The adults were baffled and frightened, struggling to deal with concepts they could barely envisage. But they trusted her, Dura realized slowly, with a mixture of relief and shame — and so, one by one, the children were delivered to Dura.

Deni Maxx glared as the grimy bodies of the children were passed into her car, and Dura wondered if Deni was even now going to raise some cruel objection. But when the doctor watched Dura settle little Jai — frightened and crying for his mother — in the arms of the oldest girl at the back of the car, Deni's irritation visibly softened.

At last it was done. Dura gathered the bereft adults in a huddle and gave them strict instructions on how to get to the Pole. They listened to her solemnly. Then Dura embraced them all, and climbed into the car.

As Deni flicked the team of Air-pigs into motion, Dura stared back through the huge, expansive windows at the Human Beings. Shorn of their children, they looked lost, bewildered, futile. Dia and Mur clung to each other. I've taken away their future, Dura realized. Their reason for living.

Or, perhaps, I've preserved their future.

When the Human Beings were out of sight — and despite the continuing crying of the frightened, disoriented children — Dura settled into one of the car's expensive cocoons, relief and guilt once more competing for her soul.

—

Deni steered the car with unconscious skill along the renewed vortex lines. "The City is taking in injured from the hinterland. It's not been easy, for any of us." The doctor was scarcely recognizable from the cheerful, rather patronizing woman who had treated Adda, Dura thought; Maxx's eyecups were ringed by darkness and crusty sleep deposits; her face seemed to have sunk in on itself, becoming gaunt and severe, and she hunched over her reins with tense, knotted muscles.

Dura stared moodily out of the car's huge windows at the Crust as it passed over them. She remembered how she had marveled at the orderliness of the great hinterland with its ceiling-farms and gardens, as she had viewed it that first time with Toba Mixxax. Now, by contrast, she was appalled at the destruction the Glitch had wrought. In great swathes the farms had been scoured from the Crust, leaving the bare root-ceiling exposed. Here and there coolies still toiled patiently at the shattered land, but the naked ceiling had none of the vigor of the natural forest; obscenely stripped of its rectangles of cultivation it looked like an open wound.

Deni tried to explain how the Crust had responded to the Glitch by ringing — vibrating in sectors, apparently all over the Star; the devastation had come in orderly waves, with a lethal and offensive neatness. Dura let the words wash over her, barely understanding.