Dura knew that rotation instabilities lost energy rapidly. Soon, very soon, this fantastic demon would wither to nothing, leaving the Air calm and empty once more. And, glowing, roaring, stinking of sour photons, the instability was indeed visibly shrinking as it bore down on the Net.

But, it was immediately obvious, not shrinking fast enough...

With a heat-wail like a thousand voices the instability tore into the Net.

 —

It was like a fist driving into cloth.

The Air inside the Net ceased to be superfluid and became a stiff, turbulent mass, whipping and whorling around the vortex instability like some demented animal. Dura saw knots burst open; the Net, almost gracefully, disintegrated into fragments of rope, into rough mats to which adults and children clung.

The Air-pig herd was hurled away into the Air as if scattered by a giant hand. Dura could see how some of the beasts, evidently dead or dying, hung where they were thrown, limply suspended against the Magfield; the rest squirted away through the Air, their bellow-guts puffing out farts of blue gas.

One man, clinging alone to a raft of rope, was sucked toward the instability itself.

It was too far away to be sure, but Dura thought she recognized Esk. Dozens of mansheights from the site of the Net, she was much too far away even to call to him — let alone to help — but nevertheless she seemed to see what followed as clearly as if she rode at her lost lover's shoulder toward the deadly arch.

Esk, with his mat of rope, tumbled through the plane of the quivering, arch-shaped instability and was hurled around the arch itself, as limp as a doll. His trajectory rapidly lost energy and, unresisting, he spiraled inward, orbiting the arch like some demented Air-piglet.

Esk's body burst open, the chest and abdominal cavities peeling back like opening eyes, the limbs coming free almost easily, like a toy's.

Farr cried out, wordless. It was the first sound he'd made since they'd pushed away from the Net.

Dura reached for him and clutched his hand, hard. "Listen to me," she shouted over the arch's continuing heat-clamor. "It looked worse than it was. Esk was dead long before he hit the arch." And that was true; as soon as he had entered the region in which superfluidity broke down, the processes of Esk's body — his breathing, his circulatory system, his very muscles, all reliant on the exploitation of the Air's superfluidity — would have collapsed. To Esk, as the strength left his limbs, as the Air coagulated in the superleak capillaries of his brain, it must have been like falling gently asleep.

She thought. She hoped.

The instability passed through the site of the Net and sailed on into the sky, continuing its futile mission toward the South. But even as Dura watched, the arch shape was dwindling, shrinking, its energy expended.

It left behind an encampment which had been torn apart as effectively as poor Esk's body.