The surviving male glister, having come within a whisker of falling prey to one of the deep-sea denizens, instinctively headed for the shallows where such creatures never came, and where it might digest in peace the hundredweight of turbul flesh now cramming its gut. It was this last huge meal, putting excess pressure on the network of blood-vessels lacing the creature’s body, which forced one such vein up against a sharp fragment of its own damaged shell. This circumstance would not have proved so unfortunate had the creature stayed in the depths; but the drop in external pressure, as the glister rose to the surface, caused the vein to expand, sawing against the shell as it swam. The vein burst just as the creature reached the surface near a small isolated atoll. The injury, in itself, was a minor problem for the glister and would have healed in a few days, had not the leakage of blood left a trail for the molly carp resident close by. Feeling a surge in the water behind it, and tasting molly carp — a taste that elicited only terror in it - the glister accelerated away from the shallows towards open sea, though it was sluggish after its gorging. Swimming over a declivity into deeper water, the glister experienced something like relief, assuming that the carp pursuing it from the shallows would be unlikely to pursue it any further. But when it flipped its tail to dive, the tail remained rigid and its body moved up and down instead. Sculling in panic with its flat legs it found itself rising inexorably out of the sea. As the carp somersaulted it into the air, its last view in this world was of a large mouth gaping where it would rather have seen ocean.

The adolescent Vrell mistook the grinding of Ebulan’s mandibles as an indication of hunger, and nearly lost a leg trying to feed the councillor a nicely decayed hock of human meat. Sliding on his AG, Ebulan slammed Vrell up against the weed-pocked stone-effect wall.

‘An adult Prador initiates and manipulates. But what does an adult Prador not do?’ Ebulan asked.

‘An adult Prador does not physically intervene, Father,’ Vrell signed.

Ebulan again slammed the child against the wall, putting a crack in Vrell’s carapace as a reminder, then backed off to let the child escape. As the adolescent scuttled away, Ebulan accessed Speaker’s thrall unit and looked through the blank human’s eyes. Prill everywhere, water rushing in through a hole in the hull, screams and shots: chaos. Stupid human.