If the heat didn't kill him then the other Saints would. He was tired of sitting at their interrogation tables. He was tired of sitting under the incadescent lamp and sweating. From far away, from the top corner of the room, Donovan watches. Had he washed all the blood off yet? Had Nemesis been fed to the birds? The world was losing its edges. Look up and it seems that there's nothing really separating you from the great vaccuum.

The sight of so much green brings Colin to tears, again. Recently, he had started to cry for no reason at all. He closes his eyes. he sees Ruth, he opens them. He hasn't seen the backs of his eyelids for a long time; there is always someone there.

He looks up to find a boy who is curled in on himself, captured like a dust mote in a ray of light.

He turns once to compose himself and turns again to ask, Are you alright? Empathy has never felt more like cement shoes.

The pale boy speaks and trips over his own words. He feels the sweat rolling in slow, winding trails down the back of his neck. The cicadas scream.

I'm sorry, he says, uncertain. It's impossible to know what the boy means. He's just lost. He smells like a pack, and vaguely of bears, though Colin is sure that he is somehow imagining that. There are harder things to conjure up inside your head. Is there any way I can help?

Truth is, he is no more secure in his world than the boy is. Unmoored, swept out to sea, at the whim of God... he knows that he must have faith. He clutches at it, close to his chest, as if it were something alive.

Well, he murmurs. You were going towards where I came from. He points at the Sunspires which sit far away like spectators crouched at the top of a stadium, tinged with blue. Away from your pack? It's half a question and half a statement. Colin liked to exist within these in-betweens. What were you running from? is the implication here. Colin liked to create implications. It wasn't so different from creating negative space on a painting.

He smiles gently, apologetically. I'm afraid I might know less about here than you do. 

It was no surprise that he was a stranger here. He feels how unfamiliar the ground is beneath his feet, the horizon he has never seen before, the leaves on the trees which flap in the wind in a way he had never quite observed, and will never observe the same way again. 

When he responds to his question, it is with more tension in his voice— No, I'm from Redsand Canyon. He doesn't know it but Ico's fear is bleeding into him. It was an inescapable evolutionary trait. Surely if one man was scared to death, then the other had good reason to be. The skin on the back of his neck prickles with the heat of a gaze that isn't there.

Reasonably, this invisible enemy had nowhere to hide. It was hard to imagine that any kind of malevolence could exist in these woods, choked by sunbeams and dust like seeing an attic in your summertime house through rose-colored glasses. But Colin is shaken by the white-haired boy's anxiety all the same.

What happened, if I may ask? The inevitable question, the pinpoint on the horizon they were hurtling towards, it is said in a near-whisper.