"Through this cargo port? Out through the Skin? But that's against City ordinances..." Cris grinned. "You bet we are." With a whoop, Cris placed one hand on the lip of the elliptical entrance and somersaulted into the shaft. His board clutched above his head, he flapped his arms, Waving in reverse feet-first down the shaft. Farr, clumsier, clambered over the lip of the port and plunged down. Laughing, their voices echoing from the wooden walls, the boys tumbled toward the open Air.

Farr shot out of the oppressive wall of the City and spread his arms and legs, drinking in the yellow-shining Air and staring up at the arc of the vortex lines.

Cris was looking at him skeptically. "Are you okay?"

"I'm just glad to be out in the Air... even if it is this sticky Polar stuff."

"Right. Not like back in the good old upflux, eh?" Cris leveled his board, flexed it with the palm of his hand experimentally against the Magfield.

Farr rolled luxuriously in the Air. The port they'd emerged from was a rough-rimmed mouth set in the wooden outer hull — the Skin — and it loomed around them still, as if threatening to snap down on them, to swallow them back into the City's wooden guts. But the boys were drifting in the Air, away from the City, and Farr saw that this port was just one of an array of similar entrances which stretched across the face of the City in all directions, as far as he could see. Farr tried to pick out identifying features of "their" port, so he could find it again if he needed to. But it was simply a crudely finished gash in the wooden Skin, unmarked, with nothing to distinguish it from a hundred others. Farr soon gave up the effort of memorizing. After all, if he did get lost, even if he found this particular port again he'd never find his way back to the Mixxaxes' home through the City streets.

He flipped his legs and pulled a little further away from the City. The Skin was like a gigantic mask, looming over him. This close he could see its detail — how it was crudely cobbled together from mismatched sections of wood and Corestuff — but it was hugely impressive nevertheless. The dozens of cargo ports in this part of the Skin were, he thought, like mouths, continually ingesting; or perhaps like capillary pores, taking in a granular Air of wood and food. As he pulled back still further he saw the huge, unending falls from the sewage outlets spread across the base of the City; the roar of the semisolid stuff tumbling into the underMantle seemed to fill the Air.

The City — battered and imperfect as it might be — was magnificent, he realized slowly; it was like an immense animal, noisily alive, utterly oblivious of his own tiny presence before its face.

He heard his name called.