Lift, Place, Repeat

"The mountains looked beautiful. Terrifyingly, impossibly beautiful. Also approximately a million kilometres away. But sure, let's walk there on bleeding feet. What could go wrong?"

The world outside was vast.

I'd known that, intellectually. Had felt it in the darkness, glimpsed it in the pre-dawn glow. But knowing and experiencing were different things, and as I squeezed through the gap in the boulders and emerged into the light of a Clivilius morning, the experience hit me like a physical force.

Space. That was the first impression. Not the cosmic kind, but the geographical kind. The sheer amount of it, stretching away in every direction, seemingly infinite, absolutely empty.

The landscape was a study in ochre and rust. Dust and sand and scattered rock, punctuated by the occasional boulder rising from the earth like a fist pushing up through skin. No trees. No grass. No sign of water or life or anything that might suggest this place was hospitable to human existence.

And the mountains.

God, the mountains.

They dominated the horizon, a massive wall of purple-grey stone that seemed to grow directly from the earth itself. In the morning light, I could see details I'd missed before—ridges and ravines cutting through the rock face, shadows that might have been caves or might have been tricks of the light, the way the sun painted the peaks in shades of gold and amber while the valleys remained lost in darkness.

They were beautiful. Terrifyingly, impossibly beautiful. And they were far. So far that looking at them made something in my chest clench with despair.

How many kilometres? I wondered. Fifty? Sixty? More?

I didn't know. Couldn't know. The scale was beyond anything I'd ever experienced, the distances warped by unfamiliar terrain and an atmosphere that might not work the same way as Earth's. The mountains could be a day's walk away. They could be a week's. They could be forever.

"Stop gawking."

Nelson's voice came from behind me. I turned to find him adjusting the straps of his rucksack, his face set in its usual expression of cold indifference.

"The mountains," I said. "How far?"

"Far enough."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only answer you're getting." He finished with the straps and looked at me—really looked, those calculating eyes taking in my posture, my pallor, the way I was favouring my left leg. "Can you walk?"

"Do I have a choice?"

"No."

"Then I can walk."

Something flickered across his face—too fast to identify, gone before I could analyse it. Then he turned and started moving, heading out across the open ground toward the distant mountains.

I followed.

The first hundred metres were the worst.

Every step was a negotiation between will and body, between the part of me that understood we had to move and the part that was screaming—literally screaming, nerve endings lighting up like fire—that this was a terrible idea and we should stop immediately.

I didn't stop. Couldn't stop. Nelson was already ten metres ahead, his pace steady and relentless, not looking back to see if I was keeping up. The message was clear: keep up or be left behind.

He wouldn't actually leave me, I told myself. He went through too much trouble to take me. I'm worth something to him.

But the uncertainty gnawed at me. What if I was wrong? What if my value had a limit, a threshold below which I became more trouble than I was worth? What if every stumbling step was bringing me closer to that threshold?

Don't think about it. Just walk.

The ground beneath my feet was a special kind of torture. Sand and dust that shifted with every step, robbing me of traction, making me work twice as hard for half the distance. And beneath the sand, hidden like traps, were rocks—sharp-edged, uneven, perfectly positioned to catch bare feet and tear at already-damaged skin.

By the time I'd covered a hundred metres, my feet were bleeding again. I could feel the warm wetness between my toes, the sting of dust in open wounds. Walking was agony. Walking was going to be agony for however long this journey took.

One step at a time.

Mum's mantra. The phrase she'd used to get me through every difficult thing I'd ever faced. One step at a time. Don't think about the destination. Don't think about how far you have to go. Just think about the next step. And then the next. And then the next.

One step.

Left foot forward. Pain.

One step.

Right foot forward. More pain.

One step.

Left again. The world narrowing to this single, simple action. Lift. Place. Transfer weight. Repeat.

An hour passed. Maybe more. Time had become slippery, hard to hold onto.

The sun climbed higher, and with it came heat—not the brutal midday furnace I dimly remembered from my time in the camp, but enough to make me sweat, to add thirst to the catalogue of discomforts I was already carrying.

Nelson maintained his pace. Steady. Relentless. The gap between us widened and narrowed as my strength ebbed and flowed, but he never got so far ahead that I lost sight of him. Some part of me wondered if he was doing that deliberately—calibrating his speed to keep me just on the edge of being left behind.

Motivation through fear, I thought. Lovely.

But it worked. Every time the gap started to widen, every time I felt the urge to stop, to rest, to just collapse in the dust and give up, the fear of being alone in this wasteland pushed me forward.

Better the devil you know.

Was that the phrase? It felt appropriate. Nelson was a devil—a cold-blooded killer who had ordered my death and was now dragging me across a desert for reasons he refused to explain. But he was a devil I could see, could predict, could maybe even understand. The devils I couldn't see—those growling things in the darkness, the vast emptiness of the landscape, the simple, terrible mathematics of being alone without food or water or shelter—those were worse.

