"Gryntaro," Wirkani's muffled voice came.

"What?" the Protector asked.

"He really does have a right to know," she said. "Go ahead and tell him."

Reluctantly, Manta thought, Gryntaro stopped. "You've been exiled from Centerline," he said. "We have to make sure you won't try to come back. Therefore—" he flicked his tails over his back toward the side of Manta's head. "—I'm going to bite out your left ear."

A jolt of terror and disbelief shocked through Manta. "What?" he gasped.

"You'll still be able to function well enough to survive," Gryntaro continued, his voice almost obscenely calm. "But you'll find that the pressure of the winds in the open cavity will make it painful for you to swim northward for very long. Far too painful for you to ever undertake the journey back to Centerline."

"I'll stay with you long enough to make sure you're healing properly," Wirkani added. "It will mostly heal."

"I'll be removing the ear itself, plus all the parts of it that lie beneath the skin," Gryntaro said. "There will be pain, and for that I apologize. But I know what I'm doing, and I'll be as quick and clean as possible."

Manta was having trouble breathing. "You don't have to do this," he pleaded, his teeth chattering uncontrollably. "I won't come back. I promise."

"It'll be easier if you hold still," Gryntaro said, beginning to drift forward again. "If you squirm, I'll only wind up biting off more than I have to." He opened his mouth, his breath warm on the side of Manta's head.

From the depths beneath them, something flashed suddenly into view. Manta caught just a glimpse of rapid movement as the jaws opened wide beside him—

And with a grunt of pain, Gryntaro jerked and doubled over as a blur of color slammed up hard into his belly, catching him squarely in the lungs. The Protector rolled half over onto his side, fin tips twitching as he gasped for breath.

Manta gaped in astonishment. But before he could do anything more than that, the blur slid deftly past Gryntaro's bulk and continued upward. There was the whistling hiss of something slashing across Wirkani's skin, and her shrill scream of pain joined in with Gryntaro's deeper wheezing. The Nurturer tilted to the side—

And with a hard twist the opposite direction, Manta rolled out from underneath her, popping out and bouncing upward like a baby being ejected from its mother's womb. Stretching out his buoyancy sacs, he headed as fast as he could for the upper levels.

Above him, his rescuer was similarly moving upward, and Manta could see those lumpy and distended fins rippling as he added a horizontal component to his upward movement. Manta tried to do likewise, but his muscles were still trembling too much from residual panic for him to get them moving. He continued to rise, watching as the other slowly began to leave him behind.

Abruptly, the rescuer seemed to notice the widening gap. With a smooth twist of his body and tails, he abandoned his forward motion and curved back around toward Manta. "Well, come on," he called. "You want to stick around here all sundark?"

A very familiar voice; and for the second time that terrible day, Manta felt his throats tighten in surprise and uncertainty and fear.

It was Pranlo.

They swam the rest of the day together in silence, pushing themselves to the limit as they tried to put as much distance as possible between them and Manta's erstwhile companions. Keeping quiet seemed only prudent; and for his part, Manta didn't have any extra lung power to spare for conversation anyway.

He could only hope Pranlo's silence was for the same reasons.

They swam until sundark, and a little ways beyond it. Only then, finally, did Pranlo signal a halt.

"Whew!" he said, breathing hard as the two of them coasted to a stop in the buffeting winds. "I haven't had a swim like that in dayherds. Nice to know I can still do it. How about you? You okay?"

"I'm a little winded," Manta admitted, feeling nervous and awkward and fearful as he faced the other. "My fins are probably going to hurt in the sunlight."

"Hopefully not as much as those new friends of yours are going to hurt," Pranlo said, his voice sounding rather grimly satisfied. Maybe he was feeling awkward, too. "I was trying to catch that Nurturer's eye with my tails as I went past. Don't know if I got her or not."

"You definitely got Gryntaro square in the lungs," Manta said, trying hard to pretend this was just a casual conversation between two friends. "I tried that trick on a couple of Vuuka once. Works pretty good."

"Wish I could have seen their expressions," Pranlo said, moving in for a closer look at Manta's left ear. "He didn't get you, did he?"

"No, you were just in time," Manta assured him, wishing he could read the other's face. There seemed to be more background light here than he remembered from a typical Centerline sundark, but it wasn't nearly enough for him to figure out what Pranlo might be thinking.

Odd that he hadn't noticed the brighter sundarks before during this trip. But then, the way Gryntaro had pushed them, he was usually fast asleep by this time of sundark.

"Yeah, it looks fine," Pranlo confirmed, drifting back again. "Good thing, too. I'd hate to have followed you all this way and then wound up being a couple of pulses too late. Drusni would never have let me hear the end of it."

Manta's heart twisted painfully inside him. Drusni. "Is she... I mean...?"

"She's fine," Pranlo said. "She was still weak when I left, but the Nurturers assured me she was out of danger. She's probably mostly healed by now."

"At least physically," Manta murmured. "Pranlo... I..."

"It's all right," Pranlo said softly. "Drusni told me what happened."

Manta winced. "All of it?"

"All of it," the other said. "Like I said, it's all right."

Manta turned away from him. Even in the dim light, he couldn't stand to look his friend in the eye.

"It's not all right," he said, the words hurting his throats. "What I did was... I can't even find the right words for it."

He flipped his tails restlessly. "I've been thinking about it ever since it happened," he went on, wondering if Pranlo was understanding any of this. "All my life, anything bad that happened to me was never my fault. At least, not as far as I was concerned. It was always someone else's fault, or even the whole universe's fault. Never mine."

"But this one wasn't your fault," Pranlo pointed out.

"Ironic, isn't it?" Manta said, grimacing. "For once in my life, I really didn't have anything to do with it; and so, of course, this is the one I feel worse about than all the rest of my screw-ups put together."

He sighed. "And this is the one I can't ever make right."

"Not to mention the one you were going to be punished for," Pranlo pointed out.

Manta shivered, thinking about what had almost happened to him.

What still would happen if they ever caught up with him again.

Pranlo was apparently thinking the same thing. "We'll have to be careful, of course," he said.

"They'll be on the watch for us as soon as those two get back to Centerline and whistle up the alarm."

"They'll be watching for me, anyway," Manta said. "With luck, you went by too fast for them to be able to identify you."

"Probably," Pranlo said dryly. "But if they catch us together, they shouldn't have any trouble figuring it out."

"We'll just have to make sure they don't, then," Manta said, suddenly making up his mind. "Do you want me to leave now? Or should I wait until sunlight in case we get jumped by predators—"

"Whoa, whoa," Pranlo interrupted. "Wait a pulse. What's this leaving stuff? We're going back to Centerline together, aren't we?"

"We most certainly are not," Manta said firmly. "Like you said, if they catch you with me, you've had it. Besides, I've been exiled. I can't go back."