The border was a river.
Not a wall, not a checkpoint, not the kind of boundary that announces itself with architecture and authority. Just a river, wide and cold and indifferent, running between two versions of the world — the version where they were temporary human infrastructure marked on a map in terrain color, and whatever version existed on the other side.
They crossed at dawn, in the shallow stretch Orren had identified from the supply route documentation, the water coming up to their waists and cold enough to make breathing a deliberate act. Ysse crossed with her hand still pressed to her side and said nothing about it. Bren crossed with the cut above his eye still seeping and didn't mention it. Orren crossed with his bad arm held above the water and watched the far bank with the expression he used when he was measuring the reliability of a route.
Kael crossed last.
He stood in the middle of the river for a moment — the current pushing at his legs, the water so cold it had moved past cold into something that felt like information — and he looked back at the territory they were leaving. Grey hills. Smoke from somewhere too far to identify. The sounds of nothing, which was its own kind of sound after a month of the other kind.
He had left as a mill worker from the Low Quarter who had never been beyond the city walls twice in his life.
He had become something he did not yet have a name for.
He turned and finished crossing.
The far bank was rocky and treeless and offered no immediate comfort beyond the fact of being it. They wrung out what they could, arranged their remaining kit, and Orren produced from somewhere inside his coat a piece of dried meat he had been saving for a reason he had not specified and which had apparently been this reason, and he divided it without ceremony, and they ate it on the rocks in the early morning light in the way that people eat when eating is the whole of what is available and they have decided it is enough.
"Where are we," Bren said. Not a question exactly. More an orientation request.
"Eastern borderlands," Orren said. "Technically outside coalition jurisdiction. Practically speaking, still within their operational reach if they chose to extend it, which they won't for four deserters when they have a resource extraction timeline to maintain."
"So we're safe," Bren said.
"We're outside immediate danger," Orren said, which was the honest version.
Ysse was looking at her hand — the one that had been pressed to her side. She turned it over and examined it with her usual precision.
"I need proper medical attention within two days," she said.
"Two days," Kael said.
"I'm telling you the timeline, not asking for reassurance."
"I know. Two days."
He looked east. The borderlands ran into low hills and beyond them, according to Orren's map, a market town — the kind that existed in the spaces between formal jurisdictions, that had developed the particular pragmatic neutrality of places where people arrived from everywhere and no one asked too many questions about the direction they had come from.
Two days' walk.
He stood up.
"Let's move," he said.