It takes an incredible amount of heat and fuel to cremate a person.

  Even if that person was relatively small.

  Even if that person was said to be a good friend, and a kind soul. Even if that person deserved a better fate.

  To nature, we do not really matter. The laws of thermodynamics do not care if we did our best to save Ruslana. That she suffered and struggled for two days before sepsis ruined her body. That we wanted to at least give her a decent funeral, even if her final hours were deprived of dignity.

  The first pyre simply whimpered down in the evening drizzle. We restocked it, careful not to disturb her half-burnt corpse. The second burn charred her to a blackened skeleton, but failed to turn her to ash. Ash that could not be scavenged by animals.

  Finally, Gordo brewed a concoction that we duplicated and splashed all over the pyre. It burned with an acrid, foul smelling smoke, and made the flames blue-green, but by the time the Moon was in the sky, Ruslana turned to dust, her remains spread by a western wind.

  Xiao scooped what was left in the hem of the tunic I gave him. For a second, he stood like this, undecided.

  “Who say for woman?” he asked, his English harsh, and stuttering with emotion.

  We looked at one another.

  “I’m not sure if she had faith,” Billy said, staring grimly into the smoldering embers, not yet ready to look at the scooped remains of his friend. “She was Belarusian, I think. A schoolteacher, she said. A good person. Kind, selfless and caring. I hope… that the next place she goes to is better than this.” He shrugged. “Don’t know any prayers though.”

  Surprisingly, Nata stepped forward.

  Shyly, she started singing.

  At first, her voice broke down with every few words, but with Sveta taking her hand in hers, and joining in, she sang louder and clearer. It was a sad, hauntingly beautiful song that I could almost, but not quite, understand.

  “Thank you. Was that a prayer?” Billy asked.

  “No.” Nata shook her head. “Not know prayer in Belarusian. Only this song. Is about white birds that die. Sad song.”

  “It is called White Swans.” Sveta added. “We learned it in school. It is about how a young swan gets killed by an eagle, but other swans live, and life goes on.”

  “Thank you both. I think… she would have liked it.”

  “What's to do?”, Xiao asked. “To water?” he pointed at the river, and moved to pour the ashes into it.

  “No, stop.” Billy halted him. “Not like that. We are not doing the Return To Nature crap. Nature already got enough of her, and Larry, and hundreds of others. Fuck nature. We are not feeding her ashes to it.”

  “Do you want to bury her?” Candice asked with an uncharacteristic gentleness. We can make a clay urn…”

  Billy sighed and looked at his tired trembling hands. “I,.. I don't know, just not… just not like this.”

  His voice shook. Gordo ambled towards him.

  “I may have a solution. I just don’t know if it's not disrespectful, or weird but… if you want to preserve her ashes forever and kept away from nature, we have a fresh batch of concrete made not a long time ago. We can mix her ashes and the bones into it. It will remain intact for millennia.”

  Billy looked to the rest of his crew. They all nodded in agreement, if with little hesitation. There was not much ceremony to it afterward. We mixed the ashes with fresh concrete. Found a nice place in the woods surrounded by flowers, and poured the concrete into a hole in the ground. We considered the idea of drawing a cross onto it, before it solidified, but we did not know if Ruslana was religious or not.

  Ultimately Nata simply pressed her palm into the surface to mark it.

  “Good thinking, girl.” Candace nodded with a grim smile. “This hand will never be claimed by nature.”

  We went back to the camp. Nobody spoke much. We were too emotionally exhausted. Instead, everybody focused on practical matters. The girls and Adelle started cutting and tailoring the duplicated tunics to create as many different-sized pieces of clothing as they could.

  Keito and Gordo started rebuilding our little forge into something more substantial. Preparing charcoal, steel, and other ingredients that they needed to create more tools. The rest of us approached the river carefully, looking out for any sign of a v-shaped wave. We dragged all our watercraft towards the shore.

  None of it was in good shape.

  The sealskin canoe was torn open. It was evident that the otters took a shine to the sheets of hide on its side, and tore off chunks to play with. I had enough leather to repair it, but I knew next to nothing about sealskin boat repair and it was one type of bushcraft that Baba never managed to teach me, in the short time we spent together.

  Worse still, the big raft pretty much fell apart completely. The strips that held it together unraveled, and a third of the logs that made it floated away, beyond our reach. Nobody dared to jump into the water to chase them.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  That left my old, single-sailed windrunner as the only seaworthy vessel. Or, at least river-worthy I suppose. The problem, of course, was that it was big enough for maybe three people and no more than two backpacks worth of supplies. Any more weight and it would either capsize or just sink under the surface.

  “That does put a snag in my plan.” said Billy, looking at it critically. “It's barely big enough for me alone.”

  “Small as it is,” I said, “it can go against the flow pretty easily. Means we could go back and forth across the river two, or three times in a day. Maybe more with favorable winds. We could haul a bag of supplies with every trip and bring one person back with us.”

  Billy grimaced. “At the current pace, Hashké is probably finding six or seven people a day. And the near eighty people we have there are already half-dead from the cold, hunger, and the shits this water gives them.” He gestured at the tiny raft. “If we were to use this thing, we might just as well focus on transporting concrete for all the cremated remains of my people, because they’ll die faster than we can ferry them.”

  Wait.

  Wait!

  “Ferry.” I nodded to myself, and beamed at Billy. “Officer Donahue, you are a genius!”

  “What?” he furrowed his shaggy brow. “Whatcha mean?”

