Abruptly the dawn chorus ended as the sun's rays flicked up and over the surrounding ridges and lit the ravine. She sagged against the hands that held her, limp, weeping because the itch was back, intensified. The compulsion to seek crystal, however, had eased. Wearily, she rubbed sweat and tears from her face on the quilt beneath her.

"Let me up, Lars," she said dully.

He kept his grip a moment longer, and then his fingers slowly released her wrists and he slid off her.

"Sorry about that, Killa, but you know I was right."

"Yes, I know," she replied, absently rubbing her wrists before she elbowed herself to a sitting position. "You're sneakier than an Altairian tangier," she said nastily. But the purely physical aches distracted her nerves from the interior throb of crystal sting.

A mug of some warm liquid was thrust at her.

"Drink this. Stuffed full of stimulants," Lars said, and she obeyed.

The beverage coursed down her gullet and seemed to find an immediate path to her armpits and stomach, radiating out from those points to her extremities.

"Thanks, Lars," she said.

He ruffled her hair. "That's my Sunny!"

"I am not your Sunny," she said, shooting him a brief, dark scowl of denial.

"No, you're not much like my Sunny, are you?" his voice had gone expressionless again.

She tried not to care, but perhaps it was as well. "We're here to cut, aren't we? Let's do it."

Stiffly she got to her feet and walked as firmly as she could to the cutter rack. The weight of the tool was almost more than her flaccid arm could support, but just as Lars's hand came to her assistance, she managed to heave the cutter strap on to her shoulder.

"Let's go."

As she descended from the sled on to the rock– and shard-strewn ground, she was vaguely aware that he had slung more than his cutter to his shoulder. By the time she had scrambled to the rock face only fifteen meters from the sled, she was panting with exertion. She paused long enough to catch her breath to sing. She chose an A; heard Lars sing out in C and the face echo it back. Not a strong rebound but enough to encourage her. With her hand flat on the rock, she tried to find the source of the echo.

"It's stronger over here," Lars said, and she closed the distance between them with a leap. "Don't break a leg!" he shouted.

She sang A again, and the reverberation rippled through her hand.

"Easy, girl," he said, but she was too busy tuning her cutter.

Old habit guided them both, and Killa managed to hold her cutter against the buck of the subsonic blade through the crystal that had lain hidden since the tectonic pressures had formed it.

"Hold it steady!" Lars's voice penetrated her cutting fever and steadied her just enough so that their initial cut was true. Lars did the underslice as Killa held out eager hands to receive the excision. Her fingers clawed it free, ignoring the lacerations, and she held it up—a form in green, clear and solid.

Sunlight caught it, making it sing in her hands. The shaft sang on and on, its sound coruscating through her skin to bone and blood, flowing down her arms to her body, through her body to her legs, flowing and blotting out the sting with its resonance, leeching the agony of her long absence from the crystal that rejuvenated her.

When someone wrenched the shaft from her, she screamed and received a hard slap across her face; she dropped to the ground, bruising her knees on the scattered crystal debris.

" Killa! You've been thralled!" Lars's voice caught her just as she was about to launch herself at him, a formless silhouette in the haze beyond her crystal rapture.

Slowly she got to her feet, crawling her hands arduously up her legs to straighten a body shaking with fatigue and the residue of thrall. Lars reached out to support her, one hand gently brushing dirt and sweat from her face. Instinctively she leaned into his body, accepting support, unconsciously entreating sympathy, and his arms closed about her, his chin on her head, as they had so often stood after a good cutting.

"There, there, Sunny," he said, patting her shoulder and cuddling her. "You needed that. Feel somewhat better?" he asked, tipping her head back and looking down into her haggard face.

"How long did you let thrall last?" she asked, aware of her incredible weariness.

"Considering your condition," he said with a laugh, "most of the day,"

She pushed away from him. "You mean, you let me thrall all day long when I could have been cutting? An hour or so at most would have been enough."

He stepped back from her ire, grinning more broadly now, holding up his hands in mock appeal. "That's more like my Sunny."

"I'm not your Sunny," she said, needing to rant and rave herself back to a more normal humor than the limp and nauseating lug she knew she had been.

"Well, then, it's a good deep green, and I cut around you, in case you didn't hear, locked in that thrall."

She both hated and admired Lars in this sort of a mood: far too amenable, far too effective, far too . . . right! Shard his soul!

Glaring at him, she sang out a high C, lost it for lack of support in her weakened condition, set her diaphragm muscles, and sang it again. She could hear his A an octave below. The green resonated, and their blades touched its bright surface as one.

When they had excised five shafts, Lars refused to let her pitch for more. He even refused to let her help him carry the carton back to the sled. When they got back and had racked their cutters, he insisted that she needed to wash, however briefly, and when she was obviously unable to stand up under the dribble coming from the shower head, he undressed, too, and supported her.

He made her lie down under the quilt while, buff naked, he made a quick meal for them both. She managed to spoon it into her, but the effort was all she had left and he caught the sagging plate before it tipped over on to the quilt.

"Can't mess it up. It's the only one we've got."

She tried to think of a smart reply to that. Honor demanded that she not let Lars get away with the last word today, but she fell asleep before she could think of something appropriately scathing.

Crystal song woke her and, aware of the warmth of the body beside her, she turned, eager for the benison of relief. She matched the eagerness of her partner, accepting and returning the passion she found. The gentleness and tenderness he displayed reminded her of Shad, and yet, as she opened her eyes, it wasn't Shad's engagingly innocent face that she saw. It was Lars Dahl's.

He gazed down at her for a long moment, his blue eyes dark with unspoken words as he searched her face. When she gave a little impatient twitch, he moved away.

"A better day today, isn't it, Sunny?" he said noncommittally.

"Yes, it is," she said with an equal lack of emphasis as she snagged her clothes from the floor.

It was easy to fall into the old habits. She might rail silently at finding herself accepting their former routine, but it helped. They didn't have much to discuss. Except the cutting.

"We shouldn't stay here," she said after they had finished eating. "Green's not black, and that's what we're after."

"Feeling up to it?" he asked offhandedly.

She shrugged. "I'd rather waste time on looking than on cutting."

"Green's easier to cut to get back into the swing of it."

"Ha! I'm back already."

He cocked an eyebrow at her. "When thrall can hold you for hours?"

"That," she said, snapping her words out, "was your fault. I wouldn't have needed more than an hour."

"Ha!" He mimicked her.

But they were already, out of long habit, setting the cabin of the sled to rights to take off.

They bickered with some heat and contempt for the first hour in the air. Some equity was reached when they came across another worn paint mark that bore enough resemblance to one of the released ones for them to land. But as they were surveying the canyons, they caught sight of a sled in one of the gorges and quickly left the area, Killa swearing under her breath.