God and Mind - Volume I - Lost
By Dark

Presented by: Xenogears: God and Mind

The continent of Ignas, in the northern hemisphere of our world.  On this, the largest continent, a war has been raging between two countries for hundreds of years.  In the north of the continent lies the Kislev Empire, in the south lies the desert kingdom of Aveh.  The war has gone on for so long that the people have forgotten the cause, knowing only the pointless circle of hostility and tragedy.

The chronic war obsession was soon to encounter a devastating change.  This was due to the ‘Ethos’, an institution that preserves our world's culture, repairing tools and weapons excavated from the ruins of an ancient civilization.  At once both countries excavated these ruins, and had the ‘Ethos’ repair the discoveries, in order to increase their military power.

The various weapons excavated from the ruins greatly changed the form of warfare.  The outcome of the battles between the two countries was no longer determined by man-to-man combat, but by ‘Gears’ - giant humanoid fighting machines - that were obtained from deep within the ruins.

Eventually, after continuous swings in the state of the war, Kislev gained the upper hand.  The major factor behind this lay in the enormous difference in the amount of resources buried within their ruins.  But suddenly a mysterious military force appeared in the continent of Ignas.  Called ‘Gebler’, this force decided to make contact with Aveh.

With the assistance of this Gebler ilitary force, Aveh was able to recover from being hopelessly outnumbered to being back on an even standing with Kislev.  Then, taking further advantage of its newly gained momentum, Aveh started to capture one territory after another from Kislev, showing no indication of slowing down in their invasion campaign.

The remote village of Lahan, in the outskirts of Aveh, near the border with Kislev.

This is where it all begins.

Prologue

     The storm raged.  Thunder boomed and cracked, and lightning flickered across the sky like some mighty electric sword.  The rain pelted down in a solid sheet, salvoes of water peppering the ground with a million droplets as if trying to mirror the millions of shots fired in the long war between Aveh and Kislev.  
     But the man trudging up the hill cared nothing for the war or the weather.  He walked slowly, not because he was tired, but because he didn’t want to make the boy’s horrific wounds any worse with rough treatment.  He moved smoothly, implacably, the water and blood soaking into his heavy blue cloak in equal measures.  When he reached the village, he paused.  The lights, which blazed out of the house windows, seemed like a welcome refuge.  But which house to choose…? At random, the stranger walked up a path and knocked on a door.  
     The man who answered it was almost the stereotype of an Aveh villager, well tanned and well muscled from hard work.  His eyes traveled slowly across the stranger, from the sturdily booted feet, past the blood soaked bundle on the shoulders, and up to the dark eyes that scrutinized him from behind an ornamental blue mask.  
     “Come in.”  The villager’s voice was hoarse with urgency.  He helped the stranger in, and aided him to lay his bloody burden down on a sofa.  “Dan, go get doc.  Alice, hot water and bandages.”  The villager commanded his children like a drill sergeant marshaling his troops.  As the younger boy ran out into the night and a pretty girl in her mid teens ran to boil a kettle, the villager turned to the stranger.  He stood impassively in the center of the room, like a tree in a storm.  “This your son?”
      The stranger stared hypnotically at the villager, his dark eyes impassive behind the mask.
     “His name is Fei Fong Wong.”  The stranger’s voice was deep, resonant and timeless, like the voice of a rock, infused with an infinite calm.  
     The villager picked up a knife from the sideboard and began to cut away Fei’s blood soaked shirt with expert hands.  The boy’s face was pale, and his limbs trembled.  He seemed very small and young, like an injured bird, but the villager guessed his age at about 15.  Damp hair spread out from his forehead in a curtain of sodden blackness, the ends matted with dried blood.  Beneath the shirt, Fei’s chest and arms were scored with long jagged slashes, none mortally deep, but all bleeding freely.  
     “Was he in the army? Or was he attacked by a wild beast?” The villager’s tone was skeptical, for he knew that the Aveh army would never take in one so young, and the wounds did not look like the marks of teeth or claws.  
     “How did this happen?”
     The stranger seemed to suck the question into the depths of his eyes, shrouding it in darkness.  
     “Look after him,” he said in his calm rock-like voice, then abruptly he turned and walked out into the night.  The villager stared down at the bloody figure on his sofa, and voiced a reply to his own question.  
     “I don’t want to know.”  

*  *  *  *  *  

     Fei opened his eyes quickly and then immediately closed them again.  He tried to open them once more, more slowly, allowing the light to seep into his sluggish brain in small doses.
      “Fei?” It was a deep, warm voice that seemed to match the kind, strong face that leaned over him, a face framed in black hair.
      “Father?!” Fei muttered, his brain still anaesthetized.  The man shook his head.  
      “I am Doctor Citan Uzuki.  You are in the village of Lahan.  A man in a blue cloak brought you here just over a week ago.  Since then, you have been in a fever and a state of delirium.  But your temperature has returned to normal.  Do you remember anything?”
     Fei took the last words as a challenge; he took the reins and forced his mind to heal.  Remember! He thrust his mind back, but came up against an immense blank wall of forgetfulness.  He tried again more furiously, but still a huge block covered all his past; thwarting any attempt he made to recall.
      “I can’t remember.”  Fei’s voice almost sobbed, it seemed so important that he should remember.  Citan’s eyes showed comfort.
      “Fevers often cause amnesia, your memory should return in a day or two.”  
     But a week passed, and still Fei could remember nothing prior to his awakening.  More time passed, slipping away from Fei like grains of sand in some cosmic egg timer.  Still Fei remembered nothing.  It was about 6 months after his arrival that he stopped trying, throwing his whole self into the daily life of the village with the vigor of a natural born villager.  The peaceful routine of work and friendship seemed to satisfy some deep inner need in Fei that he could not remember.  But his peace couldn’t last long, and it was only three short years after Fei’s awakening that it was brutally shattered.  

Chapter 1
Lahan Village

     Lahan was an out-of-the-way place.  It nestled comfortably on the slopes of Blackmoon Hill, which rose straight up out of the Blackmoon Forest.  About 70 miles away was the beginning of the Aveh desert, which ran right to the Kislev border.  The village was isolated; there was no question of that.  Few villagers had ever really seen a Gear, or even a Land Crab.  About the only form of transport in Lahan not provided by Shank’s pony was the small combustion-powered car in Chief Lee’s garage, and even that was only brought out on special occasions.  
     Fei dipped his brush one last time into the bucket of metal gloss paint, and covered a few spots on the car’s sleek coat.
     “Fei?”
     He turned to see the tall, angular figure of Chief Lee silhouetted in the garage door.  Fei smiled at the creased face, which he had come to know well over the three years he had lived in Lahan.
     “Chief?”
     “Dan wants a word with you, Fei.”  
     Fei hesitated, looking critically at the car, it was for his best friend’s wedding after all.
     “It’s fine.  You ought to knock off for a rest anyway, you’ve been daubing that thing for hours.”  Fei nodded, accepting that others may be slightly less critical of his work than himself.  He wiped his hands on a rag and took off the overalls, which had protected his clothes from the paint.  Beneath the overalls he wore green combat pants, comfortably creased, and a short sleeved white shirt with a blue collar.  It was the sort of mismatched combination people expected in Lahan.  Fei looked down at himself and wondered, with a little vanity, how he would look in the suit and tie which the village tailor was finishing for him.  A best man should look smart, and Fei didn’t want to disappoint his friend.  
     The sunlight streamed down in spring brightness, glancing off Fei’s dark hair and tanning his skin.  The scene before him was typically tranquil.  The village street was lined with small, solid houses and old people sitting in chairs.  Beyond the street, Fei could see the road running through the small patch of fields, which surrounded the village, and down into the forest like a dusty gray ribbon.  
     Suddenly, without warning, Fei was grabbed from behind, hands seizing him around the shoulders in an inexpert but enthusiastic ‘Full Nelson’.  Fei spun quickly, and, with not enough force to hurt, slung his assailant easily off his back.  He held the 12-year old at arm’s length and examined him closely.  Dan’s hair was a tussled mass of brown curls, and his clothes were predictably disheveled.  
     “I thought I’d get you then!” He slammed a fist on the wall in mock misery.  
     “Hands under the shoulders, then behind the neck.  You’ll never throw anyone if you don’t bend your elbows.”  Fei never really knew where he got his fighting skills from.  In the annual village wrestling tournament he always emerged victorious, even over larger and stronger men.  In boxing too, he was quick and fast, making up in speed and agility what he lacked in strength.  It worried him a little, for it was part of a past that he couldn’t remember and didn’t want to remember.  But it didn’t really matter, Fei consoled himself, as long as he only used his skills in sport.  
     “So you slip an arm under the shoulder,” said Dan as he wriggled out of Fei’s grip and walked behind him.  
     “Under my shoulder,” said Fei, correcting his pupil’s fumbling hold.  
     After Dan had executed quite a powerful Full Nelson on Fei (one which Fei had to use more than usual strength to get out of), they sat down on a wall.  As far as he knew, Fei had never had a younger brother, and though Dan could be annoying at times, Fei liked him.  
     “You should marry Alice, Fei.  You’d make a much better big brother than Timothy.  He’s a real...”  Dan broke off suddenly and stared up the road to where Timothy himself was making his way hurriedly towards them.  
     “What was that, Dan?” Timothy said as he came abreast of them.  “Did you want me for something?”
     “No!” Dan said quickly.  Whatever else he was, Timothy was sharp of hearing.  
     “Fei!”
     “Timothy!” Fei stared up at his friend in pleasure.  
     Timothy leaned indolently on the side of a house and scrutinized Fei minutely.  
     “Why have you got white paint on your cheek?” he asked, knowing full well ‘that it had something to do with his wedding.’ Fei sighed and reflected that Timothy would make a good detective.  
     “He’s been painting the Chief’s back gate.”  Dan helped him out.  Timothy’s blue eyes remained suspicious, but he didn’t press the point.  
     “So Fei, got the ring? I hope you don’t forget it tomorrow.”  
     Fei raised his eyebrows in an expression of mock horror.
     “Oh! No! I clean forgot!”
      Timothy’s eyes sparkled wickedly.  
     “Yes...well you better remember by tomorrow, or Alice will kill you.  She’s really nuts on little details like rings.  She almost scratched my eyes out when I suggested missing out on the confetti.”  Fei sighed melodramatically.  
     “The evils of marriage.  I’m going to stay a permanent bachelor all my life.  When Alice gets sick of you and throws you out, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”  Timothy gave out a deep, throaty laugh.  
     “Would you like to lay money on Alice throwing me out?”
     “No!” said Fei firmly.  “I’d hate to bankrupt you.”  
     Timothy laughed again, his eyes twinkling in the way that can only be achieved by a man totally at peace with life.  
     “I hope you’re coming to the stag party tonight.  I don’t want to have to drink all that beer on my own.”  
     Fei hesitated, he wasn’t really all that fond of beer, but it was tradition, so he smiled and accepted with an enthusiastic nod.  
     “Why can’t I come?” Dan whined from his seat on the wall.  
     “Because I don’t want my future aunt-in-law getting mad at me if you come home steaming drunk.”  
     “You don’t seem to care about your future wife getting mad at you when you come home steaming drunk!” retorted Dan.  
     “My future wife is very attractive when she’s angry,” Timothy slung back easily.  
     It was usually at this point in a conversation that Dan would slink away with an injured expression on his face.  But he stayed, his eyes glinting sadistically.
     “Tim? You might want to know that Fei’s been painting the Chief’s car for you tomorrow.”  
     Timothy and Fei both made an attempted rugby tackle at Dan, but the boy was over the wall and away before they could even lay hands on him.  
     “Damn! Stupid kid!” Fei was nettled, his own special surprise for Timothy ruined.  
     “Never mind.  To tell you the truth, I guessed anyway.”  Timothy smiled pleasantly.  “But thanks anyway, Fei.”  
     Fei nodded sadly, and lapsed into silence.  
     Timothy checked his watch.  
     “Sorry, got to run, I’m picking up my suit in 5 minutes.  I just came to tell you that Alice wants to see you.”  
     “Timothy, you know you’re not supposed to see the bride before tomorrow,” accused Fei.
     “I didn’t see her,” said Timothy calmly.  “She called through the window!”
     “And you were looking through the window?” Fei raised an eyebrow.  
     “Well --- only a little bit.”  Timothy smiled placidly.  
     “Alright!” sighed Fei, “I believe you.  See you tomorrow.”  

