'Mischa, you do understand? Why we have to leave?'
Mischa wanted to deny that she did, but she could see what a small and powerless group they were: their resources were directed inward, to keeping themselves and each other alive. If they stood and defended themselves, they might be scattered and tracked down and destroyed. Still, Mischa could sense the strength of their cohesion. She wondered if they underestimated themselves. 'I understand,' she said. 'I understand. why you think so.'
Val took Crab's hand, and he moved closer to her than to Mischa.
'Good-bye,' Val said. She boarded the last raft, with Simon and Crab. They poled away, and disappeared into the darkness with the other fireflies.
Within a few minutes, Mischa knew the pseudosibs were near, and soon after that both she and Jan heard the approach of the machines.
Hours later, the temperature was rising as Mischa and Jan climbed downward, leading the hunting party on, luring them away from the outcasts. Like multiple river outlets in a three-dimensional river delta, tunnels spread around them, separating and rejoining, rising, falling, flowing. The humidity rose with the temperature, and soon they were walking among myriad tiny streams that broke from the floors and pattered down the walls and fell in splashing fans of spray across the entrances of passages. Soaked and hot, Mischa took off her jacket and tied it around her waist. The echoing roar of water was distracting, but if she stretched her perceptions hard, she could just sense people behind her. They were too far away to distinguish as individuals. She touched them as infrequently as she dared.
She was worried about Jan. He was not ready for a chase, though he did not yet admit to fatigue. She wished they were farther ahead of the pseudosibs, but they had had too little warning; and they had needed to be sure the lookers would follow them and not the underground people.
Over eons, the heat and the water had slowly eaten away at the limestone, speeding reactions, leaching out the soluble minerals, weakening the structural material until the entire section had the consistency of cheese. They moved carefully among stone curtains that resembled delicate slices of honeycomb or sponge, along narrow pathways facing spectacular chasms.
Mischa spun at the rumbling of breaking rock. She grabbed for Jan as he slipped, his light swinging wildly from his belt. The seemingly solid bank collapsed beneath him; he threw himself forward and she managed to hold him. He fell hard on the crumbling, muddy rock, and lay still for a moment, until the pebbles stopped clattering, far below.
It was a treacherous fairyland.
The terrain became increasingly difficult. Steaming rivulets flowed into the channel below them, to increase the water's flow almost imperceptibly, but inexorably, until the bank was no more than a narrow ledge above a roiling pool. They slid sideways, balanced precariously. Mischa could hardly see Jan for the steam. She stopped until he caught up with her. Condensed mist sparkled on his eyelashes. He flashed his light around them, seeking out currents in the fog.
'This is incredible.'
'Yes,' Mischa said. She leaned against the stone, savoring the damp, slightly cooler surface, gazing into the grayness. 'I've never been this far down before.' Pressing her hands to the wall, she let her eyes go out of focus, and reached back toward their pursuers. Their aura seemed diffuse, as though they were beginning to separate, but she could not be sure, they were still too far away. Yet a major part of the group seemed stationary.
'I think they've stopped.'
'Stopped—?' For a moment he looked hopeful, then laughed once, drily. 'They've stopped for the night,' he said. 'That would be just like Subtwo.'
Adhering rigidly to a schedule would be almost a necessity for Subtwo, Mischa saw that. 'Subone would just keep pushing his people until he caught us.'
'Probably. Or get bored and go home.'
'Then where is he?'
'I don't know.' He sat down on the ledge and closed his eyes. 'Can we stop for just a minute?'
The fatigue he had held off for so long lay almost visible over him, and Mischa felt sorry for directing her anger and petulance at him. Balanced on the precarious ledge, she knelt down. 'On the other side, okay? This is a bad place.'
Adhering to his schedule, Subtwo called a halt in a dome-shaped cavern. This time no one bothered to argue or offer to continue, as they had the nights before. He ignored the shrugs and snickers: if his people failed to see the sense of conserving themselves, he could not help it. They would see his reasoning when slow and steady and inexorable progress brought them success. He supervised the arrangement of the camp and the setting up of his own tent.
His head ached and spun from the irregularities of the underground and the darkness. He wanted to be home, he wanted never to leave his rooms again, he wanted light, he wanted to get far, far away from Subone and his threats and desires. Yet, now, he felt uneasy: in a deranged maze of tunnels, Subone had insisted on splitting the hunting party to search more efficiently. He said the lookers were too slow and too undependable; he said there were too many scent-trails and fluorescences for them to work well, and too few antenna leads for them to report in time to be useful. He said he could get in front of Mischa and Jan and trap them; and taking his contradictory reasoning with him he had tramped away at the head of his party down another tunnel, with every indication of eagerness and even pleasure.
At moments of greatest stress, when Subtwo most needed serenity, Subone's emotions insinuated themselves into his mind. He forced them angrily back and plunged on cold and emotionless. He had decided to perform this last duty, then cut the connection between himself and Subone, no matter what the cost.
Yet his thoughts kept slipping back to Mischa, that sparkling naive child, to be killed at his hands or trapped in the underground forever, and he wanted to nullify all the time since the fight.
The portable shower had sprung a leak during the previous rest period, and nothing had been brought with which to repair it. Subtwo had not bathed in nearly twenty-four hours, and he felt filthy and sticky. Though the miasma was not so bad since Subone had taken half their followers with him, Subtwo could smell the odors of perspiration and bacteria and human secretions from the people still around him, male and female, and anger, excitement. The machines were little better, for they were hastily put together for the hunt and exuded smells of lubricants and ozone. He was not satisfied with them; he hated a job badly done. Silent now, they were when running very noisy, and the lights they carried flashed brilliantly and erratically across the tunnel walls. Subtwo felt that he might as well be in a rowboat during a hurricane.
When his tent was inflated, he walked around the camp and stopped next to Galiana, who watched the display screens: eleven dim and static-marked pictures of caves and streams and lifeless stone, jolting fantastically in quadruple-time playback, and the one blank square whose machine had been destroyed. Subtwo wished they could watch the scenes in real-time, but the dense rock made direct communication impossible. They could only watch for antenna leads, hook into the network when they found one, and hope a looker was in broadcasting range of a pickup. He watched the instant-feed recordings. 'Is there any more sign of the creature?'
'No. Nor of anything else. I'll tell you if there is.' Subtwo realized he had probably offended her: by asking the question he had implied that she might not have the intelligence to tell him of a change. He was too used to dealing with machines that required questions to respond with information.
Sometimes he wished he himself were a machine, with an easily erasable memory; he could not forget the quick glimpse they had had of the deformed, asymmetric beast, one look at the end of a fastfeed, a few seconds of real-time as the looker trundled away, still in range of the antenna lead. Then the beast set upon it, and it sent no more signals.
They had passed the place of attack, finding nothing but a few broken parts. And since then, nothing definite, nothing concrete, nothing but questionable trails and a vast, lightless labyrinth.
Subtwo slept badly, and woke abruptly, trembling with exhaustion. Someone was vibrating the balloon walls of his shelter. 'What is it? What do you want?'
Draco flung open the tent flap in his overtheatrical way and stood poised in the entrance, his mahogany face sweat-varnished, a streak of yellow clay bright on his high cheekbone, below the smudged fluorescent-paint flames. 'We've been attacked.'
Harried and haggard, a few of Subone's people approached the camp, carrying two stretchers, one covered
