explosion, but . . .” She bit her lip.
“What?”
“One of the airhoppers is missing, although none were signed out.”
But Mitsu had survived. He made himself hold onto that. If only he’d come back sooner.
Three more men, their blue uniforms stained with soot and sweat, joined the others, wearily staring at the hrinn. Heyoka’s nose twitched as Kei flexed his handclaws. “Tell them to give us weapons so we can leave.” Kei’s tone was close to a low snarl. “Hrinn cannot live in this stench.”
“They have no weapons.” Heyoka’s nose wrinkled; the station did smell terrible, reeked in fact of humans and sweat and explosives and plastics and a hundred other things he’d almost forgotten in just a few days’ time.
Nisk shook himself. “It is as I have been telling you—this pattern does not involve the Outsiders. We must find this shape alone.”
Heyoka hesitated, then decided to check the communications center for himself. “I must look at something before we leave. Wait for me outside.” He headed down the dimly lit station corridor. After a moment, he heard the pad of hrinnti feet behind him.
Vexk waited on the low roof of the Restorers’ Hold, chin propped on her bent knees, while Cimmi and Khea dug medicinal roots up on the ridge. Twilight had descended and the growing dimness to the east possessed a dense, clotted consistency, denoting, she thought, a rare convergence of patterns. Everywhere, new shapes were arising unexpectedly within the bounds of those already extant, grinding each other into furious chaos, then spinning away into nothingness. Most hrinn experienced but six or seven recognizable patterns in a lifetime, but these days had lately proved themselves of an altogether different quality, crowded with too many possibilities and therefore fraught with danger.
The wind carried the heady promise of rain out of the west, rare this late in the season. She had tasted the same damp edge in the air on the night she had severed her own ties with Vvok. Watching Khea, it swept back over her now, the anguish and loss of identity, the intense period of mourning that followed. Leaving one’s Line was devastating enough, but in addition Khea had