The Other Side of The Dark

Author's Note:

This story is set in the world of, and references the characters and events of, H. G. Wells' 1895 novel The Time Machine. The original novel, not the awful films, with which it has next to nothing in common.

It's a story I've been waiting decades to write, since the moment I read The Time Machine for the first time and thought, where's the other side of this story?

My gratitude goes to DawnDuckie for beta reading and encouragement. She's the best.

And, yes, that is a Ray Bradbury homage in Chapter Nineteen. Of course it is.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DARK

CHAPTER ONE

Weena was swimming when she first met the Big One.

She knew the Big One was there, of course. The Big One had turned up from nowhere a couple of Daylights previously, just after water had fallen from the sky as it sometimes did. Some of the others, Florun for example, said the Big One had come down from the Sun. Florun said a lot of things. Most of them were ridiculous, and Weena thought this one was another ridiculous idea. The Sun was obviously too hot for even the Big One.

She'd just watched from a distance as Florun, Wessa, and others had crowded around the Big One, listening to his thundering voice. She'd not come close. Things were better studied at a distance at first, she'd always believed. Let the others twitter and fuss, while she stood back and watched and made her observations.

So she'd watched the Big One, and, quite suddenly and simply, it had come to her. Why, the solution to the mystery was simple: he'd fallen along with the water from the sky. There must be many others of his sort in the sky, which was why there were such thundering noises when water fell. She could even see the signs of the descent in his wet clothes and the scrapes on his face and chin. She'd felt very pleased with this deduction. It was very clever, and nobody else had thought of it.

The Big One was very big, about half again as tall as Weena and everyone else she'd ever known, except Bledir who only came up to Weena's own shoulder, meaning that the Big One was twice his size. He also ate an enormous amount, as Weena saw when he'd joined everyone else in the Eating Place for lunch. Indeed, he'd probably put away three times as much fruit as anyone, by Weena's estimate. Weena was as impressed by his appetite as his strange clothing, his immense size, his thunderous voice, and his ability to fall from the sky with the water. She'd watched him covertly and wondered why he had come and what he wanted.

That night, Weena had gone to her usual sleeping place, in an inner room as far from the Dark Outside as she possibly could. Munin had come to her and dropped flowers all over her, as she'd rather been hoping he wouldn't. Munin had been following her with flowers for the last week, and she'd come to the conclusion that he wouldn't stop until she gave in and gave herself to him, at least once.

Weena knew quite well, of course, that she was now an adult and that she could, and should, give herself to any of the men who wanted her, just as any man she wanted could, and should, give himself to her. Only she didn't want any man to give himself to her, and she'd been putting off as long as possible giving herself to any man. But she'd known all the time that she'd have to do it eventually, since everyone did. All the other girls had, and now her time had come.

So she'd slipped off her tunic, spread her thighs, and felt him lay himself down beside her. She'd listened to him chatter about flowers and why he'd chosen these particular ones for her. The yellow ones, he said, went with the colour of the Sun, and Daylight, and the red ones suited her eyes. Weena was absolutely certain he'd just lifted it all from something he'd heard someone else say to another girl. After some more of this flowery and one-sided conversation, she'd begun to get impatient. How he did go on! She'd begun to wish he'd do what he'd come for and let her go to sleep.

Finally he'd rolled on her and she felt the warmth of his throbbing thing slide into her. It felt abstractly good, but nothing special, nothing like some of the other women giggled about while looking at men and talking about what their things were like. Weena was just beginning to wonder if other men's things were better and nicer than Munin's when there had been a tremendous roaring and banging from the outer Sleeping Chamber. Some of the others of the People had come stumbling inside, terrified, and Munin had rolled out of and off her. For a moment Weena had imagined that the Terrors Underneath had invaded the hall. But, she'd begun to think, they never did that, so it must be something else.

What that something else might have been she'd never been able to follow the thought long enough to speculate, for the next moment the Big One had stumbled in, roaring and bellowing. Somehow, he'd managed to take a little Fire captive, which he held in his hand to throw light. He'd glared around with his face distorted with an emotion Weena had never seen before and so had no familiarity with. He'd roared one final time and rushed back out towards the Dark, knocking Bledir over as he went.

Weena had some vague idea of stopping him, because the Dark Outside was something to be avoided. Without bothering to pull on her tunic and sandals - he'd be long gone by the time she did - she ran after him, but his long legs had carried him much faster than hers. She'd just caught a glimpse of his back, vanishing into the Dark, as she stopped at the feeling of the cold Dark earth under her bare feet.

She had wanted to run after him; the Dark was not somewhere to blunder around, even with a captured Fire. But her courage had failed her. So she'd given him up and wandered back to her sleeping place, wondering if Munin would come back and finish what he'd begun.

He had not.

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The next Daylight, the Big One had come back.

Weena had been simultaneously slightly surprised and gratified to see him. Gratified because he was something that broke the monotony of life, and surprised because of what he was doing; he was banging at the doors beneath the White Statue, the one that led to the Underworld. This was not safe behaviour. This was not even sane behaviour. Nobody even went near those doors if they could help it, let alone bash on them as though demanding admittance.

The things inside those doors were not something anyone, even a Big One from the sky, could safely make acquaintance with.

Weena didn't know how to explain that to him. She was trying to think of a way that didn't involve just going over and grabbing his arm, when something else, a question, struck her.

Why did she want to explain anything to him? She normally didn't care to explain any of her deductions to anyone else. She hadn't even told anyone of her realisation that the Big One had fallen from the sky with the water; they'd never have believed her anyway. So why did she care about this now?

She'd begun examining this thought and was so lost in it that by the time she'd thought to look for the Big One again, he'd stopped hammering at the doors and gone away somewhere. Weena had looked around and seen the top of his head just vanishing behind a flowering bush. She obviously couldn't catch him, so she'd put him out of her mind and went off to find something to do while the Daylight lasted.

At least, that was what she told herself.

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A little later that morning, Weena went down to the river to swim, as she did every Daylight when the Sun was hot enough. Some of the People were already in the water, splashing around. Weena saw that the Big One was there, in his strange heavy grey clothes, sitting on the bank and watching; and suddenly a quite naughty thought came to her mind, a thought so naughty that she'd never have confessed it to anyone.

She decided that she'd make the Big One notice her. It ought to be quite easy to do.

She stripped naked as usual and plunged into the water. She'd always swum excellently; the little silver creatures that lived in the water were hardly more at home in it than she. But, today, instead of swimming happily and quickly back and forth as usual, she pretended that she was being carried away by the current and began crying piteously for help. Not one of the other People, of course, was fooled; they all knew her for the strongest swimmer of them all, and so they did nothing.

Weena had gambled on them doing nothing.

Weena had also gambled on the Big One doing something.

So it was with a spasm of inner glee that she saw the Big One jump up and pull his strange clothes off his body. He ran down to the water and flung himself into it, swimming strongly but so clumsily that Weena could have swum rings around him. With a shiver of delight she pretended to be on the verge of drowning; it was easy since she regularly swam long distances underwater. If her head hadn't been at that moment submerged, she'd have had a hard time suppressing her laugh when she felt him grab her by the arm. Meekly, she allowed him to pull her to the surface and tow her to the riverbank.

Weena was quite pleased with the opening this gave her, almost as pleased as she was with the opportunity to see his body with nothing on.

Being naughty was quite fun, she thought, fun and interesting.

And the Big One was very interesting indeed.

____________________________________________________

Weena laid her trap with an impressive amount of patience.

She spent the rest of the morning constructing a garland; quite an impressive garland, with red and white flowers, interrupted by a cluster of the small blue ones, the ones that were very difficult to thread without breaking because they were so delicate. Weena had to collect a lot of flowers because of the Big One's size; he'd need a garland at least twice as big as any she'd ever made before. She'd also needed to find twice the number of the blue flowers as she planned to use, to allow for ripped and ruined stems and petals. And that was why, despite her considerable skill at making garlands, it was afternoon by the time she finished.

The Big One had gone stomping off somewhere, and Weena hadn't seen him all day while she worked on the garland. It had given her time not only to collect the flowers and thread them, but to think. The repetitive act of threading flowers was soothing and automatic; she loved making garlands, she'd always loved making them; it always calmed her. So she pushed the thread through the centre of flower after flower, and meanwhile her mind focused on the mystery of the Big One.

He was, obviously, new to the World. He was, as obviously, strange. He seemed to fear nothing. He was very strong, very hungry, and - this pleased Weena, whom nobody except Munin had noticed - he noticed her.

The garland took time, and Weena had only just finished when she'd seen him coming back. She ran to him and held out the garland.

He took it from her, examined it, and smiled at her. His teeth were huge, as big as he was, and quite yellow. She took the garland back, motioned for him to bend his head, and slipped it around his neck. With quiet satisfaction she noticed that her estimate of the size had been quite accurate. The cluster of small blue flowers hung at the centre of his immense chest.

"Come on," Weena told him. "Let's go somewhere and talk."

They sat in a stone place and Weena thought about asking him how it was in the sky and how it felt to fall with rain. She planned to ask him about his clothes and what wearing such strange many-layered things felt like. She would then, she decided, ask him how he had captured the little Fire he'd been holding in his hand the night before.

She wouldn't ask him why he'd come in, roaring, or why he'd been pounding on the Statue doors. That would have been like asking someone about things that they'd be ashamed to answer. But of course she'd ask him later, when she knew him better.

So she asked him about his home in the sky.

He stared at her and rumbled something back.

She tried again. She pointed up at the sky, pointed at the ground, made motions like water falling, and asked him again, speaking very slowly and carefully.

All it got her was another rumble.

Then Weena realised the horrible truth. It didn't matter what she asked or didn't ask.

The Big One didn't understand her at all, not one word!

She stared at him. He stared back.

Weena sighed to herself. Well, then, she thought, she'd just stick with him and teach him Language until he understood her, no matter how long it took. It might take a while, but Weena didn't give up easily. That was why she was the best swimmer and the best garland maker of the People.

Another thought struck her, and made her giggle.

As long as she stuck with the Big One, Munin was unlikely to bother her with flowers again.

Being naughty wasn't just fun, it had quite pleasant side effects as well!

CHAPTER TWO

Something was wrong with the third pump stack on the right.

Negufta stood at the foot of the stack, staring up at it. To her eyes, it looked as usual, throbbing as it sucked in air from Outside, its long iron throat rising until it was lost in the maze of piping running along the ceiling. But she knew, with the instinct honed by years of working on pump stacks, that something was not right. The feeling itched at her like a fire-ant sting.

Finally she decided that she'd go up and have a closer look.

It was the work of a moment to shed her short boots, put them neatly side by side on the floor, and swarm up the side of the stack. There were rungs, but she ignored them: rungs merely slowed a person down, and her hands and feet knew where to go without her needing to think about it. Within moments she was balanced on the edge of the collar at the neck of the stack, clinging on by one arm around the exhaust pipe and her toes gripping the cold iron ring of the collar.

And here, up on top, she could hear it clearly, the hissing sound mixed up with the thudding beat of the pump. A valve was leaking.

Negufta grimaced. Normally she'd switch out the valve without thinking about it. She'd done it many times before, more times than she could remember. But valves were growing few in number. There had been no new valves in longer than she cared to think about, and she had no spare handy. She had only the odds and ends she'd been able to scrape together from discarded stock. She'd have to try and repair it, then, standing there up on the stack, with one hand.

Well, she'd done that before, too.

All her tools were in the belt around her waist. She didn't turn off the stack; the other valves were fine and the problem wasn't severe enough to stop the pump and make everyone suffer the consequent reduction in ventilation. She pulled out the valve housing far enough for her to access the valve itself without disturbing the mechanism. It was the washer, as she'd expected. The leather was old and had become brittle and frayed. She stripped it out with two fingers, reached in one of her belt pockets, found another washer by touch, and pushed it into place. There was one moment of anxiety as it caught on the lip of the housing, and she thought it had shrunk and was too small; but then, with a relieved sigh, she felt it slip into position. Hopefully this would last a while longer and she might be able to find a valve somewhere in the meantime.

Job done; when she pushed the valve housing back in, the hissing sound had disappeared.

The fire-ant itch vanished with the hissing sound. Everything was fine.

She'd just made it back down and was sitting pulling on her short boots when she felt the familiar disapproving stare on her bowed head and shoulders. "What is it?" she asked, without looking up.

"Why are you sitting down wasting time?"

Negufta didn't bother explaining that she'd just repaired the pump valve and saved the entire stack from having to be stripped down. Yntho's disapproval was a permanent state, like damp in the lower passages. Nobody ever escaped it. "What is it?" she repeated, lacing her boots.

"We found something. You will come and look at it."

"What did you find?" Doubtless it was some statue or new kind of stone or small animal that had strayed in from somewhere, or something of the sort.

"You will see."

Negufta got to her feet, frowning. "Why ask me?" How could she help with a statue or new kind of stone or small animal? She knew next to nothing about any of those things.

"Because you are a Machinist." Yntho turned around and began striding down the cavern towards the passages beyond. Negufta gave a small mental shrug and followed.

____________________________________________________

It was not a statue or new kind of stone or small animal.

Negufta had been expecting to be led to the deeper tunnels, where mining teams still dug desultorily looking for useful things. They found useful things, too, sometimes. The useful things were deep under the ground, metals and other, stranger objects. Nobody knew how or why they were under the ground or how they'd got there, so far below any tunnel the People had cut earlier. Negufta had once tried to formulate a hypothesis about it. Her own conclusions were so ridiculous - that at some point in the distant past those objects had been on the Outside and been buried somehow, by means she couldn't begin to imagine, over the passage of long, long periods of time - that she never mentioned it to anyone and tried her best never to think about the topic again.

But those useful metals and other objects were always broken, twisted, often corroded, of no interest to a Machinist. And instead of leading her down into the tunnels where discoveries might be unearthed, Yntho led her upwards, out of the familiar tunnels, along a long sloping passage that Negufta hadn't travelled before.

"Where are we?" she asked once, glancing at the walls, which were lined with some dull silvery alloy. She didn't expect an answer from Yntho, and received none.

The passage ended quite suddenly at a wall set with metal rungs leading up into a shaft. Negufta looked up, expecting to see the usual distant circle of Outside light, but instead there was only a sheet of metal ceiling, close enough for her to be able to see the joints in it.

Yntho was already swarming up the rungs. With another mental shrug, Negufta followed.

____________________________________________________

The object stood in the middle of a room with huge bronze doors set into tracks in the floor at one end. Apart from a simple wheel mechanism for opening and shutting the doors, and a few of the People standing around, none of whom Negufta knew, it was bare.

"Is that the Machinist?" one of the People asked Yntho, with a complete lack of interest.

"She is."

"She doesn't look like much."

Negufta tuned out the words. It was easy to tune out anything when she was faced with something like this, something actually interesting. She walked slowly in a circle around it, staring. "It's a machine," she said eventually.

"We know," Yntho snorted. "What is it?"

Negufta didn't answer. With a machine, she was always in her element, but this was a new one, and she needed to look at it carefully before she could make up her mind.

It was shiny in places and dull and tarnished in others, as though it'd been constructed with great care and then treated with absolutely none. There was a seat, a very large seat, much bigger than would fit one of the People. There were twisted crystal bars and levers and... she traced the outlines with the tips of her long sensitive fingers... sockets in which other levers should have been seated. Where were those levers? Why were they missing? What were they for?

"Well?" Yntho asked, after he had clearly decided that the silence had gone on long enough.

"I do not know. Where did you find it?"

Yntho hesitated long enough for Negufta to look at him sharply. "From Outside."

"Outside?" The Beasts from Outside could never have created anything a thousandth part as complex as this. Even one of the People could never have created anything a thousandth part as complex as this. "What do you mean?"

"Never mind. What can you tell me about it?"

"It has been badly handled," she said at last, pointing to the stains and dirt. She hated to see machinery abused and dirty. It offended something in her core. "Did you knock it about when you brought it in?"

"Not we," the one who'd said she didn't look like much replied. "The Gian..."

"Gian...?"

"Forget it." Yntho held up a hand and everyone fell silent. "You, Machinist; can you dismantle this thing and find out how it works?'

"I could," Negufta said, without looking in his direction. Her eyes were on the object, tracing the lines of joints and seals. "I mean, I could take it apart and put it together again. Whether that will tell me how it works is another thing altogether, because at this moment I can't even tell what it's for, and..."

She abruptly broke off as a thunderous pounding began on the metal doors at the far end of the room. The bronze panels seemed to shiver.

"What in the name of Kartak is that?" she asked.

"The Giant that appeared," one of the other People burst out.

"What Giant?" It seemed a redundant question even to Negufta's own ears, given the pounding on the doors. She took a few steps closer and watched fascinated as the metal panels shook. However, a glance at the grooves in which the doors were set showed her that there was no danger of them falling open.

"It came from somewhere," Yntho said. "The machine also appeared at the same time. It seems logical that it brought the machine."

"That does sound logical," Negufta said. The blows on the door were slowly weakening, as though whatever had been pounding on them was tiring from the effort. Negufta listened to them and thought about it. A Giant that had appeared Outside and was, presumably, hammering on the doors. The very strange machine behind her had appeared at the same time. This Giant, she thought, I need to find out more about this Giant. "I suggest you keep watch on this Giant of yours," she said.

"Why?" Yntho's voice was immediately hostile. A mere Machinist shouldn't be giving him suggestions, let alone orders thinly disguised as suggestions.

Negufta sighed and turned away from the doors to the machine. Both were much more interesting than Yntho and his ego.

"If you find out more about it, you could maybe find out where it came from," she said. "If you know where it came from, you could perhaps work out what this machine is for. And then if I know what this machine is for, I could..."

"You could tell us how it works!" the one who'd said she didn't look like much replied, delightedly, as though making some enormous discovery.

"Exactly," Negufta replied wearily. "Now get me some oil and cleaning things, and leave me to it."

CHAPTER THREE

The Big One's behaviour had become increasingly disturbing.

It wasn't that he wasn't still interesting. To Weena, he had, over the last couple of Daylights, become even more interesting in a lot of ways. For example, she'd noticed the outlines of his face becoming blurred and fuzzy. In order to investigate this phenomenon more closely, she'd raised herself on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. As she'd expected, he'd happily lowered his head to let her do it, which seemed to indicate that he was used to being kissed there. She'd then discovered that his cheek had somehow become covered by a dense, short, and very prickly layer of hair.

This was surprising enough, since the men of the People had no such hair on their faces, not even Wessa, who was the hairiest man Weena had ever seen. That led her to ask another question: why was he doing it? Was it supposed to stop him from being kissed on the face? Weena was intrigued and made up her mind to keep a close watch on the phenomenon. In the meantime, she decided to confine herself to kissing his hands only. At least they weren't covered by a prickly layer. Maybe they would, later, if the Big One decided he didn't want to be kissed on his hands either.

Either way, Weena would keep gathering information. The project of understanding the Big One was really rather fascinating and she found it a little sad that none of the other People found the Big One nearly as fascinating as she did. His falling from the sky, his strange clothes, his great size and thundering voice, his yellow teeth, the fact that he'd chosen to sleep in a room open to the Outside, everything about him was fascinating. And yet apparently she was the only one interested in studying him.

But, while he was still so interesting, Weena couldn't ignore the fact that he was behaving increasingly strangely. She had already seen how he'd been bashing the doors at the base of the White Statue, just as though he wanted to go in there, where the Terrors had their nest. Maybe, she'd thought, it was a moment of insanity like the one where he'd rushed in roaring in the night and knocked Bledir flat. Maybe falling from the sky with the rain had made him a little wrong in the head, like Damaa who had fallen from a fig tree and been strange for days afterwards. But Damaa had been all right again after a few Daylights; surely the Big One, so much larger and stronger, should have begun recovering by now?

Weena's first indication that he hadn't had come the first Dark after she'd given him the garland. She had, naturally, decided to stay with him instead of going back to her usual place and Munin's unwelcome attentions. As naturally, she had assumed, he would find a place for himself to sleep in one of the inner chambers, among the People, as far from the Dark as he possibly could. Even if he didn't understand Language, he had eyes, hadn't he? He could see that everyone filed into the sleeping chambers at night, as far from the Dark as they could, right? Surely he had enough sense to come to the obvious conclusion that one absolutely did not go out into the Dark, let alone sleep there?

Apparently not.

Weena watched the Big One select a room open to the Outside, where the Dark was only an open doorway away. She watched this in utter disbelief, and rubbed her eyes to make sure she wasn't dreaming, but, no, he was still settling down for the night, as though this was a perfectly sensible, logical action. She then told him, in clear unambiguous words, that this was idiotic. Of course he didn't understand, just grinned at her with his big yellow teeth in a way she found absurdly frustrating.

"Look," she said, after briefly squeezing her eyes shut to drive down the frustration to manageable limits, "you don't understand Language, but you understand this, don't you?" She caught him by the sleeve of his thick strange grey overgarment and tugged. "You at least understand that I'm trying to make you come with me to somewhere safe? No?"

After a bit of this she realised that the answer was no. If the Big One could comprehend anything at all from her tugging and pleading, it seemed to be that she was playing.

Playing! Weena snorted as she thought of the Terrors for whom the Dark was the key to freedom, when they could swarm out of the Underneath and do whatever they wanted. Playing!

So she was faced with a choice: go back to her usual place and Munin's caresses, or stay with the Big One.

After thinking for a while, she chose to stay with the Big One. Nothing has happened to him in the two Darks since he's fallen from the sky, she thought. Maybe he has something that protects him from the Terrors. Maybe, then, nothing's going to happen to him, and I can be with him safely.

Or maybe I should just go and put up with Munin, she argued with herself. Really, it wasn't bad, just uninteresting. I can survive uninteresting; I could easily put up with it again. At least I'll be safe there. She half decided to leave, and then realised that the Dark had come already and she'd have to walk through the open to reach the Sleeping Chambers, which was even stupider than staying isolated with the Big One.

So she curled herself next to him, put her head on his shoulder, and wrinkled her nose delicately.

He was beginning to smell a little sour, she thought. Maybe that was a defence mechanism against the Terrors, like the little yellow and black insects that buzzed around flowers and could hurt your fingers if you tried to catch them. If even she could smell him and found it disagreeable, the Terrors would probably recoil at the odour. At least she hoped so.

She stayed like that, hoping the Big One would say something, give her some opening to try and teach him Language, but he just fell asleep and began to snore. He snored very loudly, and his breath was becoming as foul as the smell of his body.

That was helpful, actually. The smell and the snores kept Weena awake, so she could keep watch, ready to wake the Big One if anything, a Terror, for example, came nosing around inside.

But, though she kept her eyes valiantly open until the Light had begun creeping back into the sky, nothing did.

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"Weena," Munin said at the Eating Place over breakfast, "I came to you at Sleeping Time, but you were not there."

"No." Weena manufactured a smile. "I wasn't, was I?" She made a great show of busying herself in eating fruit and stuffing the peel into the waste-hole at the side of the table. By her side the Big One gobbled and scrunched, as loud as usual. Munin stood there for a while and then wandered away.

Would he leave her in peace for good? I should be that lucky, Weena thought. Munin had, apparently, formed some kind of attachment to her. It was rare among the People, but not entirely unheard of, for one man and one woman to form a relationship with each other. Binto and Sawian, for example; neither ever touched anyone else, and every Dark the sound of their giving themselves to each other carried all across the Sleeping Chambers; Weena had often had to cover her head with a cushion to muffle the noise of their pleasure. Come to think of it, Sawian was very much like Munin; but she was no Binto.

As Munin wandered away, the Big One stuffed more fruit into his mouth and made noises at her that sounded as though they might be a question.

"No," she replied, "I don't know where the fruit comes from. They're just here every morning."

The Big One chewed a Food Flower and made more noises.

"No," she told him. "I don't want Munin. The problem is just that he wants me." Of course the Big One didn't understand, but it was true all the same; and telling someone, especially someone who couldn't understand and so couldn't judge her, was a relief.

The situation, however, was highly inconvenient, and Munin would probably run after her with flowers if he found her alone after breakfast. If he did, it would be just good manners and social etiquette for her to spread her legs for his thing again. The idea was less than appealing.

So she laid aside her plans to get some proper swimming done after breakfast, some real hard swimming without any pretend drowning, and instead trotted beside the Big One as he went exploring.

And then she realised, with dawning horror, just what he intended exploring.

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Nobody went near the Holes.

Even children knew this. Even children were taught this from the moment that they were old enough to walk.

It wasn't just where the Holes led; it was dangerous. You never knew when a particularly adventurous Terror might not be hiding just inside a Hole; you didn't want to find out.

Of course, a single Terror would be no match for the Big One and his immense arms. Even Weena could see that, and when she followed the Big One to one of the Holes and watched him peer down it, she thought it was just more of his slightly insane behaviour; less than balanced, but ultimately harmless. When she tried to warn him, nevertheless, he created some more captive Fires from his hands. This was, of course, very interesting, and Weena almost forgot the Hole while she tried to work out just how it was done.

But she was reminded forcefully of the Hole when the Big One killed the last of the captive Fires, swung a leg over the parapet, and began climbing down inside.

Weena was stricken with panic. The Big One couldn't do this! Not even he could go down into the Underneath and hope to return. Didn't he know what was down there? Was he really that stupid? But even though she screamed and pulled at him to hold him back, he, like the dumb animal his behaviour increasingly resembled, only shook her off, grimaced at her with his huge yellow teeth, and began scrambling down into the Dark.

She watched him until he'd quite vanished, and then, only then, did she throw herself down on the grass and cried a little. Not only for the Big One himself, but because her project to study him would remain forever incomplete.

And, in the depth of her mind, was a strand of shame, that she hadn't followed him down there as well.

____________________________________________________

She'd just managed to get her emotions under some kind of control when she heard a great bellowing.

It was a familiar bellowing; she'd heard it before, when the Big One had come rushing into the Sleeping Chamber and sent Munin rolling off her and Bledir flying. It was coming from down inside the Hole, and it was getting louder. She jumped to her feet and rushed to the parapet around the Hole, looking down recklessly, and there the Big One was, clambering upwards desperately and clumsily as usual. Weena glimpsed the pale shape of a Terror trying to drag him back by the leg before it gave up and scrambled downwards again.

And then the Big One had somehow heaved his bulk out of the Hole and flopped on his back on the grass, gasping the air with frantic gulps, and Weena, giddy with relief, was kissing his hands over and over again.

Slowly, the Big One's breathing eased. Slowly, Weena's own heart stopped beating with quite such frantic fear. She knelt beside him to check how badly he was damaged.

Not too badly, she thought, noticing the scratches on his hands and face; his strange thick clothes were ripped, too, but that couldn't be helped. At least none of him was missing and he'd probably heal in a Daylight or two.

But that was beside the point. He'd survived this time. He might not survive next time. She was only too afraid that he was ignorant of that simple fact. Nothing that happened seemed to affect his reckless behaviour in any way.

The Big One was, she was beginning to believe, incapable of learning from experience.

How, she thought, still pressing her lips to the back of his huge hand, was she supposed to teach him?

CHAPTER FOUR

"Well?"

Negufta didn't bother to turn around. She continued probing the sockets on the machine with the tips of her long fingers. "What do you want?" she asked.

"Have you, or have you not, found out anything about this?" Yntho's voice vibrated with impatience. "Or should I get another Machinist?"

The idea of surrendering the machine to another Machinist sent a shaft of dread through Negufta. She was invested in the object now, determined to learn its secrets if she could, for reasons that had nothing to do with Yntho and everything to do with her inner need to find out how a thing worked. It was why she'd become a Machinist, the inability to leave something broken alone until she knew why it had broken and what she could do about it. "It's up to you, of course," she replied, impressing herself with how steady she managed to keep her voice. "But I doubt if another Machinist would do any better than I... and he or she would have to start from scratch. If you want that, go ahead."

There was a brief silence, filled only with the harsh sound of Yntho's frustrated breathing. It seemed that he did not want to go ahead. Negufta let a sliver of triumph raise the corners of her mouth in a little smile. It wasn't as though, since her back was turned to him, Yntho could see it.

"So what have you found out?" Yntho repeated eventually, when the silence had gone on long enough that he understood that Negufta had no intention of volunteering any information.

Negufta finally straightened and turned around. "I've taken it apart," she said. "I've inspected every part, cleaned and polished and oiled everything, and I've put it back again, exactly as it was." She didn't bother to mention that she'd hardly eaten and what snatches of sleep she'd permitted herself had been on the ground next to the machine, curled up with some part of her body always in contact with it. Yntho would have considered it irrelevant. Negufta herself considered it irrelevant. Her priority was the object on which she was resting her right hand. "Here's what I have found out so far."

