The woods began where the last shuttered shop ended.
Kin went in at a run and the trees closed behind him. Thin pines, older oaks, undergrowth that tore at his ankles. The ground was soft with last week's rain and every step left a print, and he knew the prints would be read by men who had read prints before, and there was nothing he could do about it.
The helicopters came over the compound behind him and spread out. Two moved east toward the ring road. One stayed low over the parade square. The fourth turned north and swept its searchlight across the tree line in long slow arcs that made the leaves glow white and then go dark again.
Kin put the general down behind a fallen trunk and lay flat in the wet leaves beside him.
The light passed over them once. Twice.
The general lay on his back with his ruined hand on his chest and his eyes on the sky, and he did not move and he did not speak, and Kin watched him the way you watch a snake that has gone quiet in your hand.
The light went away north.
Kin got up and pulled the general up with him and went deeper.
***
They walked for an hour.
The ground rose, then fell, then rose again. The trees thickened and the undergrowth thinned and the helicopters turned into distant sounds and then into nothing. Kin's shoulder had stopped bleeding on its own and the suit had begun to knit what it could, but the wound the guard had put through him had gone deeper than the suit could reach, and every time he lifted the general's weight he felt it tear a little wider. The pen was still in his chest. He had not pulled it out, because he had seen once what happens when a man pulls a thing out of himself in the field, and he was not going to do it here.
The general walked when he was made to walk and sat when he was made to sit, and on the third stop, he spoke.
"You are not one of mine," he said.
Kin did not answer.
"You are not one of theirs either. You are not a soldier. You are not a mercenary. I have known many mercenaries and none of them move the way you move." The general shifted his weight on the log. "You are something else."
Kin looked at the wound on the general's forearm and said nothing.
"I have known one man who moved like you," the general said. "He was very old and very quiet and he killed a great many people in my country a long time ago. He also did not answer questions." He paused. "Am I to be taken somewhere, or am I to be killed here?"
"You will find out."
"That is not an answer."
"It is the one you are getting."
The general nodded slowly, as if this were reasonable, and looked away into the trees.
Then the undergrowth moved behind them.
***
There were nine of them.
They came out of the dark the way men come out of the dark when they have been waiting there for hours and are tired of waiting. Old rifles. One shotgun. Machetes. Two of them had no weapons at all and carried only the look of men who had decided they did not need one. They wore a mix of soldier's surplus and farmer's clothes and nothing that matched, and Kin knew before a word was spoken that they were not the general's men and not the government's men.
The one in front was tall and grey and carried his rifle the way a man carries a tool he has used every day for thirty years. He looked at Kin. He looked at the general. Then he looked at the general for a long time.
"You have brought him to us," he said.
Kin did not move.
"We did not expect this. We have been watching the compound for two months. We have lost four men to that wall. And now you come walking out with him on your shoulder like a gift." The grey man tilted his head. "Who are you?"
"Nobody."
"Nobody does not do this."
"He is mine," Kin said. "You cannot have him."
The grey man laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. Behind him, the others shifted into a loose half circle, and Kin heard the soft click of a safety being taken off, and he heard the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears.
"He is not yours," the grey man said. "He is ours. He has been ours since the day his soldiers burned our village and shot the men in the square and took the girls into the barracks. We have been owed this debt for six years." He raised the rifle. "Step aside."
"No."
"You are wounded."
"Yes."
"You are one man."
"Yes."
"You will not stop us."
"I will stop you," Kin said, "and I do not want to. You are not my enemies. I do not know your village and I did not burn it. But I need him alive for one more day, and I will not give him to you, and if you try to take him you will bleed for it."
The grey man looked at him for a moment. Something crossed his face that was not quite respect and not quite pity.
"We have bled for six years," he said. "One more night changes nothing."
He raised the rifle to his shoulder.
Kin moved.
***
He did not kill anyone.
That was the hard part.
He moved through the nine of them with the katana in his hand and the wound in his chest and the borrowed time still owed from the compound, and everything in him wanted to finish it in the old way, and he did not. He broke wrists. He took rifles out of hands. He put a man into a tree with the flat of the blade and another into the mud with his shoulder, and he cut the barrel of the shotgun in half lengthwise so it could not fire and he left the two unarmed men standing where they were, because they had not attacked him and he had promised himself once that he would not be a thing that killed whatever it came across.
The grey man was the last.
He came at Kin with the machete, and Kin took it out of his hand, and the man kept coming with his fists, and Kin put him down with the pommel and stood over him and did not finish it.
"You could have killed us," the grey man said from the ground. His lip was split and one eye was closing.
"Yes."
"Why didn't you."
"Because you were right about him," Kin said. "Everything you said was true. I know what he did. I read the file." He wiped the blade on his sleeve and turned to go. "But I need him for tomorrow. After tomorrow, he is not my problem."
The grey man lay in the leaves and watched him walk away.
"You will not make it out of the district," he called after him. "They have closed every road. They will find you before morning."
Kin kept walking.
He was wrong about one thing.
They did not find him before morning.
***
The lights came at four.
Kin was sitting against a tree with the general asleep at his feet and the wound in his chest throbbing in time with his pulse when the first pair of headlights appeared on the ridge to the east. He got up and put his hand on the katana, and the lights came closer, and then the second vehicle appeared behind the first, and then the third, and he counted them and lowered his hand.
Twelve vans.
They came down the ridge without hurry and stopped in a line at the bottom of the slope, and the doors opened, and the men in black hoods and the women in the wrapped headdresses stepped out into the grey half-light, Baros' assistant walked up the slope and stopped in front of him and looked down at the general, then at the pen in Kin's chest.
"You are late," she said.
"I ran into some people."
"So we heard." She looked past him at the woods, at the nine men somewhere behind them in the dark, and something moved briefly across her face that was not quite anger and not quite approval. "You let them live."
"I did."
She considered him for a moment.
"Get in the van," she said. "We have four hours and a great deal to do."
Kin bent and lifted the general onto his shoulder, and the general did not wake, and Kin carried him down the slope toward the line of waiting vans and the trees closed behind him and the night went on.