Adda smiled, his face a grim mask. "No," he said harshly. "But then, what choices do any of us have?"

—

The forest seemed empty of Air-pigs.

The little party grew fretful and tired. After another half-day's fruitless searching, Dura allowed them to rest, to sleep.

When they woke, she knew she would have to lead them downflux. Downflux, and higher — deeper into the forest, toward the Crust.

Toward the South — downflux — the Air was richer, the Magfield stronger. The pigs must have fled that way, following the Glitch. But everyone knew downflux was a dangerous direction to travel.

The Human Beings followed her with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

The forest was dense, complex. Six-legged Crust-crabs scuttled from Dura as she approached, abandoning webs slung between the tree trunks. Cocoons of leeches and other unidentifiable creatures clustered thick on the trunks, like pale, bloated leaves.

A ray turned its blind face toward her.

Adda hissed a warning. Dura flattened herself against the tree trunk before her, wrapping her arms around it and willing her ragged breath to still. The wood pressing against her belly and thighs was hard and hot.

A breath of Air at her back, a faint shadow.

She shifted her head to the right, feeling the roughness of the bark scratch her cheek. Her eyecups swiveled, following the ray as it glided by, utterly silent. The ray was a translucent sheet at least a mansheight wide. At its closest it was no more than an arm's length from her. She could recognize the basic architecture of all the Mantle's animals: the ray was built around a thin, cylindrical spine, and six tiny, spherical eyes ringed the babyish maw set into the center of its face. But the fins of the ray had been extended into six wide, thin sheets. The wings were spaced evenly around the body and they rippled as the ray moved; electron gas sparkled around the leading edges. The flesh was almost transparent, so that it was difficult even to see the wings, and Dura could see shadowy fragments of some meal passing along the ray's cylindrical gut.

The ray was the only animal — other than humans — that moved by Waving, rather than by squirting jetfarts like pigs or boar. Moving in silence, without the sweet stink of jetfarts, the ray was an effective predator. And its mouth, though tiny, was ringed by jagged, ripping teeth.

The ray slid over the four humans for several heartbeats, apparently unaware of their presence. Then, still silent, it floated away into the shadows of the forest.

Dura counted to a hundred before pushing herself away from the tree trunk.

The vortex lines were dense here, almost tangled together among the trees. The Star, its rotation continually slowing, gradually expelled the vortex lines from the Mantle... until a fresh Glitch struck, when the lines crumbled into deadly fragments before renewing.