were different things, not even comparable.
'I think we can get down,' Mischa said. 'There's a kind of crevice.'
He turned the light back on and picked out the fault; it led steeply downward. Mischa lowered herself over the edge, clutching the bare handhold of the crack, digging her toes in for better purchase. Jan hooked the flash to his belt, pulled off his boots and tossed them to the floor, counting: fifteen meters. He followed Mischa.
'It's narrow right below you,' she said.
'It's narrow now.' The crevice was damp and grimy, allowing only a difficult purchase. He wished his fingernails were not already broken to the quick, for he needed every bit of help he could get. Three meters above the floor, the rock sheared away beneath his weight, and he landed in a shower of bits of stone.
'You okay?'
'Nothing broken.' He put his boots back on, calming himself, straightened, flashed the light around.
They were in a stone forest, a lunar mountain range. The stalagmites were old and huge, towering above their heads, some standing alone, many so close together they formed double or triple peaks or freestanding stone curtains, flying buttresses without buildings, a labyrinth of pillars and screens.
'In a cave this big there's got to be another way out.'
'I hope so,' Mischa said.
The wall of the cavern continued in a smooth curve, unbroken by any route of escape. The hunters behind him did not blind Jan to the beauty. The stalagmites seemed to move around him, animated, disembodied fingers, whole webbed hands, gesturing and reaching as the light glanced from their tips and left their bases in darkness. They recalled to him a mountain near his father's estate, a solitary, ancient volcanic peak that disappeared sometimes in the clouds, 'Gone visiting,' people always said; or seemed to hover on a bank of mist.
Jan and Mischa stopped before a shield of fluted rock. 'Think we can get over it?'
'Want to try?'
He gave Mischa a hand up, but she could not reach the edge, even standing on his shoulders. When she jumped down, she looked into Jan's face. He could see her searching out the lines of strain. 'Let's not do that again,' she said, and he did not argue.
The shield forced them toward the center of the labyrinth. Trying to round the barricade, they came upon another, and another: they were pushed gradually into a maze of baffles that cut them off from any sense of direction; they moved through chutes and canyons too high to climb or see over. The little sounds they made themselves, Jan's boots on the stone, the rub of fabric, their breathing, came back to them as echo from strange directions. Then they heard, overlaid, direct noises: voices, machines. Mischa looked up and around them. Jan followed her gaze and saw his light glinting from the petrified banners above, stabbing in shafts like flares that matched his abrupt shock of apprehension. He looked down again, into Mischa's bright green eyes. 'Jan,' she said, approaching tentatively, unwillingly, with her voice, 'Jan.' He knew what she was going to ask him.
He reached down and turned off the light. The darkness snapped down like a box. Mischa took his hand, tightly, reassuringly.
'I wish I had your genes,' he said.
'No, you don't, you'd have to take my family too.' She led him forward. 'Maybe we can get to the edge this way.'
Jan touched cool stone with outstretched fingertips as Mischa guided him in what seemed like circles, a serpentine route around the pinnacles. He was lost.
Brilliant lights flashed through the cavern above and around them, then the flare died to a glow too dim for sight. Jan turned toward its source; he could not see the hunting party, but the lights they carried reflected from ceiling and rock peaks in a multicolored aurora as the people gathered in the tunnel entrance and prepared to climb down.
'Come on,' Mischa said. She pulled him forward. In the brief explosion of light, he had seen a forest of solitary stalagmites and the cavern wall beyond them. They had passed through the maze.
He did not yet dare turn on his own light. Reflections wavered above him like sunlight on water, tantalizing, but never bright enough to show him a path. Mischa's hand tightened on his.
'What is it?'
'Just there—'
Blackness against blackness: a narrow passage. Jan could make out its borders when he looked at it obliquely; straight-on, it was invisible, like anything in darkness to normal human sight. But above it, and to its left, and to its right, three identical spidery painted symbols glowed with phosphorescence, fading slowly as the excitation from the pseudosibs' flare radiated away. Jan had seen the symbol only once before.
'Mischa—that sign.'
'Yes,' she said.
'It means 'danger,' doesn't it?'
'It means strange,' she said fervently. 'It means don't go near it, because normal humans made it.'
'It was above the tube.'
'I know, but it might not, it doesn't have to mean there's glass down there.'
'There isn't. another passage?'
'I can't see one, there's another maze beyond this one, I think.' She came forward: he could see her eyes, like a cat's, picking up the dim, dim light, glowing brightly back at him. She gripped his forearms.
'I don't want to go in there,' he said, very softly.
'I know.'
He looked down at her, surprised he had spoken aloud.
As he passed between and beneath the symbols, Jan felt as though they were climbing from the walls like luminous spiders, following him, crawling up his spine, driving him into hell. Remembering a story from his childhood, he wondered where the Lord of the Dead was, to take his place. He wanted sunlight and peace.
'I think the light would be okay now.'
Her voice startled him again; he had been following like an automaton, focused totally inward to avoid the darkness and his fear. He turned on Kiri's flash. He might as well have left it off, for there was nothing to see. The featureless night almost seemed preferable to the endless passages stretching to far-off terminations in curves or perspective. He was becoming disgusted with himself for his fright and vacillations, but he was too exhausted to collect himself effectively, too close to the experiences of hurt and loneliness to put them aside for later reflection.
The passage tilted upward and grew cooler. They left footprints in the condensation, Jan's booted, Mischa's bare, a clear trail.
'I don't think they're scared yet,' Mischa said abruptly, 'but they don't like this much.'
Jan laughed, and for a little while it was easier. He could imagine Subtwo's unease in the caves, infinitely greater than Jan's own; and he could imagine a growing impatience among Subtwo's people. While competent, they were misfits; they were misfits because they were immature in certain special ways: unable to sustain enthusiasm or interest in any goal repeatedly delayed, needing instant satisfaction in their endeavors. Though Subtwo was tenacious, doubts would assail him;
though his people were fearless, they had no persistence. But whether those qualities would create or destroy effectiveness in this hunt depended on how long he and Mischa could force its continuation.
Jan felt himself more and more on edge. Mischa seemed not to feel it: Jan was glad he still had that much control. But the symbols at the mouth of the tunnel must have had some meaning, and he wished the danger would come, so they could face it. All the unknowns of the underground combined against him.
He noticed, for the first time, a gentle current of air flowing past him from behind, almost too light to detect. 'Mischa, do you feel that?'
'Yes.'
'An exit?'
'I hope not. It isn't nearly time for the storms to be over.'
As the tunnel narrowed, the breeze became stronger, and as they climbed, Jan could hear the whistle of wind in fissures of stone, the sigh of air, and behind it the faint, terrifying sound of wind chimes, singing in many keys.
The breeze blew cool on his back, and he shuddered.