Yntho said nothing, but every bit of his body vibrated with the demand, get on with it.

"First, it's not a machine like anything else I've ever seen, or anything else we have or we've found, whether in the deep undertunnels, or in the green porcelain building where all the olden time things are." She paused, gathering her thoughts before putting them into words. Machines came far more easily to her than words. "But, I can roughly tell you what it's for.

"It's something meant to travel from somewhere to somewhere else." Yntho opened his mouth but Negufta held up a hand to forestall him. "I know quite well it doesn't have wheels so it can't be rolled from one place to another. But just think about what I'm about to say.

"Your Giant appeared from somewhere. This machine appeared at the same time. Look at that." she pointed at the machine with its rods and levers. "It's made for someone much larger than we are. Someone like your Giant.

"Therefore, not only did the Giant bring the machine, but logic says that the machine brought the Giant."

"What?"

Negufta sighed. She hated having to explain what was obvious to her. "That seat is made for someone much larger than any of us. Therefore your Giant sat on it. The only reason your Giant would sit on it and he, and it, would arrive together is if he used it as a vehicle. And that he came banging on the door is because he wants his vehicle back to travel somewhere else. Do you understand?"

"So?"

"So..." Negufta curled her toes inside her boots to find some outlet for her irritation. "I realised that this thing is a vehicle, though it has no wheels. Then I began looking at it, specifically, as a vehicle. Come here."

Yntho approached, but cautiously, as though the machine was suddenly dangerous. "Well?"

Negufta pointed at the thing she'd spent many hours poring over, set between the levers and sockets; a graduated disc set with markings that she'd traced a hundred times with her fingertips. "See that round thing with those markings? I am convinced that they're some kind of mathematical notation, and that they've got everything to do with deciding where this machine will go. The trouble is that I can't read or interpret them."

Yntho looked at her speculatively. "Can anybody?"

"How should I know? I'm only a Machinist, not a scholar." She turned back to the machine, before he could press the question further. "Now, here we have these two sockets. Obviously they held levers like these others, but they've been removed. I've tried all the other levers, but nothing happened, so it's clear to me that those two levers hold the key to moving this vehicle."

"We don't have the levers," Yntho replied with unnecessary brusqueness.

"Of course you don't. Your Giant has." Negufta touched the sockets again. "I've no idea if you can get the levers from this Giant, but I assume that you can't. But we do have another option."

"Which is?"

"I'll make substitute levers." Negufta composed her face to conceal the desperate yearning that she felt inside herself at the thought of bringing this machine to life. "I've measured the exact dimensions of these sockets. I've checked their internal configurations exactly. I know their depth, their taper, the exact turn of the thread, to within the thickness of a hair."

"And? What do you want?"

"it's simple." Negufta took a deep breath. "Give me access to the foundry. I'll cast new levers myself."

"You? You're a Machinist."

"I know I'm not a Metallurgist. I know that. I also don't know what these levers were made of, but I do know that I can make substitutes that will fit." Negufta fought to keep the pleading note from creeping into her voice. Yntho might take malicious pleasure in denying her just because. "And after I make the levers and fit them, we'll find out what it's for." She waited a few breaths and then brought out the clincher. "Isn't that what you want?"

For a long moment she thought Yntho would refuse, just on principle. But his own need to discover what the machine was about won out, as she'd gambled it would. "All right," he said eventually. "I'll talk to the people at the foundry."

____________________________________________________

The foundry was small. It had been small for longer than Negufta had been alive. Most of the furnaces had long since fallen silent from lack of spare parts and fuel. Only two were still operational, and Negufta herself had spent much time and effort at keeping them in working condition, squeezing another season's life out of failing linings and bellows. But that earned her any goodwill among the Metallurgists, at least where their precious privileges were concerned.

"I'm not going to damage your furnaces or lathes," Negufta repeated for the tenth time. "I'll even supply the metal." She'd accumulated enough scrap iron from defunct parts - housings, broken rods, unidentifiable odds and ends - over the years to make two miserable levers. She was quite willing to sacrifice the lot if she had to. "By Kartak, I'll let you do the casting for me, and give you any metal that's left over. Just do it."

Even then, it had taken Yntho coming to the foundry and giving the orders in his own voice before the Metallurgists relented. An older woman, Glaza, so old that Negufta was faintly surprised that she was still on her feet, let alone working, took the iron scrap from her without ceremony. "Come back in three Darks," she said.

"Three Darks?" Negufta had expected to wait while they were made. "I need them as quickly as possible."

"Three Darks. We have other work, more important work."

Negufta looked around the foundry, the silent furnaces, the Metallurgists standing idly around the chamber. For a moment she very nearly said something she'd undoubtedly have regretted afterwards, but she caught herself in time. In any case it would do no good. Besides, she suddenly realised that she was hungry, tired, and covered with oil and in all probability stinking dirt, sweat, and old metal. The idea of washing herself, eating a proper meal, and having a good long uninterrupted sleep in her own warm little room seemed all at once irresistible.

"All right," she said, fighting down a yawn. "I'll come back in three Darks."

In the meantime, she decided, she could keep examining the machine. The more she knew, the better it would be when she finally had the levers in place.

And then, she thought fiercely, I'll find out. I will finally know.

And nobody's going to stop me, not even Yntho.

____________________________________________________

Negufta woke to the sound of bellowing.

The noise was unprecedented. She'd never heard anything even remotely similar. Certainly not from the People, not from any of the Beasts, and not from any natural phenomenon she could name.

For a moment she imagined it was a dream, and shook her head, but it continued. It was not a dream.

She jerked up from her sleeping mat, fumbling for her clothes and boots, and began dressing frantically. It wasn't because of any sense of modesty, of course - she and the others saw each other naked all the time, nobody bothered about nudity - but because she might need her tools to face whatever emergency was out there. And for her hands to have access to her tools, she needed her clothes on.

Some kind of emergency it certainly was. She could hear some of the People now, too, calling out orders.

"Come round from that side," she heard, in Brasza's unmistakable flat carrying tones. "Get the fire-box away from it."

A fire-box? Negufta had just dragged on her tunic. She quickly tied on the belt with its tool pockets, gave up on her boots and ran out barefoot to find out what was happening.

An enormous tussle was going on at the far end of the air pump stack chamber. Negufta glimpsed a gigantic form, surrounded by several of the People, striking out at them with fists and feet. She stood where she was, watching and trying to understand what was happening, when there was a sudden flare of intense yellow light, making her flinch involuntarily and raise an arm to shield her eyes from the glare.

A fire, she thought. It's got a fire!

Negufta's mind went immediately to the nearest water, the nearest buckets of earth, the way she'd practised a hundred times before. At least, she thought, the water and the earth would be there, nobody was stupid or lazy enough to underestimate the danger of fire. But before she could take a single step in that direction, the flare had gone out. When she looked again, the struggle had left the stack chamber and moved into the access tunnel to the Outside.

Negufta ran forwards. She could now see the Giant. She had already calculated its probable size from the dimensions of the machine, and decided that she needed a closer look to decide how close her deductions had been. She was only just in time to see it vanish into the shaft to the Outside and begin clambering Lightwards.

Negufta reacted totally by instinct, her body acting before her mind had formulated a conscious thought. She threw herself into the shaft and grabbed the Giant by one huge kicking leg.

It was like holding on to a stack that was out of control and spinning itself to destruction, torque enough to pull her arms from their sockets. The Giant kicked wildly, thrusting Negufta against the side of the shaft hard enough to drive the breath from her body. Overhead, the Light was coming closer; her eyes revolted from the unbearable radiance as they always did, raw white pain flooding her brain.

Gasping for air, half blind, she finally let go and scrambled back down into the welcoming blessed dimness of home.

By the time her eyes had cleared and she could breathe again, she found she had no interest at all in the chatter of the excited People around her. She focused on two vital facts.

The Giant had come down from Outside, unprovoked, and invaded the World.

Also, the Giant had fire.

Things were getting more dangerous than she'd ever expected.

CHAPTER FIVE

"Are you avoiding me?"

Weena sighed before looking up from her sandal straps. The Big One had gone somewhere, so she'd taken the opportunity for a quick swim, though this early in Daylight the water still had a bite to it that made her skin prickle. She thought, with some resentment, that she should at least be allowed to dress in peace.

"What makes you ask that?" she inquired, keeping her voice even.

Munin didn't reply immediately. He seemed uncharacteristically uncomfortable, as though he'd really rather not be doing this, having this conversation with her. Munin was never the confrontational type; Weena thought with a pang of pity that he'd probably stayed up half the Dark nerving himself up to speak.

"Well?" Weena finished tying the straps of her sandals and got to her feet. From where she stood on the grass bank of the river, she was about a hand taller than Munin. For once she could look down at someone instead of looking up. The fact gave her an odd thrill of advantage. She wondered, suddenly, how much more superior the Big One must feel to everyone, looking down at the world from his immense height.

"It's just..." Munin began. "You're never in your sleeping place at night any longer. You don't talk to me like you used to. You're always with him." He took a deep breath. "Are you giving yourself to him?"

Weena struggled to fight down the bubble of laughter trying to burst out of her. The idea of her giving herself to the Big One! Only someone like Munin would have come up with something so absurd. "Look," she said, gently, "I just... haven't had time for... that... these last few Daylights." She cast around for a way out and found it. "Why don't you ask Plyasun?" She pointed at the young woman gathering flowers not far away. "She's right over there, and she's far better looking."

Munin didn't even bother turning around. "That's not true. You're prettier."

"I'm not," Weena said, "and you know it. But even if I were, so what? Plyasun likes you."

She realised it was a mistake the moment the words left her mouth, even before the hurt settled on Munin's face. "And you don't?"

"Of course I like you, it's just that..." How could she explain that she just didn't want to do that, and not just not with him, but with any man? She was saved by the sight of the bulk of the Big One heaving into sight. "Let's go to breakfast."

Munin followed her look, and a bitter expression passed like a shadow across his face. It made her heart sink. He was going to be a problem, then. "All right," he said. "But, Weena?"

"Yes?" She scrambled off the bank and was suddenly shorter than Munin again. "What?"

"I'm not giving up."

Yes, he was going to be a problem. Maybe she should have a word with Plyasun.

And maybe she wouldn't. Why would Plyasun believe her?

At this point Weena didn't believe herself.

____________________________________________________

The Big One's face had become even fuzzier over the last couple of Daylights.

Weena had been compelled to revise her earlier conclusion that it was an anti-kiss barrier; the bristles were not just longer but softer, no longer so prickly. Her current working hypothesis was that it was some way of the Big One attempting to conceal his identity by hiding his features, though she was at a loss to explain why he'd want to do that. Given his size, wouldn't anyone at all be able to recognise him at once?

Maybe - the thought struck her with astonishment that she hadn't come up with the idea before - it wasn't the People he was attempting to hide his identity from? Who might it be, then? Not the Terrors, for a certainty, given that he went out of his way to seek them out. In which case...

"Are you hiding here from other Big Ones in the clouds?" she asked him at breakfast, watching him stuff a fourth Food Flower into his mouth whole. "Are you afraid that they'll follow you down here? Is that why..." the next logical idea came to her. It was so blindingly obvious! "Is that why you want to go down into the Dark with the Terrors? You want to hide in the Dark, is that it?"

The Big One chewed noisily at his Food Flower and then bared his huge yellow teeth. "Is good," he said.

Weena nodded. She knew he wasn't agreeing with what she'd deduced; he was talking about the Food Flower. She'd long since given up trying to teach him complex Language; his mind was obviously capable of only holding two basic words in it at any given time. At least he'd finally picked up a few words and begun clumsily stringing them together in twos. She supposed it was progress of a kind. "Yes," she said, getting up from the table. "Come."

They walked side by side out into the sunshine. Plyasun ran past, followed by a man whose name Weena couldn't for the moment recall, both laughing. Weena didn't feel like laughing.

"Are other Big Ones going to come down from the clouds and attack us?" she asked, not expecting an answer and not getting one. She'd only asked it as a way to see if it sounded ridiculous if she said it out loud.

It did not sound ridiculous. Not at all.

Compared to a horde of Big Ones descending from the clouds, she thought, even the Terrors suddenly seemed almost a small and ordinary danger, part of the natural order of things.

The morning passed in aimless wandering. The Big One walked down by the river and back again, making Weena wish she could slip away for a swim. He strolled around, looking up at the buildings and trees. Or was he looking at the sky to see if other Big Ones were coming? Weena began to tire, but stuck to him because the stakes had suddenly become much greater than just keeping Munin away.

The Sun was starting to sink down towards the ground when the Big One walked up the slope to the broken yellow seat and stood looking around. From her much lower eye level, Weena couldn't see nearly as far as he could, so she climbed on the seat for a better look. What was he looking at? The question was no longer of mild academic interest. If the Big Ones came down from the sky in numbers, she might need to know what her Big One was looking for.

But she couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. It was the same scene as usual. Far in the distance there were more buildings, a forest in between, and, beyond it all, a hill on which a green building glittered in the rays of the departing Sun. She'd seen all this a hundred times before. Maybe the Big One's eyes could see further than hers could, just as the Terrors could see in the Dark?

She wished she had someone she could discuss all this with. But there was nobody. The only one who might even listen was Florun, and he'd immediately disagree with whatever she said, just to prove he had opinions of his own. And Wessa would agree with whatever Florun said, as he always did, and whatever she said would be just drowned in noise.

"We go," the Big One said suddenly, and began striding down the slope, away from the Sleeping Place and the other buildings.

"Where?" she asked, jumping down from the seat and trotting beside him. "Where go?"

"Green," he said, "green house." Green house? What green house? The one on the hill? But that was insane! Even the Big One couldn't possibly reach there before Dark fell.

For a moment she considered telling the Big One this, but he'd never understand plain Language, and the very thought of breaking it down into two-word bites that he just might comprehend made her head hurt. Besides, he wouldn't listen anyway. He'd not listened to her trying to stop him from climbing down into the Hole. He'd ignored her actually attempting, with all the futile strength she could muster, to drag him back from the Hole. He'd just shaken her off and done whatever he wanted to anyway.

Still, she had to try.

"If we're going to the green building that I saw..." she began, and then caught herself. "Dark," she said. "Dark, no." She felt like a fool for mangling Language like this. She pointed skywards and shook her head. "Dark, bad." Couldn't the Big One understand that it would be Dark soon and wherever he was planning to go, he should wait until morning? Was he really still incapable of understanding that? She fought down a sudden desire to kick him. Not only would it achieve nothing, but she'd probably only bruise her toes.

He didn't even acknowledge her, just walked straight on like Florun wading through an argument he was having with figments of his imagination, oblivious to everything in his path. Weena had to trot even faster to keep up, and then her foot stuck in a hole in the ground and she stumbled.

That, at least, the Big One noticed. Without ceremony, and without asking if she wanted it, he picked her up and put her on his shoulders, one of her legs draped down each side of his chest and his huge hands grasping her ankles.

It was dizzying. Weena had a moment of sheer panic when she thought she was about to fall over backwards, and steadied herself with a frantic grab at the Big One's hair. He swayed alarmingly as he walked. It was horrible.

But, she realised, it did give her legs an opportunity to rest, and, once she'd got a little used to the motion, she realised that she could see a lot further from her perch on his shoulders than if she were running by his side. More than that, she realised that her eyes level was higher than his now and that she could see further than he could. This might be useful, if a Terror or two came clambering up from a Hole and following them. She filed away the thought for later. It was far too early for the Terrors, but later it would not be.

After a while her legs began to cramp from riding his shoulders, so she tapped him on the head and said, "Down." He put her down with obvious reluctance, and she thought that he might just go striding off leaving her behind. What could she do to appease him?

The idea had just struck her when she saw some of the white flowers she loved making garlands from - they were very large and easy to thread - and the idea came to her, the Big One likes flowers. So she ran and gathered as many as she could in her arms, ran back to the Big One, intending to give them to him. And then she realised with annoyance that there was no way he could carry them, not if he was going to put her on his shoulders again as it was obvious he'd have to do at some point; and no way she could carry them either if she were to hold on.

And then she saw the perfect solution: the odd pockets sewn into his clothes, which, she'd realised by the third Daylight, were meant to store things in. They could store the flowers now, she thought, and stuffed them into the pockets until they were bulging.

The Big One rumbled a laugh and said something that she couldn't understand.

After a while, he picked her up and put her on his shoulders again.

____________________________________________________

They spent the Dark on a slope above the forest.

Weena had by then become totally numb with exhaustion. She was so tired that she could barely hang on to the Big One's hair, and, despite the urgent need to stay awake and on the lookout, she kept nodding off. Try as she might to hold on to wakefulness, it was too much, and when the Big One put her down and sat down beside her, she flopped herself on to the grass, tunic and sandals and all, and dropped into sleep like a stone into water.

She dreamt. In the dream the Big One and she were surrounded by Terrors; there were Terrors on every side, but they weren't attacking. They were all staring at her and the Big One with their huge eyes, and the Big One was talking to them in his enormous voice and pointing up at the sky, telling them that the other Big Ones were coming. Which was confusing the Terrors because they were all inside a Hole, Weena suddenly discovered, a Hole tall dark things that thudded and wind that blew constantly, in one direction and there was a smell, of oil and metal. It was all rather terrible.

Then Weena felt herself being shaken. She opened her eyes and it was Daylight again. The Terrors hadn't attacked them during the Dark, and the Big One was sitting beside her. But there seemed to be something wrong with his feet, and he took off his leather foot coverings, like closed sandals, and threw them on the grass.

Then he pulled her up and then went down into the Forest. The Big One seemed to have forgotten about food and water, and though Weena was famished, she told herself that she could manage for a while.

Finding out what the Big One was planning was more important right now than eating or drinking again.

____________________________________________________

The Sun was right overhead when they finally reached the green building.

Weena hated it immediately. It was too big, too far away from other buildings, and there were no other People around. They'd passed many People on the way, whom Weena didn't know, but none of them were around the green building.

This was itself a warning sign. Just as Weena's own group of People knew not to approach the Statue and its doors, the People here apparently shunned the green building.

But it was still broad Daylight, and surely the Big One wouldn't dawdle too long? She worked up some saliva by wriggling her tongue in her mouth, swallowed it to moisten her parched throat, and followed him into the building.

Inside it was dusty and full of long passages and chambers with old things in glass cases down the sides, the kind of thing that Weena never paid any attention to, but for some reason the Big One seemed extremely interested in them. She didn't know what they were for and didn't see how she could learn anything from looking at them.

So she watched the Big One instead.

She watched as he walked from one to the other, taking some out and examining them. Once or twice his face was filled with excitement, and he took a few things and stuffed them in his pouches, spilling out most of the flowers as he did. Weena might have been interested in what he had chosen to take, but she began to realise something distressing.

The Big One was leading them both down into the deeper, gloomier part of the building, and when she looked down at the dust covering the floor, she saw what he was apparently incapable of seeing.

Terror footprints, unmistakable in the dust. The Terrors had been here, and if they'd been here, they would come again.

Then she ran to him and pointed at the Terrors' footprints, and somehow or other her urgent pointing got through enough to him that he turned back. Briefly, she hoped that he'd just leave the building, but of course he had no such intention. Instead he broke off a great shaft from one of the big metal things by the wall and came back swinging it around in a fashion that made Weena flinch. She herself could hardly have even lifted it, but he was throwing it around as though it weighed nothing. It would have smashed her to a pulp if he accidentally struck her, so she kept prudently behind him as he kept stalking the silent corridors, until he seemed to tire enough of his new toy to keep it dangling harmlessly by his side.

The Sun was sinking and the Dark about to creep up from the other side of the sky when the Big One finally tired of his games and left the green building.

"Go buildings," Weena said, pointing at the structures in the distance, between trees. "Eat, sleep." She was weary with hunger and fatigue, and so thirsty that she barely managed to croak the words. She didn't even really think it was necessary to say anything; even the Big One must know that they needed food, water, and rest. The People here did not know her and of course did not know the Big One, but they would never deny strangers food and shelter from the Dark.

That was not the People's way.

The Big One didn't even look at her. Clutching her hand in one of his, the huge metal rod in the other, he began dragging her back along the way they'd come.

____________________________________________________

The Big One was insane.

The truth that she'd been unable to see for what it was finally became clear to Weena as the Big One began dragging her through the gathering Dark. It explained so many things about him; why he had come down from the clouds, why he seemed to look for opportunities to go into the Terrors' domains, why he seemed heedless of the need for rest and sustenance. It even explained why he couldn't manage to learn more than two-word sentences in Language.

He was completely, incurably, raving mad.

Weena wished at that moment that she could break free of him, and run back to the nearest building and look for shelter among the People there. But it was already too late. The Dark would soon close in, and, like it or not, she was committed to the Big One's company until the next Daylight.

Meanwhile she watched him break off a mass of dry twigs and carry them in his arms, as though they were like the flowers she loved to gather. But there wasn't a flower among them, and the few leaves were dry and brown. What did he want with them? A Daylight ago, she'd have been trying to work the observation into the structure of a hypothesis. Now she was only concerned that it was another random symptom of his madness.

At this moment his insanity frightened her more than any Terror did. But at least his insanity had kept them both alive so far. And she knew what the Terrors would do to both of them if they could.

So she climbed back on his shoulders and was carried through the Dark, and wondered what she'd do in the Daylight when they got back home. What should she do about him?

She still hadn't found an answer when the Dark came down and swallowed the world.

____________________________________________________

Weena started and almost fell from the Big One's shoulders. With his arms full of the useless dross of twigs and the metal rod he was carrying, he couldn't hold her ankles, so she'd been hanging on by her grip on his hair. In her exhaustion, she'd almost fallen asleep and let go of the fistful of hair holding her in place.

Her eyes flew open.

They were on the slope above the forest. The Big One had stopped. He bent so she could slide off his shoulders, and put down all the twigs and sticks.

Then he produced one of his tame Fires and set light to them.

Weena was horrified. Even with all the growing signs of how dangerously insane the Big One was, she couldn't imagine that he'd be this unhinged. Didn't he even know what Fire could do out in the forest in the dry season? She tried to run to the Fire and throw earth on it to smother it to death, but the Big One grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back.

"No play," he rumbled, and began dragging her away. A little later they reached the forest and she got on his shoulders again.

Play? He thought she was going to play with the Fire? Weena's mind boggled as she tried to imagine the sheer depths of his insanity. What might he do next? What might he do to her, given time and lunacy enough? She didn't know.

All she could do right now, though, was clutch his hair and hold on as he carried her through the trees.

____________________________________________________

The Terrors were all around them.

Weena could hear them, their soft voices, so much softer than the People's, and she could smell them, too, the smell of oil and metal, that always clung to them. She looked around, to see where they were and warn the Big One, but even from her elevated perch on his shoulders she couldn't see anything. In the forest the Dark was absolute.

And then the Big One put her down.

She couldn't even begin to protest before a Terror was on her.

Weena had never fought before in her life. She'd never even thought of having to fight. But she let instinct take over and began striking out as hard as she could, at random, and felt her fists connect with something. For one glorious moment she thought she'd won, and then many hands grabbed her and began pulling her away. As she fell, her arms came into contact with the Big One's legs, and she clutched them with all the strength she could muster.

And then a Fire blazed suddenly and the hands on her fell away.

Weena tried to lift her head, to get up. But she couldn't. The Dark and the Fire merged and swirled in her sight into a heaving smear, and she fainted.

____________________________________________________

Weena woke to Fire.

It licked at the air and burned in her throat with every breath. The very air seemed made of it. Smoke blew into her eyes, making them stream with tears.

"Big One?" she called. Her voice was lost in the crackling of fire.

"Big One!" she screamed, as loudly as her raw throat would let her. There was no response.

Frantically, blinded by the smoke, her ears full of the crackle of flames, she felt around her with her hands for him. There was nothing.

She was alone.

Stark panic seized her then; fear of the fire and the Terrors, merging into one overwhelming whole.

She tried to scream again, but the smoke caught in her throat, burned down into her chest, and made her double over, retching helplessly.

She could feel the heat of the fire now, close by. The smoke was worse. Her eyes were burning so badly she could no longer bear to keep them open.

Half bent over, trying to shield her eyes and face with her arms, she began stumbling through the burning forest, not knowing where she was going, just that she had to get as far away from the flames as she could.

It was too much. She knew it was too much. She began to stumble. She fell. Somehow she got up again.

I can't go on any further, she realised then, with the absolute clarity of someone no longer capable of caring. I'll just stop here now, and let the fire take me. She fell to her knees.

And then something grabbed her by the arm and pulled her upright.

She felt herself slung over a shoulder like a dead weight, and then she knew nothing more.

CHAPTER SIX

The lower gallery was flooding.

"It's this damned thing that is at fault." Tovak pointed at the water pump as though it had offended him personally. Which, Negufta thought, it might as well have. Tovak was in charge of carving this particular passage out of the earth. It was difficult enough at the best of times, with water oozing out of the walls and making the floor an unstable morass. But now the water had risen almost to knee level and showed no sign of stopping.

"I'll have a look." She'd much rather have been taking apart the Giant's machine one more time, in order to measure and tabulate every piece, and hopefully get Yntho and Glaza to agree to allow her to start casting parts to construct a duplicate. She knew that the chances of their agreeing were something less than optimal, but she'd never let that stop her before.

Meanwhile the air down here in the lower passages was damp and chilly. She didn't like damp and chilly; machines rusted, seals deteriorated, and ultimately things broke down.

But, meanwhile, the pump did need fixing, and she was a Machinist.

She'd hardly removed the first coupling when she saw the problem; mud had worked its way in and blocked the pipe almost completely. She removed the couplings, flushed out the pipes with water she scooped up from the flood itself, and then, since she'd already partially dismantled the pump, decided to strip it down completely and check everything for wear and tear while she had the chance.

She'd almost finished putting it together again when she became aware that she was being watched. She didn't think it was Tovak; he'd gone off to check up on his crew as soon as she'd begun work. She took a look out of the corner of her eye. She'd been right; it was someone else.

She had seen the man earlier, when she'd arrived at Tovak's summons, standing by the wall as though he wished he could merge into it. He was very young, scarcely more than a boy. She'd glanced at him and dismissed him from her mind.

He was not a machine; therefore he was irrelevant.

Yet now he was standing close by, staring at her and watching her movements intently. She tried to ignore it as long as possible, until he cleared his throat nervously. She ignored that, too. He cleared his throat again.

She sighed and looked up. What did he want? Did he think she was attractive, was that it? The thought brought a tiny involuntary smile to her lips. She did not find anything attractive except machines. Machines and she understood each other. Men, on the other hand, were complicated in ways she could neither understand nor had any great desire to.

"Yes?" she asked, not unkindly. The man was very young, after all.

"Machinist," the man began. He looked as though he was nerving himself up before every syllable. "Can you... uh..." he held out something, a mass of blackened and corroded metal. "Can you take a look at this?"

She did have the pump to finish, but it was almost done, and curiosity won out. She took the object and turned it over in her hands. It was heavier than she'd expected, though so corroded that tiny particles flaked off in her hands. "Where did you get this?"

"I found it while digging, down there," the young man pointed along the flooded passage. "What is it?"

Negufta held it up at eye level for a closer look. There was part of what had once been a tube, attached to a block of metal that had been meant to be gripped by a hand; a very large hand; a hand, she thought, as big as the Giant's. She'd seen things like this before, in the green porcelain building, and taken them apart, though, of course, those had been in much better shape than this.

Once upon a time this had been a weapon.

She told him as much. "I've come across these before. They were supposed to throw some kind of projectile, though how exactly is something I never managed to find out." She looked at the young man's face, and saw the expected flicker of disappointment. Young men, she thought with amusement, they loved the idea of weapons. What they'd do with the weapons if they had them was something that they never seemed to think through. "It's nothing particularly special, I'm afraid."

The young man nodded glumly, but stayed there, watching as she finished putting together the pump, wiped her fingers on a piece of cloth, and turned the wheel that to set it going. It came to life with a rumble and the water level began to drop. Negufta sat back on her heels with a satisfied sigh. Healing a piece of broken machinery made something sing inside her.

That weapon, she thought, as she watched to make sure the pump didn't choke up again. The Giant could have held a weapon like that, in one huge hand. Some of the other ones from the green porcelain place were even bigger. How had one of them ended up so far under the ground? Did the Giants live far under the ground?

