An engine continuing to run did not matter. An engine stopping unexpectedly might. A wheel striking a rut did not matter. A person shouting his name would.
Koldin slept.
The bus carried him through Lenkerk without his participation.
It stopped. Started. Stopped again.
People entered and left. The air changed according to whichever door had opened. Somewhere along the route rain must have fallen briefly because the smell of wet earth entered through the window and remained after the sky had cleared.
When Defort finally touched him on the shoulder, Koldin’s eyes opened before the second tap.
“Airport.”
Koldin inhaled sharply through his nose, uncrossed his arms, and straightened.
His ears came up.
“Yeah.”
“You awake?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“No.”
“That’s reassuring.”
Defort stood sideways in the aisle and waited while Koldin gathered himself. Koldin checked automatically for the things attached to him.
Pistol. Golok. Haversack. Hat.
Everything remained where civilization had last agreed it belonged.
They got off.
The bus drove away behind them in a cloud of exhaust, bundles of pigang swaying on its roof.
The airport was across the road. There was very little about it that suggested flight.
A wire-mesh fence enclosed a broad area of flattened dirt and coarse grass. Beyond it lay a landing strip scraped out of the earth and maintained chiefly by the continued refusal to allow anything substantial to grow upon it. Several corrugated hangars stood along one side. Beyond them were warehouses, a low terminal building, a weather mast, fuel tanks set behind an earth berm, and an assortment of sheds whose purposes were advertised only by the people walking in and out of them.
The fence extended farther than Koldin wanted to walk.
Defort looked at it.
“Well.”
“Yeah.”
“This is our last one?”
“Yeah.”
“Sweet.”
They began clockwise.
The perimeter had accumulated the ordinary debris of boundaries. Grass caught against the bottom wire. Plastic wrappers. Leaves. One abandoned glove. A length of rope apparently thrown there and then reconsidered by no one.
Koldin checked the fence for cuts or places where posts had pulled loose from the wet ground. Defort occasionally stepped off the track to inspect something that looked interesting and usually was not.
For a while the only aircraft visible was a small twin-engined machine parked beside one of the hangars with its nose panels removed.
Then a sound arose to the south.
Koldin heard it first. His ears turned.
Defort looked upward a second later.
An aircraft approached low over the trees.
It was a squat transport with a broad fuselage and two large propulsion assemblies under the wings, the blades within them flashing so quickly that they ceased appearing discrete. Its landing gear hung beneath it. The machine descended unevenly through the humid air and seemed for several seconds much too large for the strip prepared to receive it.
Koldin stopped at the fence.
The aircraft crossed above the roadway. Its sound arrived bodily.
His ears flattened by reflex.
The transport touched down in a burst of dust. The wheels struck once, rebounded slightly, struck again, and remained there. Engines reversed with a deep mechanical howl. Dust ran ahead of the aircraft in a brown cloud.
Defort watched it roll.
“Comforting.”
“What?”
“That thing lands like I do.”
“You don’t fly.”
“Exactly.”
The aircraft slowed and turned toward the apron. Koldin continued walking.
Nothing happened.
They found a section of wire where something had pushed beneath the lower edge. Tracks led through the mud from the scrub outside and disappeared into the grass within.
Defort crouched.
“Person?”
Koldin looked.
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“Too many feet.”
Defort studied the tracks again.
A small animal emerged from weeds fifteen meters ahead. It possessed a low body, long rear legs, and a narrow head with two pale horns lying almost flat along its skull. A second followed.
They approached the fence and began nosing through the grass.
Defort stood.
“You know what those are?”
“No.”
“They dangerous?”
“Zhey haven’t attacked zhe fence yet.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
Koldin moved closer.
The animals looked up.
One froze.
The other bolted immediately, its companion following with sufficient urgency to imply that the first knew something the second did not. They disappeared into brush.
Koldin examined the loosened wire.
“Probably zhem.”
“You gonna fix it?”