Dura brushed the hat from her head, impatiently shrugging off the straps of her Air-tank. "Give me your hand."

"But why..."

"It's a Glitch. And if we don't move now we'll be killed. Give me your hand. Now!"

Rauc's mouth opened wide. Dura saw shock in her expression, but no fear yet. Well, there would be time enough for that. She grabbed Rauc's hand; the laborer's palm was toughened by her work but the hand was cool, free of the heat of terror. She kicked at the Magfield with both legs, Waving downward, away from the Crust and toward the approaching flux lines. At first Rauc was dead inertia behind her; but after a few strokes Rauc, too, began to Wave.

When the Star suffered a Glitch the Mantle could not sustain its even, gently slowing pattern of rotation. The superfluid Air tried to expel the excess rotation from its bulk by pushing the arrays of vortex lines — lines of quantized vorticity — out toward the Crust. And the lines themselves suffered instabilities, and could break down...

The women dropped into the racing forest of vortex lines. The lines were usually about ten mansheights apart, so — in normal times — they were easy to avoid. But now, at the birth of this spin storm, they were already rising faster than a Human Being could Wave. The vortex lines fizzed past the women, sparkling electric blue. Instabilities the size of a fist raced along them, colliding, merging, collapsing.

Rauc whimpered. Unwelcome images of the last Glitch, of Esk imploding around the rogue vortex line, crowded Dura's head. She concentrated on the buffeting of the Air against her bare skin, the thin, unnatural taste of it on her lips, the deadly sparkle of the vortex lines. Now was all that mattered — now, and surviving into the future through this moment.

The vortex lines were growing denser as they crowded toward the Crust, seeking an impossible escape from the Star. It was becoming harder to dodge the lines as they swept past her like infinite blades; she was forced to twist backward and forward, slithering between lines. The instabilities were becoming more prominent, too; now ripples almost a mansheight high were marching along the soaring lines, deepening and quickening as they passed. There was a terrible beauty in the way the complex waveforms sucked energy from the vortex lines and surged forward. The Air was filled with the deafening, deadening heat-roar of the lines.

Soon Dura's arms and legs, already stiff from a long shift, were aching, and the Air seemed to scrape through her lungs and capillaries. But now, as they penetrated the rushing vortex forest and moved deeper into the Mantle, the lines were starting to thin out. Dura, gratefully, looked down and saw that they were approaching a volume where the lines — though still cutting the Air with preternatural speed — were spaced at about their normal density. Further in still the Air seemed almost clear of lines, temporarily purged of its vorticity.