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Page 45.

“Are you hungry?”

“Ah...” He looked down at his stomach. “Back to reality. Yes. And thirsty. I hate to keep climbing down to that watering hole every time we need a drink.” He sighed. “Starting over again is a drag.” He brightened. “We can probably scavenge some simple things like knives and cups if we can figure out how to get into the dead city.”

She nodded. “Yes, without suffocating or imploding or whatever.”

He grinned. “You can do it. Just hold your breath.”

“Your mama, pal. You’re the one that’s full of hot air, so you go.” She made a wry face. “We don’t even have enough sunlight or heat to fire a clay pot or two. We’ll have to use a hollowed tree trunk to store water.”

“If we can find a sharp rock suitable for scraping and cutting.”

“This isn’t easy,” she said with a long sigh, casting her eyes down.

“Cheer up. I’ll go down and hunt a little lunch. That will make us feel better.” He started down the wall.

“I’m coming with you,” she said with a near-wail of anxiety. “If we go, we go together.” She looked nervously over her shoulder. “I don’t even want to think about being alone if those spiders come climbing down.”

He dreaded the big crab-like creatures too, but he brushed his fear aside. “I think they just fix things. As long as we don’t look broken, they won’t come to lick us with their goo.”

“Ee-yoo-www,” she said, wrinkling her face.

They climbed down the face of the wall in the light gravity. Alex felt the momentum of the massive wall and the jolt as he jumped to the spinning inner surface of the cylinder. They followed the dry higher ground, avoiding the mucky dark marshy lower areas. They held their spears ready and moved carefully through the gloom with its drifting wisps of fog. The silence was interrupted by a low susurrus from insects humming over the water, and the scurrying of tiny feet—mammal and otherwise—in the trees around them. The light above was almost sunny as it shone in the laundry-twirl of clouds at the gravity-free center of the cylinder but down here it was still that somber coppery twilight. The leaves, however, were turned fully upward and glistened with the light that drove the photosynthesis in their veins. Lower to the ground, the leaves were huge, to catch as much light as possible, while higher up they were small as the plants optimized their exposure to the wan light.

Alex and Maryan had long ago overcome their ancient prejudices. They considered it an invigorating treat to capture a large beetle, mercifully kill it by tearing its tiny head off, and break it in half. Holding the broken carapace up, they could suck the liquid from its interior the same way they treated any lucky finds of bird eggs. Anything to get the protein and fat their bodies craved. “I’d really like a chocolate Easter egg sometime with vanilla filling,” Maryan said wistfully as she tossed a large, empty beetle aside. “Or a nice ice cream, you know, vanilla on the inside and dark, brittle chocolate around the outside.”

“Stop torturing us. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find some cacao plants,” Alex said. “I’m not sure we’d recognized them if we fell over them.”

“Do you smell something odd?”

He sniffed and wrinkled his nose. “Something faint. Dead.”

“Let’s be careful,” she whispered.

They trod one step at a time along a grassy ridge. They went up a slope and emerged in a wide brushy area. For a moment, Alex had the illusion of being earthside. The intense moonlight flooded the air, making the clouds shine bright-blue with whitish trailing wisps. The hillock smelled of flowers, and the ground felt firm and dry under Alex’s feet. In the same moment, both he and Maryan caught a stronger whiff of that dreadful smell.

“What is that stench?” she said holding her nose.

“It’s coming from over here,” Alex said. Against his will, curiosity and instinct drew him to an area of taller grass along one side of the hillock, and there he spied what looked like a reclining form. “Here it is.”

“That’s it,” Maryan added with finality as they clung together and stepped closer. The corpse in the grass was that of a tiny person, maybe half of Maryan’s size. It was neither Siirk nor Takkar, but a new species. At first glance, this looked like the body of a young boy, with fine silvery hair on its limbs and chest as well as its head and face, but the head was large in proportion to the body and the shape was like that of the Takkar, blunt and angular. From the wrinkles on the cheeks and around the eyes and mouth, as well as the webbing of fine scars on the coarsened hands, Alex suspected this was a full grown adult. “Look at the skull,” Maryan said, still holding her nose as she stepped around the body.

“Nizin or some of his people,” Alex said. “That has to be their handiwork.” The creature’s skull had been severed on top and its brain was gone. The skull was empty except for a mass of silvery ant-like insects swarming around the remaining edible scraps inside. Alex knelt and examined the edges of the skull. “It was bashed open, then pried apart. Look, you can see gnawing marks around the edges.”

“Can it be?” Alex whispered with a pang of horror. He pictured the Siirk leader with his amulet, rubbing his belly in cruel and ruthless self-love.

“Do you suppose Nizin is alive?” Maryan said in a hushed voice. Her eyes were large, no doubt remembering the horror of their capture and journey with the Siirk.

Alex nodded reluctantly. “It’s possible. We just thought he vanished into space but it makes sense—if we got here in one piece. I almost hope it’s just him, and not a whole bunch of predators like him.”

“I will bet he’s up here, looking for a way down and killing everything he finds for food or fun.”

“I almost hope you’re right,” Alex said rising. He held his spear close. “If we can find him before he finds us, we can probably have him for lunch instead of the other way around.”

Maryan made a face. “I don’t mind eating bugs, but I wouldn’t want his meat in my stomach.”

“Yes, I think I’d rather go hungry too.”

They slipped back down the jungle trail heading back to their roost. Along the way, she said: “We can’t really go back up the wall. We’re too visible.”

Alex shuddered. “What were we thinking, exposing ourselves like that?”

“What we really should do is go to the other end of the station. If he’s operating down around here, he might never get to the other end.”

He stopped and pulled her into the shade of a large tree. “Let’s try our best to find a boat. I think they are all down here, on the city end. There is probably nothing on the other end.”

She looked uncertain. “You mean in the Reception Center we flew past? It’s all dead in there.”

“The boats have to be controlled by an automated process, particularly if it turns out to be true that they get launched from the moon somehow. There can’t be humans left alive. All we’ve seen has been these canned Spectors and Nectars.”

“But I’m afraid of Nizin. We can put twenty miles between ourselves and him.”

“And a possible boat.”

“You may be wrong. So how would we get into the city?”

“There has to be a way.” He looked toward the forest. “Those flying blankets now...and the spiders. I have an idea.”