the filaments faded.

Alhone adjusted some other part of the complex panel. The filamented threads lifted slowly until Mahra could crawl beneath them. She ran sobbing, and Moljar took her easily into the folds of his red dripping arms.

Alhone had turned. She looked at Mahra with that indescribable hatred burning a raw-edged flame in her eyes.

"So you mutants, some of you anyway, are telepathic. That is why the Normals fear you so. I am helpless here. Now. There is nothing for me to do but escape." Her hands spun dials as she talked. "I go to whatever plain waits my pleasure. I am tired of this one." She looked at Moljar through veiled eyes. "I have seen all I can see here."

While the filament threads dropped down, she ran beneath them. They began to glow, rapidly now, for the last time.

"I won't let her escape me now," said Moljar. "Even if we have to die with her." He hurled his heavy long sword directly into the blazing heart of the Matrix.

There was a crackling, then a thunderous growing roar of stupendous unleashed power. A blinding, glaring explosion sent Mahra and Moljar hurtling backward. Stunned, they staggered to their feet, supporting each other, groped for the panel out of the room.

A globe of burning white energy was expanding rapidly, eating up wall and metal and air with thirsting ferocity.

It devoured its own base and plummeted downward through the towering heights of Anghore. Burning, blasting, eating, destroying. It ate straight down into the bowels of the Venus beneath the Mountains of Maghrone.

Through the trembling, smoking chaos, the tottering ruins of Anghore, Moljar and Mahra blindly fought their way. The towering gateway was blasted as though by a tremendous electronic charge; they ran through the cavern and over the twisted gates and far up the beach of grey sand before they finally paused, panting, and looked back.

Anghore was a smoke-belching crater. A thundering volcano of burning energy.

They stood breast to breast, looking at each other. Half-breed and mutant. Outcasts. Scourged. Excluded and estranged. The hated and feared. Her eyes half-closed beneath his. Her lips parted slightly, and her body was soft.

"No wonder the Terran Normals are so fearful of 

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