Heavy jungle began to behave itself the closer Hannowold approached. Challis could feel the chaos disentangle into more controlled growth, and a more consistent vibe of smooth moss replaced the twisted vines and branches. Soaring flattop trees descended into shorter, fatter varieties that stood radiating out from the city in concentric ripples, and they dismounted behind the last rise.

Challis flung herself gracelessly from the saddle, shaking off the feel of the horse beneath her as well as the feel of Drunnel behind her. It was safest if she sat in front, he had insisted, while his arms had to reach around her to hold the reins. The thought of his breathing over her shoulder the entire way back too brought on a cold sweat.

A warbling bird masked their approach as they crouched up onto the rise of earth. Drunnel pulled the horse behind him and followed Challis, who bent forward to walk on her hands and toes on the spongy slope. Tree roots emerged in ropy clumps and provided solid enough footholds if she took the time to find them. No need to slip and skate back into the Director like a runaway toboggan. She kept her senses wide open, then stopped just short of the ridge with a gasp.

"What is it?" he asked in a throaty whisper. He had his gun strapped to his thigh, and laid his hand on it while sweeping his eyes around the night-soaked landscape.

Her head still down, Challis turned her voice toward him. "What was that about Brumelo swamping the place?"

"What? Why?" He crawled up beside her, and his long exhalation of awe confirmed Challis' feelings.

A grassy slope swept down before them to meet the rugged panorama of Hannowold's cityscape. Tall, warped structures wound away into the distance, a mazelike formation as if huge fingers had poked trailing lines into a mud puddle and let it dry. These glowed with pale green. Lumpy edifices that could hardly be called buildings stood between them in clusters, connected by sleek gleaming overpasses that cut through them like shish-kebabs.

Flat openings were slitted into every vertical surface, and Drunnel thought that if he shone a light at the city it would penetrate all the way through the sieve holes to the other side. Where light escaped from inside the buildings, the edges were fuzzed. When Drunnel mentioned that, Challis realized that Hannowold was indeed coated with moss, at least it would seem from this distance. The structures must have had heavy leafy greenery sticking to all outside surfaces like fur.

A wall, twice the height of a man, meandered around the circumference of the city. And sticking straight up from it, a transparent shimmering green shell with a top edge that didn't fade into the night until it was two hundred feet in the air.

Drunnel swore.

"I've never seen such monstrous… Brumelosity," he growled when he had finished. "Look at it. It's like a huge moldy circuit board."

"Brumelo city is right," Challis breathed. "I thought Hannowold was neutral territory."

"You were wrong. It's an army base, not its own isolated province." Drunnel turned his back to the lights and sat down on the slope, muttering to himself. "You're a damn fool, Haske. We've probably alerted any number of passive trigger mechanisms."

Challis paused before asking, "You mean… tripwires?"

He didn't answer. Challis heard him fiddling with some small gadget, and turned her attention back toward the city. A strong meshwork of energy pulsed in a million tiny spots, closer and farther, as she swept her mental gaze around. An almost violent freshness seemed to pour into her lungs and ground her to the earth. She wanted to take her boots off, to run and dance on that fertile terrain. The tripwire itself buzzed sparse and cold in comparison.

She rubbed her arms up under her loose sleeves, the leather edges of her wrist braces scraping at goosebumps.

"Come on," he brought her back into the moment. "We'll take a loop as far as we can and get closer if possible. I've got all sensors on for any sort of high-energy reading, though I'm not sure I can program it well past that outside shield. What we really need is a bird's-eye flyover, if only… but it can't be helped. Stay sharp, and alert me the second something seems wrong. Alright?"

"I think so."

"Listen to me," he said closely, his voice in a hoarse whisper. "You're on private assignment now. From here on out, it'll be orders, not suggestions."

"Got it."

"If something happens, that could make the difference between whether or not we get out alive. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir."

When he seemed like he was finished, Challis pushed her hair up into a tail and swiftly tied it, a thrill trembling through her fingers. She grabbed the tripwire knots. "I'm going to take the wire."

It zapped through her, easy as winking, and whirled between her fists as its energy charged her brain into high voltage. The spray of light almost knocked her over, and she cried out.

"Hell on wheels," Drunnel choked and tackled her flat onto her back, his hand clapped over her mouth. "Be quiet. What's wrong with you?"

Challis dug at his fingers until he took them away. Efflux energies flowed in rapid succession as her mind outlined Drunnel, the horse, and a fresh awareness from the direction of the city. But the image of sparks clung to her eyelids, vivid and bright. "I just –" she stammered, then shook her head. "I thought I… nothing. Sorry."

"Not another sound," he hissed. "Give me that tripwire. I'm going to chug it myself before we recharge it."

She obeyed and tried not to react to the crackling rush of static electricity that seemed to fill the air around Drunnel as he imitated her tripwire move. He handed it back without a word and tugged her sleeve to follow him back down the slope where the horse waited. Challis wiped the wire on the fabric of her trousers before putting it back on.

