"By the time we get to the top of whatever we're trying to get to the top of," rumbled Urson, "we won't be able to see anything. It'll be too dark." "Then let's hurry," Geo admonished. Sunset stained one side of the towers copper while blue shadows hugged the other. By way of a plastic-domed stairway, they mounted another eighty feet to a broader highway where they could look down on the band of lights which was the one they had just left. They were beginning to clear the roofs of the lower buildings now. On this road fewer lights were working. They were just about to enter a dark section when a figure appeared in silhouette at the other end. They stopped, but the figure was suddenly gone. A little farther, Geo suddenly halted and said, "There!" Two hundred feet ahead of them, what may have been a naked woman rose from the ground, and began to walk backwards until she disappeared into the next dark length of road. "Do you think she was running away from us?" Iimmi asked. Urson reached out and touched Iimmi's jewel. "I wish we have some more light around here." "Yeah," Iimmi agreed. They continued. The skeleton lay at the twilight edge of the next stretch of functioning lights. The rib cage marked sharp lines on the pavement with shadow from the lamps' glare. "Do we turn back now?" Urson asked. "A skeleton can't hurt you," Iimmi said. "But what about the live one we saw?" countered Urson. "... and here she comes now," Geo whispered in a cynical stage voice. In fact two figures approached them through the shadow. As Urson, Geo and Iimmi moved closer, one stopped, and then the other a few steps before the first. Then they dropped. Geo couldn't tell if they fell, or lay down quickly on the roadway. But they seemed to have disappeared. "Go on?" asked Urson. "Go on," said Geo. Pause. "Go on," from Geo. Two more skeletons lay on the road where the figures had disappeared a minute before. "They don't seem dangerous," Geo said. "But what do they do? Die every time they see us?" "Hey," Iimmi said. "What's that? Listen." It was a sickly liquid sound, like mud dropping into itself. Something was falling from the sky. No, not the sky, but from the roadway that crossed fifty feet above them. Looking down again, they saw that a blob of something was growing on the pavement ten feet from them.