“Nothing,” said Divers, walking out from under the hanger’s roof.

“Stay inside,” said the general.

“But I can’t see as much that way,” she said.

She had better eyes than anyone else, and she had the telescopes and endless practice watching the world from here. But the world could see her when she was in the open—another difficult-to-measure risk resting on a great pile of hazards. The important people were no doubt asking themselves if they should try to coax the Eight into the dark. But odds were that Divers would ignore them, which was disagreeable enough when you were standing alone. They weren’t alone. The other important people would see the brave one fail, and that’s why nobody tried to argue with her, every face nervous, lips curling while the hands built anxious fists.

The Eight walked out into the open, and Zakk followed. The safest position for the boy was inside their shadow, letting the enormous invulnerable body absorb any lost bullets. Yet without warning, the newcomer suddenly turned fearless, hurrying far out onto the rubber tarmac. Without a worry in his world, he dropped down on his haunches, a tiny pair of what looked like toy binoculars coming out of his deepest pocket.

Divers laughed gently, gazing up at the sprawling wilderness.

Talk among the officers fell back to the usual obsessions. Who had orchestrated that first attack? Was it the tree-walkers, some element in the papio ranks, or a marriage that straddled the reef and forest? Counts had been made. No weapons or fuel were missing from the local stocks, which was wonderful news. But you didn’t become important by trusting the first report, and the ranking general demanded fresh counts. Then a government woman asked for the latest target assessments, which meant Diamond. The intelligence officer claimed that the boy had survived the onslaught. But was that believable? Everyone was talking at once. Nobody held real evidence. Diamond could be anywhere in the Creation, including beneath the demon floor. Beneath the floor meant that he could be lost for the next million days. And even if he was alive and still somewhere the Corona District, how much were the papio willing to do, trying to gather up this prize before the tree-fools succeeded in destroying that half-grown gift?

The Eight settled on their haunches, eyes watching the wilderness.

Divers didn’t miss any word or the smallest breath.

A lesser general described the enemy’s overnight attacks. Two distant Districts, working together, had attacked fortifications of the reef’s lip, as many as one hundred dead and dying.

At that point, a government voice mentioned retribution.

The ranking general gave an unhappy sigh. “Our assault killed hundreds of our cousins yesterday,” he said.

“Cousins” was the most polite word for tree-walkers.

“But they didn’t have to fight us,” the woman said. “We were carrying out a rescue mission. We haven’t declared war. We were trying to extract our consulate personnel, and without provocation—”

“They’d endured one attack already,” the general said contemptuously. “Do you really think they wouldn’t try to slaughter the lot of us?”

Once again, various voices dismissed every blame, government people being the loudest and least secure.

“Anyone can build that kind of bomb,” said the ranking civilian.

“And what reason would we have to attack?” her aide asked, trying to support a superior.

“None,” said the woman, with feeling. “And besides, if war was our policy, then our first strike would have been fifty times more savage.”

No general would argue with that blunt opinion. Divers put down the telescopes and glanced over a shoulder, finding looks that were uncomfortable and slippery, ready for any excuse to change subjects.

Every voice inside the Eight had fallen silent.

Then Zakk put down his tiny binoculars. He said, “The wilderness is prettier here than at home.”

Divers lifted just one telescope, pressing it to the left eye. “Why does it seem prettier?”

“Because it’s different,” Zakk said.

Then inside the Eight, a voice said, “Watch this one. I don’t like him.”

Tritian.

The others told him to be quiet.

Divers didn’t need to reprimand her brother. She rarely had to police her siblings. The great accomplishment of her brief life was to convince the Seven to obey her directions. They were free to offer opinions, and didn’t she often bow to their shared will? But they understood what Divers had always known: each of them was tiny—a speck of flotsam riding the same Time together, hundreds of days and millions of little voices bringing them to this very dangerous brink.

Foresters sold wood for money. Foresters were better climbers than most tree-walkers, although many had papio blood in their deep past. But appearances didn’t matter; they regarded both of their civilized cousins as being separate from them. Papio coins were the same as District coins, which made every species equally contemptible in any forester’s eyes.

A colossal burr-tree had been recently carved into lucrative planks, leaving behind a void filled with quiet empty air. The void was where the hunter-ship had taken refuge. To hide from the coronas, its skin was painted a mottled green, and that’s why the ship was hard to see against the trees. But once noticed, it looked out of place, preposterous, probably misplaced. Hunter-ships wanted the open air. Only skilled or drunken pilots dared punch their way through gaps and unbroken walls of foliage, reaching such a remote location. But there it was: corona bladders and bones, human machines and human bodies and human mind—all of that wrapped inside a carefully balanced entity, ten strong mooring lines holding it in place.

If not for its smell and her eyes, and also the endless tiny sounds raining out of it, Quest might well have flown past Bountiful, missing it entirely.

Quest was considerably harder to see than the airship. No unnatural scent leaked from her body, and every sound that she made belonged to the wilderness. Her shrunken form was transparent in places, richly green in others. She was breath and a dream, and maybe a flick of motion in the corner of the most observant, inadequate eye. Three times she had changed positions, gazing into windows and that one open doorway. She once even straddled a mooring line, contemplating making the short climb before slipping inside a space where hiding would be next to impossible.

The urge was resisted, and she retreated.

And then in the next moment, she imagined seven new ways to see what she wanted to see.

The decision was made. The adjacent burr-tree was a scrawnier, light-starved child of the original giant. She spread out along one of its branches and changed her flesh again. Sugar was a treasure to all kinds of mouths, and she made herself look like the sweetest plant in the forest—a rare epiphyte known as the sweetheart. The trickery took time, but she didn’t need perfection. Long before she was finished, ten species of birds and swarms of insects were arriving, greedily feasting on the easy nectars.

The birds celebrated the prize, and people noticed their singing.

A tall man looked down from his cabin’s window. His face was tired and forlorn, but when he stared at the sudden garden, he wiped his mouth and eyes and then his mouth once more.

Then he vanished.

A huge room claimed much of the ship’s belly. That was where the one wide door was propped open, letting motor sounds and voices escape. Suddenly two men came out of the room. They were straddling a small airship, and the airship growled and climbed towards Quest and then slipped past her.

One of the men was the old slayer, Merit.

She watched Merit until he was gone, and then she watched him again in her memory. Meanwhile the large man had returned to the cabin window, opening its glass, talking with a voice that was both soft and loud.