Don't be ridiculous, she told herself. The Giant couldn't see a thing in the chamber of the air pumps. It had to start up tame Fires from a box to see. Besides, this particular weapon is totally corroded, the way something can only get if it's been abandoned a long, long time under the ground.

Then how did it get so far underground, another part of her mind asked. Do you have an explanation for that, apart from your wild hypothesis that things get buried in the earth over very, very long stretches of time?

No, she didn't. She decided to put the whole topic aside for now. The pump was throbbing merrily, the water level in the passage had already dropped by a quarter, and she had other work to do.

But the boy was still standing there, the corroded weapon in his hands. "Well?" she asked him. "What is it?"

"Ah..." He couldn't meet her eyes. "What's your name, Machinist?"

She bit her lip to fight down the smile. "Negufta. What's yours?"

"Doklam." He still couldn't meet her eyes. "I, ah..."

"You need to get back to work," she told him firmly. The last thing she needed was to encourage a post-adolescent romance. She got up to go. "I think I can hear Tovak calling." If it wasn't quite true, it would be true soon enough, as soon as Tovak noticed that the water level was falling. And then he might remember he had other pumps that needed clearing.

The boy, Doklam, nodded glumly and turned away. She watched him walk off before throwing another look at the pump. It was thudding away happily, so she patted it encouragingly.

"Good machine," she said, and waited to see if it decided to prove her wrong. It didn't, so she patted it again and turned away to go back up to her own domain, the machinery-filled chambers high above.

Her foot struck something. Looking down, she saw that the boy had dropped the corroded ancient weapon.

She might find a use for the remaining usable metal in the thing, if only to trade for some favour, so she picked it up and began the long trek upwards to the passages and caverns she called home.

____________________________________________________

Negufta's home was a tiny alcove just off the chamber of the air pumps, actually between the cavern's rock wall and the bulk of one of the great condensers accumulating water for the People from the pumped air. She'd chosen it not for comfort, but for two things: proximity to the machines that she loved, and for privacy. She'd rather have the tiny space to herself than a much larger chamber she'd have to share with someone else.

It wasn't much, but she didn't need much. Her sleeping mat was old, but thick, comfortable, and large enough that she didn't have to worry about rolling off it in dreams. She had put some hooks made from broken machine parts in the wall on one side to hang up her tunic and belt. On the wall opposite she'd managed to hammer in the metal cover of a defunct air filter. It hung slightly lopsided, but it hadn't fallen off yet, and it served well enough as a shelf. She put the weapon on it, next to a long stiff piece of wire she'd been saving so long that it had almost become part of the furniture, stretched, and yawned. After the long journey down through the narrow twisting tunnels and back, not to speak of bending over the water pump, her body ached in every joint.

You're becoming an old woman, she thought. It wasn't true, of course, she had lived only twenty Cold Seasons, but it gave her a certain masochistic pleasure. Soon nobody will want you, except boys like Doklam who don't know what they want. And the machines you love can't love you back anyway.

She thought of going to the Statue Room for another go at the Giant's machine, but she was very tired, too tired even to walk down to the communal dining chamber for food and drink. Besides, if she did, someone was bound to ask her for help in fixing something or other, and then her mind wouldn't be able to rest until whatever it was could be set going again.

I've too many things going on, she thought. She looked at the ancient, half-dismantled, casting machine she'd been trying, so far with a total lack of success, to repair before the Giant and his vehicle had appeared. Someday I'll get back to this, too, she told herself, just not now. Sorry, machine. I promise in the name of Kartak I'll try to heal you when I have the time.

Then she took off her boots, stripped off and hung up her belt and tunic, and flopped down naked on her sleeping mat with a sigh. But sleep would not come.

Machines, she thought, staring up at the ceiling, where a whorl of rock made a twisted pattern she liked to look at while she was relaxing. Everything is a machine. She held up her hand, flexed her fingers, and watched the tendons shift under the cover of her skin. This is a machine, too. I'm a machine which tends machines so that those machines can make life possible for all of us machines.

It wasn't the first time she'd thought this, and usually she could follow this train of thought down a deepening spiral that led to sleep, but this time it didn't happen. Soon the levers would be ready. What would happen when she put them in place in their sockets? She knew how dangerous even the machines she spent every day around could be; and those were machines that she knew inside and out, whose workings and purpose she knew as well as she knew herself. What would the Giant's mysterious vehicle be like once it got going? What dangers would it reveal when she operated it? How should she prepare for this?

No answers suggested themselves. She felt sleep slip further away.

It was just as she was considering giving up on rest altogether and getting back to work on the casting machine that she heard Brasza shouting.

"Everyone out!" he was yelling. The urgency in his voice made Negufta sit up so quickly that she almost struck her head on the bottom of her shelf. "The Outside is on fire!"

____________________________________________________

Negufta did not like the Outside.

It had been a very long time since she'd been Outside last, but she could still recall the flaring light, only just bearable, of the white orb that hung in the sky. Those who went Outside every Dark, to harvest and supply food to the Beasts and to hunt, had told her that the white orb ate itself every fourteen Darks and then grew again; and when it was all eaten away, the other tiny flickering points of light provided just enough illumination for it to be pleasant.

Negufta had taken their word for it. She wasn't interested in the Outside or its methods of illumination. She was much happier down in her familiar caverns with her familiar machines, with good solid rock overhead, and had always been.

But fire was a crisis, and she didn't have the option of remaining.

She jumped up, dragging on her tunic with one hand while gathering up her boots with the other, and ran into the cavern, still tying on her belt. "Fire? Where?"

Brasza barely bothered to glance at her. "It's past the next air stack cavern from here," he snapped. "We've just got word that it's spreading fast. We can't risk sparks finding their way down here."

Negufta looked around. Small groups of the People were forming. The nearest one to her was gathered around Gudal. Gudal was loud, overbearing, and convinced that volume was a viable substitute for thought and planning. She began quietly sidling towards one of the further groups. But Gudal saw her before she could get away.

"You, Negufta. Here." Gudal beckoned her over and went back to talking to the others. "It's supposed to have started in the forest beyond the air vents."

"How many shafts in that sector?" someone asked.

"I don't know. The People there will tell us." Gudal looked around impatiently. "Gather whatever you can find to make fire breaks around every shaft opening you find. Strip vegetation, pile up earth. Every bit helps."

"How are we going to get there fastest?" the same questioner asked. "Do we go Outside here and cross country?"

"Don't waste time on idiotic questions." Gudal looked as though he were about to blow his top. "It's straight along the passages from here to that sector. Now go!"

____________________________________________________

The world was on fire.

Even before she'd finished climbing out of the shaft, Negufta had seen that the sky was glowing red. She'd always feared the sky, so huge and limitless, unlike the safe roofed chambers and tunnels where she spent her life. The sky had always made her feel as though she were going to fall into it. But it had never been red before, like a hot forge-mouth in the foundry where the Metallurgists worked away.

The air outside was different, too. She'd always disliked the air Outside as well, so prone to gust and eddy and change speed and direction in an instant, unlike the steady pump-driven currents of home. But now the air smelt of smoke, raw and acrid; it caught the back of her throat and made her cough.

She pulled herself up from the shaft opening, squeezed under the canopy, and dropped to the ground. The fire wasn't close enough yet to see, but she could hear it, a hissing and crackling noise that was slowly growing louder and clearer. It was obvious that it would reach the shaft soon, and then the air currents from the pumps would drag flame and smoke down into the chambers and tunnels.

She really didn't want to find out what would happen if the fire got into the chambers and tunnels. The damage to the pumps and air filters alone didn't bear thinking about.

"Spread out," she shouted. "We need to keep the fire as far from the shaft as possible!"

Other People, from this sector, were busy piling up earth between the shaft and the direction of the fire, and drenching it with buckets of water. It would help, but not if the fire changed direction. And Negufta knew all too well how fickle winds Outside were, so she knew that if the fire could change direction, it would.

So she ran towards the forest on the opposite side to the others, until she was close to the nearest trees, and began ripping up dry twigs and grass as quickly as she could make her hands work.

____________________________________________________

Negufta didn't at first realise that the fire had caught up with her.

She'd been intent on clearing away a thicket of dried brush, pulling at the stubborn roots with all her strength, when she noticed a curious phenomenon. The light on her hands was a lot brighter than it had been. She could see her fingers distinctly, in fact with an almost uncomfortable distinctness, and the air had grown rather warm.

She looked up, and recoiled.

White pain flared in her head from the wall of dazzling orange light advancing on her from three sides. Heat struck at her next, heat so intense that she thought she could feel the hairs in her nostrils curling up and charring from it with every breath she took. Instinctively, she bent almost double and threw up her hands to shield her face and eyes.

The stacks, she thought, I've got to go back down and tell them to shut down the stacks before the air flow draws the fire and smoke inside. Her eyes streaming, barely able to see a thing, she turned to run back to the shaft.

The flames were between her and the shaft.

They licked at the air, which was acrid with smoke and drifting ash. The light was so brilliant that she could just barely make out that the flames hadn't yet spread to the right, along the slope. Bent over, covering her nose and mouth with the hem of her tunic to keep the worst of the ash and smoke from her lungs, she ran.

The fire followed her, racing to catch up, as though it were sentient and malignant, and she had a moment of insensate fury at whatever had started it in the first place. It was already too late to circle back to the shaft from which she'd emerged. She wasn't running any longer just to save the air pumps; she was running to save her own life.

For a few frantic moments she emerged into the shadow of the slope, a patch of blessed near darkness, enough to raise her head for a moment and risk a peek through her fingers, enough to orient herself. She was running homewards, but it was clear she'd never be able to outrun the fire. She'd have to find a shaft, any shaft, and get down it if she were to survive.

Then the fire blazed along the crest of the slope, snatched away her darkness, and she ran on again.

Head down, almost completely blinded by the glare, she didn't know the thing was there in her path until she stumbled over it. Something that gasped and gave way when struck by her shin, and even as she went sprawling, she reached out instinctively to break her fall. Her hand closed on something that was unmistakably an arm.

One of the People, then, probably also caught out in the fire like she was. She couldn't see anything, couldn't spare the breath to ask anything, and for a moment wondered if it were too late and she should simply leave the person behind. But then, above the crackling of the fire, she heard whoever it was coughing and wheezing. The person was alive.

Working now almost entirely by instinct, shielding her face with one arm, she dragged whoever it was up, slung the person over her shoulder like a sack of spare parts or a piece of piping, and stumbled on again.

____________________________________________________

Negufta found the shaft entrance by falling into it.

She had been stumbling along for so long that she'd lost all notion of time. The only realities were the blinding light, the heat that battered at her, the smoke that burned her throat and nostrils, and the weight of the person on her back that grew heavier with every step. She felt her way with her free hand, fumbling her way through hedges and past trees and along a half-crumbled wall, until, abruptly, the ground disappeared under her foot and she pitched forwards.

She twisted instinctively, taking the impact along the side of the shaft on her hip and thigh rather than the person she carried, and then she was falling, grabbing frantically for the rungs until her fingers found one. For a long moment she hung by it, the combined weight of her and her passenger almost wrenching her shoulder joint out of socket, and then her kicking feet found another rung.

Rung by rung, groaning with the combination of effort and the smoke ravaging her lungs, she climbed down into the blessed, wonderful dimness until she at last reached the bottom.

She was in an air stack chamber, she could tell that much from the feel of the space around her. She couldn't hear any voices, so she and the person over her shoulder must be alone. The air was still. There was none of the usual thumping of the pumps. Someone, she realised, had had the intelligence to shut down the stacks.

With a moan of relief and exhaustion, she dropped her burden at the foot of a stack and slid down to the floor, gasping and wiping her streaming eyes. For a long time she just sat there, with her back to the curve of the metal, limp, waiting until she could breathe properly and see again.

And, so, it was only after her breathing had eased and her eyes had cleared enough to trust again that she looked down and discovered just what she'd rescued and carried down with her into the sheltering dark.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Weena swam back to consciousness through a haze of pain.

Everything hurt. Her throat burned raw with every breath she drew. Her legs and arms felt as though they'd been wrenched out of their sockets and put back wrong. For the space of several agonised breaths she didn't dare to open her eyes at all, afraid that it would hurt as much as everything else.

When she finally did open them, she thought at first that she'd gone blind. The darkness around her seemed at first absolute. Then, slowly, she realised that it wasn't quite as dark as she'd first thought. There was a very faint, flickering reddish light coming from somewhere, as though from far away, reflected off stone and metal just enough to let her make out a little of whatever was around her.

There wasn't anything to see at first. She was lying on a hard surface. To her fingertips it felt like stone, cold and unyielding. There was something very large and hulking across from her, soaring up until it merged into darkness. Weena hadn't the faintest idea what it might be. If only the flickering light was a little nearer, a little steadier, she might...

The flickering light! It was exactly like a distant fire. And the fire...

She'd been in the fire. She'd been about to die in the fire, had knelt down in it and given herself up for lost. But she wasn't dead now, and she obviously wasn't in the fire any longer.

So, the question was: where was she?

A horrified gasp to her right made her turn her head. What she saw would have forced a scream from her, but her burnt throat barely managed a strangled squeak.

Two eyes were staring at her, two gigantic eyes that glowed red-orange in the distant light of the fire. They were set in a face the colour of the marble of the White Statue, a face surmounted by a mass of white hair, which tapered down to a small pointed chin.

There was no mistaking what the creature was: a Terror. She was lying next to a Terror. Which meant... her heart nearly froze with fear so consuming that it felt like being struck... that she was in the Terror's tunnels.

She was in the Underworld.

Desperate energy seized Weena. She somehow pushed herself up on her elbows and tried to scramble away backwards from the creature. All she succeeded in doing was cracking the back of her head against a hard metal surface.

She was trapped.

She was still trying to decide what to do when the Terror began crawling towards her on its knees...

... and then it started making noises that could only be an attempt to speak.

____________________________________________________

The horror that rushed through Negufta's mind was like a live thing.

What have I done? she shrieked to herself. I've brought a Beast down here! The animal is here with me!

For one delirious moment she tried to convince herself that she was mistaken. It wasn't really a Beast. Her eyes weren't really recovered from being out in the fire, perhaps. She must be seeing things.

But, no, that wasn't true. She stared, in horrified fascination, at the creature. It wore the cloth tunic and leather sandals the crafts specialists made for the Beasts up on top. Its skin was a warm reddish-brown shade, its hair short, curly, and the colour of copper. Its eyes were the strangest thing about it; they were so small that it was astonishing that the creature could see at all. And at this moment those eyes were dilated in fear as it gazed back at her.

It's scared, she thought, the Beast is terrified of me!

Of course it is, she told herself. I didn't mean to bring it down here, it didn't want to come down here, no wonder it's afraid.

The Beast had pushed itself up on its elbows and was scrambling backwards away from her. It couldn't get far, and didn't, its attempt at flight brought up short by the metal of the stack behind it. It froze, staring at her with its tiny eyes, paralysed with fright.

Her first impulse was to grab the creature, drag it up the shaft, and let it go Outside where it belonged. But the fire was still raging on top, and it would probably be burnt to a crisp before it had run a hundred paces. Besides, she couldn't even contemplate facing the pain of the light of the flames or the smoke in her lungs again, even for the moments it would require for her to drag it far enough from the shaft opening so it wouldn't fall in again. She'd had enough of the fire to last several lifetimes.

The Beast had suffered too, she realised. Its tunic was singed black around the hem, its leather sandals and feet smeared with soot and ashes, and around it hung the unmistakable stench of burnt hair. Its tiny eyes were sunk deep into their sockets, and its breathing came in raspy, uneven pulls.

She felt a sudden surge of pity for the creature. Not only was it terrified, but it must be in agony as well.

It needs care, she thought, but I can't do it here. I can't risk it being found here. Kartak must be watching over us that someone hasn't come along and seen me with it already.

She crawled over to it on her knees, so as not to stand up and loom over it threateningly. "I'm not going to hurt you," she told it, trying to sound soft and friendly, as though she were talking to a child. She had very little experience with speaking to children. The People had few children as it was, and she'd always preferred machines to the company of anyone else anyway, irrespective of age. She probably sounded too loud and harsh, she decided, and, making her voice even softer, tried again.

"I'll take you somewhere I can care for you," she told it. "We can't stay here. Someone might come at any moment and they can't find you here. It isn't safe."

It flinched at her voice and uttered a small, thin cry. Then she realised the obvious, awful truth.

The Beast hadn't understood a single word.

For a long moment she almost gave in to frustration, jumped to her feet and walked away, leaving it to its fate. But she'd brought the Beast down here. Whatever happened, however it had happened, she had done that. Therefore, she had a responsibility to it.

Taking a deep breath, she extended a hand to the Beast, palm up.

And, to her own astonishment, she saw and felt the Beast's small hand creep into her own.

____________________________________________________

The Terror's voice was soft, softer than she could have believed from a creature so terrible, and its words were slurred meaningless syllables strung together. Its enormous glowing eyes seemed to stare right into Weena's mind. It was so close that she could smell it, above the stench of her own sour, smoke-soaked clothing and charred hair, the unmistakable Terror scent of oil and worked metal. Somehow it seemed, in this particular Terror, stronger than she'd ever encountered before.

Or maybe it was just that she'd never been so close to a Terror before, except during the confused tussle before the fire when Terrors had been trying to drag her from the Big One. And then she'd been too frantic and fighting too desperately to notice anything at all.

Big One, she thought with despair so deep that it felt like the weight of worlds, where are you? I need you.

But the Big One was gone. He'd disappeared and abandoned her to the fire.

It's the Terror that didn't abandon me, she realised then, the thought arriving unbidden and unwelcome. It must have been this very Terror that caught me and pulled me along after I'd given up. Why has it brought me down here into the Underworld? To eat me at its leisure?

But it could easily have eaten her, while she lay unconscious and at its mercy. Not only had it not, it was clearly trying to say something to her.

As she thought this, she saw the Terror extending its hand, palm up, to her. The meaning of the gesture was unmistakable. It required no Language to understand.

I'm finished anyway, she thought, with a strange hollow calm. It makes no difference what I do, really. So I might as well.

She reached out and put her hand in the Terror's. The creature felt warm, not cold and slimy as she'd half expected. Its hand was as warm as anyone else's.

Then the Terror pulled her to her blistered feet and led her into the pitch darkness, away from the reflected light of the distant orange flames.

____________________________________________________

Incredible, Negufta thought, as she led the Beast by the hand down the tunnels. It's nothing short of incredible that nobody's come across us.

Of course, the solution came to her a heartbeat later, it's no mystery; everyone is up on top making fire breaks to stop the flames from spreading. Otherwise we'd have attracted a crowd by now.

The Beast was slow and clumsy, stumbling over ground Negufta would have crossed unerringly while examining a piece of machinery hanging from the ceiling. It must be totally sightless in the dimness of the passages, she realised, its tiny eyes adapted to the unendurable glare of the Outside being down here of no use at all. It didn't help matters that the creature was not just unable to see but terrified; she could feel its hand trembling in hers.

"It's all right," she said over her shoulder, trying to make her voice sound soothing. "Just keep following me. We're almost there."

It didn't reply, of course, but the tone of her voice seemed to help a bit. Its fingers curled around hers a little more firmly, and the trembling eased a bit.

Finally they arrived at Negufta's own sector. The air pumps here had been shut down as well, she saw approvingly; someone had used common sense without her needing to tell them. As they passed the shaft to the Outside she cast a glance upwards by force of habit. The tiny circle of sky glowed dull red.

The fire was still burning, then; though not close, not yet.

She led the Beast past the air pumps, past the table where they butchered food sometimes when the kitchen chambers were too busy, round the condenser stack and through the low door into her little room. It was dim and dark there even to her own eyes; to the Beast it must be as black as in one of the deepest mining passages without the light of a glow-globe.

I must get a glow-globe, she thought. Otherwise the Beast can't see, and if it can't see, it's sure to injure itself or make a noise or wander out, and be found.

She led the Beast to her sleeping mat, put her hands on the creature's shoulders, and pressed it gently downwards to make it sit down. Even it should be able to understand the meaning of that.

To her relief, it did.

____________________________________________________

Weena sat down in the dark and felt the Terror leave.

She was in a small room; she could tell that much from the way the Terror had been moving, carefully, so as not to bump into things she herself couldn't see. She had probably never in her life before been in a room this small. When she reached out with her hand, her fingers came in touch with something made of cold metal.

By now she was beyond fear. She had no idea why the Terror had brought her here, and then left her alone, and it no longer mattered. Whatever would happen to her would happen.

Meanwhile, she was exhausted, in pain, thirsty, and hollow with hunger. She could not even remember when she'd last eaten and drunk anything.

Pain, thirst, hunger, and tiredness fought each other for her attention. Tiredness won. She was sitting on something reminiscent of the cushions in the Sleeping Chamber. She curled up on it and began to drift off into sleep.

She'd just begun drifting off when faint light pressed at her eyelids. They flicked open.

The Terror had returned. In its hand it held a small sphere of something transparent. In the heart of the sphere was a dim light that threw a greenish-yellow radiance, just enough to see by.

She had been right; it was a room. Weena saw that one wall was of curved metal, the others of rock. A sloping rock ceiling stretched overhead. Was it the Terror's home?

Weena tried to bend her mind around the concept of anyone living alone. Only a Terror might do it. Nobody would come to drag it away in the middle of sleep, after all.

The Terror put the sphere down on a sheet of metal on a wall that obviously served as a shelf. It stood looking down at her for a long, long time, long enough for Weena to realise it was studying her. She stared back at it.

The Terror was taller than her, maybe a little taller even than Munin; if she took into account the knot on top of its head into which its long white hair was worked, it would be taller still. It was dressed in black, and around its waist was a belt with pouches in which she could see the tops of shiny metal things. Its body was even paler than she'd thought at first, so white that it seemed astonishing that it was flesh at all, and not the same marble from which the Statue was made.

Its eyes were its most remarkable feature. They were easily thrice as large as Weena's own, and in the light thrown by the globe they blazed like green fire. Weena thought she would probably be afraid of those eyes if she'd been capable of feeling fear anymore at all.

She tried to say something, but all that emerged from her parched and abused throat was a croak.

Then the creature shook itself, as though breaking free of a thought that had held it captive. It went to the shelf, picked up a metal beaker just like the ones the People drank from, and left the room through a low door in the wall. Moments later it returned and held out the beaker to her.

It was full to the brim of water, tooth-achingly cold and as clear as air. With incredulous gratitude, she swallowed it all. The Terror took the beaker back, left the room, and returned with it filled with water again. She drank that, too, and again a third time. Finally, she shook her head when it held the beaker out to her for the fourth time, unable to hold any more.

She thought then that the Terror would drink the water itself, but instead it put it down on the floor and took down a piece of cloth hanging from a hook on the wall.

Then the creature moved its mouth in a way that Weena could only imagine might have been an attempt at a smile. It knelt on the floor at her feet, reached out, and began gently unlacing her sandals, one by one.

Scarcely able to believe the evidence of her senses, she watched as it dipped the cloth in the water and began wiping the soot and ash from her burnt and blistered skin.

____________________________________________________

The light of the globe was almost too strong for her tiny room.

Negufta felt her pupils contract to pinpoints. In the harsh green-yellow light, the Beast looked even more pitiful. She looked it over, noticed that it had cuts and scrapes on its arms, shins, and face, and that its lips were cracked and dry. It opened those lips and made a small, rasping sound.

Water, she thought, I should have realised; of course it needs water.

As the creature swallowed beaker after beaker of the water she fetched from the condenser, Negufta tried to decide what to do. The Bright would probably be returning to the world outside by the time the People came back down into the tunnels, driven in by the unendurable glare. She had lost track of time long ago and had no idea how long that might be.

When they came back, she'd have to return to her duties. The pump stacks would have to be turned on, one by one, in the proper sequence. The filters would have to be inspected for smoke damage. Also, she'd have to make sure to be seen working, so that nobody came looking for her here.

Until then, there was this. She'd clean the Beast's wounds and tend them as well as she could.

Thinking that, she removed the Beast's sandals and wiped its feet free of the ash and soot coating them. They were blistered in places, with angry looking red burns, probably from cinders the creature had stepped in while stumbling through the fire.

Small burns and blisters were routine in a Machinist's existence; she scarcely passed an extended work shift without at least one or two of these. She had a pot of unguent for this, was never without it. She smeared the material on the Beast's feet, gently working them in with the tips of her fingers, until she heard it heave a long, shuddering, sigh of relief.

Then she dipped the cloth in the water again and got to work on the scrapes on the Beast's legs and arms.

And finally, when it had stopped flinching away when she came too close, she began tending to the cuts on its soot-streaked, tear-stained face.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Negufta leant against the wall next to the hooks and watched the Beast sleeping.

It had fallen asleep at some stage while she was cleaning its wounds and smearing ointment on them. She'd finished with the final visible cut - a rather nasty laceration on the heel of its left hand - and sat back, only to discover that it had already gone under. Now it lay, curled up on itself, its head pillowed on its right hand, gently snoring. Even its breathing was easier, slow and even, the rasping that had accompanied it earlier gone finally. She watched it and felt a sense of rather absurd accomplishment.

The creature would wake, though, and when it did, it would need food.

That thought led her straight to a difficult question: just what, exactly, did Beasts eat?

Fruit, wasn't it? Those of the People who worked on top, in the Outside, gathered fruit every night and left it for the Beasts to eat when they woke, tending the Beasts as anything else that needed tending. Yes, that was what they did. Everyone knew that.

So how could she possibly fetch fruit down for the Beast, when the entire sector was up on top in the Outside, battling a fire, and might be pouring back down at any moment for all she knew?

The answer was simple: she couldn't. It wasn't possible.

Therefore, she'd have to find something else, something the Beast would be willing to eat.

Meat, perhaps? Her eyes went to the bag slung from one of the hooks, the one with her emergency kit, the one with essential tools and medication, among which were stuffed strips of dried and smoked meat. She thought about it and shook her head. A creature that had always lived on fruit was not likely to take kindly to feeding on flesh of any description.

Just then she heard the murmur of voices and the tread of feet passing by her door. The People were coming back, then, and that meant that the Bright was taking over the Outside again. That put paid to any chances of her climbing out of the shaft to fetch fruit. It wasn't going to happen.

And that, in turn, left her only one real option. At the thought, her stomach rumbled. She herself hadn't eaten in longer than she cared to remember.

____________________________________________________

The curtain was of very heavy, thick cloth, and so old that it had faded to a brownish-grey colour almost indistinguishable from the rock of the wall around it. Drawn across the door, it made her room all but invisible to anyone who didn't already know it was there.

She rarely bothered to hang it up. Nobody ever came to her room, anyway, and if anyone ever did, what was the worst that could happen? Might they see her naked? Who cared about that? She didn't, and never had.

But now it was suddenly important that nobody come in at all.

So, making sure nobody saw her doing it, she put up the curtain, drawing it across the door. She hesitated about the glow-globe. Taking it away with her was the sane and logical option, because it glowed so brightly that she couldn't rely on its light not leaking through the curtain and drawing the attention of a curious eye. But if she did, and the Beast awoke and panicked in the dark, it might easily panic and go blundering blindly out into the cavern. And she absolutely couldn't let that happen.

In the end she settled on a compromise; she left the glow-globe inside the emergency bag, wrapped in a thin sheet of cloth, with the bag's flap raised and open, so that the diffuse glow reflected off the ceiling. That way, if the Beast woke, it wouldn't be left in what to it was total darkness and be seized by panic.

At least, that was what she hoped.

Then, her stomach by now rumbling incessantly with hunger, Negufta went down to the next level below, to the dining chambers.

____________________________________________________

The fire had been beaten.

Negufta knew as much before she even entered the dining chamber, from the conversation she could hear. There was none of the grim determination and exhausted tones of people fighting a crisis. She could hear the relieved voices of people who knew they'd won. She could hear someone telling a bad joke and being laughed at anyway.

Her own shoulders relaxed from a tension she hadn't even known was there. With a deep sigh, she rotated her shoulders and entered through the low door.

Despite the crowd filling the chamber, Brasza saw her at once. "Machinist! There you are!"

She made her way over to him between the tables. "I know. I'll get to work on the stacks right after this, I promise."

"I didn't call you over for that." Brasza's eyes were red with smoke like everyone else's and he looked exhausted, but his expression was still sharp and alert. "I'm just relieved you're still around to work on them at all."

Negufta was taken aback. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"I was told we'd lost you in the fire. The last anyone saw, you were cut off from the shaft by the flames." Brasza took a long pull of water and rubbed his forearm wearily across his face. "It's good to see you still got back to us."

