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doesn’t nearly do the thing justice.”
    â€œI don’t think anything can,” he agreed, vaguely disappointed she’d recovered so fast. “You have to experience it to really believe it.”
    â€œI don’t even believe it now.” She took another deep breath. “The really scary part is that I didn’t feel a thing. You could keep crossing that same five meters of Tunnel forever trying to reach the other end.”
    â€œReingold’s people damn near did that. It was sheer desperate inspiration that anyone thought about trying it naked.”
    He could almost hear her wince. “… right. Well. We ought to get started on that ourselves, I suppose. Shouldn’t we.”
    â€œYeah. The lockers are over here, built to look like part of the wall …”
    He showed her how to open them, and in the dim light they stripped off their coveralls and stowed them on the hooks provided. Ravagin had long since stopped being embarrassed by the necessity of crossing the telefold naked, but a surprising percentage of his clients—even though they knew what to expect—got their backs up at this point and tried like hell to bend the rules. Usually it took several trips across that same five meters, as Danae had put it, to convince them that nothing but their own personal bodies could make the trip through from Threshold to Shamsheer. No one knew exactly why the Tunnel’s builders had set things up that way, but it was abundantly clear that there was nothing anyone could do about it.
    â€œOkay, I’m ready,” Danae said at last, flipping off her dimlight and closing the locker door. “Now what?”
    â€œTake my hand,” Ravagin said, reaching it out toward her voice in the darkness. “Crossing the telefold sometimes plays tricks with your balance.”
    Her hand was stiff and unwilling, but at least she didn’t argue the point. Walking carefully, taking both balance and direction cues from the faintly luminous marker dots, he led her forward … and abruptly, for just an instant, the floor seemed to tilt sideways.
    Danae gasped and lost her balance, falling heavily against him. He caught her, and for a moment they were pressed together—
    She got her feet under her again and jerked away, pulling her hand out of his in the process. “Sorry,” she muttered, sounding both angry and embarrassed.
    â€œThat’s all right,” he assured her, the words somehow coming out a lot more sincere than he’d planned them to. “That generally happens during a person’s first time,” he added, a bit lamely. Her skin had felt extraordinarily good against his. … “Come on—the next set of lockers are down the tunnel a ways. Give me your hand and I’ll lead you.”
    â€œI’m all right, thank you,” she said, a bit tartly.
    â€œUp to you.” He headed off down the tunnel, leaving her to find her own way as best she could. The pathway continued to curve to the left, and he let his fingertips graze the righthand wall until he felt the gentle swelling that was one end of this set of camouflaged lockers. The bulge swelled further and further out into the passageway, and a few steps later Ravagin’s fingers found the hidden catch and swung open the door. A handful of firefly rings sat on the top shelf; picking one up, he slipped it onto his left hand. “Let there be light,” he said, cupping his palm … and a glowing ball of hazy light appeared. “Now,” he said, glancing back at Danae, “let’s get dressed and get out of here. Here—try this on for starters.” He handed her a flowing dress of the sort worn by the minor Shamsheer nobility.
    â€œThanks,” she said, hugging the dress close to her against her nudity and the firefly’s light. “What was that you said?—‘let there be light’?”
    â€œAll you really have to say to a