*  *  *  *  *  

     When he reached the sturdy house on the edge of the village, Fei found Alice standing on a chair, swathed in white satin.  Her aunt stood beside her with a mouth full of pins.  Pieces of white, lacy material littered the carpeted floor, and the coffee table was covered with scissors, needles, bobbins and other sewing paraphernalia.  
     “Isn’t it a bit late to start the dress?” Fei asked in horror, having visions of Alice walking down the aisle with safety pins holding her dress together.  
     “This was Mom’s wedding dress, Fei.”  Alice smiled down from her perch, her pretty face framed in a cloud of dark hair.  “Auntie’s just fixing it to fit me.”  
     “You wanted to see me?” asked Fei, imagining Timothy staring through the window as his bride was measured for her dress.  
     “Yes, Fei.  You know Dan was going to take the pictures? Well, our camera’s got a smashed filter or something.  I was wondering if you’d go up and ask doc if you can borrow his.  I would ask Dan, but he’s too busy setting out the tables for the wedding reception afterwards.”  
     Fei thought of Dan messing around in the street, but didn’t say anything.  He had nothing to do and it was a pleasant walk up to doc’s house on top of the hill.
     “Of course I’ll go.  Shall I drop the camera off tomorrow morning?”
     “That’d be fine,” said Alice, wincing as her aunt tightened a thread around her waist.  “Thanks, Fei.”  

Chapter 2
Mountain Path

     It was about a 45-minute walk from the center of Lahan up the hill to where the doctor’s house stood proud and lonely on top of the hill.  But it was a pleasant walk, through well-tilled fields and past hedges covered with flowers, and villagers could always be assured of a warm welcome.  If anyone needed the doctor for a real emergency, they could contact him from Chief Lee’s house with a radio transmitter, but this was rarely used.  Fei himself often slogged his way up the hill on many an evening.  Though Chief Lee had acted as Fei’s guardian while he was in Lahan, Doctor Citan Uzuki had been his teacher.  Some evenings they would play chess or cards in the doctor’s spacious living room, at others, Citan would school Fei in politics, history, military tactics, medicine, psychology, or any subject that took his fancy.  
     The early spring light was fading by the time Fei reached the isolated red brick house on the crown of the hill.  Surrounded by its own small budding garden it looked almost unreal; a picture book house from some idyllic painting.  But Fei knew that the climbing roses and sweet honeysuckle, which sprang around Citan’s porch, was put there only with a huge amount of hard work by Citan’s wife, Yui.  Fei could never work out whether Yui should become a gardener, or a chef, for she was equally skilled at both.  
     Fei walked up the two well-scrubbed steps to the solid mahogany door and rapped on it twice.  Almost instantly, it was flung open by the smiling figure of Yui with her daughter Midori wavering uncertainly behind her.  Yui was pretty in the precise opposite way to Alice, Fei decided.  Where Alice was tall and slender, Yui was of medium height and solidly built.  Where Alice’s eyes were a rich blue, Yui’s were a deep wood brown.  She also possessed the bronze skin and angular features that marked her as Kislevian, but this made little difference, for mixed blood was common in Aveh.  
     “Fei,” she beamed.  “Come in.  Midori, go make Fei some tea.  How are the wedding preparations going?” Yui’s dark-haired, prettily dressed 12-year old daughter shot the athletic 18-year old an admiring glance and was just scuttling off to the kitchen when Fei stopped her with a raised hand.  
     “It’s okay Midori, I’ve got to meet Timothy at 9.  To tell you the truth, I just came over to ask if Alice could borrow your camera for tomorrow.  Hers has a broken filter and...”  
     “Of course Fei, it’s in the garage.  Ask Citan to get it for you, he’s in there tinkering.”  
     “Garage?” asked Fei, mystified.  Why would the Uzuki’s, who didn’t even own a car, get a garage?
     “Oh, sorry.”  Yui apologized, seeing Fei’s questioning eyes.  “His workshop.  He’s insisted on calling it a garage ever since he found that damn machine.  Why he wants to get it going, I’ll never know.”  
     “Thanks,” said Fei, nodding to Midori and Yui as he walked out of the door and sauntered around the side of the house to the large brick structure Citan had once called his workshop.  
     Fei smiled to himself, the vanity of calling a workshop a garage just because it happened to have a vehicle in it was just like Citan, slightly pompous but utterly logical.  Fei put one hand to the electric buzzer switch that served the ever-locked workshop as a doorbell, and gave it a good hard push.  Just like his wife, the doctor opened the door suddenly.  He stood there, silhouetted against the electric light, a tall, handsome man in his late twenties with a fencer’s build and poise.  He was dressed in one of his favorite outfits, white pants of a light denim, an eccentrically formal olive green jacket of a distinctively formal cut, which looked militaristic, though it was not part of either the Kislev or Aveh army uniforms.  Adding to the impression of a military officer on his day off was a purely ornamental pink-red sash about his waist.  Like his wife, his face was almost Kislevian, but in his case, the skin across the angular bones and around the slanted black eyes was drawn into a network of lines which spelt out a clear message of long ago sorrow to whoever read it.  This was a man who had seen murder.  But when Fei entered, the lines creased into a smile.  
     “Aaah, Fei.”  Citan’s voice was deep, warm and precise, like the voice of a doctor ought to be.  “How do you like that?”
     Fei looked along the green clad pointing arm to the large metallic spider, which rested against one wall like some disemboweled metal giant.  In the center of its body were set two black leather seats and a control panel.  Its six legs each had two joints, and the ends were clawed.  At the rear above the seats was a short hump with a hole in the top that Fei instinctively knew had held a machine gun.  On the side of the machine was painted the three transverse stripes of the Aveh flag, two of them white down the sides, and one deep blue in the center.  
     “It’s a mini Land Crab, isn’t it?”
     “Scout class,” replied Citan proudly, running a black eye over the military machine.  
     “What’s it doing here? It isn’t...”  Fei stopped, thinking of Yui’s dark warnings that Citan’s ‘tinkering’ would land him in trouble one day.  “It’s not stolen, is it?”
     “Of course it’s not.  I found it in the woods a couple of days ago.  It had been abandoned because the engine overheated and melted quite a lot of the internal wiring.  I took out the handcart and lugged it up here.  It only needed a little work.  I thought Timothy and the delectable Alice could get married in it, instead of that clapped out car of the Chief’s.”  
     Fei tried to visualize Timothy in his best suit and Alice in white satin, clanking down Lahan’s main street in the monstrous battle machine.  
     “I don’t think it would really do for a wedding, doc,” said Fei carefully, knowing how touchy his teacher could be if one of his projects was criticized.  
     “Perhaps not,” sighed Citan, accepting the inevitable.  “But it’ll be nice to have some mechanized transport around here, and it will save Midori that long walk to school.”  
     Fei decided to get off the subject of the Land Crab before he burst out laughing.  
     “Doc? Alice’s camera broke, I came to ask if I could borrow yours for tomorrow.”  
     “Fine, I’ll just go get it.”  
     Citan was back almost instantly.  Under one arm he held a large black metal case with a lens on the front, and under the other he held a squat wooden box with a key protruding from it.  
     “I wondered if you’d like to see this, Fei,” Citan said, almost gravely.  “I found it while I was getting the camera.”  Fei touched it gently with his hand, stroking it thoughtfully with his fingers.  
     “What is it?”
     “It’s a music box… if you just wind the key.”  
     Obediently, Fei picked up the box and started to wind the curiously carved metal key.  He felt the springs tense, and then laid the box down on the workshop’s cluttered table.  It looked curiously out of place amongst the spanners, welders and engine parts, which littered the table’s surface.  From the box came a haunting, chiming melody, lazy yet sad in a peculiar way.  Fei felt something stir in the back of his memory, as if something behind the great dark wall of amnesia was fumbling, trying to get out.  But the rocks of the wall of night were too thick, and only a distant tap could be heard at the back of Fei’s conscious mind, like an itch on the border of his ego.  
     “I think I’ve heard that somewhere before.”  He found his voice a hoarse croak of tension.  
     Then suddenly, without warning, the box exploded.  Fei and Citan were flung backwards by the explosion’s force.  Engine parts and pieces of metal peppered the floor around them like shots from a gun, but there was no sign of the box, it had completely disintegrated.  
     “What was that?” gasped Fei, choking on the cloud of dust raised by the explosion.  
     “Could be an omen,” puffed Citan as he struggled across the floor to open a window and release the dust.  
     As if mirroring the box’s detonation, from outside there came a distant crump whoosh of an exploding shell.  Fei staggered to the window and stared out into the deepening night that had suddenly become red.  From the direction of Lahan there came a second, louder explosion, and a fist of fire punched its way over the horizon.  
     Lahan Village, the only home Fei could remember, was burning.  

Chapter 3
Fallen Shadows

     Fei dashed to the door, his instincts racing to protect his home.  But Citan grasped his arm in an iron fist, and as Fei turned to stare at his teacher, the flames of panic died inside him, even though the flames of Lahan still burnt on.  For in Citan’s face, no trace of the slightly nutty doctor who lived on a hill remained.  Now he was a healer with a job to do.  When he spoke, his voice was calm, strong and confident.  
     “There is no point dashing off unprepared.  Wait here.  This is too dangerous for Yui and Midori, so I’ll need you to carry some medical supplies.”  Fei stood in precisely the same place for a full ten minutes, watching his home burn.  Citan returned at last, carrying two bulky hikers backpacks (one on his back) and a red leather case, which Fei knew, contained drugs.  “Take these.”  Fei strapped on the backpack, which was heavy against his spine, and took up the red case.  “We must hurry.”  

