The tunnels inside the cliff were rarely lit, and the deeper the Gannagens went the thicker the darkness got. But they kept going, scooting in and out of passages as if in daylight. Challis stuck a hand in Rasalas' belt, following in his flux slipstream, and tried to send her mind forward into his eyesight to get some idea of where they were going. The darkness instantly condensed into clear pathways through storage chambers and rooms filled with pipes and machinery, visible through Rasalas' eyes in differing monochrome shades instead of empty black. But no sooner had Challis noticed this when a side ache stabbed her in the lung.

She heard herself cry out, the noise coming from somewhere behind her. Her own consciousness rushed back with a pulse of pressure.

"Stop," she gasped, dumbly banging into him from behind at his immediate response. They collapsed against the wall to slide to the floor. The little chamber was mostly empty, except for a cylindrical structure about four feet tall that glowed faintly with a deep orange at its core; a capacitor, with a whirring hum that swarmed into the Gannagens' minds in a dizzy dance with the jittering flux already there.

"That's probably far enough," Challis panted, subconsciously nudging at her circunet dials.

"Nuggets," Rasalas said shakily. "We need to stop, we need – I let the, the flux – sorry, Chall. We've got to ground it."

They both went still, then regretted it as thoughts of Corvin and flux adrenaline withdrawal caught up to them with a vengeance. Rasalas straightened, took a hard left and threw up.

Challis would have joined in, but the ripe pain of a flesh wound cut through the nausea so she couldn't. That was worse. A shudder pushed her into a black hole, a sickened, sweaty tilt to one side until she hit ground. She considered dying slowly instead.

Nobody mentioned stuffed pompano.

"Ras," she whispered. He didn't answer, or couldn't yet. She wondered if he'd blacked out, sitting in a huddle as if he never wanted to move again.

"Ras?"

"Mm."

"You okay?"

"Swell."

"I'm… I got cut up by the thrikes. Do you think –"

"Bleeding?"

"I think."

Rasalas grunted. A beat later Challis recoiled when he pushed something wet at her. It was his shirt.

"Fountain," he said tiredly. "Calm down."

Challis pressed it to her stomach. A master healer, she.

"Did he…" she began, low. "Will he make it?"

The scene replayed over their unwelcome imaginations.

"I… I pulled his shoulder out." Rasalas coughed, his breathing labored. "I didn't mean to. But then he… I mean, you saw how he couldn't defend himself. Those thrikes…"

"We should go back," Challis interrupted quietly.

He hesitated, then spoke so hushed that Challis almost missed it.

"We do, we're dead," he said. "They'll have zapped those loose thrikes. Then arrest us, quick as a wink."

Challis bit her lip. Thrauricci laws had tightened over the last six years or so, and thrike mishandling was as serious a crime as aggravated assault. Arrest would mean charges and imprisonment, procedures as long and drawn out as possible for someone like the Gannagen twins, and goodbye to their chances of learning to fly or leave Polescos. After that, probation wouldn't let them go much farther than their rooftop. And without work, they would land in prison anyway for debt buildup until arrangements could be made. After several cycles.

"You're an utter moron," she said at last. "Jumping into the thrikes like that. I thought you were a goner."

"Another tick and I was. What was that thing you did?"

They sat, unhurried, as Challis explained the flux bender. A novelty that could have only come from high-tech envisionist labs on the other side of Oedolos, the little tool could be Challis' future in her pocket. She hoped Jakko hadn't missed it yet.

"A supersonic…?" Rasalas whistled. "That can't be legal. In fact, knowing Jak, it definitely isn't."

Legality be damned. Arrest, procedures… Challis thought of Corvin again. No one had seen what happened. But if Corvin was alive, he would be hospitalized under intensive care, likely moved to the Arrkagongol Institute. The other two, Shanty and Kailett, had taken the shrewd course and gotten out of there, and more than likely would keep their heads down about the fight if they had any sense. There was still time.

"What if," she began. "What if we do it? We train, two cycles, then we take off."

"Can we? If they can get us in – we'd finally do windworking, Chall," Rasalas said, his voice rising.

Challis pressed a hand to his arm. "Listen. We train for two cycles," she said slowly, "and then we… take off."

A baffled silence. Challis waited for it to dawn on him. It did.

"Take off. You mean, completely?"

She nodded in the dark. Polescos rumors and junior school stories had plenty of examples of Vortesharken gone rogue. They were thrike riders, initially trained as windworkers on contract with the city as energy sourcers. But some had vanished and never returned, suspected of losing control of a thrike, being shot down by raiders, or perhaps just deserting Oedolos entirely and black-marketing single supplies of airbound flux energy to underground buyers around the continent.

