Orion hated that voice: It grated against his teeth like icy gravel and called to mind a cold, unfeeling creature that lived more more as a computer than a woman. Mitch stirred, and Orion shifted her weight in his arms. 

He stopped, but did not turn to look toward the scene behind him. ORIN was not wrong about Mitch's condition: She was in trouble, and he had neither the expertise nor the supplies to help. The medical team certainly would. 

And then, just as certainly, they would carry her off to endure an interrogation. He would be pinned and locked down, unable to help. They would question if she had met anyone out in the Ash; what information she had shared and with whom. She would not know who was asking or where she was, or why she had been turned in. The investigators would not accept an answer until they had a confession that would dehumanize her to the public. 

He looked down at her broken body, scanning up from her mangled legs, dangling over his right arm, all the way to where her cheek rested against his shoulder. The scratch on her forehead had bled over her eyelids, and the wound was already crusting in the dry weather. 

Mitch's head rose and fell with Orion's sighing breath, and he started again.

Perhaps it was selfish of him, but he could stomach neither the frigid voice behind him, nor the possibility of meeting the woman who made it. Dying in a moment with someone watching over you was a more noble death, he thought, than dying alone in the dark some time away. He did not respond to ORIN. 

[@VitoftheVoid]

... 

He did, however, draw up short as a rather large beast alighted a few feet beside him. As someone from a long line of arena showmen, it did not take long to recognize the creature as an Erubescan bastardization. His uncle was a trainer, and his cousin had once nearly died  when one spooked at sixty feet in the air. 

He tucked Mitch against his body more tightly, and took a turn that would lead deeper into the city, and toward cover. 

[color=8C6868]"Git,"[/color] he commanded with a quivery voice. He shifted so that his bicep blocked Mitch's face from the animal in case it should nip. Whether the creature was some further trap, a parlor trick, or something in between, he was absolutely not in the mood. [color=8C6868]"Go to your master. Git."[/color]

[@Framing A Moose]