The tunnels in the cliffside were rarely lit, and the deeper they went, the thicker the darkness was. Most people the twins' age had blue glow-gadgets, little handheld phosphorescent rods, to navigate the tunnels. Challis and Rasalas had been forced to pawn theirs to the grungy pawnbroker months ago. That money was gone now, too, and they would never see their flares again.

But the Gannagens kept going, slipping in and out of passages as if in broad daylight. Challis had her hand in Rasalas' belt again as he led the way. As she was going entirely by feel anyway, she whizzed forward into her brother's head. The darkness instantly condensed into a straightforward pathway between obstacles visible in differing shades of gray instead of an unchanging black. But no sooner had Challis noticed this when aching pain drove into her head and all along her left side.

She heard herself cry out, oddly behind her, before rushing back into her own consciousness.

"Stop," she gasped, pulling back on Rasalas' belt. He did, and they collapsed onto the floor against the nearest wall. The room contained a small structure, four feet tall and three feet across, glowing with bioluminescence that seemed to come from inside. The energy capacitor sat in front of them and released a humming sound that swarmed into their minds alongside the dizzying flux driving their flight.

"Where are we even going?" She rubbed at her skull where the pain had disappeared as soon as she had come back into her own mind.

"Oh man," he panted. She heard his head fall back against the doorframe as his voice aimed up toward the ceiling. "We need to stop, we need ­– I let the, the flux – sorry, Chall. We have to stop."

"Ras," she said with a wheeze.

"That fool," he went on, even as he sucked in breaths. "That muttoned fool, jumping on us like that? It's only his fault the thrikes went –"

"Ras." Challis whacked her hand to the side. It hit his arm.

"What?"

"I'm… my stomach, those beasts were jabbing at me. It hurts."

Rasalas swore, his breathing coming up close in her face as he crouched over her. "I should have asked. Are you bleeding? Are you going into shock? Nugget, I'm so sorry."

His hand fumbled at the torn strips of her shirt, then came a spattering whoosh as he pulled his own shirt off. It was still soaking wet, but he pressed it to her stomach and held it there, his hand still quivering from the excitement.

"Did he –" Challis said in a small voice, "will he make it?"

They sat for a long minute while their panting slowed. The darkness pressed in close, replaying the scene in their unwelcome imaginations. When Rasalas finally spoke, his throat was hoarse.

"I… I wrenched his shoulder out," he said, and coughed. "I didn't mean to. But then he… I mean, you saw how he couldn't defend himself. Those thrikes…"

"We should go back," Challis interrupted.

His response was so hushed that she almost missed it.

"We do, we're dead," he said. "They'll have stun-gunned those loose thrikes. Then arrest us, quick as winking."

Challis didn't say anything. Thrike mishandling was as serious a crime as aggravated assault. Arrest would mean charges and imprisonment, procedures undoubtedly as long and drawn out as possible for someone like the Gannagen twins, and that meant saying goodbye to their chances of learning to fly or leave Polescos. After that, probation wouldn't let them go much farther than their rooftop. And without work, they would land in prison anyway for debt buildup until arrangements could be made. After several years.

But no one had seen what happened. If Teakle was alive, he would be hospitalized under intensive care, likely moved to Cormellican. The two women, Shanty and Kailett, had taken the shrewd course and gotten out of there, and more than likely would keep their heads down about the attack if they had any sense. There was still time.

"What if," Challis finally began. "What if we do it? We train, two months, then we take off. You and me."

"Can we? If there's any way – thrike training, we'd finally get to do it, Chall," Rasalas said, his voice rising in excitement.

Challis pressed a hand to his arm. "Listen. We train for two months," she said slowly, "and then we… take off."

There was a baffled silence as it sunk in.

"Take off. You mean, completely?"

She nodded in the dark.

The pressure on her stomach lessened as he sat back. "That's a terrible idea."

"Is it?"

"Yes."

