She looked carefully at his yellowed hair-tubes, unwilling to betray more ignorance. How old was he? "Do you remember the old days -- before the Core Wars? Is that how you got the suit?"

He looked at her with contempt -- but, he saw, a contempt softened with pity. Am I really such a savage? she wondered.

"Kid, the Wars were over before I was born. All the technology -- the cities, the wormhole paths across the Mantle -- all of it had gone. There were just a few scraps left -- like this suit, which my father salvaged." He grinned again, his face splitting like a skull. "It used to belong to police, in one of the great cities. Police. Do you know what that means?

"The suit kept us alive -- my parents and me -- for a while. Then, after they were dead--"

She tried to fill her voice with contempt. "You used it to fly around the Mantle being the Hero."

He looked angry. "Is that so terrible? At least I help people. What will you do with it, little girl?"

She reached out for him, turning her hands into claws. In a moment, she could crush the life out of his bony neck--

He returned her stare calmly, unflinching.

She tipped backwards and Waved away from him.

Thea surged along infinite corridors of vortex lines. Floating spin-spider eggs padded at her faceplate and legs. The Quantum Sea was a purple floor far below her, delimiting the yellow Air; the Crust was a complex, inverted landscape beneath which she soared.

Waving was glorious. She stared down at her silver-coated body; blue highlights from the corridors of vortex lines and the soft purple glow of the Sea cast complex shadows across her chest. Already she was moving faster than she'd ever moved in her life, and she knew she was far from exhausting the possibilities of this magical suit.

She opened her mouth and yelled, her own voice loud inside the helmet.

She flew, spiraling, around the arcing vortex lines, her suited limbs crackling with blue electron gas; breathless, she swept from the leafy fringe of the Crust forest and down, down through the Mantle, until it seemed as if she could plunge deep into the bruised-purple heart of the Quantum Sea itself.

She turned her face towards the South Pole, that place where all the vortex lines converged. She surged on through the Air, drowning her doubts -- and the image of the Hero's disquieted face -- in motion.

...But there was something in her path.

Spin-web.

The web was fixed to the vortex line array by small, tight rings of webbing which encircled, without quite touching, the glowing spin-singularities. The web's threads were almost invisible individually, but the dense mats caught the yellow and purple glow of the Mantle, so that lines of light formed a complex tapestry.

It was really very beautiful, Thea thought abstractedly. But it was a wall across the sky.