"What would you call it?" He made no effort to keep the fury from his tone. "Who tripped me when I would have stabbed Quos Reggar? Who shot a second dose of _theol_ into my veins?" She drew away from him, then, and the look she threw stung like a whip. "Come, _Sha_ Shane. If that is your belief, then I must indeed go first." Lithely, she lowered herself over the edge of the shaft and disappeared down a metal ladder set in one wall. * * * * * Knife still in hand, Shane followed. The effort made him shake, and under the strain of climbing, the claw-wound in his side began to bleed again. Then, at last, they were in the murky passageway below, and Talu was leading him swiftly through the darkness. Once Shane staggered and would have fallen, had not the _Malyalara_ caught him; and once he dropped the knife. But she picked it up again, and her groping hand strayed into the blood as she sought to return the weapon. So she made him sit down while she tore up some garment and bandaged his wounds, and her fingers were very gentle. They went on again, then, for what seemed endless miles, till at last they came to a huge, dim-lighted ramping-spot where dull black _Malya_ flyers stood in ordered rows, their bubbles pointed up into the starlit sky. And finally they even found one with its lower hatches open, and the girl helped Shane to climb aboard. She strapped him in the pilot's seat, and herself in the other seat beside him. For a long time, it seemed, he worked at the controls with clumsy fingers, till at last, somehow, they were blasting off, roaring up and up and up into the gaudy heavens. And Talu talked to him, and braced him, and helped him hold the jet-globe steady, while seconds, or maybe hours, ticked by. Only then, suddenly, the sky about them was full of ships, great black-hulled ships that were built for ranging clear across the void. They came in hundreds--thousands, maybe--blazing in thunderous silence through the blackness of spatial night. And one of the ships swerved and came alongside the little _Malya_ flyer, and a great hatch opened in its side and sucked them in. Then the hatch slid closed again, and the darkness about them was complete. Even their jets were blacked out, killed by the great ship's pickup neutralizers. And still Shane sat in silence, staring stupidly straight ahead. But the body of the girl, Talu, came warm against him in the ebon murk, her voice a fierce, husky whisper in his ear: "You must believe me, Shane! I did not betray you--not ever! The things I did, I had to do, in order to live to pay back the blood debt of my people. You could never have killed Quos Reggar with one thrust, no matter where, for he is a cross-bred mongrel, and his body does not work as ours do." Shane forced out words: "Why tell me now? Why care about it?"