I woke swinging, a gentle motion, side to side. For a second, I enjoyed it. Then everything lurched.

  I opened my eyes, light stabbing straight into my brain. My migraine was like a monster eating a star and spitting out flashing spears. The swinging was giving me motion sickness. I turned my head to throw up, and forgot all about my migraine.

  There was no floor.

  I was in the air, strapped to someone I didn’t recognize, a good fifty or sixty meters above a bubbling vat of puke-brown, stinking recyclables.

  The rope broke and we fell. I whimpered, then was violently jerked upward.

  Not upward. To a stop. A poor man's drop harness, working on a straight line. Two wheels, clamping the line. Press the hand grip to loosen the wheels and let you fall. Release it and the wheels engaged, running along the line while breaking against metal pads.

  Only a void-loving crudmuncher could invent something like that. Gravity vanished and we fell again, only to be yanked to a stop. Fall, yank, fall, yank. My back felt like it was breaking. My head felt like it was being smashed against the distant floor over and over. I contemplated conjuring a thread of force just to faint again.

  Someone screamed, passing us on a parallel line.

  Hao, zipping downward faster than I would have dared, riding the breaks and laughing like a punch-mad bluegrub addict, one hand on the drop rig grip, the other clutching Montar's void-loving bag of junk.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Hopefully, she'd dip herself in the recycling vats deep enough to shut her up.

  She didn't, and neither did we. The Kylians hauled us in to the side, landing us on a thick steel gantry.

  I rose on shaky legs to thank my rescuer, whom I hadn't seen other than a deep purple body suit pressed against my side. I came eye to eye with Riina.

  My surprise must have been obvious, because she smiled, the kind of smile you imagine would be followed by a mischievous finger across the lips and a shushing sound. Luckily for me, she just nodded, because if she'd put a finger on my lips I would have turned beet purple.

  Shamed by your own grandmother. Right.

  "You know how to shoot?" I asked her instead, partially to mask my embarrassment.

  "Of course," she said, without hesitation.

  "Rifles or handguns?"

  "Both," she said, "although I prefer up close and personal."

  "Then you'll love this," I said, pulling my M3 from my holster and offering it to her, butt first. My hand shook slightly as I held it.

  She hesitated. The people around us, those landing from the drop rigs with soft thuds, or those shuffling away along the gantries, cast guilty glances at us, me holding a high caliber handgun, Riina contemplating it.

  "Don't you need it?" she said.

  "Not as much as you do," I said.

  "No, likely not," she agreed. "I saw what you did."

  "That," I said, "was four months of daily warding, sewn up in a fine jacket and blown up all at once. Don't expect anything that fancy again. But I've got a few wards left. You people have nothing."

  "Less than nothing," Riina said, taking the M3 from me. "We have nowhere to go."

  That made me grin through the pain in my skull.

  "Then I have a gift for you," I said, offering her my two spare magazines for the M3. "If you'd be so kind as to holler for Hao."

  She hollered, a deep bellow loud enough to kick me in my hurting brain, but not loud enough for my remaining wards to cut in and protect me.

  I staggered away. Qualifiers. There's a world of hurt in missing them.