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mention the stress of events leading up to it, the toll on her system had been high. Pattie felt the stiffness in her joints and the ache in her muscles. She knew she had very little left in the way of reserves.
    Though she hated to do anything that might be mistaken for animal behavior, Pattie decided to take advantage of the insulation the packing box offered. Curling up in her makeshift shelter, Pattie settled down for the night.

Chapter
6
    A pparently having decided she was well enough to forgo being tightly bound in blankets, her three nurses let Corsi sleep unencumbered through the night. At least she assumed it was night. In a windowless room lit by a basket of glowing yarn, it was hard to tell. Sticking her head out the low doorway proved her nurses doubled as guards; all three of them were asleep across the only other exit from the next chamber.
    In the morning Lefty presented her with a wooden bowl of water and a pack of survival rations. Predictably, the seal of the pack had been ignored and the foil sliced open.
    â€œThat had to be sharp,” Corsi said. “How many of these did you mangle before you figured out what it was?”
    There were only four in the emergency jump harness’s survival kit. Two thousand calories of essential nutrients and vitamins each, along with a half-dozen water purification pills, good for a liter each.
    The bowl was a bit more than half a liter, but she wasn’t going to try and split one of the tiny tablets. She dropped it in, accepting the metallic taste as fair trade for the knowledge she wasn’t ingesting any unwelcome microbes.
    As she ate, she demonstrated the pouch’s unseal and reseal feature to the chiptaurs. This led to another round of left ear brushing. Corsi tentatively decided the gesture meant either wow! or arrgh!
    After brunch, Head Nurse, Lefty, and Spot led Corsi through a series of small chambers that opened abruptly into a large indoor amphitheater. At least that was her first impression. Her second was that she was in the root system of a giant banyan tree.
    Apparently realizing she needed time to take it all in, her nurses paused and made gestures that seemed to invite her to look around. Corsi did, turning in place as she surveyed her new surroundings.
    Around three-quarters of the edges of a roughly oval clearing about two hundred meters across its long axis, columns of wood several meters thick rose from the ground to meet what appeared to be a network of even wider branches some thirty meters overhead. There was no sky, though the foliage above glowed with a diffuse green light that suggested daylight somewhere beyond.
    Broad roots, like the one from which she and her companions had emerged, diverged horizontally from the base of each column, while smaller trunks arched between columns at apparently random intervals farther up.
    The air was pungent with a dozen odors she couldn’t identify. Or almost could. A smoke, very like incense; the peppermint and cedar scent of her bedding; a sharp, sweet tang like a mixture of apples and oranges; and a musky, nutmeg odor she suspected was her hosts en masse.
    And they were en masse. There were dozens of chiptaurs moving across the open area, heading in and out of tunnels carved into the wooden pillars, or angled shallowly into the ground, or disappearing into the rock face that broke into the circle of roots along about a quarter of its arc.
    Corsi realized it was a city, made up of carved spaces in both rock and wood built within the root system of a giant forest, or a single tree. Though superficially the image of the chiptaurs with their mostly horizontal bodies moving about plants that dwarfed them resembled a nest of carpenter ants, there was nothing insectoid in their movements. No one seemed to be in a hurry and knots of conversation seemed to form and break up again with companionable informality.
    She noticed the chiptaurs came in two sizes. Some, like her nurses, were broad and