Brasza was by far the best sector leader Negufta had ever known, intelligent and compassionate, a rarer combination than it ought to have been. For an insane moment she was on the verge of telling him about it all; the rescue, the Beast in her room. She bit back the words in the nick of time. "I found a shaft before the fire found me," she replied. Technically speaking, she consoled herself, it wasn't a lie.

"Great. You look half-starved. Go and eat. I won't keep you from your food." Brasza yawned widely and began picking at the meat before him. Negufta watched him for a moment, but he clearly had nothing more to say to her, so she looked around and found a vacant table in the far corner.

It was a good place to sit for what she had in mind. From here she could watch the room, but with her back to the corner, nobody could look over her shoulder at the wrong moment. And - so far - nobody had joined her at the table. It was perfect.

"You and I could make heat together

You know that as well as I do,

Meanwhile something between my wide open legs

Is hot and ready, waiting for you."

Someone - it sounded like Rukwa, but Negufta couldn't be sure, since the smoke had scraped the singer's voice raw - was singing. Rukwa couldn't carry a tune to save her life on her best day, and her songs tended to the crude and physical. Ordinarily Negufta would have wished her silent. But Rukwa was useful right now. She was so loud that nobody had eyes or ears for anything else.

"I've had Metallurgists, hot from the forge

I've had Miners all covered in dust

But give me a Machinist any old Dark,

They know how to handle a rod that won't rust."

As the only Machinist there, Negufta winced and tried to slide down in her seat as far as she possibly could. A ragged burst of laughter swept the room. She was glad for more than one reason that nobody was looking at her.

"Old Gudal came calling, with meat and with wine,

He said, 'Dear Rukwa, come and be mine,

We'll make pleasure and make children too'

I said, yes, Gudal, once Kartak cooks me a stew."

The laughter was louder now. Nobody liked Gudal. Negufta couldn't see him, but if he was among those present he'd be seething.

"They say the Beasts in the world up above

Know nothing about pleasure, still less above love,

But I've had men here, oh, more than once

Whom even a Beast would consider a dunce."

As Rukwa launched into an even bawdier verse, Negufta studied the food on the table in front of her. There were strips of steaming meat which she heaped indiscriminately on a platter for herself. There was also what she'd been hoping for: baked fungus, purplish-brown, spongy, and still hot from the ovens. With a quick glance around to make sure nobody was looking in her direction, she stuffed her belt pouches as full of it as they could hold until they strained at the seams. Made suddenly reckless, she then took up a whole irregular loaf of it and stuffed it under her tunic. It lay against the curve of her breast, uncomfortably warm but not unbearably so.

Rukwa was still going strong. Negufta shook her head, remembered how hungry she was, reached for the meat, and began to wolf it down as quickly as she could.

____________________________________________________

Hunger woke Weena.

For a moment she thought she was in some outer room next to the Big One; there was the same feeling on unfamiliarity in the texture of the surface under her and the feel of the air; none of the warmth and soft breathing of People sleeping all around her, cheek by jowl. She reached out automatically for the Big One, but her fingers felt nothing. Then her eyes slowly adjusted and she made out the faint green-yellow wash of light on the low stone ceiling.

Memory flooded back to her then; the fire, the Big One's disappearance, the Terror. The Terror had left her alone in its room, but had left the light, obviously so she wouldn't be left alone in the dark..

She thought about that until her stomach protested its emptiness with a growl loud enough to make her grunt.

As though in response, the curtain over the door - when had it appeared, or had she just not noticed it before? - twitched aside, and the Terror entered. Its gigantic eyes went quickly to her, and she seemed to see its shoulders slump as though letting go of a breath it had been holding in.

Relief, she thought, that's relief. The Terror is relieved that I'm still here. But where could I go? Surely it knows that I couldn't take a step out of here in the darkness.

That's not what it's relieved about, the thought came then. It's relieved that I'm safe, that nothing's happened to me.

She pushed herself up on the mat, wincing at the pain in her cut and burnt palms. The Terror knelt beside her, reached inside its tunic, and then handed her a large lump of something. It was too dark to see properly, but it was irregular in shape, soft and warm, with an unfamiliar smell. She looked at it and then up at the Terror questioningly. The Terror pointed at the lump, and then reached out and gently touched its fingertip to her lips.

Food, she thought, it's brought me some kind of food to eat. But I've only eaten fruit before, and Food Flowers. How do I know this is even edible?

Her stomach reminded her that she didn't have a choice. She took a tiny, experimental bite, bracing herself to spit it out.

The next thing she knew was that her hands were empty and warmth and fullness had settled into the pit of her stomach, the hunger banished. And the expression on the Terror's face was unmistakable.

Relief. Total, unmistakable relief, mixed with joy.

Weena looked at the Terror, studied it from messy white hair to black-booted feet, and thought about everything that had happened to her since it had dragged her half-dead from the fire.

She decided, all at once, that it was time.

Ignoring the pain in her hands, she pushed herself to her knees so that her face and that of the Terror were roughly on a level.

Then she put her hand flat on her chest and introduced herself.

____________________________________________________

"Weena," the Beast said, touching itself over its heart.

Negufta started. There was no mistaking the creature's gesture. It was telling her its name!

But Beasts were animals. How could it even have a name?

"Weena," the Beast repeated, insistently tapping its chest. The sound reminded her of the tone that sometimes sounded in the shafts when strong winds blew across the Outside and set the air columns to vibrating, a wild, musical noise. "Weena."

"Weena," she whispered in response. Her mind was in turmoil. This was a Beast. Beasts were animals. Animals didn't have names. But this one had a name, and, holding her gaze, was unequivocally telling her that name. She swallowed, and nodded. "Weena."

If there was any remaining doubt in her mind it disappeared when the Beast pointed at her and made a noise that had the sound of a question. It was asking her name.

"Negufta," she replied, knowing, even as the word left her lips, that from that moment nothing would ever be the same again.

"Nay-goof-tah." The Beast - Weena, her mind screamed, not the Beast, its name was Weena - repeated the syllables as though tasting them one by one. Then it smiled.

The smile transformed its face so completely that it sent Negufta rocking back on her heels. She blinked. The smile was still there, unmistakably real. She found herself smiling nervously back.

"Weena," the creature repeated, pointing to itself, and then at her. "Negufta."

Negufta nodded and swallowed. "Yes," she said. "That's right."

The creature tilted its head, listening intently. "Yes," it repeated. "That's right."

Negufta stared. Its accent was terrible, with hard jagged consonants her own mouth could never manage, but the words were unmistakable, as was the intent behind them. It was trying to understand what she was saying.

It's not an animal, she thought, the idea hammering at her mind. She felt as though a motor she'd been tending had suddenly spoken to her. It's sentient. All of them are. All these days we've been calling them Beasts, treating them as beasts, and we were wrong.

It isn't any kind of beast at all.

____________________________________________________

Negufta, Weena thought, her name is Negufta.

She ran it over in her mind. It was a strange name, one she'd never come across among the People, but it was a name, and it confirmed everything she'd surmised. The Terror wasn't just a predatory animal. She wasn't just a hunter in the Dark.

The Terror had feelings and compassion. She had a language. Which meant that...

"I've been trying to teach the Big One Language," she said aloud, half to herself. "If even he could learn a little, I think you could, and a lot more."

The Terror - Negufta - flinched, looked over her shoulder quickly at the curtained door, and turned back to Weena with a finger over her own lips. Weena heard it a moment later, the soft murmur of Terror voices passing by. She understood then that her presence here was a secret, and that Negufta was probably taking some real risk to keep her hidden. The curtain suddenly made a lot of sense.

She nodded, and lowered her voice to a soft murmur, the kind of murmur People used to talk to each other not to disturb those sleeping around them, the way she had talked to Munin in another existence completely. "I, Weena. You, Negufta. We speak."

Negufta stared at her with a look like wonder on her white face. "I, Negufta," she replied. "You, Weena. We speak."

Weena clenched her fists in silent triumph.

They were talking to each other.

____________________________________________________

Negufta clung on to the top of yet another pump stack and ran her fingers along the air filter. It was all right; smoke hadn't penetrated this sector to any appreciable extent. She didn't envy the Machinists in the worst affected sectors. She fervently hoped that she wouldn't be ordered to go and assist them.

Stack by stack, she checked them and set them working again, so that the air currents were finally moving once more and the cavern beginning to resound with the familiar thumping. It was not just the welcome sound of returning normalcy; importantly, it would help to cover up any sound Weena might make behind the curtain.

Things are suddenly very complicated now, she thought, as she clambered up the penultimate stack. They're complicated in ways I never thought they could be.

Weena... she ran the name over in her mind for maybe the thirtieth time. I've been wrong even in thinking of her as an it. She's not a possession, she's not an animal to be rescued, healed, and then quietly released in the wild.

What was she supposed to do now?

Whatever happens, she thought, the most important thing is she can't be seen. It would be bad enough if she were just a Beast; she's a sentient creature, and for all Negufta knew, she might be as clever as one of the People. Nobody would stand for that. It would upset their entire belief system about how the world worked.

If only I could just somehow take her up the shaft and let her go free, she thought, stripping out the filter and looking it over. There were only a few smudges of soot on it, and she rubbed them away with a cloth before slotting the unit back in place. But she's far from healed yet. Besides...

Besides, she thought, now that I know this, now that I know she's a thinking, feeling... person... I can't let her go without knowing more. It would be like finding an unknown machine and passing it by without trying to uncover its secrets. I just can't do it.

Descending from the stack, she began climbing the last one, the one across the cavern from her door, fighting down the temptation to look over her shoulder at the curtain every few moments. She'd, by means of considerable gesturing, managed to convey to Weena that she should stay hidden until she, Negufta, came back to her. She was nearly sure Weena had understood. And yet there was always the chance that...

"Machinist!" Yntho's unmistakable voice cracked across the cavern like a snapped cable. "Where are you?"

She twisted around as far as she could while clinging on to the top of the stack. And her heart seemed to stop.

Yntho was striding past the stacks, headed right towards her door.

"I'm here," she called, but her voice was lost in the thumping of the awakened stacks. She could barely hear herself. There was no way Yntho could have heard her at all.

"Machinist?" Yntho bellowed again. His hand was rising towards the edge of the curtain. "Where in Kartak's name are you?"

CHAPTER NINE

Negufta stared with horror at Yntho, and then she moved faster than she ever had in her life.

There was obviously no way she could climb down from the stack in time. Even if she jumped all the way down, the only thing that would happen would be that she'd break her legs. There was only one thing she could do.

Her hand reached out almost before she'd finished thinking, and yanked out the safety valve plug. The stack had only just started running, so the air pressure in it was still low, but there should be enough. She hoped.

There was. The screech of escaping high pressure air all but deafened her. Yntho flinched and turned around, his hand falling away from her curtain. Trying to look as though she'd only removed it as a test, Negufta slammed the plug into place and scrambled down the stack as quickly as she could.

Yntho had crossed the cavern and was looking up at her, arms crossed on his chest. He began talking even before her feet had touched the stone floor. "There you are," he snapped. "Come with me at once."

"Where?" Negufta asked.

"To the foundry, first, to get your levers."

"Is it three Darks already?" Negufta suddenly realised that with everything going on, the fire and Weena, she'd lost track of the passage of time. "Are they ready yet?"

"They'd better be, or someone's going to hear about it." Yntho took a few steps towards the exit tunnel and then turned impatiently. "Are you coming or aren't you?"

"I've to get my boots." Negufta gestured down at her bare feet. "I left them back in my room because of all the climbing I had to do. Let me go and put them on, and I'll be right with you."

"Oh, for Kartak's sake." Yntho seemed to be vibrating with impatience. Negufta ran quickly across, flipped aside the curtain just enough, and slipped inside before he could decide to go and fetch her boots for her.

Weena was lying on the mat, dozing. She started awake as Negufta ran in, jerking upright with a gasp of shock.

"It's all right," Negufta whispered. She smiled as reassuringly as she could as she snatched up her boots. With her free hand she gestured emphatically at Weena, flapping her palm up and down twice. Stay. Would the Bea... would Weena understand?

Weena nodded. Relieved, Negufta was about to sit down and pull on her boots when she heard an impatient shout from outside. "Machinist!"

Negufta sighed, smiled as reassuringly as she could at Weena again, and ran back out, boots dangling by their laces from her hand. She'd pull them on when she could.

____________________________________________________

Weena was dreaming.

She stood at the door of a vast hall, bigger by far than even the largest of the sleeping chambers of the People. It was almost empty, and sunlight pooled on the polished floor through holes in the roof high above. At first she thought that she was alone, but then she saw movement at the far end of the hall. It was Munin, she saw, and he was carrying in armload after armload of flowers from outside and throwing them down on someone lying on a pile of cushions.

Curious, Weena walked across the immense floor, to see who it was that Munin seemed determined to bury in flowers. It would be Plyasun, she hoped. But then she looked to her right and through another doorway she saw Plyasun, chasing a butterfly and laughing. Not Plyasun, then. Who could it be?

When she turned back, it was to find that she was standing by the pile of cushions. Munin walked past her with another gigantic bundle of flowers and dropped it on the sleeper, covering the person's face. He didn't seem to see Weena although she was standing right there. When he left, she pulled aside the flowers from the person's face.

The face was her own.

Weena had seen herself enough times, reflected in the river water and from shards of broken glass, to know exactly what she looked like. She was now looking down at herself.

But she was standing right here, and also she was lying under the flowers, sleeping. It was absurd and funny, but Weena felt no urge to laugh.

Munin would probably be returning with flowers again at any moment, and Weena decided she didn't want him to find the sleeping-Weena's face bare when he'd just covered it. She piled the flowers back on. Then she thought that sleeping-Weena might find it hard to breathe with all the flowers on her face so she pulled the flowers off again.

But it wasn't her face she saw now when she pulled the flowers away.

It was Negufta who lay on the cushions, with the flowers framing her stark white, sharp-boned face.

Then the dream melted away and her eyes flew open as Negufta, the real Negufta, came rushing in through the curtain. Weena didn't even have time to be alarmed. Negufta gave her a quick smile and made a gesture that needed no translation at all: stay, don't move; stay where you are. Negufta then snatched up her boots by the laces just as a loud voice from somewhere near shouted something that sounded urgent and demanding.

Negufta sighed, shook her head, gave Weena another hurried smile, and ran back out barefoot, the dangling boots thudding against each other as she went.

____________________________________________________

"What's happening?" Negufta leant briefly against a passage wall to draw on her boots on, hopping on one foot as she drew on the laces. "Why do we need to fetch the levers in such a hurry right now?"

"Just come along and I'll tell you." Yntho really was stressed, Negufta realised. This wasn't his usual impatience as performance. Something was on his mind. He was almost out of sight when she managed to finish tying the laces and run after him.

He was already at the foundry when she caught up. "Glaza!" he shouted. "Are the levers ready?"

The Metallurgist poked her venerable head around the door. "Oh, it's you two." She regarded them with no pleasure whatsoever. "Didn't I tell you three Darks? It's only been two-and-a-half."

"Forget that. Are the levers ready or not?"

Glaza sniffed, went in, and came back out with two dull metal objects in her hands. She held them out for Yntho to inspect. "The working ends are done," she said. "But the handles aren't smoothened or polished yet. They..."

Yntho snatched the levers from her before she could finish and handed them to Negufta. "Check. Will they do?"

Negufta exchanged a baffled glance with Glaza and examined the levers. She immediately saw that the ends meant to fit in the sockets had been made with real care and, as far as she could tell, had been machined to her exact specifications. The handles were rough and lumpy, but...

"They're fine," she said. She might have added something more about how the levers would have to be tried for fit and adjustments might be necessary, but Yntho had already begun striding away.

"What's the matter with him?" Glaza demanded.

"I haven't the faintest idea." Negufta began thanking Glaza, but was interrupted by a shout from over Yntho's shoulder.

"Come on! We have no time to waste."

Stuffing the levers into her belt, Negufta nodded her gratitude at Glaza and ran after Yntho again.

____________________________________________________

"What's the hurry?" Negufta asked as she caught up with Yntho. "And where are we going now?"

Yntho didn't break his stride. He was much taller than Negufta, and was walking so quickly that she had to trot to keep up. "Where do you think? The Statue Room. Your precious machine."

"But..." Negufta could feel every bit of her exhaustion in her bones. She hadn't had any real sleep in days. For that matter Yntho looked utterly spent as well, with soot streaking his face and arms and his eyes still inflamed from smoke from the fire. Of course he'd been up Outside fighting it. Yntho was a lot of things, but he wasn't a shirker. "Can't it wait for later?"

"No, it can't, not if you want to see the machine again."

"What? What are you talking about?"

Yntho glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. "The Council decided to use the machine as bait to trap the Giant."

"They did what?" Negufta was flabbergasted. "How?"

"They'll roll down the bronze doors of the Statue Room. When the Giant enters, they'll roll them up again. The Giant will be trapped and helpless. That's what they think." He made a disgusted noise. "That's their plan. All of it."

"That's..." Negufta searched for a term and found only one. "That's idiocy!"

"Of course it is," Yntho snorted. "But when they discovered that the Giant set the fire - "

"The Giant set the fire?" Negufta stared. "Why?"

"Who knows why?" Yntho shook his head angrily. "There's no doubt about it, though. One of the Outside work parties saw the Giant and a Beast come out of the green building, the one with the old things."

"The Giant... and a Beast." Negufta's mind whirled.

"Quite naturally the work party was interested in finding out where they were going. So they followed the Giant and the Beast until they came to the forest. Then they saw the Giant start the fire from one of his boxes of tame Fires."

"I... see." Negufta didn't really, but she nodded anyway, to keep Yntho talking. "What happened afterwards?"

"What do you think? The Giant escaped while everyone was trying to get away from the fire."

"The Beast, too?"

"I don't know. Who cares what happens to a Beast, anyway?" They were only two passages away from the Statue Room now. "The other sector lost several people in the fire, Machinist. People died, and there was a lot of smoke damage in the pumps as well. And, don't forget, the Giant invaded our chambers unprovoked, though we'd done nothing to it. So the Council has decided that the Giant has to be taken down before it does any more harm."

"Of course they did, but why the machine? Where does the machine come into this?"

"Because the Giant wants it, and it's the perfect bait. That's what they think."

Negufta's mind went to her own brief encounter with the Giant, the feel of the power in its immense leg as it had slammed her against the side of the shaft. She winced as though feeling the pain in her ribs again as the air was driven out of her. "That's insane," she protested. "The Giant is too big and strong. They don't know what they're doing."

"That's what I tried to tell them, but they wouldn't listen." Yntho stopped and turned to face Negufta. "Look, Machinist, I know you don't like me much, and the feeling's mutual, I can assure you. But we're on the same side here. We both want to find out what that thing does."

"Yes."

"So," Yntho said, "we need to get there and try your levers out while there's still a machine on which to try them."

Negufta stared at him for a long moment and then took off running.

____________________________________________________

She was too late.

Negufta could hear the shouting from the bottom of the shaft, mixed with the unmistakable noise of the Giant's bellowing.

She scrambled up the rungs anyway, as fast as she could, in the desperate hope that she could still somehow get there in time, could slot her levers in and see what they did before the Giant wrested the machine away from them forever.

The bronze outer doors of the Statue Room, on which she'd once heard the Giant hammering, were already rolled back up and in place. According to the Council's plan, the Giant should at this very moment be at their mercy.

Of course it wasn't. Negufta could have told them that. Yntho had told them that, and been ignored. The Council always thought it knew everything already.

As Negufta scrambled through the shaft, the Giant was already in the machine's seat, desperately trying to fight off the scramble of People around. Negufta saw two white levers in its huge hands, and had a tiny moment of mental triumph - she had been right - as she saw it try with desperate haste to push them into their slots. Then she rushed forwards and tried to snatch the levers away from the Giant. Her fingers found one and she pulled at it, almost succeeding in wresting it free.

Then the Giant butted her in the head with its own immense skull. She went down hard in a blaze of white-hot agony.

She lay on the floor, pain washing over her, as she watched the Giant slot the levers into place and pull them over. For a moment nothing happened at all, and then...

... the Giant and the machine began blurring around the margins. They grew dim and fuzzy, floating in the air, just barely visible. She could see the far wall, right through them.

And then, suddenly, they were gone. The platform on which the machine had stood was as bare as though it had never been.

____________________________________________________

"The Council's still quite satisfied," Yntho helped Negufta down the last couple of rungs of the shaft. "They still got what they wanted."

Negufta nodded. Her head still ached from the blow, and with the tips of her fingers she could feel a knot growing under her hair. "The Giant's gone, they think. But it's still got its machine, so of course it could come back."

"Of course it could. But try telling them that." Yntho looked at Negufta with a concern she could never have thought him capable of. "How are you feeling now, Machinist?"

"I'll live. The pain's easing." Negufta bit her lip as she tried to reconstruct the last she had seen of the Giant and the machine; the dim figure, flickering at the margins, the metal rods and levers whirling around it before dissolving into nothingness. "We were right, it was a vehicle."

"A vehicle. To where? Where did it go?"

"I don't know, but it went somewhere. We both saw it. And I was right, it was operated by those levers. I even saw how it moved them."

"That's not of much use now that it's gone." Yntho's familiar brusqueness was returning. He turned to leave.

It was on the tip of Negufta's tongue to call him back and tell him that she'd kept a record of all the parts and dimensions of the thing when she'd taken it apart, that they could possibly think of rebuilding it with Glaza's help. But she decided not to. Not yet.

Weena, she thought, the Beast the working party saw with the Giant must have been Weena. Beasts never went out in the Dark, but Weena did. Which means she knew the Giant well enough to be in its company, taking part in whatever it was that it had been doing, to have been at its side in the burning forest. Which in turn meant...

Suddenly, Weena was no longer someone she'd rescued almost by accident and was hiding, at considerable personal risk, in her room. Suddenly, Weena could be Negufta's key to understanding everything: the Giant, the machine, and where it had come from and why.

Suddenly, Weena was the most important thing in Negufta's world. Weena was possibly the most important thing in Negufta's world ever to exist. It was an uncomfortable thought, as though there were several layers to it that she didn't have time to explore properly.

And on the heels of that realisation came another thought. She'd left Weena alone for far too long, hidden by just a curtain. By now anything could have happened to her. Anything.

Ignoring the throbbing in her head at every step, Negufta began walking as fast as she could go, hurrying for home.

Soon, she was running.

____________________________________________________

Weena stood just inside the curtain, trying to decide what to do.

It had been a very long time since Negufta had made that gesture ordering her to stay. She'd sat on the mat obediently, expecting Negufta to return in moments, but one moment had followed another, and then time had dragged on and on without her coming back. Slowly, inevitably, anticipation had curdled into worry.

What was Negufta to her, anyway? Weena tried to examine the question logically, the way she thought about everything. Was she her, Weena's, captor? Her host? Something else, something more complex, something that Weena have a word for in Language? She thought of the Big One, what the Big One had been to her. Was she something like the Big One where Negufta was concerned?

But the Big One had wandered where he wanted. Weena couldn't even step past this curtain and out of the tiny, dimly lit, room.

After a while, she'd looked around for something to do, to keep her hands occupied. The heavy metallic object taking up space on the floor meant nothing to her, but it must be of importance to Negufta, because why otherwise would she have put it here? So Weena gave it a respectful berth, careful not to touch it even by accident. There were some things on the shelf fixed to the wall, most of them incomprehensible to her, which she again didn't dare touch. But there was also a long, stiff wire. She picked up and examined the wire. The wire had possibilities.

But, now, even more time had passed, and she stood irresolutely just inside the curtain, straining her ears for any sign of Negufta's return. She was sure she'd recognise that voice anywhere, even if Negufta was speaking her own language, even among a gabble of other Terrors speaking. So far she'd heard nothing.

And then she did hear a voice, very close. Just on the other side of the curtain, in fact.

"Negufta?" it asked.

Weena stood, transfixed with horror, waiting for the curtain to be thrown aside.

CHAPTER TEN

Negufta turned the corner into the cavern at a dead run.

"Why are you running?" someone had called as she'd rushed by; a curious head peeking round a home doorway. "Is something wrong?"

Negufta hadn't bothered looking round. "I left a safety valve disengaged. I've to go and fit it before something blows." It was a flimsy excuse, which no Machinist would've believed for a moment, but Machinists were thin on the ground and nobody else knew enough about pumps to argue about it. As expected, the person had not tried.

The pain in her head had settled into a steady throbbing ache that bit into her every time her running feet hit the ground. She ignored it as far as she could. She needed to get back to Weena as fast as possible. Nothing else mattered at that moment.

And now, as she turned the corner, she saw someone standing at the doorway, hand raised to draw the curtain back.

"Here!" she called. "What do you need?"

Startled, the figure dropped the curtain and turned around. She stopped, panting, hands braced on her knees, trying to catch her breath. "Well?"

"I just came to see you." The voice and face were vaguely familiar. She blinked at him for a moment before the recognition came. It was Doklam, the young miner.

"What for?" Her heart was pounding so loudly that it rang in her ears. Surely he could hear it? Surely the entire sector could hear it! She tried to calm herself. "And how did you know to look for me here?"

"I... er... asked around."

Oh, Kartak, Negufta thought, he's infatuated with me. That's the last thing I need at this point. She clenched her fingers until her nails dug into her palms, trying to steady her heart and breathing. "All right. Why did you want to see me?"

"Ah..." Doklam looked down at the stone floor. "I just..." Sudden inspiration came to him. "That ancient weapon I asked you about. I couldn't find it again afterwards."

"Oh, that." Negufta tried to sound as dismissive as she could. "You left it on the ground, so I brought it with me. Wait here, I'll fetch it."

"Oh, I couldn't ask that of you. I'll get it myself." And, before she could stop him, he threw back the curtain and stepped inside.

____________________________________________________

For an endless moment, Negufta stood frozen in place. She literally couldn't will her legs to move.

She listened for the inevitable cry of surprise as Doklam discovered Weena, the scream of fear as Weena felt herself seized and dragged out.

Nothing happened.

Then the curtain twitched back again as Doklam emerged, the ancient corroded weapon in his hand. "I found it."

"Right." Negufta's mind was whirling. Was the boy blind? Could he literally have failed to see Weena in the room? How in the world could he have missed the glow-globe reflecting off the ceiling? She couldn't even summon the anger she ought to have felt at him for entering her home uninvited; the sheer relief that flooded her at the fact that he'd somehow not seen anything left no room for any other emotion. "You'd better be off now," she managed. "I'm sure..." Whose crew was he on again? Her mingled headache and confusion made it hard to think. Oh, yes, Tovak, it was Tovak, of course. "I'm sure Tovak needs you back on the job."

Doklam looked at her, looked at the corroded piece of metal in his hands, and finally nodded. "Yes, I'd better be going." With one last lingering glance, he walked away down the passage.

She waited until he was out of sight before she could make her legs move. The curtain felt heavy as stone when she pulled it aside to step through.

Weena wasn't there. Nor was the glow-globe reflecting off the ceiling.

She stood there, utterly at a loss, before two things registered at once.

Firstly, the flap of the bag was pulled tightly down into place, smothering the light.

Secondly, her sleeping mat was no longer spread out on the floor. Instead, it was in a messy roll pressed against the metal side of the water condenser.

She leant against the wall until she was confident that her legs would bear her again. Then she pulled the bag's flap back so green-yellow light split across the ceiling.

And then she stepped forwards, and tapped on the rolled mat.

"Weena," she said, "you can come out now."

____________________________________________________

Weena squeaked as Negufta's hug drove the air from her lungs.

Negufta clung to her as though, Weena thought, she'd never expected to see her again. She tried to hug Negufta back as far as she could manage. With her upper arms squeezed against her sides, there wasn't much hugging she could do.

At last Negufta released her and sat back on her heels. "You," she said, slowly and carefully, in Language. "You," and another word, in her own language, which Weena didn't understand, but which was accompanied by a smile so huge that it took her whole face over. Then Negufta reached out and patted her on the shoulder, a little awkwardly, as though such gestures didn't come naturally to her.

Weena smiled and patted her back. For a moment she thought that they could start over again where they'd left off with Language, but then she realised that something was wrong. Negufta looked exhausted, her face drawn thin, the skin stretched over her skull.

Of course, Weena thought, she needs rest. I haven't seen her rest for one moment since I woke up in the Underworld and saw her looking at me that first time. She must be ready to drop.