The tended moss was thick enough to hide any footprints, and they kept to the shadows. Night drifted cool through the rise and fall of the slopes, and for a long time the trek went on in a restless silence that contrasted the distant sounds of activity inside the walls.

The horse let out a whiffle. Challis swallowed him up in her mind, though keeping her distance from him.

"What's the horse's name?" she whispered across to Drunnel. His annoyance pricked into her.

"Brigadier. Treat him with respect, too."

"Brigadier is smelling other horses. Do you think they could be ours?"

"Possibly. Let's get up on that rise and get a better look." They scaled a ridge and tried to melt into the grass as they crept toward the copse of trees on top. From here, a slight buzzing noise carried up the slope to them from the translucent shield wall of the city. Challis got a vague idea of sniper slits in the stone wall beneath it and wondered if there were eyes on her.

On the other side of the wall, in front of the first tall buildings, Drunnel described the sight of long low structures hunched in rows and mostly unlit. Stables, or perhaps soldier barracks, he couldn't tell. Two or three miles further around, the land rose even higher until it led straight out onto one of the extended peninsulas that wormed its way into the city space and effectively separated it into divisions. The stone wall around the city melted into the sides of the peninsula instead of following the shape of the landscape up and over it. The green translucent shell, however, shot straight up out of the ground and continued on top of the wall on the other side of the promontory with no regard for the interruption.

"Interesting," was all Drunnel said when they observed that.

The wilder rainforest drifted in closer to the wall as they continued around Hannowold's circumference, just before the ground vanished into ravine. Here, Challis led the way through rougher terrain and mindswept the area for patrol stations. She halted in midstep over a thick tree root and turned back toward Drunnel, frowning.

"Report," he whispered in her silence.

"Something," she began, "not horses. But there's a lot of them."

In response, a howl rose up from the nearby jungle, followed by another. They seemed to come from back where Challis and Drunnel had just trekked. Challis' foot slipped at the noise and she swallowed down the fear gripping vice-like around her windpipe. Drunnel let out a curse that was covered by Brigadier's shuffling whinny.

"On the horse," he commanded, tucking away Tofflar's holostrap. "We keep moving."

"Into the ravine?" Challis started to object, but Brigadier thumped up close enough to nose her elbow. "Right. Yes, sir." She stirruped her boot, grabbed the saddle, and lifted herself up with a bound onto Brigadier's back. Drunnel crowded in behind her, pushing her gracelessly forward until she hit the saddle's horn. He got the stirrups. He was still enfolding her too close for comfort, and Challis tightened herself into the smallest package she could while his arms reached around to work the reins. She shuddered at the feel of his heartbeat.

A broad swathe of open air started to close in on them as they dropped into Dogoby's Reach. Challis tried to relax instead of leaning to the side as Drunnel led the horse down at a shallow angle, turning sharply to slope down the other way, back and forth. The muscles of her stomach still clenched and twisted in reaction to the unseen changes in direction.

"Oh, look," she said suddenly in a whisper that made Drunnel stiffen.

"It's the middle of the night, Challis," he said, though he strained to see back up the slope they had descended. "We being followed?"

"No, sir, but the city-side wall of the ravine, it's –" Challis searched for the right word, "it's tunneled. Openings in the cliff. If Hannowold was a tub full of water, those would be the drain pipes."

She spread her mind out over the whole surface of the steep stretch up to where the city hovered on its brink. Pockmarked into the surface, hole after hole expanded in her awareness, each slanting up toward what must be the underside of the military city. A pang of reminder of the cliffsides in Oedolon broke her concentration, and Challis was torn back to her squished seat on the saddle and its ridges digging into her bones.

"Are they guarded?" Drunnel asked, his voice tickling just behind her ear as if whispering a secret. Challis gave a sharp movement of her head so her skull bonked into his nose. His breathy grunt of pain brought a moment of rare satisfaction, and she felt up toward the openings again.

"Not by people," she said finally. "Though I'd expect them to be monitored by some sort of technological security or…"

"Tripwires."

"Maybe."

"I wonder what they're for."

Brigadier pushed along an uncharted pathway through the depths of the Reach, back toward the cave where the others waited. Challis gave Hannowold one last sweepover, as it were, her face aimed at the city now high above her. The density of energy from a cityful of people, hostile or not, was pulling at her enough that she couldn't stand to leave without getting one last look.

Her patch buzzed at the same time as something swarmed over her vision, a jarring cluster of colors. She blinked it away, a shiver running through her as she brought one hand up to cover the vitasnaps. A thought struck her.

Drunnel pulled the reins hard enough to stop the horse completely. His whisper was furious.

"Don't you dare," he said. "Get out."

Challis came back into her own mind with a disorienting yank. "Apologies." She tightened her grip on the saddle. "I was testing a theory."

"No theory justifies you getting into my head without explicit permission."

