SEVENTEEN

Ray called me into lucidity on my 'front porch', thumping the doors.  I patted my hips, and found my revolvers there.

"Ben, we have a worry." he said, and stepped away from my door to follow his gaze upwards.  Above us, a bat-winged shape was drawing wider and wider circles as it climbed, and then turned to glide away.

"Where was that...?" I started.

He finished for me, as I paused.  "It was skimming right above ground level when I came out.  I called Abraham out to shoot it down, but I'm not sure he hit it."

My fortress doors cracked, and Ulla came out, panther-sized.  She sat down beside me, and we looked up together.

"So, I meant to ask.  The cat.  Is she like Abraham?  A tribe member, memory-person, kind of thing?"

"Nah.  She's my Animal Guide.  All the best people have them."  And I winked at him.

Mrrr.

Sounded approving, I thought.  It'll do.

"Uh...  Okay, sure.   Anyway, come on, man.  Let's grab Gina.  I got plans for the night."

"What's on the agenda?"

"The coma ward. You know, the ninth floor."

"Yeah, I know, you work with them a fair bit dayside.  What about them?"

"We learned a lot from visiting Edith, right?  Well, the road out her way is a whole lot bigger tonight.  I've been thinking about visiting the rest of them; I know a lot of their

stories.  Any reason we shouldn't go?  I mean, besides the really obvious one."

"Nope.  Just the really obvious one.  Dying sucks."

"Right."

Then, we were standing on Gina's 'porch'.   The doors cracked, and Gina drove out in a jeep.  Not the one we'd been using, though.  This one was modern, with the roof taken off, and had itself a .50 calibre machine gun mounted in back.

"You boys need a ride?"

We got in, and I got to sit in the back, and mess around with the machine gun.  Turns out, rock beats scissors.  Good old rock.  As we started to move, Ray talked about his agenda for the night, and Gina nodded.

"My night tomorrow, though." She let us know.

As we drove, I grabbed the handles of the machine gun.  It wasn't as strong as Edith Krenski's machine gun, but some tiny snippets of Gina's memories were bound up in it.  Rolling across a sandy landscape, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and laughing, sitting on crates of illicit guns.  It gave me a momentary start, but I managed not to flail around or shout.

A few minutes later, a forest of pillars sprouted on the horizon.  Some were what we had come to think of as usual, but well over half of them had one or more of the hives growing on them.  A few were utterly covered, encrusted to the point that the original shapes of the buildings that made up the pillar beneath could not be easily made out.

Gina pulled to a stop on the top of the hill; a wide valley between us and the multiplicitious hillside where the pillars Ray had called up sat together.

We cannot go to them overhill.  We must go underhill; there.

Ulla looked down into the valley.  Following her gaze, I could see it - a chasm in the hillside, surce of a faint and shifting radiance.  Worth a try.  "Hey, guys.  We might be able to get closer if we tried going in there."

Gina followed my pointing finger "Good eyes, coz.  But what's to say that's not a horny-head hideout?"

"Because it's glowing." Ray returned.

So we drove down, and into to the cavern.