Rasalas scooted toward her a bit. "That's a terrible idea."

"Is it?"

"Yes."

"Look what just happened. We don't have much choice. The patrols catch up to us sooner or later," she pushed. "Think about it. We get help from the Haskes to get into thrike training, which they're paying for, keep our heads down, and have an excuse to spend all that time getting ready. But before two cycles are up, we leave. On thrikes. Before any commitment to the FHF. Honestly, we wouldn't be doing anything illegal."

"That's as illegal as it gets. Without even a contract, we'd be… rogues gone rogue."

Challis rubbed at goosebumps. She knew Rasalas was studying her with his sharp eyes. The tension stretched taut. They had both guessed what flying away from the FHF agents meant for Rasalas' addiction. A vomit or two would be a walk in the park compared to cold turkey off the wire.

She modulated her voice with extreme care. "Well, do you have any –"

"Better ideas?" He scoffed. "No."

Leaving Polescos was no small hurdle on its own. Here, at least, their work had been consistent and straightforward enough that Challis could manage by herself when she had to. But if they left, with her vision overload and Rasalas' faulty memory, a world of unfamiliarity would drive them aground quickly.

Rasalas rubbed his forehead. She was wrong. She had to be. They couldn't just leave, not like this. Could they? The training offer from the FHF had dropped out of the blue sky. Maybe it was exactly what they needed.

"What about Raffar?" he asked.

"Hm?"

His tone went stiff. "You heard me."

Challis took a deep breath that could have led to a calm, rational response. But no.

"I don't know, Ras," she bit down on the words. "It's only his fault we've been stuck here, isn't it."

"Chall, wait."

"I lost everything because of Raffar," she said flatly, emotion burning her throat. "Mother first, my training, my friends, gone. Why he ever commissioned those surgeries, I don't know, but look what they did to me. What chance do I have now for the only kind of life I ever wanted?"

Rasalas pushed himself to his feet, then wished he hadn't. His stomach gurgled.

"You?" he demanded. "Are you that thick? What about me?"

Flux energy coursed through him, brimming up from both himself and Challis. He took a few swift steps away and turned his back, leaning both hands on the glowing capacitor until the hum tremored in his elbows. Then, with the scrupulous care of a surgeon isolating a nerve, he found the touch-activated switches on his circunets and, with shaking fingertips, slid them back down to temperate levels.

"Damn these… things," he said with difficulty. Then, "One day, we'll get past this. Another surgery. I don't know."

Cold dipped into the room as both went still. Just as Rasalas had stopped talking, a small, distant sound came, the squeak of a hinge. Then nothing. In the silence of the tunnels, the throbbing hum of the capacitor seemed to swell ten times louder, drowning out any other half-imagined noise that the twins listened for in the dark. Challis didn't even dare to turn her head.

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The tunnels were a maze complex, with too much room for imagination. Any number of workers or vagrants could be nearby – it was the middle of the day, after all – but with their every nerve frayed at both ends, the sight of a mouse would send the Gannagens to the ceiling.

Neither wanted to leave the room and venture into the unknown beyond the doorways, but sitting like ducks was unthinkable. A thousand pinpricks to the back of the neck, the idea of something sneaking toward them, and the instinct to run and hide took them both.

Wordlessly they slid through two more chambers and down a passage, letting their feet go while every brain cell blared with the need to be silent. Challis' head spun and she hardly knew if she was following Rasalas or leading the way. With the shock of her injuries wearing off, she had all the vigor of a drowned rat.

After a time that could have been three beats, or three bells, the twins were no longer wandering but aiming for a distant glow reflecting off a wall of metal piping without knowing why at first. But then the clear aura of indirect sunlight, not the artificial orange of a capacitor, brightened through a crack in the dark as they followed it around the corner and down a long, dusty passage. One more corner and they broke into fresh air.

A weight rolled off Challis' shoulders, and she flattened against the wall to the side of the doorway with Rasalas, just breathing.

In front of them, the spinning blades of a wind turbine blocked the only other opening in the room. Beyond those, a gillig thicket hugged the cliff just below. Haphazard limbs billowed outward in a tangled spidery mass whose leaves had long since dried up, gradually blending into the rainforest outside of Oedolos.

Challis stepped closer to the turbine and looked down. "Gilligs. We can get some queline for these cuts and scrapes, and no one needs to know."

"Sure, right," Rasalas said, sliding down to sit. "But we're not allowed to be here."

"And?"

