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had a chance, he had hope, and that was enough to keep him going long past the point where

he would normally have been exhausted.

At last, when he had cleared all obstructions from the door, Jommy considered his options.

The vault door weighed several tons and was held secure with thick pistons. However, despite

its bulk, the motors and the lock were controlled by a simple spring-loaded hydraulic

mechanism.

Completely focused on his task, Jommy tinkered with the dead controls. He needed only a

power source to activate them, and then he could short-circuit and bypass the vault’s standard

combination. For him, this was child’s play.

Now that he no longer had any need for the hand-held locator device, he removed the back

plate and exposed its circuits. Pulling out the tiny power source, he inserted and adapted it for

the vault door’s security controls. He was rewarded to see the lights on the locking panel glow

green and amber. Jommy pulled more wires from his tracker, cross-connected them, then

hooked the detector to the motor controls for the large locking wheel.

Powered again, the locking bolts slid aside, making the sealed chamber vibrate. The motion

caused the whole self-contained vault to shift and settle where it rested precariously in the

unstable rubble. Jommy knew that if the rubble pile collapsed beneath him, he—and the

vault—could be buried in a giant cave-in. He fought for his balance, ready to leap free at the

last moment.

Then the thick locking bolts finally thumped into place, and the door unsealed itself with a

hiss. Thick, lubricated cylinders heaved the massive barrier on gigantic hinges. Because the

vault box lay tilted backward, the door lifted against gravity, then ground to a grudging halt,

leaving a gap barely two feet wide.

The shifting rubble stabilized, and the ground beneath Jommy’s feet stopped trembling. He

approached the laboratory chamber cautiously. Wafting from the thick darkness of the

interior, he could smell stale air, spilled chemicals, burned circuitry. The disintegrator tube

would be in there.

Moving anxiously, Jommy squirmed through the gap and climbed partway inside, fearing

that the uncertain pistons would release their hold at any moment. Even though the

jury-rigged power source kept the controls active, the several-ton door could easily slam back

down. He slipped inside quickly, dropped to the tilted floor, and squatted, catching his breath.

Still not safe, though: If the door crashed shut now, he would be trapped in a tomb.

Jommy fumbled his way forward, straining to see details in the darkness. Then he tripped

on something and crashed to his knees. Catching himself with palms flat against the metal

floor, he found himself staring face to face with a pallid corpse.

The man had been smashed, his face bruised, his eyes open. Jommy scrambled backward

and bumped into a second dead man. As his eyes adjusted, he noted that both men were

wearing the armbands of the secret police. Both looked like broken dolls, tossed about in the

tantrum of a hyperactive child.

Jommy realized what had happened. Though the vault walls were impregnable, this whole

room had crashed down during the intense bombardment of the palace. To the men sealed

inside, it would have been like being in a barrel going over a waterfall. They had been smashed

to a pulp.

The slice of daylight shining through the open door provided just enough illumination for

him to make his inspection. Forcing himself to ignore the corpses, Jommy searched the debris.

His tendrils gave him no advantage; in the thick-walled vault, he could sense nothing around

him, nothing outside. A table lay overturned among smashed bottles; papers were strewn like

the feathers of a startled chicken. Wall brackets had snapped, tumbling and twisting metal

shelves into piles. Jommy flung the shelves aside with a loud clatter, searching for his

disintegrator.

With a distant rumble, the shaking vault continued to settle, and the floor tilted at a more

substantial angle. Jommy scrambled to keep his balance. Three unbroken canisters and a metal

pipe rolled down to the low point of a back corner. Then, as the room came to rest at a new

unstable point, he spotted the slender, polished tube that had saved his life so many times. His

father’s weapon!

With a wash of relief and a sudden flood of urgency—something from his slan senses, even

here in the thick-walled vault?—he knew he had to get out of there. He grabbed the weapon

and worked his way up the steep and slippery floor, past the scarecrowish corpses. Victorious,

with the disintegrator in one hand, he worked his head and shoulder through the door gap,

then balanced on his elbows. He had done it!

As he blinked in the low light of sunset, cradling the weapon, he heard voices outside, other

people moving through the rubble. Nearby. Treasure seekers must be looking for valuable

artifacts and antique treasures in the palace ruins. He hadn’t sensed them from inside the

thick-walled chamber.

As he oriented himself and turned, in the cramped gap, he felt a tingling, sensed someone

very close—and then hands grabbed his shoulders from behind. A man was standing right on

top of the partially open vault door above him. “Here he is! I told you I saw someone up here.”

Caught halfway in and out of the door gap, Jommy struggled, but the metal floor and walls

were slippery and he couldn’t get a solid grip. People rushed forward to grab him. To his

dismay, he dropped the disintegrator weapon as he tried to wrench himself free. He heard the

tube clatter back down among the debris.

More scavengers clutched at him, wrenching his arm. Someone wrapped fingers in his hair

and yanked it with a painful tug. “Hey, look at this. He’s got tendrils!”

“Tendrils! He’s a bloody slan!”

“Looks like we caught ourselves one of the enemy.”

«
^
»

Now that Anthea’s head was filled with wonderful, horrible knowledge from the library’s “true

archives,” she knew what she had to do. Long ago, the children of Samuel Lann had built a

large subterranean hideout right under the noses of the humans. The Porgrave message said

that it had been designed to last for centuries.

