SOON THEY STOOD on the grass, and all that remained visible of the world that had birthed them was a vast circular darkness overhead, mysteriously balanced on its two ramps, seeming to contain nothing but a few lamps gleaming high on the gantries in the dome. Cedric led the way forward, out from under the shadow of that dark umbrella, until they reached the sunlit grass and could walk beneath the clean blue sky, frilled with new-washed white clouds. Soon the window was invisible, and the ramps seemed to end in midair.
The guards looked around longingly for something to shoot at, but no threat showed on Tiber.
There should have been a fresh smell of crushed grass from the skiv tracks. The bubble suits masked that, and they masked the wind also, diluting it to a mere crackly flopping of their own material. But they could not conceal the warmth of the sun, or the lushness of the hills, or the autumn glory of the woodland in the valley bottom. Far off to the east lay a hazy blue range, snowcapped. Baker announced that there was an ocean westward—the aerials had photographed it already, and didn't the clouds that way have a maritime look to them?
Cedric did not care. The one lush little valley looked good enough all by itself. Four head to the hectare, easy. He would settle for this—and Alya, of course.
A circle of skivs had settled down as a camp near the edge of the wood; already suited rangers were out, peering at trees. Technicians fussed around the rocket launchers on a grassy hillock a safe distance away. Another group of vehicles was just disappearing over the skyline upstream.
Cedric crouched to poke at a tire scar. The soil was dark and rich, but the grass looked a little strange. The ground was peppered with flowers and feeding butterflies. He found a flower with two red heart-shaped petals and rose to offer it to Alya.
She took it and thanked him with a look that needed no words.
And then he held out his other hand to show its contents, starting with Jathro, who glared and spat out an unintelligible oath.
Cedric was startled and then started to laugh. "No offense meant, sir! I just wanted to show you. It's animal dung."
"I can see that!"
"But don't you see what it means? Not more than two days old, and obviously something big." Cedric glanced at Devlin and Baker, and they were way ahead of him, of course.
Baker was grinning. "Herbivore. Could be edible, maybe."
"Well, something's keeping the grass cropped," Cedric said, "and on Earth I'd have said these were horse buns."
"Want to domesticate it, do you?" Baker asked. "As the sun sinks slowly in the north, gallant Sheriff Cedric forks his trusty seven-legged feathered warthog and gallops off in a shower—" He dodged as Cedric threw the specimens at him.
Alya's face was glowing, but they all felt it—peace and freedom and boundless opportunity. The new world, Eden regained.
Thunder rolled over the meadow, and they turned to watch the first rocket scamper up the sky on a rope of white light. Following it with his eyes, Cedric noticed the sun. It was too yellow and too large, and he could look straight at it. There seemed to be shadowy markings on it.
"Smaller than Sol," Baker shouted, having seen his attention. "But closer. Also safer. No UV to worry about. You could sun-bathe here!"
Cedric shivered at that idea. All his life he had been nagged about goggles and blocking cream and told to keep his skin covered.
"It's looking good," Devlin said as silence returned. "No problems so far. Your intuition seems to be working, Highness. Almost I can envy you . . . and you, Abel."
Alya smiled at Devlin, and at Baker.
She did not look at Cedric.
Suddenly System's metal voice twanged in Cedric's ear. He jumped. He had not realized that he was still within range, and yet Devlin and Baker had not lost the preoccupied looks of men half listening to other voices.
"Message for Hubbard Cedric Dickson from Deputy Director Fish. Text as follows: 'Come to my office as soon as possible.' Text ends."
"Message received," Cedric told his wrist mike. He did not add, "and ignored." Duty and pleasure required that he stay with Alya.
"Time to go," Devlin said. "If the old woman hears about this, she'll have my hide for a rug. And we have another world waiting."
Alya seemed to shrink, her happiness dissolving like a mist. She moved closer to Cedric. He put an arm around her for comfort.
"Don't worry, my lady," Baker said. "This one'll be back in another three days."
"We can start the planting then?" Jathro asked.
Devlin shrugged. "If the overnighters don't turn up anything unexpected, and if the princess still feels that this is the one she wants . . . . Yes. Why not? The sooner we start, the more people we can move before we lose the string."
Alya nodded reluctantly and let Cedric urge her forward; but as they walked back toward the ramps, he could almost feel that he was having to push her.
There had been one decon chamber going in to protect Tiber; there were three on the way out, and the brew in the first was powerful enough to wilt Alya's flower into a smear of brown slime. Cedric could not be sure through two thicknesses of streaming plastic, but he thought she dropped a tear over that.