He blew out a breath. "And… we'd need to stop those." He gestured at the spinning blades, leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

Challis muttered. He may or may not have been closing his eyes for her sake, but she took advantage of it anyway and looked again at the turbine. The wheel hub rested on a shaft that turned and disappeared into a generator box on the landing. She found the control cover and snapped it open with her stubnicker. The master switch let out a squeak when she flipped it, but the turbine showed no signs of stopping. Challis cursed. The flux momentum of the blades had been building up for years.

When her straining fingers failed to slow down the rotating shaft, Challis shifted her feet and tried again. "Good thing," she said irritably, "you've got thrike crap on your hands."

Rasalas' arms appeared beside hers. "I do not have crap on my hands."

"You always have crap on your hands."

Together, they fought and overpowered the shaft in the end.

"Whew!" Rasalas kneaded a shoulder. "Just what my arms needed. Do you want to just rope it down? I think I saw some a short way back. Or we can climb."

"Let's rope it." Challis looked at him in the light. Red blotches and raw scrapes decorated his face, sides, and arms and shone on his knuckles. "Um. If you've got anything left."

Of course he did. He looped Challis into a harness and helped her control her descent, though the cliff was angled away and she hung like a plumb bob. When she was safely perched on top of the gillig thicket, he followed, making it look easy.

They crouch-crawled over the top of the branches to drop into a space beside the cliff. Here, the rock cuddled a piece of shade, and the Gannagens took a moment to breathe in the strange, airy sensation of being this far from people.

Rasalas pulled out his stubnicker and scraped at a gillig. The bark came away easily to release an almost immediate ooze of clear, yellowish goo.

"Your shirt, my lady," he said, letting the queline run onto his fingers.

Queline was the lifeblood of gilligs, with a habit of expanding tendril-like whenever it was exposed to air. When taken root, hungry gillig bark grew over the queline strings to form the unique spiderwebbing thicket, but on its own there was no other natural bandage like it to be found.

"That's going to oxidize fast," Rasalas said, wiping off his hands. "So don't poke at it. Feel okay?"

"A little gross," she admitted. "Once it hardens, peeling it off is going to be hell."

"You're welcome."

There was nothing to be done about the pain in her knees and shins, but Challis didn't care about bruising as long as she could still walk. She suspected it would be worse tomorrow.

Rasalas got some queline too, but he was far too twitchy and in the end he was covered in a layer of goo splats that dripped and pooled before hardening. When he elbowed her away for the fourth time, Challis gave up. Let him waltz around red and shiny for all she cared.

"Honestly," she said, "if you're that ticklish…"

"Shush."

"I'm surprised you can even –"

"Shush, will you? I hear something."

They sat still, ears open to the clicking and whirring of the rainforest that hadn't seemed to Challis to change at all. Then it came: a soft, snuffling noise as if from the solid wall just behind them. Rasalas looked at her, wide-eyed. He rose to his feet and turned his head like a wolf honing in on a scent.

"Odd."

He squeezed under a branch and along the cliff wall. Challis grabbed at his arm but only managed to tap the elbow.

"Wait. It's just some animal."

"The tunnels don't go down this far in the cliff."

At that sufficient explanation, he led the way along the edge, ducking wayward gilligs. Some roots had burst skyward and webbed out and back down into the ground, making the footing hazardous. Challis had to disentangle her sweatkerchief more than once. She collided into Rasalas from behind, but he was expecting it, and without even looking he caught her with an arm to steady her.

Challis blinked at the black gaping maw of some cave or tunnel sliding over her vision, just around the corner where Rasalas stood.

He pulled back. "Ugh. You smell that?"

Challis shuddered. "Probably an animal's den. What's going on with those branches over there?"

The thicket had a path trampled through it. But before they could examine further, over the shuffling sound came a startling clank. The two shared a look.

"Come on," Rasalas whispered. "Let's see what it is."

"Ras," she shot back, sharp and urgent. "We shouldn't. We just got away from mysterious noises in the dark. What, a bit of sunshine and now you want another go at it? None of Tofflar's girlfriends are here for you to impress."

He ignored her and slid around the corner toward the cave, making no noise. Challis reached for him again but missed completely, the black wall eclipsing her eyes.

"Stop," she hissed, scrabbling at her thoughts for another angle. "Or I'll tell Raffar you're doing stims."

He froze.

Challis did too. She had momentarily forgotten Raffar was…

"Sorry," she said. Then, stupidly: "Maybe not."