*  *  *  *  *  

     Fei could usually walk from Lahan to Citan’s house in 45 minutes.  If he hurried, he could do it in half an hour.  But on this dark night, with the fires of Lahan blazing before them, the two men managed it in less than twenty, straining every muscle to get them there quickly.  
     Fei never forgot what he saw that night.  Many of the houses were fully alight, and a few had already burned to the ground.  Villagers scattered here and there like frightened chickens; some with grisly burns, that were being inexpertly tended to by their neighbors.  But Fei’s eyes saw through the flames and smoke, to where the battle was.  
     Since they had been excavated by the Ethos, Gears had become the main weapons in both countries’ armies.  They were immense humanoid figures in steel and glass, giants under human control.  When they fought, trees were uprooted and the ground kicked up in mountains of soil.  But at this moment, Fei was far from impressed.  The titans strode through the square, letting off volleys of shells and blasts of ether weapons that seemed to rarely touch the opposing side, but more often than not, fell amongst the houses of the innocent.  They were painted in a variety of colors, and built in different ways.  There were white Gears, built like immense cat burglars, with dexterity and swiftness in their movements.  There were immense red Gears, slightly taller than the others were, which roared forward in immense kicks and punches that could floor an elephant.  But all, usually on the back, bore the three stripes of Aveh, or the rayed sun of Kislev.  
     Anger flooded through Fei’s mind like the fire itself, how dare these great clumsy invaders destroy his home with their needless battle!? He hated them with a burning, sizzling hatred, which scoured him dry of all emotions.  He wanted to destroy them.  Not caring that he could be stepped on, or hit by a stray shell, he walked to the side of the square and shook his fist impudently at the towering titans.  If only he had a weapon, he could kill them all.  Fei turned wild in his rage, swirling his eyes around as if expecting to see some huge tank ready and waiting for him.  
     But there was a weapon, parked in the field, which led off the square.  A Gear, as tall as all the others, but silent and pilotless! It knelt in the field in the landing position, its head down, and the ladder, which led to its glass cockpit, inviting.  It was a slenderly built Gear, not perhaps as swift as the white Gears, but swift enough, and more enduring.  The paint on its sides looked black in the firelight, but it seemed to Fei that it was scored with purple flashes.  
     With a wild yell, he ran to the Gear, scattering the frightened villagers out of his way like sheep.  He felt a quick rubbing of the iron rungs against his hands, and then he was in the cockpit and the roof was closing.  
     Piloting a Gear is never easy.  As the Gear’s body can move in as many ways as a human body, it was found best for pilots to slot their feet and hands into reactive controls, so every move the pilot made was amplified by the Gear.  It was a difficult discipline, for the Gear was of course far larger and stronger than the pilot was, and it took years to master completely.  But once mastered, a pilot could carry out any number of complex routines in a Gear, including of course, the most extreme of the martial arts.
      Fei had never even seen a Gear while in Lahan.  But his hands slipped into the grips, and his feet found the pedals with ease.  By a familiarity of instinct, he found the power switch and pressed it, knowing almost by experience how to wait until the Gear was at full power before moving.  He felt the body responding to his touch with the lightning reactions of a trained athlete.  The Gear stood up slowly, the restraints falling from its hands and feet with ease.  It towered fully 50 feet above the ground.  Now he was equal! Fei started to move forward, feeling the gargantuan body move beneath him.  He began to run, as an earthshaking iron tread that covered the ground at terrific speed.  
     It felt so strange and so familiar.  He leapt into the air, glorifying in the power and acceleration as his thrusters kicked in.  He rocketed forward bringing a leg up in a kick, which sent a white Gear sprawling across the ground spouting flames like red arterial blood.  He landed lightly and sighted a huge red Gear as his next target.  He felt his hands come forward in punches of immense power, the first clanging into the red Gear’s chest and shattering its main power circuit, the second splintering the cockpit glass, sending the pilot flying.  A shell clanged off the back of his head, and he spun to meet the new attack, feeling the thrill of battle playing him like a human guitar string.  When the attacking Gear was in his sights, he let loose the ether weapon.  The incandescent ball of energy struck his enemy in the stomach and threw the giant device backward to crush another house.  But then two other Gears rushed in on Fei, cannons blazing.  He backed away down the ruined main street.  
     And there, before him on the ground, was the familiar squat figure of Timothy, arms waving in the air, shouting encouragement to Fei.  But even as he saw the tiny figure of his friend, he saw something else, a shell falling.  Frantically, he flung his Gear forward, trying to protect his friend, but he was too late.  The shell crashed down, crushing Timothy’s body into a bloody mess.  
     Fei could almost feel Timothy die as he looked down to the squashed fly that had once been his best friend.  The fury surged in Fei again, and he threw his machine into the attack with fresh vigor.  Aveh, Kislev, all these Gears were his enemies and they all deserved death.  
     The human mind is an iceberg, the small area, which we call the conscious, protrudes above the swinging waves, but most of it is beneath the surface, vast and unseen.  It was in the coldest, darkest regions of Fei’s mind that the tremor started.  But quickly it rushed up through steadily lightening levels of thought, until it burst on his conscious like a bomb.  Fei fell back in his harness, his hands sliding from the grips, his Gear standing still as the storm wrenched through his mind, from the deepest pits of blackness to the very pinnacle of his Superego.  
    He saw a face, his face, younger, and from its eyes tears welled like water bubbling up from volcanic springs.  He saw a pendant; a huge silver cross set with a single red ruby, which winked at him with an unknowable brilliance.  But then the storm proved too much, and he started to drown, his conscious self sinking into the dark waters of the unconscious.  But before he drowned, he saw one last image.  He could never afterwards be sure if it were an outpouring of his mind, or the last sight of his eyes, but he saw a man, dark beyond measure, rising up against leaping powers.  The man was laughing, and Fei was afraid.  

*  *  *  *  *  

     He woke in discomfort, the hard knotty surface of the tree roots biting into his back like the teeth of some hungry animal.  He opened his eyes with slow care, but he needn’t have worried, the light of the few remaining fires was dim and subdued.  He scanned his memory, remembering the tide of waxing fury, his fight in the Gear, the death of Timothy.  But then what? Fei was familiar with black walls blocking his attempts to remember, and this one was no more impregnable than the one that hid his first 15 years of life.  
     “Fei?” He looked up and saw Citan’s face leaning over him.  The lines of anguish were clear and unveiled around the angular eyes.  
     “What --- What happened?”
      Citan did not speak, but pointed mutely with one green clad arm.  
     Fei scanned what was left of his home and wept.  When the Gears had attacked Lahan, one or two houses had been crushed.  A few others had been set on fire, but the majority of Lahan’s buildings had remained intact.  But now the village was a wasteland of broken brick and shattered lives.  The houses had been mowed down, plowed over by some terrific force, their windows splintering as easily as the bodies of their inhabitants.  Corpses littered the streets, some (like Timothy) squashed flies of blood and brains, and others burned or mutilated by flying rubble.  Faces he knew stared up at Fei, many of them without bodies.  
     Alice’s aunt huddled against a heap of rubble, rocking quietly forwards and backwards with grief, gripping in her one good hand the tattered remnant of white satin.  Near her lay her niece, with her spine showing through the huge rent in her back, the glass that had driven into her skull glinting in the smoldering firelight.  
     In the center of the devastation, like some god of destruction, stood the purple and black Gear.  It was battered and damaged, but it seemed mostly intact.  
     “You! Fool!” A furious little figure hurled himself on Fei, hands clawing with manic animal rage.  Dan’s hands battered at his one time boxing instructor in a blind, mindless fury.  Citan dragged the boy off and held him tightly.  “I’ll kill him,” spat Dan, fighting furiously.  “Murderer!” Remorse gripped Fei and shook him like a rat.  A huge pendulum of guilt started to swing back and forth as the truth started to dawn.  
     “I...  did...  this?”
     “You know damn well you did, you goddamn evil bastard! You got in that thing and went berserk! You should have never come to Lahan! You should have died! I HATE YOU!”
     Fei left Citan and the struggling Dan and walked slowly towards the Gear, his feet crunching on broken glass.  Some of the survivors spat as he passed, others simply stared in silence.  As he passed, Alice’s aunt stood, her face twisted into a mask of pain, her blue eyes blazing.  She didn’t speak.  With a swift, violent movement she hit Fei, once, her hand carrying all of a lost life behind it.  Fei rocked on his feet, his eyes blinded with tears of pain.
     Slowly he looked up at the Gear, remembering the joy he had felt in piloting it.  He seemed to feel all the villagers’ eyes, living and dead, boring into him.  He was a moth spread out under the hottest light bulb in the world, and he deserved it.  Then suddenly, something snapped.  
     With an inarticulate cry he charged out of the village, blinded with emotion.  Down the road he ran, his feet pounding on the concrete, trying to outrun his feelings.  Then he turned off the road in a mad dash and charged into the forest, trees snatching at his hair and tearing his clothes.  He wished the branches would scratch out his eyes so that he would never have to see such a sight again.  He longed for the leaves to muffle his ears to the screams of the wounded and the sounds of the dying.  But grief is tiring, and after what seemed like hours of running, he fell down into a patch of dense bushes, curling himself into a fetal ball, and within seconds, he had cried himself into a deep, blissful sleep.  

