"Quit worrying and hold still."

"They're very busy out there, Ash." Chaiel kept twisting his head around as if he could see. Maybe he could. It wasn't helping, though.

"And I would be very busy in here, if you would hold still. And control your hair, would you? Tie it in a knot or something."

With a wordless grumble, Chaiel tried to obey. In the process, he threw them both off balance. Ash curled up as he fell, to avoid a repeat of the incident that had given him a bloody nose a few hours back. As a result, it was Chaiel who got an elbow in the eye. Chaiel reacted by howling and thrashing for a while. Ash was getting really tired of this. He believed he'd punch the kid out if he didn't need him for a stepstool. He considered that maybe it was time to voice this thought.

"I'm not really a violent person," he said quietly into a lull in Chaiel's tantrum. The lull didn't last, but he kept talking. "Normally, I'd try to calm you down in a much nicer way. But Kieran is on his way here. From what you said, Thelyan is more than ready for him. Which means he's going to need my help. Is this making sense to you? There are things going on that are a lot more important than your stupid eye. So if you don't pull it together here, I'm going to give you a matching shiner, and then I'm going to hurt you some more after that. Are you getting this at all?"

Chaiel's complaining turned into laughing. "You know we don't have a chance. Nothing can get out of this thing, don't you understand? Nothing can get in or out. Thelyan had a long time to design this -- this torture device -- and you think you're going to break it in a matter of hours."

"Yes, actually, I do."

Chaiel laughed harder.

"Look, it's just math. You've heard of math, right? It's that stuff you do with numbers?"

"It's not math, it's magic!"

"Same thing. You don't have to understand it, okay? Just trust me."

"Trust. Trust? Trust you!" The kid's laughter was increasingly hysterical. "Why should I trust you?"

Ash felt his face harden. Though it took some doing, he collected Chaiel's wrists in one hand and a fistful of hair in the other, and brought the thrashing creature to a halt.

"Because," he said carefully, "it costs you nothing to do so. If hope hurts that much, be bored. Stand there smiling your superior little smile and telling yourself how funny it's going to be when I give up. Now do something with your goddamn hair and give me a lift again."

Calmer now, Chaiel sniffled and met his eyes. "You don't get it. I do think you can do it. I just don't think you can do it in time. And when Ka'an dies --"

"Kieran won. I felt it."

"Then when Kieran loses to Thelyan, you're going to give up. Then I'll be stuck here knowing you could get us out but you won't try."

"That's the kind of person you think I am? Let me explain how you're wrong. Thing one, Kieran's going to win. Thing two, I am going to get it in time, if you cooperate. Thing three, if Kieran loses and I don't get it in time, I'm going to bust out anyway so I can take it out of Thelyan's hide. And finally, you could do this yourself if you'd just pay attention to what I'm telling you. This magic is math. It all is, if you look at it right. I just have to figure out what kind."

"And then you'll, what, subtract it?"

Ash sighed. "If you like. Here, let me do that for you, you're just getting yourself tangled." He spun Chaiel around and collected the ridiculous length of his hair. It was too matted to braid, and too long; he couldn't separate the strands with his arms at their full stretch, there was that much of it. So he settled for twisting it into a rope so he could tie knots in it. As he worked at that, he sensed Chaiel calming; apparently more visions were coming, and these weren't incoherent enough to set him off. "What are you seeing?" Ash asked, more to keep him present than because the answer mattered.

"Oh, he's figured out how to go invisible. That's sort of clever."

"Who has?"

"Who do you think? The Dreamer, whatever you want to call him now."

"Invisible? I didn't think that was possible."

"Not invisible. You can still see him. But they can't sense him. They don't know he's coming."

"Who can't sense him?"

"Watchmen. It looks as if Thelyan sent them out to the end of the line to get near the Burn, but I guess he's recalled them now because they're getting back on the train."

"There's a rail line that goes there?"

"Didn't I just say there was? Within a dozen miles anyway. Oh bugger." Chaiel bit the base of his thumb as a stutter of confusion ran through him. The visions had switched.

Much as Ash would have liked to keep hearing what Kieran was up to, it sounded as if things were well in hand on that end, and there was the little matter of the null sphere to deal with. He tied one more knot and let go of the now more localized mess of hair. "Okay, let's get to work."

