Jason tore at the fingers that were choking the life out of him, but was like pulling at bent steel bars. He couldn’t talk and the blood hammered in his ears and drowned his thoughts. It was over now and he had lost. They’d butcher each other in the spaceship and Pyrrus would keep on being a deathworld until every one of them was dead.

Meta hurtled forward like an uncoiled spring and the crossbow twanged. One bolt caught her in the leg, the other transfixed her upper arm. But she had been shot as she jumped and her inertia carried her across the room, to her fellow Pyrran and the dying offworlder.

She raised her good arm and chopped down with the edge of her hand.

It caught Skop a hard blow on the biceps and his arm jumped spasmodically, his hand leaping from Jason’s throat.

“What are you doing!” he shouted in strange terror to the wounded girl who fell against him. He pushed her away, still clutching Jason with his other hand. She didn’t answer. Instead she chopped again hard and true, the edge of her hand catching Skop across the windpipe crushing it. He dropped Jason and fell to the floor, retching an gasping.

Jason watched the end through a haze, barely conscious.

Skop struggled to his feet, turned pain-filled eyes to his friend “You’re wrong,” Kerk said. “Don’t do it.”

The sound the wounded man made was more animal than human. When he dived toward the guns on the far side of the room, the crossbows twanged like harps of death. He skidded into the guns, his hand knocking them aside, but he was already dead.

When Brucco went over to help Meta, no one interfered. Jason gasped air back into his lungs, breathing in life. The watching glass eye of the viewer carried the scene to everyone in the city.

“Thanks, Meta… for understanding… as well as helping.” Jason had to force the words out.

“Skop was wrong and you were right, Jason,” she said. Her voice broke for a second as Brucco snapped off the feathered end of the steel be with his fingers, and pulled the shaft out of her arm. “I can’t stay in the city; only people who feel as Skop did will be able to do this. And I’m afraid I can’t go into the forest-you saw what luck I had with the stingwing. If it’s all right, I’d like to come with you. I’d like to very much.”

It hurt when he talked so Jason could only smile, but she knew what he meant.