.o01

Singh felt that if he could sweat, he might be able to figure things out.

Sweat was a smelly and dirty and reassuring human thing. It's one of those things the body does that shows you it's working. Hello sympathetic nervous system, and thank-you for cooling me through the extrusion of water and saline and metabolic waste.

Singh didn't sweat here. That worried him. Admittedly, there were a lot of things to worry about here, but this was a small worry, and he felt about better focusing on this than the larger worries, such as whether or not he was dead, and if this was hell. He was pretty sure it wasn't. Hell was not a place with no eccrine glands. If it was, they'd have made it hotter.

He hadn't seen Alice or George sweating either, and he wondered if they had noticed that they weren't. Probably not. George had a very tenuous grip on what was going on at the best of times, and Alice... well, who knew what Alice was thinking, except Alice? She scowled a lot, thin brows forming a knot above her eyes. Everything about Alice was thin. She looked like a character from a Japanese cartoon, stick legs and large eyes and a small, stubborn mouth. And there was the sword, half as tall as she was. She could swing it with her scarecrow arms like it weighed nothing.

Maybe it did weigh nothing. Singh didn't know, Alice wouldn't let him touch it.

Still, you'd think with all the activity, she'd sweat just a little bit?

"Alice," said Singh.

She didn't turn around. "What?"

He almost posed the sweat question, then thought better of it. "I'm getting tired," he said. "When are we going to stop?"

"At the ruins," Alice said tersely. "Don't talk. Wastes energy."

Singh fell silent.

They were walking again, which was what they had been doing for days (hours? years? there wasn't any time here, not in a measurable sense, just things happening one after another). They walked so that they wouldn't be where they were before. Nowhere they arrived was better (or worse really) from where they had been, but if they stayed too long in one place, the Counters came.

When Singh had gotten here, however he'd gotten here, however long ago he'd gotten here, he had tried not to look at the sky. It was high and dark, and there weren't any clouds, or stars, or even a damn moon. It felt like a ceiling, but a long way off, as if you could stand at the bottom of the Empire State Building and look all the way to the top. The ceiling is high and far away, but it's still a ceiling, and not a sky.

He'd tried not to look at the ground either, which was purple and a little bit sticky in an unpleasantly organic way. And he'd tried not to look at the structures around them, which were ruins, but ruins as if they had always been ruins, not the ruins of anything, just ruins, hanging open and jagged and rotting like the ribcage of a dead giant. Ruins inside a box with high ceilings.

Singh stared at Alice's back instead, stared at her back and wondered about sweat. Alice was the leader. They hadn't voted or anything. She was the leader because she walked in front, and had a sword, and had probably been here longest, or so she said. Longer than Singh. Maybe longer than George, but George wasn't really the sort to argue.

George was behind Singh, he could tell by the muttering. George muttered like other people had dandruff. Things just fell out of his mouth all the time, nonsense things, words crashing into one another so that they became different words, a different language, the language of a television quickly switching channels. He was thin, like Alice, but in a wild, hollow way, like a prophet fresh out of the desert, still trembling from his conversations with God.

The trio passed under the open arches that marked the start of another expanse of the odd ruins of ruins.

"I said they'd Swedish nothing followers extra genocide remember so informative," came George's soft litany, and then he stopped abruptly. Singh turned to see him no longer following, but standing very still, and then his legs folded and he dropped to the ground. "Tired," he said, by way of explanation.

Alice scowled but shrugged, sticking her sword upright in the ground. "Oh well. Good a place as any, I guess," she said. An understatement, Singh thought privately, as he sat near George, who was staring into space, his lips moving soundlessly.

Singh touched his shoulder lightly. "Are you all right?"

George looked at Singh's hand, then Singh's face, not really seeming to see either, and nodded. Singh tried to smile encouragingly. He worried about George. A slightly bigger worry than sweat. "Hungry?" he asked.

George seemed to consider the question, and nodded again. Singh sighed. He wasn't. Another thing that worried him. He'd been here for ... however long, and he wasn't hungry. He had to be using energy, all this walking, and yet he only ever felt tired. Not hungry. Never hungry.

"I'll see if I can find something later," he told George, who nodded a third time and closed his eyes.

Singh rubbed the back of his neck. Whenever later was.