Nevertheless, when the sun went down she broke through thick turf and peered around at the forest. The moon had not yet risen, and a nearby stream was almost as dark as ice. The fir trees kept the same deep
tone as in bright sunlight. Still, all the colors were black.
Dark breathed deeply of the cold air. It was stuffy underground, through she had not had to switch to reducing her own oxygen. That was for deeper down, in altogether more difficult regions.
The air smelled of moss and ferns, evergreen trees, and weathered stone. But under it all was the sulfurous volcano, and the sweet delicate fragrance of flyers.
Sinking down into the earth once more, Dark traveled on.
* * *
The closer Dark got to the volcano, the more jumbled and erratic grew the strata. Lava flows and land movement, glaciers and erosion had scarred and unsettled and twisted the surface and all that lay beneath it. Deep underground Dark encountered a tilted slab of granite, too hard for her to dig through quickly. She followed it upward, hoping it would twist and fold back down again. But it did not, and she broke through topsoil into the chill silence of a wilderness night. Dirt and pebbles fell away from her shoulder armor. From the edge of the outcropping she looked out, in infrared, over her destination.
The view excited her. The tree-covered slope dropped to tumbled masses of blackened logs that formed the first barrier against intrusion into the flyers' land. Beyond, at the base of the volcano, solidified lava created another wasteland. The molten rock had flowed from the crater down the flank of the mountain; near the bottom it broke into two branches which ran, one to each side, until both ended like true rivers, in the sea. The northern shore was very close, and the pale nighttime waves lapped gently on the dim cool beach. To the south the lava had crept through a longer sweep of forest, burning the trees in its path and toppling those beyond its heat, for a much longer distance to the ocean. The wide solid flood and the impenetrable wooden jumble formed a natural barricade. The flyers were exiled to their peninsula, but they stayed there by choice. The humans had no way of containing them short of killing them. They could take back their wings or chain them to the ground or imprison them, but they wished to isolate the flyers, not murder them. And murder it would be if they denied the creatures flight.
The basalt streams glowed with heat retained from the day, and the volcano itself was a softly radiant cone, sparkling here and there where upwellings of magma approached the surface. The steam rising from the crater shone brightly, and among its clouds shadows soared in spirals along the edges of the column. One of the shadows dived dangerously toward the ground, risking destruction, but at the last moment it pulled up short to soar skyward again. Another followed, another, and Dark realized they were playing a game. Entranced, she hunched on the ridge and watched the flyers play. They did not notice her. No doubt they could see better than she, but their eyes would be too dazzled by the heat's luminous blackness to notice an earthbound creature's armor-shielded warmth.
Sound and light burst upon her like explosions. Clearing the ridge that had concealed it, a helicopter leaned into the air and ploughed toward her. Until this moment she had not seen or heard or sensed it. It must have been grounded, waiting for her. Its searchlights caught and blinded her for a moment, till she shook herself free in an almost automatic reaction and slid across the bare rock to the earth beyond. As she plunged toward the trees the machine roared over her, its backwash blasting up a cloud of dirt and leaves and pebbles. The 'copter screamed upward, straining to miss treetops. As it turned to chase her down again, Dark scuttled into the woods.
She had been careless. Her fascination with the volcano and the flyers had betrayed her, for her stillness must have convinced the humans that she was asleep or incapacitated.
Wondering if it would do any good, she burrowed into the earth. She felt the helicopter land, and then the lighter vibrations of footsteps. The humans could find her by the same technique, amplifying the sounds of her digging. From now on they did not even need her beacon.
She reached a boundary between bedrock and earth and followed its lessened resistance. Pausing for a moment, she heard both movement and its echoes. She felt trapped between sounds, from above and below. She started digging, pushing herself until her work drowned out all other noises. She did not stop again.
The humans could move faster down the steep terrain than she could. She was afraid they would get
far enough ahead of her to dig a trench and head her off. If they had enough equipment or construction explosives, they could surround her, or simply kill her with the shock waves of a shaped charge.
She dug violently, pushing herself forward, feeling the debris of her progress slide over her shoulder armor and across her back, filling in the tunnel as quickly as she made it. The roots of living trees, springy and thick, reached down to slow her. She had to dig between and sometimes through them. Their malleable consistency made them harder to penetrate than solid rock, and more frustrating. Dark's powerful claws could shatter stone, but they tangled in the roots and she was forced to shred the tough fibers a few strands at a time. She tired fast, and she was using oxygen far more quickly than she could take it in underground.
Dark slashed out angrily at a thick root. It crumbled completely in a powdery dust of charcoal. Dark's momentum, meeting no resistance, twisted her sideways in her narrow tunnel. She was trapped. The footsteps of the humans caught nearly up to her, and then, inexplicably, stopped. Scrabbling frantically with her feet and one clawed hand, her left front limb wedged uselessly beneath her, she managed to loosen and shift the dirt in the small enclosed space. Finally, expecting the humans to start blasting toward her at any moment, she freed herself.
Despite the ache in her left shoulder, deep under her armor, she increased her pace tremendously. She was beneath the dead trees now, and the dry porous earth contained only the roots of trees that had burned from top to deep underground, or roots riddled with insects and decay. Above her, above ground, the treetrunks lay in an impassable tangle, and that must be why the humans had paused. They could not trench her now.
Gauging her distance to the basalt flow by the pattern of returning echoes, Dark tunneled through the last few lengths of earth. She wanted to go under the stone barrier and come up on the other side in safety. But the echoes proved that she could not. The basalt was much thicker than she had hoped. It was not a single flow but many, filling a deep-cleft valley the gods only knew how far down. She could not go under and she did not have time or strength right now to go through.
It was not the naked sheet of stone that would keep the humans from her, but the intangible barrier of the flyers' boundary. That was what she had to reach. Digging hard, using the last of her stored oxygen, Dark burst up through the earth at the edge of the lava flow and scrambled out onto the hard surface. Never graceful at the best of times, she was slow and unwieldy on land. She lumbered forward, panting, her claws clacking on the rock and scraping great marks across it.
Behind her the humans shouted, as their detectors went off so loudly even Dark could hear them, and as the humans saw Dark for themselves, some for the first time.
They were very close. They had almost worked their way through the jammed treetrunks, and once they reached solid ground again they could overtake her. She scrambled on, feeling the weight of her armor as she never did underground. Its edges dragged along the basalt, gouging it deeply.