With the outside of their bubble suits still glistening and doubtless reeking of diabolic chemistry, they mounted golfies again for the trip back to David Thompson Dome. The joy that Tiber had produced in Alya had withered like the blossom; she sat tight against Cedric with her fists clenched, biting her lip.
He decided that conversation was required. "You said you had brothers and sisters with the same intuition?"
She nodded. "And cousins."
"But it only works when you—they—are in danger, personally?"
"Ten of us have gone. I'll be the eleventh."
"My god, woman!" he exclaimed. "How long has this been going on?"
"Twenty-five years at least. Ask your grandma. I don't know all of it. She hinted that there had been two others before we got involved, but there could have been more. One of them was Oak, Cedric."
"My parents?" But Cedric was a clone of Hastings Willoughby, so his father would have been his son, and his mother no relation at all—hell! When he thought about that, he felt as though he did not even exist. He was not anyone.
"Yes, your parents," Alya said. "They were part of a plantation, apparently. The tale of a broken string was a cover, but the antimony business seems to have been real, so they did die. Maybe! As I said, only your grandmother knows for sure."
"And System."
"I doubt if even System gets all the truth." Alya was staring straight ahead, and her chin had taken on a determined set. Cedric had a curious feeling that her soul was somewhere else, that her voice was speaking words she hardly heard. "The deception is staggering. How she's kept it going all these years is beyond imagining. It helps to have unlimited money, of course."
"Where does she get the bods—from Pilgrim Clubs?"
"Pilgrim Clubs?" Alya snorted. "They may have meant something once, when the transmensor first started up and everyone had hopes. Maybe a few are still legit, but most of them are nothing but gun-toting, wife-swapping, screaming racist religious fanatics."
Cedric started to laugh. After a moment she looked at him with hurt puzzlement, and then seemed to realize what she had said. She smiled sadly. "On alternate days, I guess."
The train of golfies whizzed eagerly down a long ramp and cornered on two wheels at the bottom. Devlin must have pulled some potent override code to pry that kind of speed out of them.
A shaky image of the Mayflower and Puritans in tall hats had faded from Cedric's mind, giving way to pictures of giant skivs and mobile laboratories, of shining city towers rising amidst the virgin beauty of a paradise like Tiber. Of course, the line between habitable world and Class Two was so fine that a single number in a report could make the difference. "BEST!" he said. "That's why Gran won't let BEST people into Cainsville! To keep the secret."
Naturally Alya knew that. She nodded distractedly. "And nothing defines loyalties like a good feud."
"So where do the people come from?" Cedric asked again. "Who runs it? The Institute, obviously, but who? The rangers? How big is this?"
"Very big. Most come from refugee camps, I think. There are so many disasters these days—floods and famines and mass evacuations. No one can keep track of all the millions."
"But there must be a core of scientists for each new colony, surely? Engineers and doctors and—"
"Perhaps a few," Alya said with a shake of her head. "But they wouldn't be much use. Any plantation is going to start from where? The bottom, right? You don't need doctors. First you need peasants to till the land. Civilization is always built on the peasants."
And Cedric's visions of futuristic science-cities were replaced in turn by remembered newscasts of endless dusty shantytowns under deadly sunlight, of dark brown men with ribs like picket fences, of bloated starving babies.
"And they'll scatter," she said, "spread out in search of the best land. In ten years they'll cover a continent."
"Huddled masses! The homeless! Chinese and Bangladeshis? And Africans, of course. And I suppose lots from Central America, the flood running before the plagues?"
Alya agreed. "You European types are being shortchanged on this round, I think."
"We did better than we deserved on the last one."
She smiled, her distress momentarily forgotten. "That's true, although not many of you would admit it. Some must get to go—Dutch, maybe, and Afrikaans survivors. I suppose her choice is largely dictated by the timing—by wherever there happens to be a good disaster going on and enough confusion that a few hundred or thousand won't be missed."
It was staggering. "Thousands? They're doing it on that scale?"
"Tens of thousands. So far as I know, the last Class One world was Raven, three years ago. My sister Tal chose it—I think she had a choice of one, but her satori wanted Raven. Before that was Etna, and my brother Omar. You would have liked Omar—I remember his last call home. He mentioned Japanese—that was the time of the Nipurb floods. There would be doctors and so on in that lot. The Institute moved forty thousand to Etna; so Devlin told me yesterday."
A voice spoke in his ear. "Call from Deputy Director Fish Lyle for Deputy Director Hubbard Cedric."
