But still… Tresit was right. Anara was right. Considering everything, it was much less of a risk to just kill him. She’d already killed once… She felt sick thinking about doing it again, and to someone who deserved it far less. She couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t.

She sat down beside Tresit. ”Help me move him over into the shade?” Kes asked him.

Tresit looked to her, nodded once in agreement, and the two of them dragged Artem over. Kes considered her options as they did. There was one other choice she had… she didn’t like it at all, but she knew it was probably the only one she could reasonably make under the circumstances.

Once they were in the shade, she looked to Tresit and met his eyes. His eyes told her that he was going to follow her, whatever she chose to do. She closed her eyes a moment and tried to center herself, then opened them again. ”I’m going to wake him up.” She told Tresit softly. ”He has to walk on his own, it’s too much of a chance any other way.”

Tresit held her gaze and then looked down at his cousin. ”He’ll try to fight us.” Was all he said.

”I know. We’ll… have to gag him, to keep him from calling out. And I’ll… I’ll have to threaten him to get him to do what we want. I don’t want to, but… he’s already scared of me, from what I… what I did to him before…” Kes finished quietly. ”We’ve got to try this anyway… if it doesn’t work, I can put him to sleep again.”

Tresit nodded that he would go along with her plan. ”…If we do this, I shouldn’t talk to him, or look at him.” He told her. ”…He wouldn’t react well.”

Kes held his eyes a moment, then nodded that she agreed and went over to Artem and used her knife to cut another length of cloth from his shirt, using it as a gag once she was done. She looked at what she’d just done and thought of what she was about to do and tried very hard to keep the contents of her stomach down… This was the cost though. If she wanted to keep Artem alive, this was the cost. In life, she’d come to learn, everything had a cost. The Caretaker’s gifts had a cost. Her love for Tae had had a cost. She’d learned the cost of her friendships when she’d left them behind. She’d learned the cost of reckless trust when she’d first come to the Kazon city. She’d seen the cost of freedom when she’d burned the man who’d tried to rape her’s mind. The cost of life for Anara and her children had been theft. The cost of saving Tresit… she’d paid that too. The cost of protecting her family… that had been a man’s death. Everything she did had a cost. She could only hope that, once this was over, once she got her family to safety, that she would be done paying the worst of them.