Rasalas turned on a heel. Twins though they were, he had inherited a scoop and a half of Trent Gannagen proportions and stood a head taller. Challis inhaled sharply when both his hands closed around her circunets. Such a move was as good as a nonverbal threat, as grabbing someone's armgear was equivalent to twisting an arm behind their back – they didn't want to move for fear of injury, compelled to listen to whatever you had to say.

"No, you won't," he said in a hard voice. Then, "Please."

"I will if I have to. If you don't tell him first."

He let out a grudging sigh. "Weasel."

The clank broke out from behind him again. Both turned to look. Rasalas spun back around and clotheslined Challis' stomach, thudding her against the rock wall and shoving himself up against her. He cursed in a panicked whisper and went completely still.

Challis' mouth went dry as something scooted into view, at least what she could glimpse past Rasalas' arm. A stocky shape of muscle and sinew – the jaguar, not his arm – with a tawny speckled hide passed not four feet from the Gannagens. It was heaving backward to drag the hapless body of another big animal in its jaws, and snuffled out of sight along the path into the gilligs.

Neither Gannagen moved for an uncertain number of breaths, as neither was breathing. An earthquake wouldn't have budged them an inch. But the sounds blended back into the rainforest, leaving just the pounding of their hearts against their ribs. Challis breathed first. Then she fell forward into Rasalas' chest. Her frascato was always there, warm and solid, enfolding her in his arms as easily as he always had.

"That was…" she began.

"My fault," Rasalas breathed. "Nuggets, Chall."

"What are we doing down here?"

"That one's on you. Next time, we bring a jacker."

Challis put a hand to her stomach with a wince. The queline had hardened, but Rasalas' ungentle jostle had torn it off-kilter at the seams.

"What's that?" He was peering to the side. He cautiously slid out into the open spot in front of the cave where the jaguar had been a beat before. He picked something up off the ground and brought it to Challis. "Ghi nagaste?"

It was a thin, shiny length of cable, hanging limply over the sides of Rasalas' palm where a metal tag studded the center of it. The twins stared in silence at the two gently swinging knotted ends.

"Keep an eye out for me, would you?" Rasalas stepped back toward the cave. "In case it comes back." He stood with one hand on the wall, steady as a warrior of old facing a gate to the underworld.

"I can't be a lookout," she protested. "I can't see worth crumbs. Not with you staring into that."

But Rasalas had already vanished into the black before he could concur.

They were everywhere. First, he accidentally kicked one. When he tried to replace his foot, he stepped on another. Rasalas stopped looking around him and turned his gaze down, sweeping his head to get his peripherals in gear. A furry shape, as big as the one the jaguar had plundered, lay sprawled and unmoving.

He slowed his breathing, in and out through his mouth. But the old, mealy scent of molding mud was so thick in the air that he could taste it, and tears coated his eyes just to keep them from shriveling up. Blinking around at the multitude of shapes, ape-like creatures down to tiny lumps that looked like lizards, Rasalas pulled at his mind to force it up and away. If he could just stay cool and rational. The goosebumps on his arms and the tremble in his gut needed to become mere distractions rather than the voices in charge.

Challis clicked into his mind like a tap on the forehead. Knowing she was looking through his eyes, Rasalas took up a slow wander around the cavern. In some places against the walls, bodies lay in piles almost as tall as he was. Others lay alone on the stone floor, and the forced analytical part of Rasalas' brain noted the lack of any decay. Lifeless, yes, but there was no blood, no bloating, no sign of rot as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark again.

More doorways appeared, black smudges opening further into the cliff. This one was just an antechamber.

Something gleamed off to his right. Reflecting the light outside, another metal tag sat on the neck of what seemed to be a little fox. After a hesitation, Rasalas knelt and reached for it. It didn't come away at first when he tugged, but a long pull finally slid something from around the dead animal's neck until it swung out beneath Rasalas' hand. He didn't need to take a closer look. Instead, he straightened and stared again at each body, this time knowing what to look for. Wires, everywhere, coiled around every furry, scaled, hairy throat.

Rasalas closed his eyes tight and counted three long breaths.

"We need to go," Challis said from the doorway. The words might have made Rasalas run for cover for fear of the jaguar's return, except that the tone was gentle, pleading.

"Definitely," he said, sliding the wire into his pocket. It seemed to give just the slightest buzz against his skin.

"I mean, we need to leave Polescos. Please, Ras."

He started toward her, his voice grim.

"I know what you meant. And I'm with you."

Back at their gillig dropoff, two Gannagens stared up the cliff. A barrier made to keep people in, they thought glumly, would just as easily shut them out.

Their rope had slurped up into the turbine, the free end whirling out from blades naively chopping the air again at breakneck speed.