They have explored. They have seen the temples and the shark pits and the galleries and arcades, and the cray slums, the architecture of the shallows. As light fails and Salkrikaltor’s globes glow, traffic increases. Young cray dandies fight and posture on the spiraling walkways above (their actions are reflected in the hidden watchers’ eyes).

Hours pass. The streets empty out. The globes dim a little in the hours before dawn.

And there is silence. And dark. And cold.

And the intruders move.

They pass through empty streets, cloaked in darkness.

The intruders move like ribbons of waste, as if they are nothing, as if they are tugged by random ebbs and tides. They trace anemone-scarred backstreets.

Nothing living is in the trench-streets except night fishes, the snails, the crabs that freeze with fear as the intruders approach. They pass beggars in the atomies of buildings. Through a rip in a warehouse poised on the brink of being dust. Out over the lowest level of a water-beaten roofscape like coral, insinuating themselves into shadows that seem too small for them. Quick as morays.

A name was whispered to them in a coil of blood, a clue that they have accepted, and stalked and found.

They rise and look down on the roofscape through the sea.

He sleeps there, his legs folded below him, his torso rocking faintly in the current, his eyes closed-the he-cray they have hunted. The intruders hunker low. They stroke him and touch him and make sounds from within their throats, and his eyes open slowly and he spasms violently in the bonds in which they have spread-eagled him (as quietly and gently as nannies, not to wake him), and his mouth strains so wide that it looks as if it will split and bleed. He would be screaming and screaming in cray vibrato if they had not fit him with a collar of bone that skewers painlessly into certain nerves in his neck and back and cuts off his sound.

Little gouts of blood float up from the cray’s throat. The intruders watch him curiously. When finally his frenzy exhausts him, a captor moves with alien grace and speaks.

-you know somethingit says.- we need to know it too.

They begin their work, whispering questions as they touch and touch the cray translator with unthinkable expertise, and he snaps back his head and screams again.

Again, without a sound.

The intruders continue.

And later.

The wormcast floor of the ocean plunges out of sight and the water opens endlessly and the dark figures (far from home) sit motionless suspended in the dark, and ponder.

The trail has exploded.