Challis found that she was smiling despite herself, despite Drunnel, despite the fact that they could still be sniped down like rabbits at any moment. She had seen something.

Knowing Drunnel would be upset with her, but unwilling to wait, she shot her mind up at Hannowold again until she snagged someone else, a Cormellican member from her own FHF crowd. She jumped into his vision like a child into a puddle.

A long, low room swelled in front of her, piercingly bright. Strips of luminescent green screamed for attention off to the side, and Challis had to jerk away before the sight blinded her.

Darkness swarmed over her once again, currents of energy piecing together her surroundings as if nothing had happened.

"I said, is that clear?" Drunnel's voice prodded at her again, dull and numb around the edges compared to what she was feeling at that moment. "Challis."

"Yes. Whatever you say, Director."

He scowled at the Tofflarism. Not much more than a shadow, Challis was faintly illuminated from above by the outer shield of Hannowold. Drunnel could see the bright orange patch on her neck glittering, reflecting off the section of tripwire that covered a corner of it.

Gannagens, he sighed to himself. There really was no stopping them.

"Okay," he muttered, tapping Brigadier with his heels again. They needed to get back to the others. "You got something to say, then say it. Be quick."

"I just need to look around," she said. "If I try to climb down, stop me."

"Are you out of your mind?"

"I will be in a second."

Confusion stopped his words in their tracks. Drunnel went quiet as Challis looked up toward the city again, pressing a hand to her forehead.

She pushed her mind forward with all the concentration she could muster, shunting it up the ravine and through the wall to the other side. She reached deep into the city, and her mind net condensed into a single darting column of focus. Streaks of electrical atmosphere shot past as if she were flying through the air, then a hardy upward thrust to scale a vertical surface. One of Hannowold's building structures loomed up in front of her. A pinpoint of distinctly Cormellican energy lit up, and she went straight for it without hesitation.

* * *

Chief Bosk blinked fully awake, an uncanny feeling that he was being watched dropping onto him. He swung around to sit up. No one in sight. Still, he buttoned his shirt with all the haste of someone who knew that he wasn't alone.

He kneaded his forehead and put himself back onto the straight track of rational thought with the help of a deep breath. One hand pulled down his sleeve and flicked open the display from his holostrap. Almost eighteenth bell, and still no word back from the city's Interrelations Manager. He hadn't gotten updates from his primary pterosaur captain either, or the Director-in-chief. Without the Haskes, and without direct communication to his other officers – he rubbed his eyes tiredly – the expedition's main delegations had fallen back onto his shoulders.

He stood and crossed over to the window overlooking the city. The lights made the distinctive mounds of Hannowold glow from the inside as if they were huge slitted lanterns. The sight seemed to shrink him down to insignificance even as he stood staring. His quarters were roomy, if sparse, but he couldn't shake the feeling that he was in a cell. A long-term one, possibly. The city council was more concerned with the new battlefield tech of its tenant military than with him and his campaign, even despite the influx of prime Oedolon pterosaurs that the FHF had brought with them. It must be some nice tech. The only other reason he could think of was a far more sinister one.

His hands ran along the faintly glowing window ledge, smoothing away fingerprints in subconscious, mechanical movements. Perhaps it was for the best. The city's government stemmed from its army operations, after all. Perhaps the less attention on him, and his expedition, the better.

Bosk turned and traveled the absurd distance across the room with nothing to fill it except his thoughts and a dark blue rug that lit up where his feet touched it. The door handle, when jiggled, remained stubbornly locked. A cell, indeed. He pressed his thumb on the wall panel beside the door.

"Speaking," said a young man's voice from the panel, broken by static as if coming through miles of wire but still sounding bored. "Can I help you?"

"This is Luthio Bosk," he said, forcing a patient tone. "I need you to put me through to one of the building managers who can tell me exactly what the –"

"You are not permitted to leave your quarters," the voice continued. "Mid-month Wenhower district procedures sanction a civilian curfew at fifteen hours. If you wish to leave a notice for the…"

"Send Officer Lars to my quarters, then," Bosk said loudly, talking over the monotone.

"Major General Metterick Lars is not available. If you wish to leave a notice for the…"

"Send Director Haske, then. Or Lieutenant Nadari. Any one of the excursion party officers will do. We're not civilians, so hold off on that curfew claptrap."

"Zero communication with your holding is authorized until further notice," the voice said after an uneasy pause, as if reluctant to break the truth.

Bosk took the edges of the panel in his hands. "By whose authority?" he demanded of the little green screen.

"Major General Metterick Lars."

The rug shuffed under his feet, almost tripping him until he turned to visit the window again.

He was not a suspicious man. But his gaze roamed unseeing over the city for a long minute while the gears turned. His reflection showed the yellowing Cormellican patch above his collarbone.

A dull click sounded. Bosk turned, but the room was still empty. Perhaps it was just his imagination, he thought as he sat down wearily on the cot again. He couldn't afford to go crazy, not yet. There were people who needed his confidence, his leadership, and his vision.