She got to her feet, unrolled the sleeping mat, spread it properly on the floor, and patted it with one hand while pointing at Negufta with the other. "Negufta," she said. "You. Sleep."

Negufta's exhausted eyes looked from her to the mat and back again. She seemed to want to argue, and then a yawn swallowed whatever she'd wanted to say.

"I," she agreed, "sleep."

____________________________________________________

Weena sat by Negufta's side, watching her.

Sleeping, the Terror looked much smaller, much more vulnerable. Her face in repose was almost peaceful. Weena was reminded of her dream. She suddenly wondered what Negufta would do if she could bring in flowers and dropped them on her.

The idea made her uncomfortable, so she looked away from Negufta's face at the rest of her. The Terror was still dressed in her tunic, though she'd shed her belt and boots. Her fingers were long and looked delicate, but Weena knew from personal experience the strength that lived in them. Her feet and toes were slender, her ankles prominent bulges of bone under skin so white that Weena still found it hard to accept that it was skin at all. Weena was prepared to wager that those slender feet were as strong as her hands were.

Negufta's hair drew her next. Weena had stared fascinated at the Terror's long, white hair before, but never had the chance to examine it so closely. She ran her fingers through Negufta's hair where it spilled across the mat, feeling the soft, light texture, much finer than her own or anyone else's she'd ever known. Then she saw something else which made her frown.

There was something crusted on Negufta's hair at her temple, something dark. It came away sticky in Weena's hand, and when she sniffed her fingers, the smell was unmistakable enough to make her gasp with shock.

Blood.

Suddenly it was obvious that Negufta wasn't just tired. She'd been hurt somehow. For all Weena knew, she could be hurt quite badly.

Slowly, as carefully as she could manage so as not to wake Negufta, Weena slipped her fingers under the blood-encrusted hair. Her fingers encountered a swelling that was hot and pulsated, throbbing with every beat of Negufta's heart.

Weena sat there for a very long moment, scarcely breathing. Then she got up very quietly and fetched the beaker from the shelf. There was still water in it, as she'd hoped.

Pulling down a cloth from a hook on the wall, Weena wet it from the beaker, and, working very slowly and lightly, began wiping the wound clean.

____________________________________________________

Negufta woke to a very gentle touch on her forehead.

For a long moment she couldn't decide what it could be. It felt almost like her mother's hand. But that had been long ago, when she'd been a child. Her mother, she recalled with a pang that never quite went away, was long dead. This was someone else.

Whoever it was, she didn't want to open her eyes just yet, because that would interrupt the moment and break the spell. She lay there, feeling something cool and moist rub her forehead, and the unmistakable sensation of fingers combing gently through her hair. Who could it be?

Then memory returned to her and her eyes flew open.

"Weena," she said.

Weena had been kneeling over her. She started back slightly, and her face coloured as though she'd been doing something wrong. She held up the cloth and smiled apologetically.

Weena had been tending Negufta's wound. She had sitting protectively over her as she slept.

Negufta pushed herself upright and simply looked at Weena for a while. "Thank you," she whispered eventually.

"Thank you?" Weena repeated, clearly wanting to understand what the words meant.

Negufta thought of trying to explain, but decided that she wasn't up to the effort right then. Besides, it was already obvious to her that Weena was far better at languages than she. Which in turn reminded her...

I've got to be able to learn to speak to her properly, Negufta thought. It's absolutely essential, and not just because we're together and I'm hiding her. She may be the most important thing ever to happen in the world. She caught the word and corrected it immediately. The most important person ever to happen.

But she can't stay here, the next thought followed. We've already had two extremely close calls in just one work-period. She looked around and her eyes landed on Weena's sandals, lying in the corner where she, herself, had put them after taking them off to clean the other woman's feet. Doklam hadn't noticed them, or if he had, he hadn't understood their significance.

The next time we won't be so lucky, she thought, or at most, the time after that. I've got to get her hidden away somewhere she won't be discovered. But where?

Of course, she thought, the old caverns, the really deep ones, near the fungus farms. Nobody goes there any longer. I have to get her down there, and without being seen.

She got up, walked to the door, and peeked past the curtain. Everything was deserted. Where was everyone?

They must be Outside, she realised. It must be mid-Dark on top now, and everyone will be making post-fire damage assessments and starting on repairs. Why didn't they wake me?

It was probably because Brasza told them not to, she thought. He must have seen me working on the stacks, decided I'm half dead with exhaustion, and told himself I need the rest.

A feeling of hot shame washed over her at the thought of all she was keeping from Brasza, a man who had only ever looked out for her. The sector leader deserved a seat on the Council, she'd thought many times. But if he were promoted, who'd take over his place? Gudal, in all likelihood. The very thought made her shudder.

In any case, now was her chance, and it wouldn't last. She turned around, pointed at Weena's bare feet and at her sandals in the corner, and began drawing on her own boots. She did take a quick look to check that Weena had understood, a look too brief to see Weena pick something off the shelf and slip it under her tunic.

Getting to her feet, Negufta tied on her tool belt, and then took the bag off the wall and slung it over her shoulder, the flap just open enough to let a thin sliver of light escape.

And then she grabbed Weena by the hand and ran.

____________________________________________________

Weena ran along behind Negufta, the other woman's potent grip on her hand drawing her along. She had no idea where she was being taken, but it was clear by now that Negufta didn't intend any kind of harm to her. In any case, it wasn't as though she had a choice.

The light leaking from the bag over Negufta's shoulder was so dim that Weena could only just see enough to run without stumbling. She had only a vague sense of being dragged along caverns of gigantic thrumming machines, and down passages of rock that branched and divided again and again. And then they were at a shaft heading down.

Negufta stopped and took the globe from her bag. Its dim greenish-yellow radiance illuminated metal rungs in the stone wall.

Every nerve in Weena's body flinched at the thought of climbing down into the dark, but Negufta wanted her to. So she would. She took a deep breath, looked from Negufta's huge glowing eyes at the metal rungs, and began climbing down, hand over hand.

Close behind, matching her rung for rung, Negufta followed, her feet just above Weena's head.

____________________________________________________

They'd been incredibly lucky so far, but of course that luck couldn't hold forever.

Negufta heard the voices before she'd even reached the bottom of the shaft. They were still some distance away, but closing. She hesitated a moment, wondering if they should climb back up, but Weena, unpractised as she was, would be far too slow. Besides, there was no way of telling if whoever it was wouldn't decide to follow them up as well.

So she dropped lightly to the floor next to Weena, who stood frozen in place with fear at the sound of the voices. Negufta slapped the flap down on the bag, killing the glow, and looked around quickly. At this depth there was almost no light even for her eyes to work with, but she made out the dark shape of a storage niche behind the shaft entrance. She pulled Weena into it, pushed her as gently as she could manage against the bundles it contained, and pressed herself between the other woman and the niche entrance.

Not a moment too soon.

"... and she wants to be a Metallurgist, of all things." It was a woman speaking, her voice lifted complainingly. "Our entire family are farmers. We've always been farmers, generation after generation. None of us has ever wanted to be anything else, but..."

"You can't just force her to be something she doesn't want to be." It was a deeper voice, a male voice. "There's nothing wrong with being a Metallurgist. I could talk to the Metallurgists if you want. I could ask them if they have an opening for an apprentice."

They were very close now. Negufta could feel Weena's frightened breathing stirring her hair. She reached back, found Weena's hand, and squeezed, closing her own eyes to avoid any possibility of a random ray of light reflecting off them and drawing attention.

"She won't settle for anything else," the first, female voice said plaintively. "I'm afraid that if they turn her down, she'll just run off and force herself on them regardless."

The man, whoever it was, laughed. "In that case they'll know she really wants to be one of them, so..."

The voices faded down the passage, swallowed by distance and rock. Negufta released a breath she hadn't realised that she had been holding.

Then, when she was sure nobody else was coming, she gently pulled at Weena's hand, and they went on.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Two tunnels deeper and the darkness, even to Negufta's eyes, was absolute.

She hadn't been down to these levels in years, not since she was a trainee Machinist and had been sent to help strip down the ancient machines still rusting at these depths. Those machines had obviously once been used to drag heavy loads up towards the surface, though what loads those might have been nobody was sure. Negufta's own private hypothesis was that the machines had been used to remove the rock and earth displaced from cutting out the chambers and passages of her world.

But that would mean that the chambers and passages hadn't always been there. They'd had to be built, to be made by People's hands, in a time so long ago that nobody now could ever get those machines going again.

That was another line of speculation that it wasn't too safe to follow to its logical conclusion, and so Negufta had kept it, like the others, to herself.

The immediate problem was that she'd forgotten the way. Thrice, three separate times, she'd led them both wrong, had to backtrack after following tunnels and passages until they ended in blank rock, or parts so unfamiliar she was certain she'd never set foot in them in her life. The darkness made things worse, so, for her sake as much as Weena's, she'd given in and uncovered the glow-globe despite the danger of its drawing attention. In its green-yellow wash, she could see that Weena's little face looked drained of colour as well drawn with exhaustion. The smaller woman had been flagging for a while, and Negufta couldn't blame her. These dark tunnels were not her world; it was astonishing enough that she'd managed to keep a lid on her fear so far.

"It's all right," she murmured, wishing Weena could understand her. "I'll get us there eventually. Don't worry."

By the time she found the sloping tunnel leading down to the fungus farms, it was she who'd begun to worry. Some of these tunnels had never been walked, as far as she knew, within living memory, and she'd begun to imagine wandering into one and going on so long that they'd never find their way back again. She had been on the verge of giving up and turning for home when she led Weena round yet another turning; and there it was, the remembered passage with the arched opening sloping down gently into the darkness.

"Yes!" she exclaimed in triumph, punching the air with her free hand.

"Yes?" Weena asked her. "Negufta? Yes?"

"Yes, Weena," Negufta told her, grinning with relief. She pointed down the slope. "We go."

"We go?" Weena repeated the phrase dubiously. She looked at Negufta, glanced down the passage, back at Negufta again, finally squared her shoulders, and nodded.

"We go," she said.

____________________________________________________

Negufta had forgotten how strange the fungus farms could be.

Down here there were no pump stacks keeping the air moving, so it lay thick and still in the immense cavern. There was no need for the glow-globe here. A dim blue-green phosphorescent glow rose from the growths sprouting on every side, and even dangling from the ceiling above. She put the sphere back in her back and closed the flap.

All around them were the heaped beds on which the fungi grew; fungi in all shapes and sizes, from thick fleshy spheres to leathery fans sprouting from greyish-white stalks. Between the beds were low troughs, and Weena started with surprise when she looked down into one.

The trough was filled with the peels of fruit, the remnants of Food Flowers, and the other detritus of the meals she'd had all her life up in the far distant world above. How had they got down here?

Of course, she realised, we throw the peels and what we don't eat down into the holes in the tables in the Eating Place, and we never think about them again. Then the Terrors must then collect it all and bring it down here for... this.

Whatever this was. She'd never have imagined anything like this could exist, and she had no idea what any of what she was looking at might mean.

So she looked at Negufta, her only anchor in this bizarre world, and Negufta seemed untroubled, moving between the masses of growths with ease and confidence.

So Weena decided that everything was all right after all.

____________________________________________________

Negufta stopped before a particularly large greyish sphere.

I'm no fungus farmer, she thought, I have no idea which of these is safe to eat raw and which needs broiling to cook out the poisons. But this one, this is one that they always serve up raw, so it ought to be all right for Weena.

She dug her fingers into the grey sphere, ripped off a chunk, and bit into it. It was the same slightly sweetish taste she remembered. She held out the rest to Weena and pointed at her mouth. "Eat."

Weena took the piece from her, nibbled at it with obvious suspicion, and then seemed to inhale it all. One moment it was there in her hand, the next, it was gone.

Negufta resisted, with conscious effort, the urge to punch the air in triumph again.

____________________________________________________

The fungus would probably not provide everything Weena's body needed. Negufta wasn't certain what a Bea... she shook her head sharply... what Weena would need, but she'd started to think that Weena and the People were alike in everything that mattered. So Weena would need some other source of nutrients as well as water.

Down here in the fungus farms, water wasn't a problem. Safe water was another thing entirely.

Negufta began turning possible solutions over in her mind. Should she, could she, carry jars of water down from the condenser in her room without being noticed? Once, maybe, perhaps even twice, but more than that and someone would wonder where their Machinist kept wandering off to with water. Even worse, someone might get curious enough to follow her.

That would simply never do.

Then they came to the far end of the fungus farm cavern, where more tunnels headed into darkness, and she uncovered the glow-globe again. The tunnel entrance was almost blocked with fungi of a different sort to those they'd passed earlier; thick, pulpy, and pinkish-brown in colour, marked with prominent pores. She wasn't familiar with the type and so began pushing past them. And then she paused.

There were things moving in the pores, fat and white, with hard orange heads. She fished out one with her finger. It was what she'd hoped for, a thick white grub that lay in her palm, its translucent flesh rippling slowly.

"That's it," she said aloud. These grubs were full of moisture and nourishment. She held the creature up for Weena to see; the smaller woman was watching with transfixed horror. "Eat," she said.

"Eat?" Weena sounded genuinely appalled.

Negufta held the grub by the hard orange head end, cleanly bit off the body, chewed, and swallowed. It squirted wetly on her tongue with the faintly meaty flavour she remembered from when baskets of them were served up on Kartak's feast days as a delicacy, alive and wriggling. "See?" she said, fishing out another and holding it out to Weena. "Here."

Weena looked at it, then squeezed her eyes shut, took it from Negufta by touch alone, and popped it into her mouth. Negufta watched, hoping she wouldn't be violently ill, and also that she'd survive the experience.

She wasn't, and, apparently, she would.

____________________________________________________

Negufta found the ideal place after several more twists and turns along the passages.

It was a small room cut out of the wall, which had almost certainly been intended as someone's home back when People would live down here all the time instead of coming down from the upper levels to work. There was a stone platform on one wall, big enough to sleep on, and niches cut into another to use as shelves. It was almost cosy.

Really, she thought, it was perfect. It was close enough to the fungus farm to be able to fetch food and grubs whenever necessary, but not so close that anyone working there could hear them or see the light of the glow-globe. All it really needed was her sleeping mat. She'd fetch it down when she went up next. She'd have to, before someone began wondering where she'd disappeared to. Besides, she had duties to attend to. She always did.

But not now, not right away. She could tarry a while.

"Sit," she said, patting Weena on the shoulder and pointing to the low platform. She set the glow-globe on one shelf where it illuminated the little room. "We talk."

Weena nodded, slipped off her sandals, and sank on to the platform with a tired sigh.

____________________________________________________

Negufta found what she was looking for in the little pouch on the back of her belt, the one in which she kept things she almost never used. It was a packet of marker chalk. She chose a nice flat piece of wall where the light from the glow-globe shone clearly.

Where should I begin, she thought. Maybe best to start with where I found her. Finding a red stick of chalk, she drew flames as best she could, and pointed.

Weena understood immediately what Negufta was trying to do. "Fire," she said in Language, fighting down the instinct to flinch away. She noticed that Negufta seemed no more comfortable about it then she did.

"Fire," Negufta repeated. She rubbed out the crude flames with the heel of her hand, drew a shaft entrance with the protective cupola, and raised interrogative eyebrows at Weena.

"Hole," Weena said immediately. She hopped down from the platform, plucked the chalk from Negufta's hand, and began to draw, naming each thing as it appeared.

Negufta found it hard to concentrate on repeating the words Weena was saying. Her eyes kept watching the smaller woman's fingers flying over the stone, tracing out pictures far better than Negufta could have ever imagined. It was like tracking the intricate workings of an unknown machine and seeing them come to life under her eyes.

"And tree!" Under Weena's fingers a pair of trees appeared on the stone, drawn so perfectly that Negufta could almost see the leaves stirring in the wind. She put down the chalk and turned with a huge smile. "Negufta, you understand?"

Negufta worked her tongue around the hard consonants. "I understand." She smiled back and took Weena's hand. The scrapes and cuts were beginning to heal, but she decided to put more ointment on them anyway.

As she bent over the nasty scrape on the back of Weena's left hand, she felt the other woman's fingers slip under her hair and, ever so gently, trace the outline of the swelling on her head. "Pain?" Weena asked.

"Not so much," Negufta leaned her head a little into the delicate touch. Her face grew hot at how much she was enjoying the company of the other woman. It shouldn't be like this, she thought, I don't like being with anyone. Everyone knows this. She's only good with her machines, they say, and they're right about that. They've always been right about that.

So why am I feeling like this?

She sighed, decided to stop interrogating her own mind, and bent to check how the burns on Weena's feet were healing.

____________________________________________________

"We stay?" Weena asked. She pointed around the little room. "Stay here?"

Negufta nodded. Her pale cheeks were flushed and she couldn't quite bring herself to look Weena in the eye. She busied herself with putting her ointment pot back in her bag. "We stay."

"Together?" Weena insisted. She'd taught Negufta the word by drawing the two of them side by side, pointing to each in turn, naming them individually, and then miming them pressed to each other with her hands. It had taken Negufta multiple attempts to get it right. For some reason she'd been more interested in examining the drawing instead of listening to the word.

Negufta looked at her, down at her hands, and eventually nodded. "Together."

Weena smiled. She sat down on the platform and patted the space next to her for Negufta. "Now let's talk about you," she said.

Negufta blinked at her, entirely lost. Weena sighed. Too much, she thought, too much and too soon.

She tried again. "Negufta, you... do what?"

"Oh." Negufta's face cleared. "I, Machinist."

"What is..." Weena's tongue stumbled over the unfamiliar word. "What is machinist?"

Negufta bit her lip and reached for the chalk.

This was going to take a long, long time.

____________________________________________________

Negufta went back to the fungus farm for food and found it no longer deserted.

Far away across the immense chamber, just visible in the phosphorescent gloom, a line of farmers in their heavy greyish robes was working its way in her direction along the fungus beds.

It wasn't, of course, as though she had no right to be here; the fungus farms weren't exactly off limits to anyone. But nobody except farmers ever came all the way down here, Machinists least of all. If someone saw her, they'd notice. If she were noticed, people would ask questions. And right now she needed, at all costs, to avoid questions.

So, keeping as low as possible, she gathered as many of the smaller grey spheres as were within reach and popped them under her tunic. Then, working her way back towards the tunnel entrance along the line of pinkish-brown fungi, she winkled out as many of the grubs as she could. By the time she had a decent squirming handful, the farmer's voices were uncomfortably close. A few paces closer, and she'd be able to hear what they were saying. Any closer than that, and she couldn't avoid being seen.

She'd intended to leave the food for Weena and then make her way back to the air pump chamber, to return when she safely could. But now she abandoned that plan on the spot. There was no telling how long the farmers would be on the job. They might even start working shifts if it were a major project, like preparing a section of new beds or something of that nature. They might be working here for Darks.

On elbows and knees, she quietly backed away down the passage until she was hidden by darkness and could get to her feet. She'd stay with Weena for now. There was nothing else to be done.

It wasn't really wasting time or neglecting her duties, she told herself. The longer she stayed with Weena, the faster she could learn the other woman's language, and the faster she did, the quicker she could ask the questions she wanted to about the Giant and find out to her satisfaction where it had come from and what it had been doing.

That, after all, was what this was all about, wasn't it? It wasn't that she enjoyed being with Weena. That didn't influence her one bit. It probably wasn't even true.

The problem was that she, herself, didn't believe it at all.

____________________________________________________

Weena looked up as Negufta entered. She pulled a face when she noticed what was in the other woman's hands.

Negufta handed her a grub anyway. "Eat."

Weena shuddered and chewed at the thing. It was almost big enough to span her palm, and it was no better than the first time; but the cool liquid that burst out of it wet her throat. "Negufta," she said.

"Yes?" Negufta had herself dispatched two grubs, and was putting several of the greyish food-spheres on the shelf, the ones Weena actually liked. "What?"

Shyly, Weena handed her what she'd been working on while Negufta was away. "For you," she said.

Negufta took it with a look of wonder on her face. It was the stiff wire she'd kept for so long on her shelf that she'd almost forgotten it existed. Weena had brought it down with her, and had, with nothing but her hands, twisted and worked it into the prefect shape of a flower; petals, stem, the curl of a leaf, it was all there. She held it up to her face and breathed on it as though checking to see if it were real enough to give off perfume.

"You like?" Weena asked.

"Oh, I like," Negufta said. And suddenly her arms were around Weena and she was hugging her again as tightly as she could.

____________________________________________________

Weena sat cross legged on the platform and watched Negufta.

The other woman - Weena couldn't even begin to think of her as a Terror, now, it was impossible - and she had eaten one of the grey spheres each, and Negufta had forced her to swallow several more of the grubs. Now she watched as Negufta went over the things she'd drawn on the wall, softly repeating the words to herself. It was amazing how quickly she was picking up Language. It was quite unlike the Big One and his baffling inability to string anything longer than two words together.

The Big One. She hadn't thought of the Big One in a long while, what with everything going on around her. I wonder what happened to the Big One. Did the fire eat him? What made him act as insanely as he did? She wondered if Negufta knew anything about the Big One at all, and how to ask her. Together they might be able to solve that mystery.

It was just one mystery now, among all the others Weena had been dealing with since her rescue from the fire. The Terrors weren't what she'd thought. The Underworld wasn't what she'd thought. Which made her wonder what Florun would have made of this little room and the white-haired woman in black leather patiently teaching herself Language from drawings on the wall.

The idea made her laugh aloud. Negufta looked around with a quizzical smile. "What?"

"Nothing." It wasn't nothing. If she lived through this, and she was beginning to cautiously think she just might, one Daylight she'd go up again, and then nobody would believe a word she had to say. Not unless she had Negufta with her. And if she had Negufta with her...

If she had Negufta with her, nobody would stop to listen to her anyway. They'd all be too busy screaming and running in every possible direction.

Weena savoured the mental image with considerable satisfaction. Then she thought of how very much they'd have to do before any of that might happen.

"Negufta," she said.

Negufta turned and waited.

"Negufta," Weena repeated. She made a gesture encompassing them both, the bag and glow-globe on the shelf, her sandals on the floor, and the room around them. "Negufta, what now?"

CHAPTER TWELVE

Negufta woke with her cheek pressed to the gritty stone of the platform and Weena's arm thrown over her.

She'd not had a pleasant sleep, and neither, she suspected, had Weena. From what she could make out from the other woman's drawings, her people slept in large numbers on thick cushions that made even Negufta's own sleeping mat, comfortable as it was, seem inadequate by comparison. And here she'd been compelled to spend the night on bare stone.

It was quite cold too, and the air, without the circulation of the pumps on the upper levels, was clammy. Negufta groaned softly as she tried to move and her shoulder, the one she'd wrenched while carrying Weena down the shaft from the fire, protested.

"Negufta?" Weena asked, her voice muffled by Negufta's hair. "Pain?"

"No," Negufta lied, and rotated her shoulder to ease it as far as she could.

It wasn't just the discomfort of cold bare stone against bone. Her skin felt gritty and dirty. Her tunic stank of old sweat and smoke; she hadn't had an opportunity to change or wash it since before the fire. Weena looked not much better, with dust smearing her face and arms in greyish streaks.

"Get up," she told the other woman, sliding off the platform. "We go bathe."

Before they'd dropped into an exhausted sleep, they'd managed to progress far enough to be able to put together basic sentences in a makeshift pidgin composed of words from both of their languages; though Weena's predominated since Negufta's own language, thick with tonal shifts that altered the whole meaning of words by change of pitch alone, was difficult enough for native speakers, let alone someone attempting to learn it off a wall.

"Bathe where?" Weena asked, rubbing her back and wincing.

"I'll show you." If I can find the place, Negufta thought to herself. After all, she'd never actually been there, just heard about it from others who'd not been there either or had only visited it long ago and whose directions had been vague even then. She pulled on her boots and picked up the glow-globe from the shelf, where it had lain all night beside the wire flower Weena had made. "Come on."

Holding the glow-globe before her to light their way, she led Weena down the passage. It sloped and dipped and turned on itself, but mercifully there were no branches to lead them astray. The tunnel just kept leading them further and further down into the darkness and the rocky depths.

At one point they passed a niche in the wall which must have once been a shrine of Kartak. The statue of the deity still stood, though blurred with dust and time, his wings folded crossways across his torso, his beaked face inscrutable. Negufta automatically curtsied and touched her hand to her heart and forehead in obeisance.

"Who is this?" Weena asked, staring up at the stone face of the idol with open curiosity.

"This is God. His name is Kartak." Negufta held the glow-globe close to the base of the figure, looking for any markings that might show how old it was. There was nothing, or else it was so old that the markings had been worn away by the years. "He is worshipped by everyone, Machinists especially." She began looking for the words to explain that Machinists' work was dangerous enough that Kartak's protection was absolutely necessary, when she noticed that Weena was staring at her with a perplexed frown.

"What," Weena asked, "is a god?"

____________________________________________________

They found the place almost by accident.

Negufta had spent longer than she cared to think about trying to explain the concept of god to Weena and getting absolutely nowhere.

"Look," she said, "it's simple. A god takes care of a person. A god makes sure the person does not come to harm. A god makes sure that a person has food, water, and shelter."

Weena looked up at her with a blandly innocent expression. "Does that make you my god, then?"

At that Negufta literally threw up her hands and gave up the attempt.

The act of throwing up her hands made the glow-globe swing wildly on its cord, and they both saw it then: a narrow and irregular opening in the wall on the right, little more than a crack, just wide enough to squeeze through sideways. "There it is."

"What is it?" Weena asked, craning her neck to look into the crevice. All she saw was darkness.

"You'll see." Negufta eased herself through the narrow aperture, and drew Weena in after her. Just a few steps inside and the crack opened out into a slightly wider passage, enough to walk side by side, though the roof was so low that they had to bend almost double in places. Walls, roof, and floor were all raw unfinished rock.

"Where are we going?" Weena asked as she followed Negufta down a segment so steep and narrow that it reminded her unpleasantly of food sliding down a throat.

Instead of answering, Negufta vanished. One moment she was there, the next, she was gone. Where she'd been a moment ago there was only a blank rock wall.

Weena goggled, too astonished even to be frightened, and then she realised that Negufta hadn't actually disappeared. She'd jumped down into a hole in the floor, from which the glow-globe still threw up its green-yellow fan of light. "Jump," Negufta's voice came from below. "I'll catch you."

Weena looked down cautiously into the hole. It wasn't very deep. Negufta's head was only a little below its lip. She grinned up at Weena. "Come on!"

"The things you make me do," Weena muttered, half to herself, and jumped.

____________________________________________________

It was like a fairy-tale castle made in crystal.

Weena looked around, her mouth hanging open. Beside her, Negufta was struggling between her own sense of awe and simple pride at Weena's reaction.

They stood on the shore of a lake, its water still except where it was occasionally broken by small white eyeless fish. Above them the roof of the cavern sent fingers of stone pointing down, each reflecting the light of the glow-globe in different hues of the rainbow. Other spies and spires of stone rose from the floor of the cavern around them and pierced the water of the lake, sometimes joining up with those above to form slender natural pillars.

That was not all. The air of the cave was noticeably warmer than in the passages down which they'd come, and when Negufta knelt to test the water with a finger, it was pleasantly warm.

"It's just as I was told," she said.

"What is this place?" Weena asked, still unable to take her eyes off the multi-hued stone fingers.

"An old cave. Very old." Negufta stretched. After the long climb down the cramped passage, it felt glorious to be able to go up on tiptoe and raise her arms above her head. "This is the first time I've been here myself. I just heard tales of it before."

Weena dipped her hand in the water as well. "Why is it so warm?" she asked.

"I don't know. I'd heard it was, but nobody seems to know why." She thought about it. "Maybe," she said, "hot water rises from somewhere below us, through the rock."

"How could it?" Weena poked experimentally at the rock on which she was kneeling. It remained unyielding rock.

"I don't know." Maybe the Giants lived underneath after all, and just like the air vents vomited out the heated air of home into the Outside, their heat seeped up through the rock to make the water warm? Negufta thought about the notion and laughed to herself, feeling glad that she hadn't tried it on Weena. Then the thought of the Giant reminded her of all the questions that she needed to ask Weena.

But those can wait, she thought. We have other things, important things, to do.

"Well," she said, "here we are. We can bathe here, and wash our clothes as well."

She'd expected some hesitation from Weena, so what happened caught her completely off guard. Weena's tunic seemed to fly off her body. Her sandals fell from her feet in almost the same motion, and she threw herself headfirst into the water with a great splash.

"What in Kartak's name..." Negufta began.

