.
Rebeke is barely paying attention to him. She stares down at the fallen scout. I shot him, she says. He asks if it was her first time. She nods. She has shot at people before; she has never hit. She is a hunter — all of Beacon's gunhands are hunters; that is how they get meat — but to fire at a person seems awful. She does not feel different, she says, but feels as if she ought to. He answers, careful, that the first time he killed was with a spear and the moment had passed before he could mark it; that night, at stew, it had felt like a surreal day of training. He could barely remember the moment itself. She nods. Aux, in Alethi, observes that she looks comforted even though the squire said nothing actually helpful. Nomad explains, also in Alethi, that knowing you are not strange and that others have felt as you do can be all there is.
Rebeke asks why he speaks gibberish to himself sometimes. He tells her, picking a lie he thinks will appeal to her, that it is his own language and that he is offering prayers to one of the ancient gods of his realm. Aux protests, in his head, that he is no god, he works for a living. Then Nomad checks his cycle for flight time and nods toward the wreck. Come on, he tells her, we go check on him. She protests that the scout is dead. He tells her the first lesson of being a killer: always make sure.