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off a cactus, sliced it up and they
ate it. They walked more, LuvRay occasionally stopping, smelling
the wind in a blissful way. He bent down, picked a handful of earth
and crumbled it under RJ’s nose.
    “Smell.” He almost smiled. “No place ever
have same smell.”
    They came to a cave and sat inside.
    “My home. No other man seed. You are first.”
LuvRay looked back out to the desert. “And last.”
    A wolf walked up.
    “Is that the same wolf?”
    But LuvRay was gone. Afraid, he turned to
the wolf, who lowered its head onto its paws, staring at him. He
eased down, looking it in the eyes. They lay like that for a long
time, neither moving.
    “Run.” Sublime jumped up. Had the wolf said
it? “Run. Run with me.”
    So he ran. He found the freedom of the
desert, running with the animal. He ran in the bright night,
blessed by ghosts to fly over rocks and holes. The wolf loped at
his side, eager to fly with a new friend. The still, cool air took
them together, turning into a breeze as they moved, luring the
beast and the man to a communion before such things as wolves and
men found themselves apart.
    His mind was pushed into a boundary past the
sky, buried deep in the cool earth. Nothing and no one owned them,
and they were nothing at all. Just animals in the wild, happy and
free. They ran, unencumbered by the pretension of humanity.
    They stopped, rolled together, played
together. RJ stared into the beast’s eyes without thinking of time.
He understood something never before guessed at. He was satisfied
that it had no words. The pair ran some more. They arrived at the
campsite as the sun rose. LuvRay was not there.

unreflecting boots
    The Sergeant looked down at his black
high-lacing boots. He loved them. Danner boots, the choice for
outdoor professionals. His philosophy was that durable, dependable,
waterproof footwear would get one through all sorts of troublesome
situations. A soldier can’t make the world conform to his plans and
schemes, but with the right boots he can kick the merde out of any
nasty surprises. And he was about to do that to one wolf and Indian
raised no nation wildman.
    Not that the Sergeant had any particular
problem with Luvray Chose. Far from it. He respected and liked
Luvray, at least by reputation. He admired the man. Luvray seemed
happy when things got tough. He obviously liked sleeping in the
dirt and the cold. He was no stranger to battle, either.
    The Sergeant was not going to fight Luvray
for personal reasons at all. In fact, he never did anything for
personal reasons. He just followed orders. He liked it. A woman
once asked why he was that way and he had no answer. “Probably my
years of training,” he replied. But that wasn’t it. The Sergeant
had been genetically encoded to derive deep satisfaction from
taking orders in an appropriate chain of command.
    He was a tactician to the bone, able to
carry out any order below the level of ‘overtake that country’ or
‘formulate policy for such and such a situation.’ He would be lost
in diplomatic terrain and if the General had, as some sort of joke,
ordered him to go to a party and make friends or get a date, he
might have clarified parameters. “What sort of friends, SIR?” He
felt the urge to snap out the word “sir” if he didn’t comprehend
the orders he were given, as if the loudness of the word could
somehow rearrange the sentence into a more comprehensible
arrangement.
    But these were orders that made sense,
orders that he liked. He had also been genetically encoded to enjoy
fighting, and to excel at it. His pain tolerance bested an
elephant’s. He was a laboratory of humanimal bioengineering
designed for a single purpose: to carry out with no question and no
concern the orders of his commander, in this case, the General,
also a bioengineered being.
    They had been designed to work with each
other.
    Although he had no troops per se, he had
issued many commands. He possessed an almost primal ability to
force others