Cedric ignored it.
The golfie skittered around a corner and the parking hall was right ahead, with Devlin and Jathro dismounting.
"Forty . . . " Cedric's mind whirled at the revelations.
Alya smiled in bitter amusement at his expression. "Of course, for its size Banzarak has sent more colonists than anywhere else has."
He frowned, at first puzzled and then with growing distaste. "What exactly does that mean?"
"The Institute needs my intuition, or thinks it does, or else it just likes to have its own judgment confirmed. I have to be prepared to go, or my satori won't work. I buy the tickets—five hundred of my countryfolk for every five thousand others."
"That's horrible! You're being bought!"
She smiled and laid a tiny hand on his much larger one. "I minded more being sold! I hated to leave Banzarak. I hated to come here—and yet I couldn't resist my kismet. It drove me. And you saw what happened today: I could hardly drag myself back from Tiber." She squeezed his hand squeakily and sighed. "Now I want to go! I will scream and fight to go. Standing there under that fat yellow sun, I felt as though I were free for the first time in my life, as though a great curse had been lifted from me. I shan't rest until I return."
Cedric's wild longing almost choked him, but he fought it down. Time enough for begging when he knew a little more.
"But if there really are all these Class One worlds, then why keep them secret at all?"
"Isn't that obvious?" Alya said bitterly.
The com on the golfie went ping!
"Call from Director Hubbard Agnes for Deputy Director Hubbard Cedric."
The cart parked itself and stopped. He grabbed Alya's hand and jumped off, hauling her behind him. "Run!" he said, and they raced for the door where Devlin and Jathro were disappearing. Baker and the armed rangers were on the golfie behind.
"Before noon," Deputy Fish had said, and Cedric realized that he was famished again. Lunch must be hours overdue—where had the day gone? So his grandmother was in Cainsville, and almost certainly she was waiting at that very moment in Fish's office with her glare turned full on the comset, ready to fuse its circuits. Cedric knew he could not evade her for long, but he was going to stay with Alya while he could. She seemed to want him around. Nothing mattered more than that.
Behind them Baker shouted, "Heh!" He came up at a limping run, with his two gun-bearing buddies close behind. "What's the screaming hurry?"
Cedric could hear his golfie still squawking; he hauled the door of the decon chamber closed as soon as the others were inside. "Just want to get it over with."
But Alya obviously did not want to get it over with. She was hump-shouldered and hugging herself. That seemed like a waste—Cedric put his own arms around her also as the chemical drizzle began to fall. The runnels on the plastic made her look as though she were weeping, and she cuddled into his embrace.
"This is crazy!" he said, peering out at Devlin through his own streaming cover. "She's frightened to death. What are you doing to her?"
Devlin tried to rub his moustache through the crysfab of his bubble suit. He scowled. "We just want her to take a look. She doesn't have to go down to the surface. She'll be perfectly safe."
"Saskatchewan window's open," Baker said. "Skivs're on their way already. No problems so far." He paused, listening. "Not as pretty as Tiber, but robbie data register nominal across the board."
"But if Alya likes Tiber—"
"We've got five or six likelies out of eight," Devlin said. "It may be that more than one's okay. She can't cut herself in half, but we could use two worlds, if the windows fit. Okay, sonny?"
Cedric was about to protest, but Alya spoke first. "I'll look. I just want Cedric with me, that's all."
The light went on at the far door, to indicate decon was complete.
"And that's another point," Devlin added sourly. "The way she clings to you like tired ivy doesn't exactly reinforce my confidence in this famous judgment of hers." His voice grew angrier as Baker swung the door open. "Sure, I've seen the records on the others, and I saw her sibs pick Raven and Etna. But there can be black sheep in any family."
"Now, look here—" Cedric began, trying to disengage himself from Alya's embrace.
"No, you look here!" Devlin's square face was growing ruddy, and he thrust his chin out as he glared up at Cedric. He was a big man—Cedric knew how big men disliked him. "I'm not going to risk hundreds and thousand of lives just on the word of a dippy, slant-eyed floozy unless I believe in it, and if she picks you as her ideal of manhood, then I don't think she knows what's good for her, which is what this exercise is all about. If she can show me what there is on Saskatchewan to be so all-powered scared of, then I—"
Ping!
Lost in the argument and growing hotter by the minute, Cedric had not noticed that there was a comset on the wall of the decon chamber. He spun around and was surprised to see a red helmet and red uniform and the familiar scowl of Bagshaw Barney.
