“THERE SHE IS!” cried Gill and Rafik.
“No, she isn’t,” Pal insisted.
Mr. Li whispered a command, and his hoverchair carried him across the room to float before the screen showing Mine Working HID.
“There he is!” the other kids who were in the training session squealed when Hajnal darted into the open area around Ramon’s sledger and slid the last twenty feet, triumphant, stopping himself just inches short of the piles of rough lunar rock that marked the end of the workings. “Didja get it? Didja get it?”
“Hajnal, Master Thief of Kezdet, strikes again!” Hajnal boasted, pulling open his jacket to reveal an extremely nervous, long-eared, white-fronted marchare. The marchare squeaked and leapt out of its hiding place with a powerful thrust of its long rear legs. The other children scrambled to catch it.
“Ow! It scratched me!”
“‘At’s nothing. Look ‘ow it got me on the way here, but I didn’t drop it.” Hajnal pulled up his shirt and proudly showed the long bloody scratches on his chest and stomach. “Now ‘urry up, you lot, and get it into the toolbox in the back of Ramon’s operator cab. I seen Ramon coming this way. Ain’t gonna believe the workings is ‘aunted if ‘e sees the blasted hanimal, is ‘e now?”
“Poor little marchare,” crooned a girl who cradled the nervous animal in her arms for a moment, petting it until its eyes stopped rolling and the long nervous ears stopped twitching. “Didn’t mean to scratch anybody, did you. poor little frightened thing? Hajnal, I don’t think we oughter put him in the toolbox, he’ll get scared.”
“If you don’t stop petting him, Eva, he’ll go to sleep on us, and we’ll lose our chance.”
The little fiends of Kezdets first graduating class had been working on Ramon Trinidad for weeks, trying to convince him the combination power unit and loading station he operated was haunted by the ghost of a mining engineer who’d been killed in an accident so grisly nobody who knew the story was ever willing to use that station again. They gauged their success by the number of holy medals and icons Ramon hung on the device, blamed the miners of the next shift for “losing” most of the icons, and competed to see who could drop the most hairraising hints about what had “really” happened to the mythical dead engineer. But Ramon was beginning to doubt their unsupported stories. It was time for some hard evidence. They were counting on the scrabbling and squeaks of the third-shift pastry cook’s pet marchare, concealed in a compartment in the back of the sledger, to provide that evidence. Hajnal, proud of his past as a free thief on Kezdet and no factory slave, had boastfully volunteered to “borrow” the marchare without the cook’s knowledge.
“It’s mean, putting him in that dark little place,” another girl piped up. “Let’s not. He’s so cute!”
“Cute,” Hajnal said darkly. “Lemme tell you, you wouldn’ think ‘e was so bleedin’ cute if you’d had to carry him through Central under your shirt, and ‘im gougin’ tracks in your belly every time he startled!”
“Sita Ram wouldn’t like it,” Eva said.
“Huh! Lukia don’t mind. She ‘elped me get away,” Hajnal boasted.
Eva’s eyes widened. All the children seemed suddenly to be looking up, over Hajnals head. Slowly he turned, certain that Ramon had spoiled his plot by reaching the workings before he could conceal the marchare.
But it wasn’t Ramon who stood behind him, but a being taller and far brighter than the little miner; a being who seemed clothed in light from Her golden horn to the silvery wisps of hair around Her hooves.
“Epona,” “Sita Ram,” “Lukia,” whispered the children, and wen they were all over the bright being.
“I knew you were here, Acorna, I knew? you wouldn’t just leave us without saying good-bye,” squealed Khetala, who had known Acorna as a person rather than a vision of goodness. She threw herself on the tall, silver-haired being in an unrehearsed_ and decidedly unwelcome-embrace.
“Get off me!” Thariinye sputtered in his own tongue. In the panic of the moment he could not remember the words the LAANYE had implanted in his cortex a few hours previously.