Ti opened his eyes a moment, and Silver quickly flinched into action. She smiled, half-closed her own eyes, picked up the rhythm of her flexing hips. "Oooh," she murmured, as Van Atta had taught her. Let's hear some feedback, honey, Van Atta had demanded, so she'd hit on a collection of noises that seemed to please him. They worked on the pilot, too, when she remembered to make them.

Ti's eyes squeezed shut, his lips parting as his breath came faster, and Silver's face relaxed into pensive stillness once again, grateful for the privacy. Anyway, Ti's gaze didn't make her as uncomfortable as Mr. Van Atta's, which always seemed to suggest that she ought to be doing something else, or more, or differently.

The pilot's forehead was damp with sweat, plastering down one curl of brown hair around the shiny plug. Mechanical mutant, biological mutant, equally touched by differing technologies; perhaps that was why Ti had first seen her as approachable, being an odd man out himself. Both freaks together. On the other hand, maybe the jump pilot just wasn't very fussy.

He shivered, gasped convulsively, clutched her tightly to his body. Actually, he looked—rather vulnerable. Mr. Van Atta never looked vulnerable at this moment. Silver was not sure just what it was he did look like.

What's he getting out of this that I'm not? What's wrong with me? Maybe she really was, as Van Atta had once accused, frigid—an unpleasant word, it reminded her of machinery, and the trash dumps locked outside the Habitat—so she had learned to make noises for him, and twitch pleasingly, and he had commended her for loosening up.

Silver reminded herself that she had another reason for keeping her eyes open. She glanced again past the pilot's head. The observation window of the darkened control booth where they trysted overlooked the freight loading bay. The staging area between the bay's control booth and the entrance to the freight shuttle's hatch remained dimly lit and empty of movement. Hurry up Tony, Claire, Silver worried. I can't keep this guy occupied all shift.

"Wow," breathed Ti, coming out of his trance and opening his eyes and grinning. "When they designed you folks for free fall they thought of everything." He released his own clutch on the wings of Silver's shoulder blades to slide his hands down her back, around her hips, and along her lower arms, ending with an approving pat on her hands locked around his muscular downsider flanks. "Truly functional."

"How do downsiders keep from, um, bouncing apart?" Silver inquired curiously, taking practical advantage of having cornered an apparent expert on the subject.

His grin widened. "Gravity keeps us together."

"How strange. I always thought of gravity as something you had to fight all the time."

"No, only half the time. The other half, it works for you," he assured her.