But where was the danger?

She held her fingers up before her face, trying to judge the spacing and pattern of the vortex lines. Were they drifting, becoming unstable?

Twice already in Thea’s short life, the Star had been struck by Glitches — starquakes. During a Glitch, the vortex lines would come sliding up through the Air, infinite and deadly, scything through the soft matter of the Crust forest — and humans, and their belongings — as if they were no more substantial than spoiled Air-pig meat…

But today the lines of quantized spin looked stable: only the regular cycles of bunching which humans used to count their time marred the lines’ stately progress.

Then what? A spin-spider, perhaps? But spiders lived in the open Air, building their webs across the vortex lines; they wouldn’t venture into the forest.

She saw Lur, now; her sister was trying to Wave towards her, obviously panicking, her limbs uncoordinated, thrashing at the Magfield. Lur was pointing past Thea, still shouting something—

There was a breath of Air at Thea’s back. A faint shadow.

She shifted her head to the right, feeling the lip of her cocoon scratch her bare skin.

A ray, no more than two mansheights away, slid softly towards her.

Thea froze. Rays were among the forest’s deadliest predators. She couldn’t possibly get out of the cocoon and away in time — her only hope was to stay still and pray that the ray didn’t notice she was here…

The ray was a translucent cloud a mansheight across. It was built around a thin, cylindrical spine, and six tiny, spherical eyes ringed the babyish maw set into its sketch of a face. The fins were six wide, thin sheets spaced evenly around the body; the fins rippled as the ray moved, electron gas sparkling around their leading edges. The flesh was almost transparent, and Thea could see shadowy fragments of some meal passing along the ray’s cylindrical gut.

The ray came within a mansheight of her. It slowed. She held her breath and willed her limbs into stillness.

I might live through this yet…

Then — with ghastly, heart-stopping slowness — the ray swiveled its hexagon of eyes towards her, unmistakably locking onto her face.

She closed her eyes. Perhaps if she didn’t struggle it would be quicker…

Then, he came.

There was a blue-white flash: a pillar of electron light that penetrated even her closed eyecups, and ripped through the encroaching silver-gray shadow of the ray.

She cried out. It was the first sound she had made since waking into this nightmare, she realized dully.

She opened her eyes. The ray had pulled away from her and was twisting in the air. The ray was being attacked, she saw, disbelieving: a bolt of electron light swept down through the Air and slanted into the ray’s misty structure, leaving the broad fins in crudely torn shreds. The ray emitted a high, thin keening; it tried to twist its head around to tear into this light-demon—

No, Thea saw now; this was no bolt of light, no demon: this was a man, a man who had wrapped his arms around the thin torso of the ray and was squeezing it, crushing the life out of the creature even as she watched.

She hung in her cocoon, even her fear dissolving in wonder. It was a man, true, but like no man she’d seen before. Instead of ropes and ponchos of Air-pig leather, this stranger wore an enclosing suit of some supple, silver-black substance that crackled with electron gas as he moved. Even his head was enclosed, with a clear plate before his face. There was a blade — a sword, of the same gleaming substance as the suit — tucked into his belt.

The ray stopped struggling. Fragments of half-digested leaf matter spewed from its gaping mouth, and its eyestalks folded in towards the center of its face.

The man pushed the corpse away from him. For a moment his shoulders seemed to hunch, as if he were weary; with gloved hands he brushed at his suit, dislodging shreds of ray flesh which clung there.

Thea stared, still in her cocoon, unable to take her eyes from his shimmering movements.

Now the man turned to Thea. With a single, feathery beat of his legs he Waved to her. The suit was of some black material inlaid with silvery whirls and threads. Apart from a large seam down the front of the chest, the suit was an unbroken whole, complete like an spin-spider eggshell. Behind the half-reflective helmet plate she could see a face — surprisingly thin, with two dark eyecups. When he spoke, his voice was harsh, but sounded as natural as if he were one of her own people.

“Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

Before Thea could answer Lur came Waving clumsily out of the sky, her small breasts shaking. Lur grabbed at Thea’s cocoon and clung to it, burying her face in Thea’s neck, sobbing.

Thea saw the stranger’s shadowed gaze slice over Lur’s body with analytical interest.

Thea encompassed Lur’s shoulders in her arms. She kept her eyes fixed on the man’s face. “Are you real? I mean — are you him? The Hero?”

Was it possible?

He looked at her and smiled obscurely, his face indistinct in the shadows of his suit.

She tried to analyze her feelings. As a child, when she’d envisaged this impossible moment — of the actual arrival of the Hero, from out of nowhere to help her — she’d always imagined a feeling of safety: that she would be able to immerse herself in the Hero’s massive, comforting presence.

But it wasn’t like that. With his face half-masked the Hero wasn’t comforting at all. In fact he seemed barely human, she realized.

Behind the translucent pane, the Hero’s eyes returned to Lur, calculating.

Her father wept.

Wesa’s thin, tired face, under its thatch of prematurely yellowed hair-tubes, was twisted with anguish. “I couldn’t reach you. I could see what was happening, but—”

Embarrassed, she submitted to his embrace. Wesa’s thin voice, with its words of self-justification, had less to do with her safety than with working out his own shock and shame, she realized.

As soon as she could, she got away from her father’s clinging grasp.

Her people were clustered around the Hero.

The Hero ran a gloved thumb down the seam set in the suit’s chest panel; the suit opened. He peeled it off whole, as if he were shedding a layer of skin. Under the suit he wore only gray undershorts, and his skin was quite sallow. He was much thinner than he’d seemed inside the suit, although his muscles were hard knots.

Thea felt repelled. Just a man, then. Is that all there is to it? And an old man, too, with yellowed hair-tubes and sunken, wrinkled face — older than anyone in her tribe, she realized.

He passed the suit to Wesa. Thea’s father took the ungainly thing and tied it carefully to a tree branch. Suspended there, its empty limbs dangling and its chest sunken and billowing, the suit looked still more grotesque and menacing — like a boned man, she thought.

Wesa — and Lur, and some of the others — clustered around the Hero again, bringing him food. Some of their prime food, too, the most recent of the Air-pig cuts.

The Hero crammed the food into his wizened mouth, grinning.

Later, the Hero donned his suit and went up into the forest, towards the root ceiling, alone. When he returned, he dragged a huge Air-pig after him.

The people — Lur and Wesa among them — clustered around again, patting at the fat Air-pig. The Air-pig’s body was a rough cylinder; now, in its terror, its six eyestalks were fully extended, and its huge, basking maw was pursed up closed. Futile jetfarts clouded the Air around it.

It would have taken a team of men and women days to have a chance of returning with such a catch.

Even through his faceplate Thea could see the Hero’s grin, as the people praised him.