Chapter 4
Into the Woods

     The wood was dark and silver, a tangled mass of fronds, and bars of shadowsplit the silver moonlight like the crazy jagged bars of some pandemonium prison.  But though the wood was still, still as the sleeping youth, it was not silent.
     Around the small clump of bushes creatures rustled, and a gentle breeze brushed the trees with loving fingers, accentuating the stillness and the night.  As the moon rose like a great argent gunship, its beams shone on the white shirt of the sleeping figure and washed it with an ethereal cleansing.
     For the second time that night, Fei awoke with tree roots digging into his back.  But this time, he didn’t jump to his feet, but lay still on the hard and dirty ground.  His mind was muzzy and ill formed; but even so, the grief leapt on him like a predator.  Again, he saw the falling shells, the flames blooming in his home like red flowers, grown over the graves of the screaming dead.
     He didn’t cry; he was passed tears, his tanned face creased in the moonlight like an ancient stone.  He didn’t move, what was the point? Grief ran through his brain like a tide of black lava, why should he move? Going anywhere wouldn’t make the pain any easier to bear.
     But the body takes no note of the vagaries of emotion, so after a while he stood, obedient to his aching muscles.  Then like a sleepwalker, he began to walk.
     With his hands by his sides like a bear’s heavy paws, his feet shuffling, his shoes covering themselves with mud and mold, his head down, and the moonlight unable to penetrate the depths of his dark eyes, Fei walked through the wood.
     The direction didn’t matter; however far he went from Lahan he would always be haunted by his mistake.  He visualized Citan, his angular eyes behind their professorial spectacles.  Judgmental, he said nothing but just looked.  Behind him was the squashed fly that had once been Fei’s best friend, and the shape of an aunt, mourning her lost daughter.
     Fei walked through the dark.
     He thought of suicide, swallowing a berry or root that would stop his heart or devour his brain, maybe leaping to crush his skull, or finding a predator to excise his pain in a single bite.  Though he thought of these things, none were serious.  Some part deep down in the preconscious knew that Fei wouldn’t kill himself.
     So when the creatures attacked him, he did not stand and be mauled.
     There were two of them, blue reptilian baboon-like shapes, melting out of the moonlight.  Though they only came upto Fei’s chest, they were broad and heavy set, and their huge monkey arms reached down to the ground.  Along the back of each head, and continuing down the back, was a ridge of stegosaurus spikes that proved the mutant’s reptilian origin.  Their eyes were hungry, and their fangs were greedy.
     Fei swayed aside from one creature’s rush, then spun forward and kicked a foot into the creature’s belly.  As it flinched from the blow, he struck it with an uppercut under the simian jaw that snapped the monster’s head back and threw it to the ground.
     But the other was already moving.  It sprang like a cat, long arms and polydactyl hands grasping for a hold.  Fei ducked the flailing arms, and slammed up with a chop that brought with it the axe edge of his hand, snapping the creature’s jaw.  It fell back whining, and slunk away.
     Fei watched the two creatures go silently.  For the few seconds of the fight, he had for a moment forgotten his pain.  But as the blue creatures left, the grief returned, tempered with the bitter gall that he had muffed the perfect opportunity to kill himself.  He couldn’t even lose a fight properly!
     Like a dog lost and abandoned, he howled into the night: "Come and kill me! Come and kill me!!” But the silent forest whispered on, uncaring.
     He walked on, his body robotic.  Since his eyes were cast down, he didn’t see the branches that grasped his shirt and tore it, but what did it matter?  These clothes were from Lahan, and Lahan owed him nothing but punishment.  He didn’t see the root that tripped him to tear his hands, but what did that matter? His hands were so stained with others’ blood that a little extra of his own didn’t matter.
     Only another attack could have brought Fei out of his death dreaming, or his stumbling delirium drunk on sorrow.  But no attack came; only tangled woods, silver poisonous moonlight, and the rustle and scurry of small creatures, frightened by the bloodstained killer.
     But when the voice spoke, Fei stopped shambling and looked up, the darts of silver striking his expressive brown eyes and making them glow.  But what startled him even more than the voice, or the dim figure that stood in the clearing before him, was the fact that it did not speak in Ignasian; the language spoken universally all over the continent of Ignas.  It was a lilting yet strangely guttural language, with an ancient music to the words that lent even the peremptory command in the voice an air of grandeur.
     Fei took in the figure slowly, piece by piece. It was small; smaller than he was anyway.  It was defiant, obvious from the proud set of the shadowy head and dimly flowing hair.  It was hostile, easily evident from the glinting pistol that pointed at Fei’s chest, rock steady and deadly in the moon.  But there was one other thing Fei noticed, by the dark outline of the figure and the sound of the voice: it was female.
     "Halt!”
     Fei stood perfectly still as the girl switched to Ignasian.
     "I have beenordered to kill any land dweller I meet in these woods."   She spoke with a soft lilting accent, giving her voice an exotic tinge.  But Fei was not interested in her voice - he loved her! She had just made his dreams of this night come true.  She would kill him.  Warm with gratitude, he stepped forward, waiting for the lead to lance into his psychotic murderer’s brain.
     The shot rang out, but it was an innocent ash tree that got hit, not Fei’s skull.  The bullet struck the trunk and ricocheted away with a hard, woody thunk.  Fei took another step forward, his hopeful feet scrunching leaf litter.
     "Stand still!”
     "Kill me!!!”
     Though the darkness made them both just dim shapes to each other, Fei thought the girl looked startled.  Evidently her training didn’t cover suicidal trespassers.
     "I’ll only kill you if I have to.  Who are you?”
     "You have to if you believe in justice, I’m evil! Just kill me and be done with it!”
     He saw a dim hand reach down to the level of her waist, and for a moment his hope soared.  Maybe she was reaching for another weapon or more bullets for her gun.  But his desire evaporated in the bright beam of a powerful flashlight that shone out in white glory.  In its warm, friendly glow, cutting into the dark, Fei could see the girl examining him minutely, as if scanning a target.  He in turn was able to examine her.
     She was of average height, which made her a few inches shorter than he was, but the pride in her erect stance told him that she was no gentle flower of a girl.  Her clothing, too, was not what the old-fashioned matrons of his home - though he didn’t want to think about that - would call womanly.
     She wore brown pants of some heavy cotton, and like military fatigues spattered here and there like the mud and grass stains adorning her large leather boots.  Around her waist was a broad leather belt from which hung several tools of her trade: a hook for her torch and a holster for her gun, ammunition pouches, and at her hips hung two broad-bladed light metal spears that reached down to her calves.  Above the pants she wore a white uniform jacket that seemed to glimmer inthe light.  It was ornamented here and there with patches of red on the shoulders and arms, and a purple stripe up the chest.  On the lapel was emblazoned a red G that Fei felt he ought to recognize from somewhere.  But it was her face more than anything else that startled him out of his deadly lassitude.  Her skin was pale, almost transparent, and it was stretched over sharp bones in a configuration that while proud, was at the same time somehow heart-stoppingly beautiful, a tiny fairy face painted on a queen.  It was framed in a cloud of chestnut hair that seemed to accentuate the whiteness of the skin and make it strangely vulnerable.  But there was nothing vulnerable about the almost violet eyes that scanned him with a kind of quizzical pride that seemed part soldier, and part curious.
     "Who are you?” she asked again more slowly, but suddenly her words were cut short in a scream, and the flashlight went flying to the ground, where its warm glow was extinguished.  A blue baboon creature lunged down from the trees, and before she could move, it had sank its long, greedy fangs into the soldier-girl’s forearm.  With that hold and the grip of two hands, it tried to drag her back towards the bushes.
     Fei moved totally on instinct, his body seeming to move before his grief sodden psyche could follow.
     "Get your hands off of Elly!” he screamed as he dashed forward.  He didn’t know where the words came from; they simply erupted from his vocal cords like bullets from a machine gun.  He chopped with all his strength at the creature’s scaly neck, but the axe edge of his hand was blunt against the stegosaurus spikes.  Bending down, he picked up a stout stick and whacked the beast solidly across the head.  This time it loosed its hold on its prey and came snarling after Fei with fangs bared.
     With all the power of his muscular shoulders, he thrust at the beast with the branch as if it had been a lance, catching the mutant in the throat.  It fell back, gasping from its open red mouth, and this gave Fei time to deliver two crushing jump kicks,which shattered the animal’s ribs in a crackle of bone.
     Another beast advanced from the bushes, but Fei was ready, his body moving like a well-honed machine.  He elbow smashed the beast on the point of its blue jaw, and it ran back into the trees yelping, evidently deciding to find a meal that didn’t fight back.
     For an instant Fei stood still, amazed at his own ferocity.  But then a scuffling sound behind him caused him to whirl around with his club raised.  He was just in time to see another baboon - a little larger and darker than its fellows, busily slamming a reptilian fist down onto the mystery girl’s forehead.  She span to the forest floor, and the creature bared its dirty fangs down towards her unprotected jugular.
     Rage filled Fei then, not the blazing, blinding fury of Lahan, but a bitter, flat desperation.  Though he had hardly known the girl for five minutes, it seemed to Fei that she was the last bastion of humanity, his last chance for salvation.  Something deep in the core of his being told Fei that if she died, he would be an outcast, exiled, hated and alone for the rest of his miserable life.
     With a wordless battle cry, he charged forward.  This was no calculated rush but a desperate dash, to stop the fangs falling just as he had failed to stop the shell in the fire-stained village that had killed his best friend.  His club swung wildly, slamming with a meaty thunk into the lizard-like head of the beast.  It turned on Fei, hulking its simian body for a spring, but Fei didn’t give it a chance to spring.  The club whistled through a second and then a third time, smashing the beast twice more in the head.  It backed away, but Fei wasn’t going to let it live.  He leapt and his muddy boot smashed up under the creature’s chin, breaking its neck with an audible snap.  Fei didn’t even see the body fall, but as soon as his feet touched the leaf litter, he searched for the flashlight.  He found it lying in a patch of moonlight, snatched it up and prayed that it wasn’t broken; it wasn’t.
     The girl lay blanketed in the white beam, her white jacket and pale skin sgleaming angelically.  She looked thin and small, flung aside like a knitted soldier-doll.
     Fei knew a little first aid, taught to him by Citan in those long evenings that seemed a world away.  To his relief, her head wasn’t crushed.  There was only a swelling bruise marring the perfect sheen of her face, formed under her beautiful tangled mane of foxy hair.  Her arm, on the other hand, was more serious.  Blood had soaked the sleeve of her jacket, changing the color from white to a murderous red and still flowing.  Fei looked around frantically, the wave of desperation still strong in him.  What could he do? He needed disinfectant, a needle and thread, bandages, anything! He was just about to rip some pieces out of his grubby shirt, when his eye fell on a dim, huddled shape at the base of a tree.  Her pack, he guessed.  She was a soldier...  though her uniform was not that of either the Aveh or Kislev forces.  But her race didn’t matter.
     Pushing aside the slight reluctance he felt at going through a lady’s things, he rummaged through the pack.  There were some crushed looking boxes of spare ammunition for her gun, a few things that might have been grenades, a compass with its glass smashed, the shattered remnants of a radio and a white box that Fei saw by the universal red cross on its lid contained medical supplies.  One side of the box was smashed in, but that didn’t matter so long as the contents were all right.  One bottle of pills was shattered into fragments, and several medicine bottles had holes in the sides that shed dark liquid, but at the bottom of the box Fei found an undamaged bottle of iodine, along with a cotton roll and some dry bandages.
     Almost tenderly, he rolled down the white sleeve to expose the gashed arm.  The fang marks were ugly and bled profusely, but they didn’t seem as deep as Fei had originally thought.  He swabbed the cuts clean of dried blood with the iodine-soaked cotton roll, and then tied a tight bandage around the arm to stop the blood.
     For an eternity, he sat watching the girl’s sleeping face, willing her eyes to open.  He thought of going to find fuel for a fire, but that would mean leaving her.  He wished he had a blanket or a long coat to wrap comfortingly around her as she slept, but he shivered in his short-sleeved shirt in the cold night air.  After a while, his thoughts turned to the contents of her pack.
     It was clearly a standard military survival kit, but why were the contents so battered? It suddenly came to him that the girl’s clothing was too thin and light to be that of a foot soldier.  Was she in a flying squad then, or a Gear pilot?  He didn’t like that line of reasoning.  The thought of Gears jerked his mind sullenly back to Lahan.
     The fires would be lower now, those with severe wounds would be dead, and the others would crawl around in the wreckage and try to rebuild their lives.  But not in his mind, there they still screamed and burned and he still rushed to destroy them.
     Once more the girl’s sweetly accented voice cut through his despair.
     "Where am I? W-w-w-w-what happened?”  Then she seemed to come awake, the violet eyes clearing like a sun setcoming through the clouds.  "You saved my life."
     It was not a question but a statement, the acknowledgment of one soldier’s bravery by another.
     Fei sat silent and awkward, rocking back on his heels, unable to answer.  Wincing slightly at the pain from her bandaged forearm, the girl got her body into a sitting position, pulling her knees under her chin.
     "You did this?” She nodded at her bandage.  Fei nodded in return.  She nodded at her bandage again.  Having nothing better to do, Fei nodded back.
     "Are you going to kill me?” the young man asked.  His voice was almost eager, his tanned face showing an expression of desire.  The girl shook her head, making the mass of copper colored hair wave like a heavy banner.
     "Have you got some kind of death wish?  For one thing, I owe you my life."   Her voice was proud and matter-of-fact, but suddenly her eyes sparkled and her tone lightened.  With a shock of realization, Fei saw that she was no older than he was, probably a few months younger.  "And anyway, you’ll have to reload my gun for me, it’s a two-handed job."   Despite his grief and pain Fei laughed.
     "I’m not good with guns,” he offered, having rarely seen a firearm in secluded Lahan, let alone reloaded one.
     "You’re good with other things,” the girl said feelingly.  "Like your fists, and first aid, not to mention guessing other people’s names."   Fei blinked, he had no recollection of his war cry.  "You called me Elly,” she explained simply.  Something about her directness embarrassed Fei.
     "Oh...  sorry Miss..."  
     "Van Houten, Lieutenant Elhaym Van Houten of Gebler if you must know, but I’d prefer you to go on calling me Elly.  What is your name?”
     "Fei Fong Wong,” he answered absently.  Something in her self-description had toucheda nerve.  He had heard of Gebler...  on the TV news.  "Gebler! That’s Prime Minister Shakahn’s elite force, isn’t it?” Elly nodded.
     "For the moment, we don’t want Kislev to have too big an advantage...  and they’ve excavated all those Gears,” she sighed dramatically.  "But Shakahn’s a fool.  I don’t think he’ll last much longer."  
     A sudden bubble of patriotism blazed in Fei.  Though he knew little of Aveh’s capital, Bledavik, and his only politics came from Citan, it seemed somehow sacrilegious to call Aveh’s prime minister a fool.
     "He’s no fool, he’s destroying the Kislevian Gears."
     "We are destroying the Kislevian Gears,” Elly corrected.  "I wouldn’t be surprised if we were ordered to depose him soon, he’s an ambitious pig."   Something in her last comment hit Fei.
     "Ordered? By who?” The change was instantaneous.  Elly had become chatty, clearly at ease in talking to Fei, almost the exact opposite of the stern soldier who had challenged him in the dark.  Now the soldier returned, her beautiful face becoming almost arrogant, her eyes hard, and all signs of callow youthleaving her.
     "Never mind."
     Fei backed off quickly.  He had clearly touched upon a military secret, locked away in the mind of this girl likea jewel in a subterranean treasure house.
     Elly relaxed, smiling forgivingly at Fei’s blunder.  But despite that smile Fei felt guilty, why should he pry into military secrets that were no business of his? He had to redeem himself, to make some gesture to show that he was no enemy to this strange, beautiful soldier that had entered his shattered life.  With his voice shaking, he made his peace.
     "I don’t suppose...  that is...  err...  We both want to get out of this forest, right...  and...  Do you think we should sort of...  travel along together?”
     She looked at him curiously, with one fox colored eyebrow raised.  Her eyes went significantly from the ill-equipped and grubby young man to her loaded pack.
     "I think you need more looking after than I do.  But I do want to get out of this forest, and I don’t think this will make it any easier."   She twitched her wounded arm.  "Alright, Fei.  We’ll help each other."
     A double thrill passed through him as she said his name and accepted his offer.  Though the grief was still heavy and leaden, he felt that now he had a reason to live.  The purpose of protecting this girl, as he had failed to protect his friends at Lahan, would become his goal.  If he could help her reach the wood’s edge, he could part company from her knowing that the grief would end, and that no sorrow lasts forever.  

