She shook her head. "You call believing in nothing ... a talent?"

"Absolutely. And you can use that talent to help your people. And, meanwhile, to thrive once all the horizons are down. Or ... "

"Or what?" She kept expecting the conversation to steer back in an innocuous direction. Shouldn't his or her animas be taking over, smoothing things, preventing the distress she felt building up to an intolerable state?

"You go back to Westerhaven without my protection. In that case, you can't leave, or change your realities anymore. Like all your people. That's the deal."

She stood up. "I'm afraid I have to be going."

"That would be a bad decision," he said. Behind him, Alison bit her lip nervously. "We separated the other leaders from your peers on the pretext of negotiating with Oceanus's founders," Lucius continued. "Your people are isolated and vulnerable now — but they're safe as long as they don't know that Oceanus has been subverted. Livia, I'm not going to use force to keep you here; treat that as a gesture of sincerity on my part. You can go back to the camp if you want, or you can stay and learn from us. But if you go back, you should know the consequences. We can't let the others know what you know."

"You'll do what? Imprison me? Kill me?"

He laughed. "No — you're the valuable one, not them. No, we'll imprison them. Or kill them. Now sit down."

She ran around the table. Alison stepped in between Livia and the corner of the wheelhouse. "Out of my way!" Livia shouted.

"livia, listen, forget about Westerhaven, it's you and I — "

As Lucius made to stand she overturned the table on him. He fell backwards against the ship's rail. Livia shoved Alison out of the way and ran around the wheel-house.

"Livia, please!" shouted Alison.

"Why are you so angry?" shouted Lucius. "Ask yourself that! I know you, Livia. I know what drives you. Westerhaven was too small for you and we both know it!"

Livia clambered into the seat of one of the kayaks and threw off its anchor rope. The distant shoreline had reappeared, even as the distant sails of Oceanus faded. She would not be able to return there, she knew.

She put all her strength into the paddles, nearly capsizing in her haste to get away.

Livia beached the kayak at the base of the cable. When she stepped onto the sand, she found she could barely lift her arms from the effort of paddling this distance. She was shaking. She had the sick feeling that something terrible was happening in her absence.

There were many fresh footprints in the sand. She ran heedlessly up the hillside, willing herself to act in order not to think.

The forest was deep and she had to pick her way over ancient moss-covered logs and around thick brambles. Tangled as it was, there was no need to call up an inscape compass; though there was no way to tell direction from the permanently vertical sunlight, she could not mistake the way to the clearing. Just follow the sound of screaming and the music of war.

It was only a kilometer, but it took her nearly an hour to fight her way through the thick undergrowth to the edge of the clearing. By the time the last bushes gave way to reveal the field, all was silent.

She stood panting, legs and torso scratched and bleeding, sword in hand; but there was no one to fight. The air-cars were gone, the tents overthrown, and the grass trampled everywhere, bloody in places. There were no bodies.

Lucius had been true to his word. She shouldn't have run. The peers were gone, and it was her fault.

8

For a while Livia was too devastated to even think. She just stood in the bright sunlight and stared about at the results of her decision to run. Eventually she realized she was an easy target here and stepped back into the trees, leaning against one as if the world were tilting out of control.

She was lost in a hostile manifold, alone and probably hunted. She didn't dare ask her Society for help, because she no longer trusted the AIs that controlled the animas. Also, she didn't want to see how many of her friends and family were now missing from it.

Reflexively, she did the automatic thing her upbringing had conditioned her to do when at a loss: she ran some sims.

While they were going she skirted the clearing, looking for any signs of other survivors. When she finally summoned the courage to step into the field, she found only human footprints. Raven's mythological beasts had not been present. So, the attackers were almost certainly gamers from Oceanus — probably tricked into thinking this attack was some new simulation.

In the ruins of the mess tent she found some ant-covered bread and cheese. She ate while huddling under the one upright corner of the tent. After a while her sims signaled their completion.

The results were not good. She watched herself call up her Society — and immediately be found by 3340. The sims couldn't give her probabilities of escape. She watched herself head out to sea, there to be scooped up by a ship loaded with troops; or confronted by Alison, maybe winning the subsequent fight or maybe not.

She could paddle back to the mainland; but it would take her days to get back home, and then what would she do? Westerhaven was lost.

The hopeless permutations went on and on, until she dismissed them all. She walked out into the center of the field, and sat down in the sunlight.

She was only one person. Maybe it was time to give up.

In the months after their rescue, Aaron had started acting strangely — taking chances, going on adventures that were uncharacteristic of him. Once, he took a bet to skydive from one of the Teven side cables. A group of unruly peers including Livia had flown alongside one of the great upsweeping behemoths. The peers had landed their aircars ten kilometers up its length where the air began to fail and took ground cars up switchback trails another two kilometers. In the dizzy air high above the mountains they had gotten into their parachutes while perched on platforms welded to the slope of the now-bare cable. Far below, it entered the ground alongside dozens of others that curved away to left and right. Above, it vanished into haze high above the mountains. Hundreds of smaller cables hung off it or stretched away like vast open nets into the distance: the abodes of the Cirrus manifold. Tiny flying specks were all that could be seen of the people who lived there.

Aaron let Livia — only her — ride his sensorium on the way down, and she felt the terror of the drop with him as he stepped into space, falling without air resistance at first. All was silent for that first part of the fall save for the sound of Aaron's breath, which felt like it was heaving in Livia's own chest. She remembered the stiffness of the drop suit and the giddiness of the long fall, as the imperceptible glide through half-vacuum became an increasing rush through heating air. At first the Coriolis effect meant Aaron was falling almost sideways rather than down and he sailed away from Westerhaven, over strange countries and oceans like a bird. As the whisper of air became a violent roar, the swirls of white and mottled green below became cloud and sea filigreed with shorelines, then visibly hills and forests waiting to catch him.

Aaron went into a spin and blacked out long before his chute opened. When his sensorium went dark Livia switched to the view of one of his angels, which paced him a kilometer away. Slowed now by the air, he fell limply, as though exhausted of meaning, and somehow that moment summed up everything about him since the crash. She wept even as his chute opened and he glided toward the silver-touched barley fields that were his target Naturally he was awake again by the time he reached them and when he staggered to his feet and his Society coalesced, cheering, around him, he laughed as proudly and confidently as ever. Livia smiled as she greeted him, too, though her eyes ached from remembered tears.