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. . . And something touched it. Despite !Xabbu's warning, the surprise was so great she almost lost her grip again, but the fingers around her wrist were tight and sure. She sidestepped again, having to lean back a little now as the stone bulged out above her, and suddenly she felt her balance shift back, back toward nothingness. She had only a moment to draw breath for the pointless reflexive scream, then her arm was jerked hard and she scraped along the stone. Her right foot slipped off the path, but the rest of her caromed out, swinging on the pivot of her other foot, and !Xabbu was there, still holding on with blessed, blessed strength as he flung himself backward into a wide cleft in the mountainside so that she tumbled in on top of him. He quickly dragged himself out from under her; a moment later Renie heard him shuffling back to the edge of the fold in the mountainside, calling to Sam, but Renie herself could only lie facedown on the floor and cling as hard as she had gripped the mountainside, rubbing her face against the precious horizontal stone.
She was dimly conscious of !Xabbu bringing the others in safely. Sam fell gasping beside her, whimpering at the cramping of her fingers and toes. A more stolid Jongleur followed and tumbled silently to the ground. Even as the adrenaline diminished and her heart began to slow, Renie suddenly realized that !Xabbu had gone back to the rim of the crevice, risking his life to help the brain-damaged Ricardo Klement to safety. She struggled to her knees, every muscle shrieking in protest, and crawled to the edge. !Xabbu was leaning out at an angle that made her heart begin triphammering again, talking slowly and softly to someone she could not see, his slender arm stretched out of sight around the outcropping.
"I'm behind you, !Xabbu." Her voice was a dry croak. "Do you want me to grab your hand?"
"No, Renie." His voice was muffled against the rock. "I need it where it is for balance. But if you held my leg, I would be grateful. Let go quickly if I ask."
As her fingers closed around his ankle he leaned out farther. Renie could only watch for a moment before having to shut her eyes. The sky's strange lack of depth did not prevent vertigo.
It's just as well T4b isn't here, she thought, the distracted thought keeping a greater terror at bay.
For a moment, as !Xabbu's muscles tensed beneath her touch and he leaned out even farther on his fingernail grip, she thought her pulse would explode in her chest. Then the naked body of Klement came wobbling around the edge of the stone and !Xabbu crouched and pulled backward, toppling onto Renie as he pulled Klement in on them both.
They all lay gasping for a while, until Renie found the strength to help !Xabbu away from the edge of the cleft, deeper into the dimple in the mountain's side. It was scarcely three meters to the place where Sam lay almost wedged into the back, but after that ribbon of trail the space seemed palatial.
Renie slept then, a brief dive beneath the surface of consciousness. When she woke, she dragged herself toward !Xabbu where he sat propped against the black stone and put her head against his chest, nudging until she found a spot in the hollow under his chin. The beat of his heart was soothing, and she realized she never wanted to let go of him.
"We're in trouble," she whispered.
He said nothing, but she could feel his attention,
"We can't go out on that trail again. There's nothing left of it."
She thought he drew breath to argue, but then she felt his head slowly nodding, the curve of his throat and jaw enfolding the line of her own skull like a cupping hand. "I think you are right."
"So what's left? We stay here until the thing dissolves out from under us?" She looked at Sam, as rigid as a catatonic, staring at her own hands. Jongleur too seemed lost in some i
"Wait. Hope." !Xabbu brought his arm up and drew her closer. His fingers rested lightly above her heart, on the upper slope of her breast. "We will be together, no matter what comes."
She burrowed even deeper against him, and realized that she wanted not just to be held, but to kiss him, weep against his face, make love to him. But not here. Not inches from slow-breathing Jongleur, not under Ricardo Klement's aquarium gaze.
And if not here, where? she thought with a brushstroke of sad humor. If not now, when? For it seemed fairly certain there was nothing left. Still, bone-deep weariness and the presence of hateful strangers had turned the thought grotesque. She would content herself with childlike pleasures, with being held, with falling asleep in what for the moment was as much safety as she could imagine.
"Tell a story," she murmured instead. "We need one, !Xabbu."
She felt his head turn slowly from side to side. "I ca
It seemed the saddest thing she had ever heard. Unseeing, she touched his face as sleep came and took her again.
Even after all the unreason she had experienced, all the visions and hallucinations, she came up out of the blackest, most unknowing depths into the active force of the dream and realized immediately that this was perhaps the strangest one yet.
Usually when she dreamed, she was the active one, even if those actions were frustrated; in some of the worst she was a helpless observer, a bodiless phantom condemned to watch over a life it could no longer enjoy. But this was different. This dream came at her, washing over her with the force of moving water, a river of experience that had swallowed her down and was rushing her along, battering her until she felt she might drown in it.
If there had been coherent images she might have found it easier to resist the terrible flow, to feel some tiny chance of control, but the whirling chaos roared over her and through her, unstoppably. Streaks of color, snatches of incomprehensible sounds, flashes of nerve-scraping heat and cold, it went on until she felt so overwhelmed that she could only pray for some sleep deeper than this terrible active dream, anything that would blank out the sensation, stop the terrible screaming input.
Death. The word registered only for a moment, like a headline on a gust-snagged newspaper. Death. Calm. Quiet. Dark. Sleep. In the uncontrolled anarchy of sensation, trapped on this brakeless thrill ride, it had a dreadful allure. But the life inside her was really very strong: when the darkness did come, it terrified her.
It was a cold, oozing dark, a clammy black static grip that, after the initial relief, was only slightly better than the surging horror it had replaced, for not only the swirl of images vanished, but most of her thoughts as well. Reality fragmented and disco
She floated in the midst of a living shadow. There was nothing but herself, surrounded by an unimaginable blackness. She could not think, not properly. She could only wait, while time or perhaps some incompetent impostor did its work.
The emptiness was aeons long. Even imagination died. Aeons long.
Then at last she felt something—a fluttering in the void, Oh, God, it was real, it was! Something distant, but actually separate from herself. No, many somethings, small and alive, tiny blessed warm things where before there had been nothing but cold.
She reached out eagerly, but the fluttering things darted away, frightened of her. She reached again and the presences retreated even farther. Her sorrow grew so large and painful that she was certain all that kept her coherent would burst and she would spill inside out into the darkness, disperse, collapse. She lay in cold misery.