Weena's head broke the surface near the nearest pillar poking out of the water. She looked over her shoulder at Negufta, laughing.

"Come on in," she shouted. "What are you waiting for?"

Go into the water like that? Negufta decided Weena had taken leave of her senses. It was about all she could do to dip herself into water up to her chin. Even as she thought that, she watched Weena cut through the lake as effortlessly as one of the eyeless white fish all the way to the far edge of the glow-globe's light and then turn and swim back again.

"Well?" Weena called, shaking her head so that droplets of water arced from her hair in a multi-coloured halo, "are you coming or not?"

As though hypnotised, Negufta began stepping forwards, and then realised her blunder only when water began seeping into her boots and pooling around her toes.

"You've got to take your clothes off first," Weena said. She hung in the water effortlessly, keeping herself in place with slow, easy sweeps of her arms.

Blushing furiously, Negufta retreated a couple of paces up the bank and began stripping. She had never, in all her life, had any problem being naked around other people before, and until this moment she hadn't thought it would've made any difference around Weena either. But, suddenly, undressing in front of the other woman seemed an intensely intimate act. She had to fight down an impulse to turn her back in an attempt at modesty.

Naked at last, she walked resolutely into the water until it rose to her hips, and slowly eased herself down into it.

____________________________________________________

Weena watched Negufta disrobe and walk down into the water.

She's beautiful, she thought suddenly. Once you learn to look past those gigantic eyes and that stone-white skin, she's lovely. Naked she looks even better than I ever expected. And then there's the way she's so caring and tender about me...

Stop that, she told herself firmly, this isn't the time. She watched, frowning slightly, as Negufta awkwardly lowered herself into place until her head and shoulders showed above the surface, sitting rather than swimming. Whatever was the woman doing?

She can't swim.

The thought arrived like a revelation. Weena was astonished. She'd been able to swim for as long as she could remember. The People could all swim, though none as well as she. Even the Big One could swim, in a manner of speaking, in his clumsy way. But Negufta, it was suddenly clear, couldn't swim at all.

She was about to ask why when the logical reason occurred to her. Negufta was a creature of the Underworld. Unlike the People, she had no river to swim in. Her people must make do with washing themselves like this, probably in basins where water gathered. A surge of unexpected pity swept through her.

"Negufta," she began, and waited as the other woman drew a deep breath and dipped her head below the surface, her fine soft white hair spreading on the water like spider silk. "Negufta," she repeated, when Negufta's head emerged once more, water streaming down it and from her nostrils, her eyes screwed shut as tightly as possible. "I'll swim around a bit and then I'll come for you."

"Come for me?" Negufta tried to get water out of her right ear with a fingertip. "Come for me and do what?"

"Talk. At first, just talk." Weena pushed with her feet against a rock protuberance and sent herself gliding away from the shore.

____________________________________________________

They'd washed their tunics and spread them on a couple of rocks to dry. Now they lay side by side on their backs on a large smooth flat rock by the shore, one that seemed almost designed to be lain on. Above them hung a pointing rock finger which the glow-globe's light made glisten and twinkle like a million stars in the sky.

"It's funny," Weena said.

"What is?" Negufta asked absently. She couldn't get the image out of her mind of Weena twisting, turning, and diving like a fish, of erupting out of the water almost to her waist before splashing back again. How did she do all this? She glanced covertly at the other woman's body, wondering if she had bones and muscles completely different from her own. It seemed about as likely as the Giant coming from deep beneath the ground, so she dismissed the notion. "What is funny?"

"Those." Weena pointed up at the finger of stone and its reflected points of light. "Up above, when it's Dark, I could have seen stars just like those if I went out and looked up. But I couldn't go out, though it was my world. And you, it's not your world, but you could see them, couldn't you?"

"I didn't go out either." Negufta's voice sounded harsh to her own ears, her tone abrupt. She tried again. "I... I'm a creature of machines, Weena. I really know nothing about anything except machines. My own people say I'm half machine myself."

Weena propped herself up on one elbow and stared down into Negufta's face. "You aren't," she said with quiet certainty. "You're more people than anyone else I've ever known, including my own People."

Negufta's huge eyes stared up into Weena's own. Red colour flooded her white cheeks. She seemed about to say something, but blinked and turned her head away for a moment. Then she looked back, and drew a long, unsteady breath.

"Teach me," she said abruptly.

"Teach you what?" Weena was baffled. What could she teach this woman, who was in her own world where she herself was, at best, an interloper passing through?

"Teach me to be more... people," Negufta said. She sat up, her breasts, with their large pale pink nipples, swinging. "But, first, teach me how to swim."

____________________________________________________

"What was your life like... Outside?" Negufta asked.

They were back on the rock. The swimming lesson had been a hilarious disaster, with Negufta thrashing around in panic the moment her feet couldn't feel the bottom. Weena had tried her best but given it up as hopeless in the end.

"For now," she'd said, as they walked out of the water. "Just you wait, I'll teach you. One Daylight, or Dark, or whatever it is down here, you'll swim, too."

"You just want to drown me," Negufta had accused.

"Or I just want to hold you..." Weena had bitten off her words. "Well," she'd added with a grin, "you know what I mean."

Now she glanced at the pale woman stretched out beside her. "When you say Outside, you mean my world?" She sighed. "You know, to us, Outside just means out of our buildings, especially the Sleeping Places. And most especially when the Dark comes."

"Oh." Negufta rolled on her side to face her. "Your world, then," she said. "Your life. Tell me about it."

Weena nodded, carefully arranging in her mind the words, the simple words, she'd need to use to make herself understood clearly, and began.

____________________________________________________

Once she started, she found herself unable to stop.

She poured out everything she'd been holding inside, things she hadn't even consciously recalled in years. She talked about growing up with the other children, under the benign neglect of adults who made sure they were given food and clothes, but who cared about little or nothing else. She spoke of the dread of the Dark, when the People imprisoned themselves in their buildings, and the joyous freedom that arrived with the Daylight. She spoke of Florun, who thought he knew everything, and of Wessa, who invariably agreed with him. She told Negufta about making garlands and swimming in the river, darting all the way to the opposite bank and back again. She talked about Munin, and, though her face grew hot at the retelling, she even spoke of what she had done with him on her sleeping cushions, and how she'd done it only because she was expected to, without finding any particular pleasure in it.

The only thing she didn't talk about was the Big One, because she hadn't yet sorted out her own thoughts about him.

Negufta watched her as she spoke, drinking in the sight of her, how animated she was, and thought, once you learn to look past the outer differences, those tiny eyes, that ruddy skin and strange curly coppery hair, she's an incredibly attractive woman. Not just physically, either, it's her whole personality. Look how her hands move as she talks, gesturing to make sure I understand. Negufta's heart beat faster just to see it.

And at the same time something else, harder and colder, grew in her as she listened to Weena speak of about how she and her kind dreaded the onset of darkness. They are terrified of us, she thought, they think us monsters. And why wouldn't they, another part of her mind said right back, we call them Beasts and treat them exactly as that word suggests.

And finally she said it to herself, in plain terms she could not ignore, a thought that she knew was dangerous, a thought that would rip a hole in the entire fabric of her own people's world.

They aren't Beasts. They are People, too.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Weena wanted to stay on in the cavern with the lake.

"It's warm," she said, "it's safe, and it's nice and clean. Why do we need to go up again at all?"

Weena had finally declared that their clothes had dried enough to put on again. In reality, they had been dry for a while, as Negufta had pointed out, holding up a sleeve of her tunic to demonstrate. Weena had said that a little more drying wouldn't hurt. And Negufta hadn't found any way to say no.

Until, that is, Weena had wanted to make this place their home.

"I wish we could, too," Negufta told her. "But we have no food here, and while this water is fine to swim in, I'm not prepared to bet our lives on it doing nothing to us if we began drinking it."

"You could go up and bring down food for us," Weena argued.

"And leave you here in the dark meanwhile?" Negufta snorted. "Is that what you want?"

In the end Weena gave in, albeit with bad grace. "We're going to come back," she muttered. "With every scrap of food and all the grubs we can carry."

"That we will." Negufta boosted Weena up the hole into the rough cave passage above. Her own longer arms and a lifetime of climbing up stacks meant she needed no assistance scrambling up the rock throat. The glow-globe lit the way before them like a tiny captive sun.

There was still a long way to go to reach the little room near the fungus farm. With Weena repeatedly needing a steadying hand climbing the rock throat towards the proper, carved and smoothened, tunnels, it seemed even longer and more wearisome. Negufta bided her time until they squeezed back through the crack into the proper tunnel before she finally articulated the question that had been sitting at the back of her tongue all the way up.

"Weena," she asked, "could you tell me what you were doing out in the Dark, the time I found you in the fire?"

____________________________________________________

Weena glanced over her shoulder at Negufta. For a moment she thought about lying outright, and immediately rejected the idea. She'd never been good at making up stories. Besides, she discovered that she didn't want to lie to Negufta; not about this, and not about anything.

Then she thought about telling a partial truth, leaving the Big One out of it. But how would she reconcile wandering in the forest at night, far from her usual home near the river and the White Statue, with what she'd already told Negufta? The very thought made her head hurt.

"Weena?" Negufta prompted, gently. "If you don't want to tell me yet, it's all right, but..."

"No, I want to tell you." Weena took a deep breath. "It began when the Big One fell from the sky with the rain..."

____________________________________________________

Negufta listened with growing fascination.

She doesn't know about the machine at all, she thought; she never saw it, or if she did, she didn't understand what it was. She can't be blamed for that. She had never even heard of a machine until I told her about them when she asked what I did. But her information about the Giant - the Big One as she calls it - that's important, that's more than important.

So this Giant is a male, and it - he - was a total stranger in this world. He didn't know the first thing about it. It tracks with everything else. She stopped at the statue of Kartak and made her ritual obeisance, hand to heart and forehead, but it was automatic. She scarcely registered what she was doing. Her mind was awhirl with what she'd just heard.

"This Giant, I mean the Big One..." Her fingers tightened around Weena's own as she thought about the Giant's strength, how he had kicked her against the side of the shaft and later butted her in the head. The spot was still sore. "Why did he take you to the green porcelain building?"

"I don't know. Because he was mad, I thought. He began scrabbling through the old things there as though he were hunting for something. Whatever it was, he acted as though it were more important than food and water for us, let alone safety." Weena looked up from their entwined fingers at the other woman's face. "What are you not telling me, Negufta?"

"Not telling you? Why do you think I'm keeping something from you?"

"It's obvious. Why are you so disturbed about the Big One? You're all but crushing my fingers."

Negufta forced her grip to relax. "I'm sorry. I'll tell you. Just tell me the rest and then you'll hear all about mine in turn."

All this information has to go back to the Council, she thought. How, in the holy name of Kartak, am I supposed to manage that?

____________________________________________________

The little room was as they'd left it, Weena's wire flower and her own bag on the shelf where they'd been, the chalk drawings still covering the opposite wall.

They arrived just as Negufta finished telling her part of the story; Yntho summoning her to inspect the machine, the Giant hammering at the doors and later invading their cavern, and how she'd been cut off by the fire that same Giant had set. Then she finished with the account of how the Giant had climbed into his machine, butted her in the head, and vanished before her eyes.

"Did he go up into the sky?" Weena asked, her eyes wide. "Is that where he went?"

"I don't know where he went. He just vanished. But I had the strangest feeling that he didn't really go anywhere at all. Not in the way we mean going, anyway."

"How do you mean?" Weena flopped down on the platform and stripped off her sandals to rub her feet. "How could he have disappeared with this machine and still not gone anywhere at all?"

"If I could have studied and worked the machine, I could probably tell you that." Negufta took a piece of chalk and drew the machine on a free bit of wall. This was a drawing from her own world, the world of rods and levers and joints, and her fingers were swift and sure. "This was what it looked like."

"He never talked about it," Weena said. "Not unless he was roaring about it the first Dark when he broke into the Sleeping Place. He was certainly shouting a lot then, but I didn't understand a word."

"He probably was. He was likely a little upset that Yntho and his crew had carried the machine into the Statue Room."

"Upset enough to go insane?" Weena snorted.

"I don't think he was insane," Negufta replied, dropping down beside Weena and pulling off her boots with a grunt of relief. "It's a great deal more complicated than that."

"What do you think, then?" Weena lay down on her back on the platform with a sigh. She stroked Negufta's forearm up and down, over and over, almost without realising that she was doing it. "What was he up to?"

"I think he was lost, and frightened, and hadn't the faintest idea what he was doing. People like that can be very dangerous, to themselves and others, without meaning to be." Negufta relished the touch and didn't want to move her arm for fear Weena would stop. Her own words reminded her of Gubreypoka, who had been an apprentice Machinist along with her, years ago. She hadn't let herself think of him in a very long while.

Gubreypoka had been good. Even Negufta, who'd been young and brash then, had been prepared to admit that he'd been a lot better than she. The instinctive appreciation of machines, as though they were live things, which Negufta herself had taken years to develop, he'd had from the start. Which was why what had happened to him had been as unexpected as it had been tragic.

It was when they'd been nearly at the end of their training. They'd been sent down to the lower levels to strip one of the ancient rusting hulks for any spare parts that might remain. But the machine had already been scavenged of virtually everything useful long ago, probably before either of them had even been born.

"There's nothing here," Gubreypoka had said. "Not a single Kartak-damned thing."

"I think there are still a couple of pistons I can get to." Negufta had replied. She'd been buried almost up to her waist inside the shell of the ancient device, her mind and hands too busy to think about anything else. "If I can just free this cylinder here..."

"You do that." Gubreypoka had looked up at the ancient hulk with disfavour. "This thing is not just dead, it's a skeleton. I'll have a look around for something else we can salvage. There have to be other old machines down here."

"You do that," Negufta had echoed absently. She'd listened to him with half an ear, her attention fixed on the cylinder. It had proved to be far more difficult than she'd anticipated, rusted in place. By the time she'd finally freed it and extracted the piston, she had forgotten all about what Gubreypoka had said. She had, if she were honest to herself, all but forgotten that Gubreypoka even existed.

Then she'd remembered and waited for Gubreypoka to return. He'd come back any moment, she had been sure, loaded down with valves and T-joints and camshafts, all shining clean and as good as new.

But he hadn't.

____________________________________________________

"I waited for him until I couldn't wait any more," Negufta recounted. "I called out his name until my throat was hoarse. I even walked around as far as I dared to, looking for him, but I couldn't find anything. Then I went back up and reported to my trainer that he was missing."

"What happened to him?" Weena's voice had dropped to a whisper..

"He lost his way." Negufta shook her head. "These damned old tunnels... he must have wandered down one too many until he couldn't find his way back. But that wasn't the worst of it."

"Why? I can't imagine anything worse than being lost in the dark."

"Of course you can't." Negufta sighed and ran her fingers through Weena's short thick hair. "The problem with Gubreypoka is he couldn't either. And he did the absolute worst thing he could do."

"What was that?"

"He didn't wait in place for the search parties to find him." Negufta rubbed her face with her free hand. "Of course we sent out search parties. If Gubreypoka had just stopped where he was they'd have found him soon enough, without any trouble. Instead, he panicked, and kept running along tunnel after tunnel, places none of us had ever been, until, at some point, he must have come to soft rock and earth."

"And then?" Weena asked, fascinated.

"And then, with his tools, he tried to dig his way out."

Over aeons of time, water had seeped down from the Outside, carved out, and filled cavities in the rock. Gubreypoka had somehow managed to dig away enough of the thin skin of stone holding back one such pocket of water from the tunnel. With a roar of displaced rock and soil, the flood had burst in and swept through chambers and passages, washing away anything and anyone in its path.

"We lost most of the search party," Negufta said. "We couldn't even find their bodies afterwards. Nor Gubreypoka's either, of course."

Weena's face was stark with horror. "Those poor people."

"Yes... well." Negufta got up and walked over to the shelves. There were still a few spheres of grey fungus on them. She took one for herself and tossed another to Weena. "That's why I think your Big One was just lost and frightened," she said, "and not out of his mind. He just wasn't thinking straight."

"But he abandoned me." Weena's eyes grew wet with tears of anger. "He only really cared about his machine. He left me in the fire to burn!"

Negufta tried to think of words of comfort and found none. She chewed at the fungus before she spoke again.

"Let's talk a bit about what your people do with flowers," she said.

____________________________________________________

Later, while Weena slept, Negufta lay beside her staring into the near-darkness.

She'd put the glow-globe back into the bag and closed the flap so only the thinnest seam of light emerged, just enough to see by. In its feeble light the drawing of the machine she'd made on the wall seemed almost as though the chalk lines were solid, real rods and levers outlined by shadow. She had gone over what Weena had told her many times, and the problem hadn't got any closer to a solution.

The sheer scale of what had happened since she'd found Weena, of what she'd discovered, and what she had to do, lay too heavy on her mind to let her sleep.

By now, she thought, there's no way I haven't been missed. If I turn up now, there will be questions I'll have no good answers for. Yet I can't just let it go. I have a duty to the Council to tell it that the Beasts are also people, and that the Giant is a creature from somewhere else entirely, a creature who might return again one day, and more prepared this time, no longer blundering and afraid. Before, the Giant had been dangerous only due to fear and ignorance. Next time, prepared for what he was facing, he could be truly deadly.

It's not just a duty to the Council, she thought, it's a duty to the people. It's a duty to both our Peoples, Weena's and mine.

And yet, she thought, I have to do all this while protecting Weena. That's the most important thing. Everything else is secondary to that.

How can I do this? The question bounced back and forth in her mind.

She'd still found no answer to the dilemma when Weena began to twist and turn in her sleep. A soft distressed sound emerged from her parted lips.

"Weena?" Negufta whispered. There was no reply. Weena's eyes moved rapidly under their closed lids and she moaned again.

Negufta reached out and began, instinctively, to stroke Weena's head and face, very gently, until the smaller woman stopped moaning. She put an arm over Weena and carefully arranged her own body to fit around her, her breasts to Weena's back, the soles of Weena's feet pressed against her shins, the warmth of their bodies merging until it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.

And then, at last, still holding Weena to her bosom, she fell asleep.

____________________________________________________

Weena was coughing.

Negufta's eyes flew open. Weena was sitting at the edge of the platform, hunched over, her body shaking with coughs. Negufta scrambled up so quickly that she all but fell off the platform.

"Oh, Weena," she whispered. "What's wrong?"

Weena turned. "Nothing," she said, with a slightly desperate smile. "Don't worry. I'm fine."

She was obviously not fine. Her face was as pale as it could get under that ruddy complexion, and her breath rasped in her throat with every inhalation in a way that terrified Negufta. She coughed again, a thick liquid sound.

"I'm all right," Weena said. "Please..."

"Don't be silly." Negufta put the back of her hand against Weena's forehead, and winced. The heat of fever burned against her skin.

I should have known, she thought. She's not used to living underground. Her body isn't adapted to this life. Sleeping on bare stone, eating fungi and grubs, this still air down here with no circulation; it's a wonder she hasn't fallen sick already before this.

Cold dread settled in the pit of her stomach as another cough shook Weena's small frame.

Oh, Kartak, she thought, whatever am I going to do?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Negufta had made Weena lie down on the stone shelf, with her head propped up on the bag as a pillow. The smaller woman's fever was rising, and she was beginning to shiver. The thin tunic, which was all she'd worn since Negufta had come upon her in the fire, was clearly not enough to keep her warm down here.

Negufta briefly considered dressing Weena in her own clothes, but that would solve nothing; the black tunic was made for functionality, not warmth. It was clear that she'd have to find something else.

That was when she thought of the fungus farmers' robes.

The grey robes were necessary to protect regular clothing from the mess of the fungus farms. However, they were heavy and cumbersome and tended to be hard to clean. So the fungus farmers routinely discarded them in the passages after work when heading up to their homes in the upper chambers.

After all, who'd ever bother stealing a fungus farmer's robe?

Negufta, that was who.

She cautiously entered the farm cavern. Fortuitously, it was vacant at the moment. Moving as fast as she could without breaking into an actual run that would draw attention, she hurried across the glowing expanse and entered the nearest passage on the far side. A quick look around showed her no robes. There were racks from which sheets of harvested fungi were hung to dry, but no robes.

Back into the cavern, then, and another attempt.

She found the robes in the third tunnel. There were several of them, tossed down in an untidy heap in a corner that made her wince in her tidy Machinist's soul. She rummaged among them, picked out the cleanest that she could find, and then, on second thoughts, took two others as well.

One of the two could serve as a blanket, and the other, rolled up, as a pillow for Weena.

She, herself, would need her bag for what came next.

____________________________________________________

Weena looked up at Negufta with fever-bright eyes. "You're back," she whispered.

"Did you think I'd left you?" Negufta pulled the cleanest robe over Weena's shoulders and arms. The other woman's skin was hot to the touch. "I would never."

"Never is..." Weena smiled suddenly. It was a ghost of her usual grin. "It's literally an impossible promise to make. You know that."

"And? What happens if I keep it?"

Weena thought about that for a bit with grave attention. "You'd have made the impossible possible, I suppose."

"There you are, then." Negufta said. "Sit up a little and eat this." She held a couple of grubs to Weena's mouth, and then gave her a fungus sphere. "You'll need the strength to get better."

Weena nodded without much conviction. She ate the fungus slowly and without appetite. She shivered and rubbed her arms.

After Weena had lain down, Negufta covered her with the biggest robe and picked up her bag. "I'm leaving the glow-globe here," she said. "Don't worry. I'll be back."

"Where are you going?" Weena began to ask, but another fit of coughing seized her before she could finish. By the time it had passed, Negufta was gone.

____________________________________________________

Weena lay on the stone shelf, unable to sleep. Her arms were tightly wrapped around her torso, as though attempting to hold herself together. The robes stank powerfully of things she couldn't begin to name. She felt as though she were burning up, and then as though she were freezing, and, underneath all, very, very, frightened.

Negufta will come back, she told herself. She's not abandoned you. She's done so much for you already that it's ridiculous to think that she won't come back.

But suppose something happens to her, something that stops her from coming back. She didn't say anything about that, but it's obvious that she's run away from her work to be with me. What if she's stopped from coming back because she's been forced to go back to work - or worse?

And what if someone else comes along while she's gone and finds me here?

Stop it, she told herself, you've trusted her so far, and she's never done a thing to break your trust, not for a moment. She wouldn't have left you here if it wasn't safe.

She wouldn't have left you at all if you hadn't fallen sick, another, colder part of her mind suggested.

Stop it, she repeated. Negufta didn't abandon you.

But what if she can't come back?

And round and round the cycle went, with no way of getting off.

Little by little, the cycle of worry became almost hypnotic, and Weena slipped into a feverish sleep.

____________________________________________________

Negufta ran.

Once she was past the fungus farm, she no longer bothered about being seen. In these passages there was so little light that nobody who saw her could possibly recognise her anyway unless they literally ran into her. And she hadn't a moment to lose.

Keeping Weena warm and fed and as comfortable as possible might buy her a little time, but it wouldn't be enough by itself. She needed medicine; real medicine, not an ointment out of a pot to soothe a burn or ease a sprain.

And Negufta hadn't the slightest idea how to tell fever medicine from one for an upset stomach or a broken toe.

Rukwa, the thought pounded in her head like her feet pounding the rock floor of the passage, I must find Rukwa. She might not be the best Healer we have, but she's the best chance I have; the best chance Weena has. No, she thought, she's the only chance Weena has.

But what should she tell Rukwa? She couldn't pretend that the medicine she was asking for was for herself; one look and Rukwa would see the lie. Rukwa was, despite her terrible bawdy songs, no fool. If Negufta told her the medicine was for someone else, she'd quite naturally ask why the sick person couldn't come by themselves.

And if I say the sick person is too ill to walk, Negufta thought, Rukwa will insist on going to see them. She's annoyingly conscientious where her work is concerned. Whatever will I tell her?

She couldn't think of an answer while running and she couldn't afford to stop running to think. She decided she'd say whatever came to mind when she met Rukwa.

By the time her screaming leg muscles had forced her to slow to a fast walk, she'd reached the upper passages. Here there was a real danger of meeting someone she knew, especially since she'd lost track of time down in the depths and had no idea whether it was Dark outside or everyone was down inside to hide from the Bright.

She pulled her shoulders back and tried her best to slow her breathing, in the desperate hope that she'd pass unremarked. It very nearly worked.

Then, when she'd almost reached the air pump chamber and her home, a hand reached out and touched her shoulder. "Negufta?"

She went rigid for a moment before turning. "What do you want?"

Doklam took an involuntary step back from the quiet anger in her voice. "I, ah, had come looking for you, but you weren't there, so I thought, maybe she's gone somewhere, and then I had some spare time just now, so..."

"So you came looking again for me? Why?"

Doklam glanced around as if for rescue. None came. "I just thought..."

"Thought what?" Negufta fought to keep calm. Losing her temper would help in no way now. "You thought what?"

Doklam couldn't meet her eyes. He studied the floor between their boots with interest as his face grew slowly red with embarrassment. "Just... I just wanted to get to know you better, that's all."

"Oh, Kartak." Negufta sighed. "Listen to me, Doklam. It's not that I dislike you. But there are a couple of little problems that are in the way. The first is that you're much too young for me." She turned to go.

"Wait!" Doklam reached out to hold her by the forearm. "What's the other problem?"

"Oh," Negufta said, without looking around, "it's just that I prefer girls."

Shaking off his hand effortlessly, she stalked away down the tunnel. She'd gone several steps before she grew suddenly, uncomfortably aware of something she'd never realised before.

What she'd meant to be a convenient little lie to get rid of Doklam was no lie at all.

It was clearly, unambiguously, true.

____________________________________________________

Evidently it was Dark above, because the tunnels and chambers were empty enough that she managed to get to Rukwa's rooms without any further unwelcome conversations.

Rukwa lived in a large, spacious set of rooms at the end of an offshoot tunnel that opened behind the third air stack on the right; Negufta noticed with pride as she passed it that the stack was running well, the valve washer she'd replaced evidently holding as intended. The tunnel itself was generously large, too, well-ventilated enough to suit Rukwa's needs.

Except for emergencies like the fire, Rukwa rarely left her chambers. Most Darks found her elbow-deep in bandages, tinctures, sutures, and the other things that went with patching and binding up wounds, making up medicines, and all the rest of being a Healer. Being Rukwa, the rest of her time went into her other passion: trying to coax wines from the fruit and flowers she cajoled the Outside work parties to bring back down with them.

The results of her efforts defied description, but the endless failures didn't discourage her any.

She was, fortunately, in residence when Negufta arrived, and, even more fortunately, was alone. That was where it stopped being so fortunate, because she had evidently been busy sampling her own latest batch. She looked up at Negufta with a tipsy smile from a table covered with bottles and beakers and a basin. Her hair spilled dishevelled around her round face, the brown leather apron she wore askew and hanging halfway off one shoulder. All around her shelves groaned under the weight of a hundred different flasks and packets. The air was full of smells that made Negufta's nostrils twitch.

"Oh, hello there, Machinist," she slurred. "I was told you'd... they said you'd vanished, but I said, no, she'll be back." She belched gently behind her hand and held out a metal beaker half full of a puce liquid so thick that it looked like sludge. "Here, try this and tell me what you think."

"Why me?" Negufta took the goblet and looked down into the liquid. It looked as though it might come to life and begin crawling out of the beaker. "I don't know anything about wine."

"You know as much as anyone else." Rukwa belched again. "And you're the only one so far who hasn't refused to try, so it's up to you."

Keep her happy, Negufta thought, and took a tiny sip of the concoction. It tasted like liquid fire. She took a second, cautious, sip, with a frown of concentration. "Rukwa."

"What?"

Negufta tapped the beaker. "As a wine, this is worse than terrible. I think you know that as well as I do." She held up her free hand before Rukwa's face could fall. "However, it could probably be a very good cough remedy. Maybe for hypothermia as well."

Rukwa peered at her hopefully. "You really think so?"

Negufta nodded. "I do." It was perfectly true; she felt warmth flooding through her body from just the two sips. "Could I take some with me?"

"Of course." Rukwa smiled with genuine pleasure, her plain round face becoming momentarily almost beautiful. "Take as much as you want. I can always make more. What else did you need? You didn't come here just to meet me, did you?"

"No." Negufta decided to press her advantage while the moment held. "Could I have some fever medicine?"

"Fever medicine?" Rukwa looked up sharply. "Are you sick?"

