"Why don't you just burn it all?"

For the first time in a while Skellor opened his human eyes and looked across the control room to Aphran — tangled in a tree of Jain architecture that had lifted her out of her seat while he had tormented her. It surprised him that she still had enough mind left to pose such a question, as she had become so fragmented it had been necessary for him to disconnect her from any form of control.

"Because I want him. He is the arrogance of the Polity and ECS, and I want him exactly where you are now. I want him to see how wrong he is, to know how foolish it was to frustrate me."

Even though she could no longer act as a submind, he had not yet wholly disconnected her from himself. He could feel her fighting not to speak, not to let what she was thinking flow into communication. And as she fought he felt her separate into two Aphrans: the one who repeated endlessly, "I love you I love you I love you," and the one that now opened the mouth of the naked and ripped human body twisted between ligneous trunks, and spoke in a rusty gulping voice.

"Direct-linked to a crystal matrix AI… able to calculate U-space co-ordinates… able to control nanotechnology bare-brained… retarded child… idiot savant…"

With crystalline scum breaking away from his lips, Skellor opened his mouth and attempted to speak too. When nothing happened he looked at himself internally and realized how much of his human body he had neglected, and with a thought he started repairs. Soon his mouth moistened and he could more easily move his tongue and lips. However, vocal speech only became possible when he started breathing again.

"Why… do you say that? You know what I can do to you."

"I love you I love you I love you…"

"It is true… you have the power to destroy and to build on a vast scale, yet your priority is merely to capture one ECS agent so you can say to him, 'Look at me now, aren't I clever, don't you wish you'd been nicer to me? … It's pathetic."

Skellor twisted the Jain tree tighter around her, and she hissed in agony transmitted directly down her nerves.

"Please please please please…"

"Your need to grow is so strong, Skellor, because you are actually so small. You need to control minds so absolutely, because minds uncontrolled are free to see you as you really are."

Skellor suddenly felt fear: she remained so coherent yet he was pumping such agony into her body she must now imagine herself being skinned with white-hot scalpels. He instantly shut down on what he was doing to her and, through the mycelial structures netting the inside of her body and her brain, he gave her an intense forensic inspection. Immediately he observed that it was that other Aphran who was experiencing the pain: the animal, the primordial reptile. Somehow she had separated out the core of her intelligence, somehow… suddenly he also realized that there were blank areas inside her, where Jain mycelia went but where he could not sense.

"Not quite so much control as you thought," said Aphran, opening eyes dark with blood, and turning her head so she could study him.

Skellor's reaction was like a whiplash. At the same time as the Jain architecture wound itself closed, crushing and bursting Aphran's body, he concentrated heat through superconducting filaments and pumped pure oxygen through nanoscopic pipes. Broken and coming apart, Aphran suddenly flared magnesium-bright; and when Skellor adjusted for the loss of rods and cones in his eyes, and cleared the afterimages, he saw all that physically remained of her was black smoke congealing in the air. But he could not shake an echo of laughter through a structure that, in that instant, had become as alien to him as it had always been.

The explosion had flung him to the ground and mauled him through thick vegetation, before showering him with a foul mixture of heat-softened rhizomes and mud. Sitting up in that mess, as tendrils of fire flared weirdly through the night sky pursuing escaping oxygen, Molat changed his paper mask yet again, and did not have to look far to realize that he had been lucky.

One of the three soldiers who had been standing behind him had caught one of those flares even as he ran, so that from the back of his head down to his ankles his clothing had been burnt away and his skin charred black. The only part not burnt was that area of flesh underneath the scoured oxygen bottle and the ribbed pipe that snaked round to his mask. Whether or not this man was luckier than another soldier further back, who was a coiled ashen sculpture and quite obviously dead, Molat could not really judge. When the man groaned, and rolled partially to his side to look up at Molat — black skin opening red cracks which immediately began to ooze — the Proctor just wanted to get up and run away.

"That was close," the burned man said, "but God has been kind." He reached round to grope for a fresh mask from the pack attached beside his oxygen bottle. When his fingers encountered bare metal and ash, his expression turned puzzled until, in his groping around, he managed to slough away a hand-sized crust of his own skin. Then his eyes grew wide, and he started to make a horrible keening sound.

Molat closed his eyes and turned away. He wanted to vomit, but his mouth was cast in ceramic and his stomach a ball of lead. With eyes closed he heard the familiar clatter of a rail-gun nearby, the abrupt cessation of the keening, and felt something spatter against his chest. Knowing exactly what had happened, he pushed himself upright, only glancing briefly at the corpse that now lay beside him with half its head gone, and turned to Speelan who was holding the weapon with its cable fully extended from the power pack on the one surviving soldier's belt.

Handing the weapon back to the soldier, Speelan said, "Let's get moving."

Molat asked, "Get going where?"

Aberil now walked into the light cast from the still-glowing wreckage of the landers. As he looked Molat up and down, the Proctor noticed that something, perhaps a fragment of hot metal, had carved a neat coin of flesh out of Aberil's cheekbone, leaving a bloodless wound like a third eye.

"We need to find the Outlinker. Jerrick here" — Aberil gestured to the surviving soldier — "will locate his tracks and we will hunt him down."

"But why?" asked Molat.

"Because I say so," growled Aberil. Then, perhaps noting Speelan's questioning expression, he pointed a finger up into the night and added, "And because that creature up there wanted him for some reason, so he may prove useful to us. We are here now, and by God we are here now for a reason."

Molat averted his eyes from the rampant fanaticism. Personally, he would rather run off and find a hole to crawl into, but he seriously doubted Aberil would let him do that. Removing first from the front of his shirt a piece of scalp with fragments of skull still clinging inside it, he began to trudge after the other three as they moved off.