  “Ferry!” I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “A Goddamn ferry! Old-timey one, with a rope across the river! You sure have those in Minnesota. No need for fancy sails, oars, and difficult hull designs. Just a big fucking pallet and a mile of rope to pull against!”

  “Oh Jesus, yes!” his eyes widened with shared enthusiasm. “We could save them all. And we could build it so big, and put so many folk on it the furry assholes won’t dare touch them.”

  “Eh,” I winced, “not exactly what I have in mind. I mean, the limitations still apply, we won’t be hauling your whole tribe here, nor are we going to antagonize the otters.” I saw him protest, but silenced him with a placating gesture, “Think, Billy! If we had a rope ferry, we could bring so much supplies to the meadows that it would no longer matter if we hauled people back. There would be no need to piss off the otters, or risk a fucking brawl over who controls the Duplicators, and still have everyone fed, clothed, and warm.”

  “Hey, you agreed to allow the weakest and ill to cross the river. That was our deal.” He growled, pointing a finger at me.

  “Would you rather transport dozens of infirm humans across a dangerous river, or transport bags of clothes, chow, and axheads the other way? Sure it would be less of a tragedy if you lose half of the merchandise being dragged overboard, than losing even more people.”

  He puffed another “Uff-da!” under his prodigious mustache, but it was just the residual anger about being contradicted, rather than actual disagreement. Billy was a leader by nature, and could not stomach others disagreeing with him, even if he was obviously wrong and they were right.

  But then, his mood darkened further.

  “This is a pipe dream anyway, Jacek. Look at this fucking thing!” he pointed at the river spreading towards the distant promise of the opposite shore, which was barely a thin, green line. “This river is as big as the goddamn Mississippi. How do we even drag a rope across it? And what rope, pray tell? A ferry cable should be as thick as my wrist, and a piece long enough to get across the water would weigh a metric fuckton.”

  “Oh ye of little faith.” I shook my head, smiling. “Gordo! Keito! I need calculations, Eye-sippy!”

  “What's Eye-sippy?” Billy was puzzled.

  “Ask Gordo one day. It's a helluva story about a very peculiar man.”

  Two hours later, all four of us were laying on a big silk tarp covered in charcoal-drawn calculations. There were notes on it, in Spanish, Japanese, and Polish, two-thirds of which were so complex they flew over my head completely, and all of them seemed too complex for Bill, who just nodded in agreement to everything, impatient to try it all in practice.

  “So, we are in agreement then?” Gordo asked. “First. Jack and Billy will sail back across the river, until they reach the meadow beach. They’ll spool out the four-millimeter silk thread across the water.”

  “How do you know how thick is four millimeters?” Billy frowned. “And why not use inches?”

  Gordo guffawed and gave Billy a chummy side hug, “Because we are civilized men and civilized men use the metric system. Also, I know that the narrowest width of my pinkie finger is exactly fourteen millimeters, and my thumb’s twenty. Jack knows his finger widths to even greater precision, it's the first lifehack learned by anydo-it-yourself enthusiast, carpenter, construction worker, or even a chemist like me. From that, we could calculate the millimeter, and from a millimeter, you can calculate every other metric unit there is.”

  “You lads just love to measure your body parts, don’t ya?” Candace heckled. I threw a charcoal stick at her but badly missed.

  “Anyway,” Gordo returned to the matter, “Once they had tied the thinnest thread to a tree on the opposite shore, they will organize the meadow people to use it to pull across the fifteen-millimeter rope. that is going to be a pain in the ass, and likely take a whole day if not more.”

  “Then we’d use the thinner rope to tie together logs for a new ferry on the other end?” Billy asked.

  “Not sure.” I shook my head. “Better wait for the second rope to be spooled in, and use that. You’ll lose some time waiting, but I’m not convinced we should try to build a multiton flat bottom vessel with essentially a fishing line to tie the logs together. Spider silk is monstrously strong, but that would be just sheer recklessness.”

  “Think, you should wait until the third, final rope is spanned across. Then, once it is secured, you can use the second rope for construction.” Gordo added.

  I hummed. “But then, we’d end up with a situation where the ferry is on the opposite shore from where the spool of the third rope, the forty-millimeter one, is made. This means that the only way to transport the final rope is to pull it across the surface of the water, and that is going to be a bitch due to drag. We’d be fighting against the might of the river pushing against the whole length of it. Even with our crude math, it appears it would be like pulling an eighteen-wheeler truck out of a ditch.”

  “Speaking of,” Billy sat up. “Can’t ya build some kind of a winch? Over seventy people working a giant lever can pull a lot of weight.”

  “Yeah,” I nodded, then skimmed Gordo’s calculations and shook my head. “Initially, maybe. But once most of the dragline is on the water, and getting taut, the forces involved would be enormous. If that winch hinge snaps, and it likely will, the backslap is going to ruin someone’s day. Not to mention, the rope will sail down river and entangle itself in the reeds.”

  Billy stood up, and returned to pacing about, which seemed like his default state when he was agitated. That and looking for someone to glare angrily at. It was a trait he shared with Candace. Both were unamused when I pointed that out. Their relations remained at a level of a clenched teeth armistice.

  “If the rope wants to sail downriver on its own, why not let it? Why not start further upriver on our end, and only nudge it into place?”, Billy asked.

  Keito lit up, but me and Gordo winced.

  “Ah, there are two problems with it. The first problem is that it would be incredibly difficult to get several tons of rope upriver, either by land or by sail, even if we did it in pieces and tied them together on the spot.” Everyone nodded at the obvious truth. “Second, and worse issue, is that the place most optimal for the rope to be spooled from… is infested with dragons.”