"Hugging's more fun without those suits on, Sprout."
"Go away. I'm busy."
Bagshaw shook his massive head like a bull aiming a charge. "You're crazy. You know damned well your grandmother's been trying to get through to you. Nobody—but nobody!—keeps Old Mother Hubbard waiting, laddie. She'll pop your balls in the stellar converter if you don't smarten up fast."
Cedric could see the area behind Bagshaw, and he recognized the waiting room outside Dr. Fish's office.
Baker had gone on into the dome. The two guards hovered by the door. "Come on, Princess," Devlin said.
Alya clutched Cedric's arm harder.
"You go ahead, sir," he told Devlin with all the calm he could muster. "Give me two minutes to settle this, then Her Highness and I will be right with you."
Devlin shot him a flinty glare. He turned and strode through the door without a word. The two rangers hesitated, then followed him. Cedric turned back to the com, but Bagshaw spoke first.
"Listen, kid, this is important! Eccles is going to blow up bridges tonight on WSHB."
"Okay, okay!"
"It's dangerous and it's all wrong. We can't stop her, but we do have a chance to put out the real story right afterward—and Fish has pulled more strings to get that chance than you could believe. But there's not much time. You've got to be briefed before she even starts. And get your hair combed this time."
Cedric felt as though part of his intestines had fallen loose. "Why me?"
"It has to be you, Sprout."
Twice in two days? "No! No! No! I'm fed up with being a comedy act. I don't know the first damned thing about appearing on holo shows, or media relations, or whatever this scandal of Pandora's is all about. Gran's just setting me up to look like an idiot again, the way she did yesterday. Tell her to go find another sucker."
Bagshaw's lashless eyes narrowed to slits.
"The last man who said something like that to your grandmother got a whole world all to himself."
"Bugger off!" Cedric said shrilly. "Oh, hell—tell her I'm escorting Princess Alya, as she asked me to. We're going to go and take a quick look at Saskatchewan, and then we'll be all through for a while." He hoped that was correct. He wondered if he dare mention his long-overdue lunch, and decided not to. "Then I'll come right away—just give me ten minutes."
"And you'll do this interview?"
"Not that! I told you—I'm sick of being the world's joke of the day. Come, honey."
"Wait!" Bagshaw seemed to hesitate. His eyes flickered momentarily.
Alya uttered a little wail as Cedric released her and made a seven-league sideways leap to catch another angle in the holo. As he had suspected, Dr. Fish had been standing just out of view. Cedric pulled a face at the pair of them and went back to Alya.
Bagshaw's expression became blacker than ever. "You fallen in love, Sprout? The old hormones really perking? That must be what's made you so god-fired uppity, 'cause you were a nice, quiet, polite boy yesterday. You're rutting!"
"Yes," Cedric said. "I'm rutting. In heat. I have fallen in love. Madly. It's crazy time. I'll come in ten minutes." He turned to the door.
"I was in love, too," Bagshaw said softly, and something in his voice stopped Cedric faster than a shout would have done. "Can you believe?"
"Huh?"
"Remember in the chopper I lectured you about the environment?" The guard's voice had gone strangely flat. "I told you I was pairing with an ecologist? We'd been together about a year. Cute little thing, soft and graceful and gentle . . . amazing she'd fall for a lunk like me."
"And?" A cold finger stroked the back of Cedric's neck.
"She's dead."
For a moment Cedric wanted to doubt, but Bagshaw was not the sort of man who would easily seek sympathy. He would not easily bare his soul, either, and to do so falsely would be even more out of character. And the topic lay too near his manhood for begging. Bagshaw believed he was tough; he had to believe in his own toughness.
So Cedric had to believe his story. "And?"
Bagshaw took a deep breath, as though his next words were going to hurt. "She was murdered. Raped and then murdered. I want justice, Sprout—revenge! Need your help. I'd appreciate that."
This was the man who had saved Cedric from BEST's agents in the Lincoln Hotel, the man who had caught him when he fell seventeen stories.
Of course, he was also the man who had pushed him out the window to start with, and the man who should have sneaked him quietly out the front door an hour earlier with no trouble.
Maybe it was just flattering to have a man like Bagshaw ask for his help. Cedric looked at Alya, but she was obviously suffering her own torments and not paying much attention. He did not turn to the com.
"Why me? Why do I have to look like an idiot?"
"Because you're so well suited to the part! Yes, you were set up yesterday. So today who's going to believe you?"
"No one!"
"Exactly."
