Despite the coat and overjacket, Jainan felt suddenly vulnerable. “Pardon?”
Kiem seemed to find the toggles of his wrist cuffs very interesting. “You say yes like that a lot,” he said, not looking at him. “I. Uh. I think I might be missing some cues.”
He thinks I’m lying to him, was Jainan’s first, panicked thought, but he clamped down on it. Kiem said what he meant, he knew that. But what he meant was bad enough.
“Sorry,” Kiem added. “I’m kind of slow about some stuff.”
Jainan couldn’t even make himself say anything to contradict that, though it wasn’t true: Kiem being too astute was how they had ended up here. “I think—” It was unexpectedly hard to continue. Jainan took a deep breath and said, “Should we really move?”
Some part of him was still waiting for Kiem to blow up at him. But Kiem scratched the back of his head. “Normally I’d say no, but we’re in the signal dead zone. And if it wasn’t an accident … well, we’re sitting ducks, here.”
Jainan had known Kiem would take the challenge calmly. He knew that, and his irritating subconscious had still not let him believe it. What was wrong with him? He had an odd moment where he felt he could see that part of him, dispassionately, like some kind of cowering animal behind glass. He hated it.
Kiem looked at him expectantly. Jainan realized he was looking for an opinion—Jainan’s opinion. “Then let’s move,” he said. It was easier to sound decisive than he thought it would be. “No point waiting to run out of food. The sooner the better.”
“Right!” Kiem said, shouldering the backpack before Jainan had a chance to question why he was the one carrying it. “We can’t die, anyway, we have to be at the press conference that kicks off the whole Unification Day circus. If we froze out here the Emperor would dig up our bodies in two big icicles and prop them up on the podiums.” Jainan choked. Kiem was unrepentantly cheerful. “Let’s get down to the valley floor. I’ll go first. Might be easier to follow my tracks when it’s deep.”
Kiem sat on the edge of the ledge they’d crashed on and looked down at the tumbled progression of boulders and slopes that formed a sort of natural path. “Doesn’t look too bad.” He slithered down to the next ledge, landed in the crust of snow up to his knees, and made a face. “I take that back.” He kicked his way through the drift.
Jainan followed exactly where he’d gone. Kiem waded up front through the drifts, kicking lumps of snow aside to clear a route for Jainan as he slid down onto each ledge. “You know what they don’t put in that bloody survival kit?” he called behind him. “Snowshoes. You okay?”
“Yes,” Jainan said. “You’re making it easy.”
Kiem threw a grin over his shoulder. “I always wanted to drive a snowplow when I was a kid,” he said. “Careful, it gets a bit steeper from here.”
The breeze had dropped completely. When Jainan paused to look behind him, the sky was a vast blue dome, clear and pristine, like some great hill reaching far above the jagged peaks. Jainan’s breath caught in his throat. He knew Iskat was beautiful on an intellectual level: there was a reason the first colony ship of Iskaners had established the capital here and protected it with national parks, but this was the first time he’d really understood why.
The next ledges were acutely sloped and more difficult. They stopped talking. Kiem had the hiker’s knack of finding the easiest way down; he skirted drifts and found unexpected flat rocks where there shouldn’t be any, so Jainan could stop thinking and concentrate instead on where he put his feet. Kiem’s occasional clumsiness indoors translated into something much more graceful out here; his extra bursts of energy just helped him kick his way through the snow and land on a hidden foothold underneath. Jainan found himself watching him more than he really had to.
Kiem looked around to check on him as Jainan slid down to land on the next patch of rock. Jainan felt a sudden intense gratitude for Kiem’s existence: for his easygoing manner, for his ability to take everything in his stride, for how he seemed to think Jainan’s opinion was important.
This was hardly new, though: Jainan knew that Kiem was too charming for his own good. As Kiem turned back around to resume the trek, Jainan realized with dismay that it was having more of an effect on him than he’d thought. Kiem obviously couldn’t switch the charm off, because he had inadvertently pointed it at Jainan multiple times. Jainan was getting attached to someone who had only ever wanted the appearance of a marriage. Kiem had outright told him so the first time they’d met.
Jainan gritted his teeth and slithered down the next drop. He clearly needed to watch his behavior, or he was going to end up being needy and embarrassing both of them. He had to keep a tighter hold on his emotions. They were already on a knife-edge with the treaty. There was no room for error.
Up ahead, Kiem stopped and looked down at his feet. Jainan put aside his churning thoughts and increased his pace, slipping and sliding, until he caught up. He stood beside Kiem, slightly breathless in the cold, and looked at the sheer drop in front of them. “Oh.”
“This one might be a bit tricky,” Kiem said.
They had come down a long way already, but they were still about fifty meters above the valley floor, where the snow was patchy amid pines and clumps of stranger Iskat trees. There was possibly a way down, if you squinted. It would require climbing.
“We can make it,” Kiem said. He pulled off the backpack and, before Jainan realized what he was doing, dropped it over the edge. It fell, rolling against the rock face for what seemed like a disturbingly long time until it hit the ground far below, where it bounced.
“We’ll have to, now,” Jainan said. The backpack rolled to a halt. “I hope you wrapped up the family glassware in that.”
“Like a baby,” Kiem assured him. He was moving with a nervous energy that Jainan suspected was the result of the three stim tabs. “Ready?” Kiem pulled his heavy-duty gloves off and stuck them in his pockets, leaving himself with only the thin, flexible inner ones. Jainan did the same.
Kiem went first, by unspoken agreement, so Jainan could see what route to take. He spread himself like a spider over the rock face, clumsy in his boots but somehow balancing. Jainan crawled to the edge to watch, but Kiem was making such good progress that Jainan started to relax. Then Kiem reached a part near the base of the cliff—one that looked the same as all the other parts to Jainan’s unpracticed eye—and got stuck for several agonizing minutes.
“Above your head to the right,” Jainan called, when he couldn’t stay quiet any longer. Kiem looked up, saw the ridge, and made a grab for it. It was just enough to get him onto the next shaky foothold. Then he went for one to the side of that—not even a ledge, more of a vertical groove—and his foot slipped.
Jainan gripped the ground in front of him convulsively as Kiem slithered down the remaining distance. The base of the wall didn’t end cleanly but broke off into a shallower slope of fractured rock and tumbled boulders, and Kiem hit them hard. He fell off one and landed on the one next to it, catching himself with his hands. After a moment, though, he pushed himself up and held his thumbs up. Jainan sat back on his heels weakly and raised his hand in response.