Chaiel sighed unhappily, but he cooperated. They put the soles of their feet together and slowly, carefully stood up. It was a very strange feeling, the way the sphere pulled them together. It made them topheavy, and every movement swung and spun them around their common axis. Reaching their hands above their heads, they stretched out until they could press their palms against the sphere's surface. That stabilized them a little.

It was slippery as a repelling magnet, though. Ash couldn't give it his whole attention, because he had to keep adjusting his posture to keep in contact with it. This would be a long piece of work even if he'd been able to concentrate fully. Seeing it as a cipher had been a simplification. The math used to break code was fairly elementary, once one knew the methods. This was a deeper kind of equation. It balanced inside and outside so perfectly that from within it seemed there was no outside. Almost as if it declared that the whole of the universe was inside the bubble. Presumably, from outside, the inside was the part that didn't exist. But from its own point of view, the skin of the bubble didn't exist, which was why it couldn't be affected, at least not directly.

What gave him a hope of breaking it was the fact that it had intermediate states. Thelyan had left it in one of these, so that light could pass. Currently, the defining equation was ignoring light. From what Chaiel had said, it had variables for sound as well, and for objects to pass through. It also had a repelling effect, which accounted for the way they were pushed toward the center.

Ash had read a theory once, in a book about fluid dynamics, that sound propagated through air by means of vibration. Following that thought, he supposed that in order to pass sound, the sphere wouldn't have to allow air through, provided it acted as a resonating membrane.

Which meant that the sphere itself was an object. It didn't have mass or thickness, but because it could be made to transmit vibrations, it could be treated as a solid object in some cases. Because it didn't have a thickness, it was a two-dimensional object, despite being spherical. Ash wished desperately for something to write on. He was starting to think that resonant effects were going to be the key, though. That and the fact that in order to do its job, the sphere had to balance its input and output exactly.

"Well?" Chaiel sounded impatient.

"Can you analyze a deterministic system?"

"A what?"

"Then I suggest you shut up and let me work."

Chaiel gave a haughty sniff, but didn't reply. Narrowing his eyes, and his field of mental vision as well, Ash dived back into his task.

Crouched behind a pile of broken ore carts, Kieran examined his options.

There were Watchmen swarming all over the place. He'd crunched his pattern down small to keep them from sensing him, but they'd certainly see him if he came out. Which was a problem, because he'd have to come out if he wanted to get on the train.

A number of methods of transport had occurred to him. He could do the really fast running thing again, but he didn't like it. The sun was high now and the air shimmering hot. He wasn't sure he could keep from overheating. It had crossed his mind to summon another storm, let the rain cool him, but he wasn't sure he could get one together in under a day. Whatever he'd done before seemed to have undone itself.

Stealing a horse would be worse than useless; it would mean confronting these Watchmen, for one thing. Powerful as he felt, he hadn't lost sight of the fact that every fight was a gamble. Then he could ride the horse to death within a dozen miles if he was unlucky, which would leave him right back at square one.

So he'd hit on the idea of hopping a train. A train would be ideal. Faster than the other options, with the added benefit that rail interference would hide his approach. The Splitwood mine's spur was the nearest track to the Burn -- or the place where the Burn had been -- and he guessed that there must be a regular run from there to either Burn River or Trestre. The right direction, anyway. Once aboard, it wouldn't be hard to stick a gun in the engineer's face and make him go take the Churchrock loop instead.

But there were these Watchmen. They'd corralled the mine workers and shunted all the mining company's engines off on a siding. They had an engine of their own, a handsome sleek thing with nothing behind it but three passenger cars, but even if Kieran could manage to steal the thing he'd have to pick up its crew as well. He had no idea how to drive a train.

He ruefully examined his gun. Removing the jammed round was easy enough, but poor thing was just a mess, what with mud and water and dust, and he didn't have anything to clean it with. Not to mention how he didn't trust his ammunition. And while he'd managed not to lose his spare magazines, his pockets had been full of mud.