Cedric spun around, feeling a quiver of rage raise goose bumps on him. "Are you saying that I was made to look like a lunkhead in front of the whole world yesterday just so I wouldn't be believed today?"
"I didn't say that, but—it could be. Could well be. It's necessary that we give out the truth, but that the truth not be believed—we have a trap to spring. It has to be you, Sprout."
"Because I don't know enough to see through your lies?"
Bagshaw roared. "We'll show you holos!" He lunged forward, as though about to fall right out of the comset. "Take you down to the morgue and let you smell the bodies. Is it blood you want?"
"Just the truth." Cedric wondered if anyone in Cainsville knew what truth was.
"You'll get the truth. And tell the truth. And you'll not be believed—that's the meat of it." Bagshaw brought his temper under control with a visible effort. "Listen. I've sweet-talked a lot of girls in my time, but I've never asked a favor from a man since I was old enough to stop wetting the bed. I'm asking you now, Sprout. And if you won't do it for my revenge, maybe you have some good times of your own you'd like to remember?"
Oh, God in Heaven!
Cedric's lips moved. "Glenda?"
Bagshaw smiled softly and nodded. "Fish can show you how to sink Eccles Pandora's dinghy, lad. She'll be all through, all washed up."
Cedric swallowed something that wouldn't go away. Oh, Glenda! He owed that much to Glenda. "Ten minutes."
"You'll do the interview?"
Glenda, sliced and wrapped in little paper packets.
"Sink Eccles Pandora?"
"Dead in the water. Your doing. Promise."
Glenda!
"I'll do anything you want," Cedric said.
The set went blank instantly.
David Thompson Dome was even larger than de Soto, or perhaps it just looked that way because it was empty. The central pit glowed with a muddy red light, like a sunset under rainclouds, but the skivs had all gone and the gaunt superstructures of cranes and gantries were still.
Cedric paused and waited for his eyes to adjust to the dimmer light. He could see only one ramp extended, and he recalled that Tiber had been given more than the standard treatment. Three men stood lounging on the rails of the spectators' enclosure at the near edge of the pit. Two carried torchguns slung on their shoulders. The other was too tall to be Baker, who must have gone down to the surface.
"Let's run," Cedric said. "We'll belt down to the rail, and you take a quick peek and say 'wrong color,' or whatever you fancy. Then we'll scamper like hell back here again. Okay?"
Alya nodded, staring down at the pit. "I feel such a fool! I'm really not this sort of sniveling idiot most of the time."
"I know you're not. And you'll be all right in two minutes when we're back here again and it's done."
She nodded, shivering. "Just keep hold of my hand."
"Ready? Go!" They took off down the slope together.
Considering relative leg sizes, she ran well. Cedric loped at her side, hanging on to her hand. Devlin had turned and was watching them come.
Panting, they reached him and flopped against the rail to peer down.
Below them lay a leprous swamp of rocks and scummy puddles, with scrub and tufty vegetation in lurid yellows and browns. Rain was falling—which was a paradox—and wind ruffled the more open parts of the pools. Soupy mud bubbled in the tracks left by the wheeled vehicles at the end of the ramp, while right below the viewers was the largest growth of all, a lumpy thing like a pallid barrel, which instantly squirted upward, extending into a high, thin column like a palm tree that simultaneously curved over, directing down at the viewers a hollow crown ringed with stubby knobs; and those in turn stretched out into long white ropes to reach over the railing and wrap around Alya, scooping her up high, tearing her hand from Cedric's grip before he had even registered what was happening. The two guards unslung their guns. Devlin yelled at them not to shoot, and their sudden movement attracted the attention of more of the white ropes, which flashed out to entangle the weapons also.
Cedric made a standing leap up on the rail, and his outstretched hands caught hold of Alya's ankles just before she was elevated beyond even his long reach. Wildly off balance, he hooked one toe under the rail, and then his other foot as well, for he, too, was now swathed in tentacles and being hoisted and pulled outward. Grips on his legs were probably human hands. He thought he heard his joints crack as he stretched out like taffy. He dared not release his hold on Alya—who was screaming and cursing in a dozen different languages, and that was a good sign because it meant that nothing had wrapped around her neck yet. He cried out at the pain of the rail on his feet and an already unbearable tension that kept on increasing, trying to tear him in half.
