The flesh in the furnace

slowly now, for it had come even to Sebastian that they had no idea where they were going. The fear of aimlessness had come back to him briefly, but he shrugged it off. It might be much worse to actually arrive somewhere, for then plans would have to be made. As long as they could always be going but never getting someplace, he could allow himself to forget about the future and concentrate on the moment.
        Sitting on her blankets in the cab, Bitty Belina would point out things that he would never have seen on his own: geese flying in a V formation, brown against a leaden sky; stretches of flat earth where the wind had turned the ever present snow to ice; the looming bulk of a distant glacier pushing down a canyon, catching the sun and glinting with a blue-green luminescence that grew brighter as they approached.
        Only once did the idyll threaten to break, and then Belina saw it coming and managed to keep everything intact.
        They had been drinking the last of the wine in the truck, more than usual, and she had already gone through the lines from her scene with the third unsuccessful suitor in her story. There were a great many double-entendres in the speeches, though Sebastian only laughed at them because she did, not aware there was some other shading of meaning. It had often occurred to her that it might be to her advantage to make advances to the brute, for she remembered his rage when he had found her with Alvon Rudi and she mistook that for jealousy. Now, as he laughed at her mischievous talk, she was certain it was worth a try to seduce him, as far as a puppet could seduce a grown human being. Lightheaded, daring, she approached him. As far as she could see, her sexuality was the strongest tool she had to force him to do what she wished, and if that did not work, there would be no way to have him bring the others back to life.
        While he drank, she stepped out of her clothes and left them behind her, her ample body displayed in its minute flawlessness.
        At rest, he did not see what she was doing, for the wine had smeared his vision with honey, and even what he did see took longer than usual to have any meaning for him.
        His left hand lay at his side, his arm loose, his entire body relaxed, and it was into this hand that she stepped and seated herself, her smooth bottom warm against his palm. She lifted one of his fingers and touched it to her breasts.
        And then he saw what she was doing.
        Fortunately, her reactions had not been extensively affected by the wine, and she was aware of the fury that slowly rose in his face. She saw his thick lips draw back from his teeth as they had that night he had killed the merchant. She saw his eyes glaze and knew that he was not seeing her as a person, but was reliving some horror from his own past. His gaze extended down a corridor of years, not upon the firm thrust of her little breasts. She danced off his hands, scooping her clothes up as she ran. Behind a crate of foodstuffs, she dressed.
        She was trembling. She could almost see how he would have crushed her, how he would have broken the slim bones of her legs and back.
        When she came into the open, reciting some of the funny lines from her play, he seemed to have forgotten all about what had almost happened between them.
        They laughed and finished the wine.
        Wind rocked the truck.
        Outside, snow began to fall again, after several days of clear skies. The sound it made when the wind whisked it across the roof of the cargo hold made Belina's flesh goosebump into thousands of little hills. When the lights were turned out, Sebastian fell asleep almost instantly, but Billy Belina lay awake for a long time, trying to think of some way to kill the idiot.
        It must be carefully done. He must have no chance for revenge. If she only wounded him, it was quite possible that he would catch her and feed her to the Furnace and never call her forth again.
        But she was still out when she killed him, because she would be alone and there would be no puppet master to resurrect the prince and Wissa and the others. She might as well be liquid flesh herself, unfeeling and unthinking, rather than be the only puppet alive.
        She fell asleep pondering murder, her pretty face a dream of soft lines and golden hair and eyes as bright as seawater.
        
        He was happier now than he had ever been in his life. He no