Chapter 5
Mystery Girl

     Watching was a slow business.  Fei huddled his body even closer at the base of the tree, curled close for warmth but still alert, Elly’s pistol cradled in his hands.  When he had volunteered to watch, she had thrust the gun peremptorily at Fei.  He had protested, of course.
     "I told you, I don’t know how to use a gun!”
     Elly’s violet eyes had been commanding.  "You know how to use a camera, same principle.  Point and click."
     She had about to say more, but shestopped at the look of pain in the young man’s expressive brown eyes.  The mention of a camera had reminded Fei of a wedding that would never happen, and a girl in a white dress who had lost her life.
     But he hadn’t needed the gun.  The moon had climbed higher, silver light flowing through the tangled masses of foliage like water, washing around the huddled figures.  A cold wind started to blow, chilling Fei’s bare arms and making the hairs on his skin extend.  He shivered, the wind seemed portentous, a harbinger of imminent disaster.  But the portent was late incoming, the disaster had already happened, and Fei, like the shipwrecked mariner, had to make what he could out of his own desert island.
     To ease his cramped muscles, he stood and walked across the clearing to where Elly was lying.  She had curled herself into a tight ball, her head pillowed on one arm, surrounded by that mass of red hair.  He stared down at her.  In sleep, all the pretended soldiery was gone from her face; her long lashes veiled those beautiful eyes.
     But still, Fei thought, she was beyond him.  Her world was not his; even her language was different...
     But no, he couldn’t hope for friendship or affection from this girl.  They would reach the forest’s edge tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, and then she would be gone, out ofhis life and out of his mind.
     He turned and went back to his tree, sitting with his head erect in the silverlight.  It was only a few minutes later that his eyes started to close and his head began to droop.  He jerked himself awake, because if he slept the baboons would return and they would both die.  Though it didn’t matter about him, Elly could not die for his negligence.
     "Fei?”  The voice was quiet, and it was a girl’s voice.
     "Elly?” His voice was equally still, matching the whispering trees all around him.
     "You ought to get some sleep, I’ll watch the rest of the night."  
     Gratefully, Fei lay down, his long dark hair falling over his face as he turned on one side.  Of course, this one kind gesture meant nothing, only a flash in life’s pan, but it didn’t matter.  Fei was a beggar for friendship, and with relief flooding his mind he slept.
     The girl saw Fei slip into sleep, silver light and shadow covering him like an ethereal patchwork quilt.  He was a -Lamb-, of course, only a land dweller.  He was a -Lamb-, no question of that, but Elly had always been more tolerant of land dwellers than her comrades, and he could fight! She wondered idly if she could get him into training when she got back to Bledavik.  Jugend had trained -Lambs- before...  or so she’d heard.  She shrugged off the thoughts, for she was at heart a very practical girl.  She could worry about Fei when she had sorted out herself.  It was egotistical, but that was what she would have to do, for Gebler.
     There was a military base some miles south of the forest’s edge, she knew, and though it galled her to come like a vagabond to the Aveh army, it was the only way she would get transport back to the capital.  Thinking of the Aveh army made her think of the Gear that she’d been given.  She seemed to see it standing in the center of the clearing, like a rusty god in all its dilapidated glory.  Why she hadn’t been allowed to use her own sophisticated model she didn’t know, but Shakahn had ordered her to take a unit of lower ranking Aveh Gears, with a few Gebler soldiers mixed in.  The images rushed in on herthen, and for a few minutes, she relived that disastrous mission.

*  *  *  *  *

     They were about a thousand feet up, the cloudy sky scudding past as she powered her Gear’s jets.  Her competent hands were steady in the grips, her slim fingers hovering close to the firing stud.  Then she had seen one of the enemy streaking out of the clouds ahead, its red body glowing with the heat of the air friction.  She fired, seeing the tracer streak out and hit the figure.  It banked down, damaged but not destroyed.  She stabbed out an ether weapon, curving her own Gear down in a howling dive that brought the plunging enemy into her sights.  She watched dispassionately as the blazeof light surrounded the already hot machine.  The pilot must have felt nothing as the main engine exploded, fire streaming earthward like divine wrath.  She banked back up, looking for another adversary.
     Suddenly, she was the recipient of a huge vibration, and she saw the flame and particles of an explosion streak around and past her.  It was clear what had happened; a shell, or even another dying Gear, had exploded behind her.  Even as she scanned the display for damage she saw red lights flashing.
     "Commander?”  The crackling voice hissed over the radio like the wind howling outside.  She was fighting now, pulling frantically on the jet controls, trying to keep the machine level.  Panic filled her; she’d been hit before...  but not this badly.  One or both ofher jets had been put out of action by flying shrapnel, and she was introuble.
     "Commander!” This time her radio answered, even as Elly wondered if she’d be unlucky enough for her fuel tank to explode when she hit the ground.  "There was anexplosion, are you alright?”
     "Shrapnelin the back...  jets damaged."   Her tone was as steady as her hands, though her violet eyes were filled with death fear.
     "Bail out!”
     Elly looked critically at the readout screen.  She was leaking jet fluid, she saw.  It was falling out of her reeling Gear like vomit from a derelict.  And derelict is just what this Gear would be in a few minutes if she didn’t do something!
     She gave up her struggle with the jet controls and unstrapped herself.  As the now uncontrollable wreck plummeted earthwards, she seized the emergency parachute, opened the Gear’s hatch, and jumped.
     For a moment she fell, legs and arms wide like a diver.  Then she felt the canvas open above her, bellying out with the air resistance increasing.
     As she floated serenely, trying to stop herself from trembling, her shudders were redoubled as she saw her vacated Gear plummet down to smash into flaming ruin on the ground below.  She drifted back the way they’d come, the wind pushing her away from the battle, until the warring Gears became nothing but bright dots on the horizon.  She saw trees drifting up like misshapen monsters, and before she had a chance to react, their branches had grasped at her strings.  She fell, unclipping the parachute even as her legs touched a branch.  Leaves caught at her face and hair, but luckily, she was able to grab a big limb as it swung past.
     Elly had never climbed a tree in her life, but she managed to get down that one with comparative safety.  She couldn’t see the warring Gears now, they had disappeared into the distance beyond the trees and she knew that the mission was out of her hands.  The best thing she could do was try and find civilization.  She squared up the Khaki survival pack, which she had slipped on before donning the parachute; though how she had found the time in that devastated burning Gear she never knew.
     Squaring her shoulders, she walked forward, fearful but determined.  

*  *  *  *  *

     While Elly sat, watching and remembering, Fei’s consciousness was miles away.  Though part of the mind is in sunlight, that part which we can see and feel and know, much is in shadow.  And in those shadows lurk things primate and feral, faceless impersonal forces with the strength of titans.  There too, in the blackness that shrouds the lower regions of being, lie stored memories, dreams, flashes of reason, or childish chaos, all lying in jumbled, glittering heaps like forgotten treasure.  It’s never certain, when a sleeping conscious self comes upon one of these splinters of experience, whether it is real, imaginary, a sliver of the external world, or a child’s moment of epiphany long since forgotten.  But whether long lost memory or fevered imagining, we all know them.  They are dreams.
     Such a fragment descended on Fei then, a dim, swimming sense at first, gradually solidifying like mud in the sun.
     Dim glittering light surrounded him, spears of brightness piercing his child’s eyelids.  Then suddenly, the veil was lifted and he was sitting on a roughened rock in the middle of a vast desert.  The sand stretched away, bright and glittering.  The whole place was a waste of arid gold.  In the sky the sun blazed, white and bright likethe blast furnace of creation.  Fei’s tiny feet were planted deep in the hot powdered rock, and his tiny child’s hands were folded.  He was alone in a waste of light and air.
     In the distance he saw them, dim cloud figures at first, then they became huge and black.  They were shadows, and like the last end of night at the end of the world they crossed Fei’s horizon, moving like ordered black chessmen with swift grace.  But they were not coming forward, but retreating.  Panic seized the child, he was alone and lost and very small, and those dim figures in the distance were his only hope.  He ran towards them, desperate for human contact.  But they faded, as his minute and tender feet slipped and skidded through drifts of dust.  He fell, striking his face on the ground.  Tears stung his eyes, as he raised his head to see the last of the heartless black shapes crossing out of his line of vision, and out of sight was out of mind.
     He lay down and started to cry in earnest, but he did not cry like a child.  He cried like a man, his hands covering his grimy face.
     "Aren’t you lonely all by yourself?”
     He looked up, his face streaked with dust and tears.
     The young woman who stood before him seemed to fill his whole world.  She wasn’t old; she appeared to be scarcely seven years older than he was.  But her red hair and pale silken skin seemed comforting.  The violet pits of her eyes were warm summer skies, filled with the light of humanity so lacking from the impersonal black chessmen.  At her throat the sun glittered and gleamed, the ruby pendant she wore flashing, its silver radiating shards of light.  It was a cross-shaped pendant, with a ruby set in its heart, and silver bar sprotruding in four directions.
     She stretched out her hand, her pale fingers moving slowly closer and closer to his, a warm human contact in that place of heat and cruel brightness.  He stretched his own hand weakly, reaching for her in the most basic of all human reflexes, the baby’s outreaching to its mother.
     "Fei?” The voice seemed harsh in that place of dreams, cutting through his thoughts like a scalpel.  "Fei!”  Then his mind swam up, the dream fragmenting like a broken mirror, a million shades of light, as the old echo fades away…
     Then like a cloud of vampire bats, his grief descended with redoubled force, and it startled him awake like a howling siren: "Lahan is gone and it’s your fault! Lahan is gone and it’s your fault! Lahan is..."       Sunlight pervaded the clearing, showing every sheen of spring green in leaf and branch.  Over their heads, the sky was a brilliant sapphire dotted with fat sheep clouds.
     "If we’re going to reach the end of the forest by nightfall, we’d bettergo."    He looked up to see Elly leaning over him.  The sunlight made her seem even more proud and beautiful than he had thought the night before.  But it also showed the mud on her clothes, and that her jacket was nowhere near as white as her skin.  Furthermore, the night lying in the woods had tangled her mass of red hair into one solid mess, and a few twigs had been caught in it.  Almost unconsciously, she saw Fei looking, flushed, and patted it down half heartedly.
     "Well, yours is just as bad,” she said irritably.
     Fei sat up sleepily, feeling his clothes sticking to his body.  Elly had been right; his dark hair that reached halfway down his back was a mass of tangled knots.
     "I’ll slow down a bit, I know you -Lambs- don’t have much stamina."  
     Fei stared at Elly in consternation.  Her tone was not insulting, or even jocular.  She was stating a fact of life as she saw it.  She saw the slightly hurt look in his brown eyes and looked a little uncomfortable.
     "...Not that I’ve got anything against -Lambs-...  My father doesn’t really think they’re any different from us."
     Fei felt an obscure sense of pain as they started; perhaps he may have just been hypersensitive because of his loss.  And even though he didn’t know in what group the word ‘Lamb’ placed him, for some reason he had decided he’d show her just how much stamina he had.
     By noon it didn’t matter who had more stamina.  Both young people were in peak physical health, but neither of them had eaten or drank for at least 12 hours, and the march through the forest was grueling.  Heat seemed to gather around them, and though the leaves kept most of the sun off, occasionally a blazing shaft would wring moisture from their skin.  Their legs ached, for the path was choked with underbrush and roots.  And although the trees were not set particularly close together, their roots sent out long trailers to snag the unwary traveler.
     It seemed to go on and on for miles and miles, and Fei felt his tongue thick in his mouth.  His skin sweated and his clothes stuck to his back.
     Then with a suddenness that surprised him, the trees opened out.  It was a long valley covered with willow, their sad, beautiful leaves hanging down in the strong sun like gibbets of green babies.  But between their huge gnarled roots ran a crystal stream.  It was swift as a deer, clear as an evening sky, and elusive as a ghost.
     Elly bent to the water and splashed her face and hair, and it suddenly struck Fei that she must be twice as hot as he was in her uniform jacket.  He considered offering to carry her pack on the next march but rejected the idea; she was probably quite capable.
     "Do you think it’s alright to drink?”  Fei asked, following the girl’s example and slashing water over his hot skin.  Elly shrugged.
     "I don’t care if it’s safe or not, I’m going to drink it anyway."
     Fei’s eyebrows rose, he thought she knew what she was doing.  But the soldier had evidently retired, for Elly laughed teasingly.  It was a pretty sound, Fei thought, like the tinkling of silver bells.
     "It’s fine, after all, it’s flowing."  
     Suiting actions to words, she bent and scooped up a crystal shimmering droplet in her cupped hands.  Once again, Fei followed her example.  When they had drank their fill they lay side by side, enjoying the simple pleasure of not having to move.
     "Pity we can’t follow this stream,” Elly observed wistfully.  She pulled the cracked compass out of her bag and held it up.  "We need to be going south...  Well, at least I do.  How about you?”
     "It doesn’t matter,” Fei replied drowsily.  That seemed to end the conversation in a warm, sunny, full stop.
     "Fei?”
     "Mmm?” he responded dreamily.
     "You really fought well last night, ever thought of joining the army?”
     Fei came wide-awake with a shock.
     "I hate fighting! I hate it!” His voice was thick with suppressed emotion, as he remembered shells falling in a blazing village.
     "Oh...  sorry."   To Fei’s relief, Elly had the tact to stop there.
     They continued only a few minutes later.  Elly lead the way with that quick, long stride that is the mark of the light infantry, in Gears or out of them.  Fei followed at the hill walker’s steady lope.  But as the sun swung downwards, hunger started to turn both styles of locomotion into a single-foot-shuffling hunch.
     There seemed to be no end to the trees.  They went on endlessly in a tangled maze of branches and brier, clawing at the two’s hair and clothing.  After what seemed like another eternity, the sun started to redden the sky like a girl’s blush.  And then the next attack came.
     The Lahan villagers had called them Hob goblins, distant relatives of the goat, with huge curving horns and yellow pelts.  Unlike the mutant they were day hunters, and unlike goats, they ate meat.
     Fei and Elly were crossing an open place amongst the trees, when two animals, their coats stained bloodily by the sunlight, dashed out of the trees.  They charged forward, horns down and teeth gnashing, their small eyes hungry.  The two young people had only one chance to leap aside just in time.
     "What are they?” Elly asked, though why she thought Fei should know was a mystery.
     "Hob goblins.  Goats, sort of."
     Elly nodded, satisfied with Fei’s cryptic answer.  Then as the snorting beast was turning for another charge, she attacked.
     Her hand flickered, and there was a short metal spear in it, its tip broad bladed and sharp.  As she turned to deliver a slashing chop to the creature’s neck, Fei was already moving, leaping onto the other creature’s back and slamming its head with both fists.  It bucked and fell under him, but he was moving, rolling off the thing’s back to land on his hands and spring up to his feet.
     There was a brief sound of dead leaves being disturbed, then a whole herd of the creatures charged out of the underbrush.  Fei exerted his tired body, avoiding the charge and kicking at a beast that tried to bite at him with its massive, equine teeth.  But they had only time to kill three more Hobgoblins; Fei kicking one in the skull, and Elly impaling two more, before the herd turned tail and ran.  Evidently, their bovine cowardice had overcome them.  Elly sheathed her spears and looked speculatively at one of the creatures.
     "How do they taste?”
     "I haven’t eaten them personally, but I’ve heard they’re poisonous,” Fei replied, remembering one of Citan’s anecdotes.
     "Then we’ll have to find something else, we can’t go on another day without protein."
     "Where are we going to find food?” Fei asked, though he thought someone as clearly at home in the woods as Elly ought to know.
     "Down a rabbit hole?” she replied brightly, unsheathing a long-bladed hunting knife from her belt.