Then buildup of air pressure in the top of his suit made his ears go suddenly dead and plunged him into choking, stuffy-headed silence. Gradually he was tilted from near vertical to horizontal as the ropes tried to carry their prey back home. Their grip tightened mercilessly around him, squeezing his bubble suit out in ridges, crushing his chest so he could not breathe. The ends of the ropes bore mouths or teeth or eyes of all of those; butting and pummeling at him, they tried vainly to chew through the crysfab. But his feet were slipping, and between the agony in his feet and the effort of keeping his toes up to maintain his hold, he could hardly think of anything except to wonder whether Alya's knees would come apart before his arms were pulled from their sockets. If the railing came loose from the floor, he was lost.
He was stretched out flat, staring down at the rocks and puddles far below, and also seeing the deadly blur that surrounded the pit. Even as he watched, a stray rope touched it and was severed in a flash and a crackle. Cedric was going to be dragged down, and when he was standing on his head, he would be crushed against the edge of the string, and that was death.
Then a coil twisted around his neck and that was much quicker death. It began to tighten.
As the ropes shortened back toward their source, they were growing thicker. The trunk had contracted almost into its original barrel shape. In a moment or two Alya was going to be sucked completely inside the monster. And he was going to be strangled.
Darkness!
Everything went black, and he dropped a meter and smashed his face into a steel floor. His feet were still hooked over the railing.
The ropes and the bubble suit had cushioned most of his fall, but his nose had taken the rest of it. Damn, but that hurt!
His bindings lashed and buckled in death agonies, which slowly stilled to small twitchings. Dim lights appeared, or his eyes adjusted. He was still clasping Alya's ankles. Dazed and giddy, choking on blood, he disentangled himself and thought he saw her trying to sit up. Then more lights and lots of people—and of course what had happened was that Devlin had ordered the window closed, and the rope plant or herd snake or whatever it/they was/were had been cut in half, and Cedric and Alya were lying on the steel object plate of the transmensor, barely lower than the rest of the dome floor, and all sorts of medics and rangers were flocking uselessly around, and Cedric's ears popped back into life again with a sudden influx of shouting and babbling voices, and his face and throat were full of blood from his goddamned nose, and perhaps he was just a little too close to losing control . . .
He took a firm grip on himself, and the world stopped spinning.
He retched and spat blood and wished he could wipe the tears of pain from his eyes. He could barely see out of the suit because of the blood smeared on the plastic, and his nose throbbed as though someone were standing on it.
He pushed hands away and sat up. "Quiet!" he roared. "You all right, Alya?" Then he coughed frantically because he had inhaled some blood.
"I think so."
He felt a great rush of relief. More pains were coming to his attention—crushed ribs and scraped feet and one elbow. Mostly his nose—he tried to pinch it through the plastic to stop the bleeding, but it hurt too much.
"Just sit a moment," a voice said. "We're trying to check you for broken bones. Your suit's intact, so there's no contamination."
"Never mind me—the princess . . . "
But there were others looking after Alya.
"You were right, Highness." That was Devlin, standing over them among the twitching white ropes and the bustling medics. "I'm sorry. Damn, I'm sorry! You too, Deputy. Great work!"
"Why?" Alya asked shrilly. "Why did it pick me?"
"Fast movement," Devlin said. "And size. The rest of us would be too big for prey. It went for the guns, too—they're small. I've seen variations on that pattern before. A good thing you didn't get sucked into the core, or it would have crushed you."
"Baker?" Cedric mumbled.
"He walked right by the damned thing. He must have been too big, or moving too slow. Lucky bastard, though!"
Pushing medics aside, Cedric crawled over to Alya and took her hand.
"You're hurt!" she said.
"It's just my nose."
She squeezed his hand in both of hers. She was shaking. So was he.
"Of course, every world has dangers," Devlin said. "We'll have to see how you feel about this one . . . later."
No one was listening to Devlin. Alya tried to sit up, and Cedric helped her.
"Darling, I'm sorry," he said.
"Sorry? Sorry, for God's sake? Sorry for what?"
"I let go of your hand."
She put her arms around him and laughed aloud. "I think you'd have pulled my arm out otherwise. I'm fine, fine! Oh, your poor, poor face! You're all bloody!"
"Bloody poor guardian."
Alya shook her head and mouthed a kiss at him. She was happy again. The danger had gone. Her satori had warned her—had Cedric not been right there at her side, she would have been sucked down into the heart of that thing.
"Call for Deputy Director Hubbard Cedric from Director Hubbard."
Cedric struggled to his feet, knocking away hands that tried to help. He swayed, wincing at a whole new world of bruises and strains. With his luck he would probably find he was ten centimeters taller yet.
"Call for—"
He raised his wrist mike to his mouth. "Tell her I'm on my way."