She ran laughing into the bowels of the city, and Gallen ran beside her, bearing the torch, sometimes touching her shyly. At last they reached a storage chamber and walked down a long corridor. Various implements of unknown intent had been piled along the walls, the machinery of a forgotten age. Enormous capacitor coils rose up for ten meters, sitting like huge thimbles. Spare legs for the hive city were strung from the ceiling. Bits of round, antique flying message pods lay heaped in a pile, and Maggie's mantle warned her to fill her pockets with them so she could disassemble them later. Things that looked like dronon heads made of glass-with three sets of compound eyes-lay in a heap, as if in some distant past the dronon had tried creating androids. Or perhaps, Maggie wondered, there were even now dronon-shaped androids running about in the hive cities. But her mantle whispered that if such things existed, they had never been seen on any world.

Much of what she saw her mantle could understand-bits of cabling, servomotors, a shelf heaped with mechanical brains, outdated egg-warming chambers. These things she would explain to Gallen. Yet much of it was equally mysterious to her. Most of the dronon equipment was bulky, five times as heavy as anything a human would use. The dronon seemed to prefer their machinery to be durable rather than lightweight or convenient.

In one vast chamber, they found what could have only been a spaceship. It was a small vessel, eighty feet long, forty wide, shaped like a Y. Maggie didn't know if she could fly it.

She opened the hatch, went inside, and her mantle whispered to her as she studied the engines. She told Gallen, "This has a gravity-wave drive. We couldn't take it out of the solar system. Still, I'll bet it's fast." She went to the control board. The chairs before the panel were saddle-shaped affairs meant to hold a dronon body, and various foot pedals on the floor looked too intricate for any being with less than four legs to operate. The hand controls were set on a dashboard nearly five feet away and could only be manipulated by something with long arms. Maggie grinned, realizing that this must be an ancient dronon warship, for only the vanquishers with their long battle arms could have worked those controls.

She was giddy with excitement, grinning in wonder. She laughed, then laid back on one of the saddle-shaped chairs and stretched. Gallen set the torch in a groove on the ship's control panel, then turned and looked at her, perplexed. "I've never seen you in this kind of mood before."

"What kind of mood?"

"So ecstatic. So free."

Maggie laughed. "That's because I've never been happy or free before," and she realized that there was more truth in it than she would have dared admit to herself.

"Your smile looks good on you," Gallen said. He swung his leg over the saddle, sat facing her, his legs wrapped around hers. He lay back with his arms folded behind his head. His half-closed eyes looked tired, and the flames from the torch flickered, showing only half of his face. She felt electric, wanted to kiss him now, make love, but Gallen only studied her a moment.

Maggie's mantle whispered for her to get up, look deeper into the storage chambers. She took it off and held it in one hand, not wanting to be distracted by its insistent promptings.

Gallen leaned forward, stroked her jawbone tenderly with his fingers, and kissed her. It was an odd kiss, she thought. It wasn't insistent with desire, nor was it one of the guilty little pecks that Gallen had given her back home. It was slower than dripping honey and tasted just as sweet. It spoke to her, saying, "I love you just as you are, and right now I am content with that."

They held each other and kissed for a few minutes, then Gallen leaned back again, pillowing his head with his hands.

"Damn you, Gallen O'Day," Maggie said. "It took you long enough."

"I suppose it did," Gallen smiled, self-satisfied. "When we get back to Tihrglas, will you marry me?"

Of course I'll marry you, she thought. But then her heart fell. "I'm not going back to Tihrglas."

"Not going back?" Gallen asked.

"Why would I want to go back? What's for me there? You said it yourself not a moment ago. In all my life, you've never seen me so happy. Gallen, how can I begin to explain this-right now, I want to tear this city apart," she said, waving toward the ship and the dronon city around her, "and discover exactly how it works. Like those little dronon message pods. Until two hundred years ago, that was the only form of communication the dronon used. They hadn't discovered radio waves at all, until we showed them. The pods have miniature antigravity drives in them, and no technician that I've ever heard of has disassembled one of the buggers and figured out how it worked. Gallen, I've got a pocket full of dronon technology, and right now I feel as rich as can be. It's amazement and discovery. Here I'm free to learn and grow. I can't get that on Tihrglas. Pick any other world we've been to. I don't care which. I could go back and be happy, but you'll never see me smile again on Tihrglas."

Gallen stumbled over his words. "Maggie, I-we don't belong here. I can't protect you here."

"I don't want your protection," Maggie said. "You asked to be my husband, not my bodyguard."

Her flippant words didn't answer his real concerns, she realized. He was a bodyguard. It came naturally to him. Part of him cried out that at all costs he had to protect those around him, maintain a semblance of order. But in these past few days, they had staggered through so many worlds that he was left confused, overwhelmed. He had not been able to discern the underlying order in the worlds around him, simply because the human societies they had visited were all experimenting and growing, twisting away from any predefined shapes.

"You have your mantle," Maggie said. "It has to be teaching you something. In time, you'll become a Lord Protector, like Veriasse." Or perhaps a frustrated fanatic, like Primary Jagget, she wondered. When Jagget's world had twisted out of shape on him, he had not been able to adapt. He kept calling Wechaus "my world," but it was peopled by folks who over the millennia had become strangers to him.

And suddenly Maggie understood. In his way, Gallen already was a Lord Protector. Back in Tihrglas, he'd planned to run for sheriff of County Morgan, and in a few years he'd have become the Lord Sheriff of all the counties. He'd been born to become the Lord Protector of Tihrglas.

Gallen's eyes misted. After a moment he said softly, "Maybe, maybe I can find a world we could both live with."

Maggie took his hand in hers. "Maybe we can find that world together."

In his dream, Veriasse rode his airbike, speeding over the dull plains of Dronon with Everynne beside him. Ahead were dark clouds, gray as slate. He could hear the distant rumble of thunder. They drove hard toward the sun as it prepared to dip below the clouds, and he passed under the sprawling leg of a dronon hive city. There was so little daylight left that Veriasse despaired of ever making it to the horizon.

The sun dipped below the distant hills, and Veriasse gasped. Grief passed through him as the night descended. Yet suddenly the white sun flared out on the horizon as if it had reversed in its course, blazing across the blasted land, filling him with hope.

The dream was so real that Veriasse stirred, heard a distant rumble, and realized that thunder was brewing on the horizon. He would have gone back to sleep, but Gallen shouted, "Over here! Come over here!"

Everynne stirred from his arms.

Veriasse sat up. Gallen had fired his incendiary rifle into the air. White chemical fire streamed in the sky like a brilliant flare, then arced toward the ground. Gallen and Maggie had come out of the dead hive city and were now standing on a gun mount. They shouted and waved, and Veriasse looked out over the horizon. In the distance, something massive and black moved in the darkness, crawling over the plains, heaving its bloated body along like a gigantic tick. Veriasse could only see it by the lights at its battle stations, lights that glowed in the night like immense red eyes.

The ground shook and rumbled in pain. Veriasse had not heard thunder in his dreams but the sound of a dronon hive city groaning as it pulled itself over the broken earth.

Gallen hooted and shot another round from his rifle, shouting in an exaggerated brogue, "Come on, you lousy bastards! Drag your ass on over here! We're tired of chasing after you!"

The dronon city changed course and began moving toward them, its turrets swiveling as the dronon searched for sign of enemies. Veriasse's heart pounded in his chest. His breath came ragged. They had found the enemy.