Hayden nearly ran them into a forty-foot-wide food net that was being towed across his path by a flock of tame, feathered barracuda. As he fumbled with the controls he stammered incoherent curses. "My mother," he heard himself saying. "He killed my mother. The pilot ordered my father executed, never saw him again. Killed them."

"What?" Mahallan leaned around the curve of the bike, unbalancing it so that Hayden nearly crashed them again. "Who killed your mother?"

He shut down the bike, turned, and glared at her. "Fanning. Fanning killed her. I was there, at the new sun, when he came out of the sky and killed everyone I knew."

She drew back. Angrily he spun up the engine again and opened up the throttle all the way, dodging them around startled people and cargo nets. "Don't tell me what happened because I know what happened," he said even though she wouldn't hear him over the rip of the wind. "I was there!"

The library, her destination, came up all too quickly. It would be petty of him to overshoot it, or circle it; reluctantly, Hayden cut the engine and deployed the bike's parachute.

"Hayden… of course I didn't know," she said. "This is the burden you carry everywhere, isn't it? If you'd only told me sooner—"

"It was years ago," he said, trying to pull back from the emotions she had stirred up. "There's nothing to be done—or said, really. Here's your stop."

For a few seconds he was absorbed with judging the final yards of their approach to the library. This was not so much a building as a concretion: perhaps it had originally been a box, or pyramid or sphere of wood with ordered rooms inside it. If that were true, there was no way to tell. Over the centuries, individual rooms had been screwed or nailed onto the original structure, jutting out like barnacles. Whole floors were canted onto it and makeshift galleries built to connect them to the whole. Shafts had been dug through existing levels while other municipal buildings that possessed their own logic of construction had been towed over and added to the assembly. The whole bizarre pile rotated by slow increments causing the light from Gehellen's sun to tangle in confusing ways in its interior. People drifted like flies in and out of this migraine-inducing architectural disaster, and smaller flecks drifted too in their thousands: loose books not yet snagged by the haggard and overwhelmed library staff who chased them down in ones and twos using nets on poles.

"So," he said awkwardly, "what do you hope to find here?"

She gazed at him sadly as he grabbed a strand of the big rope cone that framed the library's entrance. "The admiral wants me to research the destination our map points to," she said quietly as she unwound herself from the embrace of the bike. "But all I was really after was distraction."

"Well." He made to turn the bike around. "When would you like me to pick you up?"

"Wait!" Aubri stretched out to put a hand on his arm. "Stay, please. I'd appreciate the company—and the help."

On the way here Hayden had been telling himself that he would leave her here for a few hours while he tried again to contact the Aerie Resistance. He would report the important information that Slipstream was threatened by Falcon Formation. What, though, was the Resistance going to do with that information? Hayden had run through various scenarios in his head as he lay on his bunk listening to the snores of Slew the carpenter. His thoughts had not been reassuring. The Resistance was likely to take the information and try to cut a deal with Falcon; they wouldn't have any faith in this mad venture of the Fannings. Maybe, if Hayden were some sort of hero, he could steal whatever it was that Fanning was after, and bring a radar set or two home with him. Then what? Give them to Falcon? He couldn't see any deal with the Formation that wouldn't seal the fate of Aerie once and for all.

Aubri had seen Hayden's hesitation, and frowning she turned away. "Wait!" He hand-walked up the netting of the entrance funnel to join her.

They drifted into a long cylindrical space with branching entrances leading off to all sides. The entrances were marked by subject matter. Ropes with handhold loops crisscrossed the space and bright lanterns lit the walls, their windup fans gently whirring. Whatever the chaos of its facade, inside at least the library seemed remarkably well organized.

Aubri was watching him sidelong. "Slipstreamers are your mortal enemies, aren't they?" He nodded.

"And all this time you believed it was Admiral Fanning who led the attack on your sun? I can't imagine what it must have been like to be trapped on the Rook with him."

"It was intolerable," he admitted. At that moment Hayden was near having some internal dam burst and he knew it; one more sympathetic word from her and he would blurt out his whole life story like some maudlin teenager. He cast about for a way to change the subject. "Things haven't exactly been easy for you either."

She half-smiled. "Are you referring to the pirates? It was… bad, I admit. But that whole incident's over with, isn't it?" Her smile held sadness. "You should be grateful for traumas that have a definite ending to them. Some don't, you know."

"Believe me," he said, "I know." Then he narrowed his eyes. "You did this to me before."

"What?"

"Danced around the subject of why you're unhappy." 

"Ah."

He grabbed a rope, and her hand, and stopped them above a square shaft that had the words municipal engineering carved around it. For a long moment he felt her warm fingers wrapped around his their eyes met. Then she drew her hand away.

He had to say something; what came out was, "I came aboard th Rook planning to kill Admiral Fanning, but you see I never expected to survive doing it. That's what I meant before, when I said I had no future. But when I said that, you suggested you didn't have one either. What did you mean?"

Aubri's expressive face twisted in eloquent distress. "I can't explain. Not in a way that you'd understand."

He crossed his arms and let himself hang in the air before her. "Is it because I'm an 'ignorant savage'? I believe you used that phrase to describe Martor a few days back."

She bit her lip. "It's not that… I don't know how to explain it to you." She looked around, spotted something, and said, "I think we need to go that way."

Hayden thought she was changing the subject again, but as the] flew down the hexagonal wood-paneled corridor to the library' history department, Aubri said, "I didn't come to Virga willingly. Not entirely willingly; I wasn't lying when I told you I had studied science and admired your people for their knowledge."

They entered a vast circular room that would not have seemed out of place under gravity—if one ignored the usual crisscross of ropes that various readers were using as perches. Light was provided by bright lanterns which lit the endless ranks of books lining the walls.

"It was my love of ancient arts like manufacturing that got me into trouble," continued Aubri. In this light she looked very beautiful to Hayden, a troubled doll drifting in lamplight. "Along with some others, I tried to overthrow Artificial Nature—locally, at least. We wanted to go back to noble pursuits like industry and construction! Work with our minds and hands again. I confess that… entities died. Not humans, you wouldn't understand them, they were surfers, standing waves in the stuff of A.N. Taking down A.N. killed them. As punishment, I was exiled here."

"I understand something about being an exile," said Hayden. Aubri smiled.

"Before I can return I have to fulfill a mission for Artificial Nature," she added with a sudden frown. "It hangs over my head like a sword. If I don't do it… I'll the."

"What? They'll send an assassin or something?" She shook her head. "The assassin is already here, inside my body. It waits and watches. If I don't play my role to its end, it will strike me down."