“Let me sit up front,” she said. They made way for her to the kybernetes’ cabin, and the assistant gave her his seat. She clutched the clavicle, feeling its responses, and looked out over the endless grasslands. “Down, please,” she said.

“How far?” the kybernetes asked.

“Slow down, and descend to…a hundred arms? Less?”

She looked back at Oresias. Demetrios had crowded in the hatch behind him, eyes wide, face still pale.

“Fifty arms,” Oresias said. “Will we see it?” he asked her.

“I don’t know. It might not be large…but I’ll know when we’re there.”

The two beecraft slowed and descended, while the cargo plane and tanker began to make wide turns over the landscape, flying above them every few minutes as they searched. Rhita concentrated on the prairie, trying to match the terrain with what she felt in the clavicle…an exercise not really necessary, as it turned out.

“Here,” she said. “Stop here.” The clavicle had simply told her, in no way she could specify, that they were over the site. The beecraft overshot and she guided them back, until both craft were within a hundred and fifty arms of each other, and the site lay beneath them, recognizable now: a grassy fertile swale around a small muddy streambed. She could not see the gate with her eyes, but the clavicle told her its precise position.

“Let’s land,” Oresias instructed the kybernetes. The kybernetes spoke with his counterparts on the other beecraft, and they descended the last fifty arms, touching down with a gentle bump on the grass, their blades causing rippling waves to spread and clash between them.

“Stop your engines,” Atta instructed from behind Oresias. “We want silence. We’ve come here like a horde of drunken demons. No sense overdoing it.”

“Is there a place for the gullcraft?” Oresias asked Rhita. She was confused for a moment—how could she know?—when she remembered that the clavicle could tell her. In the clavicle’s display, she flew over the simplified landscape and searched for a flat, undimpled area several stadia in length for the plane to land. “Northeast a few hundred arms,” she said. “It looks smooth, though there’s probably a few holes…might be rough.”

“From which direction?” Oresias asked.

“They should fly in from the south. They’ll see it—it’s quite broad.”

“Wish them luck,” Oresias instructed the kybernetes as he relayed her message. “Is it safe to go out?”

“I don’t see why not,” Rhita said, though she trembled. Not seeing the gate with her eyes disturbed her. She could not tell anything about it except its position.

Perhaps it’s nothing at all.

The doors were pushed open and a sweet, clean cool breeze blew into the stuffy interior. Grass-smell like a horse barn. Tang of something else, wet soil perhaps.