Crouching down, he peered through a space between two of the rusty carts. After a moment he cautiously poked his head up for a moment to confirm what he'd seen. Most of the Watchmen, a couple dozen of them, were getting back on the train. A few still stood outside, conferring. Under the direction of one of the officers, a mining company engineer was throwing switches. Apparently they were going to turn the train around and go home.

It would take them a while, though. Meantime, he wanted to do something about his poor neglected Hart. Could magic substitute for gun oil? More to the point, could he do anything without alerting the Watch? He chewed his lip for a moment, thinking, and concluded that it was worth the risk. He really didn't want to try to do this unarmed.

Stripping the Hart gingerly, wincing every time he heard a gritty sound, he ran his fingers over the pieces. He could distinguish the textures in his mind, the difference between dirt and oil and -- he grimaced -- rust. If he let the power trickle out of his hands, if he didn't project it at all...

There was a crackling noise, and a puff of vapor blew out from between his fingers.

He looked through his peephole, but no one seemed to have noticed. The ones who'd been getting on the train were now aboard; four of them stood aside, making no move to board. None of them were looking in his direction.

Going a bit more gently this time, he divested his gun of everything that didn't belong in it, and reassembled it. He did the same to the magazines. Then he turned his attention to the bullets. He guessed that duds ought to look different to his magical senses than viable rounds, and he could indeed distinguish two different types of bullet, but he couldn't tell which was which. There were a lot more of one kind than the other. Hoping that the more numerous type were the ones that would fire, he loaded up with those, and rearranged the clips so that he had a full magazine of the rarer kind and two full of the other, with two spaces free and two bullets left out since he didn't want to mix them.

A grinding, groaning noise had been swelling up while he finished this task. He ignored it until he was done. Then he looked out, to find that the White Watch engine was being turned around. Through the windows of the passenger cars he could see the Watchmen who were leaving. That meant, of course, that they'd see him, if he tried to get aboard. And there were still those four fellows standing clear.

Half an idea occurred to him. He chewed over it while he watched the engine grumbling around the switching loop. Risky. But all his options were risky. He really hoped he'd loaded with good rounds.

The short train emitted a series of clatters as it switched onto the main track facing east. A ball of black smoke jumped from the smokestack, and the engine roared as it began to pick up speed. Kieran forced his eyes away from it, watching the four men left behind instead of the departing train. Two were watching the train go. The other two were talking to each other. As the engine's noise diminished, they all turned toward where they'd left their horses.

Time. Kieran stood up, aiming with a two-handed grip at the nearest of the Watchmen. He pulled the trigger as their heads began to turn. There was a small clack sound.

"Shit," he muttered, ducking back. There wasn't time to care where they were or what they were doing; he cleared the jammed round, dropped the clip of duds, and shoved in his solitary clip of what he hoped were good bullets. As he worked the slide, he suddenly flashed on a parallel. Shooting from behind cover, low on ammunition... he just knew that if he stood up now he'd die the same way Shan had.

Well, fine. He wasn't hiding anymore. And he had all this power, just itching to rearrange the world.

The Watchmen yelled in surprise when the pile of broken ore carts suddenly erupted, half-ton square buckets on wheels whirling across the ground like dry leaves in a wind. The noise this made almost covered the sound of their wildly fired shots, their desperately blurted shielding spells. Two men missed their spells and were smashed; Kieran felt their deaths the way Ash must have felt the deaths of the ones he'd shot on the Canyon road. He had to admit it was unpleasant. Like a splash of cold kerosene in the face. One of the men had got his shield up in time but been shoved across the yard. The last had held his ground, and was readying his rifle and gathering power at the same time. Kieran aimed at him, then hesitated.

He could taste the type of spell the man was beginning. A fire pattern. The man wasn't a natural pyrokinetic, he was using thaumaturgy. It was easy to see, now, easy to counter.

Kieran reached out and tripped the fire spell just before the man would have released it. The soft bang of expanding hot air -- a moment's glimpse of the heat-shimmer that was all the visible evidence of the colorless flame -- was followed by a sharper explosion as the pattern exciting materials to heat was sucked into the rifle. A rippling clatter as the whole magazine went off at once, and chunks of wood and metal flew spinning through the air.

For a moment, the Watchman stared at the ruined remains of his hands. Then he gave a short grunt and folded up.