That was where she would go.

The baby rested comfortably against her chest as she hurried down the corridor from the

vault room. Before she could leave the great stone building, however, Anthea heard a ruckus

coming from Mr. Reynolds’s office. “Help me, somebody! Is anybody out there?”

As she heard his plaintive tone, a lump formed in her throat. So many people had been

awful to her since the birth of the baby, but not Reynolds. What sort of person was she turning

into? Did she have to leave the poor man there, helpless? With all the turmoil in the city, there

would be looters, marauders—and no police or rescue workers. What if Mr. Reynolds starved

to death because she had tied him up, left him with no chance of escape.

She swallowed hard, hesitated, then made up her mind. When she stepped into his office,

he flinched when he saw her. “Don’t hit me again! I won’t hurt you.”

“Right now you’d say anything to get yourself free.”

He hung his head. “Yes, in fact, I probably would. I don’t understand who you are, or what

you want—”

“I just want to live in peace, to get from day to day without strangers trying to kill me!”

“But you have a
slan baby
, madam. Even if I wanted to, how could I harm you? Can’t you

just … manipulate my thoughts? Why not brainwash me so that I won’t even remember you

were here?”

Anthea marched toward where he was tied up in his chair. “Now you listen to me,

Mr. Reynolds.” She showed him the back of her head, and though he squinted without his

glasses, he could definitely see that she had no tendrils. “I’m not a slan. Neither was my

husband. But somehow I gave birth to a baby with tendrils. Don’t ask me how.” She turned

back around, let him take a good look at the infant’s innocent face. “I never expected this to

happen, but I am not going to give up my baby. I will not let him be harmed by lynch mobs of

ignorant and prejudiced people. We’re getting out of here, to safety.”

“But … but, ma’am—I didn’t threaten him in any way.”

She crossed her arms. “I saw the look of horror on your face.”

“Probably more a look of surprise. I’ve never seen a slan baby. In fact, we don’t get many

babies in the library.” A look of alarm crossed his face. “Wait! If you’re going away, please

don’t leave me tied up like this!”

Though she tried to be stern, Anthea simply wasn’t very good at looking tough. “It’s your

lucky day, Mr. Reynolds. I’ve decided not to.”

“My lucky day…” he groaned.

She took the eyeglasses from his pocket and set them on a filing cabinet in the far corner of

the room. “I just want a head start.” She unbound both of his arms. “You can free your own

feet. By the time you get out of this chair and find your glasses, we’ll have vanished into the

streets. It won’t do you any good to chase after us.”

“I have no interest in chasing after you, Madam! You’d just beat me up again. I wish you’d

asked for my help instead…”

She felt a twinge in her heart. “I feel the same, Mr. Reynolds. But the sad fact is, if you

helped me, you’d be putting yourself in danger, too.” She winced at the memory of poor

Davis, how he’d been killed so that she and the baby could get away. As she turned to leave,

Anthea hesitated at the door of his office. “You’re a man of books and of learning. Don’t let

prejudice and ignorance get the best of you. In fact, why don’t you go into that archives vault

and take a good look at those reports from the Slan Wars? Learn the truth. There’s plenty of

blame to go around, for humans and slans alike. Protect those records. Someday, they might

help us all understand each other.”

She left out of the room, not even feeling the need to hurry. She could see something

trustworthy in the librarian’s round eyes.

*

*

*

From the mysterious Porgrave transmission, Anthea had an instinctive grasp of how to get

to the safe underground base—if it still existed. Slans had apparently hidden there for many

generations, and the old redoubt had been built to last for centuries, maybe even millennia, as

a stronghold. However, Centropolis itself had changed a great deal after such a long passage of

time and the long rebuilding from the devastating Slan Wars.

Anthea had faith it would still be there.

Leaving the shelter of the library, she discovered it was a new morning, though the city was

a chaos of still-burning fires, collapsed skyscrapers, smashed cars, and crushed bodies. Anthea

spent most of the day picking her way through the streets, hiding from anyone who might see

her. In normal, civilized times, no one would have refused to help a mother and her baby;

now, though, she looked like a victim, an easy target. And if anyone should notice the baby’s

tendrils …

When she finally stood at the supposed entrance to the hidden underground base, she

fought back her disappointment and surprise. Maybe it had been a wild-goose chase after all.

The small, old building was nondescript, intentionally designed so that no one would give it

a second glance. A small sign in the window said that it was a “Museum of Sewing

Machines”—a legitimate-sounding place, but one that would not entice great crowds of

visitors. Even with the blast marks and rubble in the streets, this structure remained intact and

untouched. Anthea realized that the building was incredibly old, deceptively ancient, and

reinforced to the point that it must be virtually indestructible. The small, quiet museum had

probably existed in this spot since the days of the Slan Wars.

Looking around furtively, Anthea scurried over to the Museum of Sewing Machines and

found the door unlocked. That seemed strange to her, but then she realized that the mobs had

many more tempting places to ransack.

The current owners of the small building probably didn’t even know its connection to the

ancient slan hideout … or maybe hidden slans watched over the building. She clung to that