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five minutes Rainbird thumped his back uselessly until the paroxysm left him white and weak. She mixed a generous amount of sima into a hot broth and coaxed him into drinking it.
    He needs good food and better air. Darn that Diamada, bringing this on. Payday was still three days away, and they had barely enough coins for powdered soup mix. She knew she ate too much; her mixed blood required a lot of energy to keep going. I’m eating him out of his food and medicine.
    Two years of secrecy were all coming unraveled. Everywhere she turned, Rainbird exposed herself. The eiree on the wire, Miss Levine’s dracine, the smuggler on the sunway. She and Petrus could no longer keep up her disguise. Petrus had to go downside so he could live, and she…Well, she would have to disappear into the deepest cracks of the sunway, creeping out only at night, living on scavenged inspector rations, mosses, and whatever she could catch.
    Rainbird dozed in the chair all night, in a half-waking nightmare. She was downside again, running, frantically looking for a rib to climb back up on. Marvelo, wearing his blood-spattered suit and improbably holding a pink parasol, chased her with Miss Levine right behind him, riding in a donkey cart. When Rainbird looked up, the Day Sun had transformed into a real eye, burning and thin-slitted. A voice said I see you…
    Rainbird woke. A glance at the clock told her it was nearer to morning than not. Petrus still slept. She scribbled a note for him, grabbed boots and her extra coat, and crept out to meet the wiz.
     
    The wiz turned out to be a pale young man with an earnest way of squinting through his spectacles. He took Rainbird’s whitewashed story of Petrus’ accident with no more than a concerned, “Well, I say, what jolly bad luck. Hope the old chap’s back on his feet soon,” and turned his attention completely to the question of bonerot.
    They met inside a pressurized supply shed before hiking out to the site of the infection. Rainbird was glad to see that the wiz had brought his own mask. It would save the time otherwise spent fitting him out with one of the spares, which always smelled of other people’s sweat.
    “Been up here long?” asked Rainbird as she hauled out the heavy-duty climbing equipment, coiling rope around her waist, tossing a pack of harnesses and clips across her back. Her own useless gas mask was around her neck. Along with too-small boots and too-thick gloves, it was cumbersome but necessary to her disguise.
    “Three weeks,” said the wiz. “I have one of the old experimental mushrooms as my lab.”
    “That’s brave,” remarked Rainbird. The shrooms had been built during an efficiency craze, riveted to the side of the sunway, unlike the eggs which were nestled into excavated bone. But it turned out that inspectors didn’t like hanging above the earth during their leisure hours, and the insulation against the Day Sun’s heat was not quite as good as the Company had sold it to be.
    The wiz shrugged. “It works. It’s good for my experiments, at any rate.” He sounded like that was the more important thing.
    For a wiz, that was probably true.
    “You need a hand with all that?” asked the wiz, with belated conscientiousness. Rainbird shook her head. She had all the stuff balanced just right. Any help now would cause something to topple.
    They hiked up the spine, gas masks over their faces. The mouthpiece was fitted with an oxygen-producing mold. Even though filters supposedly took care of spores, the air smelled moldy to Rainbird. Her vision had narrowed to a smudged and wavy slice of poly, and she hated not feeling the air on her skin nor the bone against her feet.
    The sooner the wiz’s tour was over, the better.
    He was slower than she was and much more careful. He had to stop to catch his breath and, trying to be polite about it, Rainbird walked over to the edge of the sunway, balanced on her toes, and pointed out interesting features in the landscape