“Ride up in that light? It’ll drop us.”

“We’re going up on our own. We’re going to jump.”

“It’s a hundred feet! More!”

He grabbed her arm and jumped directly upward. Her weight jolted him and caused her to cry out as they sped up through the tall cathedral of trees and into the bright, full sun. As they closed with the bulk of the object, he looked up into it. The thing was fifty feet above them, then thirty feet, then ten, then he reached out with his free hand, extended his fingers, and touched it. He grasped, but their weight had overcome the power of the jump, and there was nothing to hold except the vibrating edge of one of the great paddles that jutted out from the central ring of the thing.

He slid away, dropping toward the treetops again, then crashing through them, boughs breaking under him as he slid in a shower of leaves to the ground.

She tumbled in a heap beside him, coughed, gagged, then wobbled to her feet.

“What—what—my God.” She stared at him. “My God, how did we do that?”

“Just be glad we can.”

The light shone on him. He felt himself rising, and this time helplessly. Once his feet left the ground, he was lost.

The drumming was closing in. He could see hundreds of hybrids in among the trees.

As he began rising, he made a decision and took her wrist again. Her eyes widened, she screamed, she struggled, but then she grabbed his hand and hung on as the world swept away beneath them.

Her face, twisted by fear, pleaded with him. “It’s going to drop us, Mark, oh, God, help me.”

“You’re not like them, you’re going to survive this.”

The light went out and the air screamed and Gina screamed and the forest came rushing up at them, and Mark felt the possibility of slowing and held her to him with all his strength, and they did slow, the wind ceased to scream, and then they hung clinging together like two frightened children, and there was birdsong in the treetops five feet below them, and from the depths, the eager drumming.

“Mark … Mark…”

“You have these abilities, Gina, just like me.”

He writhed in the air, trying to somehow make himself move upward, but there was no place to start, nothing to push against.

“We have to go down to the ground,” he said, “and they’re going to be waiting, so we have to be fast. The second you touch down, crouch and jump with all your might, and you will come up again, and you grab on to it and get onto it.”

They came down through the giving crowns of the great redwoods and settled toward a raging, stomping mob of hybrids.