     The flames crackled warmly, licking tongues of life consuming the sticks as fast as Fei could pile them on.  Elly hunched over the fire, her pale skin flushed red by the heat, turning her from a proud soldier to a simple country girl bending over an open oven.
     The sun had set completely while Fei fed the fire Elly had laid.  He had continued thrusting small twigs into the glowing heart until the center was a nest of red heat.  Elly had returned from her hunting expedition just as the fire was ready, holding a rabbit shot neatly through the back of the head, dangling from one hand.
     Then with her long-bladed knife, she’d skinned and cleaned the animal; not expertly, but well enough to show Fei that she had done it before.
     "How about spit roast?” she had asked him calmly.  He’d nodded, glad that she was taking the lead.  With a practiced thrust, she impaled the rabbit on one of her short rods.  Then she removed her jacket and wrapped it around the shaft as a crude handle.
     Beneath the jacket she wore a light, high-collared blouse of light blue cotton.  It was even thinner than Fei’s shirt, and she shivered in spite of the fire.  But after a few turns of the spear, the meat began to small delicious.
     "It’s not going to be very civilized, there’s only one knife between us."   Elly’s tone was a little wistful, as if she missed such comforts as plates and forks.
     Then Fei noticed the lump in his backpocket, so familiar that he’d almost forgotten it.  He pulled out his short, multiple-bladed pen knife.  It started his grief up, of course, dredging up memories of Citan and Lahan.  But this time Fei was able to resist the track of his mind, and enthusiastically hacked meat off the rabbit.
     It was not the most appetizingof meals.  Some parts were burnt; others were so rare they were almost uncooked.  But Fei and Elly had been without food for over a day now, and as such, hunger proved the best sauce.
     Full and snug by their fire, they felt comfortable and at ease, drunk on creature comforts.  But to his own surprise, it was Fei who broke the warm silence.  During his vigil over the fire, he had fell into the trap he had avoided by the stream.  He had started wondering why a soldier was wandering in Blackmoon Forest.  It was a deadly question, he knew, but it had to be asked, for not knowing gave his imagination room to wander, and he didn’t like the direction it was wandering in.
     "Elly? How did you get here?”
     "I walked,” she said flatly.  Fei shied away from the question, it was clearly none of his business.  There was no reason at all that her presence had anything to do with his own tragedy.Battles were going on all over the place.  But Elly saw the resignation in his eyes, and laughed that silvery tinkling laugh.
     "It’s no secret; not now anyway.  I was supposed...!” Her pretty face grew sarcastic.  "...To be in command of an army unit, who were supposed! ...To be capturing some kind of experimental Kislev Gear.  But I got shot down yesterday evening.  The rest of my unit must have gone on to complete the mission, but where they are now..."   She threw up her hands, easy and relaxed.
     Fei’s mind started to bubble, like a pan left on an overheated stove.  Grief whistled up from the depths and burst like molten lava.
     "You! ...I know where they ended up!”
     Elly was startled, and looked up in surprise as she saw the tears in his eyes.  He was shouting now.  Next to physical violence, it seemed the best way to release his pain; to excrete the hurt and worry in huge bursts of noise that made his throat hurt.
     "You! You destroyed my home! My home!...Why did they come!?”
     The story poured out of him, blown out of his mind like chunks of rock on a volcano.  Elly sat silent, listening and judging, but as his narrative...  interspersed with guilt and anger, wound down, she got to her feet.
     "You can’t blame the military, Fei.  What happened there just happened! It’s your responsibility, not theirs.  You chose to get into that Gear.  No one made you!” Her violet eyes stared straight into his tear flecked brown ones, an official telling a recruit to chin up.  "You’re a coward! You just want to run away! You can’t face up to yourself."  
     Anger boiled through Fei.  How could this arrogant bitch tell him what to do? Why was she suddenly so wise? He had been there, not her.  How could she just come along and order his feelings around like a general!? It was not! His! Fault!
     Clumsily he swung a fist, trying to rid himself of his tormentor in violence, but his vision was blurred with tears and his reflexes with rage.  Elly simply caught the fist in her uninjured hand, but instead of breaking his wrist or throwing him to the ground, she released him.
     "I’ll go,” she said quietly, and with a look half sympathetic, she turned and marched out of the firelight, her red hair blazing, her body moving with robotic smoothness, leaving Fei alone with himself.

     She walked straight into the dark, not looking back.  But she didn’t go far, only far enough to be out of earshot.  She squatted down at the foot of a tree and put her head in her hands.  Why had she done that? Fei was guilt ridden, certainly, but the last thing he needed was platitudes.  Then she remembered her own burden of all those months ago slamming down on her.  Who was she to advise Fei? Her own words rushed up her throat to stab her hard.
     "I’m a coward!” she thought, each syllable a blade in her brain.  "I can’t face reality.  I just run away from my responsibility."    The moon, the engine of lovers’ emotion and cult sentiments swam into view, throwing light down on the huddled girl.  A few meters away was the splash of firelight, where a grief-stricken young man lay beside a crackling fire with the bones of a dead animal scattered about him.  Both of them were in misery, and either apposed to the other with bonds of their own conscience.
     In the distant dark, Elly heard a thud.  She raised her head, her reflexes taking over.  So she saw the monster that charged out of the woods, and even had some chance to avoid it.
     It was a Rankar dragon, perhaps the most voracious predator that can be found in Aveh’s forests.  It stands about 14 feet tall, but the muscles that ripple under its green reptilian skin give it the strength of a far larger creature.  It is four-legged; each foot carrying a slashing blade of hardened claw that can chip even solid rock when it has the creature’s weight behind it.  Its muzzle is long and narrow, filled with curving teeth that grip, tear and grind.  Above the muzzle are two malignant yellow eyes that stare down with a permanent hunger, seeking out their prey and zeroing in like laser targeting.
     Elly stared into those great orbs of greed, seeing her death there.  She backed off, but there was a stout stand of oaks behind her, and the bushes at their trunks’ feet were tangled and impenetrable.  The thing advanced slowly, opening wide its reptilian fangs, and its meaty scented breath washed over Elly in a stinking wave.
     A stupid way to die, she thought...  for a soldier.
     But as the muzzle snapped at her, reflexes took over.  She leapt for a low hanging tree branch, caught it and swung herself clear across the Rankar’s head.  She landed running and dashed away, her long legs pumping.  But she hadn’t taken the thing’s tail into account.  Almost absently, the long length of thick, python-like scales came for her.  It struck lightning quick, and as hard as a club.  She fell, stunned, with the rod she had drawn with her good hand trapped beneath her body.  The Rankar turned on the helpless girl, its mouth opening to feed.

