The old female sat stiffly in the seeker’s enfolding interior, eyes wide. She quickly grasped the concept of the displays, twisted her head this way and that, following the colors and symbols as they wrapped around us. She gripped my arm as the craft lifted—not where she had bitten me. That had already healed. The pressure seemed to call up more of the information within my blood and flesh.

I felt myself coming into a denser appreciation of the way these people saw themselves—and then, like a shallow coloring laid over all that, how they felt about us.

They felt an extraordinary guilt. Or rather, somebody—not these people precisely—had once felt guilt, and now it suffused through them all, but generations before they had numbed it, stored it away in safe cubbyholes, rarely acknowledged.

Until now.

She surveyed the landscape as we rose, then pointed east and said, “That way.”

Clearance moved the seeker as instructed, at an altitude of a thousand meters. The old female never once let go of my arm. Her sense of direction was precise. Perhaps she had climbed the mountains and looked down over a similar view—but I thought it more likely she already knew.

Keeper and Chant remained with the other seeker. Despite my convictions, I still thought it best to keep options in reserve. The power of the old female’s bite might be more significant and powerful than I yet understood. Those little agents … what else could they manage, as protectors, or as persuaders?

The old female guided us along a steady curve.

“We’re following old field lines, I think,” Clearance said. “But there’s no longer a magnetic field. Hasn’t been for millions of years.”

I translated for Glow, but she paid us no mind—merely directed us with her knobby finger. We passed over deep dry gorges and wide valleys. Long lakes crossed the valleys like the marks of animal claws. Chaotic terrain. Thousands of kilometers of it.

And now we came to the peculiar feature we had noticed even from low orbit. A broad patch of grayish yellow had spread over a gorge four kilometers deep. A wide, steaming fissure opened along a two-kilometer stretch. The yellowish coloration was caused by minute bacteria and other organisms feeding on sulfur compounds. The entire valley was filled with a thin haze—not smoke but dust. Dust from spores—funguslike organisms—nothing like the Flood, of course, but bearing Forerunner genes.

Most remarkable.

“That is where we need to go,” Glow told me.

Clearance brought the seeker around, interpreting the direction of Glow’s finger, tracking its quick, precise changes, until she lifted it straight up, stared at him with her piercing gray-blue eyes, and said, “There.”

We landed.

“It’s here,” Glow said. “You walk out there … naked. Walk with me. Not him. Keep him away. He is not wise.”