"Not yet, but it's possible that I could come down with something." Negufta suddenly discovered that she could lie quite well if she had to. "I'm working on a project down on the deepest levels." She paused for effect. "Council orders. Top secret, you know how it is. And it's really cold and clammy down there."

"I'll take your word for it. Never been all the way down deep myself and never want to." Rukwa belched a third time, went to a shelf, and pulled out a cloth packet sealed at the top. It was liberally sprinkled with a fine yellow powder. "Here. Mix about as much of it as you can hold between your thumb and forefinger in water and drink it thrice over the period of a Bright and a Dark, and that should..." she hiccupped and giggled. "That should do the trick."

"Thanks so much, Rukwa." Negufta put the packet in her bag and turned to leave, hardly able to believe her own luck.

She'd made it to the door when Rukwa called after her. "Aren't you forgetting something, Machinist?"

Heart in her throat, Negufta turned. "What?"

Rukwa held up a largish flask.

"Your wine," she said, beaming happily.

____________________________________________________

Negufta had just emerged into the air pump chamber when she saw Yntho.

For a long moment she froze in place from sheer panic.

Yntho was coming along the passage to the shaft leading Outside, the one the Giant had come down by. As he came, he was looking up at the top on the air pump stacks on the opposite side of the chamber.

He hasn't seen me yet, Negufta thought frantically. Kartak, please help me now. She squeezed between the next pump stack and the wall of the cavern. The space was so small that, with the bag on her back, she could barely fit.

Yntho was the very worst person she could meet at this time. Brasza or any of the others, even Gudal, she could fob off with the same fairy tale of a top secret project from the Council, at least long enough for her to slip away, to make her escape. But Yntho was on the Council himself. Even though he was only a low level member who couldn't get them to listen to his concerns, he'd know quite well that there was no such project.

Please pass by, she thought desperately. Go away this once and don't look back.

From where she stood, she could see nothing except the curve of metal next to her face, and hear nothing above the thumping of the air stack next to her ear. Yntho could literally be standing on the other side of the stack and she wouldn't know it.

Cursing herself, cursing him, knowing every moment she was losing was precious, she settled down to wait it out.

____________________________________________________

Under her blanket of purloined farmer's robes, Weena twisted and moaned in the throes of a dream.

In the dream she was in the fire again, lost and stumbling around, and the fire was gaining on her from every side. "Negufta!" she tried to scream, but with the logic of dreams her mouth wouldn't obey her at all. And then she saw Negufta, but the other woman was lying on the ground, her silky white hair and black tunic entirely burnt away, and what remained of her skin smouldering. When Weena tried to pick her up, she vanished, and though Weena looked around all she could, she couldn't find her again.

Then she was alone, lost and terrified, and there was only the fire.

Then Weena woke with a dreadful certainty.

Something has happened to her, she thought. And then her mind delivered the final blow:

She isn't coming back.

____________________________________________________

Bent almost double, Negufta scuttled through the fungus farm, hoping she wouldn't be seen, unable to wait any longer for the perfect opportunity to present itself.

She'd spent far too long squeezed behind the pump stack before finally emerging to check if the coast was clear. There had been no sign of Yntho. Without a thought, she'd begun running, and had almost descended to the next level before she remembered, with a stab of frustration, that she'd forgotten the sleeping mat. She needed to fetch it from her room for Weena. Back up again, desperately afraid she'd run into Yntho at every turn, but once again she'd been lucky.

Until, that is, she had reached the entrance to the fungus farm and had seen a knot of farmers bent to their work on the far side, right next to the tunnel that led to Weena.

Negufta had been forced to wait forever before they'd finished whatever they'd been doing and moved on to something else over on the right. Then, finally, she put her head down and, sticking to the left wall of the cavern as far as she could, she ran.

She managed to reach the far side without hearing any startled shouts, so hopefully she hadn't been seen. She couldn't stop to gather fungi or grubs, not now. In any case getting the medicine inside Weena was more important than food right now.

She knew something was wrong the moment she'd passed the second turning beyond the fungus farm. The passage ahead of her should have been glimmering faintly in the reflected light of the glow-lamp. Instead it was almost completely dark.

"Weena?" Feeling her way almost by touch, she burst into their room. It was silent and unlit.

Weena was gone.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Stay calm, Negufta told herself fiercely. Stay calm, and think this through rationally.

She'd already fumbled her way through the room, feeling with her hands, and made sure that Weena wasn't hiding somehow, in some corner. The robes she'd been using as a pillow and a blanket still lay on the platform, but they were cold to the touch.

She's been gone a while, then, Negufta thought. Did someone come in and take her?

That suggested something to her, and she knelt and swept the floor with her hands. Weena's sandals were gone.

If someone took her, Negufta thought, they wouldn't have bothered with her footwear. The sandals would still be here. So she's wandered off by herself.

Where?

If she had come back up through the tunnel, Negufta would either have run into her on the way in, or she'd have been seen by the farmers who'd been working by the tunnel entrance. Therefore she'd not come back up.

And, so, there was only one place she could be headed for.

The place where she'd felt safe and happy: the cave with the lake.

I only have to follow the tunnel down and I'll find her, Negufta thought. There aren't any branches or side tunnels. But she could be lying unconscious, or worse, anywhere along the way, and I might pass her by in the darkness. This passage is far too dark for me to see anything in. I'll need light.

There was only one place she could find light without going all the way back to the upper chambers for another glow-globe.

Gritting her teeth to fight down the worry surging inside her, she threw the sleeping mat on the platform and went back up the tunnel towards the fungus farm.

For the first time since she had begun bringing Weena down into the old caverns, Negufta found herself wishing desperately that the tunnels had been better lit. Normally she didn't mind the darkness. It was familiar, and, naturally, infinitely better than the Bright. It was simply the absence of light, and there was nothing mysterious about it. Now it seemed full of places where Weena might be lying helpless.

Negufta pushed the thought away.

Think.

The farmers might be there. If they were, she would have to wait. Waiting was something she could not afford.

She had never been so afraid of wasting time before in her life.

____________________________________________________

Negufta didn't know what she'd have done if the farmers had been working near the tunnel. Fortunately, however, the fungus farm seemed deserted for the moment. She managed to scrape up as much of the glowing fungus as was within reach and stuff it into her bag. Then, holding a double handful in front of her, she descended the tunnel once more.

The light from the glowing fungus was extremely dim, so she was forced to walk slowly. Pieces of fungus constantly crumbled from her hands and fell on the floor, forcing her to scoop out more from her bag every hundred steps or so. Her mouth was dry with fear and her heart pounding as though it wanted to burst out of her chest.

She must be so frightened and so alone, she thought. Even with the glow-globe, she must be terrified. And who knows what tricks the fever might be playing with her mind.

What will I do if she dies, she thought. What if she's already dead? It'll be my fault for bringing her down here. I should have kept her up in my room where it's dry and warm.

It's too late to think about that, she told herself firmly. You can't go back, so look at what you can do. The first thing is to find her, alive or -

She stopped. She was at the old Kartak shrine. A dark shape was crumpled at its foot, one arm outflung.

For one dreadful moment she was convinced that it was Weena, and that she was too late. Then she realised, even as she threw herself down on her knees beside it, that it was the third farmer's robe, the one she'd tucked around Weena's arms and shoulders. She'd dropped it here, or it had fallen off her.

Negufta released a long, shaking breath.

It confirmed, at least, that Weena had come this way.

Picking up the robe and slinging it over her shoulder, filled with sudden new hope, Negufta started again down the passage, going as fast as she could see to walk by the light of the fungus crumbling out of her fists and dribbling at her feet.

____________________________________________________

She found Weena at the entrance of the fissure that led down to the cave of the lake.

She'd already seen the light of the glow-globe reflecting off the rock from two turnings away, and, throwing away the remaining glowing fungus, had broken into a run. And it was because she'd been running as fast as she could go that she almost stumbled over Weena, stopping herself at the last moment with a hand on the rock wall.

Weena sat curled up on herself at the entrance of the fissure, hugging her shins. The glow-globe lay on the ground beside her, fortunately undamaged. Her face was buried in her knees and she was shaking, whether with sobs or fever Negufta couldn't tell.

She seemed unaware of Negufta's arrival.

Negufta knelt by her and put her hand on her shoulder. "Weena? Hey."

Slowly, Weena's head lifted. Her eyes were red and tears had made tracks down her dust-smeared face. She looked at Negufta dully, as though she couldn't recognise her.

"Weena?" Negufta asked. "Talk to me."

Weena said something in her language. Most of the words were unknown to Negufta, but she heard her own name.

"Yes, Negufta's here." She shouldered off the bag and fetched out the packet Rukwa had given. A pinch three times a Dark, with water, she remembered. And then, looking around, recalled that there was no water nearer than the cave.

But there was Rukwa's flask of terrible wine. It would have to do.

Tipping back Weena's head gently, she put a pinch of the yellow powder on the other woman's tongue, and followed it with as much of the wine as the flask's cap would hold.

Weena groaned and turned her head away, but not before she'd been made to swallow it all. Her eyes fell slowly closed and she sank back against the rock.

Negufta pulled the farmer's robe around Weena, and sat down next to her to wait.

She had no idea how long it would take.

She watched Weena's breathing, one breath following another, willing it desperately to steady, for her face to lose the red flush of fever.

For once, Negufta found herself wishing she knew more about medicine. She could repair a valve with a leather washer in darkness. She could dismantle an ancient mechanism and understand what its maker had intended. She could look at a complicated machine and see, almost at once, where its stresses and weaknesses lay.

But she could not look at Weena and know what was happening inside her. That frightened her more than she wanted to admit.

So she sat by Weena's side and waited, helplessly, for whatever would happen next.

____________________________________________________

Weena woke.

She was lying on a soft surface. It was warm. Something redolent of odours that made her nose wrinkle was thrown over her. She lay still for a moment and opened her eyes.

Above her hung fingers of stone that reflected the light in all the colours of the rainbow. When she turned her head to the right, she saw the flat black water of the lake, with little white fish without eyes breaking the surface.

Had it all been a dream, then? She had vague memories of going back up with Negufta, and then feeling suddenly very sick. Negufta had left her... for somewhere... and she'd thought she wasn't coming back, so she tried to get back here, but her energy had given out and she'd slumped to the ground in the tunnel.

Yet here she was.

So had it all been a dream?

"Negufta?" she whispered.

Then Negufta was by her side and leaning over her, Negufta holding her hands and kissing them over and over. "Oh, Kartak," she said, "you're awake at last."

"At last?" Weena struggled to sit up, but Negufta gently pushed her back.

"No, lie down," she said. "You've been through a lot. Here, open your mouth."

Weena felt a bitter yellow powder on her tongue, followed by a little liquid that tasted so awful that she didn't have words to express it. Then liquid fire flooded her all the way down to her toes.

"What was that?" she asked, when she could speak again.

"Medicine. And the liquid was wine, believe it or not."

"What? Where did you get it?"

"From our Healer. For you."

Weena stared at Negufta while the import of the words sank into her. "You came back with medicine for me."

"I told you I would, didn't I?" Negufta held out a grub, its hard orange head already pinched off. "Here, you need nourishment."

Weena chewed at the grub, realising that she no longer felt the old revulsion. Or maybe after that horrible concoction anything would taste good. She looked around, at the cavern, the lake, the glow-globe, and then round to Negufta. She was there. They were all there. For the first time since that first cough had shaken her body, the world seemed to be in the right order again.

"Negufta?" she asked, tentatively.

"Yes?"

"Where did the grub come from? Oh." She realised what had happened. "You brought it down here."

"I did. I brought food. Don't worry about it."

"Was... was I very bad?"

"You were quite ill, yes." Negufta held another decapitated grub to Weena's mouth. "The medicine is working, though. Your fever's right down."

"I don't mean that." Weena ate the grub, refused a third, and this time Negufta allowed her to sit up. She saw, with no great astonishment - it was only another surprise among so many - that she was lying on Negufta's sleeping mat. "Did I try to run away somewhere?"

Negufta held her gently. "You didn't know what you were doing. It was the fever."

"So how did I end up back down here?" Weena stared at Negufta. "You carried me here. You carried me back down, all the way."

Negufta smiled. "Don't worry about it. It was nothing."

"How can you say that? You..." Weena's words broke down and she pulled Negufta to her with all the strength her recovering body could muster. "You brought me back here... because I wanted to be here. Because I was happy here."

"Well." Negufta cleared her throat. "It did mean I could trust you wouldn't disappear again."

Weena laughed weakly, her body against Negufta's, feeling the other woman's warmth. "I didn't mean to disappear."

"I know," Negufta said. Weena's arms were around Negufta's neck, and she felt the other woman's pulse race against the skin of the inside of her wrist.

Is Negufta afraid, Weena thought. I'm afraid, myself, more than a little, and it isn't fear of that horrid medicine and worse wine. I need to tell her. She has a right to know.

"Negufta," Weena said, then, her face buried in the other woman's neck. "I have to tell you something. I've wanted to for a while. But I can't, I can't, hold it back anymore."

"What?" Negufta stared at her with her immense eyes. She sounded alarmed. "What is it, Weena?"

"I love you," Weena said, looking up at her. "I love you. Whatever shall we do?"

____________________________________________________

Negufta's heart seemed to stop in her chest.

She stared open-mouthed at Weena, trying to make herself believe that her ears had actually heard what she thought the other woman had said.

"You what?" she managed finally. Her lips felt numb, as though they didn't belong to her anymore. Her entire body felt as though it didn't belong to her anymore.

"I love you," Weena said, for the third time. She reached out and touched Negufta's face. "You don't need to love me back. But that won't stop me from loving you."

"Weena." Negufta noted, with a detached part of her mind, that Weena's hand was no longer hot with fever. Rukwa is a much better Healer than everyone thinks, she thought. She's a better Healer than she takes herself for. "I..."

"I know I'm just a burden on you," Weena said, her words tumbling over each other. "I know I ruined your life without meaning to. I know I've no right to love you. But I do." Her hand stroked Negufta's face, tracing its outline. "If you want me to go away, out of your life, I will. But I'll still love you."

Negufta felt something twist painfully inside her.

A burden? Weena thought she was a burden? After everything?

After the lake, the drawings, the wire flower, the strange stories about the Outside, the way Weena touched her when her head hurt, the way Weena had trusted her in absolute darkness?

How could she possibly believe that she was a burden?

"I don't... I won't..." Negufta began, desperate to tell Weena that nothing would, nothing could, ever make her turn the other woman away.

Then her restraint, her lifelong iron discipline as a Machinist, her own view of herself as someone who only understood machines, all of that broke down like an ancient lever falling to rust, and her mouth found Weena's.

For an endless moment neither woman moved, their lips pressed gently together. Weena's arms were warm and alive around Negufta's neck.

"I love you," Negufta's lips shaped the sounds against Weena's, and then they were kissing over and over again.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Negufta woke slowly.

Such a wonderful dream, she thought to herself lazily, what a beautiful dream I had, where Weena told me she loved me and we kissed. She wriggled into a warmer spot on the sleeping mat, wanting to sleep again and hopefully drop back into the dream.

It was not to be. A pair of soft lips caressed the angle of her jaw and then the tip of a wet tongue crawled up along her face to poke inside her ear.

Her eyes flew open. Not a dream, this time. Not a dream!

"She's awake!" Weena sat back on her heels, grinning. "You were sleeping like the dead. I was getting quite bored."

Negufta sat up, shaking the hair out of her face. "You... you ought to be resting."

"I've rested enough. I'm quite all right now. See?" Weena grabbed Negufta's hand and put it on her forehead. It was quite cool and her eyes were bright, but not with fever. They danced with mischief. "How about another swimming lesson?"

Negufta groaned and got to her feet. "What have I done?" she protested. "What have I created?"

"Whatever you did," Weena said, already stripping off her clothes, "you've done a great job of it!"

____________________________________________________

The second swimming lesson lasted about as long as the first and went about as well. Weena laughed and giggled throughout at Negufta's panicked thrashings, and, by the end, Negufta was laughing, too.

Then Weena abruptly stopped laughing and pulled Negufta to her, both of them standing in water up to their necks, and kissed her hard on the mouth. "Thank you," she whispered when their lips finally parted.

Negufta blinked. "Whatever for?"

"For loving me. I don't..."

"Shut up. If you tell me again that you don't deserve my love I'll..." Negufta suddenly grew aware of how close they were, that Weena's body was pressed against hers, Weena's nipples brushing hers. A hot, urgent feeling pooled in her stomach and settled between her legs.

"What?" Weena whispered against her mouth. "What will you do?" Her hands slipped down over Negufta's back, caressing her from her shoulders to her bottom. Her knee pressed insistently between Negufta's thighs.

"I..." Negufta's conscious thought process broke down. Her legs parted. Weena's knee found her cleft and rubbed up and down her core. "Weena..." she murmured, feeling her legs grow weak.

"Yes?" Weena's knee continued to rub up and down, nudging Negufta's most sensitive spot.

"I'll... if you don't take me to shore... I'll drown."

Weena smiled and drew her by the hand out of the water and pushed her down on the flat rock. "Lie down," she said.

Negufta looked up at the other woman. Weena straddled her and eased herself down on her, until their hips met. Her hands found Negufta's breasts and caressed them.

"Negufta," she said, her face serious, while her hips thrust slowly back and forth, her slick membranes sliding up and down Negufta's. "I didn't want to do this with Munin. I very much want to do this with you. But only if you want me to."

Negufta threw her head back and moaned. "Don't stop," she whimpered. "Don't you dare stop."

In response, Weena's hip movements became faster, more urgent. Her breasts with their dark nipples bounced on her chest with every thrust. Negufta watched them with fascination and then reached out and touched them.

Weena sighed and thrust her chest out against Negufta's palms. "Oh yes," she sighed. "Do that."

Negufta felt something building in between her legs. It was a sensation as though something was building inside her, something she couldn't control, something like a runaway machine hurtling towards an explosion. And then it came, a crashing wave of ecstasy that made her cry out and buck frantically against Weena, while the glittering ceiling of the cave wavered and darkened before her eyes.

Then Weena cried out and thrust herself so hard against Negufta that it was as though she wanted their bodies to merge together between their thighs, and collapsed on top of the other woman. She was breathing heavily, and Negufta tasted the salt of sweat on her when she kissed her.

"Kartak," she murmured. "I've never felt anything like that before."

Weena lay there for a little while, catching her breath, and then chuckled. "We've just started," she said. Her hand slipped between Negufta's thighs and a finger slid inside the larger woman, slowly, lusciously, rubbing back and forth. Her thumb circled Negufta's clitoris. "We're in for a lot more, believe me."

And they were.

____________________________________________________

"I love kissing you," Negufta said, suiting her actions to her words.

"Just kissing me?" Weena murmured. Her hand slid up and down Negufta's side. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply.

Not only are they not Terrors, she thought, they can even feel pleasure in this the way we do, the way we're supposed to. She sighed. It's just where they live and what they look like, she thought. Otherwise they're exactly the same as us.

"You know it's not just kissing you I love," Negufta said. She rubbed her foot languidly up and down Weena's leg. The eyeless white fishes splashed in the lake beside them. "Idiot."

"Your idiot." Weena took one of Negufta's fingers in her mouth and ran her tongue around the tip. It sent shivers down to every part of Negufta's body.

This is what Rukwa sings about, Negufta thought. This is the kind of physical pleasure I half-imagined was a fantasy, which in any case I never thought could be for me. She sighed. It's such a pity we can't just stay here like this forevermore. I wish we could. If only we could.

"Weena," she said, softly and gently, "you do know that we'll have to leave soon, don't you?"

Weena was silent for a long time. "Why?" she asked eventually.

"Sooner or later we'll be found out. Or you'll fall sick again, maybe even worse this time. We've been incredibly lucky so far already. It can't possibly last."

Weena nodded reluctantly. "So where do we go?"

Negufta took a deep breath. Here's where you commit, she thought, once these next words are out of your mouth there's no going back again.

"Outside," she said. "We can't stay down here. It's too dangerous. We'll have to go up to your world."

____________________________________________________

Weena stared at Negufta. "You want to go up? But..."

"Just hear me out, please." Negufta sat up and put her arms around her knees. "I've been thinking about this for a while now, gone over it again and again. There's literally nothing else we can do."

Point by point, she enumerated their position. Weena couldn't possibly live forever on fungi and grubs. She, herself, couldn't go back to the upper chambers; she'd been away too long, there would be too much suspicion. Besides, the Council would want to know why she'd lied about being on a mission.

"You could just tell me to go away," Weena said. "You could push me out of a Hole and have done with it."

Negufta nodded. "I could, but then I would follow you... because I'm never going to be away from you again. I can't exist without you."

They sat in silence for a while.

"If we go up," Negufta continued, "at least you'll have the food and everything else you need. We won't have to worry about your health again, or worry about someone coming across you."

"Wait," Weena said, "how would we... how would you... survive on top? What would you eat?"

"We'll find out." Negufta smiled drily. "Maybe fruit would be enough, or I can find fungi and small game. I'll wager it's going to be a lot easier for me to live up there than for you to survive down here, anyway."

"Don't be stupid. You couldn't even see in the Daylight... what you call the Bright."

"I know." Negufta ran her fingers through Weena's thick coppery hair. "You'd have to be my eyes, just as I was for you here."

"You'd be crippled." Weena shook her head. "Maybe we could only go out in the Dark... no, we couldn't, of course. Your People would be out and about."

We'll probably only be able to move around when it's Dark enough for me to see and too Bright for our hunting and work parties, Negufta realised. She told Weena this. "And we're going to have to move as far away as possible from here. Somewhere we can be alone with each other. Safe and alone."

"Do such places even exist?" Weena asked.

"I don't know. But we'll keep looking until we find one." Negufta climbed to her feet and held her hand out for Weena.

"Come on," she said, "let's start planning for the journey, and what we'll need to take."

____________________________________________________

They stood at the mouth of the equipment storage room. Negufta peered warily round the door frame.

She'd wanted Weena to stay at a safe distance, a passage or two away, but the other woman had refused outright. "I'm not letting you out of my sight again," she said. "You take too many risks as it is on my account."

Truth be told, Negufta wanted Weena with her as well. It wasn't just her companionship; she needed the extra pair of hands. There were a lot of things they needed to steal.

Weena and Negufta each wore one of the fungus farmers' robes over their clothes. Weena had tied the third into a roll along with the sleeping mat with her own belt and slung it over her shoulder.

"We aren't coming back here, are we?" she'd asked, in a quiet, desolate voice, as they'd packed.

"No," Negufta had said, not looking up from her packing. "We'll find what we need as we go, and just keep going."

"All right," Weena sighed. She'd looked around at the cavern and lake for the last time, over the still black water and the glittering stone. This cave, this lake, she thought, have been here long before us, and will be here long after we're all dead and gone. At least, whatever happens, this beauty will endure. The thought had been almost cheering.

Negufta had put the glow-globe inside her bag next to the packet of fever powder and the flask of wine, the flap just open a crack. Weena had been delighted when she'd noticed the wire flower already resting there. "You've brought that along!"

"Of course. Why wouldn't I? You made it for me. I love it just as I love you."

Then they'd kissed and begun the long, careful trek to the upper galleries for the supplies they'd need to steal.

____________________________________________________

They'd struck lucky at the fungus farms.

Not only was it deserted, but someone had been getting ready to harvest fungi, and stacked the leather sacks for the crop conveniently against one wall. Negufta had handed one to Weena. "Gather as many of the fungi as you can. You know which ones." She'd taken another sack and begun hacking strips out of it with one of the long harvesting knives.

"What are you doing?" Weena had watched, fascinated.

Negufta pointed at the smaller woman's feet. "Those sandals of yours are already falling apart. They'll never survive all the climbing we'll need to do. I'm making foot wraps for you. I wish we could get you boots, but since we can't, these will have to do."

They'd each filled a sack with the grey fungi, and Negufta had discovered a pouch of rock salt. She'd hung it at her belt without hesitation.

"Eat all the grubs you can find," she'd said, as they made their way through the farm. "We'll need all the energy we can get."

"Why do we need to take so much?"

Negufta had glanced at her. "We can't go right up and climb out through the nearest shaft. Someone would see you at once. We're going to have to find a disused shaft, and those are a long way off."

Now they stood at the doorway of the equipment store. "What do we need here?" Weena whispered.

"Rope. Something to carry water in. We'll need all the water we can carry. And..." Negufta thought briefly. "A couple of beakers. I wish I hadn't left mine behind in my room, but there should be one or two here."

The equipment store was cavernous and filled with things that someone had flung inside without any attempt at order or organisation. It was also very dark further in, to the point where Negufta, after glancing nervously around, had to take out the glow-globe to see by.

They'd finally located a coil of good rope, a couple of water bladders, a single slightly dented copper beaker, and then something Negufta hadn't even dared hope for; a striking flint to start fires. Negufta wrapped the rope around her torso, hung the water bladders from it for filling at the first opportunity, stowed the rest in her bag, and they turned to leave.

Only to stop dead in their tracks. Two shadows loomed in the doorway, one taller than the other.

"Oh, Machinist," Brasza said, "whatever is going on here?"

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

For an endless moment the world stood still.

Negufta's breath froze in her nostrils. Her heart seemed to stop.

Weena uttered a soft squeak and tried desperately to hide herself behind Negufta.

Brasza didn't look angry. He seemed more puzzled than anything else. "I'm sure there is an explanation," he said. "I've never known you to do anything without reason. So there must be a reason for..." He waved a hand around. "... this."

Negufta's mind surged with panic. She fought desperately for control. "Brasza..." she began. "I..."

Brasza waited.

Why did it have to be Brasza, Negufta thought despairingly. If it were anyone else, I'd have tried to fight our way out. But I can't attack Brasza. It's unthinkable. He's only ever been good to me.

"... this is Weena," Negufta finally managed to regain control of her tongue. "She, Brasza, I have to tell you, we've been wrong about everything, there's..."

"You aren't making much sense, Machinist."

"I think I understand." The smaller figure stepped forward to stand beside Brasza. With a further deepening of her despair, Negufta recognised Rukwa.

Of course it would be Rukwa, she thought, the only two of the People I actually like, the only two I have any respect for, naturally they're the ones to discover my betrayal. Why not? Everything's falling to pieces right now, right at the end. It isn't fair.

It's like saying a blown gasket isn't fair, she thought. The world doesn't care about fair or otherwise. Things just are.

"Rukwa?" Brasza glanced at the Healer. "What do you understand?"

"It wasn't for yourself that you wanted the medicine, was it, Machinist? It was for that. The Beast."

"Uh..."

Rukwa grinned suddenly. The glint of glow-globe light shining on her teeth sent Weena jumping a long step backwards. "I knew it wasn't for you. You're not much of a liar. So it worked?"

"Yes. Yes, it did." Negufta gulped. "I'd found Weena Outside, in the fire. I brought her down inside, or she'd have burnt to death. Please understand, we've been wrong about everything. About the Beasts. They aren't animals. They're People just like us."

"People like us?" Brasza's always flat tones still managed to express surprise. "How do you mean?"

Negufta took a deep breath. "They think. They feel. They speak. And they..."

"They speak?" Brasza interrupted sharply. "Are you telling me you can talk to it?"

"Yes. I can talk to her." Negufta fumbled behind her back, found Weena's hand, and drew her forward. "I learnt her language. She learnt ours, sort of, enough for us to put together a pidgin. We can speak to each other very well now."

Weena looked from Negufta to the two strange Terrors. They were speaking too fast for her to understand more than perhaps one word in ten. She could, however, see that the two hadn't yet made any attempt to seize them or call for help. And Negufta had made no attempt to push past them, either.

"I am Weena," she said, slowly and clearly, in Negufta's language. "I am a friend."

There was a long silence. Then Brasza glanced at Rukwa. "What do you think?"

Rukwa tilted her head and looked Weena over from head to foot, curiously but not insultingly. "I don't see why it can't be," she said. "I've studied their anatomy. They're similar enough to us, once you get under the skin. Really, the deeper you go, the less difference there is."

"Negufta?" Weena asked, not understanding, but frightened by the way the smaller, female, Terror was looking at her, as though examining her like an... object.

"It's all right, Weena." Negufta cursed herself as the words left her mouth. Of course it wasn't all right. How could it be all right? But she needed Weena calm. "This is our sector leader, Brasza. That is Rukwa, our Healer. She's the one who gave me the medicine for you and made that wine."

Brasza crossed his arms across his chest. "Well, I can see that you can talk to her." He frowned reflectively. "All right. Let's sit down here and you can tell us all about it."

____________________________________________________

"And we fell in love," Negufta finished.

