Breathless, she swept from the leafy fringe of the Crust forest and down, down through the Mantle's vortex lines, until it seemed she could plunge deep into the bruised-purple heart of the Quantum Sea itself!

Was this how life had been, before the Core Wars? Oh, how she wished she had been born into the era of her grandparents -- before the Wars -- instead of these dreary, starving times.

She turned her face towards the South Pole, that place where all the vortex lines converged in a pink, misty infinity. She surged on through the Air, drowning her wistfulness and doubt in motion...

But there was something in the way.

Everyone had heard of the Hero, of course. The Hero myth was somehow more vivid to Thea than, say, the legends of the Ur-humans, who (it was said) had come from beyond the Star to build people to live here in the Mantle -- and who then, after the Core Wars, had abandoned them. Perhaps it was because the Hero was of her own world, not of some misty, remote past.

Even as she grew older -- and she came to understand how dull and without prospect her parents' world really was -- Thea longed for the Hero, in his suit of silver, to come floating up through the sky to take her away from the endless, drudging poverty of this life of hunting and scavenging at the fringe of the Crust forest.

But by the time she reached the age of fifteen she'd come to doubt that the Hero really existed: in the struggle to survive amid the endless debris of the Core Wars, the Hero was just too convenient a wish-fulfilling myth to be credible.

She certainly never expected to meet him.

"Thea! Thea!"

Snug inside her cocoon of woven spin-spider webbing, Thea kept her eyecups clamped closed. Her sister, Lur, was eighteen -- three years older than Thea -- and yet, Thea thought sourly, she still had the thin, grating tones of an adolescent. Just like a kid, especially when she was scared--

Scared.

The thought jolted Thea awake. She struggled to free her arms of the cocoon's clinging webbing, and pushed her face out into the cool Air. She shook her head to clear clouded Air out of her sleep-rimmed eyecups.

Thea cast brisk, efficient glances around the treacherous sky. Lur was still calling her name. Danger was approaching, then. But from where?