Only one thing was clear to Sumner. He had been duped. Behind his pain and fear a thick anguish thrummed. "Used by a distort!" he moaned. "Corby knew. Pissleaker! He knew Jeanlu wasn't dead."He shuffled on, trying to follow the highway as it dipped in and out of the death-calm dunes. The rocks around him were scorching, but his heart was chilled. The more apparent the hopelessness of his situation became, the angrier he got—enraged at himself for being such a docile fool. I should've left Nefandi in the lurch when I had the chance. A sour taste gelled in the back of his throat. He wanted to spit it out but his mouth was parched.Afterwards, he lost the highway amid coils and loops of rock. By this time the sun had rolled to the horizon, and the wild clouds in the north were piled high, dark as a mountain. He leaned against a thrust of stone that arced steeply and fanned into a mesh of spikes and bristles. The material was slick and clear-edged. In the shadows it was already seeping a faint green glow.He looked north at a ridge of far-distant mountains. Alpenglow, a misty red, outlined the summits. Closer in, the edge of the Flats was visible among the long shadows. Just beyond it, surrounded by drowsy ferns and a dark grove of veiled cypress, was a pond. Its long body flashed like beaten gold in the dusk. No pangolins were in sight.He shambled over the smooth rock and the drifts of sand. The scent of fresh water crisscrossed the air, coming and going, until he pushed through the ferns. Then it rose up like a wall, and he stepped through it, giddy. The water was clean and cool, gurgling from a cleft boulder matted over with moss and long green shoots. He went down on his knees before it and drank, moaning and rolling his eyes. When he had slaked his thirst, he doused his face and his burning neck. Finally, he lay back in the thick grass and let the leaf-shifted twilight play over him.Momentarily at peace with himself, his mind fell back from its despair, and he wondered why Corby had sent him to that living corpse. Was that really Jeanlu? Thinking about it, he decided it was. Though the features had been with-ered, he had recognized her hair and eyes. He could still feel the frosted charge she had sizzled through him. The vacancy in his chest and shoulders lingered, as if he had been drained. Like a spider, he imagined. She was sucking out my life like a spider.It was darker, the sun was a crown of flame among the fantastic shapes in the east, and he was trying to devise a way of carrying some water, when he heard an evil sound. A huge, hollow cough swelled out of the night shadows among the cypresses. He couldn't even begin to guess what it was. Pangos should be asleep now, he considered, hoping to calm himself. But other, more ominous possibilities remained: jag-uars, dorga renegades, flying gnous.He pushed to his feet and immediately saw the gleam of last light in five pairs of eyes across the pond from him. As he stepped back, they stepped out—five man-size hind rats, snout-jaws gaping, stunted forearms greedily clacking claws.Sumner whined, and the sound of his fear excited the creatures. They trotted around the pond toward him, barking and snapping their jaws.Sumner plunged through the brake of ferns and burst toward the Flats. The hind rats spartled after him, screaming raucously as they closed in. Even after he made it to the green sand he dragged on as fast as he could, not daring to glance back until his shoes slapped the hard surface of a rockshelf.He turned about and nearly collapsed. The hind rats hadn't stopped at the edge. They were kicking up flares of sand as they scampered toward him. He leaped back and dashed over the fine-grained rock, eyes straining in the falling light for pits and scoops.He ran strong and reckless, leaving all his strength be-hind. When he collapsed, his leg muscles were bunched, his chest was aching, and he had to gulp for breath. In an instant the hind rats were on him. He was surrounded by their barks and he heard them circling for the lunge.It was a long, hysterical moment before he realized that he wasn't going to be mauled. The yipping of the creatures broke off abruptly, and he thrashed about. The hind rats were gone. They had never been there. The sand was ruffled by only his feet.He got up timidly and looked toward the pond. Dark-ness obscured it, but by the green glow of the Flats he saw the gleam of the hind rats' eyes. They were watching him from the edge.Suddenly two of them bounded forward, shrieking and kicking up sand. Sumner wailed, but he was too spent to break into a run. Stiff as chalk, he stood gawking as the hind rats raced for him. They were ten meters away, ribbons of saliva running off their jowls, when the space around them fractured. They vanished.Yak pus!All five hind rats were squatting at the fringe of the Flats, sixty meters away, their tiny eyes green sparks in the shadows. None had so much as stirred. Sumner kneaded his face with his knuckles. I'm losing my mind."No you're not."Sumner wheeled around. Corby was standing behind him, his face and hands milky green in the phosphor glow. His eyes glared bright as an animal's.Sumner stammered, but the boy's form wrinkled away like a mirage.Wog! I'm luned!"Just projecting." The voice came from behind him again. He turned, this time more slowly, screwing up his eyes to see better. The boy was there, solid as the rock turret along-side him. "Stop pushing out," Corby said. "Focus in." His body blurred off into the ghost light of the Flats."Corby!" Sumner bawled. "Stop jooching me!"A voice slashed through his head, so loud that he reeled: "I'm not!" Corby's image ricocheted across his field of vision, appearing and vanishing on ledges, dunes, spires. Then it was gone.Easy, driftbrain—easy. Sumner closed his eyes. He sensed the boy's contact within him. Blood was still banging in his ears from his run, but even so he could hear a hushed presence at the back of his mind. A cooing, a whispered chant was echoing there—a dreadful recall of the corpse's alien muttering. He was ready to flick his eyes open to get away from that sound, except that he heard something else:Corby's voice, cool and rational. "It's the Flats, Father. It's empty. Your mind's filling it up."He opened his eyes. Corby was watching him with a concerned smile. The image lasted until Sumner moved; then it, too, blinked away.He closed his eyes again and listened, past the boom of his blood and Jeanlu's eerie lipping, for Corby. "Keep your mind still," the boy's voice whispered within him. "Don't talk to yourself. And don't be afraid.""Where are you?" Sumner asked aloud. Jeanlu's mumblings got louder, hissing through the blood beat. "I can't link with you long," Corby said, his voice already thinning. "Listen. Being is flow. And in the flow is pattern. But there can be no meaning until you stop strug-gling. Consciousness itself is power. Become what you are. If you re quiet, you'll …" Silence."What? I'll what?"A squawking chant caromed across his brain, and Sum-ner snapped open his eyes to see the black, shrunken corpse of Jeanlu dancing obscenely before him. Wwau! He jumped backwards and had to struggle with himself not to dash off. "It's a ghost, driftbrain," he said aloud to calm himself. "It can't touch you."Jeanlu's body shimmied closer. He could see through the peeled, scabby skin. The face was thin as wind, but shiny, the bulbous eyes trembling in their sockets. Sumner held himself steady. "Not real," he encouraged himself. "Not real."The corpse's body disappeared, but the shiny, cracked face remained, stretched into a maniacal grimace. Then it, too, faded, and he was alone. A night bird tolled from the cypress pond, but otherwise there was silence.