Boman grabbed him by the arm and pulled him aboard.

Daeman couldn’t speak for most of the fast flight northeast, hurtling several miles above the dark forest, finally circling toward a bare spur of rock rising two hundred feet above the skeletal trees. Daeman had seen this granite knob years earlier, when he’d first visited Ada and her mother here at Ardis Hall. He’d been hunting for butterflies then and at the end of a long afternoon of meandering, Ada had pointed out the rocky point rising almost vertically from a brambled meadow beyond the forest. “Starved Rock,” she’d said, her teenager’s voice sounding almost proud and possessive.

“Why do they call it that?” he’d asked.

Young Ada had shrugged.

“Do you want to climb it?” he’d said, thinking that if he got her up there, he might be able to seduce her on a grassy summit.

Ada had laughed. “No one can climb Starved Rock.”

Now, in the last of the twilight and the first of the bright ringlight, Daeman saw what they had done. The summit was not grassy after all—bare rock stretched a flat hundred feet or so, broken by the occasional boulder, and crowded onto that summit were crude tarps and a half-dozen campfires. Dark figures huddled by those fires and more figures were posted at all the edges of the granite monolith… sentries, no doubt.

The field below Starved Rock seemed to be moving in the shadows. It was moving. Voynix shuffled and stirred there, stepping over hundreds of shattered carcasses of their own kind.

“How many people made it from Ardis?” asked Daeman as Greogi circled to land.

“About fifty,” said the pilot. His face was soot-streaked and looked infinitely weary in the glow from the virtual controls.

Fifty out of more than four hundred, thought Daeman numbly. He realized that his body was in shock from losing fingers, and his mind was going into something like shock after seeing what he’d seen back at Ardis. The numbness and disinterest were not unpleasant.

“Ada?” he said hesitantly.

“She’s alive,” said Greogi. “But she’s been unconscious for almost twenty-four hours. The Great Hall was burning and she wouldn’t leave until everyone else who could be carried off had been… and even then, I don’t think she would have left if that section of the burning roof hadn’t collapsed and a rafter hadn’t knocked her out. We don’t know if her baby is still… viable… or not.”

“Petyr?” said Daeman. “Reman?” He was trying to think of who would lead them with Harman gone, Ada injured, and so many lost.

“Dead.” Greogi hovered the sonie and lowered it toward the dark mass of the granite summit. It bumped to a stop. Dark forms from one of the campfires rose and walked toward them.

“Why are you still here?” Daeman asked Greogi, holding him by his shirtfront as the others stepped off the grounded sonie. “Why are you still here with the voynix down there?”

Greogi easily pulled Daeman’s hand free. “We tried the faxnode, but the voynix were on us before we could get people inside. We lost four people there before we could get away. And we don’t have anywhere else to fly… with Ada injured so severely and a dozen others badly hurt, we could never get them all off Starved Rock in time, before those fucking animals come up the cliff. We need everyone here just to hold off the voynix… If we start flying out a few at a time, those staying behind will be overrun. We probably don’t have enough flechette ammunition to hold out another night as it is.”

Daeman looked around. The campfires were low, pitiful things—mere burning moss or lichen and a few twigs, nothing more. The brightest thing on the dark rock was the Setebos egg still glowing milkily in his rucksack.

“Has it come to this?” Daeman asked, speaking to himself.

“I guess it has,” said Greogi, sliding off the sonie and staggering slightly. The man was obviously in some state beyond exhaustion. “It’s full dark now. The voynix will be coming up the sides any minute.”

Harman fell through darkness with Ariel for what seemed an impossible length of time.

When they landed, it wasn’t with a fatal crash at the base of the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu, but with a soft thump on a jungle floor covered with centuries’ buildup of leaves and other humus.

For a stunned second Harman couldn’t believe that he wasn’t dead, but then he stumbled to his feet, shoved the small Ariel figure away—though Ariel had already danced out of range—and then stood, blinking in the darkness.

Darkness. It had been daytime at the Golden Gate. He was… somewhere else. Wherever the somewhere else might be, besides on the dark side of the planet, Harman knew that it was in deep jungle. The night smelled of richness and rot, the thick, humid air clung to his skin like a soaked blanket, Harman’s shirt immediately soaked through and lay limp against him, and all around in the seemingly impenetrable night came the buzz of insects and the rustle of fronds, palms, undergrowth, insects, small creatures and large. Letting his eyes adapt, his hands raised into fists, hoping that Ariel would come back into striking range, Harman craned his head back and saw the hint of starlight between tiny gaps in foliage far, far above.

In another minute, he could see the pale, almost spectral, genderless figure of Ariel glowing slightly ten feet or so from him across the jungle floor.

“Take me back,” growled Harman.

“Take thee back where?”

“To the Bridge. Or to Ardis. But do it now.”

“I cannot.” The genderless voice was maddening, insulting.

“You will,” growled Harman. “You will right now. However you got me here, undo it, take me back. Now.”

“Or what consequence ensues?” asked the glowing figure in the jungle dark. Ariel’s voice sounded mildly amused.

“Or I’ll kill you,” Harman said flatly. He realized that he meant it. He would strangle this green-white flop of a thing, choke the life out of it, and spit on the corpse. And then you’ll be left lost in an unknown jungle warned the last sensible part of Harman’s mind. He ignored it.

“Oh, my,” said Ariel, feigning terror, “I shall be pinched to death.”

Harman leaped, arms extended. The little figure—not much more than four feet tall—caught him in midleap and threw him thirty feet through ripping fronds and tearing vines into the jungle.

It took Harman a minute or two to get his breath back and another minute to get to his knees. He realized at once that if Ariel had done that to him elsewhere—say, on the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu where they’d been a minute before—it would have broken his back. Now he stood again on deep humus, willed his vision to see through the encroaching darkness, and shoved and tore his way back through vines and thick vegetation to the small clearing where Ariel waited.

The sprite was no longer alone.

“O look,” Ariel said in happy, conversational tones, “here is more of us!”

Harman paused. He could see better now by the starlight filtering down into this little clearing in the jungle and what he saw made him stare.

There were at least fifty or sixty other shapes in the clearing and under the trees and amidst the ferns and vines beyond. They were not human, but neither were they voynix or calibani or any other bipedal form that Harman had seen in his ninety-nine years and nine months of life. These humanoid shapes were like rough sketches of people—short, not much taller than little Ariel, and, like Ariel, with transparent skin and organs floating in greenish liquid. But where Ariel had lips, cheeks, a nose, and the eyes of a young man or woman, with physical features and muscles one associated with the human body, these short, green forms had neither mouths nor human eyes—they looked back at Harman in the starlight from black dots in their faces that could have been lumps of coal—and from their boneless-looking frames to their three-fingered hands, the forms seemed to lack all identity.