All that had happened so fast that the man who'd been shoved over the tracks was just now getting up. He'd made it as far as his knees. He didn't bother standing all the way up before sending a blast of dust flying in Kieran's face. No spell; kinetic. Coughing and squinting, Kieran dodged sideways as he threw down a bit of a pattern to settle the dust. He heard a shot, and another. Then the dust dropped as if every particle were a fist-sized stone, clearing the air, and he saw his quarry.

He fired twice. The man crumpled and lay still.

Kieran took the time to load his two spares. Now he had precisely ten bullets. There had been upwards of thirty men on that train. He suspected that if he came aboard, they wouldn't give up their seats for him. But he thought he had a way to do it that would keep them from even knowing he was there.

Calling a wind was easy enough. Because of the recent rain, there wasn't as much dust as he'd wanted, but he didn't need a sandstorm, just a smokescreen. Yellow-gray wisps rose around him, became billows, rolling off east down the tracks. He tied his kerchief over his nose and mouth, then set off after the dust cloud.

When he moved up onto the railbed, he felt the rails snatch his power away. That was all right; once started, the wind should keep up for a while. And it was only power outside himself that was disrupted. The power that remained within him, speeding him as he began to run, worked just as smoothly as it had when Ka'an had done it in the Burn. The heat was going to be a problem, though. Could he do something with it? He felt like he was juggling eggs, but just as his heart began to labor he grasped the pattern. Twisted it around and fed it back into himself in a different form. Chill washed over him. He accelerated.

There was dust everywhere now; the wind he'd begun had spread, lifting opaque veils across his path. His eyes watered. Some dust got into his lungs despite the kerchief. It didn't slow him down. Magic was substituting for breath and nourishment now. He wasn't even panting.

How long could he keep this up? It had been three days since he'd last eaten. Several hours since he'd had any water. One hour of sleep in the last thirty-six. Maybe he was using himself up. Killing himself. There'd be more exertions, too, maybe much harder ones, before he was done. Maybe it would be better to sleep and eat before he tried Churchrock? It would be terrible if he reached it and then lacked the strength to free Ash.

But the thought of leaving Ash in the Watch's hands for another day choked him. No. He'd do it now. If it broke him, then it broke him. No holding back. There's only one person in the world brave enough and forgiving enough to care for me. If I saved myself at his expense, what the hell would I be saving myself for?

He smelled coal smoke, then heard the sound of the engine ahead. The dust was still thick. The back of the hindmost car loomed ahead before he was ready for it; he nearly collided with it. There was a white uniform standing watch on the little balcony-thing there, eyes widening as Kieran vaulted the rail. The Watchman opened his mouth to give warning, but Kieran's hand smothered his shout. A twist, a crunch; the man sagged, neck broken. Kieran tossed the body overboard.

With magic running along his muscles, it was easy to climb up on top of the car. Easy to stand firm against the wind, though the train must have been going forty miles an hour. Stepping carefully, so as not to alert the men below with the sound of his feet on their roof, he walked forward. Checked carefully at each linkage to make sure there was no one who could see him go over, then leapt across the gap between cars.

Kieran crouched atop the engine, just ahead of the smokestack. He watched the desert rush past, and wondered how much of himself he'd used up to get here. It was hard to judge; unfamiliar as it was, this new magic looked infinite, but he knew it wasn't. He saw ways to increase it, though, even when the patterns around him were distorted by engine and rails. He couldn't send any energy out without it being snatched away, but he could take energy in. There were plenty of sources. The sun's heat, the wind's motion, the vibration shaking through the soles of his boots. Even the noise.

Coat and hair thrashing behind him, eyes streaming, he collected power and waited to arrive.

Chaiel was trying very hard to be still. Ash had said he needed quiet to think; it was implied that if he didn't get this quiet, he would become violent again. They were back to back, something between sitting and sprawled. Ash had said he was on to something. And also that if he ended up with Chaiel's hair in his face one more time he'd pull it out by the roots. So Chaiel held his bundled hair in his arms and worked on silence.

