He let a spear strike rock and was rewarded with the reflected composite of a bend in the corridor. As he negotiated it, Della warned, “Watch out for that hanging stone!”
Her alarmed words fetched him an impression of the sliver of rock in all its audible clarity. But too late.
Clop!
The impact of his head snapped the needle in two and sent fragments hurtling against the wall.
“Jared,” she asked, puzzled, “aren’t you zivving?”
He feigned a groan to avoid answering — not that the instant swelling on his forehead wasn’t justification enough for the expression of pain.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.” He pushed forward briskly.
“And you aren’t zivving either.”
He tensed. Had she guessed already? Was he about to lose his only means of entry into the Zivver World?
Even convinced that he wasn’t zivving, however, she only laughed. “You’re having the same trouble I did — until I said, ‘To Radiation with what people think! I’m going to ziv all I want!’ ”
Using the reflections of her clearly enunciated syllables, he planted firmly in mind the details of the area immediately ahead. “You’re Tight. I wasn’t zivving.”
“We don’t have to deny our ability any longer, Jared.” She held on to his arm. “That’s all behind us now. We can be ourselves for the first time — really ourselves! Oh, isn’t it wonderful?”
“Sure.” He rubbed the lump on his forehead. “It’s wonderful.”
“That girl who was waiting for you at the Lower Level—”
“Zelda?”
“What an odd name — and a fuzzy-face too. Was she a — friend?”
At least the echo-generating conversation was under way again. And now he could readily hear all the obstacles.
“Yes, I suppose you’d call her a friend.”
“A good friend?”
He led her confidently around a shallow pit, half-expecting a complimentary “Now you’re zivving!” But it didn’t come.
“Yes, a good friend,” he said.
“I gathered as much — from the way she was waiting for you.”
With his head turned away, he smiled. Zivvers, it appeared, were not lacking in normal human sensitivity. And he felt somewhat gratified over the pout-formed distortion of her words when she asked, “Are you going to — miss her much?”
Hiding his amusement, he offered bravely, “I think I’ll manage to get over it.”
He faked another cough and detected a vague hollowness lurking in the rebounding sound. Fortunately, he kicked a loose stone with his next step. Its crisp clatter betrayed the details of a chasm that stretched halfway across the corridor.
Della warned, “Ziv that—”
“I ziv it!” he shot back, leading her around the hazard.
After a while she said distantly, “You had lots of friends, didn’t you?”
“I don’t think I was ever lonesome.” He regretted the statement immediately, suspecting that a Zivver in his position more logically would have been lonesome — dissatisfied with his lot.
“Not even knowing you were — different from all the others?”
“What I meant,” he hastened to explain, “was that most of the people were so nice I could almost forget I wasn’t like them.”
“You even knew that poor Zivver child,” she added thoughtfully.
“Estel. I only heard — zivved her once before.” He told her about encountering the runaway girl in the corridor.
When he had finished she asked, “And you let Mogan and the others get away without even telling them you were a Zivver too?”
“I — that is—” He swallowed heavily.
“Oh,” she said with belated comprehension, “I forgot — you had your friend Owen with you. And he would have heard your secret.”
“That’s right.”
“Anyway, you couldn’t desert the Lower Level, knowing how much they needed you.”
He listened suspiciously at her. Why had she been so quick to provide the answers for which he had been only groping? It was as though she had whimsically put him on a hook, then deftly taken him off again. Did she know he was no Zivver? Somehow it seemed his entire plan to investigate the possible Zivver-Darkness-Eyes-Light relationship might be slipping into an obscure echo void.
Again he was jarred from his thoughts by the portentous sound of fanning wings-still too distant for Della to detect. Without slowing his pace, he concentrated on the ominous flapping. There were two of the beasts trailing them now!
The logical thing to do, he readily heard, would be to dig in and face the soubats promptly — before they attracted others to the pursuit. He held off with the hope that the passage would narrow sufficiently to let him and the girl through but not the soubats.
He slowed his pace and waited for Della to say something so there would be more sounding echoes.
Clop!
The impact of shoulder against hanging stone wasn’t quite as jolting this time. It merely spun him half-around.
Angered, he snatched a pair of clickstones out of his pouch and rattled them furiously. To Radiation with what she thought! If the truth that he wasn’t a Zivver was going to come out, let it come!
Della only laughed. “Go ahead and use your stones if it’ll make you feel any more secure. I went through the same thing when I first started zivving steadily.”
“You did?” he stepped off at a brisk pace now that what lay ahead was so sharply audible.
“You’ll soon get used to it. It’s the air currents that cause all the trouble. They’re beautiful but tiring.”
Currents? Did that mean there was some way she could be aware of slow, swirling air in the corridor — something he could hear only when it was further agitated by the passage of a spear or arrow?
It was Della who tripped this time. She fell against him, throwing them both off balance and sending them reeling against the wall.
She clung to him and he could feel the moist warmth of her breath on his chest, the cleaving softness of her body against his.
He held her for a moment and she whispered, “Oh, Jared — we’re going to be so happy! No two people ever had more in common!”
Her cheek was smooth where it pressed against his shoulder and her banded tress of hair lay softly across his arm, dancing as it moved with the slight motions of her head.
Dropping his spears, he touched her face and felt the even flow of trim features, firm and fine from hairline to chin. Her waist, molded to the concavity of his other hand, was evenly curved and supple, flaring out to modestly rounded hips.
Not until then had he fully realized she might quite easily become more than just a means to an end. And he was certain he had been wrong in suspecting she was trying to deceive him — so certain that he found himself thinking of forgetting everything else and settling down with her in some remote, lesser world.
But sobering logic barged in on his reverie and he retrieved the lances abruptly, shoving off down the passage. Della was a Zivver; he wasn’t. She would find happiness in her Zivver World and he would have to be content with his quest for Light — if he managed to survive his bold invasion of the Zivver domain.
“Are you zivving now, Della?” he asked cautiously.
“Oh, I ziv all the time. Soon you will too.”
Experimentally, he listened sharply with the faint hope that he would notice some indiscernible change in the things about her. But he heard nothing. It must be as he had previously suspected: The lessness he sought was so minor that he would have to be in the presence of a number of Zivvers before its cumulative effect would be noticeable.
But, wait! There was a more direct approach.
“Della, tell me — what do you think about Darkness?”
And he could hear her echo-conveyed frown as she repeated the question and added uncertainly, “Darkness abounds in the worlds—”