"What's going on?" I asked the Knife.

  The Gash stretched away into the distance, a dark, deep cut. A thousand tiny lights shone in it, along the walls, the paths, even the sandy depths. Thin streamers of smoke rose in the pre-dawn light.

  The Knife swore, a harsh harangue in a language I didn't know. No mistaking the curses, though, or the rage twisting his face.

  "Crudmungers," he said. "If this is another digger war, I'll find whomever is responsible and cut their ears off."

  He hurried forward, and it looked more like he was going to throw the responsible parties into the depths of the Gash, together with everyone else, the way he pushed and shoved his way forward, one hand clutching rocky outcroppings, the other waving at or slapping people who got in our way.

  Some of them turned on him in anger, but others pulled them back, into side caves crammed with humanity. We'd passed hundreds of people, and hadn't even made it to the wider paths with their stone-set vegetable beds. How all the people survived here, was beyond me. There had been little enough food and water before.

  Or maybe they didn't survive. Maybe they were an invading army of some kind, like the Knife thought. The worst equipped army in the history of the galaxy.

  I worried. About Hao, about Widen, about the ship. Mostly about being pushed over the edge. Whatever respect and distance the people gave the Knife didn't extend to me. Maybe I looked more scared, an easy target. Or maybe they didn't have the energy to care. These people were gaunt, tall or short, with the graceful limbs of generations of asteroid miners, or the heavy frames of high-grav worlders, they were uniformly pale and skinny, skin stretched taut over bones. If there was a gram of spare fat among the lot of them, I'd have been surprised.

  I made it to the wider ledge where deeper caves branched off the path. The Knife had disappeared ahead of me, and I was following his cursing, and snatches of rapid conversation that didn't make sense, broken-off words floating up on the night wind.

  Then something changed. A silence.

  You can tell when people are at their tipping point. They fall silent, a silence that stretches, without a whisper, enveloping everyone in its path. The silence before the scream.

  This silence carried up from where the Knife had gone, one of the caves with the bigger ledges below me. It traveled up the path, carried on a wave of whispers that were snuffed like flames the moment they passed. The silence reached me, and suddenly the people ahead of me were moving aside, giving me room. It was like having an invisible hand tapping everyone on the back, making them glance up at me, then withdraw.

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  They crammed into the overfull caves, the stench of sweat, sickness, and the acetone tang of hunger coming from them. But the path ahead of me was clear.

  I moved as fast as I dared, not trusting this silence. Even the ever-present wind had stilled. Only the cold remained.

  My boots tapped against the rock, my stiff hands closed on freezing stones, the silence remained. Shivers went up my back, whether from cold or fear, I couldn't tell. Something wasn't right.

  A pipe went up into the cave ahead, thin aluminum. From inside came the sound of pumping and a thin stream of water meandered over the cliff, adding its dark stain to the dark rock. A hand-cranked light shone inside, held in a hand stretched above the crowd.

  Hao.

  "What's going on?" I said, pushing my way to her side. A few people gave me hostile stares, but others pulled them back, creating an empty space around me.

  "You're back," Hao said.

  "Of course I'm back," I snarled. "What did you expect?"

  In the silence, the stares of the people around me were unnerving. I wanted to hunch over, crawl into a hiding place or, failing that, punch someone. Things were definitely not right.

  "They're coming," Hao said. She looked exhausted, her cheeks hollow, dark circles beneath her eyes. Long days and no food. She'd had a harder time here than I had outside.

  I almost yelled at her, but caught myself. I couldn't yell at someone because they were too shell-shocked to give coherent answers. It wasn't her fault that everyone was strange, or that I felt exposed.

  Hopefully, it wasn't her fault.

  "Who's coming?" I said, trying to suppress my anger and panic and failing. She should have punched me, or tried braining me with the crowbar that still hung at her belt. She didn't.

  That scared me even more.

  "Everyone," Hao said, and there was fear in her voice, a quiet scream trying to fight its way past the silence in the cave.

  "You're not making sense," I said.

  "Nothing is," she whispered, as if that would explain things. "Everyone is coming. Thousands of people. So many of them. They're falling off the cliffs and they're still coming. They're killing each other, killing themselves, and they're still coming."

  Suddenly, the Knife was there, the hood of his camouflage cloak hanging halfway down his back, the cloak torn along the neckline, the fastenings gone on one side. He'd yanked it off, or had it yanked for him.

  "What's going on?" I said.

  He gave me a stare, a distant, distracted one. Like a man haunted.

  "Remember that speech I gave you about being more?" he said.

  "Yes?" I replied, hoping for some explanation, some words that made sense.

  "You'd better be more right now, or we're all going to die."

  It was too much for me. I grabbed them both, balling my fists over their arms. Both had hard bones and harder muscles. Neither of them reacted. They could have been one person, except that Hao was a head taller than the Knife.

  "If someone doesn't explain to me, in small words, what's going on, I'm going to scream," I said.

  "Sit down," Hao said.

  I started to object, but the Knife interrupted me.

  "Sit down, Jake," he said. "You'd better hear it from the source."

  He reached behind him and pulled someone forward.

  Ade, Widen and Darrow's kid.