"After what just happened, we don't have much of a choice," she pushed. "Besides, you said yourself we shouldn't go off into something dangerous. So let's just do the first training period that they're paying for. We'll keep our heads down, and have an excuse to spend all that time getting ready. Then, when two months are up, we leave. With thrikes. Before they force us into the expedition, and no commitment to the FHF. Honestly, we wouldn't be doing anything illegal."

"Except it's running away."

Challis said nothing. She shifted on the stone, raw discomfort goosebumping her arms. She knew Rasalas was studying her, and that he was able to see her better than she could see him. Tension stretched taut between them.

She forced herself to breathe. "Well, do you ­–"

"Have a better idea?" He scoffed. "No."

They sat there, minds distant. They both knew what leaving Polescos would mean for them. With Challis' vision overload, and Rasalas' faulty memory, they would have to stick together, and for Challis' sake a world of unfamiliarity would drive them aground quickly.

"What about father?" Rasalas asked quietly.

"Hm?"

His tone went stiff. "You heard me."

He was always so stern about it. Challis wondered how much it would help anything if Rasalas didn't always act so serious when bringing up the topic. Her skin chilled, and then cold anger iced up inside.

"I don't know, Ras," she said, biting every word. "It's only his fault we've been stuck here, isn't it." "Challis, wait."

"I lost everything because of him! Mother first, then one thing after another, gone. Everything I had in the world, everything that could have given me a real life!" Emotion clogged her throat as Challis faltered into a whisper. "What I don't understand… besides why the hell father ever agreed to that surgery… is why we haven't gone before."

A shuffling sound came as Rasalas pushed himself to his feet.

It was too dark for Challis to see him staring at her, stunned.

As he should have been.

Astonishment was only a small piece of what he felt at that moment, a moment which stretched on and on as Rasalas fought back the urge to slap her. He almost couldn't, not while flux energy was still coursing through him like a harsh whisper. He took a few swift steps away and gripped the edge of the glowing capacitor with both hands. It was warm on his skin, the awful hum drilling into his brain. He pushed away what his sister had ignored – his own predicament – and tried to think.

She was wrong. She had to be. They couldn't just leave, not like this. Could they?

The offer from the FHF had dropped out of the blue sky. Maybe it was exactly what they needed.

"Can you walk?" he asked finally. "We need to get you looked at."

"No we don't, I don't need it."

"You sure?"

"It's a good thing your shirt's still wet. It's helping."

After another strained silence, Rasalas trudged over and pulled his sister to her feet. Challis held the shirt bunched up against her stomach, which was starting to throb painfully after the shock of the injuries had worn off. Her shins, too, stung when she put weight on them. She found herself still talking. "I'd just rather avoid any questions from father about the lodge smelling like disinfectant. And we can't afford a clinic."

"Hm."

"Oh, idea." Challis pulled on his belt a little too hard when a thought popped into her head. He let out an "Oof," but she went on before he could complain. "Let's head to the rainforest. You know the gillig forest by the cliffs? We can scrape out some queline, and no one needs to know."

"They won't, huh?" Rasalas muttered. But he turned to the left, following the pipes out of the room toward where the cliffs opened out above the jungle. Challis pulled him to a halt again. He huffed. "Will you stop that?"

"I just wanted to say," she said, "I think you're an utter moron for jumping straight at the thrikes like that. I thought you were a goner."

"Another minute and I was. What was that thing you did?"

They walked the dim passages while she explained about Lakko's flux bender. A novelty that could have only come from high-tech envisionist labs on the other side of Oedolon, the little tool seemed so insignificant on its own. But given its power over Oedolon's top floxogelene sourcing flappers, Challis could be holding her future in her pocket. She hoped Lakko hadn't missed it yet.

Within a few minutes of walking again, Challis had to put some effort into keeping her breaths even, her steps careful, and her mind detached as the pain of her stomach started to grow worse. She tried changing consciousnesses again with her brother, but his head flared up into a grating pain so sharp that she couldn't bear it in place of her own. For his part, Rasalas made no complaints. He was used to an unfair share of physical stress from working under Forge, Challis reminded herself. This was just another day for him.

