If I knew to come this way, Trey thought, others will as well. So why no sound? Why no signs that no one has come this way already, or are behind us working their way through?

They moved on. The seam dipped and turned, and for the next thousand steps their route snaked through the rock of the world as if in an effort to throw off pursuers. Trey’s miner senses led the way unerringly, and his mother followed, sighing, grunting, breathing heavily but never once complaining or asking him to stop.

Once or twice Trey mused that they really could linger here. But then he remembered that brief touch with the mind of the hibernating Nax—the fury, the rage, the hunger—and he knew that they had to go on. They may be out of immediate danger, but the Nax were unlikely to be sated with only one cavern. There were mines throughout the Widow’s Peaks, and probably long, arduous routes between them, untraveled and impassable to humans but known to the creatures who truly owned this underworld.

And so they moved on, resting now and then, licking mineral-rich moisture from the walls. And every step they took frightened Trey more.

They were leaving behind danger, but they were also moving away from the only life he had ever known. The people in the home-cave were his people, the pale fires and the moss pots and the stingers and the blind spiders and the cave rats and the mayors, the Church and the constant, comforting distant roar of the underground river . . . all his, all part of the memories that made his life. He always worked hard at the fledge face, but once back in the cavern he was contented, happy in the knowledge that he did his bit for their underground community. Sometimes there were thoughts of going topside, but it was curiosity more than desire. He was interested in why people would choose to live up there when there was obviously so much more to living down here. Certainly there were dangers in the dark—stingers took one or two people each year, and cave-ins, though infrequent, were often deadly. But he had heard about the inimical inhabitants of topside as well: the tumblers that roamed the surface of the hills, sweeping up children and unwary travelers; the bandits on the plains; raids along the coastal towns by savages from the sea. And fighting in the towns, a malaise in the villages. People topside, it was said, had no care anymore.

Trey felt comfortable history staring at his back and mourning his leaving. Before him, with every step he took into the darkness, lay his future.