Rukwa broke the long silence that followed. "Congratulations, Machinist," she said.

"What?" That was the last thing Negufta had expected.

"You deserve love. Everyone does, if they want it, that is. So the Beasts can love too, is that what you were going to say when..." she glanced at Brasza. "When he interrupted?"

I wish you wouldn't call them Beasts, Negufta thought, but kept it to herself. They were in enough trouble already. "Yes, they can. Weena loves me. I love her."

"Yes. I love her," Weena supplied.

Brasza had been frowning down at the floor and biting his lip through the recital. Now he looked up. "You realise that all this will have to go to the Council," he said. "Not just about the Beasts, but what you told me about the Giant."

"Yes. The Council has to learn about everything. But from you. Not us." Negufta threw her mind back to the one time she'd ever been at a Council meeting. She wasn't attending it, of course; only Council members could do that. But she'd been sent to repair a ventilation fan in the Council chamber and had been at work during their meeting.

They'd sat on their stone benches, arrayed in a semicircle round the central dais, and argued. Each of them had been completely convinced that he or she was in the right, and all through their meeting Negufta didn't recall even one of them admitting that anyone else had a point.

They'd ignored her, of course. She was an insignificant Machinist, little more than a machine herself, part of the background, and they were the Council.

They'd ignored her then, but they wouldn't now. And Weena they'd ignore least of all.

"Why not from you?"

"Brasza," Negufta said, "you're a sector leader. I'm a... runaway. I abandoned my duties. Weena is a... a Beast. Please try to understand."

For a very long time nothing happened. Then Brasza nodded reluctantly.

"I'll tell them," he said, "but you do know, don't you, what's going to happen when I do?"

"They're going to come looking for me?"

"Oh," Brasza smiled slightly, "they're already doing that. Why do you think we're down here, Rukwa and I?"

____________________________________________________

Negufta stared at them. "Why are you here?"

"When the Council learnt that you were on a secret mission from it..." Brasza shrugged. "A secret mission the Council absolutely had no memory of sanctioning... well, you can imagine how it reacted."

"How..." Negufta licked lips long since gone dry. "How did they learn that?"

Rukwa coloured. "Actually, it was my fault."

"We were sitting next to each other at dining," Brasza said. "Someone asked where you were. I said I had no idea, and I hoped you were all right. Then she..." He jerked his head at Rukwa. "She said, oh, don't you know, she's on a secret mission from the Council down in the depths."

Negufta glared at Rukwa, who raised a hand apologetically. "I didn't say it very loudly," she said, "and nobody took any notice. Except..."

"Except Yntho." Brasza snorted. Brasza's opinion of Yntho was no secret. "As luck would have it, he was sitting right behind us."

Negufta winced. "Oh, Kartak."

"Yntho demanded I tell him what this secret mission was," Rukwa said. "I thought since he was on the Council he knew about it anyway, so I told him how you'd come to me for fever medicine. Then he stormed out and the next thing we knew, we'd all been ordered to search the passages for you. Everyone who wasn't on some other duty already."

"Almost everyone's searching for you in other sectors," Brasza said. "I thought, though, that you'd stick to this sector, because you know the passages here. And I told Rukwa to come with me, because she knows you as well as I do." He sighed. "Of course, they'll all be coming back to this sector once they tire of traipsing down empty unfamiliar passages. Which, most likely, will be soon."

There was a brief silence. "Now what?" Negufta asked eventually. "What happens to Weena and me?"

Brasza looked surprised at the question. "You were planning to leave, weren't you? So leave. Why should we stop you?"

"You'll just let us go?" Negufta said incredulously.

"Of course we will." Rukwa got to her knees and threw her arms around Negufta. "I won't lie. I'm going to miss your grumpy face. But it won't be so grumpy, will it, when you're safe with..." she glanced at Weena. "With your... lady."

Weena sat, looking from one to the other, wondering what was happening. Then she squeaked with astonishment when the round-faced woman, Rukwa, suddenly turned to her and pulled her into a fierce hug. She said something, in which Weena recognised Negufta's name amid a string of incomprehensible syllables.

"She's ordering you to take good care of me," Negufta translated.

"She's..." Weena goggled. "Are they letting us go?"

"Yes. I'll explain later." Negufta turned back to Brasza and Rukwa. "So..."

"So." Brasza got to his feet. "We'll leave now," he said. "When I tell the Council that I have no idea which way you went, I want to be speaking the literal truth." He looked at Weena for a long moment, glanced at Negufta, muttered something under his breath that sounded like "Good luck," and walked away.

Rukwa stood up and smiled at Negufta and Weena. "I hope the Council can be made to see reason," she said. "If it can, will you be back again, some time? To tell them yourself?"

"We will," Negufta said. "You can be sure of that."

"Don't you dare disappoint me." Rukwa smiled again, gave them both a little wave, and followed Brasza into the darkness.

____________________________________________________

Negufta discovered that tears were crawling down her face only when Weena reached up to wipe them away.

They had stopped at a condenser on the way and filled up the water bladders. Now they were walking down a gallery that spiralled, apparently endlessly, into the darkness. Negufta vaguely remembered once discovering an old map that showed branches from the bottom of the spiral, raying out in various directions, each of them ending in the symbol for shaft.

I could kick myself for not keeping that map, she thought, but how could I have known that I'd need it?

How could I have known that I would one day have to flee everything I've ever known?

Weena's soft fingers were on her cheeks, then, tenderly wiping them. "I love you," she said simply. She could sense Negufta's desolation and reckoned the cause easily enough. "Remember, whatever happens - I love you. I'll always love you."

"I know." Negufta nodded and tried to smile. "It's just... hard. Meeting Brasza and Rukwa just drove it home to me how hard."

"They'll go to your Council, you said? To try and set things straight?"

"They will. Whether the Council will listen is another thing entirely." They were so far down now that without the glow-globe even Negufta's eyes would have been lost in utter darkness. "Each of the Council members is absolutely certain that he or she knows everything already."

"Like Florun," Weena said. She wondered what Florun was doing, whether anyone had missed her. To her faint surprise she discovered that she didn't care. She just hoped Munin had found someone else so he wouldn't think of her again. Plyasun, maybe. Plyasun would be happy with Munin. Whether Munin would be happy with her was another matter altogether.

She discovered, to her surprise, that she could think of the People quite dispassionately now, as though they were apart from her entirely.

How could this happen, she thought, how could I just let go of everything I've ever known all my life. Then she looked over at the pale woman with the huge eyes walking beside her, and thought, she's worth it. Everything's worth it for her.

They stopped twice, once for a short rest. Negufta made Weena take more of the medicine, washed down with the wine. "We don't need you getting ill again," she said. The second time she wrapped the leather strips she'd cut from the harvesting bag around Weena's feet.

It was getting very cold. Weena shivered, glad for once for the odoriferous farmers' robes. She hugged Negufta tight.

The two women held each other, sharing their body warmth, and then, though with increasing weariness, went on again.

____________________________________________________

By the time they reached the bottom of the spiral, Weena was visibly flagging, and Negufta found it harder and harder to conceal her own exhaustion.

The spiral ended in a round, flat chamber. The floor, at least, was clean and dry. The walls, between the tunnel openings, were crammed with detritus: corroded metal objects, decaying old sacks of unidentifiable material, and the like.

"We'd best rest here for a while." Negufta unrolled the sleeping mat. Weena collapsed on it without a word.

They lay down next to each other, holding hands, and, eventually, they slept.

____________________________________________________

Negufta woke from confused dreams of Giants and Council members and Gubreypoka calling to her to save him, to dig him out from wherever he lay under tons of rock.

She lay there for a long moment, collecting her thoughts. Beside her, Weena snored softly. Their hands still touched.

Negufta watched her sleeping for a long time, admiring the rise and fall of her breasts in the light of the glow-globe, the tiny frown on her face, the way her lips moved as she whispered something in the depths of a dream.

At least I found her, she thought. Her love makes it all worthwhile.

She knew that they had no time to lose, that they ought to get going before some search party stumbled across them. But Weena needed as much rest as she could get.

So do you, she told herself. But, once awake, she couldn't get to sleep again.

Abruptly restless, she quietly withdrew her fingers from Weena's and sat up. Those old machines and things by the wall, she thought, I might as well have a look at them to pass the time. After all, that's something I probably will never be able to do again.

She wandered over to the nearest wall. A sack she brushed against fell to powder at her touch. Inside was a crumbling amorphous mass she made no attempt to identify. It wasn't a machine, so she couldn't have said what it was, anyway.

She prodded around the metal objects. Most of them were obviously things that someone had dug out of the ground, dumped here, and apparently forgotten all about; corroded and barely identifiable if at all.

She stopped at one item. It comprised a couple of ancient bulbous metal cylinders, dented and broken and hollow inside, and a tube apparatus was connected to them by what remained of a pair of flexible metal pipes, all liberally coated with crusted mud. It reminded her vaguely of the equipment the Metallurgists used to melt and join pieces of metal together. An ancient, corroded box leaned against the jumble of broken metal. Curiously, she picked it up and tried to prise it open. For a moment it resisted, and then it all but fell apart in her hands.

Inside was a strange object: a pair of dark lenses set in a hard frame, whose ends were connected by a strap of some flexible material. She looked it over. It was obviously meant to fit over a person's eyes, with the strap going around their head. She tried it on.

And then she cried out with shock as the world went dark.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Weena jerked awake at the sound of Negufta crying out.

Negufta was standing next to some broken down metal objects on the far side of the chamber. There was something on her face, dark and bulbous, which sat over her eyes, covering them entirely. She held a hand out at arm's length in front of her and seemed to be studying it intently.

"Negufta?" Weena called. "What's that? What's wrong?"

Negufta turned her face in Weena's direction. "Weena," she said, slowly and deliberately, "I'm going to need you to get the glow-globe and then walk towards me. Stop when I tell you to."

Mystified, Weena picked the glow-globe up by its cord and began walking towards the other woman.

She didn't know what was going on, but she trusted Negufta to know what she was doing.

____________________________________________________

"Stop!" Negufta commanded.

Through the black lenses she could see Weena now, a dark outline with a shimmering outlined disc hanging from one hand. "Come forward," she said. "Slowly."

"Stop," Negufta repeated, as soon as Weena was close enough to her to clearly make out her features. The glow-globe was no longer a shimmering disk, but a dully glowing orb. Weena's clothing was a heavy grey blur.

Negufta pulled the lenses up to the top of her head and mentally measured the distance between Weena and herself. Ten paces, give or take.

"Excellent," she said, aloud.

"Would you tell me what we are doing?" Weena asked plaintively. "What's that?"

"The answer to our problems." Negufta laughed and ran to Weena, grabbed her, lifted her into the air, and swung her around in a giddy circle. "It's the answer!"

"Is it the knock you took on the head?" Weena asked, when Negufta had set her down. "Are you feeling ill?"

"What? No." Negufta's face was transformed with excitement. She pointed. "I found this along with that over there, the machine. I think that it's an ancient piece of equipment for joining metal pieces together."

"And?"

"The Metallurgists join metal like that. It needs hot fire, bright fire, impossible for a person's eyes. The Metallurgists use baffles and learn to work by touch. But that thing, it's not from the Metallurgists, it's from long ago. A very long time ago."

Weena frowned. "A long time ago? Then how did it come down here?"

Negufta shrugged. "I had an idea, which I thought was stupid. I suppose it has its merits after all." Briefly, she explained her hypothesis about things being buried in the ground over aeons of time. "In any case, whoever used that apparatus must have used this..." She tapped the lenses sitting on her head. "... to protect their eyes."

Weena was still a little befuddled. "How is it the answer to everything?"

"Don't you get it? With this on my eyes, the Bright Outside isn't a problem anymore. I can see well enough through these without blinding myself." She laughed again and kissed Weena hard. "I'll be able to see!"

____________________________________________________

"They must have been much larger than us." Negufta turned over the lenses in her hands. "This thing is big enough to cover half my face. In fact if it weren't for that strap I wouldn't be able to fit it over my eyes at all."

"You mean... the Big One?"

"Or ones like him, yes." Negufta looked around the chamber. "I wish we had time to look the rest of this over. But we need to get going before someone comes."

It was a little later. Their giddy excitement had settled down a bit. They'd eaten and drunk. It was time to leave.

They finished packing. Negufta tied the lenses on their strap around the top of her head. "Which way should we go?" Weena asked, looking around all the various tunnels.

"Any one will do. As far as I recall they all end in shafts to the Outside. I just hope those shafts haven't all collapsed or anything. They probably haven't been used in hundreds of seasons. We just have to find one that works."

They shouldered their loads and started down the nearest one.

____________________________________________________

They had to stop for rest twice before they finally came to a shaft.

It did not look like one of the upper shafts. The tunnel floor beneath it was half buried in collapsed earth and stone.

Negufta held the glow-globe at full stretch up it. "Blast!"

"What is it?" Weena asked.

"There aren't any rungs left to climb with. I should have thought of this."

"Should we go back and try for another shaft?"

"No, it's too risky. Someone might be there by now. Besides, it's not likely that the others will be in any better shape than this." She looked speculatively at the shaft wall. It was irregular, with ledges and lumps of projecting rock. She reached up and, holding on to the nearest ledge, tried to pull it down with all her strength. It held. "All right."

Weena looked at her. "Yes?"

Negufta unwound the rope from round her waist and tossed the end to Weena. "Loop it a few times around your waist, and then tie the end around the sleeping mat and the food bags. Tightly, now."

"What are we going to do?"

"You'll see." Negufta looped the cord of the glow-globe around her wrist so that it hung snug against her skin. Her face was filled with an expression of grim determination.

Mystified, Weena obeyed, and then watched in amazement as Negufta vanished up into the shaft. From somewhere up above her voice came down, a hollow echo.

"Follow me, and put your hands and feet exactly where I do. Come on!"

____________________________________________________

It was an exhausting, apparently endless climb.

"Do your People climb up this far each time?" Weena gasped. She rested her forearms and chin on a narrow ledge for a moment. The sleeping mat and bags dangled below her, the rope cutting into her waist through the two fungus farmer robes she wore, one over the other.

"Of course not." Negufta didn't bother looking down. "We're far below the levels where everyone lives, remember? This must be ten times deeper than the upper shafts." She tested another handhold, decided it was sturdy enough to bear their weights, and began climbing upwards.

With a resigned sigh, Weena followed her up again.

____________________________________________________

"We're getting near the top," Negufta announced suddenly.

"What?" Weena had long since decided that they'd keep climbing for ever. Maybe they'd climb so far that they'd reach the Big One's home in the clouds. "Can you see the top?"

"Not yet, but..." There was a sharp rustling, a crack, and something fluttered down past Weena's face. She saw dry twigs and leaves. "Keep your eyes half closed. There will be a lot of this coming down."

As though in emphasis, a falling twig bounced off Weena's nose. She yelped involuntarily and screwed her eyes shut, climbing by touch the rest of the way.

____________________________________________________

Negufta pushed the last bush aside and looked into the Outside.

It wasn't Dark, but it was dim enough for her to see clearly. She couldn't immediately tell whether it was the coming or going of the Bright. They were on a hillside. All around, the ground was choked with bushes and stunted wild trees.

She climbed out the rest of the way, turned, and helped Weena out. The smaller woman fell to the ground, gasping.

"I can't believe that's over," she said.

"I'm very proud of you," Negufta told her. "You stuck at it without a word of complaint, without flagging at all." She pulled up the bundle at the end of the rope. "We'll rest here," she said.

"Here?" Weena looked around at the scrub-choked hillside. "What about going down to somewhere we can lie down properly?"

"Not until I know we're safe," Negufta replied. "At least nobody's going to find us here."

____________________________________________________

Weena woke.

For a moment she didn't understand what was strange. Then she realised that she could see again. Properly, without the light of the glow-globe. Overhead was the blue sky, not rock. The Sun was climbing into it.

She'd never known how much she'd welcome the sight of the Sun.

For what seemed like forever she lay on her back, enjoying the sky, the feel of air that hadn't been drawn through thudding pumps, the touch of grass on her cheek. It was as though she'd woken next to the Big One, and everything since they'd left the green building, the fire, and what happened after the fire, had never been, that it was only a dream.

But of course it was not a dream.

She sat up and looked around. She was alone.

"Negufta?" she called.

"Here."

Weena turned. Negufta was near the top of the slope, clinging to the top of a tree. Her face was obscured by the black lenses.

"These are really rather wonderful," she said. "I can see adequately."

"Just adequately?"

"Adequately is better than not at all. Adequately will do." Negufta jumped down from the tree. "I've no idea where we are, of course, but I couldn't make out anyone around, my People or yours." She pulled Weena into her arms and kissed her fiercely. "Aren't you going to welcome me into your world?"

Weena laughed and then abruptly stopped laughing. She looked up at Negufta.

"My world is you," she said.

____________________________________________________

They set out when the Sun was almost overhead.

Weena had no more idea where they were than Negufta did, so they picked a direction at random. Once they'd climbed down the slope the going was easier, with thick grass underfoot. But although Negufta could see through the black lenses, her pale skin suffered intensely from the direct sunlight, so they stuck to the shade of trees wherever they could find them. It made for slow going.

"What do you think your friends are doing now?" Weena asked, hesitantly. Do you miss them, she wanted to ask, do you wish you were with them? Are you regretting this?

"Brasza and Rukwa? I don't know, but they're on our side. They want us to succeed. You can be certain of that." Negufta ran her fingers up the trunk of a tree. "It's so rough," she said, wonderingly. "It's so alive. It's like touching life."

Weena grinned. "You're like a child," she said.

At mid-afternoon they came to a grove of Food Flowers. Weena showed Negufta how to eat one. Negufta took a cautious bite. "Well..."

"You don't think much of it?"

"You said your Big One loved them?" Negufta chewed the mouthful meditatively.

"Yes, he put them away as though he were starving."

"Rather he than I." Negufta handed Weena the remainder of the Food Flower. Weena disposed of it in two bites.

"I expect you'll find fruit tastier than this," she said.

"You think so? Why?"

Weena laughed. "The Big One didn't like the fruit, so you certainly will!"

____________________________________________________

"Negufta," Weena said suddenly. "Wait."

The Daylight was nearing its end. Heavy shadows were lengthening across their path.

Negufta looked back over her shoulder. "What is it?"

"Just wait a moment." Weena was looking around. She could sense something wrong, but wasn't sure what it was.

"You know we don't have time to waste." Negufta pointed up at the sky. "We absolutely have to find shelter before the Dark. When my People start coming Outside we'll both be in danger."

"That's just it." Weena finally realised what had been bothering her. "This is... familiar. I've been here before."

"You have?"

"Yes, with the Big One while he was wandering around." Weena pointed at a tree. "He tried to climb that tree over there and a branch broke under his weight."

Negufta looked up at the tree. She spotted the place where a jagged stub of branch stuck out midway up the trunk. It was a thick stub. The Giant must be really heavy, she thought. No wonder he was so strong.

"So, we aren't far from the White Statue you talked about?"

"We can't go there," Weena said at once. "Your People come out of that in the Dark."

"I know. I worked in the room inside its base. But your People have buildings in the locality, and we can find some place to hide safely during the Dark." I'm beginning to think like Weena's People, Negufta realised. Every Dark is a time of danger to be endured. "Do you think you can find your way to it?"

Weena sighed.

"I can try," she said.

____________________________________________________

"I know where we are now." Weena pointed to the broken seat of yellow metal. "I've been here many times before."

Negufta nodded, looking around. The Daylight had waned enough that she had, with a sigh of relief, taken the black lenses off her face and slung them around her neck. Far away she could just make out the bulk of the green porcelain building. In the middle distance was a charred blackish mess.

"That must be where the fire was," she said, pointing. "That's where I met you."

"Where you saved me," Weena corrected. "Where you... made me whole."

The two women stared at each other for a long moment. Behind them the Sun was a sliver of red sinking into the earth.

"Let's go down to your buildings now," Negufta said.

____________________________________________________

"They'll all have gone in by now," Weena said, as they came in sight of the nearest buildings. Beyond them, through a line of trees, the wings of the White Statue glimmered in the last of the Daylight. "That's lucky, because they'd panic if they saw you. Or worse."

Negufta nodded. "We really are exiles, aren't we? From both our Peoples, and the stupid thing is, we only want them to understand and accept each other. We..." She stopped suddenly, staring.

"Negufta?" Weena asked. "What is it?"

"I..." Negufta muttered. "It can't be." She broke into a run, headed straight for the White Statue.

"Negufta?" Weena repeated. "What are you doing? You shouldn't go that way." But Negufta didn't even look round at her shout.

So Weena ran towards the Statue too.

____________________________________________________

Negufta skidded to a stop. At first she'd thought she was hallucinating from tiredness and from being in this unfamiliar world.

Then she'd thought that the light and shadow were playing tricks on her eyes.

But now she was standing before it, and there was no doubt.

On the grass before her, tilted very slightly askew, was the Giant's machine.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Negufta stared.

It wasn't a hallucination, not a trick of light and shadow. It wasn't even another machine. It was the Giant's machine, the one she'd worked on for so long, all right. She could even make out the deep scratch on one of the brass rods that she'd tried, and failed, to buff away.

She stepped forwards, slowly, to touch it. It was solid beneath her fingers.

"Negufta?" Weena arrived, panting. "What is that? What are you doing?"

Negufta turned slowly. She felt as though she was in a trance. "It's the Giant's - the Big One's - mach..."

There was a roar like the sound of thunder. It cut her words short as though with a knife.

From behind the White Statue the Giant appeared.

He stomped towards them with legs that were columns of bone and muscle. His head was a block of crudely fashioned flesh, which seemed to reach halfway to the sky, set with eyes which reminded her of swivelling bloodshot stones. His hands were immense paws, his chest a barrel, his neck a corded pillar. Negufta watched, fascinated, as his mouth opened, a red maw lined with giant yellow teeth. Her nostrils flared at his smell, a blend of odours she'd never encountered anywhere else. Something like bitter old smoke, merged with oil, metal, sweat, and desperation.

"Weena!" he bellowed. The noise slammed against Negufta's eardrums, making her flinch involuntarily. "You alive!"

Weena made a noise that Negufta hardly registered, something like a terrified whimper.

"Weena!" the Giant repeated. "You come!" He began reaching for the smaller woman, and then he seemed to notice Negufta for the first time.

"Filthy animal," he grunted. His right hand darted under his clothing, and emerged with something that glinted of metal.

Time seemed to drop into slow motion. Negufta watched, fascinated, as the Giant raised his hand to point the metal thing in her direction. It was sleek and dark, and her mind grappled with the problem of what it might be.

Then abruptly she remembered a flooded tunnel, Doklam, and a mass of corroded metal; she remembered explaining what that piece of metal must have once been.

"Negufta!" Weena shrieked.

The scream broke her trance. She flung herself down and to the side.

There was a terrific noise. Something flashed by her face, close enough to feel the hard slap of displaced air from its passage.

"Negufta!" Weena screamed again.

Negufta hit the grass, rolled, and scrambled to her feet. The Giant had seized Weena by the arm and was pulling her towards his machine. The metal weapon was pointing at her while the Giant prepared to try again.

Negufta threw herself towards the machine, desperate to get there first. She scarcely registered another explosion and something else streaking past her to smash into a tree.

Negufta flung herself into the machine. He won't dare use his weapon if it could damage the machine, she thought desperately. Maybe we can reason with him, then.

Or, she thought, as the Giant dropped Weena's arm and galloped towards her, he can just tear me away from it and rip me apart. He's big and strong enough.

Then Weena reached down, picked something up from the ground, swung her arm around, and threw it with all her might.

There was a heavy thud, and the Giant dropped to earth on his face. A stone fell on the grass near his head and rolled away.

Weena stood gasping, looking from the Giant to Negufta, her eyes as wide as they could get.

"Here, quickly," Negufta said. She felt absurdly calm, as if all this was happening to someone else, or in a story like the ones Rukwa loved tormenting everyone with. The Giant was already stirring. She climbed on to the machine and beckoned. "Come here!"

Weena shook her head, seemed to wake up, and ran.

____________________________________________________

The Giant was on his feet, roaring.

He raised his weapon, and then dropped his arm, baffled. For one endless moment his bloodshot eyes met Negufta's across the stretch of grass between them. Then Weena scrambled up the frame of the machine and the Giant roared again and surged towards them.

Of course the levers are missing, Negufta thought. She didn't even have to look at the instruments to know that they'd be missing. Of course they're missing, the Giant has them, I saw that just a few steps from here in the Statue Room, of course he has them and I...

Even as she thought this she was reacting automatically, pulling Weena by the arm on to the seat beside her. As she'd told Yntho long ago, the seat was big enough for two People; it was true, she noted absently, even if they were different kinds of People.

The Giant was only a few steps away now, his gigantic face a distorted mass of fury. Blood streamed down his forehead from where Weena's stone had struck it.

In a moment he'll have us, Negufta thought. If only I had the levers I would...

... What am I thinking? I have the levers.

Her hands streaked to her tool belt, found the pouch. The levers Glaza had made for her all but leapt into her hands. She slammed them down into the sockets on either side of the graduated disc.

And then she pulled them back with all her might as far as they would go.

____________________________________________________

The world dissolved.

Negufta had a brief vision of one of the Giant's huge hands coming down, grabbing at her, and then it passed by as insubstantial as air. Then everything vanished.

The White Statue, the grass, the Giant, even the very ground, had gone. The only thing real was the machine, her hands on the levers, and Weena beside her, Weena's arms around her neck and shoulders, Weena shivering with fear.

"Negufta," Weena screamed. Her words seemed whipped away by a wind, but there was no wind. "What's happening?"

"I don't know," Negufta shouted back. Her own voice was barely a half-heard whisper in her ears. The world was a grey blur. "Hold on! Hold on tight!"

She knocked out the Giant for me, Negufta thought absently, as she felt Weena's arms squeeze her. She chose me over the Giant. She chose me even though she's terrified, though she doesn't know where we are and where we're going.

Well, neither do I.

The machine swayed. Half-seen things appeared and disappeared in the grey blur before there was a chance to recognise what they might be. I have never before used a machine without knowing what it did, Negufta thought. A strange paralysis of will seemed to be stealing over her. Whatever am I doing, she thought.

Weena screamed something in her ear, the words whipped away before Negufta could make out anything.

Weena, Negufta thought, I have to stop this, if only for Weena.

She shoved the levers forwards in their sockets as far as they would go.

____________________________________________________

Weena clung to Negufta's neck, terrified almost out of her mind.

The only thing that kept her from total, mindless terror was Negufta.

Negufta had saved her before. Negufta had always known what to do.

Negufta would save them both again.

She cast her mind back briefly to the moment of sheer existential panic she'd felt when the Big One had raised his thunder-thing at Negufta. She'd reacted totally by instinct. Protecting Negufta had been the only thing that had mattered.

Now this.

"I'll be with you wherever you want to go," she screamed into the other woman's ear. The terrifying grey void sucked away her words before even she could hear them.

Negufta glanced at her out of the corner of one of those pinkish-grey, wonderful, gigantic eyes, the most beautiful eyes Weena had ever known. Her hands moved the metal sticks they'd held in a death grip all along.

Then everything seemed to explode, and the world went black.

____________________________________________________

Negufta rubbed her head and cautiously opened her eyes.

She was lying on a shallow slope. It was just about Dark enough for her to see without dragging the black lenses over her face. She ached all over.

Carefully, she sat up. "Weena?"

Lying beside her, Weena moaned. "Aah! What happened?"

"I don't know. I pulled the levers and... we arrived?" Negufta glanced down at herself. Everything seemed unbroken, at least. "How are you feeling?"

"How do you think I feel?" Weena moved her limbs experimentally and sat up. "I'll probably live."

"Where's..." Negufta looked around. A few paces away, the machine lay on its side. She got to her feet and stumbled to it.

It was immediately obvious that it wouldn't be going anywhere again. The rods were twisted and bent from the impact, crystal cracked, levers askew. It had taken its last journey, and brought them here... wherever this was.

"Weena?" she called over her shoulder. "Can you recognise anything? Are we anywhere you know?"

Weena got up and looked around. They were surrounded by trees of a kind she'd never seen before. The ground at her feet was carpeted with something that wasn't grass, either. "I don't..." she began.

"Shhh!" Negufta grabbed her hand and pulled her to her side. She pointed.

Like the shadow of a moving mountain, something so gigantic that it defied description stalked past the two women.

Silently, hand in hand, they watched it disappear into the light of the gathering dawn.

THE END