"Flixing say you got a meat thing. You trade meat thing, I make it fifty baggings."

Tygan kept his face carefully impassive. "Flix is wrong. There is no meat thing. One bag will be enough, but I'll throw in this many tasties for a half bubble," he said, holding up two five-ounce cylinders of ammonium nitrate.

"High shelf?" the Caral asked, its eyebulbs swiveling slightly, which meant the creature was excited. Carals could source pretty much anything under the suns, but they were awful at poker, and they went completely nuts for "tasties." Anything with ammonia in it was valuable enough for currency with them, but ammonium nitrate was like solid platinum. It wasn't that difficult to produce if you knew anything about chemistry, but the Caralli were as bad at manufacturing as they were at poker, and Tygan wasn't about to tell them he had enough of the stuff to blow up a city block.

"Top shelf," he said calmly.

The Caral's slimy hide twitched slightly, and it looked around, its long pink brain visibly working beneath its translucent skin. Then it turned back to Tygan, trying to disguise its eagerness with a painfully over-casual, "Those tasties and an itty-bit of the meat thing, and I give thirty baggings and the halfa bubbling."

"No meat thing. I just need the half bubble and the meds, Caral. Take the radial unit and the tasties, or I'll go find Fred."

"No!" The Caral said quickly. "No finding Fred. You bring good things, Tygan Ravenaris. For you I make it one halfa-bubbling, and one bagging, you give me one silver thing and that many tasties... Yes?"

Tygan resisted the urge to roll his eyes. "Yes."

The Caral sniffled, which meant it was pouting. "No meat thing?" it asked in an almost childishly pathetic voice. If there was one thing a Caral liked more than ammonium nitrate, it was red-meat carrion.

"No meat thing," Tygan said firmly.

With another sniff the Caral finalized its end of the order.

Tygan grinned and pressed his thumb to the purchase doc that popped up on his side of the technoglass divider. Then he deposited his payment – a half-pound wad of silver radial wire and the two cylinders of ammonium nitrate – in his end of the trading tube.

A few minutes later he left the Caralli mercantile, a small black bag of contraband terrazinone hidden in his jacket pocket, a two-thousand gallon drum of pure H2O trailing behind him on a delivery glider.

He managed not to attract any attention the whole way through the Understory market. The factory had just changed shifts and traffic was heavy, which made it that much easier to blend in, to become just one little speck of homo-sapiens drifting among the thousands of other species that teemed and flowed through the streets of the Understory. He left the main market street and took several turns, winding his way deeper and deeper into the oldest, most poverty stricken part of the Alpha-Epsilon Block, passing through three centuries worth of technological and architectural advances and about as many centuries of neglect and decay.

He glanced around, made sure none of the Draggos haunting the burning pile of trash on the corner were watching, and ducked into a long-empty metal and glass building, then crossed the marble foyer to a set of broad steps that led down to what had once been the Charlie Station. He took the steps two at a time. At the bottom he walked the length of the platform and unlocked a padlocked door marked "Employees Only," opening and closing it carefully to avoid making any noise.

He made it all the way down the access tunnel to the tracks of the old, abandoned transit system before his luck changed.

"Where have you been?"

He slowed for only a moment, but it was enough to tell the owner of that low, sultry voice that he had heard her.

"Did you bring me something?"

Tygan shook his head. "You shouldn't be down here," he said, glancing at the inky shadows beneath another access tunnel archway. The Noxvalkyr weren't lurking about, but they wouldn't be gone for long. "And no I didn't bring you anything."

The slender form of a young Manaquai became visible, her pale skin beginning to glow a silvery blue as she stopped muting her natural bioluminescence. "You brought her something," the girl said, her voice deceptively quiet.

"Flix," Tygan said, raising an eyebrow in warning. "This isn't any of your business. Go back to your pack. And I don't buy treats for kids who think it's ok to spy on their friends and blab about it topside."

Flix lifted her chin. "I'm not a kid anymore."

Tygan regarded her for a moment. She glanced away first, a look of misery flitting over her pretty face before she managed to hide it. "Did Thorga throw you out again?"

Her wince was answer enough.

Tygan shook his head and started walking again.

Immediately Flix rushed to keep up with him. "Can I stay with you? Please? Just for a little while. I'll be good, I promise. I won't get into any trouble, and I'll cook you dinner every night... keep your room clean... please?"