     Fei sat silent after Elly had left.  The night gathered around him like a great cloak of darkness, the sequins of stars and the red broach of the fire interspersing the great velvet blanket of woven trees that stretched around him.
     His mind was numb with grief and self-hate.  It was almost as if he were two selves, one hating,despising, and scorning, the other sitting like a silent spectator at an execution.  But he was wrong, his ego was not split, because both the spectator and the hater were Fei, and this was simply a defense against the flames of guilt that tried to smother him.
     In the distance he heard a rumble.  Then suddenly, across the starry field above him, he saw a light and a trail of misty vapor.  A gunship, swinging into the desert beyond the forest, a deadly dart from one side to the other.  Fei’s chest heaved, he had no side.  He was just a wild beast.  A few hours ago he could have claimed to be against the murderers of Lahan, but he couldn’t now.  It was him vs.them, and he was alone.
     He didn’t know what made him stand.  Perhaps it was a sound in the distance, perhaps some primate reflex, warning him of some danger off in the dark.  Even as his dazzled mind tried to assimilate what he was doing, he was moving, pushing aside tree and creeper, first walking, then trotting, and then running like an arrow.  But why was he doing this? He couldn’t out run himself.  But still his body ran, speed an aphrodisiac to his sorrow sodden brain.  Then he came out into a forest clearing, and he saw the answer.
     The first thing his brown eyes saw was Elly, lying like the night before.  Her red hair was a bumbled mass not unlike the trees themselves.  The light from the torch that had somehow been held in Fei’s hands was easily picking out her face with its beautiful, long lashes.  In the second glance since he entered the clearing, Fei saw the Rankar.  It humped over Elly, the dim light showing it up as a great dark beast with evil teeth.  He knew he had no chance against such a monster.  He knew that its teeth and impenetrable skin and tail would soon finish him.  He knew that this unsung, heroic death in the dark would do nothing to save the unconscious girl.  He knew that he could never take revenge for Lahan, for there was no revenge to take.  But still he attacked.
     He blurred forward, his foot coming up in a kick that slammed into the Rankar’s jaw, slamming its head back.  It swung its bulk from side to side, dazed for an instant.  Fei used that instant, reaching down beneath Elly’s body and pulling the rod from beneath her.  It was a puny weapon against such a monster, but it was a weapon nonetheless.
     The creature slashedat Fei with a clawed foot, but Fei saw the motion and danced away, slashing down with his new found spear to sever one massive talon.  A puny wound, but this monster wouldn’t win that easily.
     The Rankar bellowed as steaming blood gushed from the shattered toe.  Then it charged at Fei, froth dripping from its snarling teeth as it slashed down like a fox at a rabbit.
     Fei was knocked to the ground, but it was the jaw that caught him, not the fangs.  He rolled aside, half a second later and he would have been bitten in half.  With all his strength, he thrust at the bearded throat.  But he wasn’t the only one in Blackmoon Forest with quick reflexes.  The monster pulled to the side, so that the steel blade only tore a strip of flesh from its shoulder instead of puncturing its jugular.  It backed off, and Fei knew that with the next charge it would bite, claw and crush him into a bloody pulp.  He raised his spear defiantly, growling low in his throat like a barbarian warrior preparing for battle.
     But the monster didn’t charge.  It sat, with its head cocked to one side as if listening.  Fei listened too.  He heard it, the sound of crashing trees, snapping twigs, and the thump thump of feet.  Another Rankar - possible.  Fei stepped back and leaned against a tree, determined not to give in even if there were an army of the monsters bearing down upon him.
     But the black shape was more spider than monster.  It had many spindly jointed metal legs, huge articulated claws, and the light thrumming of an engine could be heard.  But most wonderfully of all, the single light revealed the man sitting in the control seat, leaning forward like a motorcyclist, his long ponytail flowing behind him.
     "Fei!  Take this."   The voice was familiar, lovably familiar, and as the Land Crab turned to deposit something on the ground, Fei recognized the driver.  It was Citan.
     But what he also recognized was the immense folded shape of purple metal that the Land Crab’s rear claws deposited on the earth, like Santa Claus dropping a sack of presents on the rug.
     "No!”
     It was not a denial of the Gear’s existence, but of his own self.
     "Look, Fei! I know you don’t like it.  But it’s the only way, I haven’t got any weapons that could take on that thing...  and we can’t outrun it in this."
     Fei couldn’t be sure, but his teacher’s face seemed sympathetic.  As if it had understood the part about ‘no weapons,’ the Rankar began to move forward, gnashing its jaws experimentally.  There was no way around it, Fei thought, he could either stand and die with Elly and Citan, or he could fight.  He shrugged and ran for the Gear.
     As he climbed the iron ladder between the two great gas jets, and saw the cockpit roof yawn open to receive him, a single thought flashed across his mind.
     "At least there aren’t as many people that could get killed here."  
     With a terrible feeling of deja vu, Fei powered up the Gear and stood.  Even though he hated this machine for all it had brought to his life, Fei felt an obscure sense of satisfaction.  Now he was equal with this murdering brute.
     The Rankar saw the titanic Gear striding towards it, and for the first time, animal fear showed in its great yellow eyes.  It backed off uncertain, but when it saw Fei leveling an ether gun, it leapt at him, claws spread, and they made long shrieking scratches on the Gear’s dark paint work.  Fei seized the monster in his two metal hands, and hurled it to the ground.  In a technique he had perfected against the blue forest mutants, he jetted forward and fly kicked the fallen Rankar in the ribs with one massive metal foot.  The crack of the beast’s ribs was audible.  It thrashed for a time, unspeakable blood dripping from its fangs, then it lay still.
     Fei walked the Gear back to where Citan knelt in the light of his Land Crab’s white headlight.  He was looking critically at Elly, gently touching the new bruise on the side of her head.
     They looked small down there, small and vulnerable, and from a distance they might have been a couple of children, huddled in the dark beneath the foot of a giant.  But Fei didn’t want to be a giant, not distant, unreal, or set apart from the rest of humanity.  So he bent down, placing the hateful machine’s hands on its metal knees, and exited the Gear.
     He climbed down to find Elly looking wide-eyed, from Citan, to the Gear, to the dead Rankar dragon.
     "What happened...  Who’s this??”
     Elly seemed on edge, her stern self-control ruptured by the sudden shock.
     "Doc turned up with this Gear,” Fei said inadequately, waving at the machine.  "And I killed the Rankar with it."
     Citan’s dark angular eyes flashed with starry amusement.
     "And would you introduce me to your young companion?” Fei felt out of place and awkward, put on the spot being the only link between these two people.
     "Oh...  doc, this is Elly.  I met her in the woods last night...  She works for Gebler and...  got...  lost here."   Fei stumbled into the trap of self-guilt without even realizing it, but like a Gebler soldier he didn’t give up.  "And Elly, this is Doctor Citan Uzuki."
     The soldier and the medic stared at each other with a kind of recognition, and something in Citan’s gaze made Elly flush and lower her own violet eyes to the ground.
     "Pleased to make your acquaintance, miss..."
     "Elhaym Van Houten,” Elly said, smartly raising her head like a military salute.
     "What happened to the people at Lahan?”  Fei’s mouth asked, but his expressive brown eyes asked a different question: ‘Do they hate me?’ Citan shook his head slightly.
     "I did what I could for them, and Yui’s leading them away to somewhere safe."   Fei nodded, assimilating the information and the apology, though not accepting either.  "We better se tup camp here.  Have either of you eaten?”
     "We caught a rabbit,” Elly replied in her soft accented voice.  Citan frowned.
     "Hardly an appetizing meal.  I picked a few things up before I left.  I’ll prepare something."
     The rangy doctor moved to the rear of the spidery Land Crab and opened a storage compartment that Fei hadn’t seen before.  With surprising swiftness, he built a fire and set a few tins around it.  Then he sat on a folding chair, staring into the flames with those abstracted black eyes of his.
     Neither of the young people spoke while the tins cooked, nor in the meal afterwards.  They ate silently, each shrouded in dark thought.  Citan too, seemed uncharacteristically withdrawn and silent, but Fei didn’t waste time trying to break his reserve.  After all, Citan had every reason to hate him.
     "If we’re going to stay the night, it may be advisable to gather some extra fuel for the fire...Please be patient, I won’t be long."   Once more, Fei noticed his teacher’s tact.  Citan had seen that his presence made Elly uncomfortable, so he was removing himself.  Fei didn’t deserve such good friends.
     "Fei..."   The girl’s voice was uncharacteristically timid.
     "Mmm?”
     "That Gear...I’ve never seen anything like it.  I can see why Gebler wanted it so much."  
     "Well, they can have it, I hate it!”
     Fei expected Elly to rush to the Gear’s cockpit and fly it away to the wars at that point.  After all, it would be fulfilling her mission.  But to his surprise, she simply gave him a sad stare, her violet eyes deep and liquid.
     "I don’t think I should.  Something that powerful could do real damage.  I can’t imagine what it could do in the wrong hands...  And anyway, it belongs with you."
     "Well, you got one thing right.  It can do real damage.  But I don’t want it; it’s not my responsibility.  I hate Gears.  I just want..."   Fei stopped,what he wanted was Lahan back, this purple monster with its jets and cannons back under the ground where it came from, and himself living the same, blissfully ignorant life he had lead before.
     "Look, Fei, you made a mistake in Lahan and people got hurt.  That’s not unusual.  I...  I...  Well, anyway, if Aveh or Kislev ever gets hold of this thing it’ll wipe out whole armies.  Just because I’m a soldier doesn’t mean I like killing.  This thing could destroy cities.  Imagine what it could do in the hands of a brigand!”
     Fei’s imagination...  always an overactive part of his mind, started conjuring up images.  He visualized the purple Gear emblazoned with the Aveh or Kislev insignia, doing to Bledavik or Dazil what it had done to Lahan.  Or with bands of pirates, waylaying sand ships, stealing their cargo and leaving their passengers to die.  As if by some telepathic sense of what he was thinking, Elly pressed on.  She wasn’t angry, just determined, and as she talked Fei began to understand how a soldier could love life.
     "Alright...I suppose I’ll take it...  until I can find somewhere safe to put it."   Elly looked straight into his eyes with warmth and blazing respect.
     "Good!” Abruptly her manner changed, the stern commander disappeared and the girl was left, the mission fulfilled and leave taken.  "What’s its name?”
     "Weltall!” came Citan’s voice from the bushes.  He hiked into sight, long grass around his white trousers,with a few long saplings slung over one athletic shoulder.
     "Gears have names!?” Fei asked wide-eyed.
     Elly nodded.  "It helps the pilot build up a bond and fight more effectively."
     Fei walked across the grass and cast his gaze slowly over the dark mass of the war machine.  Weltall was not a particularly large Gear, but it was not small.  At the back were the huge cylinders of the jets, with the entry ladder running between them.  Standing directly in front of the Gear, Fei could see the small slit on the dark chest that was the cockpit window.  There was a cannon mounted on the chest, used for firing the huge ether bolt he had used before, and two smaller projectile weapons on the hands.  But as with most Gears, it was size, bulk, fighting skill, and speed alone that won fights.
     "Weltall,” Fei murmured, hating the name as the name of an enemy, but at the same time, half-curious.  "Where do we go now, doc?” Fei asked.  With that question, his world seemed to turn.  He really had nowhere to go and nothing to do.  Where would he take this colossus, and where would he rebuild his shattered life?
     "Weltall was damaged.  I can’t quite work out what’s wrong, but it’s not moving up to speed.  We’ll go to a small desert town called Dazil...  They know all there is to know about Gears."
     Elly was gazing at the purple Gear in awe.  "Not up to speed..."  
     "You can still have it,” Fei muttered hopelessly, in one last effort to dodge responsibility.
     "Weltall’s yours, Fei,” Elly said firmly, her red hair sparkling disordered and lovely in the silver moon.
     "Well, I think that’s enough for one night, we have a protracted journey tomorrow."
     Obediently, Fei took the rolled sleeping bag doc produced and spread it on the ground.  Kicking off his shoes, he fell into its warm folds and was asleep before his head touched the grass.  All the pain drained from his face in the dim firelight and he looked sweet, young, and strong, a night errant worn from travel.