The visions made it so hard, though. Something had broken loose in the world. Everything was disordered. Sights and sounds and thoughts were coming in stutters, too fast to make sense. Vertigo made his stomach roll. He wondered, if he vomited, what would come out? No, don't think of that, or you will. Think about something else -- But not about what it might be like to get out of the bubble, because if Ash's idea didn't work -- if he'd been hoping and those hopes were dashed -- he wasn't sure what would happen, but he was sure it would be the worst thing possible.

But what else was there to occupy him? He had tired of his own body long, long ago. Picking at his hair, chewing his nails, even hurting himself no longer afforded any distraction. The only interesting thing was Ash, and Ash was too busy to be entertaining. The warmth against his back was pleasant, though. Unfamiliar skin, dry from too much time outdoors, a bit gritty. And the new smell. Not what would normally be considered a nice smell, kind of muddy and sweaty with just a hint of gunpowder and blood. But it was good to smell something, after being locked up with himself so long that he'd thought his nose was numb.

He wondered, if this plan failed and they were stuck here forever, whether he'd learn to want to have sex with a boy, just for something to do. He wouldn't get any satisfaction from it, because of the way the null sphere paused his body's functions, but it might pass the time. Sordid thought, that.

Chaiel surprised himself by giggling. When did I last care for the propriety of my thoughts, or my actions for that matter? Then he froze, fearing retaliation for having made noise.

Ash didn't react. A sense of involved concentration was trickling out of him. He'd got his mental fingers into some complex knot, and was picking it apart. Chaiel envied him.

"Right," Ash muttered. "Size and distance. They'd be proportional. Then it wouldn't matter, if it's parabolic. Okay. Hey, Shy."

"Chaiel," Chaiel corrected.

"Yeah. Which one of those doodads out there is the one that he turned off to let me in?"

Chaiel twisted around to point over Ash's shoulder. "There, with the glyph tacheth."

"The one that looks like a three-legged elephant in a big hat?"

"Uh... yes." Chaiel snickered. "It does, rather, doesn't it?"

"Someday you'll have to tell me what the hell it really is. Right now, though, I'd like to know whether you can muster enough power to break the switch."

"It's outside the sphere, stupid."

"That's not what I asked you," Ash said patiently.

Chaiel's heart began to beat faster. He swallowed, mouth dryer than usual, and his answer came out hoarse. "Just barely. If you could get the spell through the sphere." He swallowed again, no longer quite able to keep from hoping. "Can you?"

"Yes. Whether I can do it on the first try, though..."

"Oh." The sound jumped out of Chaiel's throat without his intention. He found he was curled small on Ash's back, fingers digging into the redhead's freckled shoulders. "Oh. Are you sure. Are you. How could. How did."

"Breathe, Shy," Ash said in an exasperated tone. "You're not going to be much use if you're hyperventilating. I know this is a big deal for you, but can you put off thinking about it for a minute? Take a deep breath. Count to ten or something."

Obeying, Chaiel gradually calmed himself. Another burst of visions helped, oddly enough, by putting something between the moment he was in and the moment in which he'd realized he'd be free soon. When he trusted himself to speak in complete sentences, he said, "I assume I wouldn't understand if you explained how you're going to manage it."

"Maybe you would. It's not a hard concept. See, the sphere is set to pass sound and light right now. But sound and light aren't going straight through. They're gathered and then emitted by the sphere. The skin of the bubble actually absorbs and then generates them." Ash's tone was admiring. "It's really a very robust design. But I think I've figured out the way it transmits energy, and it's something we can use. I'm going to make a pattern like a sort of lens, and then have you throw your spell through it. The energy will focus wherever I aim the lens -- that is, in the middle of that chunk of stone that acts as a switch. Did that make any sense?"

"I have one question."

"Shoot."

"What if he's designed it so that, if a seal is broken, it's simply stuck on forever? You'd be trapping us inside."

"No, the switches -- seals -- they hold the pattern in place. They're foci. Break one, and its particular variable is removed from the equation."

"How do you know?"

Ash chuckled. "Well, now I have to say you wouldn't understand the explanation. I'll show it to you sometime when I have lots of paper."

"Ah." Chaiel took a deep breath. "Is there anything else I need to know?"

"Wait until I have the lens made. I'll tell you when I'm ready. Then you work up a gob of raw power and fling it into the lens. Your aim isn't important; if it hits the lens at all, it'll go where I want it to go. Pure energy, mind you -- anything else will be stripped off as it goes through the bubble, and it might wreck our focus. Can you do that?"