Soon the way started to brighten with indirect sunlight, and after a long passage, they broke into the fresh air. The rainforest opened up beneath, the tallest trees reaching eagerly for the sky. The gray blades of a wind turbine rotated directly in front of the Gannagens as they scooted to the edge and looked down. Through the blades, they could see a gillig thicket hugging the cliffs, shooting out haphazard tree trunks and limbs in a tangled mass that stretched for miles to the northeast.

"We need to stop these," Challis said, and gestured at the spinning cage. The blades were within only Rasalas' reach and then only his fingertips. The twins stood looking until Rasalas said,

"I just want to jump on one."

"That's what I was going to suggest." Challis smiled. "But we might break it."

"We might break it," Rasalas agreed with a sigh. "Maybe someday."

They turned their attention to the wheel hub, where the shaft protruded and then disappeared into a generator box on the landing. The rotating shaft was slow but steady, and about as big around as Rasalas' upper arm.

He stood on one side of the shaft and clamped both hands down, fingers straining to pull back in the opposite direction of its turning.

"It's too smooth," he complained. "How do we do this? The flux momentum of this thing has been building up for years."

Challis felt around on the generator box for some kind of hinge or handle. "Good thing you've got thrike crap on your hands," she half-muttered.

Rasalas scoffed and tried again at a different angle. "I do not have crap on my hands."

"You always have crap on your hands."

Challis found the control cover and, after a hesitation, snapped it open with her stubnicker. Rasalas closed his eyes long enough for her to find the master switch and flip it, easy as anything. A high pitch squealed as the brakes applied, bit by bit. In the end, Challis was pushing her shoulder hard against the spinning hub while Rasalas fought the shaft, and within a few minutes they overpowered it.

"Whew!" Rasalas sat down on the now-still tube. "Just what my arms needed. Do you want to just rope it down? I think I saw some a short way back. Or we can climb."

"Let's rope it. I'd rather not try to climb." Challis looked him up and down. Red blotches were swelling over one eye and cheekbone, and without his shirt, raw scrapes tore up his sides and arms and shone on his knuckles. "Um, if you're up for it."

He went in search of some rope, while she rested. The makeshift bandage Rasalas had given her was still wet, from the fountain and not too much from her bleeding, but she had to swallow hard against the nausea. She hurriedly looked up and away, toward a gray tint of rain above the far edge of the rainforest toward the sea. Those wet clouds rarely approached the mountains where the canyon sat. Slowed to a halt by the heightened terrain, the rainclouds only made real effort to cross the cliffs of Oedolon every few centuries. Challis swallowed at her dry throat, closed her eyes to the rain, and breathed in the heavy calm of the rainforest.

Rasalas tied a loop of cable around the turbine's coupling and tugged on it. "Good enough. I'll go first?"

Challis watched him over the edge as he descended between the curving blades. His feet felt for holds in the rocks while he gripped the cable, letting it hug his forearms as he eased it gingerly over the scrapes. In a few minutes, he met the topmost gillig branches. The end of the cable disappeared into the knotted jungle, and Rasalas let go to perch on top of the thicket like a macaw.

"Not a wink," he called up. "Come on down."

After tying Rasalas' shirt around her waist, Challis took the rope in her hands and followed. Her brother had made it look easy. In contrast to the gentle incline of the vine wall to her bolt-hole cave, this particular wall shot directly toward the sky and pulled her weight straight down so she felt like a plumb bob. By the time she reached where Rasalas waited, Challis' arms were trembling with fatigue.

He tied the cable to the gilligs so the fan blades wouldn't start turning again before they could come back. Then they crouch-crawled over the top of the twisting branches to drop into a space beside the cliff. Here, a piece of shade held the coolness of the rock wall close, and the Gannagens took a moment to breathe in the strange, airy sensation of being this far from people.

Rasalas pulled out his stubnicker and started scraping at the warped gillig branch closest to him. The bark came away easily to release an almost immediate ooze of clear, yellowish substance.

"Take off your shirt," he said distractedly, letting the queline run onto his fingers.

