He knew the bumps meant smashed bones, organs, spurting gouts of fluids lost into the soil. Agony, screams, the light fading behind terrified eyes.

None of them moved as Cliff then backed all the way out and drove around the whole mess. No point in checking to see if anyone survived.

Irma said, “The other car’s gotten free, too. Looks like they have a Sil driving.”

“My mate,” Quert said quietly. “She fine. Drive hard.” Cliff glanced at the alien, who seemed as quiet and calm as ever.

Terry was in the other car and waved at them, holding thumbs-up. “They must’ve done something similar,” Aybe said quietly. “Wasn’t watching…”

Cliff amped the acceleration and had them up to max speed by the time the cars and bodies were just a dot in his side rearview screen. He was surprised that he did not need to think much at all about what had happened. The three-car team had tried to grab those he cared about and were willing to use force to do it. That meant they had crossed a line.

Cliff had spent endless days stacking and processing bodies, and now knew he was not the same man. He had done what he had to and had not taken any time to think it through. Before he came down to the Bowl, he had been another sort of man entirely. This place had taught him a lot, and most of it he could not say but perhaps comprehended it better that way. It was in his nervous system now, experience digested and made part of himself.

Maybe that was what Quert had. Indeed, maybe the Sil had it without having to learn. In the silence of the magcar he felt himself relax. The mountains ahead loomed large now beneath their mantle of anvil clouds, bellies ripe with purple richness, ready to rain as they climbed the slopes. Already he looked forward to that. He would get out of the car and let the falling big drops hammer him with their wealth and feel each moment for what it was, for the joy of it entire.

“Those wanted capture,” Quert said.

“I figured that,” Irma said. “Killing us is easier.”

“Our chances would be not good in their tender care,” Cliff said.

“Give us to the Folk, show loyalty.” Quert made a head-shrug.

“So … you killed them,” Irma said.

Cliff nodded. “Probably so.”

Irma let that ride and then said, “They would have gotten in their cars and come after us.”

Cliff thought that was obvious and kept his attention on their rearviews and the mountains ahead. No visible pursuit. He reminded himself that attack could easily come from above. A skyfish could be hovering a kilometer up and—he glanced out the window—not obvious until it was too late. Worrying isn’t thinking, he thought, using a saying he had honed in the long, unending days of pursuit when they were first on the run across the Bowl. Perpetual alert could degenerate into a floating anxiety that robbed the mind of concentration, sent it skittering into pointless knots. Not returning to the same damn subject was a learned skill, he saw.

“Where do we go now?” he said directly to Quert.

“Into cold.”

EIGHTEEN

They went under the mountains, not up them.

Before entering the underground maze, Cliff looked down through a short pass at the lands beyond the lofty mountains. Beyond lay the first mirror zone he had ever seen. Big hexagonal patterns gave some sparkling side-scatter of sunlight. They filled a valley and dotted the hills above. Lush vegetation filled the spaces between, but clearly most of the sunlight reflected back at the star. This was how the Bowl fueled the jet that boiled up from the hot arc light inferno at the center of the stellar disk. Expanses of mirrors, incomprehensible in scale, focused on the central fury. Somehow, the SunSeeker engineers said, magnetic fields got drawn into the perpetual hellhole. These fed outward with the jet as it escaped the focal point. The brilliant plasma billowed out at its base, and then the magnetic fields gripping it in rubbery embrace disciplined the flow, narrowing it. By the time the luminous jet reached the Bowl’s Knothole, it passed through easily without brushing the heavily armored walls.

As he watched the enormous sheets of reflecting metal in the distance, Cliff mused that this was how the star provided its own thrust, from sunlight that first bounced off the hexagonal mirrors, returned to its parent source, and propelled the jet. Riding on light, he thought, and held his phone up to the star itself, letting the device consider it. In a moment, the back panel said

K2 STAR. SIMILAR TO EPSILON ERIDANI (K2 V). INTERMEDIATE IN SIZE BETWEEN RED M-TYPE MAIN-SEQUENCE STARS AND YELLOW G-TYPE MAIN-SEQUENCE STARS.

Yet he recalled the watch officer who revived him had said it was an F star. It had turned out later that the spectrograph was saturated by the hot spot glare, and got its signatures wrong. Classic field error.

And indeed the star seen through the phone’s polarizer was a troubled disk, speckled by dark blots that circled the base where the jet blossomed. The whole star rotated around the jet base, which meant the builders had started their mammoth final touch there, perching the Bowl as a cup high above the original star’s pole. Fascinating to consider—

“Come!” Cliff noticed Quert glance back at him with irritation, eyes jouncing in the Sil way. He rushed to catch up with the others.

Their party neared the underground labyrinth and found they were not alone. There were zigzag trees in dense blue green forests near the entrance. Sil moved under the canopy, bands trotting with deft speed. They kept to well-defined bunches, entering the weaving corridors under the stony flanks. The corridor’s external locks yawned. Even in the rock hallways, yellow orange plants hung, emitting light to guide the constant line of Sils and humans. The Sil barely glanced at the humans. Quert and mate moved together in the swift shuffle Sil used, like loping in light gravity, as easy as swimming in air. All in silence.

Cliff saw as they fled that many Sils had small, betraying injuries. Parts missing—splayed knobby fingers with one gone, just a blank space of gnarled red skin. A conical Sil ear half sheared away. Marvelous purple-irised eyes clouded by some past collision with life. Mottled skin; scars adorning slim legs, feet, inflamed two-step joints that served as elbows in their arms; faces sporting red scars that wrapped around as though some enemy had used a curved blade. Cliff felt oddly embarrassed at the humans’ smooth clear skins, unmarked by a life of labor and hardship, or battle and disaster. Without even thinking about it, the humans paraded around with skins and sturdy limbs that spoke of city comforts, the easy life away from fear and pain, a softness not earned.

The unseen Sil damage was perhaps more lasting.

He watched Irma as they sped down internal corridors of the Bowl, following Quert and its team along the gradual downward slope. She was changed, subdued and reflective. Her eyes peered ahead but were focused on some internal scene. He recognized the symptoms because he had known them, back there amid the wholesale slaughter of the Sil. She had announced his own blunted responses to him, using her jargon—diminished affect, emotional isolation, a thousand-meter stare, a general emotional numbness, stress disorder.

Now it visited her. Maybe Howard’s death had done it, tipped her over the edge. Or the fast way Cliff had crushed the Sil who wanted to grab them.

He thought of this as they kept their steady pace, moving away from the big thick doors of what seemed to be the occasional air lock. Since he and Irma started having sex—neither of them called it lovemaking, and in a fundamental way, it wasn’t—they had drawn closer. The other team members had seen that, and aside from a few wry references, nobody said much about it, or seemed to let it irk them. They were a field team, not a social circle. Howard’s death had made that clear enough.