"Yes."

"Okay, hold still for a minute, the placement has to be just right."

Chaiel watched tensely as his new ally began to construct a small, tight pattern in the air between himself and the seal. It's as tidy as one of Medur's, Chaiel thought at first, but as the pattern continued to form he realized Medur wouldn't have thought of this. She would certainly have thought of something, she'd always been the creative one, but what Ash was doing... Chaiel had never seen magic used quite like that before. Spell patterns were complex, sprawling things, in his experience. Unless the mind that built them was supremely disciplined, they tended to skew and fade, fur themselves with sub-patterns, so that no spell was ever exactly the same twice. The thing Ash was building, though, was simply a stepped series of concentric rings of force. As smooth and solid to Chaiel's magical senses as if it were built of glass. It seemed to have no urge to change itself. It held itself in perfect tension, perfectly in place.

Ash studied it for a time after he'd made it, apparently not needing any effort to keep it there. Stretching out a hand, he gathered a pebble of energy and flicked it into the lens. Chaiel couldn't see what happened to it, but Ash turned the pattern a fraction of a degree and sent out another tiny spark. He repeated this procedure five times before he was satisfied.

"All right," he murmured. "I'm spent. I hope you have enough steam to get the job done."

"Now?"

"Now."

Chaiel's hands were trembling. He rolled them into fists, bit blood from his lip, telling himself firmly: There is no future. There is no next minute. If you think of the next minute, you're sunk. Just do this one thing, and then you can think again.

Slowly, he uncurled his hands. Steadying himself against Ash's body, he put a kernel of pattern between his stretched fingers and wound power around it. He didn't know quite how much it would take to break the seal, so he supposed he'd better give it everything he had -- which wasn't much. His mind hadn't been clear enough to gather and store as much as he could have from the visions. But he had what had been on Ash in the form of Thelyan's binding, and a little from his own body.

Goosebumps crawled across his skin as he stole from himself. His toes and fingertips began to go numb. Still he kept spooling it out. Only when lethargy began to creep over him and threaten his concentration did he stop.

Please, please let me not have any visions in the next two seconds...

He detached the ball of energy from himself and shot it into the lens.

A sharp crack rang through the room. Flying chips of stone stung him.

The seal was gone. There was only a charred spot on the beam where it had been fastened, and bits of it pattering and bouncing across the floor. Chaiel let out a wild screech of triumph.

Ash's simultaneous victory cry turned into an indignant yelp, and he twisted away. "Right in my ear, Shy. Ouch." He held Chaiel at arm's length. "Okay, boost me up."

Eagerly, Chaiel obeyed. Rather than standing with their feet together as before, Chaiel grasped Ash's ankles. With his arms at full stretch, Ash could just barely get his hands around one of the struts. The sphere's repelling effect was still in place; cords of muscle stood out under Ash's skin as he strained to pull them free of it. Bit by bit, he climbed out onto the floor, curled around a strut to keep from being hauled back in. Bit by bit, Chaiel was pulled out after him. At last Chaiel popped free and tumbled onto dusty stone.

Ash gave a breathless laugh. "Well, it worked."

Chaiel drew breath to reply, but was stilled by how difficult it was. He lay sprawled where he had fallen. His limbs felt like lead. He wasn't sure he could move at all. And the aches -- all the aches, hunger and thirst and torn nails and torn skin -- he whimpered in alarm. Had he been freed only to die?

"What's wrong?" Ash bent over him, concerned.

"I can. Hardly. Breathe."

"Oh. I guess you've been floating for a long time, haven't you? It's just muscle memory, Shy. Your muscles can't have really atrophied, if your body was shut down."

"Stop. Calling me. Shy."

"I just realized something. We weren't really breathing in there, were we? I mean, we were breathing, but we weren't using up the air. And now we are." Ash glanced around the small ovoid room. "And there can't be all that much in here. We need to go."

"Wait. Just. A little while."

"Can't. If the air thing isn't enough to get you moving, I bet you anything Thelyan's going to know we're out. Aw, hell, I weigh a ton." Groaning, Ash labored upright. He went to the corner where he'd left his clothes when Thelyan had made him disrobe. Chaiel numbly watched him put his glasses and trousers on.