Challis rolled her eyes and lay on her back, then pulled up her shirt to expose the thrike damage. The gashes were blessedly clean from Rasalas' damp shirt, so when he smeared on the goo it gave as good a layer of protection as any gauze would. Queline was the lifeblood of gilligs, with a habit of expanding tendril-like whenever it was exposed to air. Hungry gillig bark grew over it to form the unique spiderwebbing pattern of a gillig thicket, and there was no other natural bandage like it to be found.

"That's going to oxidize fast," he said when he had finished. He dug his fingers into the dirt to wipe off the excess queline, then took back the shirt to use as a rag. "So don’t poke at it. Feel okay?"

"A little gross," she admitted. "Once it hardens, though, peeling it off is going to be hell."

"You're welcome."

There was nothing to be done about the pain in her knees and shins, but Challis didn't care about bruising as long as she could still walk. She suspected it would be worse tomorrow.

Rasalas let himself be daubed with queline too, though he was far more twitchy than his sister. Challis finally made him clasp his arms together over his head so he would stop elbowing her out of reflex.

When he jerked up to a sitting position for the second time, she leaned back with a huff. "Honestly, if you're so ticklish that you can't –"

"Shush."

"What?"

"Shush, will you? I hear something."

They sat still, ears open to the clicking and whirring of the rainforest that hadn't seemed to Challis to change in the slightest. On a hunch, she closed her eyes and reached into her brother's head, to listen with his ears. It worked. An echoing clatter, then faint snuffling as if from the solid wall next to them. Rasalas gave her a momentarily confused look, though Challis couldn't tell if it was because of the mysterious noise or the fact that she had double-minded him without wanting his eyesight. He rose to his feet and turned his head around like a dog honing in on a scent.

"What is that?"

He squeezed under a branch and along the cliff wall to the left. Challis grabbed at his arm but only managed to tap his elbow.

"Wait, Ras. It's probably some animal."

"Inside the cliff?"

They pressed close to the rock, ducking and stepping past wayward gillig limbs. Some roots had curved up and out of the dirt again with confused ideas of direction, so it was hard to tell what was tree trunk and what was root. Challis moved carefully, disentangling her braid from branches more than once before colliding into Rasalas from behind. He was expecting it, and without even looking he caught her with an arm to steady her.

His head was turned to the left. Instead of the wall two inches from his face, Challis blinked at the black gaping maw of a cave or tunnel sliding over her vision, just around the corner where Rasalas stood.

He pulled back with a sound of disgust.

"Ugh. You smell that?"

Challis shuddered and rubbed her nose. "Probably an animal's den. Let's leave, Ras."

"Look over there." He pointed forward at the gilligs. "Can you see that? It's like the branches have been cut through to make a path."

"Cut?"

"They're not broken," he retorted, as if it were obvious. "But there's the noise again. What kind of animal, you suppose?"

Over the now audible shuffling sound came a startling clank. The two shared a look.

"Come on," Rasalas whispered.

"Ras," she shot back, her whisper sharp and urgent. "We shouldn't."

He slid around the corner toward the hole, making no noise with his boots. Challis reached for him but completely missed, her vision eclipsed by the black shadow in front of Rasalas' gaze.

"Stop," she hissed. "Or I'll tell father you've been lying to him. "

He froze.

Challis instantly regretted what she'd said. Time and place mattered. Even if the needling voice had come out uncontrolled, at least she could force it down. "Sorry," she said a moment later.

He turned around, almost on top of her. Though the same age, Rasalas was a lot bigger than his sister and nearly a head taller. Challis tried to take a step back, but he only reached out a hand to tip her face up to his.

"Please don't," he said softly.

The clanking noise broke out from behind him again, and both of them turned to look. Rasalas spun back around, threw an arm around Challis, thudded her against the rock wall and shoved himself up against her. He cursed in a panicked whisper, then went completely still.

Challis' blood ran cold as something scooted into view, at least what she could see past Rasalas' arm. A sinewy yellow shape, speckled with a pattern of brown prints. It was heaving backward as it dragged the hapless body of another animal in its jaws. It passed not three feet from the Gannagens, snuffing and growling out of sight into the gilligs.