The terrain changed as we walked. Less sand, more rock. The boulders grew more frequent, scattered across the ground like the abandoned toys of some giant child. I found myself using them for support—leaning against one to catch my breath, bracing myself on another as I navigated a particularly treacherous stretch of ground.

Nelson moved through the boulder field with ease. He knew this place, I realised. Had been here before. Probably multiple times, judging by the confidence of his movements. How long had he been in Clivilius? How long had he been mapping this wasteland, learning its dangers, identifying its resources?

Long enough, I thought, echoing his own non-answer. Long enough to survive.

I watched him navigate around a particularly large boulder, disappearing from view for a moment before reappearing on the other side. His movements were efficient, purposeful—no wasted energy, no unnecessary steps. Everything about him spoke of conservation, of a man who had learned to ration not just food and water but effort itself.

I need to learn that, I thought. If I'm going to survive this, I need to learn to move like he does.

But learning required energy, and energy was something I had precious little of. For now, all I could do was follow, and watch, and try to keep up.

The boulder field ended at the edge of a shallow depression—a natural amphitheatre carved into the rock, perhaps fifty metres across. The floor was flat stone, swept clean of sand by winds that must have funnelled through this place like water through a channel. And in the centre, miraculously, impossibly, there was shade.

An overhang of rock jutted out from the far wall, creating a shadow perhaps three metres wide and twice as long. It wasn't much, but compared to the relentless sun beating down on the exposed landscape, it looked like paradise.

Nelson was already there when I finally stumbled into the depression. He'd set down his rucksack and was sitting with his back against the rock wall, drinking from the canteen with the careful, measured sips of someone who understood the value of water in a place like this.

"Rest," he said as I approached. "Ten minutes."

Ten minutes. That was all. Ten minutes to recover from an hour of walking that had nearly broken me, before we had to do it all over again.

But I'd take what I could get.

I collapsed into the shade—not sat, not lowered myself, but collapsed, my legs simply refusing to hold my weight any longer. The stone floor was hard beneath me, unyielding, but the shadow... God, the shadow was bliss. The temperature difference was only a few degrees, but after walking in the sun for so long, those few degrees felt like the difference between life and death.

For a long moment, I just lay there. Breathing. Feeling my heart pound against my ribs, my lungs burn with each inhale, my muscles tremble with exhaustion. The world narrowed to sensation—heat and cold, pain and relief, the simple animal reality of a body pushed to its limits.

"Drink."

I opened my eyes—hadn't realised I'd closed them—to find Nelson holding out the canteen. His face was unreadable, but there was something in the gesture that caught me off guard. Consideration? Practicality? Whatever it was, I was too thirsty to analyse it.

I took the canteen. Drank. The water was warm and tasted faintly of metal, but it was water, and right now, water was everything.

"Sip," Nelson said when I started to gulp. "Small sips. You'll make yourself sick otherwise."

I forced myself to slow down. Small sips. Mum's voice: Let your body catch up, Joel. It can only process so much at once.

I handed the canteen back. Nelson took it, capped it, returned it to its place in his rucksack. The transaction was wordless, efficient. We'd done this before—last night, in the hollow. We were developing a rhythm, a pattern of interaction that didn't require speech.

Is this how it starts? I wondered. The Stockholm syndrome thing? You start to feel grateful for the small kindnesses, the water and the shade, and you forget that this man is the reason you need kindness in the first place?

I pushed the thought away. Analysing my own psychology wasn't going to help me survive. What would help was rest, and water, and whatever information I could gather about my situation.

"Those mountains," I said, my voice rough. "How long to reach them?"

Nelson glanced toward the horizon, where the peaks rose against the morning sky. "Depends."

"On what?"

"On how fast you can walk. On what we find between here and there. On whether the things that live in this wasteland decide to take an interest in us." He looked at me, those cold eyes assessing. "On whether you're stronger than you look, or weaker."

The words hung in the air between us—a challenge and a warning rolled into one.

"I'll make it," I said.

"Will you?"

"I don't have a choice, do I?"

Something shifted in Nelson's expression. Not a smile—I wasn't sure his face was capable of that—but something. A fractional easing of the tension around his eyes. An acknowledgment, maybe, of something he'd seen in my answer.

"No," he said. "You don't."

He leaned back against the rock wall and closed his eyes—not sleeping, I thought, just resting. Conserving energy. Doing exactly what he'd told me to do.

I looked at the mountains. At the impossible distance still ahead. At the sun climbing higher in the sky.

One step at a time, I told myself. Just one step at a time.

Nine more minutes of rest. Then we'd start walking again.

I closed my eyes and tried not to think about how far we still had to go.