Any second now I'm going to realize I'm out of the sphere. Any second. It's going to hit me, I'll understand it, and then -- feel something, I suppose. Happy? I might be happy.

"You can tie my shirt around your waist, like a kilt. You want the coat? I think you need to be warm more than I do. I bet your feet are pretty tender. I can go barefoot." A pile of filthy clothing hit the floor in front of Chaiel's face.

With great effort, Chaiel rolled onto his side, then curled up to sitting. He picked up one of the socks, but immediately dropped it with a cry of disgust. It practically bounced. "How did you get your stockings so dirty?"

"A mudslide was involved. Also a broken ankle and a jammed rifle and Kieran leaving, so mud in my boots wasn't exactly foremost in my mind." Ash was over by the door now, running his hands around the edge.

Gingerly brushing the worst of the dirt off, Chaiel clothed himself. He still felt too heavy, but at least he could move now, albeit slowly. The boots were much too big, and the shirt-as-kilt idea didn't work as well in practice as in theory. Nevertheless it was wonderful to be covered. On hands and knees, he put a little distance between himself and the sphere. He was afraid it would somehow grab him, pull him back in.

"Can we smash it?"

"What?"

"The sphere. Let's smash it, so he can't use it again."

Ash spoke without turning. "Sure, hand me the sledgehammer. Or you could use that keg of gunpowder, if you brought your earplugs."

"There's no need to be sarcastic," Chaiel sulked.

"Sure there is." Palms flat against the door's metal, Ash bowed his head and sighed. "Well, we're not getting out this way. He's got the door rigged somehow, might just be a weird lock but for all I can tell it'll blow up in our faces. Help me feel the walls for thin spots."

"What, you're going to tunnel through stone?"

"Yep."

"With that keg of gunpowder you mentioned?"

"Oh, so you can dish it but you can't take it?" Ash shot him a grin. "There's all sorts of power floating around loose here, can't you feel it? I mean, not enough for anything flashy, but if we're smart we don't have to be flashy."

Chaiel crawled to the wall and hauled himself upright against it. Now that he was looking, he could sense the power Ash mentioned. With skills rusty from disuse, he started gathering it in. First he strengthened himself. Then he sent his senses exploring into the rock under his hands, trying to feel its dimensions.

Then he took a step and tripped over his hair.

Ash's hoot of laughter angered him at first. He'd landed hard on his hands and knees, skinning them, and it hurt. But as he opened his mouth to say something sharp, it suddenly struck him: he was on solid ground, he had the option of skinning his knees, he was free.

Little giggles welled up in him, then turned to real laughter. Sobs of relief and gratitude mixed into it. Tears rolling down his face, he laughed until his stomach ached.

When he finally wound down, he looked up to find Ash watching him with a small, sweet smile. "You're welcome," Ash said. He offered a hand to pull Chaiel to his feet, and they went back to work.

Inching along the curved wall, they gathered power as they searched. Nearly opposite where they'd started, Chaiel found what they were looking for. "I'd say it's about ten feet thick here. There's a tunnel on the other side. I don't understand how you mean to get to it, though."

"Think small." Ash came to run his hands over the place Chaiel indicated. "Really, really small. We're lucky this isn't marble or granite or something, we'd be screwed." Without further explanation, he spread his hands across the rock and closed his eyes.

With a faint crackling noise, a few chips of stone broke off and pattered on the floor. Then a hand-sized chunk, followed by a pouring of sand. Just as Chaiel was about to comment that they'd run out of air before they got through at this rate, the whole room boomed like a drum. Chaiel's ears popped. Sand and pebbles poured out of a fresh crack in the wall, wide enough to wedge a hand into. The sound of crumbling stone was a constant sizzling now, the hole deepening until Ash was in it to the elbows, then to the shoulders.

Belatedly, Chaiel realized that all this rubble would have to go somewhere. Falling to his knees, too excited to feel the sting of the skinned places, he began scooping aside sand with both hands.

Pretty much the first thing I said to him was that he wasn't very bright. When he remembers that, I'll be sure to let him laugh for a good long time.