     Elly sat with her knees drawn up to her chin, watching the flickering flames and pondering this strange, bereaved boy that had come into her life.  Citan sat in his folding chair; the firelight bouncing off of the spectacles that he had suddenly donned on a whim.  His long tanned hands were folded in his lap, his fingers twirling around that red-pink sash he wore.  He let the silence stretch out and form a still, dark pool in the woodland night, and then he seemed to rouse himself.  He leaned forward, his strong face intent, his angular eyes narrowing to slits of concentration.
     Then he spoke, but the language he used was not Ignasian.  It was a strange, sibilant, and almost guttural tongue, which had peculiar cadences and musical overtones, flickering about the trees like the firelight itself.  Unknown to him, it was the same language that the Gebler soldier had used at her first meeting with Fei.
     Elly’s eyes widened in sudden shock.  She jumped to her feet, her chestnut hair flying.  "You know Solarian! ...How??” she asked the doctor in the same sibilant language.  Citan answered in the same tongue.
     "Quite obviously, I am from Solaris."   He laughed slightly, and the plain lines on his face relaxed into a smile.  But it evaporated almost instantly, and Fei would have recognized that guise of quick command that overcame his old friend.  "Now, Lieutenant, how did you really get here?”
     Elly lowered her eyes as if before a commanding officer.  She had no idea of who this man was, but he spoke Solarian, and there was about him the aura of one in authority.  "I got shot down over Lahan."
     Citan nodded and relaxed a fraction.  "I thought so.  I didn’t tell Fei, but there were several Gebler personnel in the units that attacked the village."
     "He knows already...  about my mission, and that I’m from Gebler, I mean."  
     "You said nothing about Solaris?” The question came quick and sharp from the doctor, startling Elly with its harsh ground overtone.
     "No! Of course not."   Once more Citan seemed to relax, his shoulders beneath their green covering loosing their taut posture.
     "What happens now?” Elly asked.
     Citan shrugged and looked genuinely sorry.  "You must leave.  Fei is extremely delicate as of yet, and I do not want him to experience too many startling revelations all at once."  
     Elly nodded, she had half expected it.  Citan would be Fei’s protector now...  she was not necessary.  She shook herself.  Fei’s protector? What was she thinking?
     "Here...  use it when you’re sure Fei and I are out of detection range."  
     Citan reached into the Land Crab and pulled out a small portable radio.  Elly took it gratefully; it would be her salvation, as Citan seemed to be Fei’s.
     She started to walk away, not wanting to overstay her welcome, but to her surprise, Citan called her back.
     "Tell me.  Why did you join forces with Fei? It is most unusual to find Solarians willing to acknowledge that -Lambs- are the same species as themselves."
     "My father always believed that they were...  And Fei seemed, well..."   Elly flapped her hands uselessly towards Fei’s comatose form.
     "As good a fighter as yourself?” Citan smiled and stood up, crushing last autumn’s leaves under his boots.  "Solarians often find that -Lambs- have reserves beyond even their own expectations."   Citan glanced significantly into the trees, and Elly understood.  But Elly lingered, longing to ask the myriad of questions that clattered in her mind.  Who was Fei? Who was this Citan Uzuki? What were they doing here? But she settled on just one.
     "What are you doing here...  I mean you’re Solarian, and you’re not in Gebler or..."  
     Citan cut her fumbling deductions short with a quick gesture.  "I’m looking after Fei, that’s all.  Nowgo."  
     Obediently, the bemused soldier turned and strode into the night forest.  She was used to obeying without question, but even as the firelight faded behind her, a pang caught at her throat.  She hadn’t had the chance to even thank Fei for saving her life...or to say goodbye.

Chapter 6
Dazil

     Clong-dong, clong.  The steel feet of the Land Crab hammered out a hollow, irregular rhythm on the concrete of the road.  Above the beat of the legs was the high-pitched electronic whine of the motor, buzzing like some great insect in the hot morning air.  Fei sat silent in the seat next to Citan, with the black leather of the upholstery creaking under his weight.  He looked listlessly across the road to where the dim-shaped trees of the forest marched past like dark green mountains.  The sun rose slowly in the sky, and the trees decreased, giving way to scrubby wild lands, heaths, and swamps, steaming in the rising air.
     They had started before the sun, with a dim, misty haze creeping through the trees.  
     "Where’s Elly?" had been Fei’s first question when he saw that her sleeping bag was empty and her pack gone.  
     "She decided to leave last night.  She thought it best.  I gave her my spare radio.  Don’t worry about her, she’s probably safely on her way to Bledavik right now."   Fei had shaken his head in regret and worry.  
     "But she’ll die out there in the forest!"
     Citan leaned back with an infuriating expression of calm in his angular face.  
     "She’s got a radio.  A patrol will receive her signal and pick her up extremely quickly.  The military is very efficient, particularly where members of Gebler are concerned."  
     Despite his worries, Fei had allowed Citan to convince him.  But still there was a minor hollowness in him, wondering why it was that she hadn’t said goodbye.
     A hot wind stung Fei’s cheeks with a blizzard of tiny particles.  He opened his eyes and realized that he had dozed off.  The sun was high in the sky now, past noon and burning with an intense brightness.  Looking around, Fei saw that the road was winding in lazy river-like coils down the side of a rocky ridge.  Behind the Land Crab he saw the last few bastions of green growth disappearing fast, as Citan’s machine sped away from them.  Ahead and to either side, a limitless waste of sand lay powdery and flat, heaping into great dunes and drifts.  Out of the sand, as if out of the sea, great rock pillars loomed; their black shadows falling far across the sandy waste with stark hardness.  Fei shuddered, it all seemed so bleak and barren; like his own life.  
     "We better rest for a bit.  There’s still a fair distance to go before we reach Dazil."  
      With a quick turn of the direction wheel, Citan brought their vehicle to rest at the side of the road.  The immense Gear, which Citan had held in the back claws of the Land Crab, was proceeded to be set down behind them.  Fei looked at the immense purple and black shape, which had loomed over him through all that day’s travel.  It seemed right at home here, in this place of harsh sand, bleak rocks and blinding sun.  The sun did not make the metal gleam, but simply highlighted it with golden incandescence.  
     "Why do we need parts for it? It seemed to work alright."  
     Citan gazed at Fei with his black angular eyes.  
     "You only think Weltall worked alright because you haven’t driven a Gear before.  I noticed when you killed that Rankar that it was moving too slowly.  It’s possible that the electromagnetic coils that operate the joints are a little worn, and that some power is being lost.  I noticed when you got out of it that it was hot.  If the joints heat up due to a displacement of current, then it’s possible that the wires will melt and then you won’t be able to move it at all."  
     "I wish I could get rid of it."   Fei’s voice was wistful as his eyes ran up the towering war machine.  
     "Don’t.  A Gear’s not just a tool.  Gears bond to the pilot’s feelings and emotions."  
      "Then why did it destroy Lahan?"
     Citan shrugged, his face grim.
      "I don’t know.  It’s possible that one or another of the Gears fighting there hit you with some kind of Ether weapon, which made you go berserk.  But what advantage any military unit could gain from such a weapon, I do not know."  
     "So it wasn’t my fault?" Fei’s voice was eager as he tried to undo the responsibility Elly had laid on him the day before.  
     "It’s difficult to apportion blame that way, Fei.  True, it was your decision to get into the Gear and fight, but if you hadn’t, it’s possible that the military would have destroyed Lahan anyway.  It’s equally possible that they would have just left us in peace.  You can never see all the consequences of one action before the action takes place, or after.  You can only act in the way that seems best to you at the time allotted to you.  It’s impossible to monitor every possibility.  You can only act, and hope that your action brings good consequences.  What of the man who buys his wife beautiful flowers, only to find that she is allergic to their scent? Is he to blame for her illness? No! His actions were in good faith, and only a quirk of fate made their consequences bad."  
     It was typical of Citan, Fei thought, to answer grief with philosophy, but he was grateful all the same.
     From the storage compartment of his Land Crab, the doctor took two folding chairs, a flask of cool drinks and some packages of sandwiches.  Fei recognized Yui’s home-baked bread and smiled.  They sat in the shade of the Gear and ate.  Then after only a short break, Citan got to his feet and dusted the windblown sand from his smart jacket.  
     "Time to get moving again, Fei.  We’ve got to be in Dazil before nightfall."  
     "Hold on a minute, doc."   The sandwiches had reminded Fei of something.  "Where are Yui and Midori?"
     "I’ve sent them somewhere safe, along with Dan and some other survivors from Lahan."  
     "But how will they get through the forest? ...Those mutant things."  
     Citan smiled at Fei’s inarticulate concern.  
     "They’ll be fine.  They’re going by road and not through the forest, and mutants don’t generally attack large crowds of people on the road."  
     Fei fell silent and climbed aboard the Land Crab.  Citan got in the driving seat and raised the back claws to pick up the Gear.  They started off again then, moving in a jolting rhythm across the road.        The sun was dipping down behind the distant mountains by the time Fei’s eyes spotted the green dot on the yellow horizon.  
     "That’s Dazil.  It’s built on the spring of a river, and so there’s a bit of an oasis around it.  If you look over to the right..."   Fei smiled; Citan was turning into a true guide.  "...You’ll see an Ethos excavation in progress."  
     Fei looked with interest; he had always wondered about the Church’s excavations, in which priests of the Ethos would dig Gears up from out of the desert sands where they had laid buried for centuries - the products of a long dead civilization.  
     The black blot on the horizon beside the green splodge that was Dazil grew steadily larger.  Soon Fei could make out great cranes and digging machinery, sticking out like the skeletons of prehistoric monsters.  In the center of the bony cranes was a great dark pit.  It looked immeasurably deep to Fei, a black mouth ready to suck him down into its murky depths.  As he watched, a great blue machine was lifted from the hole; sand and mud clinging to it like the shell of a beetle.  The second the blue machine was set on the desert sands, hoards of men in dark overalls started to clean it.  Damp cloths and preserving agents were slapped onto the gleaming blue sides of the monster-sized machine.  Standing beside the pit, Fei saw a figure in the black and red robes of a full deacon of the Ethos, his deeply colored hood thrown back and his sandy-colored hair blowing in the wind.  
     "Why does the Ethos excavate Gears?" Fei asked.  The question had never occurred to him before, but seeing the great workings, with the hundreds of dark-clad workers made him curious.  What was the reason behind all their efforts?
     Citan hunched over the controls, his green jacketed shoulders tensing as he tried to navigate the Land Crab and the Gear it carried through the crowd of men and machines that spilled onto the road next to the Ethos excavation.
     "I think it’s something to do with the advancement of science...  Does that man want to kill himself?" The man he indicated was a brawny worker, who seemed intent on being crushed under the Land Crab’s metal legs.  For a second Fei thought that the great metal foot would squash the man flat, but he dodged quickly out of the way and made an insulting gesture at them as they passed.  "I wish the Church could employ people with brains!" Citan grumbled, as he was forced to wait while a squad of workers crossed the road in front of him.  
     After they had left the huge pit behind them, Fei saw that the desert land was abruptly replaced by scrubby trees and grass, which after a while gave way to a few acres of dusty farmland.  
     "Only the poorest people try farming in Dazil," Citan explained.  He waved a green-jacketed arm at a tiny stone house set in unprosperous looking fields.  "The main interest in Dazil is Gears.  There are miles of caves under this desert, full of relics and Gears.  When the Ethos started hiring men to work them, Dazil became a fairly major town.  What they don’t know about Gears in Dazil isn’t worth knowing.  But there’s only one place I’d trust with a Gear like Weltall.  The Ethos base.  They bring in all the newly excavated Gears and Gear parts, and they don’t have any nationalistic tendencies, so they aren’t likely to report us to Bledavik."  
     Fei looked with interest on the town that they were approaching.  In the three years of his memory, he had never seen or imagined such a place could exist.  The streets were paved with flat gray stone, and lowering over them were many storied blocks of flats and apartments, some over 30 stories high.  On the ground were shops, their windows bright with wares of all kinds.  Signs in bright neon promised delights of all kinds to those who entered through the huge revolving glass doors.  
     The streets were full of a cross section of people.  Some, like Citan, looked almost Kislevian; with bronzed skin and angular eyes.  Others were more like the people of Lahan: tall, stocky and dark-haired, but with pale skin.  Others had the coppery sheen of northerners.  
     Traffic of all kinds jostled in the roads.  Cars, combustion-powered and electric.  Land Crabs, some as small as Citan’s, others far larger: painted in bright colors rather than the somber black of the vehicle Citan was piloting.  Occasionally, Fei saw Gears, standing like sentinels outside huge metal doors.  Some bore the three stripes of Aveh’s military, but others bore different symbols.  
     "Some of those Gears are military, but what are the rest, doc?"