She turned aside and raced off into the nearest corridor, choosing a direction at random, and a moment later she had forgotten her revulsion.
Genoaro's scent, along with the associated scents of other excited hyenas, came to her a few minutes later, as she passed through a maze of low-ceilinged access tunnels. She stopped, filled her nostrils with him, savoring the mingled odors of his sweat, the metallic burnt-clay reek of his glass furnace — a scent that still clung to him — and the coppery tang of fresh blood.
She pounded after him, smiling, feeling an unambiguous pleasure at the thought of seeing him. She burst from the access tunnels into a long, empty warehouse bay, and heard the yelping of a pack. The last hyena disappeared into a corridor on the far side of the bay, and she increased her speed, ignoring the pain that began to stitch her side. She could feel her face stretching in a wild fixed grin, and she barked with anticipation.
She caught up with the pack at the exit of the corridor into another large bay. She recognized Genoaro, running at the front of the pack, legs pumping easily, body hunched forward in yearning. Then she saw what the pack was running.
Half a dozen preadolescent children raced desperately for the next tunnel. They wore the gray rags of Holding Ark refugees, and their thin legs flashed in the blue light. They wasted no energy on cries for help.
A brief keen delight lifted her forward, shouldering the other hyenas aside. She caught up with Genoaro and laughed. He glanced over, recognized her, and dodged aside in startlement. He slowed, his face filling with confusion. Then he took her arm and jerked her to a stop.
She tried to twist free, but his fingers tightened painfully.
"What are you doing, Cayten?" he asked, in a voice she did not recognize.
"Hunting," she said, and giggled. Her feet still wanted to run, and she danced up and down in place.
He groaned and reached up to his skein. Watching his face, she thought: A light just went out behind his face.
He shook her. "Crank down, Cayten. Come on."
The pack disappeared into the far corridor, and she felt a sudden heaviness in her heart.
"Yes, all right." She twisted the vernier, and a large part of the world died away softly.
She became aware of what she had been doing, in stages, as though a holoprojectionist with an unsteady hand had taken control of her mind's eye. The Dark and its deadly scents. The tween corridors and their shifting currents of life. Her hunt for Genoaro. The Ark children, fleeing from her teeth, from her hunger.
"Oh," she gasped. "Oh."
"You don't understand," Genoaro said.
Her revulsion, which had first centered on herself, widened to include him, and she did pull away finally, and took several involuntary steps back.
"What... what were you doing?" She could barely stand to look at him, but then details sank in. His hair stood up in greasy tufts; his face was dark with week-old beard. His whiskery mouth was stained with some clotted black material.
Genoaro shook his head dumbly, watching her with dull eyes.
"What were you doing?" she shouted, and sprang at him, fists balled.
He made no move to defend himself when she thumped his chest. He said nothing until she grew tired and let her hands drop to her sides.
"Really, Cayten, you're wrong," he said, in a barely audible whisper. "It's just sport; we wouldn't have hurt them. When we catch them, we give them money and let them go. Who does it hurt? It's nothing, compared to the other things they're willing to do for money, things they do all the time."
She covered her face, and concentrated on controlling her breathing. The skein idled in her backbrain, but she was barely aware of its influence. When she thought she could speak with some semblance of calm, she looked at him. "Will you take me home?"
He looked at the corridor into which the pack had run, then shrugged.
"Yes, of course, Cayten."
They were almost out of the tween corridors, when she smelled fresh death. Even though her skein was only idling, she still felt drawn to investigate the off-corridor maintenance shaft from which the smell came. She started toward the shaft, impelled by her skein, and then thought, What's wrong with me?
"No," Genoaro said, just as she decided not to look. His voice changed her mind.
"No?" She studied his face. He was almost a stranger, but not quite. Something under that sheath of twitching muscle still showed the presence of Genoaro Maryal, but he was looking for a place to hide.
She ducked through the oval pressure hatchway, into the shaft. In the dim red glow of the safety light lay a small, ravaged corpse, eviscerated and partially dismembered. Thin ribs thrust whitely from what was left of the torso, and the floor was slick with blood and other fluids.
When she backed out, gagging, Genoaro was gone.
GENOARO DIDN'T come home. Cayten roamed her studio silently, doing no work, feeling a revulsion for herself, and for Genoaro, so powerful that it seemed to produce an odd species of numbness. She could feel an agony trying to be born, but it was as if her mind were refusing to process the thing she had learned about Genoaro, as if it were fighting the onset of some storm that would forever alter the shoreline between her and Genoaro.
She found herself, perversely, thinking of the many tender things that Genoaro had done for her in the sixteen years she had known him.
So much evidence contradicted the new knowledge she had gained of him in the tween corridors. She paused beside the glass-fronted case in which she kept those things she had made that were too precious to sell. On the bottom shelf was a small begging bowl she had made when she was still learning her craft, before her skills had brought her the critical and financial success she now enjoyed. The bowl was built on an armature of clone-grown walrus ivory, a net of warm, pale yellow, polished to a glassy smoothness. Genoaro, at the time still an unknown himself, still working in relative poverty, had given her the planet-born gems from which she had cut the major parts of the design. Viewed from the top, the bowl displayed a man and woman carved from lambent blue-white moonstone, languorously entwined on a shimmering coverlet of black opal.
The two of them.... The piece had marked the beginning of her rise to prominence. He had bought her the gemstone slabs, a gift he could not afford, as an expression of his faith in her talent.
She opened the case and took out the bowl. The ivory warmed her fingers, but the opal sucked away the heat. She traced the moonstone figures with her fingertip, concentrating on the silky texture.
Her hands suddenly shook with an impulse to smash the bowl against the wall. Instead, she returned it to the case, very carefully, so carefully.
She went to Thendard that night.
She told him everything, all the terrible details.
When she was done, he shook his great head, slowly, his jowls quivering. "Cayten, Cayten. I hardly know what to say. I suppose I didn't know Genoara as well as I once thought I did."
She looked at her hands, which twisted together in her lap like two creatures with a separate life. "Nor did I. But I still love him, Thendard, though I hate myself for it."