"Forget it," I muttered. "There's no point to going back over it now."

"But there is! For me, there is!" For the first time, in this place, my companion's voice showed a flash of animation. "You were the only one who'd pushed them even a little bit off balance. I wanted to know you—to find out what you had that the rest of mankind lacked. If I could do that and save you too, what was the harm in it?"

"The harm?" In spite of myself, I roused and glowered through the blackness. "What was the harm, when you urged me to tell you—things—not knowing Kel were there?"

"But Mark, I wouldn't have done it if it had mattered! The things you said—those were for me, not them. I knew they couldn't understand them. They haven't any insight into human feelings, human thoughts."

"After the thrill-mills, you'd try to make me believe that?" I choked. "They know more about the human mind than man himself!"

"No, Mark; they don't!"

"The thrill-mills—"

"I don't care about the thrill-mills! Maybe someone else developed them. To the Kel, we're only a lower life-form, not worth the bother of that much study. We're laboratory animals, adaptable organisms to use as we'd use rabbits or guinea pigs or hamsters. I know; I've been four years with them, ever since that day on Bejak...."

She began to sob, then; a soft yet somehow desperate sobbing. Bleakly, I stared down at the hands I couldn't see for the blackness of this dungeon ... the self-same dungeon in which I'd lain alone such a short time earlier, except that in the interim our captors had stripped it bare of sacks and thrill-mills.

It wasn't the kind of ending I'd planned. Not here; not locked away, waiting out the hours till the Kel should strike, and win, and end the game.

And me not even on the field.

I cursed under my breath; hammered one clenched fist into the other palm.

"Mark—" It was Celeste again. "Mark, give up. Don't fight it so."

"I won't give up! I can't!" Choking on my own words, I lurched up and stumbled blindly along our prison's walls. "If I knew anything—even where we were—"

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