Neither moved for an uncertain number of breaths, as neither was breathing. The sounds of the jaguar quickly blended into the rainforest, leaving just the pounding of their hearts against their ribs. Challis released a shaky breath first. She fell forward, folding right into Rasalas' arms as easily as she always had. Her brother was there, always warm and solid, muscles constantly twitching as he held her tight. He'd lost so much of the thickness around his middle from years of stable work, Challis realized, and it had all gone into his shoulders and chest. And his head.

"That was…" she began.

"Completely my fault," Rasalas said in a whisper. "Holy nugget, Chall. Next time, let's plan a better hiding spot."

Challis put a hand to her stomach with a wince. The queline had hardened into a layer of malleable coating under her torn shirt, numbing the pain but also pulling at the seams where it was thin around the edges. Her brother's ungentle jostle had resulted in a thin line of red along the top edge where the queline had started to pull at the surrounding skin. She debated whether to add more fresh queline to cover that new tear.

"What's that?" Rasalas peered to the side, then cautiously slid out into the open spot in front of the cave's entrance where the jaguar had been a minute before. He picked something up from the ground and brought it back. "What in the world?"

It was a thin, shiny length of cable, hanging limply over the sides of Rasalas' palm where a thick metal piece studded the center of it. The twins stared in silence at the two knotted ends, gently swinging.

"Can you keep an eye out for me?" Rasalas asked, stepping toward the cave. "In case it comes back."

"I can't be a lookout," she protested, following him closely. "I can't see worth crumbs, remember?"

"You can." He stood looking into the hole in the cliff, one hand on the wall, steady as a warrior of old facing a gate to the underworld. "I’ll have my eyes open but it’s still dark in there. You just need to concentrate on the light."

"It's not as simple as that." Challis sent a fearful look back toward the crisscrossing brown branches blocking them in. "Don't be an idiot. Rasalas?"

But he had vanished into the depths of the cave.

They were everywhere. First, he accidentally kicked one. When he tried to replace his foot, he stepped on another. Rasalas stopped looking around him and turned his gaze down, constantly sweeping his eyes to use his peripheral vision in the dark. A furry shape, as big as the one the jaguar had been dragging, lay sprawled and unmoving in front of him.

He kept his breathing slow, in and out through his mouth. But the smell was so pungent in the air that he could taste it, and it made his eyes water. Looking around at the multitude of shapes, ape-like creatures down to tiny lumps that looked like lizards, Rasalas pulled at his mind to force it up and away. If he could stay rational and distant, the way his father did at any mention of their late mother, then the goosebumps on his arms and the cold feeling in his gut would become mere distractions rather than the voices in charge.

Challis clicked into his mind like a tap on his forehead. Knowing she was there now with him, seeing through his eyes, he took up a slow wander around the cavern. In some places, especially against the walls, bodies lay in piles almost as tall as he was. Others lay alone on the stone floor, and the forced analytical part of Rasalas' brain noted the lack of any decay. Cold and lifeless, yes, but there was no blood, no open wound, no sign of rot even as his eyes grew more and more used to the dark.

More cave openings loomed deeper into the cliff. This one was just an antechamber.

Something gleamed in the darkness off to his right. Reflecting the light of the opening, a flat piece of metal sat on the neck of what looked like a little fox. After a hesitation, Rasalas knelt and reached for it. The metal didn't come away at first, even as he closed his fingers around it and tugged, but a long pull finally slid something off around the dead animal's neck until it swung out beneath Rasalas' hand. He didn't need to take a closer look. Instead, he stood up, staring closer at each body with a distinct focus. Each one had a wire of its own, coiled around its neck or lying near its head. Rasalas closed his eyes tightly against it all, and counted three long breaths.

"We need to go," Challis' voice came. The words would have made Rasalas run for cover for fear of the jaguar's return, except that his sister's tone was gentle, pleading.

"Definitely," he said, his hand gripping the wire. It was cold, and a shiver ran up his arm.

"I mean, we need to leave Polescos. Please, Ras."

He started toward her, his voice grim.

"I know what you meant. And I'm with you."