“Eight now,” Ada said firmly. “That would be five trips on the sonie to evacuate everyone—assuming that the voynix don’t attack as soon as we start the evacuation and also assuming we had somewhere to go.”

“Yes, assuming we had somewhere to go,” said Greogi.

When Ada had fallen asleep again—sleep, Tom assured them, not the semicoma she’d been in—Daeman took his own rucksack, carrying it gingerly away from his body, and walked to the edge of Starved Rock’s summit. He could see the voynix down there, their leathery humps and headless, silvery bodies moving between the trees. Occasionally a group of them would move—seemingly with purpose—across the broad meadow on the south side of Starved Rock. None of them looked up.

Greogi, Boman, and the dark-haired woman Edide came over to see what he was doing.

“Thinking of jumping?” asked Boman.

“No,” said Daeman, “but I’m curious about whether you have any rope up here … enough to lower me to just out of reach of the voynix?”

“We have about a hundred feet of rope,” said Greogi. “But that leaves you seventy or eighty feet above the bastards—not that that would slow them down if they want to scramble up and grab you. Why the hell do you want to go down among ‘em?”

Daeman squatted, set the rucksack on the rock, and pulled the Setebos egg out. The others squatted to stare at it.

Even before they could ask, Daeman told them where he’d gotten it.

“Why?” asked Edide.

Daeman had to shrug at that. “It was one of those ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time’ things.”

“I always end up paying for those,” said the small, dark-haired woman. Daeman thought that she might have seen four Twenties. It was hard to tell because of the Firmary rejuvenations, of course, but older old-style humans tended to have a greater sense of confidence than the younger ones.

Daeman lodged the glowing, slightly pulsing silver-white egg in a crevice in the rock so that it wouldn’t roll away and said, “Touch it.”

Boman tried first. He set his palm flat on the curved shell as if welcoming the warmth they could all feel flowing from it, but the blond man pulled his hand away quickly—as if he’d been shocked or nipped. “What the hell?”

“Yeah,” said Daeman. “I feel it too when I touch it. It’s like the thing sucks some energy out of you—is pulling something out of your heart. Or soul.”

Greogi and Edide tried touching it—they both pulled their hands away quickly and then moved farther from it.

“Destroy it,” said Edide.

“What if Setebos comes looking for it?” said Greogi. “Mothers do that, you know, when you steal their eggs. They take it personally. Especially when the mother is a monster-sized brain with yellow eyes and dozens of hands.”

“I thought of that,” said Daeman. He fell silent.

“And?” said Edide. Even in the few months he’d known her at Ardis Hall, she’d always seemed like a practical, competent person. It was one of the reasons he’d chosen her as part of his fax-to-three-hundred-nodes warning expedition. “Do you want me to destroy it?” she asked, standing and pulling on leather gloves. “We’ll see how far I can hurl the damned thing and whether I can hit a voynix.”

Daeman chewed his lip.

“We damned sure don’t want it hatching up here on the top of Starved Rock,” said Boman. The man actually had his crossbow out and was aiming it at the milky egg. “Even a little Setebos-thing, from your description of what the mommy-daddy thing did at Paris Crater, might kill us all up here.”

“Wait,” said Daeman. “It hasn’t hatched yet. The cold may not be enough to kill it here—to make it nonviable—but it may be slowing its gestation… or whatever the hell you call the hatching period with a monster’s egg. I want to try something with it before we destroy it.”

They used the sonie. Greogi drove. Boman and Edide knelt in the rear niches, flechette rifles ready. The forcefield was off.

Voynix stirred in the shadows under the trees at the far end of the meadow, less than a hundred yards away. They hovered a hundred feet above the meadow, out of voynix leaping range. “Are you sure?” said Greogi. “They’re faster than we are.”

Not quite sure that he could speak properly, Daeman nodded.

The sonie swooped down. Daeman jumped out. The sonie went up vertically, like a silver-disk elevator.

Daeman had a fully loaded flechette rifle hitched over his shoulder, but it was the rucksack he removed, sliding the Setebos egg part of the way out, taking care not to touch it with his bare hands. Even in the bright sunlight the thing glowed like radioactive milk.

As if offering them a gift, Daeman began walking toward the voynix at the far end of the meadow. The things were obviously watching him via the infrared sensors in their metallic chests. Several of them pivoted to keep him centered in their sensor range. More voynix moved out of the forest shadows to stand at the edge of the meadow.

Daeman glanced up, seeing the sonie sixty feet above him, seeing Boman’s and Edide’s flechette rifles raised and ready, but also knowing that a voynix running moved at more than sixty miles per hour. The things could be on him before the sonie could drop and hover and if there were enough of the creatures in the charge, no amount of covering fire would save him.

Daeman walked on with the glowing Setebos egg half out of his rucksack, like some Twenty present peeking out of its gift wrapping. Once the egg shifted—Daeman was so shocked at the internal movement and brighter glow that he almost dropped the thing, but hung on through the torn and dirty fabric of his rucksack—but after fumbling for a minute, he continued walking. He was close enough to the massed voynix now that he could almost smell the old-leather and rust stench of the things.

Daeman was ashamed to realize that his legs and arms were shaking slightly. I just wasn’t smart enough to think of another way, he thought. But there wasn’t another way. Not with the serious condition that so many of the Ardis survivors were in—not with starvation and dehydration looming.

He was less than fifty feet from the cluster of thirty or more voynix now. Daeman lifted the Setebos egg like a talisman and walked straight toward them.

At thirty feet, the voynix began to fade back into the forest.

Daeman picked up his pace, almost running now. Voynix on all sides were moving away.

Afraid that he might stumble and smash the egg—he had the sickening mental image of the egg splitting and a small Setebos brain scuttling out on its dozens of baby-hands and stalks, then the thing leaping for his face—he still forced himself to run toward the retreating voynix.

The voynix dropped to all fours and loped away—hundreds of them fleeing out in all directions like frightened grazers freeing predators on some prehistoric plain—and Daeman ran until he could run no more.

He dropped to his knees, hugging the rucksack to his chest, feeling the Setebos egg stirring and shifting, feeling energy flowing from him toward the evil thing until he pushed it away from himself, setting it on the ground like the toxic thing it was.

Greogi landed the sonie. “My God,” said the bald pilot. “My God.”

Daeman nodded. “Take me back to the base of Starved Rock. I’ll wait there with the egg while you ferry down those who can walk the mile or so to the faxnode pavilion. I’ll lead that procession. You can load the weak and wounded and follow us by air.”

“What …” began Edide and fell silent. She shook her head.

“Yeah,” said Daeman. “I remembered the bodies of the voynix frozen in the blue ice at Paris Crater. They had all been frozen in the act of running away from Setebos.”

He sat on the edge of the sonie, the rucksack on his lap, as they floated back to Starved Rock a comfortable six feet above the ground. There were no voynix in the trees or meadows.