He kept moving.

"It wasn't so bad last time, was it? I'm sorry about how it ended –"

"You lied to my face and stole everything I had," Tygan said.

"I gave it back," she pointed out.

"After the NV beat me up and left me for dead because I couldn't pay them."

"I'm sorry, I didn't know they were going to do that –"

"Hey Hairy," Tygan said, sidestepping the mat of sticky silk that sprawled from the mouth of the B tunnel, declaring it the entrance to a Lygonian spider's lair. "Anything interesting today?"

In the depths of the tunnel a pair of round, obsidian-mirror eyes glinted in the blue light of Flix's glow. "Come closer and I'll tell you," said a dry, dusty, ancient voice.

Ty chuckled. "Nice try," he called over his shoulder.

"Some other time perhaps," the spider breathed, sidling stealthily forward, its fangs clicking together in anticipation.

Flix shivered and hurried after Ty. "I don't know how you can live here with that thing," she gasped.

Ty just glanced at her as he brought the glider to a halt a few dozen yards past the B, and waved his telekey over what looked like a plain section of wall. The hologram dissolved into flickering hexagons, revealing his front door. But instead of unlocking it and going in, he hooked his thumbs in his beltloops, leaned his right shoulder on the wall of the tunnel, and gave Flix a pointed look.

She met his gaze, deliberately ignoring his not-so-subtle hint. When he didn't move, she heaved an exasperated sigh and gestured emphatically toward the B tunnel. "Oh, come on! You're really going to leave me out here with that thing?"

Ty raised his eyebrows. "I didn't tell you to come down here. You did that all by yourself. Why should leaving be any different?"

Flix blinked, her expression softening instantly from annoyed to lost and frightened. "Come on... please?" she whispered, crossing her arms over her chest. "I don't have anywhere else to go."

"That's not my fault," he said wearily, looking away.

Flix ground her teeth, her lower lip tightening into an ugly pout. "It's her, isn't it," she said bitterly. "You don't want me to come in because she's in there."

"And that would be none of your business," Ty said, tilting his head. "Listen, kid. Your Mom might be angry, but she loves you. Your whole family loves you. Go home, Flix. Go home, tell your Mom you're sorry for whatever got you thrown out, deal with the consequences, and stop coming down here." Then he turned and opened the door, guiding the glider in front of him into his makeshift airlock and stepping in after it. "Good night," he said, catching a glimpse of Flix's furious scowl as he closed the outer door in her face. He slapped the control panel to reactivate the cloak he had put up, then turned and crossed the corrugated floor of his airlock entryway.

The second airlock door – an old aquacrawler escape hatch he had retrofitted with a heavy security bolting mechanism – let out a hiss as he cranked the gear wheel around, bringing the bolts thunking into their housings and unsealing the inner ring. The seal wasn't entirely necessary, but it did provide some protection from the gruesome noises of tunnel night life.

Right away he knew something was wrong. The next instant he ducked, his survival-honed reflexes kicking in before he had even processed the threat as a chair leg, and the foe as a girl wearing his patched over scrounging shirt.

The girl didn't give up easy. She missed with the chair leg, but that didn't stop her forward momentum, and instead of being clobbered in the face, he wound up slamming down on his backside on the floor, a screaming fury of bony knees and elbows landing on top of him.

"Hey, it's just me! I'm not gonna hurt you! Calm down –" his words ended on a grunt of pain as she got in a good jab to his ribs.

Instantly the girl went still.

Tygan inhaled.

The girl scrambled off of him, her hands clamped over her mouth, her eyes wide as she looked at him. For a moment that's all they did, just sat there inside the doorway, staring at each other. Then the girl closed her eyes.

"Say that again," she whispered.

To Tygan, it was like hearing music the moment she opened her mouth. Her accent was lyrical, rolling off her tongue in the way only human words could, and it took a moment for his brain to stop making love to the sound of her voice long enough to form a reply. "I'm not going to hurt you," he finally murmured, slowly, trying to summon up the accent he had learned from his parents.

She gasped sharply, a small frown marring her forehead. And then she started sobbing silently behind her hands, only her shoulders moving.

"I'm sorry if I frightened you," Tygan said carefully. "I... I ah... I'm Tygan. By the way."

The girl opened her eyes and looked at him.