They showed him. Falling onion was a plant parasite that grew at the forks of the branchlets. It grew as a green tube with a spray of pink blossoms at the tip. The pretty brown-haired woman named Debby assembled a handful and cut the blossom-ends off. Usa's sword carved the scarlet meat in translucently thin slices.

Meanwhile Kara bound the Grad's right wrist to his ankles, then freed his left. "Don't untie anything else," she warned him.

Raw meat, he thought and shuddered; but his mouth watered. Hild wrapped sheets of pink meat around the stalks and passed one to the Grad. He bit into it.

His mind went blank. You learned to put hunger out of your mind during a famine . . . but he had definitely been hungry. The meat had an odd, rubbery texture. The flavor was rich; the onion taste was fiery, mouth-filling.

They watched him eat. I have to talk to them, he thought hazily. It's our last chance~ We have to join them. Otherwise~. what is there? Stay here and be hunte4 or let the invaders catch us, or jump into the sky .

The man-sized bird was dwindling. Lizeth seemed content to carve slices until they stopped disappearing; Debby was now cutting the falling onions to stretch them. The women had long since finished eating.

They watched with irritating smiles. The Grad wondered if they would consider a belch bad manners, and belched anyway, and had to swallow again. He'd learned while climbing the tree: a belch was bad news in free-fall, without tide to bring gas to the top of the stomach.

He asked for water. Lizeth gave it to him in a squeezegourd. He drank a good deal. The falling onion had run out. Feeling pleasantly full, the Grad topped off his meal with a handful of foliage.

Nothing could be entirely bad when he felt this good.

Kara the Sharman said, "One thing is clear. You are certainly a refugee. I never saw a starving copsik runner."

A test? The Grad took his time swallowing. "Cute," he said. "Now that that's established, shall we talk?"

"Where are we?"

"Nowhere in particular. I wouldn't lead you to the rest of the tribe until I knew who you were. Even here, the copsik runners might find us."

'Who are they, these . . . runners?"

"Copsik runners. Don't you use the word copsik?" It sounded more like corpsik when she said it.

He answered, "It's just an insult-word."

"Not to us or them. They take us for corpsiks, to work for them the rest of our lives. Boy, what are you doing?"

The Grad had reached for his pack with his free hand. "I am the Quinn Tribe Scientist," he said in freezing tones. "I thought I might find some background on that word."

"Go ahead."