They sat by the fire until the winter sun rose, exchanging information as unemotionally as they could under the circumstances. Laman cooked a rich morning stew and they had that and tin cups of almost the last of the thick, rich coffee they’d found in one of the only partially burned storehouses.

The five new people, three men and two women, were named Beman, Elian, Stefe, Iyayi, and Susan. Elian was the leader, a completely bald man who carried the authority of age and who might have been almost as old as Harman. All were bandaged or had been slightly wounded and as the others talked, Tom and Siris tended to their injuries with what medical supplies were left.

Ada very quickly filled in her young friend Hannah—who somehow did not seem so young any more—and the silent Noman on the saga of the Ardis Massacre, the days and nights on Starved Rock, the nonfunctioning faxnode, the massing of the voynix, and the hatching and containment of the Setebos baby.

“I felt the thing in my mind even before we landed,” Noman said softly. While Hannah began her tale, the barrel-chested and gray-bearded Greek, clad only in his rough tunic even in the freezing weather, walked over to the Pit and stared down at its captive.

“Odysseus came out of his recovery crèche three days after Ariel took Harman away,” said the dark-haired young woman with the lustrous eyes. “The voynix continued to try to get in, but Odysseus reassured me that they couldn’t as long as the zero-friction field was on. We ate, slept …” Hannah lowered her eyes here for a minute and Ada knew that the two had done more than sleep. “We expected Petyr to return for us as he’d promised, but after a week Odysseus began work trying to assemble the fragments of sonies and other flying machines we’d seen in the garage—hangar—whatever one should call it. I did most of the welding. Odysseus did the circuitboard and propulsion system work. When we ran out of parts we needed, I scavenged through the rest of the Golden Gate bubbles and secret rooms.

“He got the thing to hover and fly a little bit within the hangar—it’s made up mostly of two servitor-type flying machines called skyrafts, not made for long-distance travel—but we had trouble with the guidance and control systems. Finally Odysseus had to dismantle part of a lesser AI that operated some of the Bridge kitchen, leaving the cooking and recipe parts but lobotomizing it to handle navigation and attitude for the raft. It’s not happy flying that clumsy machine—it keeps wanting to cook us breakfast and suggest recipes.”

Ada and some of the others laughed at this. There were more than a dozen people listening, including Greogi, one-handed Laman, Ella, Edide, Boman, and the two medics. The five injured newcomers were now eating their hot stew and listening in silence. The snow that Ada had smelled hours earlier now came down lightly but did not stick to the ground. Sunlight actually peeked through the scudding clouds.

“Finally, when we felt sure that Ariel wasn’t bringing Harman back and that Petyr or none of the rest of you were returning for us, we filled the raft with supplies—we brought more weapons that I found in another secret room—opened the hangar doors, and headed north, hoping that the repellors would keep us airborne and the crude navigation system would get us to the general vicinity of Ardis.”

“Was this yesterday?” asked Ada.

“It was nine days ago,” said Hannah.

Seeing Ada’s shocked reaction, the younger woman went on. “This thing flies slowly, Ada, fifty or sixty miles per hour at top speed. And it had problems. We lost most of the food supplies when we actually went down in the sea where Odysseus says the Isthmus of Panama used to be. Lucky for us, he’d added the flotation bags to the raft so that it could act like a real raft for a few hours while we jettisoned weight and Odysseus hammered the flight systems into working again.”

“Did you have Elian and the others with you then?” asked Boman.

Hannah shook her head, sipped more coffee, and huddled over the warm tin cup as if it was giving her necessary heat. “We had to stop along the coast once we crossed the Isthmus Sea,” she said. “There was a faxnode community there—you’ve been to it, I think, Ada: Hughes Town. There was that tall plascrete skyscraper there with all the ivy.”

“I went to a Three Twenty party there once,” said Ada, remembering the view of the sea from a terrace high atop that tower. She’d been young, not quite fifteen. It had been around the time she’d first met her pudgy “cousin” Daeman and she remembered an awakening sense of sensuality from those days.

Elian cleared his throat. The man had livid scars on his face, forearms, and hands, and his clothing was more a mass of torn rags than anything else, but he carried himself with strong authority. “There were more than two hundred of us in the node community when the voynix attacked a month ago,” he said in a soft but deep voice. “We had no weapons. But the primary Hughes Town Tower was too tall for them to leap onto easily, something about the outside surface of the tower made it hard for them to cling and climb there, and the overhanging terraces made defense easier than any other place else we could retreat to. We barricaded the stairways—the power for the elevators had gone off back during the Fall of the Skies, of course—and used whatever we could find for weapons: servitor tools, iron bars, crude bows and arrows made of metal cables and leaf springs from barouches and droshkies—anything. The voynix got most of us, half a dozen or so of us made it to the fax pavilion and faxed away for help before the fax quit working, and the five others and I were on the penthouse of the Hughes Town Tower with five hundred voynix occupying everything. We’d been out of food for five days and out of water for two when we saw Noman’s and Hannah’s sky-raft lumbering in over the gulf.”

“We had to jettison more of the food and medical supplies and even most of the guns and flechette ammunition to make up for the extra weight,” Hannah said sheepishly. “And we had to land three more times to work on it. But it finally got us here.”

“How did its navigation system know how to find Ardis?” asked Casman. The thin, bearded Ardis survivor had always been interested in machinery.

Hannah laughed. “It didn’t. It could barely find what Odysseus calls North America. He guided us here—Odysseus—following first one big river he calls the Mississippi, and then our own Ardis River, which he called the Leanoka or Ohio. And then we saw your fire.”

“You flew on at night?” asked Ada.

“We had to. There were too many dinosaurs and sabertooths down in the forests south of here to risk landing for very long. We all took turns helping fly the thing while Odysseus caught naps. But he’s been awake for most of seventy-two hours.”

“He looks… well again,” said Ada.

Hannah nodded. “The recovery crèche healed most of the wounds the voynix inflicted on him. We were right to bring him back to the Bridge. He would have died otherwise.”

Ada was silent a minute, thinking of how that decision had taken Harman from her.

As if reading her friend’s mind, Hannah said, “We looked for Harman, Ada. Even though Odysseus was sure that Ariel had quantum teleported him somewhere—that’s like faxing, only more powerful somehow, it’s what the gods did in the turin drama—even though Odysseus was sure that the Ariel-thing had QT’d him far away, we flew down and searched the old Machu Picchu ruins below the Golden Gate and even looked along the nearby rivers and waterfalls and valleys. There was no sign of Harman.”

“He’s still alive,” Ada said simply. She touched her swollen belly as she said this. She always did—it was not only a part of her connection to Harman, but it seemed to confirm that her intuitive feeling was accurate. It was almost as if Ada’s unborn child knew that Harman still lived… somewhere.