"Falken," said Sheila Moore. "Eric Falken!"
Some steely thing in her voice lashed him erect again. She crouched on the shelf bunk against the wall, her feral green eyes blazing, her thin body taut in its torn green silk.
"You've got to get away, Falken. You've got to escape."
He had stopped laughing. "Why?" he asked dully.
"We need you, Falken. You're a legend, a hope we cling to. If you give up, what are we to go on?"
She rose and paced the narrow deck. Paul Avery watched her from the bunk on the opposite wall, his amber eyes dull with the deep weariness that slackened his broad young body.
Falken watched her, too. The terrible urge for sleep hammered at him, bowed his grey-shot, savage head, drew the strength from his lean muscles. But he watched Sheila Moore.
That was why he had risked his life, and Avery's, and broken Unregenerate law to save her, unknown and untested. She blazed, somehow. She stabbed his brain with the same cold fire he had felt after Kitty was taken from him.
"You've got to escape," she said. "We can't give up, yet."
Her voice was distant, her raw-gold hair a detached haze of light. Darkness crept on Falken's brain.