Vess had no idea how long she'd been walking.
It couldn't have been very long. A few minutes, perhaps. She sought to convince herself, though she had begun to distrust her ability to judge much of anything as one ruined street gave way to another, and the sounds of battle stubbornly refused to grow any more distant; she kept moving anyway.
Find the rear. Find a comm. Find Lily.
The words had become something of a mantra, repeated silently whenever she found herself staring at something without remembering why she'd stopped. Her good hand remained close to the wall as she walked, occasionally pressing against broken duracrete when the ground seemed to shift unexpectedly beneath her feet. Her other arm stayed tucked tightly against her body, every careless movement of her shoulder rewarded by a sharp reminder not to do it again.
The bleeding hadn't stopped either.
Vess had tried wiping it away once, only to smear blood across the side of her face and discover several minutes later that another warm line had already worked its way down past her temple. The cold helped, she supposed. Snow melted against her skin and mixed with the blood until both ran together beneath her collar, leaving her shivering despite the heat of distant fires burning through the storm. She stopped at an intersection and stared down both streets.
Neither looked familiar.
Vess frowned. She'd been certain the rear was this way.
Hadn't she?
Her eyes drifted back over her shoulder toward the street she'd just followed. Nothing there looked familiar either. The blizzard had swallowed almost everything beyond the nearest buildings, red spores and ash moving through the snow until the world beyond a few dozen metres ceased to exist. A distant explosion briefly illuminated the clouds. Vess flinched and immediately regretted it when the sudden movement pulled at her shoulder.
"Kriff..."
She leaned against the nearest wall and closed her eyes, waiting for the pain to settle. The ringing in her ears had faded enough that the battle was beginning to return in pieces now. Blaster fire somewhere to her right. Something heavy firing farther away. The unmistakable mechanical howl of a Basilisk passing somewhere overhead. Vess pushed away from the wall and chose the street to her left. She made it perhaps another block before something occurred to her.
Hadn't she already come this way?
Vess stopped; a shattered speeder lay on its side near the entrance of an alley, half buried beneath rubble. She stared at it, trying to remember whether she'd seen it before. There had been a speeder. She was almost certain of that.
Maybe.
Her brow furrowed as she tried to force the memory into place, only for the effort to make the throbbing behind her eyes worse.
"Okay..."
She drew a slow breath; she needed to think, which was normally the easy part. Her gaze moved across the street, searching for anything useful. Most of the buildings had suffered badly enough that identifying their original purpose was difficult, and the few civilians she might have asked were either gone or dead.
Lily would find her. The thought came with considerably more certainty than anything else had managed in the last several minutes. Lily always found her. All Vess needed to do was stop wandering around long enough to give her the opportunity. She turned toward the nearest building that still looked reasonably intact. The front had partially collapsed, but an alley running alongside it offered some protection from the wind and, more importantly, from the increasingly frequent flashes of weapons fire somewhere beyond the storm. Vess slipped into it, keeping close to the wall until she found a recessed doorway beneath an overhang that had somehow survived the fighting.
It wasn't much.
Right now it looked like a resort. Vess lowered herself carefully against the wall, using her good arm to control the descent until she was sitting beneath the overhang with her injured arm resting across her lap. The simple act of sitting sent another wave of dizziness through her, and she closed her eyes until it passed.
Just for a minute.
She was just resting.
Her fingers drifted toward where the comm should have been before she remembered it hadn't survived the last few minutes any better than she had. Instead, she found the pistol at her hip, Arris's gift, and let her hand settle loosely over the grip. She didn't lift it, just let it rest across her lap, muzzle drifting toward the mouth of the alley. Then she looked down at herself properly for the first time.
Blood had stained the collar of her clothes and one side of her jacket. Dust and ash covered almost everything else, interrupted by streaks where melting snow had cut through it. Her left shoulder sat visibly wrong beneath the fabric, and the sight of it made her decide that perhaps she didn't need to inspect herself any further.
"I've had better days."
Vess let her head rest carefully against the wall behind her, immediately shifting when the contact sent pain through the wound near her temple. She settled for resting the uninjured side instead, watching the snow and crimson spores blow past the mouth of the alley.
She wondered where Lily was.
That thought had never really left. Vess could picture her suddenly appearing at the end of the alley, probably furious that she'd gotten herself hurt, and the image managed to pull the faintest smile from her.
"I'm here," she said, though there was nobody close enough to hear it.
Her eyes closed.
Just for a minute.
All of this was stupid. She just wanted Lily.
The next explosion came close enough to rattle the doorway, and her eyes snapped open with the pain rushing back into her shoulder and skull at once.
"Oh, kriff off! All of you!"
The words came out louder than she meant them to, enough to carry past the alley and into the storm. The sudden exertion was the final straw; the doorway tilted, or she did, and this time, when her eyes closed, she didn't fight it.
