A strange look passed over Sax’s face. “It’s possible,” he said. “Yes, of course. I told you— when you were sick, and unconscious— that she. . . .” He was picking his words, as he so often did, with a squint of concentration. “— that I saw her myself. In that storm I was caught out in. She led me to my car.”

Nirgal stared at the little blinking image. “I don’t remember that.”

“Ah. I’m not surprised.”

“So you . . . you think she escaped from Sabishii.”

“Yes.”

“But how likely was that?”

“I don’t know the— the likelihood. That would be difficult to judge.”

“But could they have slipped away?”

“The Sabishii mohole mound is a maze.”

“So you think they escaped.”

Sax hesitated. “I saw her. She— she grabbed my wrist. I have to believe.” Suddenly his face twisted. “Yes, she’s out there! She’s out there! I have no doubt! No doubt! No doubt she’s expecting us to come to her.”

And Nirgal knew he had to look.

3

He left Candor Mesa without a good-bye to anyone. His acquaintances there would understand; they often flew away themselves for a time. They would all be back someday, to soar over the canyons and then spend their evenings together on Shining Mesa. And so he left. Down into the immensity of Melas Chasma, then downcanyon again, east into Coprates. For many hours he floated in that world, over the 61 glacier, past embayment after embayment, buttress after buttress, until he was through the Dover Gate and out over the broadening divergence of Capri and Eos chasmas. Then above the ice-filled chaoses, the crackled ice smoother by far than the drowned land below it had been. Then across the rough jumble of Margaritifer Terra, and north, following the piste toward Burroughs; then, as the piste approached Libya Station, he banked off to the northeast, toward Elysium.